Average SF home is over 2,000 sq. ft. Assume a roof size, conservatively, of 1,000 sq. ft.
Most new housing in SF is not single family -- when I lived in SF, my share of roof for my 1000 sq ft apartment was around 100 sq feet.
10 inches of rain on 1,000 sq. ft. is around 6,000 gallons available per household per year.
Even if I could capture 6000 gallons of water, where would I find a place to store a 10 x 10 x 8 foot container that weighs 24 tons?
You could provide for 12% of residential water needs just by people not sending their roof water to the sewer system.
Why shift billions of dollars of costs to consumers to build home water capture and treatment systems when cutting just 3% of agricultural usage would free up the same amount of water? You know what's easier than capturing residential roof runoff? Not planting water-heavy crops in the desert and shipping them overseas.
Imagine if we reused the water that lands on roadways...172,000 miles of highway, average width of ~10 feet...68 billion gallons of water wasted each year...almost what the entire state uses in a year.
I don't think you understand just how much water california uses -- residential use along is 6 - 8 million acre feet, 68B gallons is only around 200,000 acre feet. It would cost billions to build 172,000 miles of highway water reclamation and treatment plants.
One of my highschool teachers when inquired as to why he was allowed to drink coffee while we were not, responded with this: "Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi."
I've always detested this way of thinking, as it is just a stupid rationalization for the real reason: "Whatever, fuck you, I can get away with it."
That's not a rationalization for "Whatever, fuck you, I can get away with it," thats exactly what it means.
But really, what other answer did you expect? Sounds like you were disappointed that he didn't make some attempt at rationalization and instead he told you the truth.
Sounds like a great way to make yourself a theft target -- who is going to take out their $700 phone and scan a paper held out by a by a guy begging for cash?
There are reasons they get connected. Many times the in-flight entertainment systems need to know things like the position, speed, altitude and heading to perform their assigned tasks. You want the entertainment system to be turned off below 10,000 feet AGL, or if you want the system to supply your customers a graphic that gives the position, speed, heading and accurate ETA then you need to get that information from the flight management system. I can imagine that it might be important to change how the data systems connect to the internet based on where the aircraft is (choosing the cheaper data path when it is in range) or use that data connection to report maintenance information to the airline's mechanics.
There are plenty of reasons the flight controls might not be totally air gapped from the in-flight entertainment systems.
RS-232 with the the RX wire clipped on the avionics side would be a good way to pass that information in a one-way direction. Or just use a dedicated GPS receiver for the entertainment system.
However, if the systems are properly designed and firewalled and the software properly vetted, I believe that you can eliminate the chances of having a successful attack vector. The problem though is how to write regulations that can assure something doesn't get overlooked and how you could prove that to the GAO so they will get off the FAA's back...
Lots of companies have gotten hacked through their properly designed and firewalled network -- every software product (even firewalls) has security holes. The only sure way to isolate the avionics from the passenger network is to air gap it. Don't rely on a firewall - I really can't believe that an airgapped network is not standard practice.
To back up a few GB, why are you making it complicated?
First, if your home fire safe is not media rated, then don't count on any media surviving a fire, the firesafe may prevent paper from burning, but don't count on it keeping any electronic media from melting or degrading. And a fire safe is no guarantee, my sister lost her house and *everything* in it -- the only thing recognizable was part of a 100 year old cast iron stove, and the remains of the brick fireplace, everything else ended up in an unrecognizable pile of debris in what was left of the basement, there wasn't even enough left of their thousand dollar gun safe to be found in the debris.
A few GB is *nothing* -- just encrypt it and email it to yourself, set up multiple accounts with different email providers if you don't trust that Google will be around for the long haul.
If you had tens or hundreds of GB of data, then I'd say use a cloud provider and migrate your data to a new provider if that one goes out of business. I keep my data in Amazon Glacier -- for $10/month (it's mostly old family home videos converted to digital along with a lot of TIFF photos). If I needed to recover the data all at once, I could send them a hard drive (plus a fee) and they'd restore to that hard drive and mail it back to me.
Drop a pipe in the Pacific, run it over the mountains, maybe parallel to the road that descends into Palm Springs and refill that nasty smelling swamp. On the way down the hill you can generate electricity, desalinate, extract minerals and make sushi. Win, win, win and wasabi.
Death Valley is next. I'm pretty sure turtles float.
I don't think you understand the limits of a siphon -- the maximum rise along a siphon for water is 32 feet (the same limit as the limit for a suction pump, which is why well pumps are at the bottom of the well) -- any higher and the pressure within the liquid drops below its vapor pressure and bubbles form, breaking the siphon. It'd take large pumps and a lot of energy to pump the water over any significant rise - even if you extract some of the energy on the way down, you don't get nearly as much back as you put in.
Since the Salton sea is below sea level, you could tunnel the water in -- though it would take massive pipes/aqueducts for enough water to flow for significant energy generation.
My Nexus 5 went into a reboot loop, after a lot of research online (and taking the phone apart to see if the power switch was damaged (it appeared to be working fine with a good "click" when pressed) -- I managed to get to boot by repeatedly and rapidly hitting the power button while it was booting, then quickly unlocked the phone and rebooted into safe mode by holding down the power button.
After it booted into safe mode, I left it in the charger overnight, and in the morning, rebooted back into normal mode and it was fine. Mostly. It was no longer in the reboot loop, but kept powering itself off throughout the day.
I replaced it with a new phone, moved my SIM over, and then the Nexus appeared to be fine, no more poweroffs, no reboot loops, I used it as a Wifi-only tablet for a day and then it got a Lolipop 5.1 OTA upgrade, so I upgraded. It's been over a week since then, and it's still working fine as a wifi-only tablet, I haven't tried moving the SIM back
I still have no idea what was wrong with the phone, maybe it was a hardware problem with the switch, or maybe it was a software problem. My Nexus 7 tablet (also running lollipop) is fine.
I replaced my Nexus 5 with a Samsung Galaxy S5 -- I really like the S5 (and removable SIM), but I hate Samsung's Touchwiz interface. I really wanted to stick with the Nexus line, but am not willing to pay $700 for a 64GB Nexus 6 when the S5 cost about half that and I wasn't going to buy another Nexus 5 after what happened to this one.
Any company that falls for the "Buy your-company.sucks before anyone else does!" deserves whatever price they pay -- they can't buy up every.sucks domain for every permutation of their company name, so why bother? Is "http://microsoft.sucks" significantly worse than "http://micro.soft.sucks" or "http://microsoft-inc.sucks" or "http://microsoft-really.sucks" or "http://microsoft-software.sucks" or any of the other thousands of permutations of the name?
But H1Bs basically aren't allowed to stay and get treated like shit while they are here.
Can't move jobs; because if they are ever unemployed even for a moment they are breaching visa requirements and immediately deported; or jailed, and then deported.
So we kick them back out again, and start the cycle again. (Saying goodbye to their spending power and wages we just paid them, since they take it back to India [or wherever])
Even if the employer files for H1-B revocation, it can take months to process that paperwork, so generally if an H1-B holder loses their job they have a bit of time to search for employment - they'll usually be able to transfer their visa to a new employer if they find a new job within 30 days. My company just hired an H1-B applicant that was in this situation -- his employer shut down suddenly, he was jobless for about 2 weeks before we hired him and filed for the transfer.
No INS agent is going to bang on your door and take you away the day you lose your job.
While some H1-B's may scrimp and save up money to send home (or take back home with them at the end of their employment), most H1-B's I know spend most of their money just like everyone else - on housing, food, transportation, entertainment, etc. Likewise, if they are only in the country for a few years, they will have paid social security and medicare taxes that they will not get any benefit from (though they may get relief from some or all of their social security tax obligation if they are from a country with a totalization agreement with the USA -- mostly European and (some) Asian countries, notable exceptions are India and China)
When I read this, I immediately thought "Has Google Indexed the Contents of your Google Drive?", in the context of those automatic backups you might have enabled for photos, etc on your Android device. In fact, you're only at risk here if you have configured some type of FTP server or WebDAV (like a QNAP, etc) to have a public IP and have no security whatsoever. So that means having enough technical prowess to accomplish that much, only to leave all your stuff open on the internet for "ease"?!?
I think much of Slashdot might agree with me that if you're silly enough to deploy a public-facing server with no or default authentication, yeah, you'll probably deserved get indexed by Google.
Yeah, I thought the same thing as you when I saw the headline. I'm a little less interested to learn that if you open your data to the public (even if you didn't mean to), it's viewable by the public.
So the question can be used to weed out pedants. I guess it is useful after all.
Or to find the engineers that can spot the missing parts of vague software specifications -- just because a user asks for something in the specs doesn't mean that he knows that the case he wrote up doesn't handle all of the options the software will encounter in the real world.
He may ask for software to generate quotes for manhole cover manufacturing, and only ask for a radius because clearly that's all you need to describe a round manhole cover, yet the smart engineer will ask how to handle the other shapes. Few companies want an engineer that blindly adheres to specs even when they don't make sense in the real world... that's more like a job for consultants so they can get paid to do the work and the paid again to do it the right way.
I have been told that it has more popularity in Japan because it's an easy gateway to learning European languages.
By "popularity" I mean slightly less overwhelming disinterest. It would be interesting to hear from a Japanese-geek on it.
My wife is Japanese and never heard of 'Esperanto', when she learned English in school, they taught English. Though she's been away from Japan for about a decade... and out of school for 2 decades.
What if it is not a bomb. What if a war breaks out, and you know for a fact that there is an intelligence agent reporting over a regular cell phone, using coded words, about the movements of ships out of a harbor. Cutting off that flow of information while you set sail might be very valuable.
What adversary would we going up against that is so powerful that being able to track ships leaving harbors in the USA is useful information for them, yet not so powerful that they have spy satellites or high altitude drones that could give them the same (or better) information as an observer on the ground?
In any case, this super spy with a cell phone is going to have lots of other ways to communicate these code words, even without a cellular network, he can use Wifi, a plain old analog phone, coded IR light communication to a compatriot on a nearby hilltop, VHF/UFH radio, satellite phone, etc. Ships move slowly enough that he doesn't have to have a phone in-hand at the time he sees it go past.
How do they know that he accepted the papers? The wife already gave her attorney access to her account, so surely the court must see that the person using the account is not necessarily the person that it belongs to. Maybe the wife knows his password and she can log on to his account and "accept" the papers on his behalf.
Please, for your own safety, do not come to California. The Bike One is right around the corner, as it has been for as long as anyone living can remember, so, if you move here, you will falll into the oceania, and die. (And wee don't need any more people driving our land prices up.)
That doesn't change the fact that the big one *is* right around the corner, it will come, lives will be lost, hundreds of billions of dollars in direct costs may be incurred, and taxpayers will be paying much of those costs in disaster aid since many homeowners are uninsured, and even for those that are, the funds backing their insurance may run out in a large quake.
Though I guess building a large metropolis on top of known earthquake faults is no worse than using flood disaster funds to build right back in the flood plain.
The volume of a shot of powdered alcohol is 4X greater than the volume of a shot of liquid alcohol so liquid alcohol is much easier to conceal.
Sure, you could put the powder into a canister labeled "flour" and smuggle it in that way, but you could also put everclear alcohol into a bottle labeled "water".
If I can't work on my car, I will not buy it. Same with my computer.
The problem is that people like you who want to work on their car are becoming more and more rare -- most people just want their car to be reliable and if it breaks, take it to the garage. Few consumers want to open the hood and fix something -- myself included.. at one time I did all of my own oil changes, tuneups (back when a tuneup meant replacing points, condenser and rotor), brake pad changes, etc. But I won't touch a modern car, I'd rather just take it to the garage when it breaks (which is rarely with most cars, my VW is 4 years old and the only maintenance it has had in all of that time is 4 oil changes - 10,000 miles between each).
So you may say that you'll only buy a car that you can work on, but as those cars become harder and harder to find, eventually you won't be able to buy one. I used to say I wouldn't buy a phone that is sealed and doesn't allow battery changes or have a microSD slot. Those phones are getting harder to find, even the new Galaxy S6 doesn't have an easily replaced battery or an SD slot... the last phone I bought is sealed without a battery or SD card slot.
If these drills make the pointy haired bosses stop thinking IT security purely as a cost to be minimized it would do some good. If an IT dept works well and prevent disasters they never get credited for it. It they slip up and make a huge mistake, they get fired. If the best reward you can hope for is "not getting fired", it will attract a level of talent that considers "not getting fired" an achievement and goal. Unless the management mentality changes IT disasters will keep happening. At least if we fired the top management too along with IT disasters and sue the corporate board for mismanagement, then they might pay attention.
Doesn't that apply to most jobs? If an accountant works well and gets most of the numbers right, he never gets credited, but make one huge mistake that costs the company huge sums of money, and he gets fired. If the Marketing Department works well and brings in lots of business, but makes one huge PR mistake that offends customers and drives away customers, then they get fired. And so on.
IT isn't the only department that gets little credit when things go well, but gets big blame when they don't.
No way would this work in our house, kids are 6 and 22 months.
I've already found items waiting for me in my Amazon cart after my daughter has played with apps like the Easy Bake Oven - which is a cute app, but includes links to add related supplies to your shopping cart...
Do you keep products like laundry detergent within easy reach of your children? If you can figure out how to keep detergent out of their reach, maybe you can figure out how to keep the button out of reach.
Hitting the button sends an alert to your phone, and you can cancel if it was placed mistakenly.
Just keeps getting handier and handier. I probably have 50 different things in my refrigerator, so let's say 25 of them I will want buttons for.
Gee, it's almost as if sticking 25 of these on your refrigerator for products you use often is not the use-case Amazon had in mind. I wonder if that's why they are only handing out up to 3 free buttons per customer.
Seems like a pretty good prank to hit all 25 of them, have me get 25 messages to verify, and make for a major PITA.
Maybe you should be more choosey about who you let into your house and/or you should set boundaries for your children so they don't order products as a "prank"?
Improvements are supposed to be improvements, not a convoluted clusterfsck. Seriously it's harder to make a list, then order online or just go to the grocery store?
Well, yes? That's kind of the entire point of this product -- convenience. I don't keep my laundry detergent in the refrigerator, it's down in the basement next to the laundry machines, so by the time I come back upstairs after noticing the laundry is done, I may not remember to add it to the list or order it online.
It's a perfectly fine idea, the problems you cited are easy to address (and indeed, have been addressed).
Its a solution in search of a problem, and complicates a simple process.
I'm not sure how a single button press complicates the process - you notice that laundry detergent (or diapers or whatever) is low and you press a button and a few days later, the product arrives. You do get an alert on your phone so you can cancel if you want to, but you don't have to respond to it, if you don't cancel the order then it's placed.
Which part of that is complicated?
Its like those TV commercials where a person is getting all frustrated performing some simple task, like cooking an egg, but fear not! here is some superduper miracle product to the rescue. Full of hinges and parts, a PITA to wash, and only has one use. Only $19.95 plus shipping and handling.
But this product is free (for up to 3 buttons), and since anyone using it is likely already buying from Amazon, there's really no added cost to them.
There is a value on your time. But it is demonstrably not your hourly rate on your job unless you are actually taking time away from your job. The rate is something different.
On a salary, the money keeps rolling in on a regular basis. If I squander a bit of it, I'll get more with the next paycheck. If I squander my time, it's gone for ever.
You haven't thought through the full implications of that statement. Earning a paycheck is essentially trading time for money. If you squander the money you earned, the time you spent earning it is wasted at the same time. The only difference is that the waste is time shifted but it is still wasted time that you will never, ever recover.
Right, I value my personal (i.e. family time) higher that work time -- I value it at 1.5X my work rate, 2X on weekends. So if my company "needs" me to come in and finish some project, that's what they'd need to pay me to make it worth giving up personal time. And they do (though they pay in comp time rather than dollars - one day of weekend work = 2 days of vacation pay).
I put going to the store in the same category - it's something that I *have* to do with my personal time, but not something that I *want* to do, so if I end up paying a bit more money for convenience, it's worth it. I *could* find a spare hour or two for shopping, but why bother when I can order my groceries on my way home on the train and have someone else deliver them tomorrow? (though I use Safeway rather than Amazon for groceries)
The only problem is, most of this stuff is cheaper at Costco — when they are having a sale, one can load-up until next year's sale of the same commodity.
But this seems like it would be darn convenient. So much so, I'm prepared to revisit the price difference. Everyone here is busy and if a single button-press can really replace a trip to the store, it just might be worth it...
Not everyone has room for costco's usual super-sized product packages, I really have no room to store a 6 pack of ketchup, #10 cans of corn, or a 24 pack of paper towels, and many items would expire before I can use them. While I might save money by buying in bulk, without unlimited storage space, I appreciate using Amazon for just-in-time delivery even if I spend a little more money. Plus, as you say, there's the convenience factor -- going to Costco ends up taking at least a few hours from start to finish.
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Average SF home is over 2,000 sq. ft. Assume a roof size, conservatively, of 1,000 sq. ft.
Most new housing in SF is not single family -- when I lived in SF, my share of roof for my 1000 sq ft apartment was around 100 sq feet.
10 inches of rain on 1,000 sq. ft. is around 6,000 gallons available per household per year.
Even if I could capture 6000 gallons of water, where would I find a place to store a 10 x 10 x 8 foot container that weighs 24 tons?
You could provide for 12% of residential water needs just by people not sending their roof water to the sewer system.
Why shift billions of dollars of costs to consumers to build home water capture and treatment systems when cutting just 3% of agricultural usage would free up the same amount of water? You know what's easier than capturing residential roof runoff? Not planting water-heavy crops in the desert and shipping them overseas.
Imagine if we reused the water that lands on roadways...172,000 miles of highway, average width of ~10 feet...68 billion gallons of water wasted each year...almost what the entire state uses in a year.
I don't think you understand just how much water california uses -- residential use along is 6 - 8 million acre feet, 68B gallons is only around 200,000 acre feet. It would cost billions to build 172,000 miles of highway water reclamation and treatment plants.
One of my highschool teachers when inquired as to why he was allowed to drink coffee while we were not, responded with this:
"Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi."
I've always detested this way of thinking, as it is just a stupid rationalization for the real reason: "Whatever, fuck you, I can get away with it."
That's not a rationalization for "Whatever, fuck you, I can get away with it," thats exactly what it means.
But really, what other answer did you expect? Sounds like you were disappointed that he didn't make some attempt at rationalization and instead he told you the truth.
50/50 chance you have the skills and equipment to be a hooker. Therefore you should be treated as a hooker?
I'd say that the chance is just about 100% -- not all prostitutes are female.
Sounds like a great way to make yourself a theft target -- who is going to take out their $700 phone and scan a paper held out by a by a guy begging for cash?
There are reasons they get connected. Many times the in-flight entertainment systems need to know things like the position, speed, altitude and heading to perform their assigned tasks. You want the entertainment system to be turned off below 10,000 feet AGL, or if you want the system to supply your customers a graphic that gives the position, speed, heading and accurate ETA then you need to get that information from the flight management system. I can imagine that it might be important to change how the data systems connect to the internet based on where the aircraft is (choosing the cheaper data path when it is in range) or use that data connection to report maintenance information to the airline's mechanics.
There are plenty of reasons the flight controls might not be totally air gapped from the in-flight entertainment systems.
RS-232 with the the RX wire clipped on the avionics side would be a good way to pass that information in a one-way direction. Or just use a dedicated GPS receiver for the entertainment system.
However, if the systems are properly designed and firewalled and the software properly vetted, I believe that you can eliminate the chances of having a successful attack vector. The problem though is how to write regulations that can assure something doesn't get overlooked and how you could prove that to the GAO so they will get off the FAA's back...
Lots of companies have gotten hacked through their properly designed and firewalled network -- every software product (even firewalls) has security holes. The only sure way to isolate the avionics from the passenger network is to air gap it. Don't rely on a firewall - I really can't believe that an airgapped network is not standard practice.
To back up a few GB, why are you making it complicated?
First, if your home fire safe is not media rated, then don't count on any media surviving a fire, the firesafe may prevent paper from burning, but don't count on it keeping any electronic media from melting or degrading. And a fire safe is no guarantee, my sister lost her house and *everything* in it -- the only thing recognizable was part of a 100 year old cast iron stove, and the remains of the brick fireplace, everything else ended up in an unrecognizable pile of debris in what was left of the basement, there wasn't even enough left of their thousand dollar gun safe to be found in the debris.
A few GB is *nothing* -- just encrypt it and email it to yourself, set up multiple accounts with different email providers if you don't trust that Google will be around for the long haul.
If you had tens or hundreds of GB of data, then I'd say use a cloud provider and migrate your data to a new provider if that one goes out of business. I keep my data in Amazon Glacier -- for $10/month (it's mostly old family home videos converted to digital along with a lot of TIFF photos). If I needed to recover the data all at once, I could send them a hard drive (plus a fee) and they'd restore to that hard drive and mail it back to me.
Drop a pipe in the Pacific, run it over the mountains, maybe parallel to the road that descends into Palm Springs and refill that nasty smelling swamp. On the way down the hill you can generate electricity, desalinate, extract minerals and make sushi. Win, win, win and wasabi.
Death Valley is next. I'm pretty sure turtles float.
I don't think you understand the limits of a siphon -- the maximum rise along a siphon for water is 32 feet (the same limit as the limit for a suction pump, which is why well pumps are at the bottom of the well) -- any higher and the pressure within the liquid drops below its vapor pressure and bubbles form, breaking the siphon. It'd take large pumps and a lot of energy to pump the water over any significant rise - even if you extract some of the energy on the way down, you don't get nearly as much back as you put in.
Since the Salton sea is below sea level, you could tunnel the water in -- though it would take massive pipes/aqueducts for enough water to flow for significant energy generation.
My Nexus 5 went into a reboot loop, after a lot of research online (and taking the phone apart to see if the power switch was damaged (it appeared to be working fine with a good "click" when pressed) -- I managed to get to boot by repeatedly and rapidly hitting the power button while it was booting, then quickly unlocked the phone and rebooted into safe mode by holding down the power button.
After it booted into safe mode, I left it in the charger overnight, and in the morning, rebooted back into normal mode and it was fine. Mostly. It was no longer in the reboot loop, but kept powering itself off throughout the day.
I replaced it with a new phone, moved my SIM over, and then the Nexus appeared to be fine, no more poweroffs, no reboot loops, I used it as a Wifi-only tablet for a day and then it got a Lolipop 5.1 OTA upgrade, so I upgraded. It's been over a week since then, and it's still working fine as a wifi-only tablet, I haven't tried moving the SIM back
I still have no idea what was wrong with the phone, maybe it was a hardware problem with the switch, or maybe it was a software problem. My Nexus 7 tablet (also running lollipop) is fine.
I replaced my Nexus 5 with a Samsung Galaxy S5 -- I really like the S5 (and removable SIM), but I hate Samsung's Touchwiz interface. I really wanted to stick with the Nexus line, but am not willing to pay $700 for a 64GB Nexus 6 when the S5 cost about half that and I wasn't going to buy another Nexus 5 after what happened to this one.
Any company that falls for the "Buy your-company.sucks before anyone else does!" deserves whatever price they pay -- they can't buy up every .sucks domain for every permutation of their company name, so why bother? Is "http://microsoft.sucks" significantly worse than "http://micro.soft.sucks" or "http://microsoft-inc.sucks" or "http://microsoft-really.sucks" or "http://microsoft-software.sucks" or any of the other thousands of permutations of the name?
But H1Bs basically aren't allowed to stay and get treated like shit while they are here.
Can't move jobs; because if they are ever unemployed even for a moment they are breaching visa requirements and immediately deported; or jailed, and then deported.
So we kick them back out again, and start the cycle again. (Saying goodbye to their spending power and wages we just paid them, since they take it back to India [or wherever])
Even if the employer files for H1-B revocation, it can take months to process that paperwork, so generally if an H1-B holder loses their job they have a bit of time to search for employment - they'll usually be able to transfer their visa to a new employer if they find a new job within 30 days. My company just hired an H1-B applicant that was in this situation -- his employer shut down suddenly, he was jobless for about 2 weeks before we hired him and filed for the transfer.
No INS agent is going to bang on your door and take you away the day you lose your job.
While some H1-B's may scrimp and save up money to send home (or take back home with them at the end of their employment), most H1-B's I know spend most of their money just like everyone else - on housing, food, transportation, entertainment, etc. Likewise, if they are only in the country for a few years, they will have paid social security and medicare taxes that they will not get any benefit from (though they may get relief from some or all of their social security tax obligation if they are from a country with a totalization agreement with the USA -- mostly European and (some) Asian countries, notable exceptions are India and China)
When I read this, I immediately thought "Has Google Indexed the Contents of your Google Drive?", in the context of those automatic backups you might have enabled for photos, etc on your Android device. In fact, you're only at risk here if you have configured some type of FTP server or WebDAV (like a QNAP, etc) to have a public IP and have no security whatsoever. So that means having enough technical prowess to accomplish that much, only to leave all your stuff open on the internet for "ease"?!?
I think much of Slashdot might agree with me that if you're silly enough to deploy a public-facing server with no or default authentication, yeah, you'll probably deserved get indexed by Google.
Yeah, I thought the same thing as you when I saw the headline. I'm a little less interested to learn that if you open your data to the public (even if you didn't mean to), it's viewable by the public.
So the question can be used to weed out pedants. I guess it is useful after all.
Or to find the engineers that can spot the missing parts of vague software specifications -- just because a user asks for something in the specs doesn't mean that he knows that the case he wrote up doesn't handle all of the options the software will encounter in the real world.
He may ask for software to generate quotes for manhole cover manufacturing, and only ask for a radius because clearly that's all you need to describe a round manhole cover, yet the smart engineer will ask how to handle the other shapes. Few companies want an engineer that blindly adheres to specs even when they don't make sense in the real world... that's more like a job for consultants so they can get paid to do the work and the paid again to do it the right way.
I have been told that it has more popularity in Japan because it's an easy gateway to learning European languages.
By "popularity" I mean slightly less overwhelming disinterest. It would be interesting to hear from a Japanese-geek on it.
My wife is Japanese and never heard of 'Esperanto', when she learned English in school, they taught English. Though she's been away from Japan for about a decade... and out of school for 2 decades.
What if it is not a bomb. What if a war breaks out, and you know for a fact that there is an intelligence agent reporting over a regular cell phone, using coded words, about the movements of ships out of a harbor. Cutting off that flow of information while you set sail might be very valuable.
What adversary would we going up against that is so powerful that being able to track ships leaving harbors in the USA is useful information for them, yet not so powerful that they have spy satellites or high altitude drones that could give them the same (or better) information as an observer on the ground?
In any case, this super spy with a cell phone is going to have lots of other ways to communicate these code words, even without a cellular network, he can use Wifi, a plain old analog phone, coded IR light communication to a compatriot on a nearby hilltop, VHF/UFH radio, satellite phone, etc. Ships move slowly enough that he doesn't have to have a phone in-hand at the time he sees it go past.
How do they know that he accepted the papers? The wife already gave her attorney access to her account, so surely the court must see that the person using the account is not necessarily the person that it belongs to. Maybe the wife knows his password and she can log on to his account and "accept" the papers on his behalf.
If you're driving down the highway with your foot on the brake, then you *need* one of these systems.
Please, for your own safety, do not come to California. The Bike One is right around the corner, as it has been for as long as anyone living can remember, so, if you move here, you will falll into the oceania, and die. (And wee don't need any more people driving our land prices up.)
That doesn't change the fact that the big one *is* right around the corner, it will come, lives will be lost, hundreds of billions of dollars in direct costs may be incurred, and taxpayers will be paying much of those costs in disaster aid since many homeowners are uninsured, and even for those that are, the funds backing their insurance may run out in a large quake.
Though I guess building a large metropolis on top of known earthquake faults is no worse than using flood disaster funds to build right back in the flood plain.
Little tiny one ounce packets would be ridiculously easy to smuggle in.
True of both powdered and liquid forms.
Sounds like powered alcohol has greater volume than liquid alcohol, so it's even harder to smuggle:
http://www.palcohol.com/
The volume of a shot of powdered alcohol is 4X greater than the volume of a shot of liquid alcohol so liquid alcohol is much easier to conceal.
Sure, you could put the powder into a canister labeled "flour" and smuggle it in that way, but you could also put everclear alcohol into a bottle labeled "water".
If I can't work on my car, I will not buy it. Same with my computer.
The problem is that people like you who want to work on their car are becoming more and more rare -- most people just want their car to be reliable and if it breaks, take it to the garage. Few consumers want to open the hood and fix something -- myself included.. at one time I did all of my own oil changes, tuneups (back when a tuneup meant replacing points, condenser and rotor), brake pad changes, etc. But I won't touch a modern car, I'd rather just take it to the garage when it breaks (which is rarely with most cars, my VW is 4 years old and the only maintenance it has had in all of that time is 4 oil changes - 10,000 miles between each).
So you may say that you'll only buy a car that you can work on, but as those cars become harder and harder to find, eventually you won't be able to buy one. I used to say I wouldn't buy a phone that is sealed and doesn't allow battery changes or have a microSD slot. Those phones are getting harder to find, even the new Galaxy S6 doesn't have an easily replaced battery or an SD slot... the last phone I bought is sealed without a battery or SD card slot.
If these drills make the pointy haired bosses stop thinking IT security purely as a cost to be minimized it would do some good. If an IT dept works well and prevent disasters they never get credited for it. It they slip up and make a huge mistake, they get fired. If the best reward you can hope for is "not getting fired", it will attract a level of talent that considers "not getting fired" an achievement and goal. Unless the management mentality changes IT disasters will keep happening. At least if we fired the top management too along with IT disasters and sue the corporate board for mismanagement, then they might pay attention.
Doesn't that apply to most jobs? If an accountant works well and gets most of the numbers right, he never gets credited, but make one huge mistake that costs the company huge sums of money, and he gets fired. If the Marketing Department works well and brings in lots of business, but makes one huge PR mistake that offends customers and drives away customers, then they get fired. And so on.
IT isn't the only department that gets little credit when things go well, but gets big blame when they don't.
No way would this work in our house, kids are 6 and 22 months.
I've already found items waiting for me in my Amazon cart after my daughter has played with apps like the Easy Bake Oven - which is a cute app, but includes links to add related supplies to your shopping cart...
Do you keep products like laundry detergent within easy reach of your children? If you can figure out how to keep detergent out of their reach, maybe you can figure out how to keep the button out of reach.
And how many people will hit it by accident?
Hitting the button sends an alert to your phone, and you can cancel if it was placed mistakenly.
Just keeps getting handier and handier. I probably have 50 different things in my refrigerator, so let's say 25 of them I will want buttons for.
Gee, it's almost as if sticking 25 of these on your refrigerator for products you use often is not the use-case Amazon had in mind. I wonder if that's why they are only handing out up to 3 free buttons per customer.
Seems like a pretty good prank to hit all 25 of them, have me get 25 messages to verify, and make for a major PITA.
Maybe you should be more choosey about who you let into your house and/or you should set boundaries for your children so they don't order products as a "prank"?
Improvements are supposed to be improvements, not a convoluted clusterfsck. Seriously it's harder to make a list, then order online or just go to the grocery store?
Well, yes? That's kind of the entire point of this product -- convenience. I don't keep my laundry detergent in the refrigerator, it's down in the basement next to the laundry machines, so by the time I come back upstairs after noticing the laundry is done, I may not remember to add it to the list or order it online.
It's a perfectly fine idea, the problems you cited are easy to address (and indeed, have been addressed).
Its a solution in search of a problem, and complicates a simple process.
I'm not sure how a single button press complicates the process - you notice that laundry detergent (or diapers or whatever) is low and you press a button and a few days later, the product arrives. You do get an alert on your phone so you can cancel if you want to, but you don't have to respond to it, if you don't cancel the order then it's placed.
Which part of that is complicated?
Its like those TV commercials where a person is getting all frustrated performing some simple task, like cooking an egg, but fear not! here is some superduper miracle product to the rescue. Full of hinges and parts, a PITA to wash, and only has one use. Only $19.95 plus shipping and handling.
But this product is free (for up to 3 buttons), and since anyone using it is likely already buying from Amazon, there's really no added cost to them.
I think of it as putting a value on my time.
There is a value on your time. But it is demonstrably not your hourly rate on your job unless you are actually taking time away from your job. The rate is something different.
On a salary, the money keeps rolling in on a regular basis. If I squander a bit of it, I'll get more with the next paycheck. If I squander my time, it's gone for ever.
You haven't thought through the full implications of that statement. Earning a paycheck is essentially trading time for money. If you squander the money you earned, the time you spent earning it is wasted at the same time. The only difference is that the waste is time shifted but it is still wasted time that you will never, ever recover.
Right, I value my personal (i.e. family time) higher that work time -- I value it at 1.5X my work rate, 2X on weekends. So if my company "needs" me to come in and finish some project, that's what they'd need to pay me to make it worth giving up personal time. And they do (though they pay in comp time rather than dollars - one day of weekend work = 2 days of vacation pay).
I put going to the store in the same category - it's something that I *have* to do with my personal time, but not something that I *want* to do, so if I end up paying a bit more money for convenience, it's worth it. I *could* find a spare hour or two for shopping, but why bother when I can order my groceries on my way home on the train and have someone else deliver them tomorrow? (though I use Safeway rather than Amazon for groceries)
The only problem is, most of this stuff is cheaper at Costco — when they are having a sale, one can load-up until next year's sale of the same commodity.
But this seems like it would be darn convenient. So much so, I'm prepared to revisit the price difference. Everyone here is busy and if a single button-press can really replace a trip to the store, it just might be worth it...
Not everyone has room for costco's usual super-sized product packages, I really have no room to store a 6 pack of ketchup, #10 cans of corn, or a 24 pack of paper towels, and many items would expire before I can use them. While I might save money by buying in bulk, without unlimited storage space, I appreciate using Amazon for just-in-time delivery even if I spend a little more money. Plus, as you say, there's the convenience factor -- going to Costco ends up taking at least a few hours from start to finish.