Depends on the traffic lights. If you have brain-dead, timer-only lights then 4 way stops are a MASSIVE improvement.
A few years ago a trafffic light at a fairly busy intersection was damaged by a storm. They temporarily replaced it with a 4-way stop. Suddenly, congestion and accidents went WAY down, to the point where they wisely replaced a bunch of other lights with 4-way stops. Traffic flow has never been better.
You have some very strange ideas of a free market.
First, gas retailing is very competitive business, and the profit margin is paper thin (2% is considered high for a gas station). This is why every gas station has some ancilallary business to acutally make money (mini-mart, car wash, etc).
A 2% margin means that if the station lowered it's price 2% (hardly enough to be noticed by consumers), it would be making NO money selling gas. Drop it enough to be noticed by consumers and you LOSE money on every sale.
Gas prices track very closely with the price of crude. Of course, a 50% reduction in the price of crude is not going to result in a 50% drop in retail price because the price of crude is not 100% of the retail price. The cost of the actual retailing operation, taxes, etc do not vary with the price of crude. I don't know where you are that the price has 'barely blipped', because in most places it certainly has http://www.gaspricesexplained.com
Your comparison to gardening equipment is especially bizarre. The beginning of gardening season is pretty much the ONLY opportunity they have to sell that stuff. And they are not selling at 'a discount', they are selling at the price that will make them the most money. If he doesn't sell his inventory NOW, he will be stuck with unsold inventory that may have to be sold at a loss. So they start with a low price that still makes them an acceptible amount of money, then raise the price for the summer where maybe they will make a few sales, then drop it again in the fall to unload the leftoverst. A gas retailer on the other hand can sell his gas at any time. Failure to sell on a holiday weekend (because of high prices) is not going to leave him with unsold inventory that he must dispose of, he just doesn't order as much next week. Dropping the price during the holiday makes no business sense.
I think it will take more than just education. The markings and signage are also a problem (at least in NY). According to the markings and signage, if you are making what would be a 'right turn', you should use the outside lane. If you are going 'straight', you can use either lane. And if you are making a 'left' turn you should use the inside lane. Furthermore, you are not supposed to change lanes in the circle (solid white lines).
This means that even if everyone is using the 'proper' lanes, using the inside lane is risky because there is always the chance that someone is going straight thru on the outside lane where you need to cross to exit. Because you are making a turn, your lines of sight are different than normal (mirrors pointed at the wrong place, etc). Because of this, people just don't bother with the inside lane.
What are you talking about? There is no such 'minimum requirement'. Where do people come up with this crap?
You don't get delisted because you failed to make some 'minimum profit', you get delisted because nobody wants to buy your stock (ie you have a worthless company)
Here is a little company you may have heard of: Amazon. It was 7 years between their IPO and the first time they made ANY profit. Yet they weren't de-listed or reorganized, and the CEO is still there. Why wasn't your 'minimum required profit' rule applied?
Management changes happen in ALL companies, public and private, if the ownership of the company is not happy with their performance. The only difference with public companies is that the change is, of course, public.
The only REAL requirement of public companies is that they tell their (potential) investors what their business plan is, what the expected outcome of their plan is, any challenges, etc so that the public can make informed decisions on what to do with the stock. If a company says 'we are going to make whatsits, and we expect to make $1/share profit, and don't expect any real problems', THEN the company had better deliver or changes will occur. If they say 'we are going to make whatsits, we have steep competition but have a product in development that is better than theirs, but might not see profit for 5 years', then there is no expectation of immediate profit and changes won't occur unless it does not appear that they are executing the plan.
No kidding. I was responding to the ridiculous statement that no secure password system could possibly know if your new password was similar to the old one, and the equally ridiculous statement that it is a Windows problem and nix doesn't have such problems.
OK, so you worked for a very profitable company. That has nothing to do with public vs private. There are public companies that treat their employees equally as well, and there are profitable private companies that treat their employees poorly.
It sounds like the problem with your company is that once the founder left there was no direction. That is quite common, and has little to do with public vs private (although that can be trotted out as a convenient excuse).
Weirdly enough, every time I change my Linux password it asks for my CURRENT password, then the NEW password, and immediately complains if they are too similar. I wonder how they manage to do that?
Hate to break it to you, but private companies are interested in exactly the same thing. You know what you call a 'company' that doesn't exist primarily for profit? A charity (or maybe a hobby). The only difference that being public makes is that your profitability (or lack thereof) becomes public information.
Here's another news flash: most employees are interested in one thing - a paycheck.
He said he worked for, not owned, the company. The perception of whether or not a company is doing very, very well quite often differs between those two groups. This is especially true when one of the parties use phrases like 'it shackles the company to be profitable...'. Yes, that is why companies exist, to be profitable, whether they are publicly or privately held.
I just did a little test. Wrote a Python program to create a Decimal number (precision 9) and add.01 to it 10,000,000 times. Elapsed execution time: 102S on an Intel CORE i7.
Wrote the same program in COBOL (same decimal numbers, same precision) and ran it on a mainframe. Elapsed execution time: 0.33S
So, yeah, running on an Intel processor using Python isn't 'too slow', it is only 300X slower than a mainframe using COBOL.
Uh, no. Their profits are dependant solely on how much total money is bet. Who wins or loses is of no concern to them and does not affect their profits at all.
The reason they support it is exactly the same as the reason they publish programs with 'morning lines' and sell racing forms, etc. It lets people think they have an 'edge', so they are more likely to make a bet (any bet, doesn't matter to them).
What are you talking about? There is no 'statistics' or 'psychology' involved. There is no 'scam'. There is no 'stacked odds' or 'over time'.
What they do is quite simple and well-known. If you bet $1, they keep a percentage as their fee for running the service. This is called the takeout. The rest of the money goes into the pool for that type of bet. At the end of the race, the pool is split up among the winners.
You are betting against all the other gamblers. The bookie is not betting at all.
Manufacturers don't have to 'deign' anything. There are loads of manufacturers who are only too happy to sell you servers, etc for something other than Windows. That is not going to change. In addition many manufacturers will build you a workstation to your requirements, you just have to make it worth their while to do it. Your statement is pure FUD.
What system do you run where an admin can't replace a kernel? Or do you just stick your head in the sand and pretend there is no such thing as an inside job? Or that there is no way (social engineering) to get an admin to do something stupid, intentionally or not?
Nobody said they WERE a big problem, just that they COULD be a big problem. If you can't acknowledge that, clearly you don't know much about security. Which I guess is rather obvious since you ask that dumb question about the keys (hint: no single person has the key, and the people who DO have a portion of the key are quite a bit higher than 'admin', and the whole key never exists anywhere but tamper-resistant hardware).
The whole 'rootkit issue' is WHY you use secure boot and associated technologies (like IMA). And if you actually know what you are doing, you will be using remote attestation to ensure that you are not, in fact, using a known vulnerable by signed kernel.
We use it to protect important machines (servers, automation controllers, etc) from tampering by external or internal parties. Of course, it is not secure boot by itself that does that, it is in combination with SELinux and IMA. Secure boot, however, is a key component (does no good to have your kernel verify signatures before running things if the kernel itself is not trusted).
1) Why? Because you said so? Exactly what is insecure about it?
2) Exactly the opposite in our case. We sign our own images. The only code that will run is stuff signed by the appropriate key. That means users, hackers, and especially rogue admins don't get to install their own backdoors. Our stuff remains OURS, not THEIRS. As it should be.
What gives you the very incorrect idea that the 'old' clode is single-threaded? IBM mainframes have supported multi-processing since 1965. Current models have up to 120 CPs in one image. And as for performance - there you are WAY out in left field. Many COBOL programs involve decimal operations, and in COBOL that translates to HARDWARE decimal operations. If you think you are going to get anywhere NEAR that performace with Python (snort), I'll have what you're smoking.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the traffic lights. If you have brain-dead, timer-only lights then 4 way stops are a MASSIVE improvement.
A few years ago a trafffic light at a fairly busy intersection was damaged by a storm. They temporarily replaced it with a 4-way stop. Suddenly, congestion and accidents went WAY down, to the point where they wisely replaced a bunch of other lights with 4-way stops. Traffic flow has never been better.
You have some very strange ideas of a free market.
First, gas retailing is very competitive business, and the profit margin is paper thin (2% is considered high for a gas station). This is why every gas station has some ancilallary business to acutally make money (mini-mart, car wash, etc).
A 2% margin means that if the station lowered it's price 2% (hardly enough to be noticed by consumers), it would be making NO money selling gas. Drop it enough to be noticed by consumers and you LOSE money on every sale.
Gas prices track very closely with the price of crude. Of course, a 50% reduction in the price of crude is not going to result in a 50% drop in retail price because the price of crude is not 100% of the retail price. The cost of the actual retailing operation, taxes, etc do not vary with the price of crude. I don't know where you are that the price has 'barely blipped', because in most places it certainly has http://www.gaspricesexplained.com
Your comparison to gardening equipment is especially bizarre. The beginning of gardening season is pretty much the ONLY opportunity they have to sell that stuff. And they are not selling at 'a discount', they are selling at the price that will make them the most money. If he doesn't sell his inventory NOW, he will be stuck with unsold inventory that may have to be sold at a loss. So they start with a low price that still makes them an acceptible amount of money, then raise the price for the summer where maybe they will make a few sales, then drop it again in the fall to unload the leftoverst. A gas retailer on the other hand can sell his gas at any time. Failure to sell on a holiday weekend (because of high prices) is not going to leave him with unsold inventory that he must dispose of, he just doesn't order as much next week. Dropping the price during the holiday makes no business sense.
I think it will take more than just education. The markings and signage are also a problem (at least in NY). According to the markings and signage, if you are making what would be a 'right turn', you should use the outside lane. If you are going 'straight', you can use either lane. And if you are making a 'left' turn you should use the inside lane. Furthermore, you are not supposed to change lanes in the circle (solid white lines).
This means that even if everyone is using the 'proper' lanes, using the inside lane is risky because there is always the chance that someone is going straight thru on the outside lane where you need to cross to exit. Because you are making a turn, your lines of sight are different than normal (mirrors pointed at the wrong place, etc). Because of this, people just don't bother with the inside lane.
What are you talking about? There is no such 'minimum requirement'. Where do people come up with this crap?
You don't get delisted because you failed to make some 'minimum profit', you get delisted because nobody wants to buy your stock (ie you have a worthless company)
Here is a little company you may have heard of: Amazon. It was 7 years between their IPO and the first time they made ANY profit. Yet they weren't de-listed or reorganized, and the CEO is still there. Why wasn't your 'minimum required profit' rule applied?
Management changes happen in ALL companies, public and private, if the ownership of the company is not happy with their performance. The only difference with public companies is that the change is, of course, public.
The only REAL requirement of public companies is that they tell their (potential) investors what their business plan is, what the expected outcome of their plan is, any challenges, etc so that the public can make informed decisions on what to do with the stock. If a company says 'we are going to make whatsits, and we expect to make $1/share profit, and don't expect any real problems', THEN the company had better deliver or changes will occur. If they say 'we are going to make whatsits, we have steep competition but have a product in development that is better than theirs, but might not see profit for 5 years', then there is no expectation of immediate profit and changes won't occur unless it does not appear that they are executing the plan.
No kidding. I was responding to the ridiculous statement that no secure password system could possibly know if your new password was similar to the old one, and the equally ridiculous statement that it is a Windows problem and nix doesn't have such problems.
OK, so you worked for a very profitable company. That has nothing to do with public vs private. There are public companies that treat their employees equally as well, and there are profitable private companies that treat their employees poorly.
It sounds like the problem with your company is that once the founder left there was no direction. That is quite common, and has little to do with public vs private (although that can be trotted out as a convenient excuse).
Weirdly enough, every time I change my Linux password it asks for my CURRENT password, then the NEW password, and immediately complains if they are too similar. I wonder how they manage to do that?
Hate to break it to you, but private companies are interested in exactly the same thing. You know what you call a 'company' that doesn't exist primarily for profit? A charity (or maybe a hobby). The only difference that being public makes is that your profitability (or lack thereof) becomes public information.
Here's another news flash: most employees are interested in one thing - a paycheck.
He said he worked for, not owned, the company. The perception of whether or not a company is doing very, very well quite often differs between those two groups. This is especially true when one of the parties use phrases like 'it shackles the company to be profitable...'. Yes, that is why companies exist, to be profitable, whether they are publicly or privately held.
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
I just did a little test. Wrote a Python program to create a Decimal number (precision 9) and add .01 to it 10,000,000 times. Elapsed execution time: 102S on
an Intel CORE i7.
Wrote the same program in COBOL (same decimal numbers, same precision) and ran it on a mainframe. Elapsed execution time: 0.33S
So, yeah, running on an Intel processor using Python isn't 'too slow', it is only 300X slower than a mainframe using COBOL.
Uh, no. Their profits are dependant solely on how much total money is bet. Who wins or loses is of no concern to them and does not affect their profits at all.
The reason they support it is exactly the same as the reason they publish programs with 'morning lines' and sell racing forms, etc. It lets people think they have an 'edge', so they are more likely to make a bet (any bet, doesn't matter to them).
What are you talking about? There is no 'statistics' or 'psychology' involved. There is no 'scam'. There is no 'stacked odds' or 'over time'.
What they do is quite simple and well-known. If you bet $1, they keep a percentage as their fee for running the service. This is called the takeout. The rest of the money goes into the pool for that type of bet. At the end of the race, the pool is split up among the winners.
You are betting against all the other gamblers. The bookie is not betting at all.
Manufacturers don't have to 'deign' anything. There are loads of manufacturers who are only too happy to sell you servers, etc for something other than Windows. That is not going to change. In addition many manufacturers will build you a workstation to your requirements, you just have to make it worth their while to do it. Your statement is pure FUD.
How? I notice a common thread of the anti-secure boot people is that they just make statements with nothing to back them up.
What system do you run where an admin can't replace a kernel? Or do you just stick your head in the sand and pretend there is no such thing as an inside job? Or that there is no way (social engineering) to get an admin to do something stupid, intentionally or not?
It is amazing how often you can repeat the same nonsense without ever offering a single shred of evidence.
Nobody said they WERE a big problem, just that they COULD be a big problem. If you can't acknowledge that, clearly you don't know much about security. Which I guess is rather obvious since you ask that dumb question about the keys (hint: no single person has the key, and the people who DO have a portion of the key are quite a bit higher than 'admin', and the whole key never exists anywhere but tamper-resistant hardware).
The Microsoft signing thing is only a convenience, it is certainly not required. We sign all our own stuff, MS is not involved at all.
The whole 'rootkit issue' is WHY you use secure boot and associated technologies (like IMA). And if you actually know what you are doing, you will be using remote attestation to ensure that you are not, in fact, using a known vulnerable by signed kernel.
We use it to protect important machines (servers, automation controllers, etc) from tampering by external or internal parties. Of course, it is not secure boot by itself that does that, it is in combination with SELinux and IMA. Secure boot, however, is a key component (does no good to have your kernel verify signatures before running things if the kernel itself is not trusted).
1) Why? Because you said so? Exactly what is insecure about it?
2) Exactly the opposite in our case. We sign our own images. The only code that will run is stuff signed by the appropriate key. That means users, hackers, and especially rogue admins don't get to install their own backdoors. Our stuff remains OURS, not THEIRS. As it should be.
Why is secure boot a 'terrible technology'? We use it quite successfully here. What are the problems with it?
Here's a crazy idea: if you don't like a product or the terms it is offered under, don't buy or otherwise use it.
What gives you the very incorrect idea that the 'old' clode is single-threaded? IBM mainframes have supported multi-processing since 1965. Current models have up to 120 CPs in one image. And as for performance - there you are WAY out in left field. Many COBOL programs involve decimal operations, and in COBOL that translates to HARDWARE decimal operations. If you think you are going to get anywhere NEAR that performace with Python (snort), I'll have what you're smoking.