"Now, wait a few years and flood the net with your oversized parameter and watch servers, routers, or whatever jump to nowhere's ville and crash and burn."
But so what? Big deal.
You can take things down, but how long can you _keep_ things down? AND, how really important is the Internet in the big scheme of things?
Slammer and other malware have each taken down a fair bit of the Internet. Even trawlers, earthquakes, backhoes, etc have done their fair share (it can take longer to fix broken cables than fix a sneaky software problem). The affected regions and countries did OK.
If the power goes out for a day, sure it's a serious problem but only a relatively few people would scream, whereas other people would be having free ice cream;).
Now if there's no power for two weeks, many businesses start going bust.
The Internet is certainly not more important than supply of electricity.
Amazon is quite dependent on the Internet, but I think even Amazon would be able to survive one week of zero sales.
"In fact, if I were a terrorist or a nation-state, I'd consider building a team that becomes a major and prolific contributor to a few high profile OSS projects like, say, Apache or Sendmail."
How are you going to achieve "Terror" if all you do is just take websites down till their sysadmins bring them back up? People will eventually figure out how you did it, and fix it. So what if your part of the internet goes down? It'll be back up ASAP so that your sysadmins can read Slashdot.
Seems ridiculous to me. If I were a terrorist (I'm not), I'd be able to do a lot more damage doing something else - e.g. buy a private plane, fill it with nasty stuff and crash it into a passenger plane or high population density building. If people can smuggle tons of drugs into the USA, I'm sure they can smuggle tons of other unwanted stuff in.
If you have limited vacation time, you'd probably prefer to spend more time at your vacation destination than on the airship.
Airship travel might be worth it the first time as part of the holiday. But after that only if you really like airship travel - just like people who like those ocean cruises to "nowhere".
24 hours from NYC to London isn't bad but it assumes the airship can sustain 230 kph.
I believe most current airships are slow max 70-80 knots (130-150 kph). If the airship only manages 70 knots it will take 42 hours to get from NYC to London (assuming no wind). Add in return trip time and that's more than 3 days of your vacation spent aboard an airship.
NYC to Tokyo or Singapore will take quite a while.
Just because it requires two hands does not make it slower, any more than a piano piece requiring two hands makes it slow.
Most people can type 1234 very fast by "rolling" their fingers across the numbers. Most people can't type 1111 as fast without autorepeat.
As for scaling beyond nine windows, this feature is for rapid access to a _working_set_ of windows. You start working on a particular task, and it may have a number of windows associated with it, however I think it is rare that you will need rapid access to more than 9 windows to work on that particular task (coding, or debugging, or sysadmin).
Most people should be able to keep track of at least 4. It'll be good to be able to go directly to any of those 4 windows without having to move the hand to the mouse.
I can think of many times where it would have been nice to have really quick access to: 1) tcpdump A 2) tcpdump B 3) logs on machine A 4) logs on machine B
Or: 1) code 2) RFC A 3) RFC B 4) Some webpage
It does not mean I would be limited to just 4 windows open.
When I use Windows, my taskbar is usually double the normal height and often filled (sometimes gets to the point where my task bar even has a scrollbar:) ). But I seldom am working on more than 9 windows at once.
Despite that I don't normally have problems rapidly finding the window I need on Windows because Windows unlike KDE, orders the tasks on its taskbar "left to right" then only top to bottom. Whereas KDE3 _stupidly_ does "top to bottom then "left to right". This means on KDE3 if a task is closed for whatever reason, _all_ the tasks to the right of the closed task change their relative vertical position on the task bar! With Windows, only two or so tasks would change their relative horizontal position (so you lose track of say 2-10%, in contrast with KDE where you could lose track of 50%).
Well if you can hold down the alt key and just press 4 and 5, you'd very quickly find out which window it is.
I'd say it'll be much faster than the "tab tab" stuff - hold down alt, and just roll across 1234 to find the screen you want (assuming a fast enough computer). If you're in a particular "context" 1 could be code, 2 = spec, 3 = logs, 4= google, 5= man page. And I assume that many people would be able to remember all of that after a few minutes.
Alt tab is fine if you are switching between just two windows, but to use it to cycle through windows is clunky because the direction reverses each time.
Anyway I think my suggestion would be a lot more useful than the sort of thing that people seem to take as UI improvement nowadays - e.g. "wobbly windows", turning windows to the side and showing them all for you to select (slow - what I suggest would be much faster, you don't need to leave the keyboard for the mouse).
Too bad the alt key is pretty much taken by a lot of stuff. Perhaps we could use the windows key (since it's not used very much in KDE/Gnome) - kind of makes sense - winkey+1 etc.
Summary: you do alt+1, alt+2, alt+3 and so on till alt 9 for the 9 different apps/windows in a "stack" of windows. You press alt+0 to "renumber the stack" by most recently used windows - 1=most recent, 2=next etc.
I don't really care what keystrokes are used as long as it's not too difficult. I don't want to do stupid stuff like "alt tab tab tab tab", or alt tab, move hand to mouse and select the task.
Simple: "Here are code samples I wrote for fun, please note the copyright belongs to me".
If you only write code when you are asked to write code, then you are probably not a good coder.
If you do that sort of thing you might even be one of those coders who only checks for errors/exceptions when explicitly asked to in the requirements document.
That's another reason why you should not work at a company where 80 hour weeks are common. So you have time to do other things.
Yeah, I suck at interviewing people. I have no idea what to ask, I don't know Java, C, C++ etc.
So the sort of thing I ask coders is "what have you done, that's not work/uni related, that you find notable or you're proud of, and why?".
I'd ask the same thing to artists (I don't know the technical details of using oils, photoshop etc).
If the "artist"/"programmer" has been out of work for 6 months and has not drawn/coded a single thing for fun, I don't think I'd want to hire him/her.
Whereas if the Artist is idly doodling something cool/cute/nifty/artistic on the sheet of paper on the interview table, then I'd want to hire him/her - the art is just "overflowing" from that person.
But what do I know, I don't work in HR, and often it seems companies just want cheap bodies, because I guess "good enough" is good enough.
I actually rely on most people not having a clue at all. And though I don't have much of a clue, sadly for the world (but not that bad for me) it seems I'm significantly above average (and I don't even know C++).
If you do consulting, the customer is NOT always right. The customer is usually wrong - that's why they need you! If the customer is always right, then they wouldn't need you except if you are willing to be cheap labour to do boring crap they have no time and resources to do themselves, or if you're there just to be blamed when something goes wrong. You don't want those jobs. Don't forget to let the customer make the final decision (or at least think they're making the decision - e.g. pick a card any card but from just this safe set).
If you're a coder in full time employment (not consultant), if possible you should try to forsee what they would want months down the line and write the code so it's easier to do it later.
I've designed and written stuff, so that though people (and the boss) _insist_ they don't need feature X (despite me saying they'll probably want it), months later when they say "Hey, marketing says we need feature X", I just add a few lines of code (or even change the config to: enable_feature_X=>1:) ), read Slashdot etc, test stuff, work on other stuff and after a suitable time say "voila here's feature X". You can't just deliver feature X immediately to them - that'll be stupid (go figure what happens if you keep doing that).
Anyway if you want to make stuff for people, you ask them what they want, after a while you have a bunch of dots (requirements). You look at the dots and hopefully you see a picture that the dots draw. If you don't have enough dots to make a good picture, or the picture doesn't make sense, you go back and try to get better/more dots.
Of course if they say "I want a cat" and you know they need and want a cat, just get them one (make fat/thin/fur/colour/tail configurable).
But for more complicated stuff, if you really think people have a clue and can provide ALL the dots to draw out a really good picture, then you're wrong. You'll have "all" the dots, but the result is going to be an ugly mess. Think of a "join the dots" picture drawn by each committee getting to put 30 dots in.
Asking for a full detailed set of requirements so that you can just implement exactly those, is like an architect asking clueless people, on _every_ detail of what they want in their dream house.
It does make for better CYA. But a crappier result IMO.
"Always remember: If law enforcement is looking at your hard drive them destroying the evidence is actually what you should be hoping for...it's not really a deterrent."
This is more for the copyright infringers. As I said - not what I consider "real crime". It'll work fine against the P2P people. If the cops show up and wipe out your 200GB stash, it'll take you a while to build it back, for one I'd be worried they were still watching me later - so might be careful even if I had backups somewhere.
If you are a suspected terrorist, law enforcement should be doing something a lot better - like secretly sneaking in and making copies of your drives, installing a keylogger into your keyboard, or just install a camera and mike in your room.
Bacteria and fungi are the equivalent of grey goo. In a way they are everywhere, and if left alone they will eventually gobble up much of the stuff - plastic, wood, even some (most?) metals.
But there are limitations of what they can do. Nanotech grey goo isn't going to turn the earth to a huge blob of grey goo. If it were so easy some bacteria would have done it years ago.
The goo will need a source of energy and materials to build copies. Say you have a metal based goo, no matter what, it takes significant energy to reshape metal to new goo. Where is the goo going to get that energy from? Say it stores up sunlight somehow, it'll still take quite a long while to do it.
If the goo is on a metal vehicle and the vehicle moves, how is that goo going to stay on? It'll fall to the ground and die (some bacteria have the "spore" mode when stuff gets bad).
2) Competition
What happens if some fungus takes a liking to the goo? You think the goo will have a counter plan? Fungi have been around for 1.3 billion years, and you can bet on the goo winning if you want, I won't:).
Any "classical" goo we make from _scratch_ is unlikely to be a huge threat. So I'm not that worried about it.
A huge threat would be some nut with USD1 million to modify an existing virus, and make one that is "really bad" (e.g. 3 month incubation period and kills > 90% of its hosts) and then letting it go free. Basically Anyone with enough money and know how/"know who" can have their "Kill hundreds of millions of people on earth" button. Currently the suicidal nuts don't have the resources to make that button yet. But if the cost goes down, who knows.
Well I don't see why people should use Windows for point of sale terminals, ATMs, User interfaces to MRI machines etc. Maybe it's easier to hire cheap coders in India to write the stuff on Windows. And if you use decent drivers and hardware, such stuff doesn't really fail more often than Linux does (just windows might require a bit more RAM and disk for the overhead). In my prev company we had at least 400 Linux servers, and believe me there are bugs in the Linux kernel.
But from a desktop POV there's a lot you can do with windows Group Policy. You can be really fascist;).
You can even make it such that users cannot change their browser settings - trusted sites, other sites, etc, and whether a CD gets Autorun or not.
Well if they investigate you and find your truecrypt container(s), they could ask for the keys.
In some countries (UK and my country) you can be forced to give up the keys.
If you only give the decoy keys, they could decide to create a huge file and fill up the decoy container and thus overwrite the data in the hidden partition.
The courts may regard that acceptable in "certain cases" (like it's so frigging obvious - you have dubious stuff in your "Recent Documents", and a 400GB truecrypt container, and the ISP says yeah his bandwidth usage is "rather high") - so the cops come by to your place once in a random while to create a big "rest of the space" file.
If you have no hidden partition, it just costs you the time it takes to write that big file.
If you do, well it means you're going to have to download more often, and thus your chances of getting caught go up (if they care that much).
Personally I'd rather the cops and courts do other stuff - like fight "real crime", you know the ones where people get killed, maimed, or actually lose property, or accept/give bribes.
I think a society that lets people share open access WiFi with others with minimal problems is far better than a society that lets the MPAA/RIAA equivalent go about suing thousands of people they _think_ have copied music illegally.
I don't mind sharing my bandwidth with my neighbours or strangers - I can control the bandwidth usage. What I can't control is whether the cops come in and confiscate my stuff and throw me in jail.
I fear the cops more than the terrorists, and I most certainly don't fear the child porn fans[1]
So what if it was some "potential terrorist" or "child porn fan". How many of them are there?
There are far more crazy cops, add the corrupt politicians and judges, and I think the "copyright infringers" are way down on my list of "Considered Harmful to Society".
Lastly I've heard some people say "Sharing is Caring";).
[1] Just because some strange people like watching Desperate Housewives doesn't mean they'll seduce your wife/husband. If it ever becomes illegal to make something like Desperate Housewives, then they should focus on shutting down the producers and distributors, not the consumers.
Practical or not, I doubt many people are willing to do all that, or do all that consistently in a way which they can't get caught. How many customers are the MPAA people going to lose from that? Why not convince some Gov to shutdown an illegal DVD factory or fifty instead.
To me open wifi is overblown. What scares me more is not some P2P kid/illegal porn fan using my open WiFi, but the cops coming over and taking my stuff and arresting me "just because".
If the computer manufacturers and O/S people have no will to fix the wifi security problem _properly_[1] I don't think it's reasonable for the law to make things bad for people with open wifi.
[1] The current state of WiFi security is crap, I won't bother going into the details, but basically the average Joe going to say Starbucks's public access point can't easily get a secure _validated_ connection to Starbucks's AP. The options are typically: a) open b) shared key (which means everyone else knowing the key can decrypt each other's traffic) c) "too difficult for most people".
I used to do IT security stuff and whether it's Windows or Linux there's not a big difference in security from the technical POV.
Imagine if 90% of the desktop users in the world used Ubuntu/Suse as their desktop O/S and don't do the sort of thing you say you do for your windows box. You'd have the same problems all over again. There was at least one windows malware that spread via _requiring_ users to actually enter passwords to decrypt zipfiles and run the resulting executables. Requiring some user to (for example) run a malware perl program is nothing in comparison, and go figure the limits of what perl malware can do on a typical desktop machine, it can even google for new instructions and download them.
Whether it's Linux or OSX, if you run the "HAWT NUDE CHIXXXORZ" trojan your user account's info will be at risk, and the trojan would be able to spam/DDoS the world from your box, and do anything your user account can do (turn on the mike, cam etc).
In fact with Windows, sandboxing of programs (via software firewalls) is more common than with Desktop Linux where the isolation is more at a "per user" level. Server Linux has SELinux and AppArmor, but that's not desktop ready.
I don't think too little of the amount of work it takes to grow food, that's why I am not a farmer.
My point is farmers don't do that 70-80 hours a week _regularly_. Those "80 hour a week" people are doing 70-80 hour weeks the whole year, all seasons- just look at them. They don't even stop work _way_ after sundown.
It's stupid for people to work 80 hour weeks most of the time, unless of course it's also their hobby, or they are being paid more than triple the rate (and they'll stop after a few years of it). If you work that much you are likely to age much faster too.
Sure, but I personally believe that while Governments should in general try not to prevent such changes (e.g. via permanent subsidies), they should normally try to dampen the rate of change.
Car analogy: think shock absorbers and springs. Instead of the car experiencing the immediate change of a bump, the impact is dampened a bit. If it turns out to be a slope and not a small bump, the car eventually goes up. And yes if it's a big bump and your small car just can't cope with it, well that's life, but it should at least do it for small bumps.
To me Governments that don't do that sort of thing for their citizens are Governments that aren't doing their jobs.
Lastly, in some cases permanent subsidies might be necessary strategically. For example given the fact that the USA and so many other countries subsidize their farmers, if your country wants to have farmers (for long term strategic reasons - e.g. if stuff happens and you want to still have food to eat), your country will probably have to subsidize its farmers as well - otherwise they would just go out of business (it may not be they are inefficient or lazy, and just that they are not being subsidized like other farmers around the world).
It would reduce demand. However in my opinion increasing the cost of energy should not be done lightly - it has huge impacts.
In a tropical rainforest energy and resources are abundant - lots of species per square km, many of them pretty inefficient (think of all those weird creatures in the tropics vs the efficiency of a killer whale).
If you suddenly increase the cost of energy, it would be like reducing the amount of sunlight to a tropical rainforest. There would be a massive die-off of many industries/species that used to do fine (they could ship stuff to other states and still make money etc).
Once stuff dies off, naturally energy demand would reduce.
I suggest the US comes up with alternative cheap energy sources, or very gradually let energy increase in cost, slow enough to hopefully let enough "species" to adapt (rather than just die off and mess up the "ecosystem" with all the interdependencies).
He's a consultant. His company probably bills the customers for his hours. So 80 hours * his rate = $$$$.
If you're a salaried worker it's a bit silly to do 80 hours regularly.
If I were your boss and you were doing 80 hours regularly, I'd ask what's wrong with you or the project manager or me or the company.
In the old days farmers did a fair bit of work and hard labour it was, but 80 hours a week regularly? I don't think so. I'd like to think a company I run would be an improvement over the old days. If a company can't make enough money without employees putting 80 hour weeks I think something is wrong with the company or the business it's in.
Uh it's possible to be killed with an electric shaver, I can think of many many ways.
You don't want to be killed with an electric shaver.
1) It would likely be rather unpleasant, maybe not as unpleasant as being killed slowly via paper cuts but still one of the bad ways to go (there are worse ways of course but let's skip those).
2) It would be quite embarassing/humiliating (not that it matters after you're dead, but if you get to realize you're being killed by an electric shaver it probably adds to the pain).
1) Changing the desktop bitmap does impact system performance. 2) If you don't know it doesn't necessarily mean you aren't a good DBA
If you set your desktop to no background picture, Windows works faster when redrawing stuff - no need to redraw your picture, no need to remember your picture in RAM.
If you have a 1 million pixel pic on your screen and it is 24 bit it takes at least 3MB of RAM to store it uncompressed. In the old days when computers had 16MB or less, 3MB was significant. IIRC my first win 95 box didn't have much RAM. Nowadays just loading up facebook and clicking a few times will cause my browser to use up > 60MB of RAM.
I personally set my desktop background to black since I usually prefer my windows maximized to full screen, so I don't often see the destop.
Slashdot Mirror
"Now, wait a few years and flood the net with your oversized parameter and watch servers, routers, or whatever jump to nowhere's ville and crash and burn."
;).
But so what? Big deal.
You can take things down, but how long can you _keep_ things down? AND, how really important is the Internet in the big scheme of things?
Slammer and other malware have each taken down a fair bit of the Internet. Even trawlers, earthquakes, backhoes, etc have done their fair share (it can take longer to fix broken cables than fix a sneaky software problem). The affected regions and countries did OK.
If the power goes out for a day, sure it's a serious problem but only a relatively few people would scream, whereas other people would be having free ice cream
Now if there's no power for two weeks, many businesses start going bust.
The Internet is certainly not more important than supply of electricity.
Amazon is quite dependent on the Internet, but I think even Amazon would be able to survive one week of zero sales.
"In fact, if I were a terrorist or a nation-state, I'd consider building a team that becomes a major and prolific contributor to a few high profile OSS projects like, say, Apache or Sendmail."
How are you going to achieve "Terror" if all you do is just take websites down till their sysadmins bring them back up? People will eventually figure out how you did it, and fix it. So what if your part of the internet goes down? It'll be back up ASAP so that your sysadmins can read Slashdot.
Seems ridiculous to me. If I were a terrorist (I'm not), I'd be able to do a lot more damage doing something else - e.g. buy a private plane, fill it with nasty stuff and crash it into a passenger plane or high population density building. If people can smuggle tons of drugs into the USA, I'm sure they can smuggle tons of other unwanted stuff in.
BTW: that "no fluids" stuff is stupid.
If you have limited vacation time, you'd probably prefer to spend more time at your vacation destination than on the airship.
Airship travel might be worth it the first time as part of the holiday. But after that only if you really like airship travel - just like people who like those ocean cruises to "nowhere".
24 hours from NYC to London isn't bad but it assumes the airship can sustain 230 kph.
I believe most current airships are slow max 70-80 knots (130-150 kph). If the airship only manages 70 knots it will take 42 hours to get from NYC to London (assuming no wind). Add in return trip time and that's more than 3 days of your vacation spent aboard an airship.
NYC to Tokyo or Singapore will take quite a while.
I'm sure there are many other contraints to the peak hearing range.
;).
Such as being to hear other animals/things before "Something Bad Happens".
In the old days there weren't that many humans around, so it can't be just about hearing humans
That said maybe even back then humans (and not other predators) were the greatest (audible) threat to humans.
Just because it requires two hands does not make it slower, any more than a piano piece requiring two hands makes it slow.
:) ). But I seldom am working on more than 9 windows at once.
Most people can type 1234 very fast by "rolling" their fingers across the numbers.
Most people can't type 1111 as fast without autorepeat.
As for scaling beyond nine windows, this feature is for rapid access to a _working_set_ of windows. You start working on a particular task, and it may have a number of windows associated with it, however I think it is rare that you will need rapid access to more than 9 windows to work on that particular task (coding, or debugging, or sysadmin).
Most people should be able to keep track of at least 4. It'll be good to be able to go directly to any of those 4 windows without having to move the hand to the mouse.
I can think of many times where it would have been nice to have really quick access to:
1) tcpdump A
2) tcpdump B
3) logs on machine A
4) logs on machine B
Or:
1) code
2) RFC A
3) RFC B
4) Some webpage
It does not mean I would be limited to just 4 windows open.
When I use Windows, my taskbar is usually double the normal height and often filled (sometimes gets to the point where my task bar even has a scrollbar
Despite that I don't normally have problems rapidly finding the window I need on Windows because Windows unlike KDE, orders the tasks on its taskbar "left to right" then only top to bottom. Whereas KDE3 _stupidly_ does "top to bottom then "left to right". This means on KDE3 if a task is closed for whatever reason, _all_ the tasks to the right of the closed task change their relative vertical position on the task bar! With Windows, only two or so tasks would change their relative horizontal position (so you lose track of say 2-10%, in contrast with KDE where you could lose track of 50%).
"Many people would think you're a nutter."
Thanks.
Well if you can hold down the alt key and just press 4 and 5, you'd very quickly find out which window it is.
I'd say it'll be much faster than the "tab tab" stuff - hold down alt, and just roll across 1234 to find the screen you want (assuming a fast enough computer). If you're in a particular "context" 1 could be code, 2 = spec, 3 = logs, 4= google, 5= man page. And I assume that many people would be able to remember all of that after a few minutes.
Alt tab is fine if you are switching between just two windows, but to use it to cycle through windows is clunky because the direction reverses each time.
Anyway I think my suggestion would be a lot more useful than the sort of thing that people seem to take as UI improvement nowadays - e.g. "wobbly windows", turning windows to the side and showing them all for you to select (slow - what I suggest would be much faster, you don't need to leave the keyboard for the mouse).
Too bad the alt key is pretty much taken by a lot of stuff. Perhaps we could use the windows key (since it's not used very much in KDE/Gnome) - kind of makes sense - winkey+1 etc.
"Still I often have the case where I have 2 Terminals and 1 Firefox open and need to constantly switch between them"
What I want is something like this:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121349
Summary: you do alt+1, alt+2, alt+3 and so on till alt 9 for the 9 different apps/windows in a "stack" of windows. You press alt+0 to "renumber the stack" by most recently used windows - 1=most recent, 2=next etc.
I don't really care what keystrokes are used as long as it's not too difficult. I don't want to do stupid stuff like "alt tab tab tab tab", or alt tab, move hand to mouse and select the task.
Simple: "Here are code samples I wrote for fun, please note the copyright belongs to me".
If you only write code when you are asked to write code, then you are probably not a good coder.
If you do that sort of thing you might even be one of those coders who only checks for errors/exceptions when explicitly asked to in the requirements document.
That's another reason why you should not work at a company where 80 hour weeks are common. So you have time to do other things.
Yeah, I suck at interviewing people. I have no idea what to ask, I don't know Java, C, C++ etc.
So the sort of thing I ask coders is "what have you done, that's not work/uni related, that you find notable or you're proud of, and why?".
I'd ask the same thing to artists (I don't know the technical details of using oils, photoshop etc).
If the "artist"/"programmer" has been out of work for 6 months and has not drawn/coded a single thing for fun, I don't think I'd want to hire him/her.
Whereas if the Artist is idly doodling something cool/cute/nifty/artistic on the sheet of paper on the interview table, then I'd want to hire him/her - the art is just "overflowing" from that person.
But what do I know, I don't work in HR, and often it seems companies just want cheap bodies, because I guess "good enough" is good enough.
I actually rely on most people not having a clue at all. And though I don't have much of a clue, sadly for the world (but not that bad for me) it seems I'm significantly above average (and I don't even know C++).
:) ), read Slashdot etc, test stuff, work on other stuff and after a suitable time say "voila here's feature X". You can't just deliver feature X immediately to them - that'll be stupid (go figure what happens if you keep doing that).
If you do consulting, the customer is NOT always right. The customer is usually wrong - that's why they need you! If the customer is always right, then they wouldn't need you except if you are willing to be cheap labour to do boring crap they have no time and resources to do themselves, or if you're there just to be blamed when something goes wrong. You don't want those jobs. Don't forget to let the customer make the final decision (or at least think they're making the decision - e.g. pick a card any card but from just this safe set).
If you're a coder in full time employment (not consultant), if possible you should try to forsee what they would want months down the line and write the code so it's easier to do it later.
I've designed and written stuff, so that though people (and the boss) _insist_ they don't need feature X (despite me saying they'll probably want it), months later when they say "Hey, marketing says we need feature X", I just add a few lines of code (or even change the config to: enable_feature_X=>1
Anyway if you want to make stuff for people, you ask them what they want, after a while you have a bunch of dots (requirements). You look at the dots and hopefully you see a picture that the dots draw. If you don't have enough dots to make a good picture, or the picture doesn't make sense, you go back and try to get better/more dots.
Of course if they say "I want a cat" and you know they need and want a cat, just get them one (make fat/thin/fur/colour/tail configurable).
But for more complicated stuff, if you really think people have a clue and can provide ALL the dots to draw out a really good picture, then you're wrong. You'll have "all" the dots, but the result is going to be an ugly mess. Think of a "join the dots" picture drawn by each committee getting to put 30 dots in.
Asking for a full detailed set of requirements so that you can just implement exactly those, is like an architect asking clueless people, on _every_ detail of what they want in their dream house.
It does make for better CYA. But a crappier result IMO.
"Always remember: If law enforcement is looking at your hard drive them destroying the evidence is actually what you should be hoping for...it's not really a deterrent."
This is more for the copyright infringers. As I said - not what I consider "real crime". It'll work fine against the P2P people. If the cops show up and wipe out your 200GB stash, it'll take you a while to build it back, for one I'd be worried they were still watching me later - so might be careful even if I had backups somewhere.
If you are a suspected terrorist, law enforcement should be doing something a lot better - like secretly sneaking in and making copies of your drives, installing a keylogger into your keyboard, or just install a camera and mike in your room.
1) Energy and resource limits.
:).
Bacteria and fungi are the equivalent of grey goo. In a way they are everywhere, and if left alone they will eventually gobble up much of the stuff - plastic, wood, even some (most?) metals.
But there are limitations of what they can do. Nanotech grey goo isn't going to turn the earth to a huge blob of grey goo. If it were so easy some bacteria would have done it years ago.
The goo will need a source of energy and materials to build copies. Say you have a metal based goo, no matter what, it takes significant energy to reshape metal to new goo. Where is the goo going to get that energy from? Say it stores up sunlight somehow, it'll still take quite a long while to do it.
If the goo is on a metal vehicle and the vehicle moves, how is that goo going to stay on? It'll fall to the ground and die (some bacteria have the "spore" mode when stuff gets bad).
2) Competition
What happens if some fungus takes a liking to the goo? You think the goo will have a counter plan? Fungi have been around for 1.3 billion years, and you can bet on the goo winning if you want, I won't
Any "classical" goo we make from _scratch_ is unlikely to be a huge threat. So I'm not that worried about it.
A huge threat would be some nut with USD1 million to modify an existing virus, and make one that is "really bad" (e.g. 3 month incubation period and kills > 90% of its hosts) and then letting it go free. Basically Anyone with enough money and know how/"know who" can have their "Kill hundreds of millions of people on earth" button. Currently the suicidal nuts don't have the resources to make that button yet. But if the cost goes down, who knows.
"In a gasoline engine detonation is a bad thing"
:).
Except if it's a DiesOtto gasoline engine
Well I don't see why people should use Windows for point of sale terminals, ATMs, User interfaces to MRI machines etc. Maybe it's easier to hire cheap coders in India to write the stuff on Windows. And if you use decent drivers and hardware, such stuff doesn't really fail more often than Linux does (just windows might require a bit more RAM and disk for the overhead). In my prev company we had at least 400 Linux servers, and believe me there are bugs in the Linux kernel.
;).
But from a desktop POV there's a lot you can do with windows Group Policy. You can be really fascist
You can even make it such that users cannot change their browser settings - trusted sites, other sites, etc, and whether a CD gets Autorun or not.
Well if they investigate you and find your truecrypt container(s), they could ask for the keys.
In some countries (UK and my country) you can be forced to give up the keys.
If you only give the decoy keys, they could decide to create a huge file and fill up the decoy container and thus overwrite the data in the hidden partition.
The courts may regard that acceptable in "certain cases" (like it's so frigging obvious - you have dubious stuff in your "Recent Documents", and a 400GB truecrypt container, and the ISP says yeah his bandwidth usage is "rather high") - so the cops come by to your place once in a random while to create a big "rest of the space" file.
If you have no hidden partition, it just costs you the time it takes to write that big file.
If you do, well it means you're going to have to download more often, and thus your chances of getting caught go up (if they care that much).
Personally I'd rather the cops and courts do other stuff - like fight "real crime", you know the ones where people get killed, maimed, or actually lose property, or accept/give bribes.
1) Copying is not stealing
;).
2) Big fucking deal
I think a society that lets people share open access WiFi with others with minimal problems is far better than a society that lets the MPAA/RIAA equivalent go about suing thousands of people they _think_ have copied music illegally.
I don't mind sharing my bandwidth with my neighbours or strangers - I can control the bandwidth usage. What I can't control is whether the cops come in and confiscate my stuff and throw me in jail.
I fear the cops more than the terrorists, and I most certainly don't fear the child porn fans[1]
So what if it was some "potential terrorist" or "child porn fan". How many of them are there?
There are far more crazy cops, add the corrupt politicians and judges, and I think the "copyright infringers" are way down on my list of "Considered Harmful to Society".
Lastly I've heard some people say "Sharing is Caring"
[1] Just because some strange people like watching Desperate Housewives doesn't mean they'll seduce your wife/husband. If it ever becomes illegal to make something like Desperate Housewives, then they should focus on shutting down the producers and distributors, not the consumers.
Practical or not, I doubt many people are willing to do all that, or do all that consistently in a way which they can't get caught. How many customers are the MPAA people going to lose from that? Why not convince some Gov to shutdown an illegal DVD factory or fifty instead.
To me open wifi is overblown. What scares me more is not some P2P kid/illegal porn fan using my open WiFi, but the cops coming over and taking my stuff and arresting me "just because".
If the computer manufacturers and O/S people have no will to fix the wifi security problem _properly_[1] I don't think it's reasonable for the law to make things bad for people with open wifi.
[1] The current state of WiFi security is crap, I won't bother going into the details, but basically the average Joe going to say Starbucks's public access point can't easily get a secure _validated_ connection to Starbucks's AP. The options are typically:
a) open
b) shared key (which means everyone else knowing the key can decrypt each other's traffic)
c) "too difficult for most people".
Give up, those bigots don't get it.
I used to do IT security stuff and whether it's Windows or Linux there's not a big difference in security from the technical POV.
Imagine if 90% of the desktop users in the world used Ubuntu/Suse as their desktop O/S and don't do the sort of thing you say you do for your windows box. You'd have the same problems all over again. There was at least one windows malware that spread via _requiring_ users to actually enter passwords to decrypt zipfiles and run the resulting executables. Requiring some user to (for example) run a malware perl program is nothing in comparison, and go figure the limits of what perl malware can do on a typical desktop machine, it can even google for new instructions and download them.
Whether it's Linux or OSX, if you run the "HAWT NUDE CHIXXXORZ" trojan your user account's info will be at risk, and the trojan would be able to spam/DDoS the world from your box, and do anything your user account can do (turn on the mike, cam etc).
In fact with Windows, sandboxing of programs (via software firewalls) is more common than with Desktop Linux where the isolation is more at a "per user" level. Server Linux has SELinux and AppArmor, but that's not desktop ready.
I think you didn't read my post.
I don't think too little of the amount of work it takes to grow food, that's why I am not a farmer.
My point is farmers don't do that 70-80 hours a week _regularly_. Those "80 hour a week" people are doing 70-80 hour weeks the whole year, all seasons- just look at them. They don't even stop work _way_ after sundown.
It's stupid for people to work 80 hour weeks most of the time, unless of course it's also their hobby, or they are being paid more than triple the rate (and they'll stop after a few years of it). If you work that much you are likely to age much faster too.
Sure, but I personally believe that while Governments should in general try not to prevent such changes (e.g. via permanent subsidies), they should normally try to dampen the rate of change.
Car analogy: think shock absorbers and springs. Instead of the car experiencing the immediate change of a bump, the impact is dampened a bit. If it turns out to be a slope and not a small bump, the car eventually goes up. And yes if it's a big bump and your small car just can't cope with it, well that's life, but it should at least do it for small bumps.
To me Governments that don't do that sort of thing for their citizens are Governments that aren't doing their jobs.
Lastly, in some cases permanent subsidies might be necessary strategically. For example given the fact that the USA and so many other countries subsidize their farmers, if your country wants to have farmers (for long term strategic reasons - e.g. if stuff happens and you want to still have food to eat), your country will probably have to subsidize its farmers as well - otherwise they would just go out of business (it may not be they are inefficient or lazy, and just that they are not being subsidized like other farmers around the world).
It would reduce demand. However in my opinion increasing the cost of energy should not be done lightly - it has huge impacts.
In a tropical rainforest energy and resources are abundant - lots of species per square km, many of them pretty inefficient (think of all those weird creatures in the tropics vs the efficiency of a killer whale).
If you suddenly increase the cost of energy, it would be like reducing the amount of sunlight to a tropical rainforest. There would be a massive die-off of many industries/species that used to do fine (they could ship stuff to other states and still make money etc).
Once stuff dies off, naturally energy demand would reduce.
I suggest the US comes up with alternative cheap energy sources, or very gradually let energy increase in cost, slow enough to hopefully let enough "species" to adapt (rather than just die off and mess up the "ecosystem" with all the interdependencies).
He's a consultant. His company probably bills the customers for his hours. So 80 hours * his rate = $$$$.
If you're a salaried worker it's a bit silly to do 80 hours regularly.
If I were your boss and you were doing 80 hours regularly, I'd ask what's wrong with you or the project manager or me or the company.
In the old days farmers did a fair bit of work and hard labour it was, but 80 hours a week regularly? I don't think so. I'd like to think a company I run would be an improvement over the old days. If a company can't make enough money without employees putting 80 hour weeks I think something is wrong with the company or the business it's in.
Uh it's possible to be killed with an electric shaver, I can think of many many ways.
You don't want to be killed with an electric shaver.
1) It would likely be rather unpleasant, maybe not as unpleasant as being killed slowly via paper cuts but still one of the bad ways to go (there are worse ways of course but let's skip those).
2) It would be quite embarassing/humiliating (not that it matters after you're dead, but if you get to realize you're being killed by an electric shaver it probably adds to the pain).
1) Changing the desktop bitmap does impact system performance.
2) If you don't know it doesn't necessarily mean you aren't a good DBA
If you set your desktop to no background picture, Windows works faster when redrawing stuff - no need to redraw your picture, no need to remember your picture in RAM.
If you have a 1 million pixel pic on your screen and it is 24 bit it takes at least 3MB of RAM to store it uncompressed. In the old days when computers had 16MB or less, 3MB was significant. IIRC my first win 95 box didn't have much RAM. Nowadays just loading up facebook and clicking a few times will cause my browser to use up > 60MB of RAM.
I personally set my desktop background to black since I usually prefer my windows maximized to full screen, so I don't often see the destop.
I am not a lawyer, but maybe this is allowed because when you get to the details it could be more complicated.
e.g. There may be more than one pot involved. And the Defense is not sure which one you are talking about.
Maybe a lawyer who knows his stuff can explain why this is allowed.