Except that at least on android, it's easy enough to sideload unofficial apps and if you actually do the encryption with a onetime pad before encoding it in the picture then apple has no ability to "dump the unencrypted cache" because it never existed.
The DA wants "zero-knowledge" encryption to go away. Apple et al are saying "we don't want to do that". Are you arguing that Apple and Google are wrong here?
They can want it to go away all they want but zero knowledge encryption is exactly what would happen if apple/google stopped providing encryption. If I encrypt it using a one time hash before I send the message, upload it to dropbox, etc... then of course they have zero knowledge of the key. Honestly, if I was a terrorist, this is exactly how I would do it. I would encrypt the message and then embed it in a Steganograph jpeg. It would be rather simple to write an iphone app that did exactly this and automated the whole process so that all it looked like was two users were sending pictures back and forth.
It's disingenuous to call a slave a 'worker' because it intentionally leaves out important context. The fact that they were slaves instead of free men is an important thing to understand in a history book.
And it would be disingenuous if it was intentional and there was no mention of slaves elsewhere. The fact that the "offending" sentence already used the word slave once in the sentence shows that they weren't trying to hide the fact that they were slaves.
A few more way to write it would be: The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of men, women, and children from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations. The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of people from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations. The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of them from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations. The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
Are these all offensive too because they fail to use the word slave a second time? Sure, they could have picked one of these other sentences which might have been better but don't assume the author was being disingenuous and trying to imply something when most likely the word selected was done haphazardly with very little intentional thought.
But if you want it to be the most factual and truthful, how about this one: The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of african natives captured and sold primarily by their native country men and rival tribes from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
How is it factually incorrect to call a slave a worker? Fact checkers would not fix that. Now the PC police might but which set of PC police do you allow to run your school? My guess is that the author actually used "worker" in an attempt to be PC because they knew that slave was a loaded word. Unfortunately for the author, it is impossible to please the PC police because if you try to downplay slavery, one side gets mad, if you skip over it, another group gets mad, and if you tell it too harshly you either have people up in arms that you were too graphic or another group saying that you still weren't harsh enough. I'm all for fact checking but PC checking is a game no one can win. The best you can do is try to rotate through authors of different backgrounds but even this is bound to fail as there are always going to be authors that a subset of people think are too extreme either one way or the other.
But why pirate anything at all? Music is pretty cheap now and you can buy individual songs instead of albums. There is Netflix, Hulu, Amazon to watch movies or you can spend $9 - $20 on a dvd movie. For gaming, you have steam which they sell games at very low prices compared to their console counterpart or there is the Emulators which is great for playing old games. As for software, If you want to learn a software program you can download and re-download trial versions from adobe, autodesk, corel, and even Microsoft. Anyway, a professional(photographer, 3d graphics, programmer, etc...) would not have the need to be pirating since they are making tons of $$$. It takes money to make money.
Why are people still pirating?
First off, many of the biggest people who pirate have always been college kids who don't have the money to buy things like autocad and photoshop. Just because you can afford it and see no reason to pirate doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people.
Secondly, netflix, hulu, and amazon are a joke. If you don't care what you want to watch and just want to watch mind-numbing tv shows then they are fine but if you actually want to watch specific movies or tv shows that are either great classics or new releases then the selection is terrible. Go to any "top 100 movies for X" where X is a genre, a year, etc... and I doubt netflix, amazon, and hulu combined even get to 25% coverage.
Regarding the licensing, I was always more confused over the vector of attacking people for downloading in the first place
So if I download a song from a pirate, they are obviously violating copyright by distributing it without license, sure. But if I receive it, with no indication of the limitation of my rights, what am I violating (morals aside) by consuming that media?
That's the beauty of the strange beast that is bittorrent. Bittorrent is used for piracy but in some ways, the RIAA couldn't have asked for a better protocol as the way it is designed, every downloader is also an uploader so the RIAA can go after downloaders and rightfully claim that they are illegally sharing their IP. The only way to prevent this is to turn off uploading but because bittorrent uses a tit for tat system of fairness, this severely limits your download speed.
I use BTSync to synchronise my own files to my various devices.
Same here. And it works like a charm.
BTSync has no conflict detection. The newest file wins. This is scary to me and the main reason that I don't use BTsync. I use syncthing which is similiar but also opensource and has built-in conflict detection.
If we cured aging and people could live to several hundred years
If we did that using some hypothetical future technology, it is possible that those beings would not be "human" under our current definition of the species.
If the only thing that changed was that people didn't age and/or were able to repair the damage done by aging then by most definitions they would still be human. I don't know of any technology in the pipeline that would alter humans drastically enough that you would consider them a different species. Now if the anti-aging was a modification of DNA before birth, you might have some argument but most anti-aging research I know of deal with things like lengthening telemeras in existing humans and/or just fixing problems that arise as a person ages.
People may be willing to spend months in a tin can to get somewhere, but years is another matter. Some explorers might visit the orbit of Jupiter or Saturn, but anything farther out would be an entire career in one trip.
You're making some bad assumptions based on current technology. Sure, noone is going to want to spend 20 years in a spacecraft but there are several future technologies that would mitigate this. If we cured aging and people could live to several hundred years, then more people would be willing to spend 20 years in a spacecraft. Likewise if we could do human hibernation where someone didn't age for those 20 years. Another possibility would be relativistic speeds where a person might be in the spacecraft for 20 years but only age a couple years. Sure, 20 years would go by in the world back home but if the person on the craft only aged a couple years then this would probably be acceptable to most people.
In any case, the bias cannot be more than the GPS positioning error, maybe a couple of meters if you're having a bad day. I'd like to know who these runners/walkers are who are complaining about an extra meter or two.
"an extra meter or two" every 10 meters can add up to a huge distance over the course of a couple miles.
As a sailor who use GPS alongside traditional navigation: stop using devices that poll and insert a new leg on your route every 5 seconds. If you lower the polling frequency to f.e. every 1 or 2 minutes this problem goes away. I realize that this doesn't work for people who insist on taking their morning run zig-zagging through city blocks.
My dad hired a "carpenter" once who measured every board 16 inches from the previous board. By the time he got 20 or 30 boards nailed in, his being off 1/8 inches each measure had ballooned to being off almost 6 inches and the boards having a noticeable lean.
I think the other issue they're dealing with besides skew is that you shouldn't be looking at the average distance between two points to calculate the distance as the "average" is always going to be greater or equal to the straight line shortest. You really should only use the shortest distance between two points as the shortest distance should always be the closest to the actual distance as it's impossible to get from point A to point B in a shorter distance than a straight line.
it's very simple to check if something is a problem if you simply take it to it's extreme.
in this case, you can pay $50 for access to a data plan but your data cap is 1MB. however, if you visit sites X, Y and Z, you can stream several gigs of data without it counting against your data cap. exceeding your data cap incurs a $10 per MB fee. so if you aren't site X, Y or Z then people wont want to use your site... but if you pay the ISP money, they will make it free for people to go to your site too.
the result is nobody will go to your site unless you pay ISPs money. this is a problem.
Although I agree with this, if the cell carrier was a common carrier with a fixed rate, then I would be ok with netflix footing the bill for the consumer. Just like we have 800 numbers where the receiving party foots the bill, if set up correctly, it could be reasonable to zero rate services.
T-Mobile isn't offering Netflix access because Netflix is some fledgeling company that T-Mobile owns and is trying to drum up business for.
But even if it was, even if T-Mobile was pushing some super new video service and people were switching to that service over Netflix or HBO or anything else, I fail to see the problem. More choices is good.
Yes, more choices is good but by offering free access to only the most popular service they are limiting choices.
At least in the case of Netflix, it's probably because Netflix has for a while now had a public offer to large ISPs where it will place caches of its servers in the ISP, resulting in a huge amount of Netflix streaming activity happening within the ISP's network rather than required to go over peering links.
That would be a valid point if the bottleneck was the carrier's connection to the internet. The reason that cell companies charge considerably more than broadband companies is because the bottleneck is between the carrier and the cell phone. Having caching servers inside the carrier's data center does nothing to help the actual bottleneck.
In all honestly this service seems completely reasonable, delivering data through this service will cost tmobile less (since it will be originating inside their network and they have complete control over the colocation and whatnot) so why not let them offer their service without billing you.
If it was "local traffic" vs "remote traffic" then not charging for the internet connectivity for that data would be reasonable. But that's not really what's happening. The cost to get from the internet to tmobile is negligible. That is not the reason that data fees for cellular is so much more expensive than broadband. The expensive part is getting it from tmobile to the end user. The reason cell phone data is a lot more expensive than broadband data is that that last mile is expensive. Whether I'm using my last mile data for vpn traffic, torrents, voip, videos, or music, the price should be the same for everybody and every service. Now, if you want to have QOS traffic where you get cheaper data for accepting higher latency, off peak times of day, etc... then I'm all for that. Stuff like torrents can be offloaded to high latency and/or offpeak times of day. Most video and music traffic is not like that but is requires premium high quality real time data channels in order to stream properly. There is no good reason that these should be charged less than other data traffic and by doing so you open a huge chasm in net neutrality.
You've never noticed that conditions in different places are different at different times?
Sorry, no player to watch 'tubes'. But it isn't ridiculous, it's a fact. People know that there is a buffer above the posted limit where they are unlikely to be stopped, so they go that fast.
Of course, I've noticed it, that's the problem. If you're not local, you have no idea whether it's safe to drive 5 over, 10 over, or if you're going to get pulled over for going 1 over. And there are some places where it's unsafe to not break the law. That's what the video was. It was a group that decided to all drive the "speed limit" on a major road where everyone routinely drove 20 over and they are lucky noone got killed in the mayhem. A buffer is fine but the buffer should be stated not some unspoken mystery that varies from city to city and even day to day. Weaving in and out of traffic and driving dangerously should be ticketed even if you're driving the speed limit but if I can drive 20 miles over during rush hour then driving 20 miles over on a sunny sunday afternoon should also be allowed with risking getting a ticket because I've lost the "herd" protection or because a cop is having a bad day. We shouldn't have laws that are knowingly broken on a consistent basis and selectively enforced where citizens never know if they are going to get in trouble for breaking them or not.
You just don't like the idea of not being allowed to 'pace' all the maniacs, you idiot *.
No, I don't like the idea that driving 20 miles over in heavy traffic is ok while driving 20 miles over when the road is empty and the cop is bored gets you a ticket. Even worse, when you go from city to city, you have no idea what speed you are supposed to drive because different places enforce it completely different and even 1 mile over you always risk the gamble of getting a ticket. You shouldn't have to risk getting a ticket just to stay in the flow of traffic. Every once in a while they'll set up speed traps and pull over 20-30 cars in a row, yet in other places thousands of cars break the "law" every day. The law should either be enforced or taken off the books.
If they raise the posted limit, then everyone will just go 10 over the new posted limit. The assumption is that the posted limit is the safe design limit for the road, and since everyone is a better than average driver everyone can go a bit faster.
No, this is ridiculous. Here is a video showing how ridiculous it is:
If the speed limit is the "suggested maximum safe speed", then don't ticket people. It's ridiculous for some places to ticket you for going 5 over the "speed limit" and other places allow you to go over by 20 mph at certain times of the day without getting a ticket. If it's the actual speed limit, then set it at the limit and enforce it. A compromise as people are used to speeding might be set it 10 below what you want the limit is and start enforcing it after 10 over but it's anarchy to have some places enforce it as a hard limit and other places allowing you to go 20 over but not 25 over. It leaves too much discretion in the cop's hands where they can selectively pull over the people they want and ignore other people equally breaking the "law"
In the 'large monitor' vein, you can either go for one that just has enormous pixels(there are some 1366x768 and 1920x1080 panels that smear those pixels over a pretty enormous area) or, if other constraints demand it(in a laptop, say) shoot for something with a resolution that is an integer multiple of the one you actually want to use. Non-integer scaling can be done more or less tastefully; but simply doesn't have a 'correct' solution. Integer-multiple scaling is both easier and produces better results.
I agree with this for the large monitors as whether it's a 32" or a 64", it's still usually supports the standard 1366x768/1024x768 or something similar that most websites expect.
For laptops, one option on linux would be a desktop that is larger than the physical screen size. You could set the physical screen resolution to 640x480 but then set the desktop size to 1024x768 or some other normal resolution. You would have to scroll side to side to see that whole screen but you would have a built in zoom no matter where you go without "breaking" sites that expect resolutions larger than 1024x768.
or they'll illustrate all the conflicts the law has with itself and reality.
That's exactly why these 'impeding traffic' laws are written. In most cases, it's perfectly legal to drive 10 mph below the speed limit, even though "everyone" will drive 10 mph faster than the limit. So here you've got this self-driving car, going at bicycle speed on a busy road with everyone else trying to go 45. They can't put the self-driving car in the bicycle lane, so traffic backs up. Add in some gawking by drivers passing by, and the car sounds like a major hazard, even if it's behaving entirely by the letter.
Do you ticket the 10,000 people going 45 or the one going 25?
Impeding traffic laws should be illegal. They are a catch-22 that it's impossible to win. Minimum speed limits are fine. Saying you must be with 10 miles of the speed limit when not starting or stopping is fine. Saying that it's illegal to go the speed limit or worse saying you must break one law by speeding to not violate a different law of impeding traffic puts you in an impossible situation where a cop can pull you over depending on the time of the day and/or no matter what you do. If everyone is breaking the speed limit then they either need to pull the entire highway over or raise the limit.
Changing every year? My my, someone is ambitious in wanting to destroy simpletons computer systems. SSN should be nothing more than a DB number, not an identity.
This might be the better solution. Everyone gets a SSN, let them publish it on the side of their car or their license plate as a UID, but make it useless without a current password. It can be their DB number, it can be their identity, they can publish it on facebook or give it to their friends to say who they are but to actually file taxes, check your credit, do a bank loan, etc, it requires a current changable password. Just like every check you write has your bank account number on it, your SSN should identify who you are just like someone's public key verifies who they are but you should need a password to actually validate it.
I'm pretty sure that most of the "40 million" are sharing a SSN with somebody who died *years* ago, and that the number of people like the two women cited as an example is much, MUCH smaller.
I mean, for ${deity.name}'s sake, there are only ~300 million *AMERICANS*. If one in 8 Americans had SSN collisions with another living person, I can *guarantee* it wouldn't have taken until now to be newsworthy.
That said, the gov't really needs to add at least a digit or two. Just adding one digit & making every existing SSN end with "0" until 2025 (to allow a graceful transition where existing 9-digit numbers would have an easily-derived 10-digit value) would give them enough unique numbers to go a few centuries without ever reusing a number.
Why would you add the digit on the end and break every system in existence? Much better to add it to the left like a normal number then the zero is completely optional unless you have a 10 digit SSN. Reusing SSNs is a stupid idea. Just start giving babies and new applicants 10 digit, then 11 digit numbers, etc... If everyone in 2016(or 2017 if you want to give a little more time) got a SSN greater than 999,999,999 then existing systems would adapt quickly, many probably already support ID fields greater than 9 digits as there are alternate IDs like passport numbers and foreign IDs already in existence that probably exceed 9 digits. The other alternative would be to go to alphanumeric IDs for new applicants.
Personally, though, it might be better to break the system and fix it right. Why do you need a non-changing number? Credit card companies and even banks have the ability to reissue you a new number if your previous number is compromised. Credit card companies sometimes even send you a new number every few years just for safety. A standard USA credit card is 16 digits, I would propose a 16 alphanumeric SSN that changes every year and can be invalidated at any time. When you file your taxes, you file it with the current year's SSN and then when it's complete, they send you a new SSN to use the next year. As long as each SSN is chained to the previous one, they you still have the ability to track what is needed but finding a 3 year old number is now worthless.
test it to see if it is actually the type of file that its file-name extension claims it is.
There are various ways to make "hybrid" files which are multiple types. Graphics files which are also archives, etc. What you really want to do is normalize the files to the type they're supposed to be. PNGs are a good candidate for this because PNG is lossless, so you can decode the image and re-encode it without losing information.
This is exactly what we did on a production site. We wanted to support several different document types but wanted everything uniform so we use a locked down version of openoffice headless that converts everything doc, txt, png, spreadsheets, etc.. to pdf format. In our case pdf format made the most sense because 99% of the stuff that was suppose to be uploaded was documents and by using openoffice we automatically can support anything that openoffice does. You still have to worry about viruses that affect openoffice but even if that's the case, it's fairly limited because it's unlikely to make it thru the conversion process so it doesn't affect our end users and if they do by some miracle manage to infect our conversion server there is very little on it of any value and they would have to jump through several more hoops to get to somewhere useful.
>Oh, I'm also only about 10 minutes away from 2 major hospitals, an airport, and several excellent colleges including a top college football team.
All of which you get to in your air conditioned transcontinental sized SUV because it's ungodly hot and humid wherever you live, and the bugs are big enough to carry off the family poodle "Noodle". Don't forget the lovely snow seven months a year, and the subscription to National Geographic to teach the kids what an ocean is, what a beach looks like, and to learn about the concept of clean water.
Oh, please.
I shouldn't even respond to this but my kids and I go to the ocean at least once a year and we have snow on the ground maybe a month total. More to the point, my original reply was to someone who lived in NY which is a heck of a lot colder than where I live. And then your last bit about clean water is a joke. I'm on city water but I have neighbors with wells that can drink straight from their wells. Most places in "flyover country" have a lot more and a lot cleaner water before treatment than places like California and New York do after treatment. California at least has mild weather year around but other places like NY and chicago with sky high rent don't even have that going for them and have very little geographic advantage.
Nope, the smack center. Columbia, MO. Not a huge town, but we do have Mizzou, 2 great hospitals, several great colleges, and are only 2 hours from both Kansas City and Saint Louis. Kansas City and Saint Louis are obviously a lot bigger and the cost of living there is actually not that much higher if you aren't right downtown but I can get to STL almost as fast as someone living on the outskirts and for my day to day, I'm minutes away from the local mall and everything else I need. For the life of me, I don't understand why people live in places where you pay $2200/month to sleep in a glorified dorm room.
Except that at least on android, it's easy enough to sideload unofficial apps and if you actually do the encryption with a onetime pad before encoding it in the picture then apple has no ability to "dump the unencrypted cache" because it never existed.
The DA wants "zero-knowledge" encryption to go away. Apple et al are saying "we don't want to do that". Are you arguing that Apple and Google are wrong here?
They can want it to go away all they want but zero knowledge encryption is exactly what would happen if apple/google stopped providing encryption. If I encrypt it using a one time hash before I send the message, upload it to dropbox, etc... then of course they have zero knowledge of the key. Honestly, if I was a terrorist, this is exactly how I would do it. I would encrypt the message and then embed it in a Steganograph jpeg. It would be rather simple to write an iphone app that did exactly this and automated the whole process so that all it looked like was two users were sending pictures back and forth.
It's disingenuous to call a slave a 'worker' because it intentionally leaves out important context. The fact that they were slaves instead of free men is an important thing to understand in a history book.
And it would be disingenuous if it was intentional and there was no mention of slaves elsewhere. The fact that the "offending" sentence already used the word slave once in the sentence shows that they weren't trying to hide the fact that they were slaves.
A few more way to write it would be:
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of men, women, and children from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of people from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of them from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
Are these all offensive too because they fail to use the word slave a second time?
Sure, they could have picked one of these other sentences which might have been better but don't assume the author was being disingenuous and trying to imply something when most likely the word selected was done haphazardly with very little intentional thought.
But if you want it to be the most factual and truthful, how about this one:
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of african natives captured and sold primarily by their native country men and rival tribes from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
How is it factually incorrect to call a slave a worker? Fact checkers would not fix that. Now the PC police might but which set of PC police do you allow to run your school? My guess is that the author actually used "worker" in an attempt to be PC because they knew that slave was a loaded word. Unfortunately for the author, it is impossible to please the PC police because if you try to downplay slavery, one side gets mad, if you skip over it, another group gets mad, and if you tell it too harshly you either have people up in arms that you were too graphic or another group saying that you still weren't harsh enough. I'm all for fact checking but PC checking is a game no one can win. The best you can do is try to rotate through authors of different backgrounds but even this is bound to fail as there are always going to be authors that a subset of people think are too extreme either one way or the other.
But why pirate anything at all? Music is pretty cheap now and you can buy individual songs instead of albums. There is Netflix, Hulu, Amazon to watch movies or you can spend $9 - $20 on a dvd movie. For gaming, you have steam which they sell games at very low prices compared to their console counterpart or there is the Emulators which is great for playing old games. As for software, If you want to learn a software program you can download and re-download trial versions from adobe, autodesk, corel, and even Microsoft. Anyway, a professional(photographer, 3d graphics, programmer, etc...) would not have the need to be pirating since they are making tons of $$$. It takes money to make money.
Why are people still pirating?
First off, many of the biggest people who pirate have always been college kids who don't have the money to buy things like autocad and photoshop.
Just because you can afford it and see no reason to pirate doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people.
Secondly, netflix, hulu, and amazon are a joke. If you don't care what you want to watch and just want to watch mind-numbing tv shows then they are fine but if you actually want to watch specific movies or tv shows that are either great classics or new releases then the selection is terrible. Go to any "top 100 movies for X" where X is a genre, a year, etc... and I doubt netflix, amazon, and hulu combined even get to 25% coverage.
Regarding the licensing, I was always more confused over the vector of attacking people for downloading in the first place
So if I download a song from a pirate, they are obviously violating copyright by distributing it without license, sure. But if I receive it, with no indication of the limitation of my rights, what am I violating (morals aside) by consuming that media?
That's the beauty of the strange beast that is bittorrent. Bittorrent is used for piracy but in some ways, the RIAA couldn't have asked for a better protocol as the way it is designed, every downloader is also an uploader so the RIAA can go after downloaders and rightfully claim that they are illegally sharing their IP. The only way to prevent this is to turn off uploading but because bittorrent uses a tit for tat system of fairness, this severely limits your download speed.
I use BTSync to synchronise my own files to my various devices.
Same here. And it works like a charm.
BTSync has no conflict detection. The newest file wins. This is scary to me and the main reason that I don't use BTsync. I use syncthing which is similiar but also opensource and has built-in conflict detection.
If we cured aging and people could live to several hundred years
If we did that using some hypothetical future technology, it is possible that those beings would not be "human" under our current definition of the species.
If the only thing that changed was that people didn't age and/or were able to repair the damage done by aging then by most definitions they would still be human. I don't know of any technology in the pipeline that would alter humans drastically enough that you would consider them a different species. Now if the anti-aging was a modification of DNA before birth, you might have some argument but most anti-aging research I know of deal with things like lengthening telemeras in existing humans and/or just fixing problems that arise as a person ages.
People may be willing to spend months in a tin can to get somewhere, but years is another matter. Some explorers might visit the orbit of Jupiter or Saturn, but anything farther out would be an entire career in one trip.
You're making some bad assumptions based on current technology. Sure, noone is going to want to spend 20 years in a spacecraft but there are several future technologies that would mitigate this. If we cured aging and people could live to several hundred years, then more people would be willing to spend 20 years in a spacecraft. Likewise if we could do human hibernation where someone didn't age for those 20 years. Another possibility would be relativistic speeds where a person might be in the spacecraft for 20 years but only age a couple years. Sure, 20 years would go by in the world back home but if the person on the craft only aged a couple years then this would probably be acceptable to most people.
In any case, the bias cannot be more than the GPS positioning error, maybe a couple of meters if you're having a bad day. I'd like to know who these runners/walkers are who are complaining about an extra meter or two.
"an extra meter or two" every 10 meters can add up to a huge distance over the course of a couple miles.
As a sailor who use GPS alongside traditional navigation: stop using devices that poll and insert a new leg on your route every 5 seconds. If you lower the polling frequency to f.e. every 1 or 2 minutes this problem goes away. I realize that this doesn't work for people who insist on taking their morning run zig-zagging through city blocks.
My dad hired a "carpenter" once who measured every board 16 inches from the previous board. By the time he got 20 or 30 boards nailed in, his being off 1/8 inches each measure had ballooned to being off almost 6 inches and the boards having a noticeable lean.
I think the other issue they're dealing with besides skew is that you shouldn't be looking at the average distance between two points to calculate the distance as the "average" is always going to be greater or equal to the straight line shortest. You really should only use the shortest distance between two points as the shortest distance should always be the closest to the actual distance as it's impossible to get from point A to point B in a shorter distance than a straight line.
it's very simple to check if something is a problem if you simply take it to it's extreme.
in this case, you can pay $50 for access to a data plan but your data cap is 1MB. however, if you visit sites X, Y and Z, you can stream several gigs of data without it counting against your data cap. exceeding your data cap incurs a $10 per MB fee. so if you aren't site X, Y or Z then people wont want to use your site... but if you pay the ISP money, they will make it free for people to go to your site too.
the result is nobody will go to your site unless you pay ISPs money. this is a problem.
Although I agree with this, if the cell carrier was a common carrier with a fixed rate, then I would be ok with netflix footing the bill for the consumer. Just like we have 800 numbers where the receiving party foots the bill, if set up correctly, it could be reasonable to zero rate services.
T-Mobile isn't offering Netflix access because Netflix is some fledgeling company that T-Mobile owns and is trying to drum up business for.
But even if it was, even if T-Mobile was pushing some super new video service and people were switching to that service over Netflix or HBO or anything else, I fail to see the problem. More choices is good.
Yes, more choices is good but by offering free access to only the most popular service they are limiting choices.
At least in the case of Netflix, it's probably because Netflix has for a while now had a public offer to large ISPs where it will place caches of its servers in the ISP, resulting in a huge amount of Netflix streaming activity happening within the ISP's network rather than required to go over peering links.
That would be a valid point if the bottleneck was the carrier's connection to the internet. The reason that cell companies charge considerably more than broadband companies is because the bottleneck is between the carrier and the cell phone. Having caching servers inside the carrier's data center does nothing to help the actual bottleneck.
In all honestly this service seems completely reasonable, delivering data through this service will cost tmobile less (since it will be originating inside their network and they have complete control over the colocation and whatnot) so why not let them offer their service without billing you.
If it was "local traffic" vs "remote traffic" then not charging for the internet connectivity for that data would be reasonable. But that's not really what's happening. The cost to get from the internet to tmobile is negligible. That is not the reason that data fees for cellular is so much more expensive than broadband. The expensive part is getting it from tmobile to the end user. The reason cell phone data is a lot more expensive than broadband data is that that last mile is expensive. Whether I'm using my last mile data for vpn traffic, torrents, voip, videos, or music, the price should be the same for everybody and every service. Now, if you want to have QOS traffic where you get cheaper data for accepting higher latency, off peak times of day, etc... then I'm all for that. Stuff like torrents can be offloaded to high latency and/or offpeak times of day. Most video and music traffic is not like that but is requires premium high quality real time data channels in order to stream properly. There is no good reason that these should be charged less than other data traffic and by doing so you open a huge chasm in net neutrality.
You've never noticed that conditions in different places are different at different times?
Sorry, no player to watch 'tubes'. But it isn't ridiculous, it's a fact. People know that there is a buffer above the posted limit where they are unlikely to be stopped, so they go that fast.
Of course, I've noticed it, that's the problem. If you're not local, you have no idea whether it's safe to drive 5 over, 10 over, or if you're going to get pulled over for going 1 over. And there are some places where it's unsafe to not break the law. That's what the video was. It was a group that decided to all drive the "speed limit" on a major road where everyone routinely drove 20 over and they are lucky noone got killed in the mayhem. A buffer is fine but the buffer should be stated not some unspoken mystery that varies from city to city and even day to day. Weaving in and out of traffic and driving dangerously should be ticketed even if you're driving the speed limit but if I can drive 20 miles over during rush hour then driving 20 miles over on a sunny sunday afternoon should also be allowed with risking getting a ticket because I've lost the "herd" protection or because a cop is having a bad day. We shouldn't have laws that are knowingly broken on a consistent basis and selectively enforced where citizens never know if they are going to get in trouble for breaking them or not.
You just don't like the idea of not being allowed to 'pace' all the maniacs, you idiot *.
No, I don't like the idea that driving 20 miles over in heavy traffic is ok while driving 20 miles over when the road is empty and the cop is bored gets you a ticket.
Even worse, when you go from city to city, you have no idea what speed you are supposed to drive because different places enforce it completely different and even 1 mile over you always risk the gamble of getting a ticket. You shouldn't have to risk getting a ticket just to stay in the flow of traffic. Every once in a while they'll set up speed traps and pull over 20-30 cars in a row, yet in other places thousands of cars break the "law" every day. The law should either be enforced or taken off the books.
If they raise the posted limit, then everyone will just go 10 over the new posted limit. The assumption is that the posted limit is the safe design limit for the road, and since everyone is a better than average driver everyone can go a bit faster.
No, this is ridiculous. Here is a video showing how ridiculous it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If the speed limit is the "suggested maximum safe speed", then don't ticket people. It's ridiculous for some places to ticket you for going 5 over the "speed limit" and other places allow you to go over by 20 mph at certain times of the day without getting a ticket. If it's the actual speed limit, then set it at the limit and enforce it. A compromise as people are used to speeding might be set it 10 below what you want the limit is and start enforcing it after 10 over but it's anarchy to have some places enforce it as a hard limit and other places allowing you to go 20 over but not 25 over. It leaves too much discretion in the cop's hands where they can selectively pull over the people they want and ignore other people equally breaking the "law"
In the 'large monitor' vein, you can either go for one that just has enormous pixels(there are some 1366x768 and 1920x1080 panels that smear those pixels over a pretty enormous area) or, if other constraints demand it(in a laptop, say) shoot for something with a resolution that is an integer multiple of the one you actually want to use. Non-integer scaling can be done more or less tastefully; but simply doesn't have a 'correct' solution. Integer-multiple scaling is both easier and produces better results.
I agree with this for the large monitors as whether it's a 32" or a 64", it's still usually supports the standard 1366x768/1024x768 or something similar that most websites expect.
For laptops, one option on linux would be a desktop that is larger than the physical screen size. You could set the physical screen resolution to 640x480 but then set the desktop size to 1024x768 or some other normal resolution. You would have to scroll side to side to see that whole screen but you would have a built in zoom no matter where you go without "breaking" sites that expect resolutions larger than 1024x768.
or they'll illustrate all the conflicts the law has with itself and reality.
That's exactly why these 'impeding traffic' laws are written. In most cases, it's perfectly legal to drive 10 mph below the speed limit, even though "everyone" will drive 10 mph faster than the limit. So here you've got this self-driving car, going at bicycle speed on a busy road with everyone else trying to go 45. They can't put the self-driving car in the bicycle lane, so traffic backs up. Add in some gawking by drivers passing by, and the car sounds like a major hazard, even if it's behaving entirely by the letter.
Do you ticket the 10,000 people going 45 or the one going 25?
Impeding traffic laws should be illegal. They are a catch-22 that it's impossible to win. Minimum speed limits are fine. Saying you must be with 10 miles of the speed limit when not starting or stopping is fine. Saying that it's illegal to go the speed limit or worse saying you must break one law by speeding to not violate a different law of impeding traffic puts you in an impossible situation where a cop can pull you over depending on the time of the day and/or no matter what you do. If everyone is breaking the speed limit then they either need to pull the entire highway over or raise the limit.
Changing every year? My my, someone is ambitious in wanting to destroy simpletons computer systems.
SSN should be nothing more than a DB number, not an identity.
This might be the better solution. Everyone gets a SSN, let them publish it on the side of their car or their license plate as a UID, but make it useless without a current password. It can be their DB number, it can be their identity, they can publish it on facebook or give it to their friends to say who they are but to actually file taxes, check your credit, do a bank loan, etc, it requires a current changable password. Just like every check you write has your bank account number on it, your SSN should identify who you are just like someone's public key verifies who they are but you should need a password to actually validate it.
I'm pretty sure that most of the "40 million" are sharing a SSN with somebody who died *years* ago, and that the number of people like the two women cited as an example is much, MUCH smaller.
I mean, for ${deity.name}'s sake, there are only ~300 million *AMERICANS*. If one in 8 Americans had SSN collisions with another living person, I can *guarantee* it wouldn't have taken until now to be newsworthy.
That said, the gov't really needs to add at least a digit or two. Just adding one digit & making every existing SSN end with "0" until 2025 (to allow a graceful transition where existing 9-digit numbers would have an easily-derived 10-digit value) would give them enough unique numbers to go a few centuries without ever reusing a number.
Why would you add the digit on the end and break every system in existence? Much better to add it to the left like a normal number then the zero is completely optional unless you have a 10 digit SSN. Reusing SSNs is a stupid idea. Just start giving babies and new applicants 10 digit, then 11 digit numbers, etc... If everyone in 2016(or 2017 if you want to give a little more time) got a SSN greater than 999,999,999 then existing systems would adapt quickly, many probably already support ID fields greater than 9 digits as there are alternate IDs like passport numbers and foreign IDs already in existence that probably exceed 9 digits. The other alternative would be to go to alphanumeric IDs for new applicants.
Personally, though, it might be better to break the system and fix it right. Why do you need a non-changing number? Credit card companies and even banks have the ability to reissue you a new number if your previous number is compromised. Credit card companies sometimes even send you a new number every few years just for safety. A standard USA credit card is 16 digits, I would propose a 16 alphanumeric SSN that changes every year and can be invalidated at any time. When you file your taxes, you file it with the current year's SSN and then when it's complete, they send you a new SSN to use the next year. As long as each SSN is chained to the previous one, they you still have the ability to track what is needed but finding a 3 year old number is now worthless.
test it to see if it is actually the type of file that its file-name extension claims it is.
There are various ways to make "hybrid" files which are multiple types. Graphics files which are also archives, etc. What you really want to do is normalize the files to the type they're supposed to be. PNGs are a good candidate for this because PNG is lossless, so you can decode the image and re-encode it without losing information.
This is exactly what we did on a production site. We wanted to support several different document types but wanted everything uniform so we use a locked down version of openoffice headless that converts everything doc, txt, png, spreadsheets, etc.. to pdf format. In our case pdf format made the most sense because 99% of the stuff that was suppose to be uploaded was documents and by using openoffice we automatically can support anything that openoffice does. You still have to worry about viruses that affect openoffice but even if that's the case, it's fairly limited because it's unlikely to make it thru the conversion process so it doesn't affect our end users and if they do by some miracle manage to infect our conversion server there is very little on it of any value and they would have to jump through several more hoops to get to somewhere useful.
>Oh, I'm also only about 10 minutes away from 2 major hospitals, an airport, and several excellent colleges including a top college football team.
All of which you get to in your air conditioned transcontinental sized SUV because it's ungodly hot and humid wherever you live, and the bugs are big enough to carry off the family poodle "Noodle". Don't forget the lovely snow seven months a year, and the subscription to National Geographic to teach the kids what an ocean is, what a beach looks like, and to learn about the concept of clean water.
Oh, please.
I shouldn't even respond to this but my kids and I go to the ocean at least once a year and we have snow on the ground maybe a month total. More to the point, my original reply was to someone who lived in NY which is a heck of a lot colder than where I live. And then your last bit about clean water is a joke. I'm on city water but I have neighbors with wells that can drink straight from their wells. Most places in "flyover country" have a lot more and a lot cleaner water before treatment than places like California and New York do after treatment. California at least has mild weather year around but other places like NY and chicago with sky high rent don't even have that going for them and have very little geographic advantage.
I'm honestly curious - where? Southeastern US?
Nope, the smack center. Columbia, MO. Not a huge town, but we do have Mizzou, 2 great hospitals, several great colleges, and are only 2 hours from both Kansas City and Saint Louis. Kansas City and Saint Louis are obviously a lot bigger and the cost of living there is actually not that much higher if you aren't right downtown but I can get to STL almost as fast as someone living on the outskirts and for my day to day, I'm minutes away from the local mall and everything else I need. For the life of me, I don't understand why people live in places where you pay $2200/month to sleep in a glorified dorm room.