It seems to be part of the bugaboo with wind -- when the wind blows and nobody needs your power, you're just, well, tilting at the wind.
Producing hydrogen seems appealing because it can be burned cleanly, either at a facility at the wind farm or at some other aggregating site at some other time or for some other purpose (heat, motor vehicle fuel, methane production, etc).
And if hydrogen were the standard, it would lower the overhead costs of equipment, enable regional aggregation (ie, no production quantity would be "too small") and probably lead to better technologies for using hydrogen as a fuel.
Hardly prejudiced. Forcing a wide, radical, and in some cases scientifically unproven set of environmental regulations down people's throat is as nanny state as they get.
You could take the anti-monitoring view and just bury all but the most egregious stuff or whatever minimum is necessary to keep from looking like you're not doing your job, up to and including submarining the monitoring effort through "problems" with the monitoring setup that require constant upgrades, maintenance and activities that take you away from your "real" job and render monitoring semi-worthless. People you like could be quietly advised that their computer is being flagged for "performance problems" and they should avoid "non-work tasks".
You could take the "info on my enemies" view and look at as a chance to dig dirt, keeping the juiciest info for yourself and passing along the trivial stuff, using the juicy info to damage enemies.
The thing I think is weird is that you get exposed to all the pervs in the office. I found one guy who was highly respected, married with a young child, a church-type who was into some weird sex thing where he swapped half-nude self-shots with other guys dressed in expensive suits and jacking off. This guy made six-figure coin and there was always a remote temptation to confront him with his pix and collect a second, cash-only income less his wife and pastor get in on the picture collection.
But I decided extortion wasn't my thing and figured anyone driven by that kind of sex craving and keeping up that facade was taking all the punishment he needed.
Why would merchants need need new hardware? AFAIK the auth code from the card is checked on the back end; merchant systems may need new software to process the transactions so that they can include the auth code from the card.
Like any other security solution, it doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to make it complex and expensive enough that crooks move along to some other form of crime.
There's millions of RSA cards in use now that work basically like that, many are in the hands of business accounting folks who use them to manage cash accounts of $100,000 or more. Consumer credit cards are peanuts in comparison; why haven't the RSA cards been compromised if its so easy?
...if the bank card wasn't using some RSA-style system but instead just had an LCD display in the card that changed numbers and just made it LOOK like the numbers were used for some kind of high-strength cryptography?
It might even be half-assed effective if it made it all the more complicated to manufacture/obtain card blanks. Bonus points for the numbers displayed on the LCD display meaning something halfway useful (some kind of hash representing the card number and the current date) but not really representing hard encryption, making thieves work harder yet coming up with an algorithm that matched the card.
And maybe that's the future of these kinds of security systems -- not actually impossible to clone, but a continually changing nuisance that requires so much energy to overcome you seek a softer target.
Apparently it's more complicated than some hand waving at "other inputs" or nobody would use the RSA security cards that operate on the same principal.
I have 5+ year old CDRs in my car that work fine. They have never left my car, have never been in a case (at best in a sunvisor CD holder, at worse, on the floor) and in the summer regularly see 120F (or however hot a black car gets in the sun on black asphalt for 8 hours) and in the winter see 20F regularly and -5 to -30F for good stretches.
They only seem to crap out when badly scratched and then I chuck them and make something else.
Personally, I think the line of reason I stated is utter bullshit; the kind of "truth" that you might be exposed to in some Maoist political education.
But I think it underscores the sort of thinking that underlies pretty much a lot of what passes for left-wing political correctness in this country, because the unspoken corollary is that anything that DOES make the restitution of oppressed peoples its primary purpose is then judged an unconditional good.
It's why you never want to get dragged into a philosophical debate with leftists without forcing them to define their terms. Marxists and their ilk live in a world of philosophical constructs that are neat and internally logically consistent but totally unrelated to the real world.
I think Gartner's audience are mid/upper level management execs of large entities who never do anything innovative and only initiate projects when they can show a laundry list of consultant/reports suggesting a project makes sense -- and thus have someone to blame when said project goes poorly; they were only implementing consultant recommendations and industry best practices.
But to be reasonably fair to Gartner, they are kind of on the right path. MS will pull the pin on XP one way or another -- dropping support, stopping security fixes, releasing an IE replacement not supported on XP, refusing new license sales, whatever, pick one or more.
And Win 7 is the only realistic replacement and MS will probably keep that around for a long time.
I doubt Linux -- for this audience -- is a realistic replacement unless they've been killing themselves to centralize all Windows apps on a terminal server/VDI infrastructure and replace everything else with Web apps and/or other open source creations.
Is your constitutional right more important than a hundred lives you endanger?
Almost certainly. SCOTUS has been very unsympathetic in the past to prior restraint of constitutional rights.
Mere "hundreds" of lives could be saved by restricting many of our constitutional rights. Unfortunately it's a slippery slope, and before long we're housed in tents, eating beans and rice and doing nothing else because it "may endanger the lives of hundreds of people."
Why stop at speeding? And what counts as speeding, anyway? Thousands of lives could be saved by cutting the speed limit to 30 MPH; surely you wouldn't advocate killing thousands just to go 25 MPH faster, would you?
And while we're at it, let's take a real close look at speed enforcement. We can use the "what is the right speed" as a jumping off point, asking ourselves if the speed limits we've set have any relationship to reality -- do they reflect the safety & engineering of our automobiles? Do they reflect the roadways we drive on (road quality, distractions, traffic levels, etc)?
When enforcing the speed limit, are we having a long-term impact on driver's speed choices, or merely a short-term impact? Is the enforcement structured around actual long-term "improvement" in speed choices or other criteria, such as revenue, citation volume, employee management (make-work for idle officers, a kind of punishment for politically inept officers, overtime generation for loyal officers, etc)? Is it merely an excuse to stop people at will for further interrogation? What about speed enforcement as it relates to the level of resources available for other kinds police work given that there's never "enough" resources for law enforcement (or that's what they told me when no one would actively investigate my car's theft or a break-in at my home).
It really doesn't take a ton of time if you think about it to realize that MOST speed enforcement has nothing to do with public policy or safety generally.
Children are genetically engineered to gain the attention of adults.
As babies they have that magic crying sound that cannot be ignored.
As a 5 year old, my son will automagically escalate his desire for attention to the point where he will inflict pain on me if I ignore him long enough -- not that he wants to hurt me (I think..) but because he knows that ultimately whacking me with a baseball bat will get my attention. He never actually hit me with the bat, and this was after at least 10 minutes of literally being climbed on, yelled in both ears, eyes covered and any other way of annoying me he could think of.
Figure it out, Steve. Every other platform is getting Flash, I want the same opportunity for malware exploits that other mobile platforms will be getting.
I completely agree that tethering should not be an extra charge since the feature is in the device already paid for and the data is part of the data plan we pay for.
I'll admit that I can see a $5 or less per month surcharge for tethering based on the idea that zillions of idiots will call to complain about why they don't get interweb access even though their phone and computer are next to each other, and AT&T would get hammered with millions of those calls.
I can also remotely see a slight justification for a surcharge based on the idea that tethering usage is going to be a more intensive data use, for a longer period of time, than any use on a smartphone, and that this has a real impact on the network.
I recently switched and have been happy. I got 12/2 business class with 5 static IPs for $69/month, free installation and it was all up and working within FOUR DAYS OF ORDERING.
Performance has been great, and it beats the shit out of the 1.5 I was stuck with on DSL forever.
The Minneapolis suburb of Edina is fairly notorious for speed enforcement.
Now I recognize that law enforcement is not a for-profit business (on paper at least...) but given the limited resources available for law enforcement and the unlimited amount of crime there's still a cost-benefit argument to make.
What often amazes me, though, is seeing them occasionally use up to *five* squad cars at a time. It gets me wondering how much money its costing them relative to how much they make back in fines.
Because they are a wealthy suburb, they have pretty state of the art squad cars. Assuming a fully equipped squad car runs about $75,000 including everything stuffed inside (from emergency gear & weapons in the trunk to lights, sirens, and other upgrades or add-ons), five cars on the side of the road is a $375,000 capital asset not to mention 5 police officers @ $100/hour each or whatever it costs the city in salary, benefits and overhead to employ them.
You could be looking at $1000/hour to run that speed trap in men and equipment without coming nearly that close to writing enough tickets to pay for it.
Mind you, I'm not slagging on him, but he seems to have kind of faded into the background. He's been dead just shy of 20 years and his music was always a tad experimental, but he doesn't seem to get tied into "modern" rock music the same way someone like John Cale does or some of the other proto-punk artists do.
1) Physics & Math wonks create elaborate models claiming to predict market behavior. 2) Financial entities lobby for reduced capital requirements to leverage "sure thing" 3) Banks and trading firms leverage themselves to the moon betting on "sure thing" 4) Banks and trading firms sell major investors on "sure thing" 5) Everybody gets rich for a couple of years until everyone is on the same gravy train 6) Markets crash, everyone is overextended and shirts are lost. 7) Wonks defend models as meant to predict "normal" market behavior, not everyone gaming a "sure thing", return to basement promising better models.
Meanwhile, rather than the market doing what markets were meant to do, providing capital for useful productive economic activity and providing "invisible hand", markets become merely get-rich-quick casinos based on split second timing, leverage and lucky guesses. Meanwhile, "useful productive economic activity" gets shuffled off elsewhere.
If there's an emergency and the guy in the exit row is doing *anything* other than opening the emergency hatch and exiting the plane I will be climbing over him to do his "job" for him, up to and including disabling him, so I can exit the plane.
But let's face it, the "exit" row is really there because it has to be and so the airline can upcharge people who sit there for the precious inch or two of extra leg room. Otherwise the FAA would require the seats to actually be filled by physically fit people between the ages of 21-50. When I get in the exit row and see my fellow passengers in that row are petite women, old people or obese people I always wonder how they'll pop the exit.
What's really amusing is that they require the extra room because it is an emergency exit, but apparently that extra room isn't required to get out of the middle or window seats in all the other seating aisles.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to be part of the bugaboo with wind -- when the wind blows and nobody needs your power, you're just, well, tilting at the wind.
Producing hydrogen seems appealing because it can be burned cleanly, either at a facility at the wind farm or at some other aggregating site at some other time or for some other purpose (heat, motor vehicle fuel, methane production, etc).
And if hydrogen were the standard, it would lower the overhead costs of equipment, enable regional aggregation (ie, no production quantity would be "too small") and probably lead to better technologies for using hydrogen as a fuel.
Hardly prejudiced. Forcing a wide, radical, and in some cases scientifically unproven set of environmental regulations down people's throat is as nanny state as they get.
Or one of several cynical views.
You could take the anti-monitoring view and just bury all but the most egregious stuff or whatever minimum is necessary to keep from looking like you're not doing your job, up to and including submarining the monitoring effort through "problems" with the monitoring setup that require constant upgrades, maintenance and activities that take you away from your "real" job and render monitoring semi-worthless. People you like could be quietly advised that their computer is being flagged for "performance problems" and they should avoid "non-work tasks".
You could take the "info on my enemies" view and look at as a chance to dig dirt, keeping the juiciest info for yourself and passing along the trivial stuff, using the juicy info to damage enemies.
The thing I think is weird is that you get exposed to all the pervs in the office. I found one guy who was highly respected, married with a young child, a church-type who was into some weird sex thing where he swapped half-nude self-shots with other guys dressed in expensive suits and jacking off. This guy made six-figure coin and there was always a remote temptation to confront him with his pix and collect a second, cash-only income less his wife and pastor get in on the picture collection.
But I decided extortion wasn't my thing and figured anyone driven by that kind of sex craving and keeping up that facade was taking all the punishment he needed.
Aren't the Greens as nanny state as they come? That was always my impression.
Why would merchants need need new hardware? AFAIK the auth code from the card is checked on the back end; merchant systems may need new software to process the transactions so that they can include the auth code from the card.
Like any other security solution, it doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to make it complex and expensive enough that crooks move along to some other form of crime.
There's millions of RSA cards in use now that work basically like that, many are in the hands of business accounting folks who use them to manage cash accounts of $100,000 or more. Consumer credit cards are peanuts in comparison; why haven't the RSA cards been compromised if its so easy?
...if the bank card wasn't using some RSA-style system but instead just had an LCD display in the card that changed numbers and just made it LOOK like the numbers were used for some kind of high-strength cryptography?
It might even be half-assed effective if it made it all the more complicated to manufacture/obtain card blanks. Bonus points for the numbers displayed on the LCD display meaning something halfway useful (some kind of hash representing the card number and the current date) but not really representing hard encryption, making thieves work harder yet coming up with an algorithm that matched the card.
And maybe that's the future of these kinds of security systems -- not actually impossible to clone, but a continually changing nuisance that requires so much energy to overcome you seek a softer target.
Apparently it's more complicated than some hand waving at "other inputs" or nobody would use the RSA security cards that operate on the same principal.
Heh, I call triple bullshit.
I have 5+ year old CDRs in my car that work fine. They have never left my car, have never been in a case (at best in a sunvisor CD holder, at worse, on the floor) and in the summer regularly see 120F (or however hot a black car gets in the sun on black asphalt for 8 hours) and in the winter see 20F regularly and -5 to -30F for good stretches.
They only seem to crap out when badly scratched and then I chuck them and make something else.
Personally, I think the line of reason I stated is utter bullshit; the kind of "truth" that you might be exposed to in some Maoist political education.
But I think it underscores the sort of thinking that underlies pretty much a lot of what passes for left-wing political correctness in this country, because the unspoken corollary is that anything that DOES make the restitution of oppressed peoples its primary purpose is then judged an unconditional good.
It's why you never want to get dragged into a philosophical debate with leftists without forcing them to define their terms. Marxists and their ilk live in a world of philosophical constructs that are neat and internally logically consistent but totally unrelated to the real world.
Thanks, you saved me from writing the same thing.
Anything that does not make its primary purpose the empowerment and restitution of oppressed peoples is inherently racist, classist and reactionary.
Jimmy Hoffa
Judge Crater
I think Gartner's audience are mid/upper level management execs of large entities who never do anything innovative and only initiate projects when they can show a laundry list of consultant/reports suggesting a project makes sense -- and thus have someone to blame when said project goes poorly; they were only implementing consultant recommendations and industry best practices.
But to be reasonably fair to Gartner, they are kind of on the right path. MS will pull the pin on XP one way or another -- dropping support, stopping security fixes, releasing an IE replacement not supported on XP, refusing new license sales, whatever, pick one or more.
And Win 7 is the only realistic replacement and MS will probably keep that around for a long time.
I doubt Linux -- for this audience -- is a realistic replacement unless they've been killing themselves to centralize all Windows apps on a terminal server/VDI infrastructure and replace everything else with Web apps and/or other open source creations.
Is your constitutional right more important than a hundred lives you endanger?
Almost certainly. SCOTUS has been very unsympathetic in the past to prior restraint of constitutional rights.
Mere "hundreds" of lives could be saved by restricting many of our constitutional rights. Unfortunately it's a slippery slope, and before long we're housed in tents, eating beans and rice and doing nothing else because it "may endanger the lives of hundreds of people."
Why stop at speeding? And what counts as speeding, anyway? Thousands of lives could be saved by cutting the speed limit to 30 MPH; surely you wouldn't advocate killing thousands just to go 25 MPH faster, would you?
And while we're at it, let's take a real close look at speed enforcement. We can use the "what is the right speed" as a jumping off point, asking ourselves if the speed limits we've set have any relationship to reality -- do they reflect the safety & engineering of our automobiles? Do they reflect the roadways we drive on (road quality, distractions, traffic levels, etc)?
When enforcing the speed limit, are we having a long-term impact on driver's speed choices, or merely a short-term impact? Is the enforcement structured around actual long-term "improvement" in speed choices or other criteria, such as revenue, citation volume, employee management (make-work for idle officers, a kind of punishment for politically inept officers, overtime generation for loyal officers, etc)? Is it merely an excuse to stop people at will for further interrogation? What about speed enforcement as it relates to the level of resources available for other kinds police work given that there's never "enough" resources for law enforcement (or that's what they told me when no one would actively investigate my car's theft or a break-in at my home).
It really doesn't take a ton of time if you think about it to realize that MOST speed enforcement has nothing to do with public policy or safety generally.
Oh, I do, but it doesn't stop ANY 5 year old I know from being insistent.
In the particular case I described I was deliberately ignoring him to annoy him and see how far he'd go.
Children are genetically engineered to gain the attention of adults.
As babies they have that magic crying sound that cannot be ignored.
As a 5 year old, my son will automagically escalate his desire for attention to the point where he will inflict pain on me if I ignore him long enough -- not that he wants to hurt me (I think..) but because he knows that ultimately whacking me with a baseball bat will get my attention. He never actually hit me with the bat, and this was after at least 10 minutes of literally being climbed on, yelled in both ears, eyes covered and any other way of annoying me he could think of.
Figure it out, Steve. Every other platform is getting Flash, I want the same opportunity for malware exploits that other mobile platforms will be getting.
I completely agree that tethering should not be an extra charge since the feature is in the device already paid for and the data is part of the data plan we pay for.
I'll admit that I can see a $5 or less per month surcharge for tethering based on the idea that zillions of idiots will call to complain about why they don't get interweb access even though their phone and computer are next to each other, and AT&T would get hammered with millions of those calls.
I can also remotely see a slight justification for a surcharge based on the idea that tethering usage is going to be a more intensive data use, for a longer period of time, than any use on a smartphone, and that this has a real impact on the network.
Singapore is about the size of a small metropolitan area. They could run the whole place on ethernet.
Is Comcast that bad?
I recently switched and have been happy. I got 12/2 business class with 5 static IPs for $69/month, free installation and it was all up and working within FOUR DAYS OF ORDERING.
Performance has been great, and it beats the shit out of the 1.5 I was stuck with on DSL forever.
The Minneapolis suburb of Edina is fairly notorious for speed enforcement.
Now I recognize that law enforcement is not a for-profit business (on paper at least...) but given the limited resources available for law enforcement and the unlimited amount of crime there's still a cost-benefit argument to make.
What often amazes me, though, is seeing them occasionally use up to *five* squad cars at a time. It gets me wondering how much money its costing them relative to how much they make back in fines.
Because they are a wealthy suburb, they have pretty state of the art squad cars. Assuming a fully equipped squad car runs about $75,000 including everything stuffed inside (from emergency gear & weapons in the trunk to lights, sirens, and other upgrades or add-ons), five cars on the side of the road is a $375,000 capital asset not to mention 5 police officers @ $100/hour each or whatever it costs the city in salary, benefits and overhead to employ them.
You could be looking at $1000/hour to run that speed trap in men and equipment without coming nearly that close to writing enough tickets to pay for it.
Mind you, I'm not slagging on him, but he seems to have kind of faded into the background. He's been dead just shy of 20 years and his music was always a tad experimental, but he doesn't seem to get tied into "modern" rock music the same way someone like John Cale does or some of the other proto-punk artists do.
1) Physics & Math wonks create elaborate models claiming to predict market behavior.
2) Financial entities lobby for reduced capital requirements to leverage "sure thing"
3) Banks and trading firms leverage themselves to the moon betting on "sure thing"
4) Banks and trading firms sell major investors on "sure thing"
5) Everybody gets rich for a couple of years until everyone is on the same gravy train
6) Markets crash, everyone is overextended and shirts are lost.
7) Wonks defend models as meant to predict "normal" market behavior, not everyone gaming a "sure thing", return to basement promising better models.
Meanwhile, rather than the market doing what markets were meant to do, providing capital for useful productive economic activity and providing "invisible hand", markets become merely get-rich-quick casinos based on split second timing, leverage and lucky guesses. Meanwhile, "useful productive economic activity" gets shuffled off elsewhere.
If there's an emergency and the guy in the exit row is doing *anything* other than opening the emergency hatch and exiting the plane I will be climbing over him to do his "job" for him, up to and including disabling him, so I can exit the plane.
But let's face it, the "exit" row is really there because it has to be and so the airline can upcharge people who sit there for the precious inch or two of extra leg room. Otherwise the FAA would require the seats to actually be filled by physically fit people between the ages of 21-50. When I get in the exit row and see my fellow passengers in that row are petite women, old people or obese people I always wonder how they'll pop the exit.
What's really amusing is that they require the extra room because it is an emergency exit, but apparently that extra room isn't required to get out of the middle or window seats in all the other seating aisles.