U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said the sentence reflected that although he was 18 at the time of the attack, his maturity level was much younger than that. She also said his home life contributed to the problem.
Damn, that precedent means virtually everyone here on/. is immune from prosecution. For anything. Especially since "mom's basement" probably qualifies as a "home life".
I use adblock on many sites, but specifically not on Slashdot.
I figure if it's this valuable to me, I do owe them a tiny bit (even though I subscribe) -- and if a pair of eyeballs spotting the OSDN banner ad somehow makes them better off, well good for them.
However, screw any flash ads they <BLINKed> in on...
If you don't like the captcha tests, you might be interested in this article by a goatse troll that either used to or still does haunt Slashdot. In it, he describes how to defeat Slashdot's humanconf module by using a perl script, the GIMP and gocr.
Note: the guy is a troll so his description is crude. But he's not an idiot.
The captcha project themselves are beginning to see their hoped-for results. The idea of captcha is simple: use a "hard AI" problem (such as obscureed character recognition) to ensure that only people, not machines, can access a resource. As a side benefit, they are hoping that attackers will "step up" to the challenge posed by captchas. By developing more and more sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms (to defeat their captchas,) the attackers are actually advancing computer science!
Probably the best thing is that since you're compelled to fill out your taxes, they can't be used against you in court. If the only thing the government has to show you robbed ab ank is "Bank robbery - $25,204.37" on line 21 of your 1040, they can't arrest you.
True, they can't use it against you in court. That doesn't mean they can't use it to begin an investigation on you, however.
I wonder what the penalty is for lying about the source? If you were a dope dealer but put down "Poker winnings - $35,000" what would they do, and when would they do it? I suppose if you were busted for dealing, and they went back to your taxes, they'd still say "hey, you didn't pay your taxes on this dope money!" You might claim "but that was what I put down so you wouldn't bust me." What would they counter with? "lying on your tax forms, 10 years!"
From: Info Security
To: All staff
Subject: Secure PIN requirements
We have determined that you are using an insecure PIN, because it has a pattern in it.
Through extensive research, our staff has determined that many PINs are insecure because they contain patterns, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. By excluding all combinations of duplicate numbers, keyboard-pattern entries, and significant numbers, we have determined that the most secure PIN you can use is 7439. Please change your PIN to 7439 immediately in order to ensure our company's assets are properly protected.
He wrote it in Delphi, and the source is available. Have you considered porting it? (I don't know if there's a Delphi compiler for Linux, that's for you to find.) Otherwise, my other suggestion would be to try to run it under WINE. I don't know if it could deal with bluez or not, but that's a possibility too.
One of the problems with porting it is: it's damn pretty under Windows. He did a great job designing the GUI. But will it port?
Oh, I agree absolutely. But what I'm trying to point out is that the corporate game developers have a legitimate gripe -- they go into a job with decent qualifications, and expect to be treated like professionals. Instead, they're treated like cattle. Yes, they can leave (and most do) but that's not the point. Their point is these places should not be allowed to treat the employees poorly in the first place.
I imagine the developers are going to form a collective bargaining agreement here, and pretty quick. This is exactly the sort of worker unrest that led to the rise of labor unions in the early part of the 20th century. It's almost scary the parallels you can draw between the game developers and the meat packers (read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair again, if you haven't recently.) Rough working conditions, aggrieved employees stirring up dissent; next thing you know they're going to be taking torches and pitchforks into the EA executive suite.
But I think he's missed the point of the "whiners". The point is if you work in a giant corporate game factory, you're going to get treated like dirt.
If I were a cashier at Target, I'd expect that kind of treatment. If you go into a job with no real training needed, just the ability to breathe and put barcodes in front of a checkout scanner, you probably aren't expecting a career path that goes far.
But these are professional developers, men and women who have college degrees in Computer Science. They DO HAVE expectations of decent rewards, but they're being treated even worse than the cashiers, in terms of uncompensated mandatory overtime. A cashier in these big companies isn't allowed to work overtime, or work through their breaks. Their managers know that if the employees complain about overwork there's going to be hell to pay, because of the violations of labor laws involved.
Sure, there are independent shops, just like there are Mom'n'Pop grocery stores. But remember, Mom'n'Pop's employees almost never get rich. Sally may have worked the register for 20 years, she might be loved like family, she probably gets invited over for dinner, but she's never going to be driving a Ferrari as a result.
he'd be one of those guys insisting the Bible should stay in Latin and Latin alone.
Excuse me? I'm the one saying, "move to Visual Fred (VB.NET) and get over crying about the loss of VB 6", not "we must forever have the one true language of VB 6."
I'm not saying VB 6 itself is necessarily awful, but what I am saying is that because it lowered the bar for development, marginal people with no understanding of design have occasionally been able to torture some VB-esque code into doing something useful. And because of this success, they call themselves programmers.
But a lot of these people typically have no concept of what they're doing. They'll establish a connection to a remote database over a slow WAN, look up the first item in a table, drop the connection, then reestablish it to query a second item in the same table. Or they'll fill their code with timer pops and select case statements in order to do four things, one after the other. I'm not talking about the people who don't get the whole model/view/controller pattern -- I'm talking about people who call Form1.Form_Load() after every mouse click to reset their screens, or people who have database queries in a Text1_KeyDown() event.
This is why VB has such a bad reputation, and why I have very little sympathy for those who wish to keep it around.
We have many dozens of those "hundred line quickies" laying around, and idiots constantly add to the list. Worse, some end up getting used in some kind of production capacity.
But the one thing I find that every quicky has in common is that they eventually need to be maintained, as systems change or get rearranged. And I get to be the one who has to go into to these programs to patch up hard coded paths, change database connection strings, fix missing columns and/or tables, or a myriad of other maintenance issues.
Perhaps you've never dealt with big groups with lots of people at all different skill levels, all making changes. Maybe you don't realize that when external things (such as machine configurations) change that random people will come around to your cube asking why these quicky scripts "don't work," and "please help me fix it." Having a good architecture up front would do a couple things: first and foremost, the need for these "quickies" would dramatically drop, because a well designed system won't need all the bandaids in the first place. Second, if the quickies were well designed they'd be either more maintainable or more resilient to change, or both.
For those few VB 6 users who actually know how to write decent code, I pity you, but consider this your chance to learn Visual Fred. It's almost as fast for the quicky stuff. For those of you who use VB 6 to write "hundred line quickies" and then come to my cube a year later asking me to help mend your patchwork quilt of IF statements, I've got a different bit of advice for you: if you can't pick up Visual Fred, here's a phrase that should help you in your career path: "you want fries with that?"
if there is an error in one of the dlls, then fixing it fixes the problem across all apps that rely on it
Oh, if only that were always true. But it's not always allowed, and for good reason.
I've tried to fix an error in a dll once and discovered the application programmer had coded around it. (It was a little endian/big endian byte-ordering problem on a piece of network data.) So when I fixed the bug, the application broke. Was the developer stupid for not filing a bug report asking me to fix the DLL in the first place? Maybe, but he felt he could work with the problem, and he did, making life miserable for everyone later.
The episode really drove home the concept of the entire interface being a contract which includes ALL the behavior, not just the data types. Once you have behavior out there that people are relying on, then you must maintain it, even if it's wrong. Counter-intuitive as all hell that you can't fix a stupid bug, but it happens.
Now, I don't know if VBRUN600.DLL has any bugs that have workarounds like the situation I described, but if it does you can bet that hundreds of those legacy VB 6 programs out there are coded to "take advantage" of them.
And as for "verification" of non-owned code, I've had to go back to Microsoft with a bug in their implementation of the STL. I even sent them a source module that demonstrated the problem. Many people have done so, even though we were simply victims of someone else's bug and in no way responsible for the code. So if nothing else, now you know me:-)
Just because they use a name containing the word Basic means that lots of people who otherwise might be afraid of writing a program will approach it, thinking "hey, I remember learning Basic in high school math." That doesn't make them developers any more than owning a hammer and chisel makes one a sculptor.
If Microsoft wants to appear serious about having customers develop decent code, pulling them off VB 6 is a good start.
A person becomes a good programmer through education and lots of experience. A good programmer can write good code in virtually any language. (Conversely, a weak programmer can write Visual Basic code in any language.) This cry for "keep our precious VB6" sounds suspiciously like the whining "because C is too hard!"
There is still one valid reason for keeping it alive, however. Many people are still writing code for legacy hardware that isn't capable of running the.NET framework. And to that end, Microsoft's decisions should not automatically mean an increase in Intel's stock price. But wanting Visual Basic to last forever simply because they don't want to learn a better language is not going to gain my sympathy.
If we "give up" and switch to IE because it works, then we've literally given up hope on having standards independent from Microsoft.
The other reason is that as developers we should be used to eating our own dogfood. Or put another way, if people stop bitching about the formatting, it will never get fixed. Not that a year of bitching has gotten it fixed yet, but without the pressure there will never be incentive to fix it.
There's a hidden problem lurking down where this study doesn't probe, however. Think about the school aged kids playing the online games who still have parents with some control over what they do. I guarantee my son should fall into the "addicted" category, except he wouldn't show on their radar because I shut down the WoW port on our firewall every so often.
I am seriously trying to find a way to help him recognize that he has responsibilities that are being overlooked by his incessant gameplaying. Because his grades dropped a full letter since signing up for WoW, he's cut off until the situation improves. He even recognizes the problem, but finds himself unwilling / unable to stop playing.
While I can help him control this as long as he lives at home, I know that his future college isn't going to block his WoW access at the firewall. This is something he's going to have to eventually learn how to deal with on his own.
And for anyone who thinks I'm draconian for shutting off his access to a game, fsck off. I'm doing what I consider to be the responsible parent thing here. I'm not enforcing this on you or yours. Raise your own damn kids however you want.
That's a fairly impressive list of keywords. You seem to be lacking in the white supremacist / racist department, but you will certainly be forgiven for not wanting to type any of their fecal phrases into your computer.
Any reason you slipped your own name into that list?:-)
Oh, sorry, I didn't realize I was implying that any of this stuff was commercially available yet. The standard itself was just ratified, and according to the CABA (see page 20) they're hoping to see Zigbee-enabled consumer products start reaching the home automation market in early 2005.
Go on, be an early adopter. You know you want to...:-)
Hell, I want to too! I've resisted X-10 since the early '90s because I figured something else better had to be coming along soon (boy was I optimistic.) I just hope that if I do early adopt they don't come out with Zigbee 1.1, Zigbee 1.2, full-speed Zigbee, hi-speed Zigbee, Zigbee 2.0 and Zigbees -a, -b and -g in the next couple of years.
Møøses' noses wiped by BJORN IRKESTOM-SLATER WALKER
Large møøse on the left
half side of the screen
in the third scene from
the end, given a thorough
grounding in Latin,
French and "O" Level
Geography by BO BENN
Suggestives poses for the
møøse suggested by VIC ROTTER
That's easy: here's the Zigbee members page. You'll see a lot of the current players in home automation are involved, and others who appear to want to get into it.
I found a lot of this out last year when Zigbee first caught my attention. I saw an article in Scientific American where the US Army is experimenting with distributing small RF-linked sound sensors to pinpoint the source of a gunshot in an urban environment. The timing of the report was all that was needed to locate the sniper in about two seconds. I believe they were using Zigbee.
Most of what I posted above was just from documents I've seen on their website, nothing more.
Zigbee is poised to become a standard that will control everything from home theater, TVs, HVAC, radio, lighting, security systems, garage doors, to mice, keyboards and joysticks. Among all these applications, it's designed to form ad-hoc networks. For example, your TV may be the first receiver of your remote control's signal to turn up the temperature on your thermostat, and it would pass the request from node to node until it reaches your thermostat, which then would use Zigbee to signal your furnace or air conditioner. It would also use Zigbee to operate the vent motors to allow for zone control (without wires.) You won't have to configure anything to make that happen, either. They'll form the network themselves via self-discovery.
One of its big advantages for home automation is two-way communication. If you press the button for "garage door close", it will transmit and wait for an ACK, so you will know the door is closing. I think bi-di will also allow for "self programming" of your smart remote control. Hit a "program my remote" button on your Zigbee equipped TV, and hit the "learn a device" button on your remote, and the marriage happens. No more pile of remotes -- one will do it. And no more code books for your All In One remote. Plus, I think the pairing can be secured (although not cryptographically secure, it'll still be good enough for your neighbors' remotes to be locked out.)
Because it was first designed for battery powered industrial sensor networks, Zigbee is designed for extremely low power for the longest possible battery life. The transmission starts instantly and is a short burst that is stopped as soon as it's acknowledged. The receiver will come active within 15ms. Zigbee remotes should last longer than IR remotes.
Zigbee allows for 65535 nodes in a network, which is a lot more than the 256 unique addresses in the X-10 namespace. Oh, and in America, Zigbee is 40kbps, which is much, much faster than X-10 over powerlines (which I believe I read is something incredibly slow, like 60 baud.) While still a low-bandwidth network, 40kbps is plenty fast enough for device control, which typically uses very tiny packets of data.
I was disappointed to find that Bluetooth could not become the home automation control protocol. One of the problems with using Bluetooth for remote control is that the discovery and connection process can take 3 or more seconds. While Bluetooth can transmit at a much higher data rate, it takes much longer to start up and more power to do so.
While Bluetooth will still exist for things like headphones, I've decided to get excited about Zigbee instead, and I plan to buy a Zigbee enabled Palm device when they hit the market.
Finally, I'm sure I got plenty of facts wrong above. I'll leave it to someone else to post corrections, I'm going to bed.
Something that surprised me greatly was to slip on a pair of Bose active noice-cancelling headphones in our office environment, and turn them on. I had no idea just how loud the office is until I had a standard to measure it against.
Yes, you're right -- without such a standard, the noise "fades" into the background. That doesn't mean it's not loud. It just means you're either used to it, or you've already damaged your hearing.
Sustained noise above 85db requires ear protection, according to OSHA. It's not a "regulatory burden", either -- it's about protecting the only set of ears you'll ever grow. Most computer labs and dinosaur pens I've been in are pretty borderline on the noise level thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I sure am getting what I deserve, though, either way you look at it.
Here: :-)
That means "it was a JOKE."
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said the sentence reflected that although he was 18 at the time of the attack, his maturity level was much younger than that. She also said his home life contributed to the problem.
Damn, that precedent means virtually everyone here on /. is immune from prosecution. For anything. Especially since "mom's basement" probably qualifies as a "home life".
I figure if it's this valuable to me, I do owe them a tiny bit (even though I subscribe) -- and if a pair of eyeballs spotting the OSDN banner ad somehow makes them better off, well good for them.
However, screw any flash ads they <BLINKed> in on...
Note: the guy is a troll so his description is crude. But he's not an idiot.
The captcha project themselves are beginning to see their hoped-for results. The idea of captcha is simple: use a "hard AI" problem (such as obscureed character recognition) to ensure that only people, not machines, can access a resource. As a side benefit, they are hoping that attackers will "step up" to the challenge posed by captchas. By developing more and more sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms (to defeat their captchas,) the attackers are actually advancing computer science!
True, they can't use it against you in court. That doesn't mean they can't use it to begin an investigation on you, however.
I wonder what the penalty is for lying about the source? If you were a dope dealer but put down "Poker winnings - $35,000" what would they do, and when would they do it? I suppose if you were busted for dealing, and they went back to your taxes, they'd still say "hey, you didn't pay your taxes on this dope money!" You might claim "but that was what I put down so you wouldn't bust me." What would they counter with? "lying on your tax forms, 10 years!"
From: Info Security
To: All staff
Subject: Secure PIN requirements
We have determined that you are using an insecure PIN, because it has a pattern in it.
Through extensive research, our staff has determined that many PINs are insecure because they contain patterns, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. By excluding all combinations of duplicate numbers, keyboard-pattern entries, and significant numbers, we have determined that the most secure PIN you can use is 7439. Please change your PIN to 7439 immediately in order to ensure our company's assets are properly protected.
Thank you for your cooperation.
One of the problems with porting it is: it's damn pretty under Windows. He did a great job designing the GUI. But will it port?
I think you meant to say: "Pants are optional, but recommended for you."
I imagine the developers are going to form a collective bargaining agreement here, and pretty quick. This is exactly the sort of worker unrest that led to the rise of labor unions in the early part of the 20th century. It's almost scary the parallels you can draw between the game developers and the meat packers (read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair again, if you haven't recently.) Rough working conditions, aggrieved employees stirring up dissent; next thing you know they're going to be taking torches and pitchforks into the EA executive suite.
Well, you know what they say: TANSTAAFI. Or should that be TANSTAAFi?
If I were a cashier at Target, I'd expect that kind of treatment. If you go into a job with no real training needed, just the ability to breathe and put barcodes in front of a checkout scanner, you probably aren't expecting a career path that goes far.
But these are professional developers, men and women who have college degrees in Computer Science. They DO HAVE expectations of decent rewards, but they're being treated even worse than the cashiers, in terms of uncompensated mandatory overtime. A cashier in these big companies isn't allowed to work overtime, or work through their breaks. Their managers know that if the employees complain about overwork there's going to be hell to pay, because of the violations of labor laws involved.
Sure, there are independent shops, just like there are Mom'n'Pop grocery stores. But remember, Mom'n'Pop's employees almost never get rich. Sally may have worked the register for 20 years, she might be loved like family, she probably gets invited over for dinner, but she's never going to be driving a Ferrari as a result.
Excuse me? I'm the one saying, "move to Visual Fred (VB.NET) and get over crying about the loss of VB 6", not "we must forever have the one true language of VB 6."
I'm not saying VB 6 itself is necessarily awful, but what I am saying is that because it lowered the bar for development, marginal people with no understanding of design have occasionally been able to torture some VB-esque code into doing something useful. And because of this success, they call themselves programmers.
But a lot of these people typically have no concept of what they're doing. They'll establish a connection to a remote database over a slow WAN, look up the first item in a table, drop the connection, then reestablish it to query a second item in the same table. Or they'll fill their code with timer pops and select case statements in order to do four things, one after the other. I'm not talking about the people who don't get the whole model/view/controller pattern -- I'm talking about people who call Form1.Form_Load() after every mouse click to reset their screens, or people who have database queries in a Text1_KeyDown() event.
This is why VB has such a bad reputation, and why I have very little sympathy for those who wish to keep it around.
We have many dozens of those "hundred line quickies" laying around, and idiots constantly add to the list. Worse, some end up getting used in some kind of production capacity.
But the one thing I find that every quicky has in common is that they eventually need to be maintained, as systems change or get rearranged. And I get to be the one who has to go into to these programs to patch up hard coded paths, change database connection strings, fix missing columns and/or tables, or a myriad of other maintenance issues.
Perhaps you've never dealt with big groups with lots of people at all different skill levels, all making changes. Maybe you don't realize that when external things (such as machine configurations) change that random people will come around to your cube asking why these quicky scripts "don't work," and "please help me fix it." Having a good architecture up front would do a couple things: first and foremost, the need for these "quickies" would dramatically drop, because a well designed system won't need all the bandaids in the first place. Second, if the quickies were well designed they'd be either more maintainable or more resilient to change, or both.
For those few VB 6 users who actually know how to write decent code, I pity you, but consider this your chance to learn Visual Fred. It's almost as fast for the quicky stuff. For those of you who use VB 6 to write "hundred line quickies" and then come to my cube a year later asking me to help mend your patchwork quilt of IF statements, I've got a different bit of advice for you: if you can't pick up Visual Fred, here's a phrase that should help you in your career path: "you want fries with that?"
Oh, if only that were always true. But it's not always allowed, and for good reason.
I've tried to fix an error in a dll once and discovered the application programmer had coded around it. (It was a little endian/big endian byte-ordering problem on a piece of network data.) So when I fixed the bug, the application broke. Was the developer stupid for not filing a bug report asking me to fix the DLL in the first place? Maybe, but he felt he could work with the problem, and he did, making life miserable for everyone later.
The episode really drove home the concept of the entire interface being a contract which includes ALL the behavior, not just the data types. Once you have behavior out there that people are relying on, then you must maintain it, even if it's wrong. Counter-intuitive as all hell that you can't fix a stupid bug, but it happens.
Now, I don't know if VBRUN600.DLL has any bugs that have workarounds like the situation I described, but if it does you can bet that hundreds of those legacy VB 6 programs out there are coded to "take advantage" of them.
And as for "verification" of non-owned code, I've had to go back to Microsoft with a bug in their implementation of the STL. I even sent them a source module that demonstrated the problem. Many people have done so, even though we were simply victims of someone else's bug and in no way responsible for the code. So if nothing else, now you know me :-)
If Microsoft wants to appear serious about having customers develop decent code, pulling them off VB 6 is a good start.
A person becomes a good programmer through education and lots of experience. A good programmer can write good code in virtually any language. (Conversely, a weak programmer can write Visual Basic code in any language.) This cry for "keep our precious VB6" sounds suspiciously like the whining "because C is too hard!"
There is still one valid reason for keeping it alive, however. Many people are still writing code for legacy hardware that isn't capable of running the .NET framework. And to that end, Microsoft's decisions should not automatically mean an increase in Intel's stock price. But wanting Visual Basic to last forever simply because they don't want to learn a better language is not going to gain my sympathy.
If we "give up" and switch to IE because it works, then we've literally given up hope on having standards independent from Microsoft.
The other reason is that as developers we should be used to eating our own dogfood. Or put another way, if people stop bitching about the formatting, it will never get fixed. Not that a year of bitching has gotten it fixed yet, but without the pressure there will never be incentive to fix it.
Check ... check ... hey, is this mic on?
I am seriously trying to find a way to help him recognize that he has responsibilities that are being overlooked by his incessant gameplaying. Because his grades dropped a full letter since signing up for WoW, he's cut off until the situation improves. He even recognizes the problem, but finds himself unwilling / unable to stop playing.
While I can help him control this as long as he lives at home, I know that his future college isn't going to block his WoW access at the firewall. This is something he's going to have to eventually learn how to deal with on his own.
And for anyone who thinks I'm draconian for shutting off his access to a game, fsck off. I'm doing what I consider to be the responsible parent thing here. I'm not enforcing this on you or yours. Raise your own damn kids however you want.
Any reason you slipped your own name into that list? :-)
Go on, be an early adopter. You know you want to ... :-)
Hell, I want to too! I've resisted X-10 since the early '90s because I figured something else better had to be coming along soon (boy was I optimistic.) I just hope that if I do early adopt they don't come out with Zigbee 1.1, Zigbee 1.2, full-speed Zigbee, hi-speed Zigbee, Zigbee 2.0 and Zigbees -a, -b and -g in the next couple of years.
Large møøse on the left
half side of the screen
in the third scene from
the end, given a thorough
grounding in Latin,
French and "O" Level
Geography by BO BENN
Suggestives poses for the
møøse suggested by VIC ROTTER
Antler-care by LIV THATCHER
I found a lot of this out last year when Zigbee first caught my attention. I saw an article in Scientific American where the US Army is experimenting with distributing small RF-linked sound sensors to pinpoint the source of a gunshot in an urban environment. The timing of the report was all that was needed to locate the sniper in about two seconds. I believe they were using Zigbee.
Most of what I posted above was just from documents I've seen on their website, nothing more.
One of its big advantages for home automation is two-way communication. If you press the button for "garage door close", it will transmit and wait for an ACK, so you will know the door is closing. I think bi-di will also allow for "self programming" of your smart remote control. Hit a "program my remote" button on your Zigbee equipped TV, and hit the "learn a device" button on your remote, and the marriage happens. No more pile of remotes -- one will do it. And no more code books for your All In One remote. Plus, I think the pairing can be secured (although not cryptographically secure, it'll still be good enough for your neighbors' remotes to be locked out.)
Because it was first designed for battery powered industrial sensor networks, Zigbee is designed for extremely low power for the longest possible battery life. The transmission starts instantly and is a short burst that is stopped as soon as it's acknowledged. The receiver will come active within 15ms. Zigbee remotes should last longer than IR remotes.
Zigbee allows for 65535 nodes in a network, which is a lot more than the 256 unique addresses in the X-10 namespace. Oh, and in America, Zigbee is 40kbps, which is much, much faster than X-10 over powerlines (which I believe I read is something incredibly slow, like 60 baud.) While still a low-bandwidth network, 40kbps is plenty fast enough for device control, which typically uses very tiny packets of data.
I was disappointed to find that Bluetooth could not become the home automation control protocol. One of the problems with using Bluetooth for remote control is that the discovery and connection process can take 3 or more seconds. While Bluetooth can transmit at a much higher data rate, it takes much longer to start up and more power to do so.
While Bluetooth will still exist for things like headphones, I've decided to get excited about Zigbee instead, and I plan to buy a Zigbee enabled Palm device when they hit the market.
Finally, I'm sure I got plenty of facts wrong above. I'll leave it to someone else to post corrections, I'm going to bed.
'I sold my house earlier this week. Boy, was my landlord pissed.'
Yes, you're right -- without such a standard, the noise "fades" into the background. That doesn't mean it's not loud. It just means you're either used to it, or you've already damaged your hearing.
Sustained noise above 85db requires ear protection, according to OSHA. It's not a "regulatory burden", either -- it's about protecting the only set of ears you'll ever grow. Most computer labs and dinosaur pens I've been in are pretty borderline on the noise level thing.