Actually, it is. Your compiling and translation happens at deployment time (or at staging time, hopefully), not during development. With native C++, you pay that penalty over and over again. With PHP and a translator, you develop the thing using normal PHP/Apache and pay that compilation penalty only near the end of the process.
A significant percentage of JavaScript stuff is done with dot notation and classes. So I'd say its closer to a subset of C++, really. It's also a pretty awful language, mainly because of the debugging environment. (Don't get me wrong, the new debuggers make it a heck of a lot better than it used to be, but that's like saying death by a million paper cuts is better than death by a million razor blades.)
Regarding the issue of array indices in PHP, it is a little ugly, but you can generally cast such a string to an integer (assuming that's what you want) just by saying $foo = $bararray[(int)$indexvalue];. And thankfully, IIRC, you can't access the non-numeric keys using numeric indices like you can in JavaScript. Now *that* is one unholy, ugly mess of an associative array design....
I don't think there's really any security check that Apple could have performed on an over-the-air configuration profile that would not defeat the purpose of having such a profile. The idea is to make it as painless as possible for users to sign up for custom settings specific to a company where they work or whatever (e.g. adding corporate firewall keys, that sort of thing). As soon as you limit who can sign the profiles, they become useless, and if Apple required everyone to sign up for a signing cert through them, everyone would be jumping up and down screaming that Apple is being too controlling. It's truly a no-win.
Even if they added an extra check to make sure the signing cert doesn't have/^\s*Apple\s*$/i or/^\s*Apple\s*Computer\s*$/i as the company name, that still doesn't fully solve the problem. Many users would just as quickly tap "OK" for an update that claimed to be from any company they trust---their bank, Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AT&T, etc. And making the warning sterner only helps if people read it and understand it. I'm just not convinced that this problem has a solution short of not trusting incompetent cert providers with a history of issuing certs in the name of other companies.
The real security flaw here, IMHO, is that Verisign issued this company a signing certificate with the name Apple Computer. And this isn't the first time Verisign has done something stupid like that. They've repeatedly shown themselves completely incapable of doing even basic sanity checking before handing out signing certificates, SSL certificates, etc. Thus, IMHO, their code signing certs are inherently no more trustworthy than a self-signed cert or someone typing the name of a company into a field in a plist file. As far as I'm concerned, they should be dropped from the list of trusted roots. If Safari and Firefox both did this, they would eventually shrivel up and die like the inept hack of a company they are.
Or you could use the serial number as the initial password and require the administrator to change it at first login, thus making it impossible to configure the device without first setting a password. Include a convenient physical reset button to reset it to factory configuration (including password) if you screw up, but make sure that this forces you to reconfigure everything before the device is usable.
Of course, this assumes that it is necessary to do at least some configuration in order to use the device. If that's not the case, then the right answer is to not use a password at all, and require that the telco connect to the device using a private key to update it.
You also pay for the power needed to operate the cell, which presumably their other customers benefit from. If they put a full cell site on your property, they'd typically pay you between $10-25,000 per year to lease the right to do so (even if it is just putting it on top of an existing structure). Why should they get to place a femtocell at your house for free merely because it runs at a lower power? At a minimum, they should give you a discount on your monthly charge and free service on that cell. Anything less is outright taking advantage of you.
Exactly. This case shows pretty clearly that if you're a big company with enough money, you can trample all over the rights of the public, break the law flagrantly, and still get off scot-free. This was anything but a win for the rule of law. At best, it was a draw.
If flying is not a civil right, neither is tourism. When Gatwick adopts this policy, that will be the last cent of tourist dollars I spend in England and the last time I fly through on the way to Europe. If enough people had the guts to do the same, this bullshit wouldn't be happening. Stand up, people! Stand up for your rights! Say no to intrusive government! Vote with your tourism dollars like the rest of the world did to the U.S. over the last decade.
The most obvious terrorist target would be the group of people waiting in line at the security checkpoint. I think most people would find it at least mildly amusing to watch a bunch of career politicians discussing ways to ensure that everyone gets scanned before they get scanned.... I believe that this is an infinite recursion problem.
A pat down leaves a record only in the memory of the person doing the pat down. A body scan leaves a record on "Girls Gone Wild: Airport Style" when some @$$hole sneaks a cell phone camera into the booth.
Yes, but the exact balance depends a lot on the weight distribution in the vehicle. I'm told that the theoretical ideal for a car with evenly balanced front/rear weight is about 67/33. Apparently, most cars ship with their front/rear bias between 70/30 and 80/20, in part because weight distribution is not even. That said, if it's too far off, your rear brakes aren't doing enough work and you warp a lot of rotors in the front....
First, accelerating from 0 to 100 takes much longer in large part because of gearing. You have different amounts of power in different speed bands. That 0-60 time measurement is the *average* of its power, but the brakes must overcome the motor in its *strongest* band.
Second, you're forgetting that it has to overcome both the engine *and* momentum.
Third, when brakes are overworked, they get hot and lose their grip.
I stand by my statement that I would not expect cars to be able to reliably stop with the engine at full throttle. Some might, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. For sure, according to Consumer Reports, at least one Toyota model cannot reliably do so.
Considering that this is directly contrary to the personal experiences of several people on this thread and a recent consumer reports road test of some of the very vehicles that this article is about, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is not nearly as clear cut as you make it out to be.
The fact is that under ideal circumstances, yes, maybe on most cars you might be able to bring the vehicle to a stop if and only if:
You do not first attempt to use the brake to kick the thing out of cruise control several times unsuccessfully.
You immediately push as hard as you can on the gas and keep it down until the vehicle stops.
You are strong enough to apply maximum braking.
The ABS system doesn't get in the way.
Your brakes have not been used a lot recently (and thus don't overheat)
The vehicle is going below about 60 MPH.
The vehicle is neither a truck nor an SUV nor a high end sports car.
That just proves that your brakes are stronger than the traction from your tires. That's not at all the same thing as the brakes on the drive wheels overcoming the engine.
It would not stop you if you put your foot on the main brake pedal, either. The brakes in cars aren't designed to overcome the engine. That said, if the emergency brake in your car doesn't slow your car down, your brake system is probably calibrated wrong, and you're going to burn up your front disk brakes much faster than normal because they're doing all the work.
There actually have been studies that show fairly conclusively that longer ramps have significantly lower accident rates. It's not all about the idiot who fails to look. On a longer ramp, the merging vehicle can comfortably match the speed of the traffic. That's not possible on many ramps. Also, with longer ramps, traffic in the driving lane has the opportunity to adjust to take the entering vehicle into account. With a short ramp, that opportunity doesn't exist, and you just have to pray that the person merging in isn't an idiot. That's why any new roads in the last couple of decades all have much, much longer ramps than roads built before those safety studies.
The problem is that we still have an awful lot of old roads with that "step on the gas and pray to whatever deity you believe in" mentality---roads that were designed based on the assumption that most of the traffic was passing through an area instead of getting on or off, based on a much lower amount of total traffic, etc. Some of the ramps on 101 and 237 in the south SF Bay area are so short that it's hard to get up to anything approaching highway speed merging in. You feel like you're taking your life in your hands just getting on the highway. There are several ramps that are so bad that I simply refuse to take them.
One such ramp has about one fatal accident per year. It is a blind merge with a total merge length of maybe a hundred feet, if that. Even adding one or two hundred feet to that entrance would probably cut the accident rate in half, if not farther. After driving it just a handful of times, I'd already had so many close calls that I've found alternate routes. I'm not talking about making ramps absurdly long here. I'm talking about fixing all the ramps that are dangerously short by any reasonable measure.
Classifying objects for these purposes amounts to asking, "Is it hard?" You can determine that well enough based on sonar or radar reflections alone. You just need the approximate density.
Regarding run-flat tires, it's safe to say that by the time we have computers driving the majority of cars on the road, non-run-flat tires won't be on the road. They're expected to become mandatory as original equipment pretty soon, and since OEM tires are a huge percentage of tire manufacturing, I would expect non-run-flat tires to be rare to nonexistent by 2020 or so.
Nails really aren't that dangerous as long as all tires are run-flat. I mean I suppose your tire could kick one up into the air, in which case it might be dangerous to pedestrians, but generally anything that small should be ignored, or at best, steered around pending classification.
Yes, I know that, but that's what I've heard many people suggesting. Really, really wrong.
Truthfully, though, even taking the next exit and finding a parking lot will increase the crash rate significantly. If more than 4 out of 5 wrecks are ramp-related wrecks, assuming that the rate of ramp-related accidents is proportional to the number of times people actually take those ramps (and there's every reason to believe that this is the case), if you doubled the number of times an average person enters or exits the highway, you should expect about 6 million additional automobile accidents per year in the U.S. alone....
The best way to make roads safer, then, is to stop worrying about what drivers do and make the stupid on-ramps twice as long. I suspect it would probably reduce the traffic accident rate by a good 30-40% if we extended every on-ramp in the U.S. to at least a quarter mile for accelerating and merging. Mandating lane change warning systems for large trucks would be another significant win (financially, if not in terms of the number of accidents).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is. Your compiling and translation happens at deployment time (or at staging time, hopefully), not during development. With native C++, you pay that penalty over and over again. With PHP and a translator, you develop the thing using normal PHP/Apache and pay that compilation penalty only near the end of the process.
A significant percentage of JavaScript stuff is done with dot notation and classes. So I'd say its closer to a subset of C++, really. It's also a pretty awful language, mainly because of the debugging environment. (Don't get me wrong, the new debuggers make it a heck of a lot better than it used to be, but that's like saying death by a million paper cuts is better than death by a million razor blades.)
Regarding the issue of array indices in PHP, it is a little ugly, but you can generally cast such a string to an integer (assuming that's what you want) just by saying $foo = $bararray[(int)$indexvalue];. And thankfully, IIRC, you can't access the non-numeric keys using numeric indices like you can in JavaScript. Now *that* is one unholy, ugly mess of an associative array design....
Yeah, and you can write some pretty powerful^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinsane stuff with shell scripts.
*points to sig*
What makes PHP nice is that it is so close to C. For people who are comfortable working in C, PHP is just a few dollar signs away.
At least one person got it.... *sigh*
I don't think there's really any security check that Apple could have performed on an over-the-air configuration profile that would not defeat the purpose of having such a profile. The idea is to make it as painless as possible for users to sign up for custom settings specific to a company where they work or whatever (e.g. adding corporate firewall keys, that sort of thing). As soon as you limit who can sign the profiles, they become useless, and if Apple required everyone to sign up for a signing cert through them, everyone would be jumping up and down screaming that Apple is being too controlling. It's truly a no-win.
Even if they added an extra check to make sure the signing cert doesn't have /^\s*Apple\s*$/i or /^\s*Apple\s*Computer\s*$/i as the company name, that still doesn't fully solve the problem. Many users would just as quickly tap "OK" for an update that claimed to be from any company they trust---their bank, Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AT&T, etc. And making the warning sterner only helps if people read it and understand it. I'm just not convinced that this problem has a solution short of not trusting incompetent cert providers with a history of issuing certs in the name of other companies.
The real security flaw here, IMHO, is that Verisign issued this company a signing certificate with the name Apple Computer. And this isn't the first time Verisign has done something stupid like that. They've repeatedly shown themselves completely incapable of doing even basic sanity checking before handing out signing certificates, SSL certificates, etc. Thus, IMHO, their code signing certs are inherently no more trustworthy than a self-signed cert or someone typing the name of a company into a field in a plist file. As far as I'm concerned, they should be dropped from the list of trusted roots. If Safari and Firefox both did this, they would eventually shrivel up and die like the inept hack of a company they are.
GPS coordinates:
38.9522,-77.144752
:-D
Or you could use the serial number as the initial password and require the administrator to change it at first login, thus making it impossible to configure the device without first setting a password. Include a convenient physical reset button to reset it to factory configuration (including password) if you screw up, but make sure that this forces you to reconfigure everything before the device is usable.
Of course, this assumes that it is necessary to do at least some configuration in order to use the device. If that's not the case, then the right answer is to not use a password at all, and require that the telco connect to the device using a private key to update it.
You also pay for the power needed to operate the cell, which presumably their other customers benefit from. If they put a full cell site on your property, they'd typically pay you between $10-25,000 per year to lease the right to do so (even if it is just putting it on top of an existing structure). Why should they get to place a femtocell at your house for free merely because it runs at a lower power? At a minimum, they should give you a discount on your monthly charge and free service on that cell. Anything less is outright taking advantage of you.
Exactly. This case shows pretty clearly that if you're a big company with enough money, you can trample all over the rights of the public, break the law flagrantly, and still get off scot-free. This was anything but a win for the rule of law. At best, it was a draw.
If flying is not a civil right, neither is tourism. When Gatwick adopts this policy, that will be the last cent of tourist dollars I spend in England and the last time I fly through on the way to Europe. If enough people had the guts to do the same, this bullshit wouldn't be happening. Stand up, people! Stand up for your rights! Say no to intrusive government! Vote with your tourism dollars like the rest of the world did to the U.S. over the last decade.
The most obvious terrorist target would be the group of people waiting in line at the security checkpoint. I think most people would find it at least mildly amusing to watch a bunch of career politicians discussing ways to ensure that everyone gets scanned before they get scanned.... I believe that this is an infinite recursion problem.
A pat down leaves a record only in the memory of the person doing the pat down. A body scan leaves a record on "Girls Gone Wild: Airport Style" when some @$$hole sneaks a cell phone camera into the booth.
Yes, but the exact balance depends a lot on the weight distribution in the vehicle. I'm told that the theoretical ideal for a car with evenly balanced front/rear weight is about 67/33. Apparently, most cars ship with their front/rear bias between 70/30 and 80/20, in part because weight distribution is not even. That said, if it's too far off, your rear brakes aren't doing enough work and you warp a lot of rotors in the front....
That's a wildly incorrect oversimplification.
First, accelerating from 0 to 100 takes much longer in large part because of gearing. You have different amounts of power in different speed bands. That 0-60 time measurement is the *average* of its power, but the brakes must overcome the motor in its *strongest* band.
Second, you're forgetting that it has to overcome both the engine *and* momentum.
Third, when brakes are overworked, they get hot and lose their grip.
I stand by my statement that I would not expect cars to be able to reliably stop with the engine at full throttle. Some might, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. For sure, according to Consumer Reports, at least one Toyota model cannot reliably do so.
Considering that this is directly contrary to the personal experiences of several people on this thread and a recent consumer reports road test of some of the very vehicles that this article is about, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is not nearly as clear cut as you make it out to be.
The fact is that under ideal circumstances, yes, maybe on most cars you might be able to bring the vehicle to a stop if and only if:
That's a LOT of ifs.
Unfortunately, the people who moderated my now-proven-correct statement down to -1 have long since stopped reading this thread.
That just proves that your brakes are stronger than the traction from your tires. That's not at all the same thing as the brakes on the drive wheels overcoming the engine.
It would not stop you if you put your foot on the main brake pedal, either. The brakes in cars aren't designed to overcome the engine. That said, if the emergency brake in your car doesn't slow your car down, your brake system is probably calibrated wrong, and you're going to burn up your front disk brakes much faster than normal because they're doing all the work.
There actually have been studies that show fairly conclusively that longer ramps have significantly lower accident rates. It's not all about the idiot who fails to look. On a longer ramp, the merging vehicle can comfortably match the speed of the traffic. That's not possible on many ramps. Also, with longer ramps, traffic in the driving lane has the opportunity to adjust to take the entering vehicle into account. With a short ramp, that opportunity doesn't exist, and you just have to pray that the person merging in isn't an idiot. That's why any new roads in the last couple of decades all have much, much longer ramps than roads built before those safety studies.
The problem is that we still have an awful lot of old roads with that "step on the gas and pray to whatever deity you believe in" mentality---roads that were designed based on the assumption that most of the traffic was passing through an area instead of getting on or off, based on a much lower amount of total traffic, etc. Some of the ramps on 101 and 237 in the south SF Bay area are so short that it's hard to get up to anything approaching highway speed merging in. You feel like you're taking your life in your hands just getting on the highway. There are several ramps that are so bad that I simply refuse to take them.
One such ramp has about one fatal accident per year. It is a blind merge with a total merge length of maybe a hundred feet, if that. Even adding one or two hundred feet to that entrance would probably cut the accident rate in half, if not farther. After driving it just a handful of times, I'd already had so many close calls that I've found alternate routes. I'm not talking about making ramps absurdly long here. I'm talking about fixing all the ramps that are dangerously short by any reasonable measure.
Classifying objects for these purposes amounts to asking, "Is it hard?" You can determine that well enough based on sonar or radar reflections alone. You just need the approximate density.
Regarding run-flat tires, it's safe to say that by the time we have computers driving the majority of cars on the road, non-run-flat tires won't be on the road. They're expected to become mandatory as original equipment pretty soon, and since OEM tires are a huge percentage of tire manufacturing, I would expect non-run-flat tires to be rare to nonexistent by 2020 or so.
Either way, IIRC, the average broadband speed is still single-digit Mbps. So for most of us, Wi-Fi can still trivially saturate our upstream link.
Nails really aren't that dangerous as long as all tires are run-flat. I mean I suppose your tire could kick one up into the air, in which case it might be dangerous to pedestrians, but generally anything that small should be ignored, or at best, steered around pending classification.
The amazing thing is how many of us actually get the reference.
The best part is that somebody actually made a shirt.
Yes, I know that, but that's what I've heard many people suggesting. Really, really wrong.
Truthfully, though, even taking the next exit and finding a parking lot will increase the crash rate significantly. If more than 4 out of 5 wrecks are ramp-related wrecks, assuming that the rate of ramp-related accidents is proportional to the number of times people actually take those ramps (and there's every reason to believe that this is the case), if you doubled the number of times an average person enters or exits the highway, you should expect about 6 million additional automobile accidents per year in the U.S. alone....
The best way to make roads safer, then, is to stop worrying about what drivers do and make the stupid on-ramps twice as long. I suspect it would probably reduce the traffic accident rate by a good 30-40% if we extended every on-ramp in the U.S. to at least a quarter mile for accelerating and merging. Mandating lane change warning systems for large trucks would be another significant win (financially, if not in terms of the number of accidents).