In the end, however, I would argue that it is irrelevant how much data is put "at risk". What matters is how recoverable the data is. Putting a one byte error in the same place in every block on a volume that uses Reed Solomon codes to correct errors within the block is far less of a problem than putting those same few thousand one-byte errors within the same block. The former doesn't cause data loss; the latter does.
Therefore, you should never put the disc in a machine that spins it and then use a polishing cloth to try to sand down the disc surface. You'll likely cause far more damage unless you are using an excessively fine grit (in which case it will take weeks to do any good). Besides, removing a scratch requires removing lots of material and there's no guarantee that even if you remove it, the disc will play correctly. The lasers were designed based on going through a certain amount of polycarbonate, and if you have half as much, there's a chance the disc will be unplayable.
Your best bet for scratches is actually to fill the gaps with a clear gap filler that is softer than the polycarbonate (e.g. high-refractive-index silicone), then polish the gap filler with something that is also softer than the polycarbonate. Wait, did I just suggest caulking CDs?
Well, yes and no. You're right that in the short term, focusing on why people hate us won't solve anything. However, in the long term, that's the only solution that will solve anything. There are some definite problems in the way we treat the rest of the world that we as a country should be working to solve, all of which in the long term are a much more effective tool at combatting terrorism than anything we are currently doing.
We could be less stingy when there are international crises that require aid.
We could be more open with our immigration policies so there are fewer people who see us as a walled garden of selfishness.
We could let Israel fend for itself, or at least not prop them up with more and more powerful U.S. weapons technologies to help them in their retaliatory strikes against Palestinian targets. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" leaves everyone blind and wearing dentures. Supporting a government that behaves that way is just plain bad foreign policy and makes us look really bad in the world in much the same way that Britain's government is starting to look really bad for supporting our government.
We could also do things to raise the world education level. Spend a few hundred million to build an Islamic institution of higher learning in the newly rebuilt Iraq. Equip it with all the modern conveniences, hire teachers who truly understand the Qur'an and don't twist its teachings into a tool of hatred, and make it an inexpensive way for people of all countries in the Middle East to get a good education without any brainwashing.
And so on. There are so many things we could and should be doing that really all come down to focusing on why the people want to bomb us. Instead of doing things to improve upon the fundamental problem, like a bad doctor, we're focusing on treating the symptoms. Focusing on finding and stopping terrorists is like giving somebody a Tylenol for a brain tumor. We need to get down to the root cause of the problem and fix it, not mask the symptoms while the patient dies a slow death.
CD audio players don't attempt to do any rereads on error. Computer CD players do. If there are errors in the CRC data, a computer drive may try to reread the track repeatedly. It may also handle the interpolation differently (or not do interpolation at all) when it can't read a sample.
The AC is correct. CD data (audio included) is interleaved around the disc within the same track. Gouge in a circle around the disc and you eliminate one entire track. Gouge in a line out from the center radially and you damage a tiny bit of every track, which due to error correction, may be salvageable. Worst case is that the player has to interpolate a sample or two here and there.
None of the Sept. 11th hijackers were in the U.S. illegally. All had legitimate forms of identification, and none used false identification. I doubt any were even suspected of terrorist ties.... We ask people to show ID as they get on airplanes for one reason and one reason only: to make people who can't see through the new sham measures feel safer.
Want to make people actually safer?
Construct a non-privacy-invading millimeter-wave scanner. Build it in such a way that everything that passes through would get hit with a beam, but not in such a way that that you can see pictures, i.e. much blurrier, more scattered, more regional in nature. Sort out the data through basic math about the composition of the human body. See way more metal than you would expect (regardless of whether it is ferrous), set off red flags. Detect massing of large polymers, set off flags. And so on. Do this with computers, not through people watching a screen. Then, let the computer identify what general vicinity set off red flags with lights on a board with the shape of a human drawn from a couple of angles and ask them to empty the contents of their shirt pockets.
Add mass spectrometry portals to detect dangerous chemical residues.
Add shoe millimeter-wave machines that don't require passengers to remove their feet from the shoes. Step in, step out.
Move all parking and drop-offs to a minimum of 1500 feet from any area where people congregate (terminal buildings, etc. Use conveyor belts to get people into the terminal. Have the mass spectrometer portals and a security person in an atrium at the midpoint of the belts. This should be a fairly quick procedure, so you shouldn't build up a line of any significance. You're just looking for bomb residue to reduce the risk of somebody doing a suicide bombing attack on the terminal.
Make all personnel subject to the same security screening as passengers---no waving a badge and getting a quick pass through security.
Figure out why people are doing these quick pass things and fix security so that they are not necessary, then give them the boot. The biggest point of security risk from an individual passenger safety perspective is waiting in line for the security checkpoint.
W: We must attack the terr'ists where they are most comfortable. We must invade Mars.
[Dick Cheney whispers something into his ear.]
W (quietly): Well.. what do you mean, they don't have oil?
[Dick Cheney whispers something else into his ear.]
W (quietly): Is that right? Dinosaurs? Well I'll be.
[Dick Cheney whispers something else into his ear. We distinctly can make out the word "moron". Bush rolls his eyes.]
W: Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I have just been informed that our previous intelligence may have been slightly inaccurate. We have therefore decided to go the route of trade sanctions against Mars. Make no mistake, though, we will not tolerate this activity, and we reserve the right to go to war in the future if the Martians continue to harbor terr'ists....
------------------
Make no mistake. If they find oil, we're going to invade before this President's term is up....:-D
I was thinking $40-60, but yes. Actually, IMHO, it tries to do too much with the whole EVDO data thing, resulting in a device that's overly feature-packed and expensive hardware-wise for a device whose software basically just lets you read electronic books. It's like putting a Cummins diesel in a golf cart. If they had made it a USB mass storage device at around a $50 price point, it would have been a much bigger hit, I think.
Yeah, but not smartphones that would be capable of doing the equivalent of what the Kindle does. The general phone market isn't relevant for comparison. In the smartphone market, the iPhone is a pretty big player. Nokia's worldwide smartphone sales only outnumber the iPhone by a factor of 8 or so. (Source: Register Hardware)
Put in perspective, if the numbers I'm seeing on websites about iPhone sales are correct, this puts the kindle somewhere on the order of 10-20 days worth of iPhone sales.... Yeah, not that great. Book reading on an existing device is useful and a lot of people will do it. Buying a special piece of hardware whose primary purpose is book reading... definitely a niche market, particularly when it costs about twice as much as an iPhone (carrier subsidized) that does so much more....
Basically, it's the same as a library making CDs available for borrowing and providing a CD copier. As I understand it, if you as the borrower are making the copies, even if the library provides the equipment, you are violating copyright, not the library. Not sure if that theory has been tested in court, though. But yeah, one could reasonably interpret copyright law to indicate that the downloaders are violating copyright, not the people making it available. This differs from hosted storage in which the person who uploaded it to the server initially was making an unauthorized copy, i.e. both parties committed a copyright violation.
Of course, when they were going after downloaders, everyone screamed and said that they should go after the people making it available in the first place. I don't think there's any way for these folks to win... except... oh... maybe not suing their fans.
Yes, but in response to the comments here about giving everything to the poor, I would note that there was a study on that subject while back. It concluded that even if the Church sold all of its possessions including real estate and gave everything to the poor, it would feed the people of Africa for, IIRC, about a year.
So they have a choice: continue an organization of people who regularly spend their time and talents on an ongoing basis to help the poor of their communities or disband it and lose all of that just to gain a very temporary improvement in one part of the world. I think anyone with a solid grasp of reality would agree that sometimes there are better ways to help the poor than selling everything you have and giving the money to them.
As for whether it is theirs or not, the good book also says that children should not be punished for the sins of their fathers. We should leave the past in ashes. It is the past. There is nothing to be gained from dredging it up again. Just my $0.02.
Well, you shouldn't commit until you believe you have it in a state where the changes are usable (i.e. don't break the tree), but beyond that, I'd rather see more commits of smaller amounts of code than giant commits that change ten thousand things. If you end up having to back out a change, it's much easier if you can easily isolate that change to a single commit. My rule is commit early, commit often. I'm not the only one, either:
(1) "Usability" is in the mind of the user. If you learned how to use some other system first and now expect that any other way of doing things isn't "usable" enough, that's just plain old resistance to change. It says more about you than it does about the usability of the software in question.
In my experience, most of the people who complain about these sorts of things do so because the new app lacks some key feature that makes their workflow better. Dismissing someone's opinion simply because they have actually used similar commercial software is stupidity, as it means you are unable to gain wisdom from the study of designs that have come before yours. In fact, it is precisely this mindset that causes user interfaces in free software to almost invariably suck---the whole "this is the way we do things, and you'll just have to get used to it" mentality does not lend itself to learning. I'll probably get modded down for saying it, but it's worth burning the karma if it gets people's attention.
(2) "Designers" who can't code have absolutely no business "working" in software. If you think you really know how an interface should work and look, then learn to code it. Otherwise, you're just a critic of the kind that the NYT doesn't hire.
Couldn't disagree more. I would argue that most UI designers have no business coding any more than most coders have any business designing user interfaces. The two skill sets are very different, with very little overlap either in knowledge or in the mental structures used in performing the two tasks. Good UI design is more closely related to software architecture, not coding. You have to figure out how best to lay out a user interface based on careful study of what the user is likely to want to do, careful thought about what things a user is likely to group together as similar operations (menu layout), and careful study of actual users to watch their workflow followed by probing interviews to find out what worked well and what didn't. It is basically scientific in nature. Software architecture is the same way. You're looking ahead to what the coders might want to add, what features the users might want, etc. and designing the overall architecture to accommodate those future needs.
Coding is a different skill set entirely. It focuses on knowledge of what types of methodical steps you have to achieve to reach a goal. Software architects and UI designers are the architects where coders are the construction workers. Expecting UI designers to code is no less silly than expecting your architect to be proficient at hammering nails into boards to build a wall.
Further, a strong case for the separation of those elements is the Mac design model. You have a separate Interface Builder application (well, it's part of Xcode now, IIRC) that gives people the ability to design the UI without writing a single line of code. Then, coders can come in and hook that functionality up to the underlying code. By doing that, it not only allows people to focus on the things that they do best, but also makes it much easier to modify the UI because you can create it visually instead of messing around with programmatic drawing that constantly puts UI elements in the wrong place. I get the impression that some Linux developers do the same sort of thing with Glade, but I've never used it, so I can't draw any real comparisons.
Trust me, getting UI designers to write code is the last thing you want to do....
And even if it is without your knowledge, the federal government won't lift a finger because that's a civil issue between you and them. Translation: we'll only help you protect yourselves against invasion of your privacy by individuals because they aren't as generous with their lobbying dollars. The government these days is pretty thoroughly in the back pockets of the corporate world. Expecting them to do anything to defend you against their buddies is like expecting the corporations not to sell your personal info if it will make them a quick buck.
Or, to a lesser degree, it works in a totalitarian regime on a larger scale because almost everyone is afraid to cheat. That doesn't make either the totalitarian regime or communism a good idea, though....
Reasonable is on the order of 16-20 hours. That's the maximum amount of time it takes to clone the largest current model of hard drive to a fresh drive. If they keep a machine substantially longer than that, they are clearly being abusive and all it takes is one competent IT person to ensure that your lawyers eat the DHS for breakfast.
This assumes you aren't doing whole disk encryption with on-motherboard key storage, of course. At that point, there isn't a limit to how long it takes to clone the data, so you're screwed. On the other hand, if your crypto keys are stored on your motherboard, a small electrical surge and you're screwed anyway, so....
I'm not sure what S.M.A.R.T. support would buy you... a warning early on in the boot process? That's really the sort of thing that makes more sense to do after your OS is up and running since you can't do much about problems at boot time anyway. *shrugs*
And by nefarious, I of course mean some hardware RAID hack that does S.M.A.R.T. on its own and then provides some sort of multi-device summary information to the controlling OS.
Chances are that's a software bug rather than a hardware limitation. If you can talk to the drive with ATA commands, you should be able to send S.M.A.R.T. commands and receive the responses unless the chipset is deliberately intercepting them for some nefarious purpose.:-)
No, I meant exactly what I said. By saying that every device must support at least one of the following three, you are guaranteeing that a site designer can cover all browsers with at most three encoded files. That's still a big improvement over the current environment in which there's no way to guarantee anything at all.
No, it is shared because it has eight houses with driveways along it, and is semipublic because in every way other than a small sign on the side of the road, it looks indistinguishable from any other street and connects from one public street to another public street.
The <source> tag should buy you the ability to include both pretty easily. I don't see why the standard can't simply say, "You must support at least one of the following codecs: Theora, MPEG4, or H.264" and be done with it. That limits the set of standards that web developers have to provide to a manageable set while allowing browser developers who aren't happy with one format or another for whatever religious/performance/battery life/patent reasons they might have to support only codecs that align with their interests.
No, a novel idea doesn't appear immediately obvious the first time you see it in action. If anyone with experience in the field sees it in action and immediately knows how they would do the same thing, it isn't very novel (or is very trivial, depending). When the first horseless carriage came out, people thought the inventor was nuts....
We've had devices for doing portable location of people for a long time. They're called cell phones. We've had data gathering sensors on people in dangerous environments for a while. We've used portable cell towers to cover areas damaged by floods and earthquakes or during search and rescue ops in the middle of nowhere. I see very little that's new in any of that except that it is being commercialized and tightly integrated instead of being done in an ad hoc fashion. What am I missing?
Yup. I wrote almost the exact same paragraphs describing why our education system sucks a couple of years ago. Same problem, same solution. Pay people more reasonably for what they have to deal with. Unfortunately, we also live in a society that only values education and safety after it is taken away from them. Part of that is human nature, part ignorance, but more than anything, I blame the media for it.
If the media focused on real issues like true journalists should instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator in a quest for the almighty dollar, we'd have a lot more people paying attention to what's important and acting responsibly. We'd have a lot fewer asinine laws that criminalize behavior that doesn't harm the public in any way because the public would throw almost every elected official currently in office out on his/her ass. We'd also have a lot less crime because people would see it on the news and would say. "Hey, those elected officials who cut the police department's budget for the fourth time should be thrown out on their asses." We'd have a lot fewer people acting like dirtbags because when some slum lord didn't fix the heat for six months, people would get genuinely pissed off at him as a society and do something about it.
Journalists have a responsibility to the public to inform them not about what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. A great deal of our society's current problems fundamentally stem from their collective trend over the last two decades towards the most mindless "news" imaginable---their decision that telling the public about Ashlee Simpson lip synching is more important than telling the public that the world is burning around them. More importantly, they have to do it in a way that actually makes people listen. Don't spend the first ten minutes of the news covering all the shooting deaths in your city. Nobody wants to hear that, so they'll just turn it off, and at that point, it doesn't do any good. Instead, take a more active role in coalescing the mundane into a story that actually brings the problem home. For example, once a month you might spend an entire newscast covering the violence problem on your city's streets. Interview elected officials and police and find out what can be done to fix the problem. Do coverage of what things to look for in determining whether your kids are into drugs or gangs. And so on. Create content that encourages people to take an active role in their own welfare by not just showing them the problem, but also showing them what they can do to help. Real news must be active and engaging.
As for people who are not members of the press, though, you can help, too. If you see your police force acting badly, speak up. If you see that they are not getting paid well enough in your district, speak up. Shout until someone listens. We need real leadership in this country, and it's not going to come from Washington, so it's time for people to take some responsibility and speak up when they see things wrong---to tell the emperor that he has no clothes. At this point, it is pretty clear that the press and our elected officials have all failed us. It's up to us now.
I would go one step further. Here in California, we have hundreds of roads marked "Private road." If you don't allow anyone to drive on them. it would be crippling in many parts of the Santa Cruz mountains. You get used to routinely ignoring the signs when looking at homes and lots for sale because 90% of the time, they're on roads marked as "private", usually with an accompanying "No trespassing" sign. To a degree, by listing the property in MLS, the owner gave you implicit permission, I suppose, but still, it's rather silly to expect an ungated road to be treated as anything other than a public road. Heck, private roads without gates like that shouldn't even be allowed to exist. The county should be forced to take over repair and maintenance of every road in the county. Either that or everybody on that road should get a reduction in the property taxes that they pay to make up for the reduction in services.
The way I see it is this: you either have a private, gated community or you don't. If you don't, you have no real right to tell people they can't use the road as long as they aren't then trespassing into your yard. If we're talking about a driveway, that's completely different because it is not a shared resource (it only serves a single home), so the correct sign is "Private driveway. No Trespassing." Expecting people to not drive on a road merely because you didn't deed it over to the county is like expecting people not to walk from a public beach area onto the beach behind your house merely because you put a sign there. You're going from one similar area to another, and the area really shouldn't have any legal protection because it is a shared, semipublic resource.
Slashdot Mirror
In the end, however, I would argue that it is irrelevant how much data is put "at risk". What matters is how recoverable the data is. Putting a one byte error in the same place in every block on a volume that uses Reed Solomon codes to correct errors within the block is far less of a problem than putting those same few thousand one-byte errors within the same block. The former doesn't cause data loss; the latter does.
Therefore, you should never put the disc in a machine that spins it and then use a polishing cloth to try to sand down the disc surface. You'll likely cause far more damage unless you are using an excessively fine grit (in which case it will take weeks to do any good). Besides, removing a scratch requires removing lots of material and there's no guarantee that even if you remove it, the disc will play correctly. The lasers were designed based on going through a certain amount of polycarbonate, and if you have half as much, there's a chance the disc will be unplayable.
Your best bet for scratches is actually to fill the gaps with a clear gap filler that is softer than the polycarbonate (e.g. high-refractive-index silicone), then polish the gap filler with something that is also softer than the polycarbonate. Wait, did I just suggest caulking CDs?
Well, yes and no. You're right that in the short term, focusing on why people hate us won't solve anything. However, in the long term, that's the only solution that will solve anything. There are some definite problems in the way we treat the rest of the world that we as a country should be working to solve, all of which in the long term are a much more effective tool at combatting terrorism than anything we are currently doing.
And so on. There are so many things we could and should be doing that really all come down to focusing on why the people want to bomb us. Instead of doing things to improve upon the fundamental problem, like a bad doctor, we're focusing on treating the symptoms. Focusing on finding and stopping terrorists is like giving somebody a Tylenol for a brain tumor. We need to get down to the root cause of the problem and fix it, not mask the symptoms while the patient dies a slow death.
CD audio players don't attempt to do any rereads on error. Computer CD players do. If there are errors in the CRC data, a computer drive may try to reread the track repeatedly. It may also handle the interpolation differently (or not do interpolation at all) when it can't read a sample.
The AC is correct. CD data (audio included) is interleaved around the disc within the same track. Gouge in a circle around the disc and you eliminate one entire track. Gouge in a line out from the center radially and you damage a tiny bit of every track, which due to error correction, may be salvageable. Worst case is that the player has to interpolate a sample or two here and there.
None of the Sept. 11th hijackers were in the U.S. illegally. All had legitimate forms of identification, and none used false identification. I doubt any were even suspected of terrorist ties.... We ask people to show ID as they get on airplanes for one reason and one reason only: to make people who can't see through the new sham measures feel safer.
Want to make people actually safer?
I can see it now.
------------------
FADE IN
INTERIOR: WHITE HOUSE PRESS BRIEFING ROOM
W: We must attack the terr'ists where they are most comfortable. We must invade Mars.
[Dick Cheney whispers something into his ear.]
W (quietly): Well.. what do you mean, they don't have oil?
[Dick Cheney whispers something else into his ear.]
W (quietly): Is that right? Dinosaurs? Well I'll be.
[Dick Cheney whispers something else into his ear. We distinctly can make out the word "moron". Bush rolls his eyes.]
W: Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I have just been informed that our previous intelligence may have been slightly inaccurate. We have therefore decided to go the route of trade sanctions against Mars. Make no mistake, though, we will not tolerate this activity, and we reserve the right to go to war in the future if the Martians continue to harbor terr'ists....
------------------
Make no mistake. If they find oil, we're going to invade before this President's term is up.... :-D
I was thinking $40-60, but yes. Actually, IMHO, it tries to do too much with the whole EVDO data thing, resulting in a device that's overly feature-packed and expensive hardware-wise for a device whose software basically just lets you read electronic books. It's like putting a Cummins diesel in a golf cart. If they had made it a USB mass storage device at around a $50 price point, it would have been a much bigger hit, I think.
Yeah, but not smartphones that would be capable of doing the equivalent of what the Kindle does. The general phone market isn't relevant for comparison. In the smartphone market, the iPhone is a pretty big player. Nokia's worldwide smartphone sales only outnumber the iPhone by a factor of 8 or so. (Source: Register Hardware)
Put in perspective, if the numbers I'm seeing on websites about iPhone sales are correct, this puts the kindle somewhere on the order of 10-20 days worth of iPhone sales.... Yeah, not that great. Book reading on an existing device is useful and a lot of people will do it. Buying a special piece of hardware whose primary purpose is book reading... definitely a niche market, particularly when it costs about twice as much as an iPhone (carrier subsidized) that does so much more....
Basically, it's the same as a library making CDs available for borrowing and providing a CD copier. As I understand it, if you as the borrower are making the copies, even if the library provides the equipment, you are violating copyright, not the library. Not sure if that theory has been tested in court, though. But yeah, one could reasonably interpret copyright law to indicate that the downloaders are violating copyright, not the people making it available. This differs from hosted storage in which the person who uploaded it to the server initially was making an unauthorized copy, i.e. both parties committed a copyright violation.
Of course, when they were going after downloaders, everyone screamed and said that they should go after the people making it available in the first place. I don't think there's any way for these folks to win... except... oh... maybe not suing their fans.
Yes, but in response to the comments here about giving everything to the poor, I would note that there was a study on that subject while back. It concluded that even if the Church sold all of its possessions including real estate and gave everything to the poor, it would feed the people of Africa for, IIRC, about a year.
So they have a choice: continue an organization of people who regularly spend their time and talents on an ongoing basis to help the poor of their communities or disband it and lose all of that just to gain a very temporary improvement in one part of the world. I think anyone with a solid grasp of reality would agree that sometimes there are better ways to help the poor than selling everything you have and giving the money to them.
As for whether it is theirs or not, the good book also says that children should not be punished for the sins of their fathers. We should leave the past in ashes. It is the past. There is nothing to be gained from dredging it up again. Just my $0.02.
Well, you shouldn't commit until you believe you have it in a state where the changes are usable (i.e. don't break the tree), but beyond that, I'd rather see more commits of smaller amounts of code than giant commits that change ten thousand things. If you end up having to back out a change, it's much easier if you can easily isolate that change to a single commit. My rule is commit early, commit often. I'm not the only one, either:
http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=96
In my experience, most of the people who complain about these sorts of things do so because the new app lacks some key feature that makes their workflow better. Dismissing someone's opinion simply because they have actually used similar commercial software is stupidity, as it means you are unable to gain wisdom from the study of designs that have come before yours. In fact, it is precisely this mindset that causes user interfaces in free software to almost invariably suck---the whole "this is the way we do things, and you'll just have to get used to it" mentality does not lend itself to learning. I'll probably get modded down for saying it, but it's worth burning the karma if it gets people's attention.
Couldn't disagree more. I would argue that most UI designers have no business coding any more than most coders have any business designing user interfaces. The two skill sets are very different, with very little overlap either in knowledge or in the mental structures used in performing the two tasks. Good UI design is more closely related to software architecture, not coding. You have to figure out how best to lay out a user interface based on careful study of what the user is likely to want to do, careful thought about what things a user is likely to group together as similar operations (menu layout), and careful study of actual users to watch their workflow followed by probing interviews to find out what worked well and what didn't. It is basically scientific in nature. Software architecture is the same way. You're looking ahead to what the coders might want to add, what features the users might want, etc. and designing the overall architecture to accommodate those future needs.
Coding is a different skill set entirely. It focuses on knowledge of what types of methodical steps you have to achieve to reach a goal. Software architects and UI designers are the architects where coders are the construction workers. Expecting UI designers to code is no less silly than expecting your architect to be proficient at hammering nails into boards to build a wall.
Further, a strong case for the separation of those elements is the Mac design model. You have a separate Interface Builder application (well, it's part of Xcode now, IIRC) that gives people the ability to design the UI without writing a single line of code. Then, coders can come in and hook that functionality up to the underlying code. By doing that, it not only allows people to focus on the things that they do best, but also makes it much easier to modify the UI because you can create it visually instead of messing around with programmatic drawing that constantly puts UI elements in the wrong place. I get the impression that some Linux developers do the same sort of thing with Glade, but I've never used it, so I can't draw any real comparisons.
Trust me, getting UI designers to write code is the last thing you want to do....
And even if it is without your knowledge, the federal government won't lift a finger because that's a civil issue between you and them. Translation: we'll only help you protect yourselves against invasion of your privacy by individuals because they aren't as generous with their lobbying dollars. The government these days is pretty thoroughly in the back pockets of the corporate world. Expecting them to do anything to defend you against their buddies is like expecting the corporations not to sell your personal info if it will make them a quick buck.
Or, to a lesser degree, it works in a totalitarian regime on a larger scale because almost everyone is afraid to cheat. That doesn't make either the totalitarian regime or communism a good idea, though....
Reasonable is on the order of 16-20 hours. That's the maximum amount of time it takes to clone the largest current model of hard drive to a fresh drive. If they keep a machine substantially longer than that, they are clearly being abusive and all it takes is one competent IT person to ensure that your lawyers eat the DHS for breakfast.
This assumes you aren't doing whole disk encryption with on-motherboard key storage, of course. At that point, there isn't a limit to how long it takes to clone the data, so you're screwed. On the other hand, if your crypto keys are stored on your motherboard, a small electrical surge and you're screwed anyway, so....
I'm not sure what S.M.A.R.T. support would buy you... a warning early on in the boot process? That's really the sort of thing that makes more sense to do after your OS is up and running since you can't do much about problems at boot time anyway. *shrugs*
And by nefarious, I of course mean some hardware RAID hack that does S.M.A.R.T. on its own and then provides some sort of multi-device summary information to the controlling OS.
Chances are that's a software bug rather than a hardware limitation. If you can talk to the drive with ATA commands, you should be able to send S.M.A.R.T. commands and receive the responses unless the chipset is deliberately intercepting them for some nefarious purpose. :-)
No, I meant exactly what I said. By saying that every device must support at least one of the following three, you are guaranteeing that a site designer can cover all browsers with at most three encoded files. That's still a big improvement over the current environment in which there's no way to guarantee anything at all.
No, it is shared because it has eight houses with driveways along it, and is semipublic because in every way other than a small sign on the side of the road, it looks indistinguishable from any other street and connects from one public street to another public street.
The <source> tag should buy you the ability to include both pretty easily. I don't see why the standard can't simply say, "You must support at least one of the following codecs: Theora, MPEG4, or H.264" and be done with it. That limits the set of standards that web developers have to provide to a manageable set while allowing browser developers who aren't happy with one format or another for whatever religious/performance/battery life/patent reasons they might have to support only codecs that align with their interests.
No, a novel idea doesn't appear immediately obvious the first time you see it in action. If anyone with experience in the field sees it in action and immediately knows how they would do the same thing, it isn't very novel (or is very trivial, depending). When the first horseless carriage came out, people thought the inventor was nuts....
We've had devices for doing portable location of people for a long time. They're called cell phones. We've had data gathering sensors on people in dangerous environments for a while. We've used portable cell towers to cover areas damaged by floods and earthquakes or during search and rescue ops in the middle of nowhere. I see very little that's new in any of that except that it is being commercialized and tightly integrated instead of being done in an ad hoc fashion. What am I missing?
Yup. I wrote almost the exact same paragraphs describing why our education system sucks a couple of years ago. Same problem, same solution. Pay people more reasonably for what they have to deal with. Unfortunately, we also live in a society that only values education and safety after it is taken away from them. Part of that is human nature, part ignorance, but more than anything, I blame the media for it.
If the media focused on real issues like true journalists should instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator in a quest for the almighty dollar, we'd have a lot more people paying attention to what's important and acting responsibly. We'd have a lot fewer asinine laws that criminalize behavior that doesn't harm the public in any way because the public would throw almost every elected official currently in office out on his/her ass. We'd also have a lot less crime because people would see it on the news and would say. "Hey, those elected officials who cut the police department's budget for the fourth time should be thrown out on their asses." We'd have a lot fewer people acting like dirtbags because when some slum lord didn't fix the heat for six months, people would get genuinely pissed off at him as a society and do something about it.
Journalists have a responsibility to the public to inform them not about what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. A great deal of our society's current problems fundamentally stem from their collective trend over the last two decades towards the most mindless "news" imaginable---their decision that telling the public about Ashlee Simpson lip synching is more important than telling the public that the world is burning around them. More importantly, they have to do it in a way that actually makes people listen. Don't spend the first ten minutes of the news covering all the shooting deaths in your city. Nobody wants to hear that, so they'll just turn it off, and at that point, it doesn't do any good. Instead, take a more active role in coalescing the mundane into a story that actually brings the problem home. For example, once a month you might spend an entire newscast covering the violence problem on your city's streets. Interview elected officials and police and find out what can be done to fix the problem. Do coverage of what things to look for in determining whether your kids are into drugs or gangs. And so on. Create content that encourages people to take an active role in their own welfare by not just showing them the problem, but also showing them what they can do to help. Real news must be active and engaging.
As for people who are not members of the press, though, you can help, too. If you see your police force acting badly, speak up. If you see that they are not getting paid well enough in your district, speak up. Shout until someone listens. We need real leadership in this country, and it's not going to come from Washington, so it's time for people to take some responsibility and speak up when they see things wrong---to tell the emperor that he has no clothes. At this point, it is pretty clear that the press and our elected officials have all failed us. It's up to us now.
I would go one step further. Here in California, we have hundreds of roads marked "Private road." If you don't allow anyone to drive on them. it would be crippling in many parts of the Santa Cruz mountains. You get used to routinely ignoring the signs when looking at homes and lots for sale because 90% of the time, they're on roads marked as "private", usually with an accompanying "No trespassing" sign. To a degree, by listing the property in MLS, the owner gave you implicit permission, I suppose, but still, it's rather silly to expect an ungated road to be treated as anything other than a public road. Heck, private roads without gates like that shouldn't even be allowed to exist. The county should be forced to take over repair and maintenance of every road in the county. Either that or everybody on that road should get a reduction in the property taxes that they pay to make up for the reduction in services.
The way I see it is this: you either have a private, gated community or you don't. If you don't, you have no real right to tell people they can't use the road as long as they aren't then trespassing into your yard. If we're talking about a driveway, that's completely different because it is not a shared resource (it only serves a single home), so the correct sign is "Private driveway. No Trespassing." Expecting people to not drive on a road merely because you didn't deed it over to the county is like expecting people not to walk from a public beach area onto the beach behind your house merely because you put a sign there. You're going from one similar area to another, and the area really shouldn't have any legal protection because it is a shared, semipublic resource.