how a "problem with installation, or other defect" can manage to "spread to other aircraft"? Seems like pretty odd wording for a problem that seems not to have been caused by a virus or worm...
Why couldn't the trains simply be equipped with GPS connected to the on-board computers that control the throttle and brakes? Seems like a pretty simple programming exercise to say "hey, our current coordinates indicate the need for reduced speed", then adjust throttle and/or brakes as required. I understand the need for integration into the greater system to prevent accidents from trains following too closely, etc, but even using GPS as a failsafe mechanism could have prevented this derailment.
I was asking similar questions after the Lac Megantic disaster. Having a train a) apply its own brakes if the train is moving when it shouldn't be, and b) send out a distress call if it can't stop itself, isn't rocket science; and it isn't even expensive. Why is the whole railroad industry on this continent so far behind the technology curve?
...that the data stolen belonged to people whose privacy was already being grossly invaded, rather than to the fuckwits who thought it was a good idea to spy on their family members.
Yes, I know that battery technology isn't quite there yet, a tall water tower for every house or neighbourhood is impractical, and the whole flywheel-in-a-vacuum-can concept hasn't yet lived up to its promise. But really, we NEED to start moving away from 'the grid' as the primary power distribution system. Such a move would hasten the development of viable, economical energy storage methods; incidentally, it would also make moot the arguments about feeding power from household solar panels to the local electrical utility.
The grid is OK as a fallback position, and to provide power to heavy industry because local power storage on that scale probably won't be practical for a long while yet. But the only way we're going to have a resilient system that isn't prone to a large portion of the continent's electricity supply being taken down by an ice storm, (or, God forbid, a terrorist attack), is to start de-centralizing power production and distribution. Yes, there are technical hurdles, but we can get over them. I am less sure that we can get past the entrenched business interests fighting that kind of disruption with all of the resources at their disposal, including the money we pay them.
I wonder if it would be a better world if every word we ever speak was filmed and available for all to see permanently. We often get to know people as we first see them at their best moments but how low are they in their very worst moments? How stable are they in real life? Shouldn't others know when a person is in a defective state of being? For example the pilot that locked the cabin door and flew his plane into the side of a mountain could have been stopped before he acted out.
You wonder? Really? Do you honestly think there's even a shred of a possibility that we would all be better off if we habitually paused to think about and weigh every utterance and action beforehand? Would you consider the loss of all spontaneity for everyone in society a fair price to pay for your incredibly narrow personal vision of safety and security? Also, who the hell are you to judge whether someone is in a "defective state of being"?
I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for.
This, exactly. Google's ideas regarding 'synonyms' for my search terms would be laughable if they didn't waste so much of my time. Also, these days when I do an 'allintext' search it almost always turns up far more results than did the same query without the 'allintext' operator. Now just how in the fuck does that happen?
I would pay two or three hundred dollars a year for access to a search engine with Google's reach and power, but without all the ad-oriented bloat, the lowest-common-denominator attempts at hand-holding, and the Microsoft Clippy-isms. You know - something that's more suitable for real research and for getting a job done than for figuring out where to have dinner or what meaningless bullshit the Kardashians and other such social parasites are up to. And while they're at it, they need to include a way of searching for exactly what I type, including case, punctuation and special characters. And if my search turns up zero results, that's fine. I'd far rather have that than be insulted by Google's insistence that it must have something I'm interested in.
I'm not so naive as to believe that anyone else can replicate Google's massive search capabilities. So I really wish Google would provide a search interface for those of us who have both a good idea of what we're looking for and a clue about how to do research. It would cost them next to nothing, they could charge for it, and they'd be doing the world a favour.
Hell, right now I'd settle for Google circa ten years ago - it was way better than it is now.
Sounds like outsourcing labour to from the US so that a third party catches flack for it should it go south. Canada, who basically has few natural enemies, could end up with a kick me sign on its back because of this.
We Canadians already have a 'kick me' sign on our backs, courtesy of our Prime Minister's insistence on following the US example of poking its nose into places where it doesn't belong. And he keeps making the sign bigger and more taunting. I have yet to figure out whether it's because he has a 'Me too!' inferiority complex, is inherently stupid and/or evil, or is a tool of the corporations that benefit from war and from a compliant populace. Possibly a combination of the above, with perhaps a dash of some other psychological and/or intellectual defects yet to be determined.
...don't know why anyone would buy this rather than Dell's XPS 13... (Too bad it doesn't have a trackpoint.)
You answered your own question - no Trackpoint. On several occasions I've used my Lenovo to do CAD work without a mouse. Not the best for a long session of schematic capture or PCB layout, but actually quite viable. Wouldn't even attempt it on a Touchpad. And even in day-to-day browsing and e-mailing, Trackpoints rule and Touchpads drool.
...for the rest of the world that counts dates logically
Came here to say this but you beat me to it. So I'll just add that if we're going to use the American system of dating, (and not add in the hours, minutes, and seconds), then Pi Day is NEXT year. Pi rounded to four decimal places is 3.1416.
I have grown really weary of this attitude that just because certain people are abusing the system, then the system itself is bad. That's a wrong-headed and dangerous approach to problem solving. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as the saying goes.
Which 'system' are you talking about? The patent system, or the larger military-industrial corporocratic political system which has undermined, perverted, and co-opted the patent system, (along with so many other things), in a manner which probably has its founders spinning in their graves?
Since many big corporations today have been shown to be corrupt, should we get rid of corporations?
That may be necessary in the short term as the only means to counter the massive power they have usurped. Yes, we need corporations - but they need to be society's servants, not its masters as they are now.
It's a people problem, not a system problem.
No, it's definitely a system problem - unless your definition of 'people' agrees with the law's definition, which extends personhood to corporations.
And the ultimate answer is: the patent system exists for YOUR benefit. And you DO benefit from it. We need to stop abuses of the patent system, not scrap it altogether.
The patent system no longer serves MY benefit - it primarily serves those who are already rich enough to defend their patents and to use them as weapons in patent wars which stifle innovation and waste tremendous amounts of resources with no net benefit for society. I agree that we need something like what the patent system used to be; however, trumpeting the cause of 'patent reform' is rather like crying out for a Band-Aid as a treatment for disembowelment. The brokenness of the patent system is a symptom of much larger problems, not a root cause. The real work needs to be done much higher in the pyramid - then things like a sane and functional patent system will follow naturally.
Apparently the banks and credit card companies in some countries will send you a new card without the RFID on request. But here in Canada at least one company simply refuses to do this. My bank DID disable contactless payment on my new debit card in their records, but of course the RFID is still physically intact so there's no guarantee that it won't suddenly start working as a result of some administrative fuckup. I'm going to call about my new credit card, but I'm pretty sure they'll tell my politely to piss off. At that time I plan to get out my drill, put a hole in the appropriate place, and test. If it disables Tap and Pay, then all of my cards will get the same treatment.
Yes, Tab Mix Plus is essential for me. I use it extensively to do things like manage saving and restoring of sessions, change the font and text colour of tabs for instant identification of state, undoing a Close Tab command, closing a tab by double-clicking the tab, and opening a new tab by double clicking the tab bar. When I'm forced to use a browser that doesn't have it I go a little bit crazy and my efficiency drops enormously.
Aside from the usual security and privacy addons, another one I find indispensable is Flashblock. I tend to have many YouTube tabs open at once, and Flashblock calms my urge to strangle and dismember whatever fuckwit decided that videos should play automatically as soon as the page loads.
The USB 3.0 sticks are pretty fast and 128GB sticks are getting cheaper all the time, with cheap 256GB units on the horizon. They are light, small, have good retention, and make it easy to divide your data types into separate physical units so if you only want to retrieve the family photos you don't need to pick up the tax returns and such as well.
Everybody and his dog who happens to be an Excel whiz or a Word macro expert is arguably a coder. As are a lot of people who call themselves programmers. Do we want more of that skillset? Or do we want more people who can take a longer, more structured, project-oriented view and who write maintainable, extensible programs? I'm asking the question in all seriousness.
One thing I don't get - why is the West - Europe and Americas - continuing to poke their noses into other countries' business? Yes, terrorists need to be stopped - but how about we just stop creating terrorists? If the US and other countries hadn't been massively interfering in Middle East politics for decades, propping up dictators in the name of Big Oil, causing wars, and doing all sorts of other shitty things, do you really think even the batshit-craziest of Muslims would be so upset about some cartoons that they'd come to our countries to commit suicide just so they could kill us? I sincerely doubt it. No, we went out of our way repeatedly to make enemies in the Middle East long before Charlie Hebdo added one more insult to a long list of grievous injuries.
Have you ever read Frank Herbert's 'Dune'? The Fremen are an object lesson in what happens when people with an extreme religious streak whom you've oppressed for a long time finally acquire the wherewithal to fight back. And interestingly enough, Fremen culture was clearly modelled on Middle Eastern cultures.
I was getting ready to tell you that bullshit flag wasn't gonna fly, as I also was under the impression that Japan would have surrendered soon even if the bombs hadn't been dropped. But it seems there's still quite a bit of controversy regarding the point:
At least for automobiles, there's a simple legislative fix for this - if only government had the guts. Mandate that EVERY automotive engineer be forced to spend two months every year, (or one year in every four, or whatever), working in a dealership garage as an auto mechanic fixing the cars his company produced. A few experiences with having to lift an engine to replace an oil filter or a spark plug, (all the while listenening to the taunts of the 'real' mechanics he's working with), and that kind of design stupidity would stop right quick.
Yeah, I know it's a fantasy - but sometimes imagining a world where the government looks out for the interests of its citizens and the future of our planet by actually calling corporations to heel is all that keeps me going - especially when I'm faced with how determinedly stupid the human race can be...
I often want to see a new movie at the cinema. But then I think of the car and bank commercials, trivia games, and other assorted pre-movie corporate crap that has become part of the standard cinema experience, and I decide to wait for the DVD release. I gotta wonder how many other people are staying away for the same reasons.
I have had myopia since I was 12, and now have age-onset presbyopia aw well. I tried progressives for a week, then took them back and exchanged them for my normal ~-5.5 diopter prescription. Even for regular use just walking around, I found the weird distortions that varied drastically as I turned my head were just too obtrusive and disorienting. And I haven't been able to find contacts that don't make my eyes gum up and blur. But if I could wear contacts, I would have my optometrist prescribe them to under-correct for distance, so I could leave my glasses off for computer work and most casual situations. Then, for driving, or anything else that required good distance vision, I would have glasses with a small negative diopter value such that the combination of glasses and contacts would provide the necessary distance correction.
The more normal approach would be to have contacts to fully correct for distance and have reading glasses. But during the short time I wore contacts, I'd get panicky when I couldn't lay hands on my readers and was unable to see well up close, whereas being unable to see well at a distance bothers me much less. Now I just have two sets of glasses, and really need three sets. It sucks, but so far I've been unable to find a better solution.
Slashdot Mirror
how a "problem with installation, or other defect" can manage to "spread to other aircraft"? Seems like pretty odd wording for a problem that seems not to have been caused by a virus or worm...
Why couldn't the trains simply be equipped with GPS connected to the on-board computers that control the throttle and brakes? Seems like a pretty simple programming exercise to say "hey, our current coordinates indicate the need for reduced speed", then adjust throttle and/or brakes as required. I understand the need for integration into the greater system to prevent accidents from trains following too closely, etc, but even using GPS as a failsafe mechanism could have prevented this derailment.
I was asking similar questions after the Lac Megantic disaster. Having a train a) apply its own brakes if the train is moving when it shouldn't be, and b) send out a distress call if it can't stop itself, isn't rocket science; and it isn't even expensive. Why is the whole railroad industry on this continent so far behind the technology curve?
...that the data stolen belonged to people whose privacy was already being grossly invaded, rather than to the fuckwits who thought it was a good idea to spy on their family members.
Local. Storage.
Yes, I know that battery technology isn't quite there yet, a tall water tower for every house or neighbourhood is impractical, and the whole flywheel-in-a-vacuum-can concept hasn't yet lived up to its promise. But really, we NEED to start moving away from 'the grid' as the primary power distribution system. Such a move would hasten the development of viable, economical energy storage methods; incidentally, it would also make moot the arguments about feeding power from household solar panels to the local electrical utility.
The grid is OK as a fallback position, and to provide power to heavy industry because local power storage on that scale probably won't be practical for a long while yet. But the only way we're going to have a resilient system that isn't prone to a large portion of the continent's electricity supply being taken down by an ice storm, (or, God forbid, a terrorist attack), is to start de-centralizing power production and distribution. Yes, there are technical hurdles, but we can get over them. I am less sure that we can get past the entrenched business interests fighting that kind of disruption with all of the resources at their disposal, including the money we pay them.
I wonder if it would be a better world if every word we ever speak was filmed and available for all to see permanently. We often get to know people as we first see them at their best moments but how low are they in their very worst moments? How stable are they in real life? Shouldn't others know when a person is in a defective state of being? For example the pilot that locked the cabin door and flew his plane into the side of a mountain could have been stopped before he acted out.
You wonder? Really? Do you honestly think there's even a shred of a possibility that we would all be better off if we habitually paused to think about and weigh every utterance and action beforehand? Would you consider the loss of all spontaneity for everyone in society a fair price to pay for your incredibly narrow personal vision of safety and security? Also, who the hell are you to judge whether someone is in a "defective state of being"?
I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for.
This, exactly. Google's ideas regarding 'synonyms' for my search terms would be laughable if they didn't waste so much of my time. Also, these days when I do an 'allintext' search it almost always turns up far more results than did the same query without the 'allintext' operator. Now just how in the fuck does that happen?
I would pay two or three hundred dollars a year for access to a search engine with Google's reach and power, but without all the ad-oriented bloat, the lowest-common-denominator attempts at hand-holding, and the Microsoft Clippy-isms. You know - something that's more suitable for real research and for getting a job done than for figuring out where to have dinner or what meaningless bullshit the Kardashians and other such social parasites are up to. And while they're at it, they need to include a way of searching for exactly what I type, including case, punctuation and special characters. And if my search turns up zero results, that's fine. I'd far rather have that than be insulted by Google's insistence that it must have something I'm interested in.
I'm not so naive as to believe that anyone else can replicate Google's massive search capabilities. So I really wish Google would provide a search interface for those of us who have both a good idea of what we're looking for and a clue about how to do research. It would cost them next to nothing, they could charge for it, and they'd be doing the world a favour.
Hell, right now I'd settle for Google circa ten years ago - it was way better than it is now.
...but wake me up when they can graft a Trackpoint onto my hand. That's something I'd be excited about!
...and a student sneaks over to it and pencils in a lewd picture on the cover.
I agree with almost everything you said. But in what way is a picture of two men kissing "lewd"?
...for web sites that are https-capable to start refusing all non-https connections. That might go along way to ensuring the ubiquity of https...
Sounds like outsourcing labour to from the US so that a third party catches flack for it should it go south. Canada, who basically has few natural enemies, could end up with a kick me sign on its back because of this.
We Canadians already have a 'kick me' sign on our backs, courtesy of our Prime Minister's insistence on following the US example of poking its nose into places where it doesn't belong. And he keeps making the sign bigger and more taunting. I have yet to figure out whether it's because he has a 'Me too!' inferiority complex, is inherently stupid and/or evil, or is a tool of the corporations that benefit from war and from a compliant populace. Possibly a combination of the above, with perhaps a dash of some other psychological and/or intellectual defects yet to be determined.
...don't know why anyone would buy this rather than Dell's XPS 13... (Too bad it doesn't have a trackpoint.)
You answered your own question - no Trackpoint. On several occasions I've used my Lenovo to do CAD work without a mouse. Not the best for a long session of schematic capture or PCB layout, but actually quite viable. Wouldn't even attempt it on a Touchpad. And even in day-to-day browsing and e-mailing, Trackpoints rule and Touchpads drool.
...for the rest of the world that counts dates logically
Came here to say this but you beat me to it. So I'll just add that if we're going to use the American system of dating, (and not add in the hours, minutes, and seconds), then Pi Day is NEXT year. Pi rounded to four decimal places is 3.1416.
I have grown really weary of this attitude that just because certain people are abusing the system, then the system itself is bad. That's a wrong-headed and dangerous approach to problem solving. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as the saying goes.
Which 'system' are you talking about? The patent system, or the larger military-industrial corporocratic political system which has undermined, perverted, and co-opted the patent system, (along with so many other things), in a manner which probably has its founders spinning in their graves?
Since many big corporations today have been shown to be corrupt, should we get rid of corporations?
That may be necessary in the short term as the only means to counter the massive power they have usurped. Yes, we need corporations - but they need to be society's servants, not its masters as they are now.
It's a people problem, not a system problem.
No, it's definitely a system problem - unless your definition of 'people' agrees with the law's definition, which extends personhood to corporations.
And the ultimate answer is: the patent system exists for YOUR benefit. And you DO benefit from it. We need to stop abuses of the patent system, not scrap it altogether.
The patent system no longer serves MY benefit - it primarily serves those who are already rich enough to defend their patents and to use them as weapons in patent wars which stifle innovation and waste tremendous amounts of resources with no net benefit for society. I agree that we need something like what the patent system used to be; however, trumpeting the cause of 'patent reform' is rather like crying out for a Band-Aid as a treatment for disembowelment. The brokenness of the patent system is a symptom of much larger problems, not a root cause. The real work needs to be done much higher in the pyramid - then things like a sane and functional patent system will follow naturally.
Time to make a Faraday Cage wallet.
Time to permanently disable contactless payment on all your cards.
Apparently the banks and credit card companies in some countries will send you a new card without the RFID on request. But here in Canada at least one company simply refuses to do this. My bank DID disable contactless payment on my new debit card in their records, but of course the RFID is still physically intact so there's no guarantee that it won't suddenly start working as a result of some administrative fuckup. I'm going to call about my new credit card, but I'm pretty sure they'll tell my politely to piss off. At that time I plan to get out my drill, put a hole in the appropriate place, and test. If it disables Tap and Pay, then all of my cards will get the same treatment.
Yes, Tab Mix Plus is essential for me. I use it extensively to do things like manage saving and restoring of sessions, change the font and text colour of tabs for instant identification of state, undoing a Close Tab command, closing a tab by double-clicking the tab, and opening a new tab by double clicking the tab bar. When I'm forced to use a browser that doesn't have it I go a little bit crazy and my efficiency drops enormously.
Aside from the usual security and privacy addons, another one I find indispensable is Flashblock. I tend to have many YouTube tabs open at once, and Flashblock calms my urge to strangle and dismember whatever fuckwit decided that videos should play automatically as soon as the page loads.
The USB 3.0 sticks are pretty fast and 128GB sticks are getting cheaper all the time, with cheap 256GB units on the horizon. They are light, small, have good retention, and make it easy to divide your data types into separate physical units so if you only want to retrieve the family photos you don't need to pick up the tax returns and such as well.
Let's teach more Americans to code.
Everybody and his dog who happens to be an Excel whiz or a Word macro expert is arguably a coder. As are a lot of people who call themselves programmers. Do we want more of that skillset? Or do we want more people who can take a longer, more structured, project-oriented view and who write maintainable, extensible programs? I'm asking the question in all seriousness.
FTA:
According to the prosecutor, the evidence against them includes finding numerous copies of a book called “Against Democracy”...
By the Spanish judge's logic, closing the curtains in your house and owning a copy of Mein Kampf would also cause him to view you as a potential Nazi.
Perhaps those who control the police are the only ones who are allowed to be "against democracy"...
One thing I don't get - why is the West - Europe and Americas - continuing to poke their noses into other countries' business? Yes, terrorists need to be stopped - but how about we just stop creating terrorists? If the US and other countries hadn't been massively interfering in Middle East politics for decades, propping up dictators in the name of Big Oil, causing wars, and doing all sorts of other shitty things, do you really think even the batshit-craziest of Muslims would be so upset about some cartoons that they'd come to our countries to commit suicide just so they could kill us? I sincerely doubt it. No, we went out of our way repeatedly to make enemies in the Middle East long before Charlie Hebdo added one more insult to a long list of grievous injuries.
Have you ever read Frank Herbert's 'Dune'? The Fremen are an object lesson in what happens when people with an extreme religious streak whom you've oppressed for a long time finally acquire the wherewithal to fight back. And interestingly enough, Fremen culture was clearly modelled on Middle Eastern cultures.
Well spoken sir, and well thought out. I wish I had mod points.
I was getting ready to tell you that bullshit flag wasn't gonna fly, as I also was under the impression that Japan would have surrendered soon even if the bombs hadn't been dropped. But it seems there's still quite a bit of controversy regarding the point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
So your call of bullshit may or may not be correct, but we'll probably never know definitively one way or the other.
"...we'd like to make that available to the whole world."
Yup, they make your 'stuff' available to the world. Even when you don't want them to.
At least for automobiles, there's a simple legislative fix for this - if only government had the guts. Mandate that EVERY automotive engineer be forced to spend two months every year, (or one year in every four, or whatever), working in a dealership garage as an auto mechanic fixing the cars his company produced. A few experiences with having to lift an engine to replace an oil filter or a spark plug, (all the while listenening to the taunts of the 'real' mechanics he's working with), and that kind of design stupidity would stop right quick.
Yeah, I know it's a fantasy - but sometimes imagining a world where the government looks out for the interests of its citizens and the future of our planet by actually calling corporations to heel is all that keeps me going - especially when I'm faced with how determinedly stupid the human race can be...
I often want to see a new movie at the cinema. But then I think of the car and bank commercials, trivia games, and other assorted pre-movie corporate crap that has become part of the standard cinema experience, and I decide to wait for the DVD release. I gotta wonder how many other people are staying away for the same reasons.
I have had myopia since I was 12, and now have age-onset presbyopia aw well. I tried progressives for a week, then took them back and exchanged them for my normal ~-5.5 diopter prescription. Even for regular use just walking around, I found the weird distortions that varied drastically as I turned my head were just too obtrusive and disorienting. And I haven't been able to find contacts that don't make my eyes gum up and blur. But if I could wear contacts, I would have my optometrist prescribe them to under-correct for distance, so I could leave my glasses off for computer work and most casual situations. Then, for driving, or anything else that required good distance vision, I would have glasses with a small negative diopter value such that the combination of glasses and contacts would provide the necessary distance correction.
The more normal approach would be to have contacts to fully correct for distance and have reading glasses. But during the short time I wore contacts, I'd get panicky when I couldn't lay hands on my readers and was unable to see well up close, whereas being unable to see well at a distance bothers me much less. Now I just have two sets of glasses, and really need three sets. It sucks, but so far I've been unable to find a better solution.