My plan has zero establishment cost, zero prominute cost for the first 120 minutes, zero SMS-cost for the first 90 sms every month, zero everything.
It is -free-. Assuming you don't use more than 120 minutes/month and not more than 90 SMS/month, you never pay ANYTHING to the company, not a single cent.
despite the fanatical rantings of RMS and other drinkers of the Koolaid, most people who are using computers aren't going to be able to "hack the code" even if all the specification are open and all the necessary information is available.
Certainly correct. Most people, even most people who -are- professional computer-programmers, are never going to change even a single line of source-code in say their kernel.
The fallacy though, is to assume you don't BENEFIT from it being allowed just because you PERSONALLY don't do it. That is patently false.
I don't -personally- change my kernel. But I do benefit from the fact that OTHER people are allowed to change the kernel (and give me the results).
The first order effect is positive, without a question, yes.
-after- I email the mp3 to my girlfriend, assuming she wants it, she has something she didn't have before, and nobody has lost anything, so humanity as such is sligthly richer.
This is the fundamental conflict of copyright: it is meant to stimulate the creation of new works, but it does this by LESSENING the value of existing works. (A work that is enjoyed by *everyone* who wants to is more worth than one that is enjoyed only be a few)
I think this bargain is obsolete. It was a good one when it was new. Back then, copying required expensive printing-presses and physical paper and the like. It was no LARGE detriment that copyrigth meant a copy of a book cost $10, rather than $7. (since the MAJORITY of the cost was elsewhere anyway).
Today, however, copyright means a legal copy of a new musical album costs $15 rather than $0.015 or thereabouts, we've come to the point where copyright is responsible for in practice the ENTIRE cost of distribution.
Worse; of those $15, only a miniscule part actually go to the creatives who made the work. Most is lost in the machinery. So we end up paying $15, and stimulating creative works by perhaps $2 -- a monumental waste.
I'm personally in favour of a flat-rate culture-tax. It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternatives. (but I'd be happy to hear about it if someone has ideas for even better systems)
It's a fairly safe bet if your data is -not- backed up.
The data I care about exists in atleast 3 copies, on 3 different continents, I think it'd take a pretty serious hit to civilization itself to destroy them all.
In contrast, the books I care about could all be lost as the result of something as trivial as a single fire or flooding in a single location.
Are you suggesting that -small- objects should survive re-entry *better* than large objects ? Because that sure as hell seems to be what you're saying.
A small object has a much LARGER cross-section-to-mass ratio (because cross-section scales with the square of the size whereas mass scales with the cube of the size), so it will experience a much LARGER deceleration than a large object. The practical result is that SMALL objects that enter the atmosphere will burn up whereas large ones can get trough.
The disk survived because most of the deceleration had already happened by the time the shuttle broke apart, it was protected by the structure of the shuttle (including the heat-shield) for most of re-entry.
Drop a unshielded HDD into the atmosphere at orbital velocity, and you'd be left with a clump of slag, if that, more likely it'd completely disintegrate.
There's no reason to be paranoid. In practice, a single overwrite with random data is sufficient to ensure that nobody will read it. There are theorethical attacks that -may- in -principle- be able to do it, but they are just that -- theorethical.
Yes, if there was stuff on the hard-disc where you had honest reason to fear that the NSA would spend a hundred man-years and a shitload of money to get some glimpses, you migth worry.
But for ordinary run-of-the-mill data, that's just not gonna happen.
Overwriting the entire platter with random data, and thereafter selling the disk on Ebay or whatever is in practice perfectly safe. The main pitfall is making sure that you actually do write over the entire platter (not just all files, for example, because areas of the disc which don't hold files -now- can and will still hold fragments of or entire files from earlier.)
cat/dev/urandom >/dev/sda
Will do you nicely.
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna
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Hardly a convincing argument. There -are- actual swordfigthers, f1-pilots, commando-soldiers and mafia-members too. Nevertheless when I play one of these characters, nobody assumes I'm -actually- the character that I play.
So why should they assume I'm -actually- a female if I play one ?
And yes, there are games that let you essentially choose the "race" of your human, for example in some you can customize hair, skin-tone facial features, body-build etc and you can easily pick features to look asian, or african or whatever. Second Life for example.
I think it's something else entirely: That some insecure male game-players would -like- to have more ACTUAL female players around (and not just female characters), for the fairly simple reason that young males in general like to have young females around (and vice versa) to flirt with, sometimes to start relationships with and so on.
Since many play with blurry lines between character and player (it's not as if RL-events and issues are never discussed by the characters in SL or WOW), they'd much prefer it if the female character that their male character flirts with, also had a female player.
It doesn't bother them to the same degree if the asian they've been flirting with turns out to actually be played by say an italian or Swedish girl.
It is -certainly- unenforcable in a free state. (as in not a police state)
Copying a file is a utterly trivial operation with todays technology, to the point where Grandma will do it in a split-second without even thinking about it. It's -literally- something you can do (and typically do) by moving your fingers a few cm, pretty close to the smallest effort imaginable. Distributing a file, let's say by emailing it to a friend, is equally trivial and common.
Both are things you can do (and typically do) in your own home.
This single fact is (imho) the best argument against current copyright-legislation; by nessecity we need to EITHER accept that a huge part of copying is simply unenforcable (and undiscoverable), OR we need to enact a extreme police-state. (to the point where the state would -discover- that the file you email your girlfriend -today- is a picture that is copyright someone else whereas the one you sent yesterday was a photo you yourself took.)
This is -MUCH- to high a price to pay for an activity that causes no direct harm. It may cause -INDIRECT- harm in lessening intensives for creation of new works, the jury is still out on this, but it certainly causes no DIRECT harm. Nobody is any worse off 1 second -after- you email that mp3 to your girlfriend than they where 1 second -before- you did it.
We should stimulate creativity. We should even do it MORE than we do today. But the method currently employed, copyright, is simply obsolete.
Actually there is, but only if it's direct line-of-sight, AND you use a directed antenna and receiver.
Somehow "broadcasting" energy and have a significant portion of it picked up by devices in the viscinity will never work. (unless you're happy with 0.01% efficiency or something)
Transmitting say microwaves using a parabolic antenna and aiming it at a rectenna tuned for the frequency used can give you upwards of 80% efficiency, and may some day be used to transmit power from solar power sattelites and down to earth, or something.
It'll never power your car...
Now, inductive short-range coupling for low currents work okay. The idea of the splashpad ain't so stupid: a surface to place gadgets on and have them recharge or run off power in the surface with no metallic contacts.
This -could- be practical, the average household have half a dozen or more gadgets that need periodic recharge (mobile phones, remote controls, dect-phones, mp3-players etc) typically each with their own one-off charger, which is a mess. If all of them would recharge simply by being put on a special shelf, that would be an improvement, but that's a much more limited application anyway, besides, much of the same advantage would be had if the makers would simply AGREE on a charging-interface, even if it required a plug.
If your relationship to your SO is such that failure to respond to an email because the SO sent it to the WRONG adress ends your relationship, then really, that relationship was beyond hope a LONG time earlier, if indeed ever it had a chance.
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna
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This is true. But it's a hard problem to solve. There are literally an infinite number of things you may want to do. Any current game has a damn hard time allowing even the tiniest fraction of them. I don't think it's really solvable without a human GM.
You also can't crawl under a table, set fire to a house, pull someones left ear or, for that matter, kill Martin DEAD and join the dark side. (anyone "important" is merely "unconscious")
It's a pre-written story. You can choose what -parts- of it to tell in which sequence. But you can't really change the story as such.
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna
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A very strange thing to do anyways. If I can pretend to be a sword-swinging dragon-killing fireball-slinging Lizardman spellsword living in a completely alien world, then why can't I also pretend to be a -female- such ?
I mean, it's not as if changing the sex is a major deal, compared to changing all that other stuff. Nobody in any game assume that I'm ACTUALLY a Lizardman, so why would they assume I'm ACTUALLY female ?
You get it wrong. This is not the same thing. It does not mean reducing comfort at all in most cases.
The problem is, transporting power costs MORE in peak-times (both due to resistive heating, and because extra use in peak times is what triggers the need for grid-updates), but people use power as if the price was constant.
My mother has a smart water-heater that adapts to actual load, and gets cheap power when the load is low. The practical result is she saves money, the power-company saves money, and the comfort is identical.
A normal water-heater may have a thermostat that turns on the heating when water-temperature drops to 60C, and turns it off when water-temperature reaches 70C.
My mothers heater instead normally heats the water to 75C, turning on the heater at 70C if loads are low (and power cheap) but turning on the heater at 55C if loads are high (and power expensive). (furthermore it pre-mixes cold water so that delivered water is always 55-60C, regardless of the temperature in the tank.
Where's the drawback ?
Same goes for a freezer. It wants to stay permanently -15C to -25C, but it make precisely NO difference at all to you if that is done by a dumb termostat that always turns on cooling at -18C and turns it off at -22C, or if it's done by a smarter termostat that cools to -25C on cheap power, but lets the temperature drift upwards to -18C when power is expensive. You food stays solidly frozen the entire time regardless. (infact the smart one will be better at keeping a stable temperature so you'll get less ice-crystals and HIGHER quality food-storage)
This makes it significantly -worse- if the problem is a large peak in electricity-consumption, and lots of people want to shower at the same time, for example in the morning.
My mother has a smart water-heater, because she has power-pricing that is such that the first 3KW she draws is very cheap, but usage above this costs much more.
So, it normally tries to heat the water to 75C, which is then automatically mixed with cold water to deliver 60C water. If, however current power-usage is above 3KW, it lets the temperature sink all the way to 55C before turning on the heating.
A tankless heater would be -horrible- for this pricing-structure. Most of the time use nothing, but some of the time peaking into many KWs.
Except, offcourse that it's not all that trivial to create a "radius" with the fresnel-plate on one end and the camera-stuff on the other, and rotate the entire assembly quickly and accurately (to within less than a mm) when the radius is a dozen miles long.
Indeed, unless the "radius" is a rod of unobtanium, flexing and bending is going to make it completely impractical.
Arming all household would mean putting 100.000 extra weapons in my city alone, complete with ammo, and easily available in the bedroom, if you want to reduce anything OTHER than burglary, those weapons also need to be carried when outside the house.
All this, for defending against something which basically never happens, namely that someone is murdered by a stranger breaking into their house. This has not happened even once in the years I've live here in this city. Yeah, there's been killings, not a -single- one where I could see bystanders or victims being armed as helpful though.
If little Bobby is hurt at all. The most likely persons to hurt him are his immediate family and friends. How many times in *your* life have you experienced a situation where you'd thougth; if only I had a loaded gun in my hand -now- ? If it's like -common- did you consider living somewhere OTHER than a crime-infested cesspool ?
Actually, my city has aproximately 115000 inhabitants in the city, and aproximately a quarter million in the metropolitan area. But nevermind.
I did not mean that the murders where ignorable as in they do not matter.
I meant they where ignorable as in if you care about the wellbeing of your family, there are going to be many other areas where you achieve a lot MORE with a lot LESS effort.
It is not worth it spending $5K and some time and some effort to reduce a 1:1 million risk if the same cash and the same effort could instead reduce a 1:100000 risk. If your house is burning and the sink is dripping you DONT fix the dripping sink first and the burning house second, you do it the other way around.
Do you -really- feel the need for a citation to believe my claim that having loaded guns around in situations where couples attack eachothers (for whatever reason) is unlikely to be helpful ? (If they're sensible, it'll make no difference whatsoever though, but sometimes people ARENT sensible, as evidenced by the fact that people ARE killed by partners regularily)
It's a bit like people driving their kids everywhere because the streets are so full of crimes, and then not realizing that those very same kids are infact much MUCH more likely to suffer or die because of too little physical activity than they are because of crime, so infact the action HARMS the children.
It's long-term though, and that's why people don't see it clearly. They worry that the child will be [insert-bad-thing-here] today. They -dont- worry that the child will be overweight in 5 years. That he/she will have (larger) problems finding a partner in 10 years, get diabetes in 40 years or die from overweight-induced circulatory disease in 50. Even though all of these latter problems are much more likely. (over 30% die from heart-or-circulatory problems, this risk is more than halved in a person of normal weight, as opposed to a overweight one)
Actually, more likely it's because they don't NEED to.
If the NSA -really- wants to read the files you store in an encrypted partition, there are many ways to do it that are MUCH simpler than say cracking AES.
For example, they can break into your house and insert a keylogger in your machine or keyboard, wait until you've used the encrypted machine, then clone your hard-disk and decrypt it using the password from the keylogger. You'd not notice anything. Total investment, a couple of hours for a pair of field-agents. Trivial.
Most peoples security is so lax that this kind of stuff is easy. ANY amount of computer-security is completely trivially breakable aslong as there is no PHYSICAL security.
If you can HONESTLY say there is NO way the NSA could get 10 minutes alone with your machine without you noticing it, THEN it may be time to start worrying about other stuff.
For 99.9% of all people though, getting physical access to their machines is easy for a dedicated and resourceful adversary.
That's a good trick, assuming you mean 9-character rather than 9-digit (I don't know anyone who uses pure numbers for passwords)
There's around 100 characters one can use in a password, so 9-characters means there are 100^9 possibilities. That is 10^18. Each hash typically takes 16 bytes or thereabouts, so that works out to 1.6 * 10^19 bytes. A terabyte is (well, depending on if you mean 1000^X or 1024^x) 10^12 bytes, so that is 1.6 * 10^7 terabytes, or 16000000 terabytes.
That's more than "a bunch" of diskdrives, it is about 8000 metric tonnes of disk-drives, or about 40 A380s FULLY loaded with diskdrives. Nevermind powersupplies, mounting, and assorted stuff.
Now, if he limits himself to only 9-character passwords that consist of lower-case-letters and digits only, then it's only 36^9 hashes, or aproximately 1700 terabyte-disks. That is still more than "a bunch", but sligthly more practical. Cut it to 8-character and it's actually practical though.
This is unfortunately partly true. The good thing is though, that if there exist well-working open source drivers for Linux, then by nessecity, the documentation needed for writing drivers for other OSes is available.
This sucks, but atleast it is MUCH better than having to guess and reverse-engineer to figure out how to use a device.
So, even for BSD-fans, a device that is supported (by an open driver!) in Linux is much preferable to one that is totally closed.
Offcourse, if all you get is a -closed- driver for Linux, then it's no good at all, and that goes for BSD AND Linux-folks, closed drivers suck.
They are tools that should be used by a web developer to run through and make sure they can be as close to valid as possible but I am willing to bet that out of the top 100 sites on the internet, the front page of all of them will produce Markup validation errors.
How much do you feel like betting ? You are wrong. You are -right- that it is quite -rare- for a site to have a completely validationg frontpage. But it's not unheard of, and infact among the top 100 there are pages with 100% valid HTML/XHTML. One example is Wikipedia, both www.wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org (which is the nr 7 website on the planet if you believe Alexa. Even if you -dont- believe Alexa, its not really possible to deny that Wikipedia is a top100 site)
They -flee- because the potential REWARD for staying is smaller than the potential RISK. (which includes the risk of being shot)
Thing is, most burglaries are not discovered before the thief is long gone. Given this, what is the point in staying in your house and risk detection or conflict just for a few more trinkets when they can much more easily leave and break into another house a few miles away ?
It's not just the risk of being shot. It's the fact that you may be able to give a useful description to the police. You -certainly- will immediately contact the police when they leave, so they risk cops on their tail. Unless they tie you up which could make noise and means physically engaging you which is, again, more risk than it's worth.
Burglars, overwhelmingly, want EASY money. It's much EASIER stealing from people who are not there, or who are sleeping soundly.
It is subject to where you live. If you live in a cesspool of crime, then perhaps the numbers look different. If you do, moving is going to be the better option, especially since you can't protect your entire family at gunpoint 24/7. (you -do- want your children to be able to play outdoors freely, don't you ?)
Where I live these numbers are -conservative- because the risk of being murdered in a crime is essentially -zero-. (TOTAL count of murders last year: 3.8/million people, murders by person not close to vicrim: 0.7/million And I should add that those 0.7 are mostly young males dying as the result of infighting among criminal gangs, if you're -not- part of such a gang, your real odds are more along the lines of 0.1/million.
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No. I mean -free- minutes.
My plan has zero establishment cost, zero prominute cost for the first 120 minutes, zero SMS-cost for the first 90 sms every month, zero everything.
It is -free-. Assuming you don't use more than 120 minutes/month and not more than 90 SMS/month, you never pay ANYTHING to the company, not a single cent.
despite the fanatical rantings of RMS and other drinkers of the Koolaid, most people who are using computers aren't going to be able to "hack the code" even if all the specification are open and all the necessary information is available.
Certainly correct. Most people, even most people who -are- professional computer-programmers, are never going to change even a single line of source-code in say their kernel.
The fallacy though, is to assume you don't BENEFIT from it being allowed just because you PERSONALLY don't do it. That is patently false.
I don't -personally- change my kernel. But I do benefit from the fact that OTHER people are allowed to change the kernel (and give me the results).
The first order effect is positive, without a question, yes.
-after- I email the mp3 to my girlfriend, assuming she wants it, she has something she didn't have before, and nobody has lost anything, so humanity as such is sligthly richer.
This is the fundamental conflict of copyright: it is meant to stimulate the creation of new works, but it does this by LESSENING the value of existing works. (A work that is enjoyed by *everyone* who wants to is more worth than one that is enjoyed only be a few)
I think this bargain is obsolete. It was a good one when it was new. Back then, copying required expensive printing-presses and physical paper and the like. It was no LARGE detriment that copyrigth meant a copy of a book cost $10, rather than $7. (since the MAJORITY of the cost was elsewhere anyway).
Today, however, copyright means a legal copy of a new musical album costs $15 rather than $0.015 or thereabouts, we've come to the point where copyright is responsible for in practice the ENTIRE cost of distribution.
Worse; of those $15, only a miniscule part actually go to the creatives who made the work. Most is lost in the machinery. So we end up paying $15, and stimulating creative works by perhaps $2 -- a monumental waste.
I'm personally in favour of a flat-rate culture-tax. It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternatives. (but I'd be happy to hear about it if someone has ideas for even better systems)
It's a fairly safe bet if your data is -not- backed up.
The data I care about exists in atleast 3 copies, on 3 different continents, I think it'd take a pretty serious hit to civilization itself to destroy them all.
In contrast, the books I care about could all be lost as the result of something as trivial as a single fire or flooding in a single location.
You're silly.
Are you suggesting that -small- objects should survive re-entry *better* than large objects ? Because that sure as hell seems to be what you're saying.
A small object has a much LARGER cross-section-to-mass ratio (because cross-section scales with the square of the size whereas mass scales with the cube of the size), so it will experience a much LARGER deceleration than a large object. The practical result is that SMALL objects that enter the atmosphere will burn up whereas large ones can get trough.
The disk survived because most of the deceleration had already happened by the time the shuttle broke apart, it was protected by the structure of the shuttle (including the heat-shield) for most of re-entry.
Drop a unshielded HDD into the atmosphere at orbital velocity, and you'd be left with a clump of slag, if that, more likely it'd completely disintegrate.
There's no reason to be paranoid. In practice, a single overwrite with random data is sufficient to ensure that nobody will read it. There are theorethical attacks that -may- in -principle- be able to do it, but they are just that -- theorethical.
/dev/urandom > /dev/sda
Yes, if there was stuff on the hard-disc where you had honest reason to fear that the NSA would spend a hundred man-years and a shitload of money to get some glimpses, you migth worry.
But for ordinary run-of-the-mill data, that's just not gonna happen.
Overwriting the entire platter with random data, and thereafter selling the disk on Ebay or whatever is in practice perfectly safe. The main pitfall is making sure that you actually do write over the entire platter (not just all files, for example, because areas of the disc which don't hold files -now- can and will still hold fragments of or entire files from earlier.)
cat
Will do you nicely.
Hardly a convincing argument. There -are- actual swordfigthers, f1-pilots, commando-soldiers and mafia-members too. Nevertheless when I play one of these characters, nobody assumes I'm -actually- the character that I play.
So why should they assume I'm -actually- a female if I play one ?
And yes, there are games that let you essentially choose the "race" of your human, for example in some you can customize hair, skin-tone facial features, body-build etc and you can easily pick features to look asian, or african or whatever. Second Life for example.
I think it's something else entirely: That some insecure male game-players would -like- to have more ACTUAL female players around (and not just female characters), for the fairly simple reason that young males in general like to have young females around (and vice versa) to flirt with, sometimes to start relationships with and so on.
Since many play with blurry lines between character and player (it's not as if RL-events and issues are never discussed by the characters in SL or WOW), they'd much prefer it if the female character that their male character flirts with, also had a female player.
It doesn't bother them to the same degree if the asian they've been flirting with turns out to actually be played by say an italian or Swedish girl.
It is -certainly- unenforcable in a free state. (as in not a police state)
Copying a file is a utterly trivial operation with todays technology, to the point where Grandma will do it in a split-second without even thinking about it. It's -literally- something you can do (and typically do) by moving your fingers a few cm, pretty close to the smallest effort imaginable. Distributing a file, let's say by emailing it to a friend, is equally trivial and common.
Both are things you can do (and typically do) in your own home.
This single fact is (imho) the best argument against current copyright-legislation; by nessecity we need to EITHER accept that a huge part of copying is simply unenforcable (and undiscoverable), OR we need to enact a extreme police-state. (to the point where the state would -discover- that the file you email your girlfriend -today- is a picture that is copyright someone else whereas the one you sent yesterday was a photo you yourself took.)
This is -MUCH- to high a price to pay for an activity that causes no direct harm. It may cause -INDIRECT- harm in lessening intensives for creation of new works, the jury is still out on this, but it certainly causes no DIRECT harm. Nobody is any worse off 1 second -after- you email that mp3 to your girlfriend than they where 1 second -before- you did it.
We should stimulate creativity. We should even do it MORE than we do today. But the method currently employed, copyright, is simply obsolete.
It's hardly a smart move to annoy the judge. This is a pretty accurately aimed footbullet.
Actually there is, but only if it's direct line-of-sight, AND you use a directed antenna and receiver.
Somehow "broadcasting" energy and have a significant portion of it picked up by devices in the viscinity will never work. (unless you're happy with 0.01% efficiency or something)
Transmitting say microwaves using a parabolic antenna and aiming it at a rectenna tuned for the frequency used can give you upwards of 80% efficiency, and may some day be used to transmit power from solar power sattelites and down to earth, or something.
It'll never power your car...
Now, inductive short-range coupling for low currents work okay. The idea of the splashpad ain't so stupid: a surface to place gadgets on and have them recharge or run off power in the surface with no metallic contacts.
This -could- be practical, the average household have half a dozen or more gadgets that need periodic recharge (mobile phones, remote controls, dect-phones, mp3-players etc) typically each with their own one-off charger, which is a mess. If all of them would recharge simply by being put on a special shelf, that would be an improvement, but that's a much more limited application anyway, besides, much of the same advantage would be had if the makers would simply AGREE on a charging-interface, even if it required a plug.
If your relationship to your SO is such that failure to respond to an email because the SO sent it to the WRONG adress ends your relationship, then really, that relationship was beyond hope a LONG time earlier, if indeed ever it had a chance.
This is true. But it's a hard problem to solve. There are literally an infinite number of things you may want to do. Any current game has a damn hard time allowing even the tiniest fraction of them. I don't think it's really solvable without a human GM.
You also can't crawl under a table, set fire to a house, pull someones left ear or, for that matter, kill Martin DEAD and join the dark side. (anyone "important" is merely "unconscious")
It's a pre-written story. You can choose what -parts- of it to tell in which sequence. But you can't really change the story as such.
A very strange thing to do anyways. If I can pretend to be a sword-swinging dragon-killing fireball-slinging Lizardman spellsword living in a completely alien world, then why can't I also pretend to be a -female- such ?
I mean, it's not as if changing the sex is a major deal, compared to changing all that other stuff. Nobody in any game assume that I'm ACTUALLY a Lizardman, so why would they assume I'm ACTUALLY female ?
fortnight is a silly word anyway, to anyone who doesn't know that spesific word it sounds a lot more like 4-nights or even a fourth (i.e. 1/4) night.
You get it wrong. This is not the same thing. It does not mean reducing comfort at all in most cases.
The problem is, transporting power costs MORE in peak-times (both due to resistive heating, and because extra use in peak times is what triggers the need for grid-updates), but people use power as if the price was constant.
My mother has a smart water-heater that adapts to actual load, and gets cheap power when the load is low. The practical result is she saves money, the power-company saves money, and the comfort is identical.
A normal water-heater may have a thermostat that turns on the heating when water-temperature drops to 60C, and turns it off when water-temperature reaches 70C.
My mothers heater instead normally heats the water to 75C, turning on the heater at 70C if loads are low (and power cheap) but turning on the heater at 55C if loads are high (and power expensive). (furthermore it pre-mixes cold water so that delivered water is always 55-60C, regardless of the temperature in the tank.
Where's the drawback ?
Same goes for a freezer. It wants to stay permanently -15C to -25C, but it make precisely NO difference at all to you if that is done by a dumb termostat that always turns on cooling at -18C and turns it off at -22C, or if it's done by a smarter termostat that cools to -25C on cheap power, but lets the temperature drift upwards to -18C when power is expensive. You food stays solidly frozen the entire time regardless. (infact the smart one will be better at keeping a stable temperature so you'll get less ice-crystals and HIGHER quality food-storage)
This makes it significantly -worse- if the problem is a large peak in electricity-consumption, and lots of people want to shower at the same time, for example in the morning.
My mother has a smart water-heater, because she has power-pricing that is such that the first 3KW she draws is very cheap, but usage above this costs much more.
So, it normally tries to heat the water to 75C, which is then automatically mixed with cold water to deliver 60C water. If, however current power-usage is above 3KW, it lets the temperature sink all the way to 55C before turning on the heating.
A tankless heater would be -horrible- for this pricing-structure. Most of the time use nothing, but some of the time peaking into many KWs.
Except, offcourse that it's not all that trivial to create a "radius" with the fresnel-plate on one end and the camera-stuff on the other, and rotate the entire assembly quickly and accurately (to within less than a mm) when the radius is a dozen miles long. Indeed, unless the "radius" is a rod of unobtanium, flexing and bending is going to make it completely impractical.
But it isn't !
Arming all household would mean putting 100.000 extra weapons in my city alone, complete with ammo, and easily available in the bedroom, if you want to reduce anything OTHER than burglary, those weapons also need to be carried when outside the house.
All this, for defending against something which basically never happens, namely that someone is murdered by a stranger breaking into their house. This has not happened even once in the years I've live here in this city. Yeah, there's been killings, not a -single- one where I could see bystanders or victims being armed as helpful though.
If little Bobby is hurt at all. The most likely persons to hurt him are his immediate family and friends. How many times in *your* life have you experienced a situation where you'd thougth; if only I had a loaded gun in my hand -now- ? If it's like -common- did you consider living somewhere OTHER than a crime-infested cesspool ?
Actually, my city has aproximately 115000 inhabitants in the city, and aproximately a quarter million in the metropolitan area. But nevermind.
I did not mean that the murders where ignorable as in they do not matter.
I meant they where ignorable as in if you care about the wellbeing of your family, there are going to be many other areas where you achieve a lot MORE with a lot LESS effort.
It is not worth it spending $5K and some time and some effort to reduce a 1:1 million risk if the same cash and the same effort could instead reduce a 1:100000 risk. If your house is burning and the sink is dripping you DONT fix the dripping sink first and the burning house second, you do it the other way around.
Do you -really- feel the need for a citation to believe my claim that having loaded guns around in situations where couples attack eachothers (for whatever reason) is unlikely to be helpful ? (If they're sensible, it'll make no difference whatsoever though, but sometimes people ARENT sensible, as evidenced by the fact that people ARE killed by partners regularily)
It's a bit like people driving their kids everywhere because the streets are so full of crimes, and then not realizing that those very same kids are infact much MUCH more likely to suffer or die because of too little physical activity than they are because of crime, so infact the action HARMS the children.
It's long-term though, and that's why people don't see it clearly. They worry that the child will be [insert-bad-thing-here] today. They -dont- worry that the child will be overweight in 5 years. That he/she will have (larger) problems finding a partner in 10 years, get diabetes in 40 years or die from overweight-induced circulatory disease in 50. Even though all of these latter problems are much more likely. (over 30% die from heart-or-circulatory problems, this risk is more than halved in a person of normal weight, as opposed to a overweight one)
Actually, more likely it's because they don't NEED to.
If the NSA -really- wants to read the files you store in an encrypted partition, there are many ways to do it that are MUCH simpler than say cracking AES.
For example, they can break into your house and insert a keylogger in your machine or keyboard, wait until you've used the encrypted machine, then clone your hard-disk and decrypt it using the password from the keylogger. You'd not notice anything. Total investment, a couple of hours for a pair of field-agents. Trivial.
Most peoples security is so lax that this kind of stuff is easy. ANY amount of computer-security is completely trivially breakable aslong as there is no PHYSICAL security.
If you can HONESTLY say there is NO way the NSA could get 10 minutes alone with your machine without you noticing it, THEN it may be time to start worrying about other stuff.
For 99.9% of all people though, getting physical access to their machines is easy for a dedicated and resourceful adversary.
That's a good trick, assuming you mean 9-character rather than 9-digit (I don't know anyone who uses pure numbers for passwords)
There's around 100 characters one can use in a password, so 9-characters means there are 100^9 possibilities. That is 10^18. Each hash typically takes 16 bytes or thereabouts, so that works out to 1.6 * 10^19 bytes. A terabyte is (well, depending on if you mean 1000^X or 1024^x) 10^12 bytes, so that is 1.6 * 10^7 terabytes, or 16000000 terabytes.
That's more than "a bunch" of diskdrives, it is about 8000 metric tonnes of disk-drives, or about 40 A380s FULLY loaded with diskdrives. Nevermind powersupplies, mounting, and assorted stuff.
Now, if he limits himself to only 9-character passwords that consist of lower-case-letters and digits only, then it's only 36^9 hashes, or aproximately 1700 terabyte-disks. That is still more than "a bunch", but sligthly more practical. Cut it to 8-character and it's actually practical though.
This is unfortunately partly true. The good thing is though, that if there exist well-working open source drivers for Linux, then by nessecity, the documentation needed for writing drivers for other OSes is available.
This sucks, but atleast it is MUCH better than having to guess and reverse-engineer to figure out how to use a device.
So, even for BSD-fans, a device that is supported (by an open driver!) in Linux is much preferable to one that is totally closed.
Offcourse, if all you get is a -closed- driver for Linux, then it's no good at all, and that goes for BSD AND Linux-folks, closed drivers suck.
They are tools that should be used by a web developer to run through and make sure they can be as close to valid as possible but I am willing to bet that out of the top 100 sites on the internet, the front page of all of them will produce Markup validation errors.
How much do you feel like betting ? You are wrong. You are -right- that it is quite -rare- for a site to have a completely validationg frontpage. But it's not unheard of, and infact among the top 100 there are pages with 100% valid HTML/XHTML. One example is Wikipedia, both www.wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org (which is the nr 7 website on the planet if you believe Alexa. Even if you -dont- believe Alexa, its not really possible to deny that Wikipedia is a top100 site)
Nope. Or well, partly.
They -flee- because the potential REWARD for staying is smaller than the potential RISK. (which includes the risk of being shot)
Thing is, most burglaries are not discovered before the thief is long gone. Given this, what is the point in staying in your house and risk detection or conflict just for a few more trinkets when they can much more easily leave and break into another house a few miles away ?
It's not just the risk of being shot. It's the fact that you may be able to give a useful description to the police. You -certainly- will immediately contact the police when they leave, so they risk cops on their tail. Unless they tie you up which could make noise and means physically engaging you which is, again, more risk than it's worth.
Burglars, overwhelmingly, want EASY money. It's much EASIER stealing from people who are not there, or who are sleeping soundly.
It is subject to where you live. If you live in a cesspool of crime, then perhaps the numbers look different. If you do, moving is going to be the better option, especially since you can't protect your entire family at gunpoint 24/7. (you -do- want your children to be able to play outdoors freely, don't you ?)
Where I live these numbers are -conservative- because the risk of being murdered in a crime is essentially -zero-. (TOTAL count of murders last year: 3.8/million people, murders by person not close to vicrim: 0.7/million And I should add that those 0.7 are mostly young males dying as the result of infighting among criminal gangs, if you're -not- part of such a gang, your real odds are more along the lines of 0.1/million.
Oh, and source ? http://www.ssb.no/