Out of the box? My guess is "almost all of them", at least where BASH 4 is concerned. Outside of the Linux community, BASH 4 will pretty much be stillborn. I expect close to zero adoption.
Why? GPL v3. The *BSD community is working hard to replace everything the FSF produces with BSD-licensed code because GPL v3 is so offensive to them. They're well on their way even in hard-to-fill spaces like compiler technology. With shells, they already have several viable replacements, so there's no point in continuing to drag along the licensing baggage that is BASH. They'll just include Zsh and pdksh instead and most people won't care. The folks who do can compile and build BASH themselves. I'd expect it to be rejected by many of the corporate-backed UNIX/Linux distros as well.
The problem with your logic is that with the economy in the toilet, one never knows which category one falls into. While you could find another job, there's no guarantee you could find one that pays as well for a company that you would be reasonably happy working for that is within a reasonable driving distance from your home. And before you say "move somewhere else", in this economy, being able to sell one's home in a reasonably short amount of time is also not a given.
In short, your notion fails to take into account that some people actually like their jobs and like working for their employer. At some point, after working somewhere for a few years, it is no longer just a job that can be so easily discarded. Where I work, there's a startling tendency for laid off employees to end up working there again for a different team within just a handful of years.
The notion of pay cuts to avoid layoffs seems perfectly reasonable to me. If anything, it means that the company values their employees enough that they hope to keep all of them. In my book, that says a lot about the company and its management. Either it means that they genuinely care about their employees (in which case you'd have a hard time finding a comparably good company to work for) or it means that they are barely able to stay out of bankruptcy and are too scared that the hit on their stock from announcing layoffs will put them over the edge. One is very positive, the other very negative. Use your own judgment on a case-by-case basis.:-)
If you ask me, big news organizations should be non-profit organizations anyway. As soon as you depend on advertisers, your ability to be unbiased becomes suspect.
That said, IMHO, the reason we're having this whole discussion at all is that the media has been paying people poorly for so many years. Outside the major markets, it pays so badly that folks can barely afford to keep a roof over their heads. The result is that journalism and communications tend to attract people who are in it for the wrong reasons---for face time, for glory, because they can't handle math, whatever. By being so uncompetitive salary-wise, they have a hard time attracting the best and brightest into the profession. Thus, although there are certainly good journalists out there, the average quality is in a state of steady decline. It is little wonder, then, that people perceive little difference between professional journalists and amateurs; there is growing to be progressively less difference with every passing year.
Here's another, more recent story about the same thing happening to a journalist just two years ago. In short, possession laws are still very much defecating on the freedom of the press.
The American laws may be better than the UK's train wreck, but they are far from sound. The reality is that if I stumbled upon something illegal through clicking the wrong link on Slashdot (for example), I couldn't necessarily report it without fear of prosecution; unlike ISPs, I don't have any guaranteed protection under the law. In fact, there was a reporter that got several years for investigating child porn a while back, so even the investigative media doesn't have protection from prosecution.
Sadly, none of the routers I've ever used or owned have that functionality, and in my experience, half the router manufacturers can't even keep basic IP routing with NAT working reliably, much less get a working SMTP stack up and running, so I'm not holding my breath that they'll add that feature any time soon.:-D
That said, I do like the idea of making the GOP handle everyone's data retention. That way, when they "blackhole" the messages, we can have them jailed for destroying potential evidence.:-)
Well, that just points out the obvious incompatibility between the concepts of blacklists and possession laws. The company can't verify a proposed submission because to do so would violate laws about viewing and possessing child porn, either, so you can probably assume that the majority of sites on the blacklist are bogus. Either that or the company is forced to violate the law to confirm the sites.
Guess which of those two things must go away for society to function? Give you a hint: it isn't the blacklist. Possession laws are about as asinine as they get. They make illegal the legitimate screening of reported illegal content, they make reporting child porn that you accidentally discover on the Internet impossible without risking prosecution for possessing it (if only momentarily in your browser cache and RAM), and in general are fundamentally contrary to efforts to rid the Internet of child pornography. Any law that achieves the opposite of its stated goals is pretty clearly a fundamentally bad law...
...unless, of course, the members of Congress enjoy child pornography and passed laws like this to make it hard to eradicate so that they can enjoy it in the privacy of a secure government network with no logging.... You don't... like... child pornography, do you, Senator? Makes you wonder, doesn't it?:-D
Most routers I've seen keep (at most) single digit hours of logs by the time you factor in things like time server requests and DNS lookups.
The fundamental flaw in the government's plan is this: in order for a wireless base station or home router to log, it has to log somewhere else. That means a computer with a static IP that must always be on. This means that every home user must BUY A SECOND COMPUTER for the logging, and it must be attached by wired Ethernet. Otherwise, there will be nothing in the logs about somebody connecting to the base station/router because by the time the computer finishes connecting to the base station or router, the UDP message from the base station with the log message has already been sent and lost in the ether.
Do our Congressmen and Congresswomen have any idea what they are asking for? They're asking for every American family with any sort of high speed internet connection to spend an additional $300 on a second computer AND violate the rules of their ISP (which almost certainly say that only one computer may be connected at a time) AND set up a logging daemon. Methinks they have not thought this through.
Even the most novice computer user should have the ability to say "I don't know how to do this" and conclude that mandating it for other average users is probably a bad idea. Thus, this isn't a case of our Congress critters not being computer savvy. It is about them being incapable of even performing the most basic logical extension---realizing that if they don't know how to do something, odds are no other average computer users do, either---and reaching the only rational conclusion---the conclusion that forcing everyone to do things that they don't know how to do is sheer lunacy.
In short, this is an absurd proposed law with which less than one half of one percent of the people who own these devices are capable of complying. Based on this, I pretty much have to conclude that Congressmen lack common sense entirely, and I'm struggling to think of very many other times when I have been so utterly ashamed at the lack of basic logical thinking shown by our elected officials.
Yeah, let me know when such a party exists. If there were a party that preserved individual liberties but didn't try to tear down legislation designed to protect the citizens from corporate abuses, it would be a great choice to vote for. Unfortunately, the Libertarian party's notion of liberty includes freedom from government intervention in business as well.
The problem is, the Libertarians fail to grasp a fairly fundamental truth: that corporations with billions of dollars can afford to run roughshod over their customers and cause extraordinary levels of harm, while individual consumers are nearly powerless to prevent it except through legislation. As a result, voting Libertarian in more than trace quantities would shift the balance of power in a very negative way towards a very corporate-controlled, anti-consumer society.
Indeed, their "the markets will sort it out" economic policy is incredibly naive. We had that sort of laissez faire economic policy for a long time in the U.S., and sure enough, large swaths of the economy rapidly collapsed into monopolies and stayed that way until the government intervened. It just doesn't work in practice.
All political parties suck from what I'm seeing. The best that can be done with the ones we have thus far is to elect enough members of enough parties to create complete gridlock to ensure that the only laws that ever get passed are those laws that pass muster with people who hold a wide range of opinions....
Maybe if the girl were texting death threats on that phone.... Otherwise, AFAIK, the courts have generally ruled that schools do not have the right to arbitrary searches without cause to believe that a law is being violated, and most state laws are consistent with that view. Unless a cell phone constitutes a weapon or has been used in a crime, I'd be absolutely shocked if a court considered it acceptable for a school to search someone for it. Reasonable suspicion of possessing a cell phone simply does not meet the necessary legal standards for a search.
Agreed. You are not responsible for knowing where your friends are at all times. If your lawyer were good, you would have gotten a payout for false arrest on top of having all the charges dropped.
Simple. Quirks mode gets rendered badly, non-QM gets rendered right. Key off the presence or absence of a DOCTYPE declaration and you'll be right 404 times out of 405.
Yes, pretty much every teenager I've ever known has used a real camera (either digital or film) for taking photos when on vacation. In fact, I can't think of even a single counterexample. Cell cameras are for pictures you don't care about, not for real stuff.:-)
Compounding the problem with the original premise, cell cameras and digital cameras started becoming popular at about the same time, so if you assume that people's first cameras will determine their response to that sort of question, the window between people holding up digital cameras and holding up cell phones is very small. Digital cameras weren't really targeted towards the consumer mass market until the late 90s, and I don't remember seeing more than a handful of non-geek people who owned them before about '01 or so. By 2002, camera phones were starting to show up on the U.S. market.
Nothing you've said has swayed my opinion in the slightest. If anything, it has reinforced my view. The police don't have an inherent right to search your physical body, nor the right to know if you are caring a cell phone. Without a warrant, that's a pretty clear case of unlawful search and seizure. The school have the right to search students and their property for violations of the law, e.g. drugs, guns, etc., but AFAIK, no court case has ever held that they have the right to search a person's body for something that is not illegal to possess on school grounds.
Lying is also not inherently a crime, and although it could cause you to get hit with obstruction charges, there would have to be a crime investigation in progress; if there was no legitimate reason to be doing a crime investigation, OoJ charges would be hard to make stick. Again, unless there's a LOT more to the story, this seems like a stretch, particularly if she had not been read her Miranda rights prior to the questioning in which she lied. If she was not advised of her right to remain silent, I'd expect this to end up in a civil suit in which the school and the P.D. end up making a pretty large payout. I'd be surprised if it didn't end that way, in fact.
I did that whole drawing thing with an iBook. Somehow, I still ended up with extra screws.:-D
As for the question of easily removable vs. unremovable, I don't think anybody expected it to be hard to replace in terms of servicing. I know they say that these batteries should last an order of magnitude longer than what's in other laptops, but they'd have to be crazy not to hedge their bets on something like that. In terms of failure rate over the years, I've had more battery failures in laptops than all other parts put together with the exception of the wire leading to the power supply brick. Most computer manufacturers tend to put parts with higher failure rates in easy-to-reach places to minimize service time. It's just common sense.
That still doesn't cover the question of removability. That mostly affects people who expect to use a laptop while traveling, however, and the set of people who use laptops on long airplane flights and the set of people who use 17" laptops are pretty much disjoint sets, making this something of a moot point, IMHO. Just my $0.02. That said, I do hope that this is not part of a trend towards making batteries unremovable in other laptops. Having multiple batteries when flying is a life saver.
Nah. I've seen plenty of over-40s using cell phone cameras and modern digital cameras and plenty of teenagers witih real cameras. I'm in the middle category, but I still hold something up to my eye. SLR is the only way to photograph. If you've ever tried to take a picture in a dark environment, you understand why. There's nothing quite like a bright LCD panel leaving you unable to see for 45 seconds after you put the camera away to guarantee that you WILL get mugged in NYC....:-)
It's not that I don't have a cell phone with a camera. I do. I just think the picture quality sucks, so for anything that matters, I'd rather use my Digital Rebel XTi with an image-stabilized 17-85mm lens.... I'm pretty sure I'd still feel that way if I were a teenager. I also have an HDV camcorder, use a FireWire flash card reader (USB is too slow), and use Macs. If you're taking pictures to last a lifetime, you should make them good pictures.:-)
Actually, it's pretty easy. We've discussed this before every time the subject comes up. Put a continuous roll of clear plastic at one end of the panel and a take-up roll on the other end. Make the plastic travel in a track with brush seals so that nothing can easily get in behind the plastic. Periodically roll the plastic to keep the portion atop the panel clear. When you get to the end of the roll, reverse the direction. You'll have less power that pass, and eventually this won't be practical, but it will work for a really long time. For that matter, you could have a series of brushes along the path of the plastic beyond the panels that would significantly reduce the dust level on the plastic even on the second and subsequent passes. And because it is just a simple motor on a spool, it is about as mechanically trivial as you can get, unlike... say a windshield wiper... and best of all, if you scar the plastic, you're not scarring the panel itself and risking causing a panel failure.
Time for reductio ad absurdum. "Seriously? That guy didn't obey the cops when they told him to rape his sister. He deserved to get shot in the forehead at point-blank range." See how absurd an appeal to authority sounds when taken to extremes?
You are right that actions have consequences; in school, those consequences rarely, if ever, escalate beyond detention---suspension if you've gotten three detentions in a row. Unless there's a lot more to this story, calling the cops because a teenager wouldn't quit texting is just plain abuse of power. Now if the teenager wouldn't quit interrupting the teacher by texting the teacher, it might be construed as harassment, but again, the right answer is to confiscate the phone, give the student detention, etc.
Either way, the teenager would have to be doing something a lot more disruptive than texting for arresting her to be an appropriate punishment. That's just plain nuts.
Except that this is no longer the case. The highest energy density ultracapacitors in mass production right now are about 30 Wh/kg, which is comparable with that of a lead acid battery, and just shy of the low end on NiCd batteries as well. EEStor claims that they have prototypes that reach 400 Wh/kg, which is significantly more than most lithium ion technologies. Their prototype tech also meets or exceeds that of most Lithium ion batteries when measured volumetrically (Wh/L).
Admittedly, nobody has beaten Lithium ion cells yet in actual production quantities, but at the current rate of progress, I would expect ultracapacitors to exceed the energy density of batteries in the fairly near future. And I would hardly call even the commercially available ultracapacitors' modest 30 Wh/kg "horrifically low". By modern standards, it is low, but we're only talking "15-year-old battery tech" low here....
If anything, I'd expect the reverse to be true. Batteries in a laptop are never allowed to be depleted below a certain point. First, the computer hardware forces a sleep/safe sleep/hibernation at one voltage cutoff point, then the circuit in the battery cuts off power at a somewhat lower point. The only way the cell voltage in a laptop battery drops low enough to damage cells is if you leave the battery completely "depleted" for a long period of time, at which point you're generally screwed.
By contrast, batteries in a car are going to be under a much heavier load (locked rotor current every time you start from a dead stop), which could well shorten battery life significantly. Also, your average laptop stays plugged in much of the time, so it goes through a fraction of a charge cycle per day; depending on the range of the vehicle when running entirely on battery, a battery in a hybrid car could easily go through several complete charge-discharge cycles per day. I would expect vehicles to be much harder on batteries than laptops.
Fair enough about those things being extensions, though many are supported so broadly (the $(()) math syntax, for example) that it surprises people when they don't work. Unless you code on the Almquist or Debian Almquist shell regularly, chances are very good that you'll be in for a rude awakening if you ever switch to it. Things that nearly every/bin/sh implementation on the planet has provided for a decade or more (not just bash) simply don't work in ash or dash because they depend on behavior that isn't explicitly specified in the POSIX spec. That makes operating systems that use those shells great test platforms for testing scripts, albeit painful platforms for actual end users.:-)
That said, I would disagree with your criticism that awk, sed, etc. are not part of the shell and are thus not relevant to a discussion of script portability. If you want to talk only about pure shell scripts that don't actually run any programs, then yeah, they're pretty close to perfectly portable as long as you avoid a handful of gotchas, and they are pretty close to useless, too. In any reasonable discussion of shell scripting, you can't realistically limit discussion to talking about the language itself. You can't do much without exceeding the bounds of shell control statements and shell builtins (which, BTW, vary from shell to shell as well even within the Bourne-compatible camp). Okay, so maybe awk is a little too obscure, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Beyond really trivial scripts, most scripts that actually do something useful are likely to have to call, at minimum, sed, grep, echo, and expr; a sizable percentage will also use tr, bc, head or tail. With the possible exception of bc, everything on that list, IIRC, has at least one significant flag difference among Linux, the *BSDs, and Mac OS X, not even counting differences on AIX, Solaris, or any of the other myriad UNIX systems. That's why people find portable shell scripting so difficult; they end up accidentally using some flag or feature that is Linux-specific, BSD-specific, Mac OS X-specific, etc. without knowing they are doing so because the documentation doesn't mention that the flags are not part of the POSIX spec.
The POSIX specification is a good place to start when writing shell scripts that you expect to work correctly on other platforms. If you design to that, you'll only have a handful of compatibility problems (such as the echo -n blah vs. echo 'blah\c' problem).
As for your assertion that tools like awk should stay the same if you change shells, that is only partially true. There are parts of Mac OS X that automatically define magic shell variables (documented in the man pages for the various tools) that turn on or off support for legacy BSD syntax support. This allows POSIX compliance for passing the compliance tests and for general shell scripts while maintaining backwards compatibility for certain critical scripts like parts of startup items, installer preflight and postflight scripts, and so on. So even a given utility on a given OS can't be guaranteed to work the same way in every environment. That's why it is important to pay attention to these sorts of details when writing shell scripts.:-)
Dogs would be useful but it'd be a lot more fun if we could get a pterodactyl out there hunting the birds.
Have you ever seen an engine with the outside peeled off from the explosion after hitting a bird? Now imagine that, only with the engine hitting something almost as big as a city bus. In your calculations, take careful note of the trajectory of the engine as it breaks loose from the wing and brings half the wing with it.:-D
I'm not sure all the horrors required by autoconf would fit into a slashdot posting.
I think it could fill an entire book.
Start with all the custom extensions for things like GNOME and KDE that each have their own custom syntax instead of coming up with a single syntax that works reliably, and many of the modules aren't included universally with various OSes and/or distros, so trying to rebuild the "configure" script with autoconf results in utter failure unless you have all the various development packages installed, including pieces that are optional.
Next, add the fact that about half the Autoconf modules I've seen don't respect shell variables like $CFLAGS and $LDFLAGS, so you end up with a dozen different --with-foo-lib directives that are specific to each individual project to force it to look in the right place if it isn't where the original Autoconf script author expected it (and even then, sometimes I end up having to hack the Autoconf script and manually splice in extra arguments in the compile directive to make it work).
If you ever need to compile with a different compiler, you're in an even bigger world of hurt, since most AC modules don't seem to care about the value of $CC.
Oh, yes, and if you need to pass linker flags, you'll often have a great deal of fun if those flags aren't supported natively by gcc.
And so on. Anybody who has ever used Autoconf at any significant level could probably go on for weeks....
Autoconf is the antithesis of portability except when porting to platforms to which the software has already been ported, and then really, what's the point? So you save a couple of extra tiny makefiles, but you end up with something that's an utter bear to port to any platform instead of having a makefile for BSD that you can tweak trivially and port to a similar platform. When I'm porting something to a new platform, I'd much rather get a Makefile with neatly laid out variables at the top for things like FOOLIBDIR, BARLIBDIR, etc. and modify it by hand than get an Autoconf script (no matter how well written) any day of the week.
But seriously, yeah, you're absolutely right. Ooh, but a basic web server written as a Bourne shell script called by inetd would be so freaking cool....
Oh, no. Somebody actually did that.... Yikes! Now I'm scared.
Well, there is some truth to the GPP's comment. Linux and Mac OS X don't even agree on how to tell echo not to print a newline or how to enable extended regular expression mode in sed. May heaven help you if you want to do something as esoteric as creating or mounting a filesystem, creating or mounting a disk image/ramdisk, talk to a USB device in any way, get a list of processes in any useful way, etc. There's a very big lack of standardization in a lot of things you might like to do with scripts, in other words. The Single UNIX Spec and POSIX are not quite sufficient, but more annoyingly, most OSes (Linux, *BSD) out there don't even come close to conforming to it, so you end up with this dichotomy between BSD behavior and AT&T behavior.
That said, a lot of things are standardized, and many others can be worked around with clever use of variables (or possibly eval in a few extreme cases). I've written chapters on the subject myself. The big things you need to remember are that $(( $FOO + 3 )) is not portable, nor for ((...)), nor >&, nor anything involving extended regexp except using Perl, that even "the one true awk" is not quite SUS-compliant, GNU awk doubly so, bash triply so, that you should use printf instead of echo for output if you don't want newlines, that signal numbers are not portable (for trap), that proper quoting of arguments is crucial, and that you need to work with the bare minimum base behavior of utilities (using few or no flags) if you expect any hope of portability without needing to make platform-specific changes.
For some quick examples of some interesting portability issues, read some of my comments in the games at shellscriptgames.com or search for the word "compatibility" in Apple's "Shell Scripting Primer". It's a real eye opener to see how many portability problems exist even for fairly simple shell scripts.
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Out of the box? My guess is "almost all of them", at least where BASH 4 is concerned. Outside of the Linux community, BASH 4 will pretty much be stillborn. I expect close to zero adoption.
Why? GPL v3. The *BSD community is working hard to replace everything the FSF produces with BSD-licensed code because GPL v3 is so offensive to them. They're well on their way even in hard-to-fill spaces like compiler technology. With shells, they already have several viable replacements, so there's no point in continuing to drag along the licensing baggage that is BASH. They'll just include Zsh and pdksh instead and most people won't care. The folks who do can compile and build BASH themselves. I'd expect it to be rejected by many of the corporate-backed UNIX/Linux distros as well.
The problem with your logic is that with the economy in the toilet, one never knows which category one falls into. While you could find another job, there's no guarantee you could find one that pays as well for a company that you would be reasonably happy working for that is within a reasonable driving distance from your home. And before you say "move somewhere else", in this economy, being able to sell one's home in a reasonably short amount of time is also not a given.
In short, your notion fails to take into account that some people actually like their jobs and like working for their employer. At some point, after working somewhere for a few years, it is no longer just a job that can be so easily discarded. Where I work, there's a startling tendency for laid off employees to end up working there again for a different team within just a handful of years.
The notion of pay cuts to avoid layoffs seems perfectly reasonable to me. If anything, it means that the company values their employees enough that they hope to keep all of them. In my book, that says a lot about the company and its management. Either it means that they genuinely care about their employees (in which case you'd have a hard time finding a comparably good company to work for) or it means that they are barely able to stay out of bankruptcy and are too scared that the hit on their stock from announcing layoffs will put them over the edge. One is very positive, the other very negative. Use your own judgment on a case-by-case basis. :-)
If you ask me, big news organizations should be non-profit organizations anyway. As soon as you depend on advertisers, your ability to be unbiased becomes suspect.
That said, IMHO, the reason we're having this whole discussion at all is that the media has been paying people poorly for so many years. Outside the major markets, it pays so badly that folks can barely afford to keep a roof over their heads. The result is that journalism and communications tend to attract people who are in it for the wrong reasons---for face time, for glory, because they can't handle math, whatever. By being so uncompetitive salary-wise, they have a hard time attracting the best and brightest into the profession. Thus, although there are certainly good journalists out there, the average quality is in a state of steady decline. It is little wonder, then, that people perceive little difference between professional journalists and amateurs; there is growing to be progressively less difference with every passing year.
Here's another, more recent story about the same thing happening to a journalist just two years ago. In short, possession laws are still very much defecating on the freedom of the press.
The American laws may be better than the UK's train wreck, but they are far from sound. The reality is that if I stumbled upon something illegal through clicking the wrong link on Slashdot (for example), I couldn't necessarily report it without fear of prosecution; unlike ISPs, I don't have any guaranteed protection under the law. In fact, there was a reporter that got several years for investigating child porn a while back, so even the investigative media doesn't have protection from prosecution.
See also: Larry Matthews
Sound? Hardly. The laws are a disaster, the courts' interpretation of them doubly so.
Sadly, none of the routers I've ever used or owned have that functionality, and in my experience, half the router manufacturers can't even keep basic IP routing with NAT working reliably, much less get a working SMTP stack up and running, so I'm not holding my breath that they'll add that feature any time soon. :-D
That said, I do like the idea of making the GOP handle everyone's data retention. That way, when they "blackhole" the messages, we can have them jailed for destroying potential evidence. :-)
Well, that just points out the obvious incompatibility between the concepts of blacklists and possession laws. The company can't verify a proposed submission because to do so would violate laws about viewing and possessing child porn, either, so you can probably assume that the majority of sites on the blacklist are bogus. Either that or the company is forced to violate the law to confirm the sites.
Guess which of those two things must go away for society to function? Give you a hint: it isn't the blacklist. Possession laws are about as asinine as they get. They make illegal the legitimate screening of reported illegal content, they make reporting child porn that you accidentally discover on the Internet impossible without risking prosecution for possessing it (if only momentarily in your browser cache and RAM), and in general are fundamentally contrary to efforts to rid the Internet of child pornography. Any law that achieves the opposite of its stated goals is pretty clearly a fundamentally bad law...
...unless, of course, the members of Congress enjoy child pornography and passed laws like this to make it hard to eradicate so that they can enjoy it in the privacy of a secure government network with no logging.... You don't... like... child pornography, do you, Senator? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? :-D
Most routers I've seen keep (at most) single digit hours of logs by the time you factor in things like time server requests and DNS lookups.
The fundamental flaw in the government's plan is this: in order for a wireless base station or home router to log, it has to log somewhere else. That means a computer with a static IP that must always be on. This means that every home user must BUY A SECOND COMPUTER for the logging, and it must be attached by wired Ethernet. Otherwise, there will be nothing in the logs about somebody connecting to the base station/router because by the time the computer finishes connecting to the base station or router, the UDP message from the base station with the log message has already been sent and lost in the ether.
Do our Congressmen and Congresswomen have any idea what they are asking for? They're asking for every American family with any sort of high speed internet connection to spend an additional $300 on a second computer AND violate the rules of their ISP (which almost certainly say that only one computer may be connected at a time) AND set up a logging daemon. Methinks they have not thought this through.
Even the most novice computer user should have the ability to say "I don't know how to do this" and conclude that mandating it for other average users is probably a bad idea. Thus, this isn't a case of our Congress critters not being computer savvy. It is about them being incapable of even performing the most basic logical extension---realizing that if they don't know how to do something, odds are no other average computer users do, either---and reaching the only rational conclusion---the conclusion that forcing everyone to do things that they don't know how to do is sheer lunacy.
In short, this is an absurd proposed law with which less than one half of one percent of the people who own these devices are capable of complying. Based on this, I pretty much have to conclude that Congressmen lack common sense entirely, and I'm struggling to think of very many other times when I have been so utterly ashamed at the lack of basic logical thinking shown by our elected officials.
Yeah, let me know when such a party exists. If there were a party that preserved individual liberties but didn't try to tear down legislation designed to protect the citizens from corporate abuses, it would be a great choice to vote for. Unfortunately, the Libertarian party's notion of liberty includes freedom from government intervention in business as well.
The problem is, the Libertarians fail to grasp a fairly fundamental truth: that corporations with billions of dollars can afford to run roughshod over their customers and cause extraordinary levels of harm, while individual consumers are nearly powerless to prevent it except through legislation. As a result, voting Libertarian in more than trace quantities would shift the balance of power in a very negative way towards a very corporate-controlled, anti-consumer society.
Indeed, their "the markets will sort it out" economic policy is incredibly naive. We had that sort of laissez faire economic policy for a long time in the U.S., and sure enough, large swaths of the economy rapidly collapsed into monopolies and stayed that way until the government intervened. It just doesn't work in practice.
All political parties suck from what I'm seeing. The best that can be done with the ones we have thus far is to elect enough members of enough parties to create complete gridlock to ensure that the only laws that ever get passed are those laws that pass muster with people who hold a wide range of opinions....
Maybe if the girl were texting death threats on that phone.... Otherwise, AFAIK, the courts have generally ruled that schools do not have the right to arbitrary searches without cause to believe that a law is being violated, and most state laws are consistent with that view. Unless a cell phone constitutes a weapon or has been used in a crime, I'd be absolutely shocked if a court considered it acceptable for a school to search someone for it. Reasonable suspicion of possessing a cell phone simply does not meet the necessary legal standards for a search.
Agreed. You are not responsible for knowing where your friends are at all times. If your lawyer were good, you would have gotten a payout for false arrest on top of having all the charges dropped.
Simple. Quirks mode gets rendered badly, non-QM gets rendered right. Key off the presence or absence of a DOCTYPE declaration and you'll be right 404 times out of 405.
Yes, pretty much every teenager I've ever known has used a real camera (either digital or film) for taking photos when on vacation. In fact, I can't think of even a single counterexample. Cell cameras are for pictures you don't care about, not for real stuff. :-)
Compounding the problem with the original premise, cell cameras and digital cameras started becoming popular at about the same time, so if you assume that people's first cameras will determine their response to that sort of question, the window between people holding up digital cameras and holding up cell phones is very small. Digital cameras weren't really targeted towards the consumer mass market until the late 90s, and I don't remember seeing more than a handful of non-geek people who owned them before about '01 or so. By 2002, camera phones were starting to show up on the U.S. market.
Nothing you've said has swayed my opinion in the slightest. If anything, it has reinforced my view. The police don't have an inherent right to search your physical body, nor the right to know if you are caring a cell phone. Without a warrant, that's a pretty clear case of unlawful search and seizure. The school have the right to search students and their property for violations of the law, e.g. drugs, guns, etc., but AFAIK, no court case has ever held that they have the right to search a person's body for something that is not illegal to possess on school grounds.
Lying is also not inherently a crime, and although it could cause you to get hit with obstruction charges, there would have to be a crime investigation in progress; if there was no legitimate reason to be doing a crime investigation, OoJ charges would be hard to make stick. Again, unless there's a LOT more to the story, this seems like a stretch, particularly if she had not been read her Miranda rights prior to the questioning in which she lied. If she was not advised of her right to remain silent, I'd expect this to end up in a civil suit in which the school and the P.D. end up making a pretty large payout. I'd be surprised if it didn't end that way, in fact.
I did that whole drawing thing with an iBook. Somehow, I still ended up with extra screws. :-D
As for the question of easily removable vs. unremovable, I don't think anybody expected it to be hard to replace in terms of servicing. I know they say that these batteries should last an order of magnitude longer than what's in other laptops, but they'd have to be crazy not to hedge their bets on something like that. In terms of failure rate over the years, I've had more battery failures in laptops than all other parts put together with the exception of the wire leading to the power supply brick. Most computer manufacturers tend to put parts with higher failure rates in easy-to-reach places to minimize service time. It's just common sense.
That still doesn't cover the question of removability. That mostly affects people who expect to use a laptop while traveling, however, and the set of people who use laptops on long airplane flights and the set of people who use 17" laptops are pretty much disjoint sets, making this something of a moot point, IMHO. Just my $0.02. That said, I do hope that this is not part of a trend towards making batteries unremovable in other laptops. Having multiple batteries when flying is a life saver.
Nah. I've seen plenty of over-40s using cell phone cameras and modern digital cameras and plenty of teenagers witih real cameras. I'm in the middle category, but I still hold something up to my eye. SLR is the only way to photograph. If you've ever tried to take a picture in a dark environment, you understand why. There's nothing quite like a bright LCD panel leaving you unable to see for 45 seconds after you put the camera away to guarantee that you WILL get mugged in NYC.... :-)
It's not that I don't have a cell phone with a camera. I do. I just think the picture quality sucks, so for anything that matters, I'd rather use my Digital Rebel XTi with an image-stabilized 17-85mm lens.... I'm pretty sure I'd still feel that way if I were a teenager. I also have an HDV camcorder, use a FireWire flash card reader (USB is too slow), and use Macs. If you're taking pictures to last a lifetime, you should make them good pictures. :-)
Actually, it's pretty easy. We've discussed this before every time the subject comes up. Put a continuous roll of clear plastic at one end of the panel and a take-up roll on the other end. Make the plastic travel in a track with brush seals so that nothing can easily get in behind the plastic. Periodically roll the plastic to keep the portion atop the panel clear. When you get to the end of the roll, reverse the direction. You'll have less power that pass, and eventually this won't be practical, but it will work for a really long time. For that matter, you could have a series of brushes along the path of the plastic beyond the panels that would significantly reduce the dust level on the plastic even on the second and subsequent passes. And because it is just a simple motor on a spool, it is about as mechanically trivial as you can get, unlike... say a windshield wiper... and best of all, if you scar the plastic, you're not scarring the panel itself and risking causing a panel failure.
Time for reductio ad absurdum. "Seriously? That guy didn't obey the cops when they told him to rape his sister. He deserved to get shot in the forehead at point-blank range." See how absurd an appeal to authority sounds when taken to extremes?
You are right that actions have consequences; in school, those consequences rarely, if ever, escalate beyond detention---suspension if you've gotten three detentions in a row. Unless there's a lot more to this story, calling the cops because a teenager wouldn't quit texting is just plain abuse of power. Now if the teenager wouldn't quit interrupting the teacher by texting the teacher, it might be construed as harassment, but again, the right answer is to confiscate the phone, give the student detention, etc.
Either way, the teenager would have to be doing something a lot more disruptive than texting for arresting her to be an appropriate punishment. That's just plain nuts.
Except that this is no longer the case. The highest energy density ultracapacitors in mass production right now are about 30 Wh/kg, which is comparable with that of a lead acid battery, and just shy of the low end on NiCd batteries as well. EEStor claims that they have prototypes that reach 400 Wh/kg, which is significantly more than most lithium ion technologies. Their prototype tech also meets or exceeds that of most Lithium ion batteries when measured volumetrically (Wh/L).
Admittedly, nobody has beaten Lithium ion cells yet in actual production quantities, but at the current rate of progress, I would expect ultracapacitors to exceed the energy density of batteries in the fairly near future. And I would hardly call even the commercially available ultracapacitors' modest 30 Wh/kg "horrifically low". By modern standards, it is low, but we're only talking "15-year-old battery tech" low here....
If anything, I'd expect the reverse to be true. Batteries in a laptop are never allowed to be depleted below a certain point. First, the computer hardware forces a sleep/safe sleep/hibernation at one voltage cutoff point, then the circuit in the battery cuts off power at a somewhat lower point. The only way the cell voltage in a laptop battery drops low enough to damage cells is if you leave the battery completely "depleted" for a long period of time, at which point you're generally screwed.
By contrast, batteries in a car are going to be under a much heavier load (locked rotor current every time you start from a dead stop), which could well shorten battery life significantly. Also, your average laptop stays plugged in much of the time, so it goes through a fraction of a charge cycle per day; depending on the range of the vehicle when running entirely on battery, a battery in a hybrid car could easily go through several complete charge-discharge cycles per day. I would expect vehicles to be much harder on batteries than laptops.
Fair enough about those things being extensions, though many are supported so broadly (the $(()) math syntax, for example) that it surprises people when they don't work. Unless you code on the Almquist or Debian Almquist shell regularly, chances are very good that you'll be in for a rude awakening if you ever switch to it. Things that nearly every /bin/sh implementation on the planet has provided for a decade or more (not just bash) simply don't work in ash or dash because they depend on behavior that isn't explicitly specified in the POSIX spec. That makes operating systems that use those shells great test platforms for testing scripts, albeit painful platforms for actual end users. :-)
That said, I would disagree with your criticism that awk, sed, etc. are not part of the shell and are thus not relevant to a discussion of script portability. If you want to talk only about pure shell scripts that don't actually run any programs, then yeah, they're pretty close to perfectly portable as long as you avoid a handful of gotchas, and they are pretty close to useless, too. In any reasonable discussion of shell scripting, you can't realistically limit discussion to talking about the language itself. You can't do much without exceeding the bounds of shell control statements and shell builtins (which, BTW, vary from shell to shell as well even within the Bourne-compatible camp). Okay, so maybe awk is a little too obscure, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Beyond really trivial scripts, most scripts that actually do something useful are likely to have to call, at minimum, sed, grep, echo, and expr; a sizable percentage will also use tr, bc, head or tail. With the possible exception of bc, everything on that list, IIRC, has at least one significant flag difference among Linux, the *BSDs, and Mac OS X, not even counting differences on AIX, Solaris, or any of the other myriad UNIX systems. That's why people find portable shell scripting so difficult; they end up accidentally using some flag or feature that is Linux-specific, BSD-specific, Mac OS X-specific, etc. without knowing they are doing so because the documentation doesn't mention that the flags are not part of the POSIX spec.
The POSIX specification is a good place to start when writing shell scripts that you expect to work correctly on other platforms. If you design to that, you'll only have a handful of compatibility problems (such as the echo -n blah vs. echo 'blah\c' problem).
As for your assertion that tools like awk should stay the same if you change shells, that is only partially true. There are parts of Mac OS X that automatically define magic shell variables (documented in the man pages for the various tools) that turn on or off support for legacy BSD syntax support. This allows POSIX compliance for passing the compliance tests and for general shell scripts while maintaining backwards compatibility for certain critical scripts like parts of startup items, installer preflight and postflight scripts, and so on. So even a given utility on a given OS can't be guaranteed to work the same way in every environment. That's why it is important to pay attention to these sorts of details when writing shell scripts. :-)
Have you ever seen an engine with the outside peeled off from the explosion after hitting a bird? Now imagine that, only with the engine hitting something almost as big as a city bus. In your calculations, take careful note of the trajectory of the engine as it breaks loose from the wing and brings half the wing with it. :-D
I think it could fill an entire book.
And so on. Anybody who has ever used Autoconf at any significant level could probably go on for weeks....
Autoconf is the antithesis of portability except when porting to platforms to which the software has already been ported, and then really, what's the point? So you save a couple of extra tiny makefiles, but you end up with something that's an utter bear to port to any platform instead of having a makefile for BSD that you can tweak trivially and port to a similar platform. When I'm porting something to a new platform, I'd much rather get a Makefile with neatly laid out variables at the top for things like FOOLIBDIR, BARLIBDIR, etc. and modify it by hand than get an Autoconf script (no matter how well written) any day of the week.
I accept your challenge. :-D
But seriously, yeah, you're absolutely right. Ooh, but a basic web server written as a Bourne shell script called by inetd would be so freaking cool....
Oh, no. Somebody actually did that.... Yikes! Now I'm scared.
Well, there is some truth to the GPP's comment. Linux and Mac OS X don't even agree on how to tell echo not to print a newline or how to enable extended regular expression mode in sed. May heaven help you if you want to do something as esoteric as creating or mounting a filesystem, creating or mounting a disk image/ramdisk, talk to a USB device in any way, get a list of processes in any useful way, etc. There's a very big lack of standardization in a lot of things you might like to do with scripts, in other words. The Single UNIX Spec and POSIX are not quite sufficient, but more annoyingly, most OSes (Linux, *BSD) out there don't even come close to conforming to it, so you end up with this dichotomy between BSD behavior and AT&T behavior.
That said, a lot of things are standardized, and many others can be worked around with clever use of variables (or possibly eval in a few extreme cases). I've written chapters on the subject myself. The big things you need to remember are that $(( $FOO + 3 )) is not portable, nor for ((...)), nor >&, nor anything involving extended regexp except using Perl, that even "the one true awk" is not quite SUS-compliant, GNU awk doubly so, bash triply so, that you should use printf instead of echo for output if you don't want newlines, that signal numbers are not portable (for trap), that proper quoting of arguments is crucial, and that you need to work with the bare minimum base behavior of utilities (using few or no flags) if you expect any hope of portability without needing to make platform-specific changes.
For some quick examples of some interesting portability issues, read some of my comments in the games at shellscriptgames.com or search for the word "compatibility" in Apple's "Shell Scripting Primer". It's a real eye opener to see how many portability problems exist even for fairly simple shell scripts.