You know not of what you speak. WiFi QoS schemes are generally just extensions of diffserv, so they are only really useful for prioritization based on what the endpoints set as a QoS classification, or if you think packet mangling is a good idea, based on what your routers can and cannot do with these flags. You can also base classifications on your own policy about applications on a very coarse level. None that I have seen offer any QoS-based per-connection fairness solution, e.g. WFQ or SF-BLUE, using the QoS channels, whether that might be technically feasable or not -- us network admins rely on the vendors to figure that out, because "competence" in our profession does not include coding our own AP OS or clients. So about the only thing they are good for is keeping web browsers out of a video/voice session's hair.
Something tells me that anyone unethical enough to raise a clone army is also unethical enough to save cash by using a redundant array of sedated kidnap victims.
Were I to listen to my paranoia coprocessor, it would have me believe that every excuse offered that seems to shield the right from some serious soul searching also serves to make it sound like "the next time will be better" to all the mark^H^H^H^Hdonors. And the Romney team was "shellshocked" in the same way Bain Capital is when one of their holdings collapses after assuming mounds of debt to pay Bain Capital.
But for once I will diligently apply Occam's Razor and attribute the whole mess to stupidity.
I can't imagine using Google Docs to store 20+ years worth of documents.
Especially since Google could just decide to discontinue the service at their whim.
Regardless of the system chosen, you really need to find someone with competent organizational and data entry hygeine skills, and have them serve as the person who manages content on the site. I don't care if you use a fileshare, wiki, or whatnot, if you let ordinary users choose the filenames/urls/directories where they upload content, it will end up a mess. Someone who knows such thing as not to name a file "minutes_2-2-12" when last months was named "2012_01_04_minutes."
Well, I'm sure a scheme could be devised, assuming one could reliably trust that they can get to an authoritative source.
The question is really how far into the core can we move such security measures before it implodes. Core routers have to carry the entire routing table for every subnetwork advertised with external BGP in the entire world, and then worry about doing the same for IPv6 as it slowly kicks into gear. They are always in need of an upgrade, even right after an upgrade and sometimes even before any such upgrade exists. Moreover they can legitimately hear advertisements for the same network through multiple interfaces -- and we are not talking multiple as in three, but tens to hundreds given how well meshed things are.
Currently it is jelly-doughnut security: the carriers all just trust each other to not trust the end sites. After establishing a customer relationship, they filter the end-sites, only allowing in the ASN's that the customers have ownership rights to. Once that perimeter is breached it's up to ISPs to react to individual incursions of rogue advertisements after the fact.
Good that you are not on those old punch card systems anymore.
Incidentally, this system is in place for most of Ohio. Fears of Romney stealing the election through electronic voting machines are thoroughly misplaced.
Given the tight margin that was, until a few days ago, expected in OH, even one urban county using a compromised e-vote system is a concern. We already know where the chips lie as far as which party is willing to block the vote of citizens and it's the one in control of the electoral apparatus. We see urban people wiith 7 or 8 hour waits to vote while the suburban people just hop out of there SUV and can get back without missing more than one reality TV show.
So yes, every facet of the thousand-cuts attack on our democracy concerns us that it might be the straw that broke the camel's back. Once a recount-proof result is announced based on preliminary machine scans, the only job then is to ignore any "question whatsoever about the machine count."
We do worry that OH will deliver result divergent from the pre-election polls. Opscan is the very best system to use, but is not a secure system unless mandatory random hand audits are done in a statistically sound manner by trustworthy individuals. We don't see the former hardly anywhere, and in OH, we have deep misgivings about the latter.
If you can, you can also do so with your boss looking over your shoulder so that they can see it too. So that's bad. A receipt that merely tells you that you voted and allows you to verify that your vote is counted in the tally, but not who or what you voted for would be tenable, though I don't know how the law currently stands on that. Likewise a receipt that shows how you voted in a human readable way, which you put in a "backup ballot" box before leaving the booth, would be acceptable.
All this, when opscans work just fine and don't have any problems that e-voting doesn't also have. I voted opscan this morning; it was easy and seamless.
In all seriousness, one must be careful with headlines these days. Next thing you know some numbnut "True-The-Vote" fanatic will be insisting that taking the picture is illegal, even if it is the act of posting it. And that might keep people from documenting problems with badly tuned touch screens.
That's not necessarily true. Just because VoIP is a kludge compared to TDM or cell switched services, does not mean that the backbone equipment to do it will not be protected by the same backup systems as TDM or cell switches.
However, the tendency not to use POTS copper on new installs would mean that new payphone rollouts would likely not be as protected, not being powered by the POTS lines but rather by a site-local power source, which could even be just grid. So what you say may happen for newer last mile setups, but existing POTS lines would likely be tied to a reliable backbone, VoIP or not.
One has to account for the added value of having backup power during grid outages, and the increase in home resale value means you don't have to actually remain the owner for the entire period of the ROI to realize a gain. That, and your 15 year figure is ancient.
Physical buttons offer little improvement from an integrity standpoint. It's the idea of a "voting machine" that is broken, not merely the touch screen calibration. What we need are "vote counting machines" that work off a single permanant, authoritative, and human-verifiable vote record, otherwise known as a paper ballot.
The justification sometimes used for using touch screens is because they have the ability to scale up the screen for accessibilty for visually impaired voters.
That's probably the only passable reason for using these peices of crap, and even at that, one could be set aside per precinct for use on-request by the people that need them, while the rest of us vote on a more verifiable system.
We should not settle for anything less than hand-marked paper (computer processing of the paper e.g. opscan is ok for a first count) with mandatory random hand-count audits of a statistically sound number of machines, with an automatic trigger of a full recount if those spot checks fail.
no more car chargers, no more wall wart chargers, no more devices disposed of due to worn out charger connections.
However this problem could be fixed without ever leaving the wired space. To some extent, it is already being fixed with USB, but for higher power devices, PoE/PoE+ might be a good thing to encourage, even for non-networked devices.
Now if we could just get them to stop changing the damn connectors all the time.
If you don't make your power signal directional, most of the power is just gonna leak away into the atmosphere.
This is not how these devices are supposed to work... that is to say, this is not the same as radio. It's a near-field, not radiative, effect. Most of the power that does not go into the receiver returns to the transmitter as part of the resonant oscillation (via a collapsing magnetic field.) Some will be lost to fringing, but the percent lost to that per oscillation is much lower than the percent absorbed by a properly tuned receiver, by design.
Not that I'd advocate this for consumer use, it will still be less efficient than a wire, and I'd rather see consumers suck it up and run a wire where appropriate instead of finding yet one more way to waste energy and pile ruin on our planet. However there may be some very productive niche uses.
I have a feeling that, depite having watched LOTR several times and still enjoying it, if I kept watching it over and over and over, eventually it would become less fun.
Same thing. To boot, most videogame stories and missions are pretty bland and rely on some sort of novelty that hasn't been unlocked in the game as of yet to make them interesting. Second time through, it is no longer a novelty.
This. The math articles are actually very good, but you have to make it past the hurdle of being able to comprehend WTF the article is about before you can appreciate the power of all the crosslinks. Many of them drop almost immediately into notations, which even if notations don't scare you off, generally aren't very helpful to the objective of description. Also they follow the general mathematical convention of "here's a big bunch of symbols, now here is what each symbol means" instead of what humans naturally need: here is thing thing, we'll use symbol to represent it, and here are these other things with these symbols, and what's going tpo happen is we are going to divide this generic concept by this other generic concept and add this other thing and now here's the big mess of symbols that describes exaclty how we go about that and here are a few things you might want to notice in that big mess of symbols because they are important/interesting."
It always amazes me after studying a mathematical topic how easy it is to picture the very simple structure of meaning after you already understand it, but how very hard it was to upload that simple structure from the printed page to the wetware. I often hold out hope that a true talent for visual art combined with modern multimedia might make that whole process much smoother. I keep meaning to suggest teaming students from our art department with math students to try to come up with art/video that explains math.
What I would not like to see is what we see on things like the Science channel where documentaries about scientific subjects are really just human interest stories about the scientists involved. That material should be on its own page, except for the tie-ins.
About that hypothetical cracking towards the catcher: keep in mind here that the only thing that has any momentum towards the catcher is the ball, and most of that is being sunk to the mass of the ground and the batter because he is pushing. While it's possible for the bat to explode in such a way that most of the bat gets pushed towards the pitcher and a shard gets pushed away towards the catcher rather fast, and I would not want to be that catcher, it cannot be nearly as impressive in that direction as when it is headed towards the pitcher.
This. The power supply is nearly always the first thing to go/degrade, even on enterprise grade gear. It may not be the wall wart side of the power supply, however, as the last stages are usually on the PCB of the unit itself, and those can go as well. A lot of our APs will lose their PoE subsystem and still work off AC power for a couple of years before finally giving up the ghost.
Generally any N device without a 5GHz radio will be listed as "b/g/n" and those with as "a/b/g/n". Or in other words, you use the older protocols to tell the difference, rather than having to dig into the product literature, which is generally abysmal.
Is that not a way of acknowledging that there is no god?
Whether or not there is a "god" and what "god" means has little bearing on a scientific assessment of the relative risks and benefits of various forms of religion and spirituality.
How much better off would she have been had she said "Oh crap!" Not any.
You could argue that she would not have risked walking down that dark alley had she not believed herself protected.
You could also argue that she would never have left the house due to lack of courage, become a deranged shutin, and died after a tumble in the shower without her faith.
People really have to get out of the OCD mode on this issue and realize that religion has effects that range from harmful to inconsequential to beneficial, and that people who say things, pro or con, about religion also span a wide range of intentions and competence. As the human body of knowlege proceeds to grow even more orders of magnitude greater than what one individual can understand in a normal lifetime, we are going to have to learn to maturely manage the fact just about everyone is taking the majority of their construction of reality on trust of one form or another, and that will often be trust in a person or a creed. It's a form of mental heuristic/memoization. Neither stringent fundamentalism nor nihilistic abolitionism are a particularly mature approach to this issue.
It's a huge mistake. It's why we have programmers that don't understand the computational expense of memory/cache, bounce buffers, and parasitic intermediate representations. Without a crictical mass of such programmers, there is not enough demand pressure for toolkits that work efficiently, and the bells and whistles are chased after instead, no matter how slow said bells and whistles make the system run. Worse yet, it's why useful paradigms become a hammer seeking a nail, as CS students don't think critically when they learn such subjects, about where and when these techniques have serious performance drawbacks, so they mis-apply them where they do not fit.
The few who do master the art are the only people capable of writing competent compilers, but they mostly go on to do other stuff, because there's little mass demand for efficient compilers among their peers. We are very fortunate to have the ones that feel compelled to work on gcc/egcs/llvm/etc in their spare time.
Slashdot Mirror
You know not of what you speak. WiFi QoS schemes are generally just extensions of diffserv, so they are only really useful for prioritization based on what the endpoints set as a QoS classification, or if you think packet mangling is a good idea, based on what your routers can and cannot do with these flags. You can also base classifications on your own policy about applications on a very coarse level. None that I have seen offer any QoS-based per-connection fairness solution, e.g. WFQ or SF-BLUE, using the QoS channels, whether that might be technically feasable or not -- us network admins rely on the vendors to figure that out, because "competence" in our profession does not include coding our own AP OS or clients. So about the only thing they are good for is keeping web browsers out of a video/voice session's hair.
Something tells me that anyone unethical enough to raise a clone army is also unethical enough to save cash by using a redundant array of sedated kidnap victims.
Were I to listen to my paranoia coprocessor, it would have me believe that every excuse offered that seems to shield the right from some serious soul searching also serves to make it sound like "the next time will be better" to all the mark^H^H^H^Hdonors. And the Romney team was "shellshocked" in the same way Bain Capital is when one of their holdings collapses after assuming mounds of debt to pay Bain Capital.
But for once I will diligently apply Occam's Razor and attribute the whole mess to stupidity.
I can't imagine using Google Docs to store 20+ years worth of documents.
Especially since Google could just decide to discontinue the service at their whim.
Regardless of the system chosen, you really need to find someone with competent organizational and data entry hygeine skills, and have them serve as the person who manages content on the site. I don't care if you use a fileshare, wiki, or whatnot, if you let ordinary users choose the filenames/urls/directories where they upload content, it will end up a mess. Someone who knows such thing as not to name a file "minutes_2-2-12" when last months was named "2012_01_04_minutes."
Well, I'm sure a scheme could be devised, assuming one could reliably trust that they can get to an authoritative source.
The question is really how far into the core can we move such security measures before it implodes. Core routers have to carry the entire routing table for every subnetwork advertised with external BGP in the entire world, and then worry about doing the same for IPv6 as it slowly kicks into gear. They are always in need of an upgrade, even right after an upgrade and sometimes even before any such upgrade exists. Moreover they can legitimately hear advertisements for the same network through multiple interfaces -- and we are not talking multiple as in three, but tens to hundreds given how well meshed things are.
Currently it is jelly-doughnut security: the carriers all just trust each other to not trust the end sites. After establishing a customer relationship, they filter the end-sites, only allowing in the ASN's that the customers have ownership rights to. Once that perimeter is breached it's up to ISPs to react to individual incursions of rogue advertisements after the fact.
Good that you are not on those old punch card systems anymore.
Incidentally, this system is in place for most of Ohio. Fears of Romney stealing the election through electronic voting machines are thoroughly misplaced.
Given the tight margin that was, until a few days ago, expected in OH, even one urban county using a compromised e-vote system is a concern. We already know where the chips lie as far as which party is willing to block the vote of citizens and it's the one in control of the electoral apparatus. We see urban people wiith 7 or 8 hour waits to vote while the suburban people just hop out of there SUV and can get back without missing more than one reality TV show.
So yes, every facet of the thousand-cuts attack on our democracy concerns us that it might be the straw that broke the camel's back. Once a recount-proof result is announced based on preliminary machine scans, the only job then is to ignore any "question whatsoever about the machine count."
We do worry that OH will deliver result divergent from the pre-election polls. Opscan is the very best system to use, but is not a secure system unless mandatory random hand audits are done in a statistically sound manner by trustworthy individuals. We don't see the former hardly anywhere, and in OH, we have deep misgivings about the latter.
Yes you could.
If you can, you can also do so with your boss looking over your shoulder so that they can see it too. So that's bad. A receipt that merely tells you that you voted and allows you to verify that your vote is counted in the tally, but not who or what you voted for would be tenable, though I don't know how the law currently stands on that. Likewise a receipt that shows how you voted in a human readable way, which you put in a "backup ballot" box before leaving the booth, would be acceptable.
All this, when opscans work just fine and don't have any problems that e-voting doesn't also have. I voted opscan this morning; it was easy and seamless.
In all seriousness, one must be careful with headlines these days. Next thing you know some numbnut "True-The-Vote" fanatic will be insisting that taking the picture is illegal, even if it is the act of posting it. And that might keep people from documenting problems with badly tuned touch screens.
That's not necessarily true. Just because VoIP is a kludge compared to TDM or cell switched services, does not mean that the backbone equipment to do it will not be protected by the same backup systems as TDM or cell switches.
However, the tendency not to use POTS copper on new installs would mean that new payphone rollouts would likely not be as protected, not being powered by the POTS lines but rather by a site-local power source, which could even be just grid. So what you say may happen for newer last mile setups, but existing POTS lines would likely be tied to a reliable backbone, VoIP or not.
One has to account for the added value of having backup power during grid outages, and the increase in home resale value means you don't have to actually remain the owner for the entire period of the ROI to realize a gain. That, and your 15 year figure is ancient.
Physical buttons offer little improvement from an integrity standpoint. It's the idea of a "voting machine" that is broken, not merely the touch screen calibration. What we need are "vote counting machines" that work off a single permanant, authoritative, and human-verifiable vote record, otherwise known as a paper ballot.
The justification sometimes used for using touch screens is because they have the ability to scale up the screen for accessibilty for visually impaired voters.
That's probably the only passable reason for using these peices of crap, and even at that, one could be set aside per precinct for use on-request by the people that need them, while the rest of us vote on a more verifiable system.
We should not settle for anything less than hand-marked paper (computer processing of the paper e.g. opscan is ok for a first count) with mandatory random hand-count audits of a statistically sound number of machines, with an automatic trigger of a full recount if those spot checks fail.
no more car chargers, no more wall wart chargers, no more devices disposed of due to worn out charger connections.
However this problem could be fixed without ever leaving the wired space. To some extent, it is already being fixed with USB, but for higher power devices, PoE/PoE+ might be a good thing to encourage, even for non-networked devices.
Now if we could just get them to stop changing the damn connectors all the time.
If you don't make your power signal directional, most of the power is just gonna leak away into the atmosphere.
This is not how these devices are supposed to work... that is to say, this is not the same as radio. It's a near-field, not radiative, effect. Most of the power that does not go into the receiver returns to the transmitter as part of the resonant oscillation (via a collapsing magnetic field.) Some will be lost to fringing, but the percent lost to that per oscillation is much lower than the percent absorbed by a properly tuned receiver, by design.
Not that I'd advocate this for consumer use, it will still be less efficient than a wire, and I'd rather see consumers suck it up and run a wire where appropriate instead of finding yet one more way to waste energy and pile ruin on our planet. However there may be some very productive niche uses.
I have a feeling that, depite having watched LOTR several times and still enjoying it, if I kept watching it over and over and over, eventually it would become less fun.
Same thing. To boot, most videogame stories and missions are pretty bland and rely on some sort of novelty that hasn't been unlocked in the game as of yet to make them interesting. Second time through, it is no longer a novelty.
This. The math articles are actually very good, but you have to make it past the hurdle of being able to comprehend WTF the article is about before you can appreciate the power of all the crosslinks. Many of them drop almost immediately into notations, which even if notations don't scare you off, generally aren't very helpful to the objective of description. Also they follow the general mathematical convention of "here's a big bunch of symbols, now here is what each symbol means" instead of what humans naturally need: here is thing thing, we'll use symbol to represent it, and here are these other things with these symbols, and what's going tpo happen is we are going to divide this generic concept by this other generic concept and add this other thing and now here's the big mess of symbols that describes exaclty how we go about that and here are a few things you might want to notice in that big mess of symbols because they are important/interesting."
It always amazes me after studying a mathematical topic how easy it is to picture the very simple structure of meaning after you already understand it, but how very hard it was to upload that simple structure from the printed page to the wetware. I often hold out hope that a true talent for visual art combined with modern multimedia might make that whole process much smoother. I keep meaning to suggest teaming students from our art department with math students to try to come up with art/video that explains math.
What I would not like to see is what we see on things like the Science channel where documentaries about scientific subjects are really just human interest stories about the scientists involved. That material should be on its own page, except for the tie-ins.
About that hypothetical cracking towards the catcher: keep in mind here that the only thing that has any momentum towards the catcher is the ball, and most of that is being sunk to the mass of the ground and the batter because he is pushing. While it's possible for the bat to explode in such a way that most of the bat gets pushed towards the pitcher and a shard gets pushed away towards the catcher rather fast, and I would not want to be that catcher, it cannot be nearly as impressive in that direction as when it is headed towards the pitcher.
You are an atheist. Did you know that?
Actually I'm a panentheist.
This. The power supply is nearly always the first thing to go/degrade, even on enterprise grade gear. It may not be the wall wart side of the power supply, however, as the last stages are usually on the PCB of the unit itself, and those can go as well. A lot of our APs will lose their PoE subsystem and still work off AC power for a couple of years before finally giving up the ghost.
Generally any N device without a 5GHz radio will be listed as "b/g/n" and those with as "a/b/g/n". Or in other words, you use the older protocols to tell the difference, rather than having to dig into the product literature, which is generally abysmal.
Is that not a way of acknowledging that there is no god?
Whether or not there is a "god" and what "god" means has little bearing on a scientific assessment of the relative risks and benefits of various forms of religion and spirituality.
How much better off would she have been had she said "Oh crap!" Not any.
You could argue that she would not have risked walking down that dark alley had she not believed herself protected.
You could also argue that she would never have left the house due to lack of courage, become a deranged shutin, and died after a tumble in the shower without her faith.
People really have to get out of the OCD mode on this issue and realize that religion has effects that range from harmful to inconsequential to beneficial, and that people who say things, pro or con, about religion also span a wide range of intentions and competence. As the human body of knowlege proceeds to grow even more orders of magnitude greater than what one individual can understand in a normal lifetime, we are going to have to learn to maturely manage the fact just about everyone is taking the majority of their construction of reality on trust of one form or another, and that will often be trust in a person or a creed. It's a form of mental heuristic/memoization. Neither stringent fundamentalism nor nihilistic abolitionism are a particularly mature approach to this issue.
There's a good chance the developer fuly intended to implement security. The conversation probably went like this:
PHB: Is it done yet?
Dev: All the basic functions work but now we need to do a secu....
PHB: Ship it!
Unfortunately, it only takes one sociopath.
...or one particularly loathsome patient.
I've alwasy thought this was a big mistake.
It's a huge mistake. It's why we have programmers that don't understand the computational expense of memory/cache, bounce buffers, and parasitic intermediate representations. Without a crictical mass of such programmers, there is not enough demand pressure for toolkits that work efficiently, and the bells and whistles are chased after instead, no matter how slow said bells and whistles make the system run. Worse yet, it's why useful paradigms become a hammer seeking a nail, as CS students don't think critically when they learn such subjects, about where and when these techniques have serious performance drawbacks, so they mis-apply them where they do not fit.
The few who do master the art are the only people capable of writing competent compilers, but they mostly go on to do other stuff, because there's little mass demand for efficient compilers among their peers. We are very fortunate to have the ones that feel compelled to work on gcc/egcs/llvm/etc in their spare time.