From a different article on this I read earlier today, it would seem that the fact that it was designed for wider views actually helps it for certain tasks - monitoring for supernovae, for instance.
Running without an AV works ONLY if a) You are intelligent enough to avoid viruses AND b) Anyone you frequently communicate with have no viruses AND c) Any sites you frequent have not been compromised.
That third one is what got me. A webcomic I read - quite a popular one, not at all a shady, untrustworthy site - got exploited, and was used to serve out malware. I happened to read it during the few hours it was compromised. The malware got past Adblock. Everything was fully up-to-date, from Firefox to Java to Windows itself (I even keep IE up-to-date despite never using it, just in case). That thing wreaked some serious havoc on my system - I ended up needing to do a full reformat and reinstall.
So yeah, ever since, I run an antivirus. Because not only can I still make mistakes (unfortunately, and not for lack of trying, I'm still human), but other people's mistakes can affect me as well.
Let's start with a basic premise - that the goal of education is to train you to enter some career, do some "job", with many of the "general-ed" classes being to train you for the job of "living in modern society". Seems like a fairly safe assumption.
Let's further assume that the purpose of tests is to ensure that you can actually do the things that job requires. That seems like the logical purpose, although I've found that far more tests seem to be just generating paperwork showing that the teacher is actually teaching, not that the students are actually studying.
It would seem logical, then, that tests should mimic the task you are being trained for. English tests should mimic the writing and reading you will actually do in real life, math tests should mimic the kind of math you will be doing, and so on.
Unfortunately, that's rarely the case.
Any multiple-choice, no-books-allowed test is simply not found in real life. Essay questions seem to test "can you write using proper grammar and spelling" rather than "can you explain a complex topic". I don't think any boss has ever said "I need you to write a report on _____, but you cannot do any research".
One of the best (and hardest) tests I ever took was in a second-level Java class. Four hours. Three tasks. No rules other than "no copy-pasting from the Internet or each other". And the tasks? First was to write, from scratch, a full four-function calculator. Then a simulated inventory system - including a database via ODBC. Final one was, IIRC, a simple, two-way Internet chat app. Grading was done based on quality - completeness, bugs, interface usability, source code readability, and any extra features outside the specifications.
It was almost exactly what I ended up doing as a career - building applications to a customer's specs. The applications were simple, yes, but the deadline was tight - out of the entire class, I was the only one who actually hit every feature in every project, and I think the main reason I did so was because I kept at *least* one tab open pointing to the Java library documentation, at all times.
I wish more of my tests would have been like that. Instead, I got hundreds of multiple-choice questions, or essays that I honestly could have filled with bullshit and still gotten an A, or math problems I know I will never, ever see again.
You want to improve education? Make the tests practical, concrete tests of competency, not "whatever is easiest to assign a grade to".
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: -- "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
Now why on earth would I read the article? That would just get in the way of writing more comments disparaging IP law, ranting about the government/Microsoft/Apple/Google/MPAA/RIAA, and fervently awaiting the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
That's making the false assumption that "physical property" and "intellectual property" are the same thing. Hint: they are not.
Any work of the United States government, or an employee of such working on government time, is automatically in the public domain. Everything from NASA photographs to recordings of the Marine Corps Band to every boring office memo are public domain. I don't see why that should not apply to program code.
Note also that "classified" and "public domain" are separate things - technically, even the ultra-top-secret "list of nuclear launch codes" is public domain, in that no one can claim copyright or trademark on it. So the "fire ze missiles" program can be (and probably should be) classified. But the accounting programs?
I've found that any music with recognizable words is too much of a distraction. My brain gets stuck keeping along with the song instead of working on the code.
So most of my "coding music" consists of soundtracks - both film (complete Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, plus a few others) and video game (every Final Fantasy, every Zelda, and a bunch more). No words for my brain to get distracted by parsing, and no more accidentally typing in the lyrics to "Flight of Icarus" instead of actual code.
Weirdly, it only happens for words I can understand. Languages I just flat-out don't know, like German or Japanese, are fine. And any Latin mangled badly enough for me to not understand it (see: most modern songs in Latin (I'm looking at you, Uematsu - that is NOT where the emphasis goes on "interius"!)) also flies right by. I've even discovered that incomprehensibly-sung English gets ignored as well, although I simultaneously discovered that I do *not* like death metal.
I would argue that a true definition of "email" is "text-based messages that can be written, transmitted, read, and archived, entirely electronically". Telegrams were never (to my knowledge) archived electronically, and (again, to my knowledge) were mostly written and read on paper, only being transmitted electronically.
Still, very interesting to think of how old some of the predecessors to email are (or rather, were).
But 1920x1080 is for all intents and purposes "close enough" to 1900x1200 (although I'm sure someone will reply and whine about aspect ratios and vertical pixels). And 1080p laptops, while not exactly ubiquitous, aren't too hard to find - Newegg lists 45, ranging in size from 13" to 18", with the cheapest ones being $800-$900.
there is no such thing as a technical fix to a sociological problem
Sure there is! Rip out everyone's brains and replace them with computers! Much easier to keep in line, easier to keep happy, and probably more productive to boot.
Hell, why bother keeping the fleshy meatbags? Kill all the humans, replace with robots. Problems. Solved.
Even if problems do arise with that, it's all code and technology. Release a patch, or come out with a new version. BAM. Sociological problems. Technical fixes.
gas pipe ain't good gun barrels. and I'm not going to say why;)
Just an FYI, your ignorance is showing.
Iran isn't Zimbabwe or even Afghanistan. Iran's essentially a modern country. They have Internet - Twitter was a major part of the protests a while back. They have a space program that's successfully launched satellites. They're actually considered a leading country in stem-cell research and nanotechnology. They helped build the Large Hadron Collider. They export automobiles. They're considered a creative player, a rising star, in cinema. Their GDP sits between Turkey and Australia. On the UN Human Development Index, they are listed as High - the same category as Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, and above China, India, and South Africa.
They produce, legally and under license, H&K MP5 sub-machineguns and G3 rifles and Rheinmetal MG3 machine guns. They have designed and built their own helicopters, UAVs, flight simulators, ballistic missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, smart bombs, you name it. Their standard infantry rifle is arguably an improvement over ours - literally, as it's a bullpup-modified variant of a Chinese copy of the M16.
If we ever go to war with Iran, it will not be like Afghanistan. It will not be like Iraq. It would be like invading, say, Norway - we would win, eventually, if only through sheer bloody-mindedness, but it would be a nasty, brutal fight, bloody on both sides. It would be months, even years before we even get to the "barely-armed guerrilla insurgency" phase.
So, basically, you're copying 40 year old tech from your enemies, but because you can't buy the bullets or missiles to shoot, you're going to arm them with whatever you can cobble together.
You say that like they'll be building guns out of steel pipe and ball bearings. But the truth is, making guns in a new caliber and making ammunition to match is easy enough that some hobbyists do it in their garage.
There are, apparently (I Am Not A Military Expert), valid military reasons to make your guns and ammunition incompatible with the enemy's. America and the rest of NATO were the first to use 5mm-caliber small arms - the M16, FAMAS, L86, etc. are all chambered for a standard 5.56mm round, and I believe most even have compatible magazines.
The USSR and the rest of the Warsaw Pact could have used the same, but that would mean that, in a war, any ammunition supplies the enemy captured would be usable to them. While that would also mean that any ammunition supplies they captured could be used by them, they decided not to take that risk, and instead created an essentially-the-same-but-incompatible 5.45mm round. The Chinese, likewise, eventually created their own version, this one in 5.8mm. While none of their ammunition can be used in anothers' weapons, they have essentially the same performance characteristics.
Iran is simply doing the same thing. Instead of using NATO-standard 7.62mm miniguns, 20mm autocannons, 40mm grenade launchers or 2.75" rockets, they'll use ones that are just slightly incompatible, but nearly identical in performance.
From a theoretical standpoint, there's two reasons for doing so. One reason is economics - trying to stimulate their own arms industry, rather than import from others. If you mandate the use of incompatible ammunition and weapons, foreign production becomes useless, while the domestic industry gets nearly-guaranteed profitability.
Another could be that they are more concerned about being invaded, rather than invading others. You are, after all, more likely to be the one capturing supplies, rather than having your supplies captured, when you are on the attack. History would seem to bear this view out - during the Cold War, neither side used intercompatible ammunition, and as it turns out, neither side much wanted to invade the other. The most notable case of cross-compatible weaponry was in WW2, when the British designed the Sten gun to use the same ammunition as the German MP40. And guess what (spoiler alert)? Britain later invaded Germany!
OK, that's probably a massive simplification of things (remember, IANAME), but still, look at things from Iran's view for a second. The US, a country they have *very* poor relations with, just invaded two countries next to them and occupied them for years. And now it almost seems like they are, once again, manufacturing evidence of WMDs and putting out agitprop to get the citizens ready, once again, to invade some Middle-Eastern country. Even if they actually *are* guilty of trying to build nukes (honestly, I wouldn't be that surprised if they were), can you blame them for worrying that the 1st Armored is going to be driving towards Tehran sometime soon, and planning to defend themselves?
I'm saying stupid users, and stupid admins, exist for every operating system. And the problem probably gets worse if executives hand down a mandate to use an operating system the admins and users are not familiar with. Doesn't matter what OS it is - no operating system is idiot-proof. A moron can break Linux. A moron can break Windows. A moron can break Mac OS, or Solaris, or VMS, or OS/2, or HP-UX, or FreeBSD or NetBSD or DragonflyBSD or OpenBSD. Name an operating system, there's a story somewhere of some moron admin who left it wide open. And anyone who pretends otherwise probably is, or will be, one of those morons.
I almost bought an Asus G55. Fifteen inch screen, full 1920x1080 resolution, and just around $1500. Only reason I didn't end up buying it was because I was mislead by the pre-order page to believe that it had two hard drive bays as well as the optical drive bay. Apparently Asus removed that feature without notifying resellers, because I got an email weeks later telling me the machine I'd configured was impossible - I got upgraded to the larger G75 instead.
Now, that particular machine would be terrible for light office/home use. But I've used 1366x768 screens - they are *terrible*, and when you're spending a grand and a half on a laptop, they're completely underspec.
Try to get at least a 1600x900 screen. Seriously. That's just about the most important advice I can give you.
At least at the level of "business desktop", I believe "user stupidity" is a far bigger threat than "insecure operating system". Yeah, for a ___ server, or firewall, or really any sort of system managed by trained, competent people, the OS or applications may indeed be the bigger risk, but on the desktop? All it means is that instead of attaching bank_of_nigeria__withdrawal_forms.pdf.bat, they'll attach bank_of_nigeria__withdrawal_forms.pdf.pl when running a scam.
Linux is not a magic security bullet - such a thing simply does not exist. No OS is unbreakable. My company found that out ourselves, when we discovered just how completely '0wn3d' a particular clients' Linux servers were - let's just say the guy who configured them is now fleeing the *country* to escape the gross negligence and breach-of-contract lawsuits (when your job description is "keep these servers up-to-date and secure", and they're still running a version of Debian from '02 and participating in Anonymous DDoS attacks, you've failed).
Windows also, I have to admit, has gotten much better at security compared to the 95/98 days, or even the XP SP0 days. Linux still has a security lead, but that lead is now orders of magnitude smaller (especially since Linux, at least for certain distros, seems to be trading security for usability).
Hopefully this will remain purely a theoretical question, but seriously, what would happen if they won?
The *only* way I can see this being copyright infringement is if a judge rules a) copying any broadcast (legally obtained, and for personal use) is piracy, overturning mountains of precedent, or b) the show + commercials combined are the "work", and that there's some unlegislated "right to artistic integrity" or something that means you cannot take a work and redistribute only parts.
Both of those are patently (hah!) ludicrous, but let's assume, for a moment, that reality is in fact as strange as this fiction.
If (a) happens, well, goodbye fair use, goodbye archival copies. No more taping TV shows. No more saving videos to disk. No more caching or buffering video, even - after all, what is a video buffer but a way to time-shift the broadcast by a few seconds?
If (b) happens, it gets even worse. Want to quote something? Better quote the entire thing - except you can't do that, because that's piracy. So no more quoting. No more referencing. No more citations or excerpts. Want to walk out of a movie theater mid-showing? You just broke the law. Want to stop reading a book halfway through? Off to a cell with ye!
Hell, even if the ruling is just a limited "you can't skip commercials" ban, ignoring any semblance of actually paying attention to the "law", that's terrible. If you're going to ban a machine skipping commercials automatically, you'll have to ban machines skipping them manually - so no DVR, no videotaping, without some mechanism to force ads to play. And why limit it to "with a machine"? Ban muting commercials, or leaving the room, or talking over them.
Congratulations, Fox. You just filed the dumbest lawsuit I've ever seen in the US system.
The sad thing? Their lawyers have to know it's completely hopeless. Their hope *has* to be that they have deeper pockets than Dish, and can essentially bankrupt them with legal costs.
I'd say there ought to be a law against that sort of thing, but I fear that would just make things worse.
Oh, I do this all the time to political surveys. Started out just re-using some Monty Python bits ("I believe America should be an anarcho-syndicalist commune...")
I'm pretty sure the Republicans' database lists me as a registered Communist and practicing Norse pagan who believes gay marriage should be mandatory, thinks abortion should be illegal "except for ugly chicks like Hillary", supports using nuclear weapons to secure the Canadian border, watches exclusively Fox News, and has voted for Ron Paul in every election since '92. They seem to have caught on - they haven't called at all since 2010 or so.
If the Democrats ever call, I'm telling them I'm a monarchist, an ordained Coptic Orthodox deacon, and a veteran of the Third Punic War. I may even claim responsibility for the assassination of William McKinley.
A lot of his criticisms of the current "new" system are valid. But the fundamental problem, as I see it, is that instead of truly "breaking the paradigm", everyone is treating the business the same way it had been.
In short, they know the players have changed, but nobody's realized that the game can be changed. Artists still expect some form of publisher to pay for their studio time, they still go to some publisher to publish their music. And now they complain that the publisher is still taking too much money.
Here's an idea (and it's just that, an idea): Go completely, 100% independent Use Kickstarter or the like to get the cash to record an album. Having a demo of one or two songs should suffice, if you can market yourself properly, and you can self-fund demos easily enough. Once you have the album, sell it on your own site instead of iTunes or Amazon. Maybe Humble-Indie-Bundle it with other, *similar* bands, if that can give you more publicity. Either use the profits from the album, or ticket presales (Kickstarter may work well again), to go on tour. Get merchandise to sell - t-shirts, physical CDs, posters, etc. Make sure to have some sort of contact for licensing. If Hollywood Director Q wants to use your song in Summer Action Movie Part XIV, you shouldn't make it hard for him. Commercials. Radio play. Anything - if someone wants to pay you to use your music, it needs to be possible. And price yourself lower than the Big Media bands do (since there's no publisher to take a 90% cut, it should be easy).
Between album sales and concerts, it should be possible to make a good living. The era of the multi-millionaire superstar is probably over, but honestly, I won't mourn them.
There are some problems with this. The publisher is normally the one to do all the advertising, so you'd have to do that yourself. It means a band *will* need some sort of marketing person to succeed, from Day 1. Music critics will also have to do a much better job - they can't just look at the list of what Big Media inc. is publishing this month, listen to the CDs mailed to you, and write down 4 stars for all of it.
There's probably a million other problems, too, but we won't find them until someone at least *tries*.
That's a bit draconian. And probably unenforceable. And probably unconstitutional, come to think of it.
A more tolerable way would be "lead by example": pass a law saying all government networks must be IPv6 (both internally, and externally) by 2018, and that any networking and computing equipment purchased with taxpayer dollars after 2014 must be fully IPv6-capable (possibly with an exception for NSA et al. to buy completely non-TCP/IP stuff, if that's a thing they do). I know they already have some requirements like this, although I believe it's just for operating systems right now.
With the size of our current government, this means anyone not supporting IPv6 automatically loses out on a huge market. Remember, this isn't just Obama's Blackberry, this means every IRS website, every Senator's secretary's assistant's netbook, every Toughbook shipped off to ___istan, every security camera watching the grass grow next to some half-forgotten FEMA warehouse. It's a big market, that's all I'm saying.
That's enough for Windows XP, actually. Maybe not with the later service packs installed (SP2 added a LOT of stuff), but I've run a usable XP machine on less.
Network speed is a big one. A 60TB hard drive would literally take three centuries to fill on a dial-up connection, 9 months on my current home fiber link, and about a week to fill on a full gigabit link. As most people consume far more data than they produce, that's one bound on useful disk space. If you consider "sneakernet" data links, the capacity of a single floppy, tape or optical disk can also be taken into account.
Another bound is display resolution. Videos are about the most data-dense thing on most computers have. The main bounds on those are screen resolution (no sense storing 4K videos when your screen is still 1024x768), framerate, and compression. Framerate hasn't really increased for mainstream video in decades, and display resolutions are only now beginning to rise again. And compression naturally keeps getting better. Display resolution also affects consumer images (while the pros edit at 20 megapixels or whatever, they still scale it down to what Joe User will be able to render), as well as all the little UI icons and junk that's probably just noise in the data, but might get significant if we ever see 16000x10000 pixel displays being common.
Those are probably the main factors in "how much space will the average user need". RAM, CPU power, all that generally shouldn't have much effect on disk usage.
Slashdot Mirror
You, however, are obviously working for the Spanish Inquisition. Precisely as I expected.
From a different article on this I read earlier today, it would seem that the fact that it was designed for wider views actually helps it for certain tasks - monitoring for supernovae, for instance.
Running without an AV works ONLY if
a) You are intelligent enough to avoid viruses
AND
b) Anyone you frequently communicate with have no viruses
AND
c) Any sites you frequent have not been compromised.
That third one is what got me. A webcomic I read - quite a popular one, not at all a shady, untrustworthy site - got exploited, and was used to serve out malware. I happened to read it during the few hours it was compromised. The malware got past Adblock. Everything was fully up-to-date, from Firefox to Java to Windows itself (I even keep IE up-to-date despite never using it, just in case). That thing wreaked some serious havoc on my system - I ended up needing to do a full reformat and reinstall.
So yeah, ever since, I run an antivirus. Because not only can I still make mistakes (unfortunately, and not for lack of trying, I'm still human), but other people's mistakes can affect me as well.
Let's start with a basic premise - that the goal of education is to train you to enter some career, do some "job", with many of the "general-ed" classes being to train you for the job of "living in modern society". Seems like a fairly safe assumption.
Let's further assume that the purpose of tests is to ensure that you can actually do the things that job requires. That seems like the logical purpose, although I've found that far more tests seem to be just generating paperwork showing that the teacher is actually teaching, not that the students are actually studying.
It would seem logical, then, that tests should mimic the task you are being trained for. English tests should mimic the writing and reading you will actually do in real life, math tests should mimic the kind of math you will be doing, and so on.
Unfortunately, that's rarely the case.
Any multiple-choice, no-books-allowed test is simply not found in real life. Essay questions seem to test "can you write using proper grammar and spelling" rather than "can you explain a complex topic". I don't think any boss has ever said "I need you to write a report on _____, but you cannot do any research".
One of the best (and hardest) tests I ever took was in a second-level Java class. Four hours. Three tasks. No rules other than "no copy-pasting from the Internet or each other". And the tasks? First was to write, from scratch, a full four-function calculator. Then a simulated inventory system - including a database via ODBC. Final one was, IIRC, a simple, two-way Internet chat app. Grading was done based on quality - completeness, bugs, interface usability, source code readability, and any extra features outside the specifications.
It was almost exactly what I ended up doing as a career - building applications to a customer's specs. The applications were simple, yes, but the deadline was tight - out of the entire class, I was the only one who actually hit every feature in every project, and I think the main reason I did so was because I kept at *least* one tab open pointing to the Java library documentation, at all times.
I wish more of my tests would have been like that. Instead, I got hundreds of multiple-choice questions, or essays that I honestly could have filled with bullshit and still gotten an A, or math problems I know I will never, ever see again.
You want to improve education? Make the tests practical, concrete tests of competency, not "whatever is easiest to assign a grade to".
Did you read my link? No?
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
Well, time to check Red Hat off my list of distros. Any company willing to pay essentially blackmail money does not deserve my business.
For those mystified by the comment subject
Now why on earth would I read the article? That would just get in the way of writing more comments disparaging IP law, ranting about the government/Microsoft/Apple/Google/MPAA/RIAA, and fervently awaiting the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
That's making the false assumption that "physical property" and "intellectual property" are the same thing. Hint: they are not.
Any work of the United States government, or an employee of such working on government time, is automatically in the public domain. Everything from NASA photographs to recordings of the Marine Corps Band to every boring office memo are public domain. I don't see why that should not apply to program code.
Note also that "classified" and "public domain" are separate things - technically, even the ultra-top-secret "list of nuclear launch codes" is public domain, in that no one can claim copyright or trademark on it. So the "fire ze missiles" program can be (and probably should be) classified. But the accounting programs?
I've found that any music with recognizable words is too much of a distraction. My brain gets stuck keeping along with the song instead of working on the code.
So most of my "coding music" consists of soundtracks - both film (complete Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, plus a few others) and video game (every Final Fantasy, every Zelda, and a bunch more). No words for my brain to get distracted by parsing, and no more accidentally typing in the lyrics to "Flight of Icarus" instead of actual code.
Weirdly, it only happens for words I can understand. Languages I just flat-out don't know, like German or Japanese, are fine. And any Latin mangled badly enough for me to not understand it (see: most modern songs in Latin (I'm looking at you, Uematsu - that is NOT where the emphasis goes on "interius"!)) also flies right by. I've even discovered that incomprehensibly-sung English gets ignored as well, although I simultaneously discovered that I do *not* like death metal.
I would argue that a true definition of "email" is "text-based messages that can be written, transmitted, read, and archived, entirely electronically". Telegrams were never (to my knowledge) archived electronically, and (again, to my knowledge) were mostly written and read on paper, only being transmitted electronically.
Still, very interesting to think of how old some of the predecessors to email are (or rather, were).
But 1920x1080 is for all intents and purposes "close enough" to 1900x1200 (although I'm sure someone will reply and whine about aspect ratios and vertical pixels). And 1080p laptops, while not exactly ubiquitous, aren't too hard to find - Newegg lists 45, ranging in size from 13" to 18", with the cheapest ones being $800-$900.
During detention, usually.
there is no such thing as a technical fix to a sociological problem
Sure there is! Rip out everyone's brains and replace them with computers! Much easier to keep in line, easier to keep happy, and probably more productive to boot.
Hell, why bother keeping the fleshy meatbags? Kill all the humans, replace with robots. Problems. Solved.
Even if problems do arise with that, it's all code and technology. Release a patch, or come out with a new version. BAM. Sociological problems. Technical fixes.
Whooooosh!
gas pipe ain't good gun barrels. and I'm not going to say why ;)
Just an FYI, your ignorance is showing.
Iran isn't Zimbabwe or even Afghanistan. Iran's essentially a modern country. They have Internet - Twitter was a major part of the protests a while back. They have a space program that's successfully launched satellites. They're actually considered a leading country in stem-cell research and nanotechnology. They helped build the Large Hadron Collider. They export automobiles. They're considered a creative player, a rising star, in cinema. Their GDP sits between Turkey and Australia. On the UN Human Development Index, they are listed as High - the same category as Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, and above China, India, and South Africa.
They produce, legally and under license, H&K MP5 sub-machineguns and G3 rifles and Rheinmetal MG3 machine guns. They have designed and built their own helicopters, UAVs, flight simulators, ballistic missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, smart bombs, you name it. Their standard infantry rifle is arguably an improvement over ours - literally, as it's a bullpup-modified variant of a Chinese copy of the M16.
If we ever go to war with Iran, it will not be like Afghanistan. It will not be like Iraq. It would be like invading, say, Norway - we would win, eventually, if only through sheer bloody-mindedness, but it would be a nasty, brutal fight, bloody on both sides. It would be months, even years before we even get to the "barely-armed guerrilla insurgency" phase.
So, basically, you're copying 40 year old tech from your enemies, but because you can't buy the bullets or missiles to shoot, you're going to arm them with whatever you can cobble together.
You say that like they'll be building guns out of steel pipe and ball bearings. But the truth is, making guns in a new caliber and making ammunition to match is easy enough that some hobbyists do it in their garage.
There are, apparently (I Am Not A Military Expert), valid military reasons to make your guns and ammunition incompatible with the enemy's. America and the rest of NATO were the first to use 5mm-caliber small arms - the M16, FAMAS, L86, etc. are all chambered for a standard 5.56mm round, and I believe most even have compatible magazines.
The USSR and the rest of the Warsaw Pact could have used the same, but that would mean that, in a war, any ammunition supplies the enemy captured would be usable to them. While that would also mean that any ammunition supplies they captured could be used by them, they decided not to take that risk, and instead created an essentially-the-same-but-incompatible 5.45mm round. The Chinese, likewise, eventually created their own version, this one in 5.8mm. While none of their ammunition can be used in anothers' weapons, they have essentially the same performance characteristics.
Iran is simply doing the same thing. Instead of using NATO-standard 7.62mm miniguns, 20mm autocannons, 40mm grenade launchers or 2.75" rockets, they'll use ones that are just slightly incompatible, but nearly identical in performance.
From a theoretical standpoint, there's two reasons for doing so. One reason is economics - trying to stimulate their own arms industry, rather than import from others. If you mandate the use of incompatible ammunition and weapons, foreign production becomes useless, while the domestic industry gets nearly-guaranteed profitability.
Another could be that they are more concerned about being invaded, rather than invading others. You are, after all, more likely to be the one capturing supplies, rather than having your supplies captured, when you are on the attack. History would seem to bear this view out - during the Cold War, neither side used intercompatible ammunition, and as it turns out, neither side much wanted to invade the other. The most notable case of cross-compatible weaponry was in WW2, when the British designed the Sten gun to use the same ammunition as the German MP40. And guess what (spoiler alert)? Britain later invaded Germany!
OK, that's probably a massive simplification of things (remember, IANAME), but still, look at things from Iran's view for a second. The US, a country they have *very* poor relations with, just invaded two countries next to them and occupied them for years. And now it almost seems like they are, once again, manufacturing evidence of WMDs and putting out agitprop to get the citizens ready, once again, to invade some Middle-Eastern country. Even if they actually *are* guilty of trying to build nukes (honestly, I wouldn't be that surprised if they were), can you blame them for worrying that the 1st Armored is going to be driving towards Tehran sometime soon, and planning to defend themselves?
I'm saying stupid users, and stupid admins, exist for every operating system. And the problem probably gets worse if executives hand down a mandate to use an operating system the admins and users are not familiar with. Doesn't matter what OS it is - no operating system is idiot-proof. A moron can break Linux. A moron can break Windows. A moron can break Mac OS, or Solaris, or VMS, or OS/2, or HP-UX, or FreeBSD or NetBSD or DragonflyBSD or OpenBSD. Name an operating system, there's a story somewhere of some moron admin who left it wide open. And anyone who pretends otherwise probably is, or will be, one of those morons.
Holy crap, that's a horrible idea.
I almost bought an Asus G55. Fifteen inch screen, full 1920x1080 resolution, and just around $1500. Only reason I didn't end up buying it was because I was mislead by the pre-order page to believe that it had two hard drive bays as well as the optical drive bay. Apparently Asus removed that feature without notifying resellers, because I got an email weeks later telling me the machine I'd configured was impossible - I got upgraded to the larger G75 instead.
Now, that particular machine would be terrible for light office/home use. But I've used 1366x768 screens - they are *terrible*, and when you're spending a grand and a half on a laptop, they're completely underspec.
Try to get at least a 1600x900 screen. Seriously. That's just about the most important advice I can give you.
At least at the level of "business desktop", I believe "user stupidity" is a far bigger threat than "insecure operating system". Yeah, for a ___ server, or firewall, or really any sort of system managed by trained, competent people, the OS or applications may indeed be the bigger risk, but on the desktop? All it means is that instead of attaching bank_of_nigeria__withdrawal_forms.pdf.bat, they'll attach bank_of_nigeria__withdrawal_forms.pdf.pl when running a scam.
Linux is not a magic security bullet - such a thing simply does not exist. No OS is unbreakable. My company found that out ourselves, when we discovered just how completely '0wn3d' a particular clients' Linux servers were - let's just say the guy who configured them is now fleeing the *country* to escape the gross negligence and breach-of-contract lawsuits (when your job description is "keep these servers up-to-date and secure", and they're still running a version of Debian from '02 and participating in Anonymous DDoS attacks, you've failed).
Windows also, I have to admit, has gotten much better at security compared to the 95/98 days, or even the XP SP0 days. Linux still has a security lead, but that lead is now orders of magnitude smaller (especially since Linux, at least for certain distros, seems to be trading security for usability).
Hopefully this will remain purely a theoretical question, but seriously, what would happen if they won?
The *only* way I can see this being copyright infringement is if a judge rules a) copying any broadcast (legally obtained, and for personal use) is piracy, overturning mountains of precedent, or b) the show + commercials combined are the "work", and that there's some unlegislated "right to artistic integrity" or something that means you cannot take a work and redistribute only parts.
Both of those are patently (hah!) ludicrous, but let's assume, for a moment, that reality is in fact as strange as this fiction.
If (a) happens, well, goodbye fair use, goodbye archival copies. No more taping TV shows. No more saving videos to disk. No more caching or buffering video, even - after all, what is a video buffer but a way to time-shift the broadcast by a few seconds?
If (b) happens, it gets even worse. Want to quote something? Better quote the entire thing - except you can't do that, because that's piracy. So no more quoting. No more referencing. No more citations or excerpts. Want to walk out of a movie theater mid-showing? You just broke the law. Want to stop reading a book halfway through? Off to a cell with ye!
Hell, even if the ruling is just a limited "you can't skip commercials" ban, ignoring any semblance of actually paying attention to the "law", that's terrible. If you're going to ban a machine skipping commercials automatically, you'll have to ban machines skipping them manually - so no DVR, no videotaping, without some mechanism to force ads to play. And why limit it to "with a machine"? Ban muting commercials, or leaving the room, or talking over them.
Congratulations, Fox. You just filed the dumbest lawsuit I've ever seen in the US system.
The sad thing? Their lawyers have to know it's completely hopeless. Their hope *has* to be that they have deeper pockets than Dish, and can essentially bankrupt them with legal costs.
I'd say there ought to be a law against that sort of thing, but I fear that would just make things worse.
Oh, I do this all the time to political surveys. Started out just re-using some Monty Python bits ("I believe America should be an anarcho-syndicalist commune...")
I'm pretty sure the Republicans' database lists me as a registered Communist and practicing Norse pagan who believes gay marriage should be mandatory, thinks abortion should be illegal "except for ugly chicks like Hillary", supports using nuclear weapons to secure the Canadian border, watches exclusively Fox News, and has voted for Ron Paul in every election since '92. They seem to have caught on - they haven't called at all since 2010 or so.
If the Democrats ever call, I'm telling them I'm a monarchist, an ordained Coptic Orthodox deacon, and a veteran of the Third Punic War. I may even claim responsibility for the assassination of William McKinley.
A lot of his criticisms of the current "new" system are valid. But the fundamental problem, as I see it, is that instead of truly "breaking the paradigm", everyone is treating the business the same way it had been.
In short, they know the players have changed, but nobody's realized that the game can be changed. Artists still expect some form of publisher to pay for their studio time, they still go to some publisher to publish their music. And now they complain that the publisher is still taking too much money.
Here's an idea (and it's just that, an idea): Go completely, 100% independent
Use Kickstarter or the like to get the cash to record an album. Having a demo of one or two songs should suffice, if you can market yourself properly, and you can self-fund demos easily enough.
Once you have the album, sell it on your own site instead of iTunes or Amazon. Maybe Humble-Indie-Bundle it with other, *similar* bands, if that can give you more publicity.
Either use the profits from the album, or ticket presales (Kickstarter may work well again), to go on tour. Get merchandise to sell - t-shirts, physical CDs, posters, etc.
Make sure to have some sort of contact for licensing. If Hollywood Director Q wants to use your song in Summer Action Movie Part XIV, you shouldn't make it hard for him. Commercials. Radio play. Anything - if someone wants to pay you to use your music, it needs to be possible. And price yourself lower than the Big Media bands do (since there's no publisher to take a 90% cut, it should be easy).
Between album sales and concerts, it should be possible to make a good living. The era of the multi-millionaire superstar is probably over, but honestly, I won't mourn them.
There are some problems with this. The publisher is normally the one to do all the advertising, so you'd have to do that yourself. It means a band *will* need some sort of marketing person to succeed, from Day 1. Music critics will also have to do a much better job - they can't just look at the list of what Big Media inc. is publishing this month, listen to the CDs mailed to you, and write down 4 stars for all of it.
There's probably a million other problems, too, but we won't find them until someone at least *tries*.
That's a bit draconian. And probably unenforceable. And probably unconstitutional, come to think of it.
A more tolerable way would be "lead by example": pass a law saying all government networks must be IPv6 (both internally, and externally) by 2018, and that any networking and computing equipment purchased with taxpayer dollars after 2014 must be fully IPv6-capable (possibly with an exception for NSA et al. to buy completely non-TCP/IP stuff, if that's a thing they do). I know they already have some requirements like this, although I believe it's just for operating systems right now.
With the size of our current government, this means anyone not supporting IPv6 automatically loses out on a huge market. Remember, this isn't just Obama's Blackberry, this means every IRS website, every Senator's secretary's assistant's netbook, every Toughbook shipped off to ___istan, every security camera watching the grass grow next to some half-forgotten FEMA warehouse. It's a big market, that's all I'm saying.
That's enough for Windows XP, actually. Maybe not with the later service packs installed (SP2 added a LOT of stuff), but I've run a usable XP machine on less.
It depends on a number of other things.
Network speed is a big one. A 60TB hard drive would literally take three centuries to fill on a dial-up connection, 9 months on my current home fiber link, and about a week to fill on a full gigabit link. As most people consume far more data than they produce, that's one bound on useful disk space. If you consider "sneakernet" data links, the capacity of a single floppy, tape or optical disk can also be taken into account.
Another bound is display resolution. Videos are about the most data-dense thing on most computers have. The main bounds on those are screen resolution (no sense storing 4K videos when your screen is still 1024x768), framerate, and compression. Framerate hasn't really increased for mainstream video in decades, and display resolutions are only now beginning to rise again. And compression naturally keeps getting better. Display resolution also affects consumer images (while the pros edit at 20 megapixels or whatever, they still scale it down to what Joe User will be able to render), as well as all the little UI icons and junk that's probably just noise in the data, but might get significant if we ever see 16000x10000 pixel displays being common.
Those are probably the main factors in "how much space will the average user need". RAM, CPU power, all that generally shouldn't have much effect on disk usage.