The problem is that most people don't get enough exercise for the same reason that they don't get enough sleep—there aren't enough hours in the day. I would kill to be able to carve out an extra five hours a week for aerobic exercise. However, that would mean giving up either my job, giving up sleep, giving up (at least) one of my hobbies, or never watching another minute of TV for the rest of my life.
By contrast, I can walk on a treadmill while I'm watching TV (a pair of extreme isolation headphones helps), which means I don't have to give up other activities to do it. That makes it the best bang for my buck, time-wise.
No, no one runs their own updater. Some vendors may run their own update installer. This means:
One user policy governs the frequency of checks, not one policy per app.
The app can be updated even if the user infrequently runs the app (without adding a bunch of timed jobs that randomly piss off the user).
Developers who do not already have an update mechanism would not need to create one.
As for updaters killing processes or doing reboots, that could easily be part of the check-in mechanism. The installer would be allowed to kill and relaunch daemons that it owns; if it needs to restart a daemon that it does not own, a message requesting such a restart would need to be part of the protocol, but this shouldn't be a common occurrence.
As for reboots, When finished, each installer would report back to the actual software update app to indicate completion. When the last installer finishes installing, if any of the RSS feed entries indicated that a reboot is needed, the main updater application would handle that. Otherwise, it would check for additional updates, and quit if there aren't any.
Why would Adobe need to conform to anything? An ideal automatic update system would involve the application, upon first launch, registering for update support. By registering, it would provide a URL to an RSS feed. If it uses the standard system package format, this is all that it would need to do; if it uses its own package format or if its installation requires some additional hand-holding, the registration request could provide an optional helper (as part of the app bundle or whatever) that knows how to install the update.
When the RSS feed shows an update, the update manager asks the user if they want to install the update. If the user says yes, the update manager runs the tool that Adobe provided when its app registered for updates, and that tool takes whatever arbitrary binary blobs were attached to the RSS feed entry and does whatever it needs to do to extract them.
And look at the other option: implementing it yourself. Do you think that companies performing all the memory management and security implementations would be doing a better job? Less visible maybe, but I'm pretty sure that the relatively few bugs that affect Java deployments weigh up against that? My bet (and my experience with "seasoned C++ programmers") says that they don't.
That's not the other option. The other option is using services that the OS or browser provides.
For application programming, Java is a giant abstraction layer that may provides a benefit in terms of being able to write once and run (debug) everywhere, but the OS provides most of those services in some form underneath you already. If you use them directly, you're cutting out a huge layer of bloat with a huge layer of complexity and replacing it, generally speaking, with much simpler code specific to your app. This means that A. the amount of code is less, which usually means fewer bugs, and B. the code is specific to your app, and thus a much less tempting attack surface.
And in the browser, things like Java and Flash make even less sense. The browser already provides a built-in programming environment and runtime, complete with garbage collection, etc. You're just adding a second runtime environment, and the flexibility this gives you comes at the expense of a huge increase in total systemic complexity. Remember that the attack surface of a web browser, at least where compromising the user's system is concerned, is the browser's native code itself. The web frameworks are irrelevant because anyone in control of a malicious page can add any web framework that they want to add in order to achieve the desired goal; your site's choice of web frameworks affects only the security of your site, not the security of the user's machine. However, by adding Java applets (and thus forcing the user to enable Java support), you're effectively forcing the browser to increase the size of its native code by a large margin, and thus increasing the browser's potential attack surface dramatically. By definition, doing so can only result in a reduction in security, never an improvement.
This could be necessary medical equipment, or even clothes in a suitably exposed setting. Stealing that property is tantamount to murder, since it will directly cause the death of its former owner.
If another copy of said equipment is available, then no death occurs, so the only reason you are perceiving the property as being valuable is because of the circumstances under which it was obtained. By stealing it, you cause someone to die, which makes you guilty of killing that person. That secondary crime, caused by the act of committing the first crime, is a large crime. However, the value of the item itself is still less than the value of a human life. For a slightly more illustrative example, if you are dying of hunger, a loaf of bread is still not more valuable than your life. If someone were going to kill you over it, you are better off starving and trying your luck at finding other food than dying immediately (and still losing the food). And more to the point, if the loaf of bread were more valuable than your life, you would be better off keeping the bread rather than consuming it to save your life. Clearly this is not the case.
If you believe that no property is worth more than a human life, then why don't you give away everything you own towards the cause of saving lives? If you refuse to do so, then you are valuing your property more than human lives.
That's a flawed argument. First, if I give away everything I have, I will likely die of exposure and hunger, therefore what you are essentially saying is that I should give my life to maybe save other people's lives. Second, there's no guarantee that even if I did so, even one other life would be saved.
Not sure why it shouldn't be their responsibility. The power company folks were the cheapskates who ran the lines to your house above the ground in the first place. Lightning is highly unlikely to damage equipment in areas where all the power lines run underground as they properly should. If it isn't a high tension line, it really doesn't belong above the ground, and arguably even then.
I certainly hope replacing the passenger's naked photo with a paper doll isn't enough to "quiet" the privacy concerns.
Only among the incredibly stupid. Like I keep telling people every time the government spouts such idiocy, it's software. They're still taking a picture of you naked; they're just hiding some of the details from the screener. Thus:
Nothing prevents that data from being stored in its raw form, and even if the software does not do so now, it requires only a trivial change (like five minutes of a single engineer's time) to make it do so.
Even if the government has no intention of ever doing so, any screener or other person with physical access to the console could almost certainly take the initiative on his or her own, because for all practical purposes, physical access == complete access.
Once people understand this, no amount of government doublespeak can allay the privacy concerns, because the people then understand that the privacy issues are fundamental to the technology and cannot be corrected without simultaneously eliminating the supposed benefit of the devices (e.g. by physically modifying the actual imaging and/or emission hardware so that it can only produce really, really blurry pictures).
Other technologies do exist that can provide the same perceived benefit without the privacy concerns, such as using ultrasonic hand scanners to sweep for hard objects beneath clothing, thermal imaging cameras to check for unexpected cold spots, puffers and/or dogs to sniff for bomb residue, etc., but these all require replacing the entire set of hardware, not making minor software patches.
Bart knew the protest was coming and had stationed people with radios that worked on every platform. Just because civilians can not call 911 does not mean that an incident will not be reported by the BART personnel who are tasked to do just that.
Which means exactly squat if the BART personnel are the first ones pushed under the train. And if there are enough BART personnel to mitigate that threat, there are also enough BART personnel to evacuate the platform, thus mitigating the safety risk.
The protesters were sending out spotters and attempting to find stations that had fewer BART police in attendance. They were then going to call all protesters to these platforms. People were waiting on other platforms for text messages so they could get on a train and go to the designated platform. By shutting down the cell systems BART slowed down the coordination of this effort.
By shutting down the cell systems, BART slowed the coordination of a lawful protest. Seems like a pretty clear case of prior restraint of speech to me. The protesters were not coordinating with the intent to kill people or cause people harm. The risk of accidental harm is present to varying degrees in nearly any activity you can think of. That does not make it rise to the level of risk sufficient to warrant shutting down cell service.
A specific, credible threat to human life.
Evidence of a coordinated effort to concentrate a large number of people on a few platforms which could credibly lead to people falling off the platform in front of trains and/ or onto the electrified rails and dying.
Unsafe is not the same thing as a credible threat to human life. A credible threat to human life is an armed gunman threatening to shoot people. A credible threat to human life is not a bunch of peaceful protesters occupying a train platform who might accidentally fall in front of a train. A single person standing on the platform might fall in front of the train, too; the difference in risk is relatively small, and can trivially be mitigated in other ways, such as reducing the speed of the trains before they pull into the stations.
Oh, and I should have added one additional requirement:
Shutting down cellular service must be the most straightforward, simplest, and least invasive way to mitigate the threat.
If there is an easier or less invasive way to mitigate the threat, then shutting down cell service should absolutely not be allowed.
To me the planned protests on inherently unsafe platforms is akin to yelling "FIRE" in a crowed theater and is therefore not protected speech.
Not remotely. Yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater is deliberately causing panic. A protest is just deliberately causing a large crowd. BTW, if the platforms are inherently unsafe, they should be torn down. I think you mean that the protests were unsafe because the number of people exceeded the capacity of the platform. This is a solvable problem. When there are too many people on the platform resulting from 300 people getting off the same train, shut down the platform until they clear the area.
Further, I would argue that BART's actions were akin to yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater. Had there been any sort of actual emergency, riders would have been unable to contact emergency services. Even if the BART personnel were able to contact help, the passengers' inability to contact emergency services would inevitably cause many of them to panic more than they otherwise would have, putting them all in further danger. In earthquake country, this seems like a bigger risk to human lives than having a few too many people on the platform.
The way it is talking about the TSA might tend to give that impression.
Not necessarily. I seem to recall reading that the U.S. government has been throwing its weight around with other countries, trying to get them to put those d**n things in airports that send passengers to the U.S., so one could reasonably describe those devices as the TSA's scanners, too, in a roundabout way.
*Wow* Just when I think the pirates can't come up with an even more tortured and logic free "reason" justifying themselves - they manage to top themselves yet again.
Wrong on both counts:
1. I do not pirate movies.
2. I was not attempting to justify anything.
It is a well understood fact that prohibition almost invariably leads to a black market. What we have here is a movie distributor prohibition on the sale of DVDs. Because there are no legal channels for watching the movie at home, an illegal channel for doing so naturally forms. I'm not saying that the black market is right or a good thing. I'm saying that the movie studios are morons for stubbornly refusing to provide a viable alternative, and are thus at least partially to blame for the situation. If you refuse to make your product available in a form that people want to consume, you can't really expect me to feel sorry for you when people find ways to convert it into that form using illegal means.
For printing photos on a laser printer, I generally would recommend glossy coated laser paper or (ideally) glossy coated laser card stock. AFAIK, you pretty much have to order the stuff online—I've never seen it at any office supply store—but it is readily available.
And shutting down the cell phone network will prevent them from pushing people in front of trains? No, it won't. In fact, quite the opposite; it will prevent people from calling quickly for an ambulance after they do push someone in front of a moving train. In most cases, the added risk to safety caused by shutting down cell service greatly exceeds the benefit.
Maybe if we were talking about a team of gunmen coordinating a strike over the cell network, I could also see it. In general, the requirements should be:
A specific, credible threat to human life.
Evidence that disruption of phones would mitigate that threat.
Evidence that any delay in said disruption would likely result in additional loss of life.
Confidence that disruption of those phones would not cause a significant delay in determining the location of or otherwise responding to the threat.
In other words, if it's the sort of situation where the police would break into somebody's house without getting a warrant first, it might be acceptable. Otherwise, you'd better have a judicial order.
The only time it could ever be acceptable would be if terrorists were actively using cellular phones to control the detonators for explosive devices, and even then, it should be shut down only long enough to sweep the expected target area for such devices. In all other circumstances, it should be disallowed. In other words, very nearly never.
Was this in the United States? Last I checked, the TSA was required to allow people to opt out of the full-body scanners, period. She shouldn't have even needed to produce documentation about the medical implant. The only places I'm aware of where you can't opt out except with medical documentation are the UK and Australia (who somehow manage to out-fascist even the 'States).
What that tells us is that, just as we saw in the music industry, the primary driving reason for piracy is not cost, but rather unavailability. Not everybody likes the "full cinematic experience"—sticky floors, overpriced food, little b**tards throwing popcorn at your head, etc. However, lots of folks still would like to see the movie at the same time as everyone else so that they can talk about it with their friends.
Thus, the very act of trying to prop up the theaters through protectionist tactics drives people to pirate, resulting not in not lost sales, but rather delayed sales caused by the inability to buy the DVD at the same time as the movie appears in the theaters; many of those same pirates probably rent or buy a legit copy of the movie when it finally does come out on DVD.
I bought some frames and laser photographic paper, printed it at home a couple of them in the sizes I wanted (I played a little). Now I have some nice traditional pictures on my desk, where I can see them permanently without the bother of a bright energy consuming digital frame (which I also have).
Agreed. Laser printers do a reasonable job for photos. Of course, the original question included this gem:
I do have a cheaper Samsung color laser printer, but color lasers don't make the most color-rich prints...
Laser printers produce reasonably color-rich prints. You just have to pick a good laser printer. I went around to various booths at MacWorld about three or four years ago to compare print samples from the various vendors. The Brother was rich, but a bit on the bold side (which may have been more a property of the image than the quality of the printer). The Canon printers looked good. The Konica Minolta booth used a photo of flesh tones as a print sample. Now that takes cojones, as it is one of the hardest things to reproduce acceptably. And it looked good. I now own a wide-format KM printer. I could comfortably recommend color lasers from Brother, Canon, or Konica Minolta.
On the flip side, the HP prints had bad banding problems. They looked okay from a distance, but looked bad up close. However, there was only one print sample out of the batch that was completely unacceptable, and that was from Samsung. It was dark, blotchy, and muddy; it was one of the worst looking prints I've ever seen from any printer. It made prints from 1980s printers look acceptable by comparison. Maybe Samsung has improved their print quality in the past few years, but I couldn't believe any company would ship a printer whose print quality looked that bad.
In other words, it's not that laser printers in general can't produce color-rich prints, but rather that the original questioner managed to pick one of the worst laser printers out there.
They weren't long-lasting bulbs. They were just seldom used. During the day, both of my bathrooms are bright enough from sunlight to not require any additional illumination.
1000h over 20 years is 8 minutes per day. If your average light bulb is used that little, your house is too big.
No, my house has good natural lighting and multiple backup lights per room. For example, my bedroom has a light on each night stand, plus an overhead light fixture that's part of the fan, plus a couple of decorative lamps on the dresser. Those decorative lamps never get used, nor does the night stand light on the other side of the bed. The overhead lights get used when I'm walking into the room so I don't trip over something while I walk across the room to turn on the bedside table lamp on the side of the bed that I primarily use, after which I turn them back off. So in that one room alone, there are nine incandescent bulbs, only one of which is used for more than a few minutes per day most days, and only six of which are regularly used at all.
Here's a complete breakdown:
The bulbs in certain rooms get used a lot more than eight minutes per week because I regularly turn them on after dark. This includes the TV room, bedroom, and bathroom. I also regularly use the light in the kitchen, but that's a standard long-tube fluorescent fixture; I almost never turn on the incandescent in the breakfast nook because it provides little benefit over just using the kitchen light.
The overhead light in my bedroom gets turned on sometimes when I first walk into the room, but most of the time, I use the bedside table lamp because I can turn it on and off without walking across the room.
When I walk from by bedroom to the kitchen, however, I can see well enough that I don't bother to turn on the light in the hallway or the overhead lights in the living room (and it isn't practical to do so because of where the switches are located).
When I play piano after dark, I turn on the light by the piano, not the overhead light in the living room.
The front and back porch lights almost never get turned on.
The table lamp in my living room almost never gets turned on.
Three of the four table lamps in my bedroom are largely decorative and never get turned on.
One of the table lamps in m TV room is purely decorative and never gets turned on. The second one only gets turned on when I need a lot of light (read "when I'm soldering in the middle of the floor").
The lights in my closet almost never get turned on.
Being a typical guy, the vanity lights in my bathroom never get turned on (except in the one bathroom that has only vanity lights).
The chandelier in my dining room almost never gets used because my dining room is actually storage for my Christmas tree, plus my printers, audio gear, etc. I don't own a dining room table, and it's a good thing because I don't have room for one. Because my printers aren't afraid of the dark, I don't regularly need lighting in there.
In short, there are three incandescent bulbs that get tons of use, five more that get moderate use, five more that get brief use daily (under five minutes), and some twenty-six bulbs that get used at most once per year, not because I do not use any of the rooms in my house, but because I do not need to turn on those particular lights most of the time when I use the room. So on average, I'm using one bulb out of thirty-nine except when I'm in the small bathroom, so for a quick ballpark, divide an average of four hours per night by roughly thirty-nine, and that comes to 6.15 minutes per day. In other words, that 8 minutes per day isn't nearly as outrageous a figure as you might think, and might actually be an overestimate for a single-person home.
And no, it's not too big a house; I'm actually desperate for more space, though I'll readily admit I could live with a smaller kitchen and master bath. The disadvantage to being a musician is that a studio grand and a drum kit can fill most of a living room.
Here are twobanks that are paying around 4%. You have to have a debit card, and you have to use it for a certain number of transactions per month, you have to have at least one direct deposit per month, and there's a dollar cap per account (above which they pay a lower percentage).
Laws certainly can fix that. It's called strict criminal liability. You hold out funds in such a way that it causes a critical system to be built without proper security, and you go to jail when somebody compromises it. If the people responsible for the money could be held liable for damages when withholding that money causes loss of life or limb, we would have a lot fewer problems (and a lot fewer rich people walking the streets).
A 100W light bulb consumes 100kWh over its rated lifetime, which is 1000 hours. Depending on the price of electricity in your part of the world, that's probably between $8 and $30. Assuming a dismal lifetime of just 5000 hours for the LED bulb, you'd need five $1 incandescent bulbs for a total cost of ownership between $5+5*$8=$45 and $4+5*$30=$154. The LED bulb (let's say $35) consumes electricity for $9 to $35, for a total cost of ownership between $35+$9=$44 and $35+$35=$70. So unless the LED doesn't last 5000 hours or your electricity costs less than $0.08, the LED bulb is cheaper, and you don't need to change the bulb as often.
First, you're making the dubious assumption that the electronics will last for 5,000 hours. If that 5,000 hours involved continuous burning (half a year), it probably would. Unfortunately, those electronic voltage converter stages use electrolytic capacitors that degrade over time, particularly in the presence of heat (such as from having a bunch of hot LEDs right above them). So the longer a period of time you spread the usage over, the fewer hours you'll actually get out of them.
Second, even if you are correct, you are guilty of a broken window fallacy. Money that is spent up front on that bulb is money that is no longer earning interest. In a home environment, an average incandescent bulb lasts for anywhere from five to twenty years, depending on usage. Therefore, in the case of the incandescent bulb, assuming your numbers are correct, you spend maybe fifty cents in the initial investment, pus an additional $154 spread over up to two decades, or 32 cents per month. If the LED bulb costs $35, assuming you have a bank account that pays about 4% interest as mine does, then compounded annually, that LED bulb costs a whopping $76.69 over those twenty years before you factor in the cost of electricity. By comparison, the fifty cent incandescent bulb costs $1.10 over the life of the bulb in that same period of time. Add in the cost of power, and the LED bulb costs $85.69 - $111.69, whereas the incandescent costs $46.10 - $155.10. So depending on your power cost, the LED might be cheaper or significantly more expensive.
Even amortized over a hundred year lifespan (unlikely), five incandescents cost you $45.53 plus $2,896-9,911 (the 100 year amortization of $225-770), where the single LED costs you $1,767.67 plus $579-2,252 (the 100-year amortization of $45-175). In other words, spending 70x as much for a light bulb is probably not going to save you money in the long run.
The law exists because most people couldn't do a simple calculation if their life depended on it.
The law exists because the lighting industry makes more money per unit off of CFLs and wanted to get rid of the competition from older technology. Nothing more.
By contrast, I recently replaced the incandescent bulbs in my bathrooms when I replaced the fixtures. Out of the twelve bulbs (three fixtures), all were original bulbs, about a decade old. The only places I've ever blown bulbs are the ceiling fan in my room and the three-way bulb in the table lamp in my TV room, both of which have blown about two bulbs in eleven years.
Incandescent bulbs (good ones) last a long time. For CFLs to make sense at the current price, they would need a hundred year guarantee.
File corruption wont generate ioerrors I dont think.
Depends on the cause of the corruption. If it was caused by bad RAM or a hard drive with bad cache memory on the board, causing filesystem corruption that randomly permutes data, then it won't cause any detectable I/O error. If it was caused by a bad block, it will. Then again, when your OS repaired the file system, it should have flagged the overlapping extents/blocks in such a way that you can determine which files were potentially corrupted, so there should still be a log unless the corruption is occurring actively while you read data off the disk (bad cache RAM on the drive itself), in which case your best bet is probably reading data off the disk a block at a time, flushing the disk cache before each block read command. This will take weeks, however. Or swap the controller board from an identical drive and use that board while cloning it to a third drive.
The latter type of corruption (bad blocks) is more common than the former (silent corruption), though regrettably the former seems to be becoming more and more common lately, which has me growing quite concerned about data integrity with modern hard drives.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that most people don't get enough exercise for the same reason that they don't get enough sleep—there aren't enough hours in the day. I would kill to be able to carve out an extra five hours a week for aerobic exercise. However, that would mean giving up either my job, giving up sleep, giving up (at least) one of my hobbies, or never watching another minute of TV for the rest of my life.
By contrast, I can walk on a treadmill while I'm watching TV (a pair of extreme isolation headphones helps), which means I don't have to give up other activities to do it. That makes it the best bang for my buck, time-wise.
No, no one runs their own updater. Some vendors may run their own update installer. This means:
As for updaters killing processes or doing reboots, that could easily be part of the check-in mechanism. The installer would be allowed to kill and relaunch daemons that it owns; if it needs to restart a daemon that it does not own, a message requesting such a restart would need to be part of the protocol, but this shouldn't be a common occurrence.
As for reboots, When finished, each installer would report back to the actual software update app to indicate completion. When the last installer finishes installing, if any of the RSS feed entries indicated that a reboot is needed, the main updater application would handle that. Otherwise, it would check for additional updates, and quit if there aren't any.
Why would Adobe need to conform to anything? An ideal automatic update system would involve the application, upon first launch, registering for update support. By registering, it would provide a URL to an RSS feed. If it uses the standard system package format, this is all that it would need to do; if it uses its own package format or if its installation requires some additional hand-holding, the registration request could provide an optional helper (as part of the app bundle or whatever) that knows how to install the update.
When the RSS feed shows an update, the update manager asks the user if they want to install the update. If the user says yes, the update manager runs the tool that Adobe provided when its app registered for updates, and that tool takes whatever arbitrary binary blobs were attached to the RSS feed entry and does whatever it needs to do to extract them.
That's not the other option. The other option is using services that the OS or browser provides.
For application programming, Java is a giant abstraction layer that may provides a benefit in terms of being able to write once and run (debug) everywhere, but the OS provides most of those services in some form underneath you already. If you use them directly, you're cutting out a huge layer of bloat with a huge layer of complexity and replacing it, generally speaking, with much simpler code specific to your app. This means that A. the amount of code is less, which usually means fewer bugs, and B. the code is specific to your app, and thus a much less tempting attack surface.
And in the browser, things like Java and Flash make even less sense. The browser already provides a built-in programming environment and runtime, complete with garbage collection, etc. You're just adding a second runtime environment, and the flexibility this gives you comes at the expense of a huge increase in total systemic complexity. Remember that the attack surface of a web browser, at least where compromising the user's system is concerned, is the browser's native code itself. The web frameworks are irrelevant because anyone in control of a malicious page can add any web framework that they want to add in order to achieve the desired goal; your site's choice of web frameworks affects only the security of your site, not the security of the user's machine. However, by adding Java applets (and thus forcing the user to enable Java support), you're effectively forcing the browser to increase the size of its native code by a large margin, and thus increasing the browser's potential attack surface dramatically. By definition, doing so can only result in a reduction in security, never an improvement.
If another copy of said equipment is available, then no death occurs, so the only reason you are perceiving the property as being valuable is because of the circumstances under which it was obtained. By stealing it, you cause someone to die, which makes you guilty of killing that person. That secondary crime, caused by the act of committing the first crime, is a large crime. However, the value of the item itself is still less than the value of a human life. For a slightly more illustrative example, if you are dying of hunger, a loaf of bread is still not more valuable than your life. If someone were going to kill you over it, you are better off starving and trying your luck at finding other food than dying immediately (and still losing the food). And more to the point, if the loaf of bread were more valuable than your life, you would be better off keeping the bread rather than consuming it to save your life. Clearly this is not the case.
That's a flawed argument. First, if I give away everything I have, I will likely die of exposure and hunger, therefore what you are essentially saying is that I should give my life to maybe save other people's lives. Second, there's no guarantee that even if I did so, even one other life would be saved.
Not sure why it shouldn't be their responsibility. The power company folks were the cheapskates who ran the lines to your house above the ground in the first place. Lightning is highly unlikely to damage equipment in areas where all the power lines run underground as they properly should. If it isn't a high tension line, it really doesn't belong above the ground, and arguably even then.
Only among the incredibly stupid. Like I keep telling people every time the government spouts such idiocy, it's software. They're still taking a picture of you naked; they're just hiding some of the details from the screener. Thus:
Once people understand this, no amount of government doublespeak can allay the privacy concerns, because the people then understand that the privacy issues are fundamental to the technology and cannot be corrected without simultaneously eliminating the supposed benefit of the devices (e.g. by physically modifying the actual imaging and/or emission hardware so that it can only produce really, really blurry pictures).
Other technologies do exist that can provide the same perceived benefit without the privacy concerns, such as using ultrasonic hand scanners to sweep for hard objects beneath clothing, thermal imaging cameras to check for unexpected cold spots, puffers and/or dogs to sniff for bomb residue, etc., but these all require replacing the entire set of hardware, not making minor software patches.
Which means exactly squat if the BART personnel are the first ones pushed under the train. And if there are enough BART personnel to mitigate that threat, there are also enough BART personnel to evacuate the platform, thus mitigating the safety risk.
By shutting down the cell systems, BART slowed the coordination of a lawful protest. Seems like a pretty clear case of prior restraint of speech to me. The protesters were not coordinating with the intent to kill people or cause people harm. The risk of accidental harm is present to varying degrees in nearly any activity you can think of. That does not make it rise to the level of risk sufficient to warrant shutting down cell service.
Unsafe is not the same thing as a credible threat to human life. A credible threat to human life is an armed gunman threatening to shoot people. A credible threat to human life is not a bunch of peaceful protesters occupying a train platform who might accidentally fall in front of a train. A single person standing on the platform might fall in front of the train, too; the difference in risk is relatively small, and can trivially be mitigated in other ways, such as reducing the speed of the trains before they pull into the stations.
Oh, and I should have added one additional requirement:
If there is an easier or less invasive way to mitigate the threat, then shutting down cell service should absolutely not be allowed.
Not remotely. Yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater is deliberately causing panic. A protest is just deliberately causing a large crowd. BTW, if the platforms are inherently unsafe, they should be torn down. I think you mean that the protests were unsafe because the number of people exceeded the capacity of the platform. This is a solvable problem. When there are too many people on the platform resulting from 300 people getting off the same train, shut down the platform until they clear the area.
Further, I would argue that BART's actions were akin to yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater. Had there been any sort of actual emergency, riders would have been unable to contact emergency services. Even if the BART personnel were able to contact help, the passengers' inability to contact emergency services would inevitably cause many of them to panic more than they otherwise would have, putting them all in further danger. In earthquake country, this seems like a bigger risk to human lives than having a few too many people on the platform.
Not necessarily. I seem to recall reading that the U.S. government has been throwing its weight around with other countries, trying to get them to put those d**n things in airports that send passengers to the U.S., so one could reasonably describe those devices as the TSA's scanners, too, in a roundabout way.
Wrong on both counts:
1. I do not pirate movies.
2. I was not attempting to justify anything.
It is a well understood fact that prohibition almost invariably leads to a black market. What we have here is a movie distributor prohibition on the sale of DVDs. Because there are no legal channels for watching the movie at home, an illegal channel for doing so naturally forms. I'm not saying that the black market is right or a good thing. I'm saying that the movie studios are morons for stubbornly refusing to provide a viable alternative, and are thus at least partially to blame for the situation. If you refuse to make your product available in a form that people want to consume, you can't really expect me to feel sorry for you when people find ways to convert it into that form using illegal means.
For printing photos on a laser printer, I generally would recommend glossy coated laser paper or (ideally) glossy coated laser card stock. AFAIK, you pretty much have to order the stuff online—I've never seen it at any office supply store—but it is readily available.
And shutting down the cell phone network will prevent them from pushing people in front of trains? No, it won't. In fact, quite the opposite; it will prevent people from calling quickly for an ambulance after they do push someone in front of a moving train. In most cases, the added risk to safety caused by shutting down cell service greatly exceeds the benefit.
Maybe if we were talking about a team of gunmen coordinating a strike over the cell network, I could also see it. In general, the requirements should be:
In other words, if it's the sort of situation where the police would break into somebody's house without getting a warrant first, it might be acceptable. Otherwise, you'd better have a judicial order.
The only time it could ever be acceptable would be if terrorists were actively using cellular phones to control the detonators for explosive devices, and even then, it should be shut down only long enough to sweep the expected target area for such devices. In all other circumstances, it should be disallowed. In other words, very nearly never.
Was this in the United States? Last I checked, the TSA was required to allow people to opt out of the full-body scanners, period. She shouldn't have even needed to produce documentation about the medical implant. The only places I'm aware of where you can't opt out except with medical documentation are the UK and Australia (who somehow manage to out-fascist even the 'States).
What that tells us is that, just as we saw in the music industry, the primary driving reason for piracy is not cost, but rather unavailability. Not everybody likes the "full cinematic experience"—sticky floors, overpriced food, little b**tards throwing popcorn at your head, etc. However, lots of folks still would like to see the movie at the same time as everyone else so that they can talk about it with their friends.
Thus, the very act of trying to prop up the theaters through protectionist tactics drives people to pirate, resulting not in not lost sales, but rather delayed sales caused by the inability to buy the DVD at the same time as the movie appears in the theaters; many of those same pirates probably rent or buy a legit copy of the movie when it finally does come out on DVD.
Agreed. Laser printers do a reasonable job for photos. Of course, the original question included this gem:
Laser printers produce reasonably color-rich prints. You just have to pick a good laser printer. I went around to various booths at MacWorld about three or four years ago to compare print samples from the various vendors. The Brother was rich, but a bit on the bold side (which may have been more a property of the image than the quality of the printer). The Canon printers looked good. The Konica Minolta booth used a photo of flesh tones as a print sample. Now that takes cojones, as it is one of the hardest things to reproduce acceptably. And it looked good. I now own a wide-format KM printer. I could comfortably recommend color lasers from Brother, Canon, or Konica Minolta.
On the flip side, the HP prints had bad banding problems. They looked okay from a distance, but looked bad up close. However, there was only one print sample out of the batch that was completely unacceptable, and that was from Samsung. It was dark, blotchy, and muddy; it was one of the worst looking prints I've ever seen from any printer. It made prints from 1980s printers look acceptable by comparison. Maybe Samsung has improved their print quality in the past few years, but I couldn't believe any company would ship a printer whose print quality looked that bad.
In other words, it's not that laser printers in general can't produce color-rich prints, but rather that the original questioner managed to pick one of the worst laser printers out there.
Ugh. Well, apparently it is fairly straightforward to disable the local control feature.
They weren't long-lasting bulbs. They were just seldom used. During the day, both of my bathrooms are bright enough from sunlight to not require any additional illumination.
No, my house has good natural lighting and multiple backup lights per room. For example, my bedroom has a light on each night stand, plus an overhead light fixture that's part of the fan, plus a couple of decorative lamps on the dresser. Those decorative lamps never get used, nor does the night stand light on the other side of the bed. The overhead lights get used when I'm walking into the room so I don't trip over something while I walk across the room to turn on the bedside table lamp on the side of the bed that I primarily use, after which I turn them back off. So in that one room alone, there are nine incandescent bulbs, only one of which is used for more than a few minutes per day most days, and only six of which are regularly used at all.
Here's a complete breakdown:
In short, there are three incandescent bulbs that get tons of use, five more that get moderate use, five more that get brief use daily (under five minutes), and some twenty-six bulbs that get used at most once per year, not because I do not use any of the rooms in my house, but because I do not need to turn on those particular lights most of the time when I use the room. So on average, I'm using one bulb out of thirty-nine except when I'm in the small bathroom, so for a quick ballpark, divide an average of four hours per night by roughly thirty-nine, and that comes to 6.15 minutes per day. In other words, that 8 minutes per day isn't nearly as outrageous a figure as you might think, and might actually be an overestimate for a single-person home.
And no, it's not too big a house; I'm actually desperate for more space, though I'll readily admit I could live with a smaller kitchen and master bath. The disadvantage to being a musician is that a studio grand and a drum kit can fill most of a living room.
Here are two banks that are paying around 4%. You have to have a debit card, and you have to use it for a certain number of transactions per month, you have to have at least one direct deposit per month, and there's a dollar cap per account (above which they pay a lower percentage).
Laws certainly can fix that. It's called strict criminal liability. You hold out funds in such a way that it causes a critical system to be built without proper security, and you go to jail when somebody compromises it. If the people responsible for the money could be held liable for damages when withholding that money causes loss of life or limb, we would have a lot fewer problems (and a lot fewer rich people walking the streets).
First, you're making the dubious assumption that the electronics will last for 5,000 hours. If that 5,000 hours involved continuous burning (half a year), it probably would. Unfortunately, those electronic voltage converter stages use electrolytic capacitors that degrade over time, particularly in the presence of heat (such as from having a bunch of hot LEDs right above them). So the longer a period of time you spread the usage over, the fewer hours you'll actually get out of them.
Second, even if you are correct, you are guilty of a broken window fallacy. Money that is spent up front on that bulb is money that is no longer earning interest. In a home environment, an average incandescent bulb lasts for anywhere from five to twenty years, depending on usage. Therefore, in the case of the incandescent bulb, assuming your numbers are correct, you spend maybe fifty cents in the initial investment, pus an additional $154 spread over up to two decades, or 32 cents per month. If the LED bulb costs $35, assuming you have a bank account that pays about 4% interest as mine does, then compounded annually, that LED bulb costs a whopping $76.69 over those twenty years before you factor in the cost of electricity. By comparison, the fifty cent incandescent bulb costs $1.10 over the life of the bulb in that same period of time. Add in the cost of power, and the LED bulb costs $85.69 - $111.69, whereas the incandescent costs $46.10 - $155.10. So depending on your power cost, the LED might be cheaper or significantly more expensive.
Even amortized over a hundred year lifespan (unlikely), five incandescents cost you $45.53 plus $2,896-9,911 (the 100 year amortization of $225-770), where the single LED costs you $1,767.67 plus $579-2,252 (the 100-year amortization of $45-175). In other words, spending 70x as much for a light bulb is probably not going to save you money in the long run.
The law exists because the lighting industry makes more money per unit off of CFLs and wanted to get rid of the competition from older technology. Nothing more.
By contrast, I recently replaced the incandescent bulbs in my bathrooms when I replaced the fixtures. Out of the twelve bulbs (three fixtures), all were original bulbs, about a decade old. The only places I've ever blown bulbs are the ceiling fan in my room and the three-way bulb in the table lamp in my TV room, both of which have blown about two bulbs in eleven years.
Incandescent bulbs (good ones) last a long time. For CFLs to make sense at the current price, they would need a hundred year guarantee.
That's odd. AFAIK, X10 modules generally use a relay for power switching, so there should be no leakage whatsoever. Maybe it has a bad relay.
Depends on the cause of the corruption. If it was caused by bad RAM or a hard drive with bad cache memory on the board, causing filesystem corruption that randomly permutes data, then it won't cause any detectable I/O error. If it was caused by a bad block, it will. Then again, when your OS repaired the file system, it should have flagged the overlapping extents/blocks in such a way that you can determine which files were potentially corrupted, so there should still be a log unless the corruption is occurring actively while you read data off the disk (bad cache RAM on the drive itself), in which case your best bet is probably reading data off the disk a block at a time, flushing the disk cache before each block read command. This will take weeks, however. Or swap the controller board from an identical drive and use that board while cloning it to a third drive.
The latter type of corruption (bad blocks) is more common than the former (silent corruption), though regrettably the former seems to be becoming more and more common lately, which has me growing quite concerned about data integrity with modern hard drives.