Even if there weren't a hardware defect, shouldn't they wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from scratch (to protect the second buyer from the possibility that the first buyer got some malware).
Sounds like a good way to do identity theft - buy a laptop, install your favorite malware (infecting the Windows recovery partition to make it permanent just in case they do a recovery), then return it and let Bestbuy resell it to an unsuspecting customer. Use that user's stolen credit card/bank account details to repeat the process with another batch of laptops.
What!? You mean a technology exists that can be used for both good *and* evil? Too bad TOR doesn't have a clear-cut legal use with no potential for abuse. You know, like fertilizer. There's no possible way to use Ammonium Nitrate for anything but nourishing crops to feed people (or fill gas tanks).
I could not agree more with your post ! so I will repeat that fundamental part:
Some of us went into CS because we actually had an inherent interesting in coding, not because a parent or guidance councilor told us it was a good career path.
But that doesn't change the grandparent poster's point that when most CS students look for a paying job, they don't end up writing fun code, they end up writing codes to meet the business analyst's spec. No bonus points are given for innovative code, doing things the most boring (but easily maintained) way possible is what's called for.
Sure, there are lots of jobs out there doing "fun" things, but there are many more doing the boring things the grandparent poster mentioned.
Your motivations for entering the field do not assure that you'll be doing interesting work. Many teachers enter the teaching field to make a difference in a child's life and help give them a good education, then when they finally get that teaching job, they find out that they spend an awful lot of time pushing paper, working under restrictive rules, and teaching students to do well on standardized tests, not teaching them what they should be learning.
While that's true for trivial tasks, Man can't read (and understand) a book and write a software program at the same time without timeslicing between them. For tasks that require little thought, more seamless, continuous multitasking is possible.
Walking and chewing gum are trivial tasks that don't require the full coordination of the cognitive part of your brain, so the ability to walk and chew gum is more akin to an operating system offloading the TCP stack handling to its NIC and using a hardware RAID controller so it just needs to do some minimal filesystem processing, but basically just passes off blocks of data to the RAID controller and lets it take care of parity calculations, decide where to physically place the data, etc.
So the computer can read a TCP stream and write it to disk with barely using any of the main CPU at all, the CPU just needs to coordinate the data transfer. Just like you can walk and chew gum at the same time with very minimal use of your brain, though your brain is still active keeping an eye out for obstacles, keeping your tongue away from your teeth, savoring the artificial grape flavor, etc.
Your typical New York resident can afford a $10 pack about as easily as a typical West Virginia one can come up with $4.50; see states by income. The main reason many of the NYC smokers I know gave up smoking (I'm speaking across a sample base of around 20 people there) was not the cost, it was the bans on public/workplace smoking. When you can't smoke easily in a bar, that takes much of the old fun of smoking away. And if it's hard to smoke while working, that makes for a dead period that impacts addiction. People either face constant withdraw symptoms when they to work, or just quite altogether to make life easier. Taxes, education, trendiness, and the restrictions I'm mentioning here all have played a role in making smoking less popular.
But when you normalize for cost of living, the average incomes are much closer. NY income: $48K, cost of living index: 133. WV income: $37K, cost of living index: 92
So that guy in WV making "only" 37K/year actually has more disposable income than the guy in NY making $48K/year since his cost of living is so much lower.
There's no doubt that preventing smoking is public places lowers the smoking rate, but people still smoke despite the restrictions (and based on the number of cigarette butts I see on the side of the road (and lit cigarettes tossed out of car windows), people see to be smoking in their cars more than anywhere else), so higher taxes is another way to further reduce smoking.
"The rest of us" shouldn't have to pay for anybody's choices. How about everybody pays for their own healthcare expenses? Gosh, what a concept!
Tell me how well that works out for you when you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer treatment out of pocket.
We have insurance to spread the risk, not to encourage people to take stupid risks and make intentionally bad choices.
And insurance really only works when *everyone* participates. Otherwise you get into a situation when the young "healthy" people forgo healthcare insurance because they are so healthy. And they know that if they end up with a brain tumor or a fall down the stairs resulting in a broken leg, they'll still get healthcare whether they can afford it or not. So everyone is paying for his treatment through higher healthcare costs even though he didn't pay anything at all into the system.
For some reason, people are fine with government mandated car insurance (even for drivers who always drive cautiously and have never been in an accident), but when it comes to health insurance, suddenly everyone is up in arms because healthcare insurance should be "optional", even though there's an expectation that emergency healthcare treatment will always be provided for "free".
If you crash your car into a tree and don't have insurance, you can't tow your car to an emergency body shop and expect them to fix your car, yet if you suffer a stroke and call an ambulance, they'll take you to an ER who will treat you regardless of your ability to pay.
But in my mind, one of the most broken things about our healthcare system is that it's designed to make it impossible to afford healthcare without insurance. If I go to the hospital on my own, they may charge me their "cash" rate of $1000/day for a room, while when they bill my insurance company, they may bill the exact same room at $100/day because they have "negotiated rates" with the insurance company. If healthcare agencies were required to charge their lowest negotiated rate to all cash payers, then many people could get by with a high deductible major-medial policy to cover big expenses (cancer, heart surgery, etc), while paying out of pocket for everything else.
I've known at least four people who drink 8+ high calorie/high sugar/high caffine drinks per day and they are as thin as rails. Yet I work out, drink 95% water, and try my best to eat healthy and I'm the one with 'extra' pounds. So I think you and alot of other people are not looking enough at biological factors and deciding it is all in the foods consumed.
Public health policy is not about keeping any specific person healthy, it's about keeping the general population, on average, more healthy. It's accepted that in general, the more calories you eat the more weight you'll gain. In addition, consuming large quantities of sugar (whether HFCS, sucrose, or even processed carbs like white bread) increases your risk of diabetes.
By taxing a very cheap source of sugar that's often known to be consumed in quantities that can be harmful, the general health of the population can be increased by lowering their consumption.
Yes, there are outliers that can seemingly consume large quantities of sugar with no ill effect (though they may still have increased risk of diabetes later, just because your body tolerates something when you're in your 20's or 30's doesn't mean it will do so forever). But public health policy isn't about covering all people. Some public health policies can even be detrimental to some people, but still make sense due to the overall beneficial effect - i.e. vaccines can cause serious or even deadly reactions in a small percentage of people, but since they prevent many more illnesses or deaths than they cause, vaccines are recommended for everyone despite the risks to a few.
Of course you do - because you think that it is okay for the state to take other people's money. In my book taxation = theft at gun point. Now there is a proper place for government to function, and someone has to pay for it, but when they take money from one to give to another because of some social engineering that someone is trying to accomplish, I call that theft.
You assume that the money is used to pay for treatment - HAH! Just like the Gas Tax in California pays for the great roads.
I think it's ok to tax cigarettes (even if the money doesn't go to healthcare since higher taxes reduce smoking rates) because my health care premiums pay for smoking related healthcare costs. If insurance companies were required to charge high enough rates to smokers to cover all costs of smoking (including second hand smoke) related illnesses, then I wouldn't really care how much people smoke (as long as it's not around me, I don't smoke my own cigarettes, I certainly don't want to smoke someone else's second hand).
Of course there's no way to accurately charge smokers for all of their healthcare costs - some smokers will lie and say they never smoke, what do you do when someone develops emphysema 15 years after quitting smoking, how do you know if a some health problem was caused by second hand smoke (i.e. if the child of a smoker develops lung cancer, is that from exposure to smoke, or because they live near a bus depot and they breath diesel exhaust all day long?), etc.
I feel the same way about helmet laws - as long as the motorcyclist pays higher healthcare premiums to reflect the extra risk of head injury, I'm fine with him riding without helmet. Just don't make me pay for a lifetime of assisted care living when you have a minor accident and suffer brain injury when you fell to the pavement.
It wasn't the tax that reduced smoking. It was education campaigns showing blackened lungs, plus the fact smoking is simply not fashionable anymore. People used to smoke because it was "cool", but that's not the case anymore. It had NOTHING to do with the imposition of the tax. Correlation is not causation.
Do you have statistics to back that up? I know plenty of people that cut back smoking because that $6+/day habit adds up to real money. But when they see surgeon general warnings, and even graphic pictures of blackened lungs, that has limited effect because no one thinks it will happen to them, and they think that there's always plenty of time to quit smoking before the really bad health effects kick in (i.e. an actual excuse from one of my nieces: "I'm only going to smoke while I'm in my 20's, then I'll quit so I don't get lung cancer").
A pack of Cigarettes in New York costs $10/pack, surely fewer people can afford that than West Virginia's $4.50/pack?
Optimizing for low hanging fruit means you will NEVER get the higher fruit. If one uses pass-phrases correctly, the average case will be with in a few magnitudes of a brute-force average case. This also means you need to dedicated A LOT of resources to breaking the password. If you're going to have a super-computer cluster that is going to cost millions to break a password, are you willing to chance optimizing for something that might NEVER break the password or just brute-forcing from the get-go?
But most of the time, an attacker isn't trying to hack some specific password, he's got a database will a million passwords and he wants to hack as many as he can as quickly as he can because stolen password databases quickly lose their value (either as people reset their password, or as other hackers who have the same password database hack and exploit them).
If he can use heuristics to limit the search space to test passwords more quickly, that'll give him the most bang for the buck, even if it means he misses out on many more complex passwords.
Unfortunately expanding-out the acronyms doesn't make the summary any clearer:
"CERT/CC has called out AMD for having insecure video drivers. AMD/ATI video drivers are incompatible with system-wide Address space layout randomization (ASLR).
'Always On' Data Execution Prevention (DEP) combined with 'Always On' ASLR are effective exploit mitigations. However, most people don't know about 'Always On' ASLR since Microsoft had to hide it from the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit with an 'EnableUnsafeSettings' registry key â" because AMD/ATI video drivers will cause a Blue Screen Of Death on boot if 'Always On' ASLR is enabled."
What?
Actually that helps. I didn't recognize the ASLR and DEP acronyms since there wasn't enough context to know what they were talking about, I didn't immediately recognize the term "Address Space Layout Randomization", but when I saw "Data Execution Prevention" it became much more clear what they were talking about.
But a little explanation would have been nice. Something like "DEP and ASLR are security mechanisms used to make it more difficult for malware to execute code or to predict memory addresses where programs and their data are located"
They didn't even use the knowledge from their searches and ended up strangling her instead. A killer doesn't need to use Google to know that strangulation can kill a person, so it's not clear that such a system would even stop a significant number of crimes, but it is clear that a lot of wasted resources will be used in tracking down queries made by people with no ill intent. And possibly even ruining some innocent lives (Sorry sir, you searched for "common childhood poisons", we're going to put your children into foster care for a few months while we investigate")
“So why not try and create a database where internet companies can check it to see if it's known illegal material? There are many known YouTube videos, for example, with content like be-headings. You don’t need to watch them to know if they are illegal or not.”
So what is the answer? Is a beheading video illegal? Why? What is the law that makes a beheading video illegal? What happens if it's legal in one country, but not in another? Does this magic content filter know where a user is watching content? Is it illegal if it's in a depiction of a beheading from a movie? How about if I stage a fake beheading of my own in my back yard, but I claim it's real, is that illegal? Likewise, what if I post a beheading and claim it's fake.... but it's so well done, no one knows if it's fake or not. Is that illegal?
(I'm ignoring the obvious questions like, what happens if my movie promo with a fake beheading gets flagged as illegal (even if it's not), and now suddenly it's banned from the internet and I can no longer show my promo)
Back in the 90's (and still to an extent these days) if you were a really bad programmer you'd just screw around for 3-6 months and then change contracting companies, usually getting a $10-$15K raise in the process. Then the next guy would get stuck supporting your crappy job. Case in point, in the late 90's I got picked up on an inventory project that was already late and over-budget. My predecessor had left in a hurry. Upon reviewing her code, I found that, among other things, she had not realized that in C you have to null-terminate your strings. No accountability must have been nice. It's still pretty damn hard to fire a programmer just for sucking, and it's still pretty damn hard to find good programmers even with the economy as bad as it is. Pretty easy to find bad programmers, though.
Well you don't *have* to, but if you can be certain that your string fields hold only ASCII data, it makes things easier since then you don't need to keep track of how long each string is. I've written more than one app where a null could be a "normal" part of a database text field. Just don't try to use the str*() functions unless you're sure that you're dealing with null terminated strings (and maybe not even then for destructive functions like strcpy(), the strn*() functions are much safer)), that was a lesson quickly learned.
That isn't the way that things work in San Francisco, it is actually fairly easy to evict regardless of what you have heard, the problem is that most laws in SF require "good faith" on the part of the landlord to work and it is more difficult to fight an illegal eviction than it is to just leave (as I learned the hard way). As it is you can evict by doing X% of renovations on a home, proving non residency of a leaseholder (with as little as 2 weeks absence), moving in a family member, etc. etc. The prices of rent have traditionally been tied to both the economy and housing prices, which is bad right now because housing prices are too high to buy but income hasn't really raised in a significant factor meaning more renters, less places, therefore higher rent.
While a landlord can temporarily evict a tenant for capital improvements, he has to pay relocation payments, *and* offer the unit back to the tenant after the work is complete. If the cost of renovations exceed 75% of the cost of new construction, the landlord can permanently evict tenants (after paying reloc), and if he doesn't have the renovations evaluated by the rent board after 2 years to ensure that it met their standards for eviction, it will be deemed an unlawful eviction.
A landlord can evict for breach of the lease, so if your lease has a "residency clause" there may be a way for the landlord to evict based on an extended absence, but I don't think the court would look too kindly on evicting a tenant on a 3 week vacation who is current on rent.
When I was evicted due to an owner move-in and my landlord (who was already refusing to do repairs to the unit - like a roof leak that she didn't fix after a year) balked at paying the mandated relocation payments, I sought advice from a lawyer, he said "Do you want to stay, or do you want the money? If you just want the money, you don't need me, just remind the landlord that you're under no obligation to leave until you get the relocation payment. If you want to stay, I can keep you in the apartment for 6 - 9 months, maybe longer by stretching out the eviction process".
I didn't test his theory about stretching out the eviction process, but after hearing stories from other friends who own and rent property and have tried to evict problem tenants, I believe it.
As a tenant, the laws can be great security, but I'd never want to be a landlord in SF.
Not to mention Disney's EPCOT where they have [...] a geodesic representation of the entire Earth, etc.
Is it at least a full scale one, like the village in this article?
Well, they have the big silver sphere that is a representation of the earth, but just beneath it is an actual full-scale replica of the earth. Completely indistinguishable from the real thing.
Big CDNs don't make much money on Netflix - the margiins in media delivery suck and Netflix is notoriously cheap. CDNs might not mind losing some bad paying traffic so they can fill their networks with stuff they get more money for serving.
If the CDNs want to stop serving Netflix traffic so they are free to serve up other, more lucrative traffic, couldn't they already do that by charging Netflix more money, which would either give the CDN more revenue, or get Netflix off their network, so they win either way? Why would they want to see Netflix create an open source CDN appliance that Netflix (and others) can use to replace the CDNs?
This sounds a lot like Huis Ten Bosch in Japan near Nagasaki. A surprisingly complete (and well maintained) replica of a Dutch town. I don't know how it stays in business as it was pretty much a ghost town when I was there, but all of the gardens and buildings are well maintained, even the hotels that are closed due to lack of business have well maintained exteriors.
Though I guess the difference is that the Japanese built it in cooperation with the Dutch government.
Divrese? How about all upper class or upper middle class. Where is there proof that I can gain more money based on my location. The same investors can give me the money somewhere else.
The risk is less and Austin has the largest university in the world with 50,000 students and plenty of engineers are abound who are not tied up with other.coms making 85k a year like in San Fransisco. Just because more programmers live there does not mean they are sitting around waiting for work and willing to work for cheap.
Chicago and Dallas also have great fiber networks and students willing to work for cheap and with diverse technology base as well. It is why Boeing left Seattle. Just because you want to open in an expensive high risk area does not mean you are awesome. The risk is much higher as it costs double to tripple to stay in business over there.
UT Austin isn't even the largest university in the country (and barely the largest in Texas) let alone the largest in the world:
But in the SF Bay Area, you have a good chance of snagging an engineer that's already worked for Google, Facebook, Zynga, Oracle, etc - someone who can bring in some solid industry experience and help you avoid some growing pains. The good engineers have already done the same math as you "Hmm..I can stay here and work for $50K/year with no benefits, or I can let a company pay me to relocate to SF where I can make $80K with full benefits and possibly strike it rich after an IPO".
If $30K in salary is a real impediment to getting your company off the ground, your company is undercapitalized anyway. There are plenty of incubators and office-shares around that can help you avoid the need to pay $15K/month for an office (and of course, may early stage startups use a livingroom or Starbucks as an "office")
Tell me again why Landlords charging market rents are "greedy", but you're just being economical and responsible with money when you refuse to pay health care or other benefits for your own employees? The employees that you're counting on to make you money and create a quality product so you can get a few enterprise customers.
"California can create more jobs if they lower taxes, regulations, and make it more worthwile for someone like me to open. But the high demand for wages and real estate is a huge issue for me as well regardless. That is the argument."
I thought the argument was that there are so many high paid jobs being created in San Francisco that is drives up housing and other prices, forcing out lower paid workers. Maybe San Francisco just doesn't want someone like you who sees laws that mandate equality and broad access to healthcare as being an impediment to business. Feel free to start your business in North Dakota, and maybe after a few years of hard work you'll be successful enough to come to SF and court enough investment capital to make it really take off. Or maybe in those 3 years while you slave away, pinching pennies with your low-paid engineers, a couple Google Engineers will write a replacement for your company's software in their 20% Time.
"The only real way to fix this is to make everybody poor."
It seems you have never heard of rent control.
Get an education before you spew bullshit, you moron.
There is rent control in S.F. But there aren't rent caps, so people that got into apartments in S.F. before the prices went up are relatively safe (then again there are problems if the apartment owner wants to sell/privatize and you are kicked off and can't afford the current rent prices).
As you said, there are no price caps, so what Rent Control does is make prices spiral to very high levels. The landlord factors in that he can only raise the rent a couple percent/year (varies per year based on the a consumer price index) for as long as the tenant lives there so rents are much higher than they otherwise would be. Worse for landlords is that it's exceptionally hard to evict a tenant regardless of cause, especially tenants that are disabled or elderly, so many landlords that might otherwise rent out an inlaw apartment chose not to to avoid the headaches if they get a bad tenant. Even when there is a legitimate reason to evict a tenant, it can take 6 months or longer to evict, after paying thousands in legal fees. If you own a house in SF, you cannot evict a disabled or elderly tenant to move into your own house.
Even if you're not a protected tenant, the owner needs to buy you out ($5,000 per tenant, but you can negotiate higher if the landlord wants to avoid a protracted eviction process) to help cover your relocation.
I spent 10 years in a rent controlled apartment, not because it was a great apartment but when you're paying under $1000/mo for something that would cost $2000/mo to rent today, it's hard to move. I now live in a non-rent controlled house outside of SF (but near transit) and pay much less for this house than if I tried to rent a similar place in SF.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if there weren't a hardware defect, shouldn't they wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from scratch (to protect the second buyer from the possibility that the first buyer got some malware).
Sounds like a good way to do identity theft - buy a laptop, install your favorite malware (infecting the Windows recovery partition to make it permanent just in case they do a recovery), then return it and let Bestbuy resell it to an unsuspecting customer. Use that user's stolen credit card/bank account details to repeat the process with another batch of laptops.
What!? You mean a technology exists that can be used for both good *and* evil? Too bad TOR doesn't have a clear-cut legal use with no potential for abuse. You know, like fertilizer. There's no possible way to use Ammonium Nitrate for anything but nourishing crops to feed people (or fill gas tanks).
I could not agree more with your post ! so I will repeat that fundamental part :
Some of us went into CS because we actually had an inherent interesting in coding, not because a parent or guidance councilor told us it was a good career path.
But that doesn't change the grandparent poster's point that when most CS students look for a paying job, they don't end up writing fun code, they end up writing codes to meet the business analyst's spec. No bonus points are given for innovative code, doing things the most boring (but easily maintained) way possible is what's called for.
Sure, there are lots of jobs out there doing "fun" things, but there are many more doing the boring things the grandparent poster mentioned.
Your motivations for entering the field do not assure that you'll be doing interesting work. Many teachers enter the teaching field to make a difference in a child's life and help give them a good education, then when they finally get that teaching job, they find out that they spend an awful lot of time pushing paper, working under restrictive rules, and teaching students to do well on standardized tests, not teaching them what they should be learning.
NEWSFLASH - Man walks and chews gum!
While that's true for trivial tasks, Man can't read (and understand) a book and write a software program at the same time without timeslicing between them. For tasks that require little thought, more seamless, continuous multitasking is possible.
Walking and chewing gum are trivial tasks that don't require the full coordination of the cognitive part of your brain, so the ability to walk and chew gum is more akin to an operating system offloading the TCP stack handling to its NIC and using a hardware RAID controller so it just needs to do some minimal filesystem processing, but basically just passes off blocks of data to the RAID controller and lets it take care of parity calculations, decide where to physically place the data, etc.
So the computer can read a TCP stream and write it to disk with barely using any of the main CPU at all, the CPU just needs to coordinate the data transfer. Just like you can walk and chew gum at the same time with very minimal use of your brain, though your brain is still active keeping an eye out for obstacles, keeping your tongue away from your teeth, savoring the artificial grape flavor, etc.
Your typical New York resident can afford a $10 pack about as easily as a typical West Virginia one can come up with $4.50; see states by income. The main reason many of the NYC smokers I know gave up smoking (I'm speaking across a sample base of around 20 people there) was not the cost, it was the bans on public/workplace smoking. When you can't smoke easily in a bar, that takes much of the old fun of smoking away. And if it's hard to smoke while working, that makes for a dead period that impacts addiction. People either face constant withdraw symptoms when they to work, or just quite altogether to make life easier. Taxes, education, trendiness, and the restrictions I'm mentioning here all have played a role in making smoking less popular.
But when you normalize for cost of living, the average incomes are much closer. NY income: $48K, cost of living index: 133. WV income: $37K, cost of living index: 92
http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/index.stm
Normalize the incomes: $48K / 1.33 = 36K $37K / .92 = $40K
So that guy in WV making "only" 37K/year actually has more disposable income than the guy in NY making $48K/year since his cost of living is so much lower.
There's no doubt that preventing smoking is public places lowers the smoking rate, but people still smoke despite the restrictions (and based on the number of cigarette butts I see on the side of the road (and lit cigarettes tossed out of car windows), people see to be smoking in their cars more than anywhere else), so higher taxes is another way to further reduce smoking.
"The rest of us" shouldn't have to pay for anybody's choices. How about everybody pays for their own healthcare expenses? Gosh, what a concept!
Tell me how well that works out for you when you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer treatment out of pocket.
We have insurance to spread the risk, not to encourage people to take stupid risks and make intentionally bad choices.
And insurance really only works when *everyone* participates. Otherwise you get into a situation when the young "healthy" people forgo healthcare insurance because they are so healthy. And they know that if they end up with a brain tumor or a fall down the stairs resulting in a broken leg, they'll still get healthcare whether they can afford it or not. So everyone is paying for his treatment through higher healthcare costs even though he didn't pay anything at all into the system.
For some reason, people are fine with government mandated car insurance (even for drivers who always drive cautiously and have never been in an accident), but when it comes to health insurance, suddenly everyone is up in arms because healthcare insurance should be "optional", even though there's an expectation that emergency healthcare treatment will always be provided for "free".
If you crash your car into a tree and don't have insurance, you can't tow your car to an emergency body shop and expect them to fix your car, yet if you suffer a stroke and call an ambulance, they'll take you to an ER who will treat you regardless of your ability to pay.
But in my mind, one of the most broken things about our healthcare system is that it's designed to make it impossible to afford healthcare without insurance. If I go to the hospital on my own, they may charge me their "cash" rate of $1000/day for a room, while when they bill my insurance company, they may bill the exact same room at $100/day because they have "negotiated rates" with the insurance company. If healthcare agencies were required to charge their lowest negotiated rate to all cash payers, then many people could get by with a high deductible major-medial policy to cover big expenses (cancer, heart surgery, etc), while paying out of pocket for everything else.
I've known at least four people who drink 8+ high calorie/high sugar/high caffine drinks per day and they are as thin as rails. Yet I work out, drink 95% water, and try my best to eat healthy and I'm the one with 'extra' pounds. So I think you and alot of other people are not looking enough at biological factors and deciding it is all in the foods consumed.
Public health policy is not about keeping any specific person healthy, it's about keeping the general population, on average, more healthy. It's accepted that in general, the more calories you eat the more weight you'll gain. In addition, consuming large quantities of sugar (whether HFCS, sucrose, or even processed carbs like white bread) increases your risk of diabetes.
By taxing a very cheap source of sugar that's often known to be consumed in quantities that can be harmful, the general health of the population can be increased by lowering their consumption.
Yes, there are outliers that can seemingly consume large quantities of sugar with no ill effect (though they may still have increased risk of diabetes later, just because your body tolerates something when you're in your 20's or 30's doesn't mean it will do so forever). But public health policy isn't about covering all people. Some public health policies can even be detrimental to some people, but still make sense due to the overall beneficial effect - i.e. vaccines can cause serious or even deadly reactions in a small percentage of people, but since they prevent many more illnesses or deaths than they cause, vaccines are recommended for everyone despite the risks to a few.
Of course you do - because you think that it is okay for the state to take other people's money. In my book taxation = theft at gun point. Now there is a proper place for government to function, and someone has to pay for it, but when they take money from one to give to another because of some social engineering that someone is trying to accomplish, I call that theft.
You assume that the money is used to pay for treatment - HAH! Just like the Gas Tax in California pays for the great roads.
I think it's ok to tax cigarettes (even if the money doesn't go to healthcare since higher taxes reduce smoking rates) because my health care premiums pay for smoking related healthcare costs. If insurance companies were required to charge high enough rates to smokers to cover all costs of smoking (including second hand smoke) related illnesses, then I wouldn't really care how much people smoke (as long as it's not around me, I don't smoke my own cigarettes, I certainly don't want to smoke someone else's second hand).
Of course there's no way to accurately charge smokers for all of their healthcare costs - some smokers will lie and say they never smoke, what do you do when someone develops emphysema 15 years after quitting smoking, how do you know if a some health problem was caused by second hand smoke (i.e. if the child of a smoker develops lung cancer, is that from exposure to smoke, or because they live near a bus depot and they breath diesel exhaust all day long?), etc.
I feel the same way about helmet laws - as long as the motorcyclist pays higher healthcare premiums to reflect the extra risk of head injury, I'm fine with him riding without helmet. Just don't make me pay for a lifetime of assisted care living when you have a minor accident and suffer brain injury when you fell to the pavement.
It wasn't the tax that reduced smoking.
It was education campaigns showing blackened lungs, plus the fact smoking is simply not fashionable anymore. People used to smoke because it was "cool", but that's not the case anymore. It had NOTHING to do with the imposition of the tax. Correlation is not causation.
Do you have statistics to back that up? I know plenty of people that cut back smoking because that $6+/day habit adds up to real money. But when they see surgeon general warnings, and even graphic pictures of blackened lungs, that has limited effect because no one thinks it will happen to them, and they think that there's always plenty of time to quit smoking before the really bad health effects kick in (i.e. an actual excuse from one of my nieces: "I'm only going to smoke while I'm in my 20's, then I'll quit so I don't get lung cancer").
A pack of Cigarettes in New York costs $10/pack, surely fewer people can afford that than West Virginia's $4.50/pack?
Optimizing for low hanging fruit means you will NEVER get the higher fruit. If one uses pass-phrases correctly, the average case will be with in a few magnitudes of a brute-force average case. This also means you need to dedicated A LOT of resources to breaking the password. If you're going to have a super-computer cluster that is going to cost millions to break a password, are you willing to chance optimizing for something that might NEVER break the password or just brute-forcing from the get-go?
But most of the time, an attacker isn't trying to hack some specific password, he's got a database will a million passwords and he wants to hack as many as he can as quickly as he can because stolen password databases quickly lose their value (either as people reset their password, or as other hackers who have the same password database hack and exploit them).
If he can use heuristics to limit the search space to test passwords more quickly, that'll give him the most bang for the buck, even if it means he misses out on many more complex passwords.
wow, you sure you wasn't home schooled too?
He was making a reference to a Fertilizer bomb, and you completely missed it.
Or maybe I was making a toungue-in-cheek literal interpretation of what he said and *you* missed it. Whose home skooled now?
Teach them what can be made with fertilizer.
That sounds more like an agriculture class than a chemistry class...
Unfortunately expanding-out the acronyms doesn't make the summary any clearer:
"CERT/CC has called out AMD for having insecure video drivers. AMD/ATI video drivers are incompatible with system-wide Address space layout randomization (ASLR).
'Always On' Data Execution Prevention (DEP) combined with 'Always On' ASLR are effective exploit mitigations. However, most people don't know about 'Always On' ASLR since Microsoft had to hide it from the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit with an 'EnableUnsafeSettings' registry key â" because AMD/ATI video drivers will cause a Blue Screen Of Death on boot if 'Always On' ASLR is enabled."
What?
Actually that helps. I didn't recognize the ASLR and DEP acronyms since there wasn't enough context to know what they were talking about, I didn't immediately recognize the term "Address Space Layout Randomization", but when I saw "Data Execution Prevention" it became much more clear what they were talking about.
But a little explanation would have been nice. Something like "DEP and ASLR are security mechanisms used to make it more difficult for malware to execute code or to predict memory addresses where programs and their data are located"
They didn't even use the knowledge from their searches and ended up strangling her instead. A killer doesn't need to use Google to know that strangulation can kill a person, so it's not clear that such a system would even stop a significant number of crimes, but it is clear that a lot of wasted resources will be used in tracking down queries made by people with no ill intent. And possibly even ruining some innocent lives (Sorry sir, you searched for "common childhood poisons", we're going to put your children into foster care for a few months while we investigate")
From TFA:
“So why not try and create a database where internet companies can check it to see if it's known illegal material? There are many known YouTube videos, for example, with content like be-headings. You don’t need to watch them to know if they are illegal or not.”
So what is the answer? Is a beheading video illegal? Why? What is the law that makes a beheading video illegal? What happens if it's legal in one country, but not in another? Does this magic content filter know where a user is watching content? Is it illegal if it's in a depiction of a beheading from a movie? How about if I stage a fake beheading of my own in my back yard, but I claim it's real, is that illegal? Likewise, what if I post a beheading and claim it's fake.... but it's so well done, no one knows if it's fake or not. Is that illegal?
(I'm ignoring the obvious questions like, what happens if my movie promo with a fake beheading gets flagged as illegal (even if it's not), and now suddenly it's banned from the internet and I can no longer show my promo)
Back in the 90's (and still to an extent these days) if you were a really bad programmer you'd just screw around for 3-6 months and then change contracting companies, usually getting a $10-$15K raise in the process. Then the next guy would get stuck supporting your crappy job. Case in point, in the late 90's I got picked up on an inventory project that was already late and over-budget. My predecessor had left in a hurry. Upon reviewing her code, I found that, among other things, she had not realized that in C you have to null-terminate your strings. No accountability must have been nice. It's still pretty damn hard to fire a programmer just for sucking, and it's still pretty damn hard to find good programmers even with the economy as bad as it is. Pretty easy to find bad programmers, though.
Well you don't *have* to, but if you can be certain that your string fields hold only ASCII data, it makes things easier since then you don't need to keep track of how long each string is. I've written more than one app where a null could be a "normal" part of a database text field. Just don't try to use the str*() functions unless you're sure that you're dealing with null terminated strings (and maybe not even then for destructive functions like strcpy(), the strn*() functions are much safer)), that was a lesson quickly learned.
That isn't the way that things work in San Francisco, it is actually fairly easy to evict regardless of what you have heard, the problem is that most laws in SF require "good faith" on the part of the landlord to work and it is more difficult to fight an illegal eviction than it is to just leave (as I learned the hard way). As it is you can evict by doing X% of renovations on a home, proving non residency of a leaseholder (with as little as 2 weeks absence), moving in a family member, etc. etc. The prices of rent have traditionally been tied to both the economy and housing prices, which is bad right now because housing prices are too high to buy but income hasn't really raised in a significant factor meaning more renters, less places, therefore higher rent.
While a landlord can temporarily evict a tenant for capital improvements, he has to pay relocation payments, *and* offer the unit back to the tenant after the work is complete. If the cost of renovations exceed 75% of the cost of new construction, the landlord can permanently evict tenants (after paying reloc), and if he doesn't have the renovations evaluated by the rent board after 2 years to ensure that it met their standards for eviction, it will be deemed an unlawful eviction.
A landlord can evict for breach of the lease, so if your lease has a "residency clause" there may be a way for the landlord to evict based on an extended absence, but I don't think the court would look too kindly on evicting a tenant on a 3 week vacation who is current on rent.
When I was evicted due to an owner move-in and my landlord (who was already refusing to do repairs to the unit - like a roof leak that she didn't fix after a year) balked at paying the mandated relocation payments, I sought advice from a lawyer, he said "Do you want to stay, or do you want the money? If you just want the money, you don't need me, just remind the landlord that you're under no obligation to leave until you get the relocation payment. If you want to stay, I can keep you in the apartment for 6 - 9 months, maybe longer by stretching out the eviction process".
I didn't test his theory about stretching out the eviction process, but after hearing stories from other friends who own and rent property and have tried to evict problem tenants, I believe it.
As a tenant, the laws can be great security, but I'd never want to be a landlord in SF.
EPCOT is so fucking shit it is unbelievable.
Is that the "good" shit as in it's "the shit" making it unbelievably good, or is that the bad "shit" as in it's unbelievably bad?
Not to mention Disney's EPCOT where they have [...] a geodesic representation of the entire Earth, etc.
Is it at least a full scale one, like the village in this article?
Well, they have the big silver sphere that is a representation of the earth, but just beneath it is an actual full-scale replica of the earth. Completely indistinguishable from the real thing.
Big CDNs don't make much money on Netflix - the margiins in media delivery suck and Netflix is notoriously cheap. CDNs might not mind losing some bad paying traffic so they can fill their networks with stuff they get more money for serving.
If the CDNs want to stop serving Netflix traffic so they are free to serve up other, more lucrative traffic, couldn't they already do that by charging Netflix more money, which would either give the CDN more revenue, or get Netflix off their network, so they win either way? Why would they want to see Netflix create an open source CDN appliance that Netflix (and others) can use to replace the CDNs?
They're hardly the first to try to reproduce tourist destinations and landmarks. Tokyo has an Eiffel tower and a Statue of Liberty.
Isn't there a lot of stuff in Las Vegas as well? (They're not the original Pyramids, I suspect...)
Not to mention Disney's EPCOT where they have an Eiffel Tower, a Chinese Temple, a geodesic representation of the entire Earth, etc.
This sounds a lot like Huis Ten Bosch in Japan near Nagasaki. A surprisingly complete (and well maintained) replica of a Dutch town. I don't know how it stays in business as it was pretty much a ghost town when I was there, but all of the gardens and buildings are well maintained, even the hotels that are closed due to lack of business have well maintained exteriors.
Though I guess the difference is that the Japanese built it in cooperation with the Dutch government.
Divrese? How about all upper class or upper middle class. Where is there proof that I can gain more money based on my location. The same investors can give me the money somewhere else.
The risk is less and Austin has the largest university in the world with 50,000 students and plenty of engineers are abound who are not tied up with other .coms making 85k a year like in San Fransisco. Just because more programmers live there does not mean they are sitting around waiting for work and willing to work for cheap.
Chicago and Dallas also have great fiber networks and students willing to work for cheap and with diverse technology base as well. It is why Boeing left Seattle. Just because you want to open in an expensive high risk area does not mean you are awesome. The risk is much higher as it costs double to tripple to stay in business over there.
UT Austin isn't even the largest university in the country (and barely the largest in Texas) let alone the largest in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_United_States_universities_by_enrollment
But in the SF Bay Area, you have a good chance of snagging an engineer that's already worked for Google, Facebook, Zynga, Oracle, etc - someone who can bring in some solid industry experience and help you avoid some growing pains. The good engineers have already done the same math as you "Hmm..I can stay here and work for $50K/year with no benefits, or I can let a company pay me to relocate to SF where I can make $80K with full benefits and possibly strike it rich after an IPO".
If $30K in salary is a real impediment to getting your company off the ground, your company is undercapitalized anyway. There are plenty of incubators and office-shares around that can help you avoid the need to pay $15K/month for an office (and of course, may early stage startups use a livingroom or Starbucks as an "office")
Tell me again why Landlords charging market rents are "greedy", but you're just being economical and responsible with money when you refuse to pay health care or other benefits for your own employees? The employees that you're counting on to make you money and create a quality product so you can get a few enterprise customers.
"California can create more jobs if they lower taxes, regulations, and make it more worthwile for someone like me to open. But the high demand for wages and real estate is a huge issue for me as well regardless. That is the argument."
I thought the argument was that there are so many high paid jobs being created in San Francisco that is drives up housing and other prices, forcing out lower paid workers. Maybe San Francisco just doesn't want someone like you who sees laws that mandate equality and broad access to healthcare as being an impediment to business. Feel free to start your business in North Dakota, and maybe after a few years of hard work you'll be successful enough to come to SF and court enough investment capital to make it really take off. Or maybe in those 3 years while you slave away, pinching pennies with your low-paid engineers, a couple Google Engineers will write a replacement for your company's software in their 20% Time.
"The only real way to fix this is to make everybody poor."
It seems you have never heard of rent control.
Get an education before you spew bullshit, you moron.
There is rent control in S.F. But there aren't rent caps, so people that got into apartments in S.F. before the prices went up are relatively safe (then again there are problems if the apartment owner wants to sell/privatize and you are kicked off and can't afford the current rent prices).
As you said, there are no price caps, so what Rent Control does is make prices spiral to very high levels. The landlord factors in that he can only raise the rent a couple percent/year (varies per year based on the a consumer price index) for as long as the tenant lives there so rents are much higher than they otherwise would be. Worse for landlords is that it's exceptionally hard to evict a tenant regardless of cause, especially tenants that are disabled or elderly, so many landlords that might otherwise rent out an inlaw apartment chose not to to avoid the headaches if they get a bad tenant. Even when there is a legitimate reason to evict a tenant, it can take 6 months or longer to evict, after paying thousands in legal fees. If you own a house in SF, you cannot evict a disabled or elderly tenant to move into your own house.
Even if you're not a protected tenant, the owner needs to buy you out ($5,000 per tenant, but you can negotiate higher if the landlord wants to avoid a protracted eviction process) to help cover your relocation.
I spent 10 years in a rent controlled apartment, not because it was a great apartment but when you're paying under $1000/mo for something that would cost $2000/mo to rent today, it's hard to move. I now live in a non-rent controlled house outside of SF (but near transit) and pay much less for this house than if I tried to rent a similar place in SF.