I agree there can be abuse, but here's a counter example:
My neighbors across the street were a well-educated couple in their early 50s. Your stereotypical liberal, white academics. They had a son in college. Mike was a university professor and Theresa was a writer and an editor for a book publisher. We hosted several neighbors for a New Year's Eve party, including this couple. We had known all of them for a few years.
During the party, Theresa was unusually animated -- if I didn't know better, I'd thought she'd done a couple lines of coke. Fast forward a couple of months later, I see her pulling up to her house in a brand new hybrid sedan. I start talking to her and it's like, wow, Theresa, no more coke. She's, well, crazy animated. She's got a semi-paranoid story about how her husband left her. She's starting her own magazine. She's arranging a photo shoot in Nepal. She's just bought a $2000 recumbent bike. A $2000 set of downhill ski gear.
A week later, I see her again. This time "I've been staying at the Grand Hotel [a pricey, boutique hotel downtown] because I need Internet access and Mike made it so I can't get it at home."
A week after that, a really scary looking black guy is getting out of her car -- without her -- and is seen going in and out of her house, sometimes carrying stuff to load in the car. Her immediate next door neighbors try talking to the guy "Hey, how's Theresa?" and he's angry and threatens them. They call the cops, the cops detain the guy but they let him go after talking to Theresa on the phone "Yes, he's my boyfriend."
Fast forward a few weeks later and we see her ex-husband and we get the story. Theresa is bipolar. She's went off her meds around New Year's Eve. She got so bad and refused any kind of treatment or to take her meds, yes, he does leave her and basically files for divorce to protect himself from her.
By the time her sister -- working with lawyers -- is able to gain conservatorship of her, about a month later, after probably six weeks of trying, she's nearly bankrupt. When she and her husband divorced, their house had been recently remodeled and was owned free and clear. She stayed, mortgaged the place to cash him out and had blown through the $200k half of her equity plus another $50k in credit card debt. Fired from her job, the "magazine" a total fantasy. The black guy was literally some guy she met on the street outside the hotel.
Her sister finally gets her committed on a short-term basis and they get her back on her meds. By this time, though, she's done. She files bankruptcy, sells the house short along with almost all her possessions to try to pay off some debt. She ends up in a studio apartment somewhere, working part-time at a book store.
All of this happened in about six months. About 2 months into it, before the divorce is finalized, Mike had called her sister and said "Terry is out of control, we have to do something" but it was all futile. Had they been able to institutionalize her and stabilize her, she might still be living across the street with a manageable mortgage and some cash in the bank. But because it was so impossible, her life is basically over. Totally broke, divorced, career lost, friends alienated.
Disclaimer: My longest Perl programs were around 500 lines, designed mostly to process log files and provide some kind of selectable reporting capabilities.
Is this a function of Perl itself or a function of the people writing code adopting poor coding and commenting practices? Just because the language lets you use weird shortcuts to compact several atomic steps into one line, should you?
In my case, the scripts were dependent on the log files being in a specific format for parsing and analysis. A couple of times over the five year time I used them the vendor changed the log format, requiring me to modify the parsing and in one case make some non-trivial changes to a reporting summary due to differences in the log format.
I never had a problem going back to the script 18 months or so since the last time I edited it and understanding what I did or how I did it, thanks to generous comments and avoiding the kind of obfuscation Perl let you -- but doesn't require you -- to do.
I'm not a coder by trade and I thought Perl was very easy to learn. My sense is the complaints about Perl code are more a function of a language that's easy to learn and is thus adopted by a lot of amateur coders who then churn out a lot of code that they think is "made better" by some of Perl's shortcuts. I think it was one of those things where the user culture was such that the "smart guys" in the forums an newsgroups wrote obfuscated code and since they're elite, well, maybe I should to because it just might trim.025 seconds of execution time or something.
More complex languages are adopted by people with more discipline and experience and they just naturally impose more discipline on their coding style.
We already have technicians who work with the law, they're called lawyers and their very technical sophistication is what enables a lot of the clusterfuckery which takes place. Creating and finding loopholes, manipulation of the legal process, etc. And they also write the rules in very technical language, enabling a kind of only-we-understand-it monopoly control.
Maybe what we need is more non-technicians to eliminate the technical meddling.
Really? Let's think about this point. Why do you think this? Let's consider recent events:
It's not really a fair comparison to dropping a couple of barrels of chlorine or mustard gas. When that mushroom cloud goes up in the air, all bets are off. You can't compare a small-scale chemical weapons usage to a nuclear weapon. It's the difference between taking potshots at the freeway with an airsoft and a RPG.
And it's not even so much the question of what target was hit, it's the idea that some actor is willing to use nukes at all. That actor is a threat.
My experience travelling just two timezones west was on the day of arrival just going "I feel kind of tired, why, it's only 9 pm" and then realizing my body thought it was 11 pm. And of course the next day I'm wide awake at 4 am local time.
I was lagged as hell going to Fiji, but that was just a shitload of exhausting travel. 3-4 hours MSP to LAX, 2 hour delay, and about 10 hours LAX to NAN. I left at about 3 pm minneapolis time and got to fiji about 6 am and then had to third-world haggle my cab ride to the resort I was staying at.
Adding to my fatigue was the general weirdness of traveling alone to a third world country for the first time. I was literally the only one I knew in Fiji and my wife had made all the lodging reservations. Until I got checked in my room, I was a little paranoid about being stuck, alone, a million miles from home.
Nukes aren't a winning answer to regional politics either, especially when your biggest, richest Sunni rival, Saudi Arabia, is a major US ally.
I think mere *use* of a nuke -- regardless of target -- by Iran would result in retaliation by the US. There may be an additional few seconds of mulling as to the extent of a retaliation on something other than a NATO country or US soil, but you can guarantee there would be retaliation.
I wonder if the recent Syrian history hasn't led to rethinking of Iranian regional goals. Propping up Assad hasn't really helped Assad make a lot of progress. Iraq is easy to manipulate due to the large number of Shia, but still a thorny proposition due to the not insignificant Sunni Arab population.
It might just be that some saner, non-revolutionary minds have gained some influence in Iran and made them second guess their ambitions in the Middle East, at least in terms of obtaining them via military solutions. Iran hasn't the resources to occupy mail any country with a significant Shia population.
What possible use are nukes for Iran anyway? Their ability to manufacture a large number of them or deliver a lot of them at once over any distance (especially intercontinental) makes them less than useful.
Any actual use of them against the US or Israel would result in a retaliation that would seriously threaten the existence of Iranian civilization as its now known. Any US president in office when an American city was targeted by an Iranian nuke who did not turn Iran into the world's largest open air supply of Trinitite might seriously be deposed if not lynched in the streets like Mussolini.
I've read that the Israelis have a standing threat that if Israel is targeted by a nuke, they are retaliating against all major Arab capitals and Mecca, regardless of who's at fault. Ironically or not, the Israelis do collective punishment like nobody since Imperial Rome.
They might get some short-term mileage out of stunts with the Straits of Hormuz, but it only works if they are willing to risk a catastrophic retaliation from which recovery is all but unlikely except on geological timelines. And the more serious their threat, the more likely they might face a preemptive strike. Even a conventional preemptive strike would force them to either capitulate or go nuclear. If they capitulate, they lose and future threats will go nowhere. If they go nuclear? Game over. All your base are glassed over.
I was referring to a parent poster who claimed if you charge your phone at his place of employment (a UK "public" school) you get in trouble unless you have been "authorised". That sounds ludicrous, unjustifiably authoritarian and almost impossible to enforce.
It makes sense that the train outlets might be a bad idea given what you write about power supply issues.
But it seems an equally bad idea to have outlets that are trivial to use (even if they require a hex key to enable) when they shouldn't be used and present any kind of fire risk to something plugged into them. IMHO, the better idea is that those "dangerous" outlets don't work at all unless the electric system is placed in some kind of service mode or the plugs are switched on from a secure panel.
Or, better yet, make sure your electrical outlet system is insulated from changes in supply.
Putting more-or-less working outlets someplace people can easily get at them, even with a "don't use these" sticker is a problem. Now if the sticker said "SERIOUS RISK OF FIRE OR EQUIPMENT DAMAGE -- DO NOT USE WHILE TRAIN IN MOTION" I think the train people would have a better point.
There's a reason there's so many code requirements with electrical outlets. When they all look alike EVERYWHERE, people have an expectation that they all WORK ALIKE everywhere. If you have funky outlets that start fires or are supposed to be restricted or just plain aren't normal, you need to take more steps to make sure they aren't used, like signage that states the actual danger or serious controlled access.
I wonder how related travel fatigue from a very long flight is to the "lag" caused by timezone changes.
It'd be interesting to talk to people to take the NYC - Buenos Aires 11 hour nonstop and see how lagged they feel even though the time change is only an hour.
You would think it would be much less, but I can see where taking an overnight flight and getting poor/little sleep could leave you just as lagged on the morning of your arrival as if you'd changed timezones radically. Same with a morning flight where you end up sleeping on the plane just to kill time. The advantage to a daytime flight would be arriving at approximately a normal bedtime, although I'd guess with immigration and ground transportation you still wouldn't get to a hotel for an additional 2+ hours, resulting in a later-than-normal bedtime and laggy feeling the next day.
Flights to Europe have the time change, but most people I've talked to make it sound like sleeping on the plane is a good idea and when you get there, just jump into the local time zone the first day you're there (as hard as it might be) and you're pretty well adjusted by your first full day on site.
I kind of get why they want to make vSphere management less Windows dependent, but the Flash dependency is crazy. And IMHO, they are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by not adding new features to the fat client, even if it goes against their desire to be less Windows dependent as it makes most places less aware of engaged with new feature that require the web client because they all want to use the fat client (not to mention the clusterfuckery catch-22 of new features on standalone hosts without a vCenter instance).
Surely you're just trolling here, what possible rationale would they have for not allowing the use of electrical sockets for charging mobile phones?
I don't buy the risk of fire answer at all as I assume that there's some consumer electronics standards for safety that must be met for selling chargers in the UK. Even if some cheap Chinese chargers slip in, the fire risk is still absurdly low based on the number of actual fires vs. the number of chargers in use.
I don't buy the cost of electricity either. A USB charger uses what, 7-8 watts? 100 people charging their phones for an hour each day probably isn't even enough to use enough power to tick off more than a couple pennies of electricity.
I might buy this argument if it was about portable kettles or heating elements of some kind (I'm personally amazed so many people get away with portable heaters under their desk), but I doubt that most people walk around with a portable kettle.
I used to take an "express" bus that cost me $2.50/day and involved a total (both directions, from all stops) of 10 blocks of walking. I traded it for an $85/month parking spot.
The route was an express, but I caught it at the start of the route, which meant that the "express" part was only about half the trip distance, the rest of the route was stopping frequently to pick people up before it hit the freeway and quit making stops. This meant that the time from home to work, including waiting, was 45 minutes, longer if there was bad weather that delayed the bus. The return route was just as long. My total time commitment was something like 90 minutes per day.
My drive time to work average case was close to 20 minutes from garage to parking spot.
So by spending twice as much for parking, I gained nearly an hour per day of free time. Beyond worth it just for that.
But the bus had other annoyances -- climate control was often poor, meaning in the winter when I had to dress for the walk/wait, the bus was often way too hot. In the summer, good air conditioning was available only about 2/3rds of the time. Seating was too cramped for anything but a tablet (and in 1999, I didn't have a tablet) and often cumbersome with anything like a package or larger bag.
Driving, I could take care of other errands to/from work. If the weather was poor, I was at least stuck in a car with good heat/ac and I knew my commute would still be no longer than the bus and probably shorter since I could adapt my route and the bus couldn't. I was on my own schedule, which made leaving early/late easier as well as doing stuff directly after work versus 45 minutes to get home and then XX minutes to get someplace.
I think the express bus would have been more worth it if I was closer to the last stop before the freeway, but even then it would have largely been a tie only on trip time, the car would have still had all of its other advantages and the bus disadvantages (like climate) would have only been marginally better.
Parking price matters, obviously, and I had a good deal on parking (remember, this was '99) but I think given my specific details I would have paid probably $150/month for the time + flexibility pretty easily. Now that I have MORE demands on my time, I'd probably pay even more for parking to avoid the bus. I work as a consultant now, so the bus isn't even remotely an option.
It would be nice if their routing algorithm had more ways to influence route selection.
No freeways Avoid Left Turns Fewer stoplights Avoid major arteries
Stuff like that. I've lived in the same metro area all my life, so I think I know most of the "back routes" to avoid congestion as well as the relative timing penalties of their use versus more direct routes, but I even occasionally stumble across a great back route I hadn't considered before and it would be nice to map those out automatically or at least get some suggestions.
In the headlong rush to market and sell the IoT, it sure seems like IoT devices are either trying to stake out a standalone role or they're just punting everything related to serious networking and security to some central controller system. Worst is the combination of both of these concepts into "cloud based" controllers, giving you weak devices with little inbuilt intelligence coupled with forced data exporting to "the cloud".
I don't even understand what constitutes IoT in real world applications these days -- thermostats? Alarm systems with some kind of internet interface? Those LED lights you can change on your phone? Web cameras?
The kinds of data that seem smart would be more like smart electrical panels that allow you to closely monitor and control electrical consumption on a per-breaker basis, especially when tied into solar/wind or generator based backup systems, but I don't hear anything about that.
Is there such a thing, or are all (advertised) APIs considered, rich, lush and exquisite as the 12 square feet of Corinthian Leather in the back of my '75 Cordoba?
Abrams speciality seems to be stringing along an oblique big idea forever. Fringe was occasionally interesting, but the whole parallel universe thing got strung out for so long I just lost interest after two seasons. I'm glad I never got into Lost.
Citizen, we are here to free you from your unconscious biases so that you may more thoroughly accept the wisdom of the party and refine your thoughts and actions for the glory of the party and the state.
One question that pops to mind is "How often do intentional swatting calls NOT end up deploying a tactical strike team?"
I have a hard time believing that every attempt at swatting ends up gaining the desired tactical response and instead results in a generic squad wiping the donut crumbs from their uniform and knocking on the door with a "is everyone OK?" response.
Of course the unintended consequence the cops fear from not responding with a full-on tactical response is the newpaper headline that reads something like "panic 911 call ignored, family raped and killed for 12 hours in their own home". Given the "right" family, such a headline probably means the end of quite a few careers, lawsuits, etc.
Where the woman has her memory wiped every day and wakes up to some kind of everyone-has-gone-nuts scenario and runs for her life in terror, over and over again. Everyone else is an actor or an audience member but her.
I'm always kind of amazed its a crime (and a fairly serious one) to lie to the FBI and many other government police agencies. It seems like a fair number of people accused of some crime don't get convicted of it, but instead end up getting convicted of lying to investigators, often before they have been charged with a crime or even if they are not the target of the investigation at all.
The better strategy most criminal defense attorneys advocate is don't talk to them at all. I think only a handful of people truly understand this and probably even fewer have the moxie to tell a government agent they don't want to talk to them. Cops have all manner of techniques they use to trick people into talking, including outright lying themselves, which is perfectly legal.
I think it's a natural psychological reaction when asked questions about something by someone in authority to provide answers that make you seem as innocent as possible, even if you actually believe you personally haven't done something wrong. Some of it may not even be something we're aware of, along with all the other problems of memory error and the stress of being questioned by someone in authority.
Perfecting lie detection just seem to be another way to ultimately force people into making confessions.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree there can be abuse, but here's a counter example:
My neighbors across the street were a well-educated couple in their early 50s. Your stereotypical liberal, white academics. They had a son in college. Mike was a university professor and Theresa was a writer and an editor for a book publisher. We hosted several neighbors for a New Year's Eve party, including this couple. We had known all of them for a few years.
During the party, Theresa was unusually animated -- if I didn't know better, I'd thought she'd done a couple lines of coke. Fast forward a couple of months later, I see her pulling up to her house in a brand new hybrid sedan. I start talking to her and it's like, wow, Theresa, no more coke. She's, well, crazy animated. She's got a semi-paranoid story about how her husband left her. She's starting her own magazine. She's arranging a photo shoot in Nepal. She's just bought a $2000 recumbent bike. A $2000 set of downhill ski gear.
A week later, I see her again. This time "I've been staying at the Grand Hotel [a pricey, boutique hotel downtown] because I need Internet access and Mike made it so I can't get it at home."
A week after that, a really scary looking black guy is getting out of her car -- without her -- and is seen going in and out of her house, sometimes carrying stuff to load in the car. Her immediate next door neighbors try talking to the guy "Hey, how's Theresa?" and he's angry and threatens them. They call the cops, the cops detain the guy but they let him go after talking to Theresa on the phone "Yes, he's my boyfriend."
Fast forward a few weeks later and we see her ex-husband and we get the story. Theresa is bipolar. She's went off her meds around New Year's Eve. She got so bad and refused any kind of treatment or to take her meds, yes, he does leave her and basically files for divorce to protect himself from her.
By the time her sister -- working with lawyers -- is able to gain conservatorship of her, about a month later, after probably six weeks of trying, she's nearly bankrupt. When she and her husband divorced, their house had been recently remodeled and was owned free and clear. She stayed, mortgaged the place to cash him out and had blown through the $200k half of her equity plus another $50k in credit card debt. Fired from her job, the "magazine" a total fantasy. The black guy was literally some guy she met on the street outside the hotel.
Her sister finally gets her committed on a short-term basis and they get her back on her meds. By this time, though, she's done. She files bankruptcy, sells the house short along with almost all her possessions to try to pay off some debt. She ends up in a studio apartment somewhere, working part-time at a book store.
All of this happened in about six months. About 2 months into it, before the divorce is finalized, Mike had called her sister and said "Terry is out of control, we have to do something" but it was all futile. Had they been able to institutionalize her and stabilize her, she might still be living across the street with a manageable mortgage and some cash in the bank. But because it was so impossible, her life is basically over. Totally broke, divorced, career lost, friends alienated.
Disclaimer: My longest Perl programs were around 500 lines, designed mostly to process log files and provide some kind of selectable reporting capabilities.
Is this a function of Perl itself or a function of the people writing code adopting poor coding and commenting practices? Just because the language lets you use weird shortcuts to compact several atomic steps into one line, should you?
In my case, the scripts were dependent on the log files being in a specific format for parsing and analysis. A couple of times over the five year time I used them the vendor changed the log format, requiring me to modify the parsing and in one case make some non-trivial changes to a reporting summary due to differences in the log format.
I never had a problem going back to the script 18 months or so since the last time I edited it and understanding what I did or how I did it, thanks to generous comments and avoiding the kind of obfuscation Perl let you -- but doesn't require you -- to do.
I'm not a coder by trade and I thought Perl was very easy to learn. My sense is the complaints about Perl code are more a function of a language that's easy to learn and is thus adopted by a lot of amateur coders who then churn out a lot of code that they think is "made better" by some of Perl's shortcuts. I think it was one of those things where the user culture was such that the "smart guys" in the forums an newsgroups wrote obfuscated code and since they're elite, well, maybe I should to because it just might trim .025 seconds of execution time or something.
More complex languages are adopted by people with more discipline and experience and they just naturally impose more discipline on their coding style.
We already have technicians who work with the law, they're called lawyers and their very technical sophistication is what enables a lot of the clusterfuckery which takes place. Creating and finding loopholes, manipulation of the legal process, etc. And they also write the rules in very technical language, enabling a kind of only-we-understand-it monopoly control.
Maybe what we need is more non-technicians to eliminate the technical meddling.
Really? Let's think about this point. Why do you think this? Let's consider recent events:
It's not really a fair comparison to dropping a couple of barrels of chlorine or mustard gas. When that mushroom cloud goes up in the air, all bets are off. You can't compare a small-scale chemical weapons usage to a nuclear weapon. It's the difference between taking potshots at the freeway with an airsoft and a RPG.
And it's not even so much the question of what target was hit, it's the idea that some actor is willing to use nukes at all. That actor is a threat.
My experience travelling just two timezones west was on the day of arrival just going "I feel kind of tired, why, it's only 9 pm" and then realizing my body thought it was 11 pm. And of course the next day I'm wide awake at 4 am local time.
I was lagged as hell going to Fiji, but that was just a shitload of exhausting travel. 3-4 hours MSP to LAX, 2 hour delay, and about 10 hours LAX to NAN. I left at about 3 pm minneapolis time and got to fiji about 6 am and then had to third-world haggle my cab ride to the resort I was staying at.
Adding to my fatigue was the general weirdness of traveling alone to a third world country for the first time. I was literally the only one I knew in Fiji and my wife had made all the lodging reservations. Until I got checked in my room, I was a little paranoid about being stuck, alone, a million miles from home.
Nukes aren't a winning answer to regional politics either, especially when your biggest, richest Sunni rival, Saudi Arabia, is a major US ally.
I think mere *use* of a nuke -- regardless of target -- by Iran would result in retaliation by the US. There may be an additional few seconds of mulling as to the extent of a retaliation on something other than a NATO country or US soil, but you can guarantee there would be retaliation.
I wonder if the recent Syrian history hasn't led to rethinking of Iranian regional goals. Propping up Assad hasn't really helped Assad make a lot of progress. Iraq is easy to manipulate due to the large number of Shia, but still a thorny proposition due to the not insignificant Sunni Arab population.
It might just be that some saner, non-revolutionary minds have gained some influence in Iran and made them second guess their ambitions in the Middle East, at least in terms of obtaining them via military solutions. Iran hasn't the resources to occupy mail any country with a significant Shia population.
Understanding the requirements is the hard part.
I find so many people overexplain their weird irrelevant details that it's hard to make out just what they're trying to do.
What possible use are nukes for Iran anyway? Their ability to manufacture a large number of them or deliver a lot of them at once over any distance (especially intercontinental) makes them less than useful.
Any actual use of them against the US or Israel would result in a retaliation that would seriously threaten the existence of Iranian civilization as its now known. Any US president in office when an American city was targeted by an Iranian nuke who did not turn Iran into the world's largest open air supply of Trinitite might seriously be deposed if not lynched in the streets like Mussolini.
I've read that the Israelis have a standing threat that if Israel is targeted by a nuke, they are retaliating against all major Arab capitals and Mecca, regardless of who's at fault. Ironically or not, the Israelis do collective punishment like nobody since Imperial Rome.
They might get some short-term mileage out of stunts with the Straits of Hormuz, but it only works if they are willing to risk a catastrophic retaliation from which recovery is all but unlikely except on geological timelines. And the more serious their threat, the more likely they might face a preemptive strike. Even a conventional preemptive strike would force them to either capitulate or go nuclear. If they capitulate, they lose and future threats will go nowhere. If they go nuclear? Game over. All your base are glassed over.
I was referring to a parent poster who claimed if you charge your phone at his place of employment (a UK "public" school) you get in trouble unless you have been "authorised". That sounds ludicrous, unjustifiably authoritarian and almost impossible to enforce.
It makes sense that the train outlets might be a bad idea given what you write about power supply issues.
But it seems an equally bad idea to have outlets that are trivial to use (even if they require a hex key to enable) when they shouldn't be used and present any kind of fire risk to something plugged into them. IMHO, the better idea is that those "dangerous" outlets don't work at all unless the electric system is placed in some kind of service mode or the plugs are switched on from a secure panel.
Or, better yet, make sure your electrical outlet system is insulated from changes in supply.
Putting more-or-less working outlets someplace people can easily get at them, even with a "don't use these" sticker is a problem. Now if the sticker said "SERIOUS RISK OF FIRE OR EQUIPMENT DAMAGE -- DO NOT USE WHILE TRAIN IN MOTION" I think the train people would have a better point.
There's a reason there's so many code requirements with electrical outlets. When they all look alike EVERYWHERE, people have an expectation that they all WORK ALIKE everywhere. If you have funky outlets that start fires or are supposed to be restricted or just plain aren't normal, you need to take more steps to make sure they aren't used, like signage that states the actual danger or serious controlled access.
I wonder how related travel fatigue from a very long flight is to the "lag" caused by timezone changes.
It'd be interesting to talk to people to take the NYC - Buenos Aires 11 hour nonstop and see how lagged they feel even though the time change is only an hour.
You would think it would be much less, but I can see where taking an overnight flight and getting poor/little sleep could leave you just as lagged on the morning of your arrival as if you'd changed timezones radically. Same with a morning flight where you end up sleeping on the plane just to kill time. The advantage to a daytime flight would be arriving at approximately a normal bedtime, although I'd guess with immigration and ground transportation you still wouldn't get to a hotel for an additional 2+ hours, resulting in a later-than-normal bedtime and laggy feeling the next day.
Flights to Europe have the time change, but most people I've talked to make it sound like sleeping on the plane is a good idea and when you get there, just jump into the local time zone the first day you're there (as hard as it might be) and you're pretty well adjusted by your first full day on site.
Well, there's that, but I always had a thing for the yellow Falcon interceptors.
I kind of get why they want to make vSphere management less Windows dependent, but the Flash dependency is crazy. And IMHO, they are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by not adding new features to the fat client, even if it goes against their desire to be less Windows dependent as it makes most places less aware of engaged with new feature that require the web client because they all want to use the fat client (not to mention the clusterfuckery catch-22 of new features on standalone hosts without a vCenter instance).
Surely you're just trolling here, what possible rationale would they have for not allowing the use of electrical sockets for charging mobile phones?
I don't buy the risk of fire answer at all as I assume that there's some consumer electronics standards for safety that must be met for selling chargers in the UK. Even if some cheap Chinese chargers slip in, the fire risk is still absurdly low based on the number of actual fires vs. the number of chargers in use.
I don't buy the cost of electricity either. A USB charger uses what, 7-8 watts? 100 people charging their phones for an hour each day probably isn't even enough to use enough power to tick off more than a couple pennies of electricity.
I might buy this argument if it was about portable kettles or heating elements of some kind (I'm personally amazed so many people get away with portable heaters under their desk), but I doubt that most people walk around with a portable kettle.
That sounds like a more enticing reward.
I used to take an "express" bus that cost me $2.50/day and involved a total (both directions, from all stops) of 10 blocks of walking. I traded it for an $85/month parking spot.
The route was an express, but I caught it at the start of the route, which meant that the "express" part was only about half the trip distance, the rest of the route was stopping frequently to pick people up before it hit the freeway and quit making stops. This meant that the time from home to work, including waiting, was 45 minutes, longer if there was bad weather that delayed the bus. The return route was just as long. My total time commitment was something like 90 minutes per day.
My drive time to work average case was close to 20 minutes from garage to parking spot.
So by spending twice as much for parking, I gained nearly an hour per day of free time. Beyond worth it just for that.
But the bus had other annoyances -- climate control was often poor, meaning in the winter when I had to dress for the walk/wait, the bus was often way too hot. In the summer, good air conditioning was available only about 2/3rds of the time. Seating was too cramped for anything but a tablet (and in 1999, I didn't have a tablet) and often cumbersome with anything like a package or larger bag.
Driving, I could take care of other errands to/from work. If the weather was poor, I was at least stuck in a car with good heat/ac and I knew my commute would still be no longer than the bus and probably shorter since I could adapt my route and the bus couldn't. I was on my own schedule, which made leaving early/late easier as well as doing stuff directly after work versus 45 minutes to get home and then XX minutes to get someplace.
I think the express bus would have been more worth it if I was closer to the last stop before the freeway, but even then it would have largely been a tie only on trip time, the car would have still had all of its other advantages and the bus disadvantages (like climate) would have only been marginally better.
Parking price matters, obviously, and I had a good deal on parking (remember, this was '99) but I think given my specific details I would have paid probably $150/month for the time + flexibility pretty easily. Now that I have MORE demands on my time, I'd probably pay even more for parking to avoid the bus. I work as a consultant now, so the bus isn't even remotely an option.
It would be nice if their routing algorithm had more ways to influence route selection.
No freeways
Avoid Left Turns
Fewer stoplights
Avoid major arteries
Stuff like that. I've lived in the same metro area all my life, so I think I know most of the "back routes" to avoid congestion as well as the relative timing penalties of their use versus more direct routes, but I even occasionally stumble across a great back route I hadn't considered before and it would be nice to map those out automatically or at least get some suggestions.
In the headlong rush to market and sell the IoT, it sure seems like IoT devices are either trying to stake out a standalone role or they're just punting everything related to serious networking and security to some central controller system. Worst is the combination of both of these concepts into "cloud based" controllers, giving you weak devices with little inbuilt intelligence coupled with forced data exporting to "the cloud".
I don't even understand what constitutes IoT in real world applications these days -- thermostats? Alarm systems with some kind of internet interface? Those LED lights you can change on your phone? Web cameras?
The kinds of data that seem smart would be more like smart electrical panels that allow you to closely monitor and control electrical consumption on a per-breaker basis, especially when tied into solar/wind or generator based backup systems, but I don't hear anything about that.
Is there such a thing, or are all (advertised) APIs considered, rich, lush and exquisite as the 12 square feet of Corinthian Leather in the back of my '75 Cordoba?
Abrams speciality seems to be stringing along an oblique big idea forever. Fringe was occasionally interesting, but the whole parallel universe thing got strung out for so long I just lost interest after two seasons. I'm glad I never got into Lost.
Citizen, we are here to free you from your unconscious biases so that you may more thoroughly accept the wisdom of the party and refine your thoughts and actions for the glory of the party and the state.
Didn't it used to be called getting your Mrs. degree?
I think it's revealed to her at the end that the terror episode is staged, so wiping her memory is necessary to make the stunt work again.
One question that pops to mind is "How often do intentional swatting calls NOT end up deploying a tactical strike team?"
I have a hard time believing that every attempt at swatting ends up gaining the desired tactical response and instead results in a generic squad wiping the donut crumbs from their uniform and knocking on the door with a "is everyone OK?" response.
Of course the unintended consequence the cops fear from not responding with a full-on tactical response is the newpaper headline that reads something like "panic 911 call ignored, family raped and killed for 12 hours in their own home". Given the "right" family, such a headline probably means the end of quite a few careers, lawsuits, etc.
Where the woman has her memory wiped every day and wakes up to some kind of everyone-has-gone-nuts scenario and runs for her life in terror, over and over again. Everyone else is an actor or an audience member but her.
I'm always kind of amazed its a crime (and a fairly serious one) to lie to the FBI and many other government police agencies. It seems like a fair number of people accused of some crime don't get convicted of it, but instead end up getting convicted of lying to investigators, often before they have been charged with a crime or even if they are not the target of the investigation at all.
The better strategy most criminal defense attorneys advocate is don't talk to them at all. I think only a handful of people truly understand this and probably even fewer have the moxie to tell a government agent they don't want to talk to them. Cops have all manner of techniques they use to trick people into talking, including outright lying themselves, which is perfectly legal.
I think it's a natural psychological reaction when asked questions about something by someone in authority to provide answers that make you seem as innocent as possible, even if you actually believe you personally haven't done something wrong. Some of it may not even be something we're aware of, along with all the other problems of memory error and the stress of being questioned by someone in authority.
Perfecting lie detection just seem to be another way to ultimately force people into making confessions.