If you don't want to suffer inflation, there's a simple way of doing that: Don't keep money, always buy gold for your dollars and sell it right before you need dollars - inflation is over time so with no delta-t there's no inflation. In practice I assume you would buy parts of a gold bullion locked away in a vault, not actually handling it. If having money was such a sure way to lose money, why aren't everyone doing this? Oh, because you get interest or because it's invested in the economy. Your 97% loss only makes sense if you take that first dollar and put it in a vault to do nothing with it - which would probably be worth millions today as a collector's item by the way.
Well, there's the difference between mostly cashless and completely cashless. My salary is paid direct deposit, pretty much all my bills are paid electronically. I don't really care that the government knows I pay rent and insurance and electricity and broadband and groceries and that I purchase clothes and furniture and computer equipment and whatnot. But if I don't want the government to keep track of how much liquor I drink I can pay in cash at the liquor store. I can pay in cash when I'm out partying all night. Cash is for all those transactions which I don't think it's any of the damn government's business to know about.
Every so often people come up with the "now 9x% of all trade happens electronically, we should go cashless" but it's meaningless to measure it by volume. At work some 9x% I'm in the presence of coworkers, that doesn't mean I don't want privacy when I make a bathroom break. Same with all the shit people share on Facebook, even for those that share 9x% of their life there the rest matters. Yeah, it's annoying with the black market that doesn't pay taxes, but then put the effort into tracking those who make a living that way instead of taking everyone's privacy away. I don't know if I follow every detail of every paragraph in the tax code and I don't know if anyone could but it's 95%+ correct. And that damn well better be good enough.
Ex-CEO. That was Bill Watkins, who was replaced in 2009 by Stephen J. Luczo. And for all the candor of that statement "pirate more crap" would probably be even more honest...
There isn't really a story in this anyway, anyone who knows how warranties and defects liability work in the EU knows that Apple as a manufacturer can only be offering a voluntary warranty, and that the store where you actually buy the product is subject to defects liability, and it's not Apple's job as a manufacturer to explain that on its web site.
As long as Apple sells directly to customers, that's absolutely their job to explain the difference. Besides even if your rights are guaranteed in law I think all companies have a responsibility to clearly say what rights you have by law, that the warranty is not a replacement for that and what it actually offers that isn't already guaranteed by law.
As far as I know, most "EU law" is actually EU guidelines that are put into national laws by the member states. So the member states will have very similar laws, but it's not a single law that is applied to the entire EU.
A guideline is voluntary, EU directives most certainly not. A few choice quotes from the WP page:
A directive is a legislative act of the European Union, which requires member states to achieve a particular result without dictating the means of achieving that result. (...) If a member state fails to pass the required national legislation, or if the national legislation does not adequately comply with the requirements of the directive, the European Commission may initiate legal action against the member state in the European Court of Justice. (...) Also, in Francovich v. Italy, the court found that member states could be liable to pay damages to individuals and companies who had been adversely affected by the non-implementation of a directive.
Basically the national governments are rubber stamping it, it's just so that the same law can exist in different legal systems and to keep up the illusion of sovereignty. It may take a court case in each country but the EU requirements won't differ.
As I understand it LibreOffice nabs anything useful from OpenOffice anyway since it open source and LibreOffice doesn't need any copyright assignment. So in practice I just expect it to slowly die off like xfree86 did after everyone continued on as xorg. Maybe they get the name back or maybe they don't, but it'll practically be a rename not a merger.
Businesses yes for the most part, but Windows power users that would like a way to log in remotely - like Linux people ssh with X forwarding - often have RDC enabled and internet exposed. Plus if you can traverse the external firewall some other way, then launch RDC attacks on the computers that's a pretty big loophole too. Or if you're somehow on the inside already, in a big company that external wall is just a tiny bit of your defenses. Overall it's pretty critical.
Re:I suppose I have to start building...
on
Linux 3.3 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You gotta wonder what the hell Linus is thinking on this.
Well, while he's a hard nail on code quality he's always been a pragmatic man. When it's an interface used on hundreds of millions of Android devices it's something worth supporting if he can do it as long as it doesn't interact badly with the mainline code. And that's exactly why something like wakelocks are still out while others are in. I don't think Linus believes in the one perfect system, if he has to support different IPCs then fine but maybe the implementation can share code and work towards supporting several approaches.
Remember it's not in anybody's interest to diverge just to diverge, it's just that sometimes it's better to do your own thing and show that it works rather than trying to get permission to change an old recipe. A lot of branches have lived in parallel to mainline and eventually gotten merged in as the real needs and differences - not just the NIH and semantics - have emerged. Getting over these hurdles and keeping the kernel from fracturing into smaller branches that each go their separate ways has always one of the true strengths of the project.
Oh boy, the same "it's not our fault for releasing KDE 4.0, it's the distros who ship it" just this time it's for KMail2. Distros ship what you release. Users use what you release. They only package it, if you release turds the users get gift-wrapped turds. If it's not a packaging issue - and a quick search indicates many distros share the pain so it's not - then it's a developer issue. Call it alpha, betas, previews, RCs, anything you want but when you call it a release then it's nobody's fault but your own that people think it's ready to upgrade from the old release.
There's the firehose but it doesn't do anything for stuff that's gotten on the front page. I'd like to see a moderation and a bar that listed the percentages like
That way you could easily see if other people thought this was worth reading or not, not just whether it passed the somewhat arbitrary submission process.
Remembering who is who doesn't get any easier with email or QR or vCards or whatever you choose, so why bring that up at all? If you're running a eCommerce operation I can understand but for most of us dealing in the real world they're not going away anytime soon. For example when we give a presentation or attend some event with a bunch of students, we don't have their email. Any amount of techno-gadgetry won't replace a simple "We'd be very interested in talking to you about employment opportunities, here's my contact info". Same if we meet at a real world breakfast meeting / seminar / conference / training class or indeed anything else that doesn't happen online.
Even if I can just scan the code on the back with my smartphone and hand it back to you, it takes the whole complication out of the exchange. If they can easily convert it to electronic info, great and they can throw away the card. If they can't, well they have it on the card. To use the word "lugging" about a few grams of paper shows this is full of hyperbole and pointless eGadgetry. It's just creating a lot of possible technological issues and suddenly you're standing there fumbling with smart phones instead of doing what you should be doing, which is talking to people. That time is usually so precious that the expense and inconvenience of a card that you can just hand over is trivial by comparison.
9 USC 2 - VALIDITY, IRREVOCABILITY, AND ENFORCEMENT OF AGREEMENTS TO ARBITRATE
A written provision in any maritime transaction or a contract evidencing a transaction involving commerce to settle by arbitration a controversy thereafter arising out of such contract or transaction, or the refusal to perform the whole or any part thereof, or an agreement in writing to submit to arbitration an existing controversy arising out of such a contract, transaction, or refusal, shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract.
In short: "A written provision in (...) a contract (...) to settle by arbitration (...) shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, (...)", the last part might save you if you claim the whole contract is unconscionable but not for your average dispute.
Shouldn't be mixing units. 60ns is time, c is velocity. That's like saying you were driving 3 minutes more than 55mph.
Actually in this case it was intended to be a limit, not a velocity. "Usually I drive by the speed limit (55mph) but today I arrived 3 minutes late." is a perfectly reasonable sentence. Of course you can't from this alone say neither distance or velocity, but you can say it went slower than expected which was the essential point.
In this particular case, I think the jury did the right thing by rejecting the hate crime charges. It seems as it Ravi was dumb, insensitve and certainly invasive of his roomates privacy but it doesn't seem like this was a crime intended to intimidate the community.
But if Ravi knew it would be far more embarrassing and hurtful for him to be outed as gay, as opposed to him necking with a girl? Does it have to be hurting him for being gay and so intimidating all gays, as opposed to by being gay? I mean if someone took a sneak picture of my naked chest they'd get a lot lower sentence than if someone took a sneak picture of a woman's naked chest because she's got tits. Hmm that's actually not such a bad analogy, it's worse yes but in no way a hate crime against women. I think I agree with you.
I always assumes the faster than light shit wasn't an actual claim, just lazy reporters trying to hype up some attention and web clicks or what not.
Of course that was the claim, but in a sane science to layman translation it'd be: "We have this crazy result here with neutrinos that seem to go 60ns faster than light speed. Pretty much all of established science goes against this, but we've double checked our equipment and figures and can't find the error. So we're telling you about it so someone else can run this experiment and see if they get crazy results too, meanwhile we'll triple check our equipment and figures." There's not a single scientist surprised by this eventually being proven to be just a fluke. Nor by journalists hearing "blah blah blah neutrinos blah faster than light blah blah blah", lets make a headline. Absolutely par for the course, as far as science reporting is concerned.
Yes and no, but mostly irrelevant in this context. I'd say in the Scandinavian countries in general there's very low tolerance for huge wage differences, that one person is so much more worth than another person. For example here in Norway probably the best paid CEO is Helge Lund, who leads an oil company with $90 billion USD in revenue and 30,000 employees - he's paid a little over $3 million USD - in a country where the average full time job pays around $80k so about 40 times that. The prime minister is paid about $240k or three times average wage.
However, I have no impression that people try to out-do each other that way at work. Working yourself into the ground isn't well regarded, it's seen as destructive and a sign of bad management. So yes, if I was upper middle class or beyond, I'd probably want to move to the US because there's more "I want to be like you" envy than "I despise you" envy, not to mention the tax rates are much better. But I think you would find that the normal person is quite happy, and despite the economic hangups far more socially liberal than most of the US. Freedom is highly regarded, but not showing off superiority.
What you need is a change in the "exempt" laws. Here in Norway the only people that are exempt are those in management and particularly independent positions, simply being a white collar worker is not sufficient. As long as you have fixed or semi-fixed working hours, as long as you have no power of delegation or to organize your own work (really free like where, when, how you want as long as you meet your deliverables) you are not exempt. There are also some laws on maximum overtime but in all honestly both employers and employees often ignore that as long as they get their overtime pay.
That gives the right incentive that employers would rather hire people at full rate than have people work for time and a half. That penalizes inefficient workers and slackers who can't make up for it by working extra time - forcing you to work extra time to stay "even" because employers lose money when you need overtime to finish what others finish in regular hours. As long as the US is full of "exempt" workers whose work is still measured in wall clock hours, you will continue to get screwed because another hour is a free hour. It's like trying to keep the flies away after dipping yourself in honey.
Which is why COBOL is still alive, too much legacy code and too many libraries to re-implement. That doesn't really say much about new languages though, C to C++ is more the exception to the rule here in that it was an extension to C but C itself kept living its own life. Most other languages just grow and grow with one new feature here and one there and a few things deprecated but never really gone. And that's really why most new languages appear, to get rid of all the crud. To get rid of all the legacy code. To get rid of unsafe methods, stupid interfaces, stupid syntax, stupid keywords, inheritance systems, constructors/initialization and whatnot. I program in Qt/C++... but I'd just love to redo it without all the C-isms and take the best from Java and C#, it'd just be a helluva job. Many of the popular languages have had a huge corporation backing them - Sun for Java (now Oracle), Microsoft for C#, it's not just a language but today I'd also expect a fairly complete standard library (which is why I said Qt/C++, I'd not do plain C++) and that's a lot of work.
No, it's almost as if a culture with a huge population of poor people encourages crime. It's cute to compare tiny little Holland to the US though.
Don't forget retarded people, because it's the only country I know that doesn't understand concepts like "per person", "per square kilometer" or other forms of normalization.
"Guns in nightstands protect against crime" "Here's some crime figures per 100,000 inhabitants" "Cute, but you can't compare a big and small country" "???"
"We can't build fast Internet in the US, the population is too thin." "Uh but this country does with a lower population density than yours (people/km^2)" "Cute, but you can't compare a big and small country" "???"
"We're not so bad polluters, China emits more CO2 than us" "Yes but China is 1.33 billion people and you're 300 million, per person you emit more than triple what a Chinese person does." "Hurr durr, I ignore what you said and China is worse". "???"
Arguing here I get enough stupid from both posters and moderators to make me want to tear my hair out and then I remember this is supposed to be the intelligentsia of the US, the nerds. I guess that's true when I see the support a guy like Santorum has, but you're over a hurdle about two inches high. Could someone please teach Slashdot some remedial math classes so my intelligence stops being insulted? Believe it or not, it is possible to compare the US to other countries even if they have different sizes and populations. Everywhere else this is accepted but here I sometimes feel like I just preached evolution in a southern baptist church group.
If you got friends or clan buddies on your team, chances are huge you also have them on audio coordinating what you do. That hugely increases your odds and is something most don't do with random strangers.
That's all well and nice, but people act on indicators not causation. To take an example I'm a male and most rapists are male and most rape victims are female. So if I happen to be walking in the same direction as a woman late at night she's got far more reason to fear that I'll drag her into the bushes and rape her than I got reason to fear that she'll drag me into the bushes and rape me. None of this has of course anything do to with causation, unless you're the kind who thinks women are "asking for it". Is it sexist or just good threat assessment? Now repeat the same with a potential mugger and a potential mugging victim, are you then a racist if you fear the black guy more than the white guy?
Of course we're all individuals, and I'm not guilty of anything because someone else who shares some physical or other characteristic with me commit crimes but you can't tell that from looking at me. Prejudice you can cure through knowledge, but what of statistical "truths"? Say you have two possible hires, practically identical resumes and interviews but you know one belongs to a group you know that's generally known to worker harder and complain less, which do you pick? Here in Norway we've had companies now pretty plainly state that they prefer Swedes for bars and restaurants and Poles for construction and industry and somehow that's not discrimination based on nationality - I guess it helps we're all white. But if someone were to say something of Somalis or Iraqis or Afghans, they'd be burned at the stake as racists.
In short my impression is that you get plenty discrimination, but only certain groups in certain situations gets to call foul and say it's racism. We're all equals but as usual some are more equal than others, the rest of us are just supposed to take it when we're being discriminated against. Why am I supposed to take blanket statements about us when I can't make the same kind of blanket statements about others? Same with our department of equality, you'd have to search long and hard to find a case where men were discriminated rather than women, sexism is another one-way street. But if you point that out it's STFU you're a white male, you got nothing to complain about - as if that wasn't the most racist, sexist remark of them all.
But if you publicly share the rips of DVDs/CDs/LPs/books/ whatever then you are breaking the law and there is no moral high ground there.
The law is not always just, certainly not all of the laws all of the time. Prohibition didn't end because everybody stopped drinking but so intensely persisted in their desire to drink alcohol. It ended because vast masses of the people broke the law, maybe that's not the moral high ground solution but it's a solution. It would not be the first nor the last time that the law has changed long after people stopped following the law. In a democracy the authority of the government and of the law is supposed to come from consent of the governed. Of course some profess the virtues of having a republic to thwart the will of the public, but I'd say in most cases the sabotage is not in the public's best interest but of special interest groups and lobbyists and the system itself. Refusing to obey the law is one of the lesser checks and balances we have on a system gone astray.
You can choose not to buy, but when they want more surveillance laws and handing out subscriber information to private companies and three strikes, you're out disconnections from the Internet you can't opt out of those. You can not opt out of the next Mickey Mouse protection acts which means the public domain practically ceased to exist sometime in the early 1900s. Being a pacifist in a war is certainly the moral high ground, but it's not going to stop you from being a victim. I certainly don't blame the people that see a system that has ceased to act in our best interest, that has ceased to promote the science and arts, that ought to be broken for the good of everyone. And are willing to give it a good push in that direction.
There are those trying to create the perception that nobody really wants to break the system, we're just doing it because we can get away with it and hide in the masses. That we all "know" this is wrong but do it because we're selfish cheapskates and for some I suppose that could be true. But I strongly disagree that being hidden implies it being wrong. The people who operated the underground railroad smuggling slaves out of the US sure didn't put up neon signs saying I break the law, come arrest me but they sure did it because they thought it was right. When you risk a million dollar conviction for sharing 24 songs (Thomas-Rasset case) then I understand those willing to break the law, but not volunteer for the firing squad.
My recommendation for a really secure pass phrase:
1. Pick a phrase like "maryhadalittlelamb" 2. Add (or replace) with one capital letter, one number, one special character. Don't use l33t-speak, just at random. 3. Remember your three weird words like "maVry" "li6ttle" and "lam!b", it's much easier than when it's all just a hopeless mess. 4. Your password is now "maVryhadali6ttlelam!b", there not a password cracker in the world that'll find this.
It's way, way too long and uses from all the character sets for a brute force attack. As for a dictionary attack, there's way, way too many permutations. It could just as easily be "mar#yha1dalittlelRamb" or "m%aryhadalitOtlela9mb" or a million other combinations based on "maryhadalittlelamb", even if you knew that was the basis. Of course the biggest risk is the computer you're typing it into, for example I feel my mail is now much safer now that I can log into it from my smartphone rather from any random webcafe/desktop/laptop I happen to have available. It's a lot more difficult to get a spy app installed or bug my hardware than if I type it in on machines I don't control.
If I remember correctly, this is how our university got breached once, they bugged a desktop in the computer lab, trashed the software a bit then waited for an admin to come and try cleaning things up with the admin password. Boom, they got admin rights to every desktop on the network. Against that it doesn't matter if your password is a kilometer long, if you can't trust the console it doesn't matter. It only matters if your data is stolen and they never got the password, which is of course one important vector with stolen laptops and all, but it doesn't protect against other threats. All in all I consider my password complexity as being a very low-risk threat. No point in a bullet proof blast door if a burglar would use the window.
If we go back 100 years, the best record you got of people is maybe a few photographs and a diary. Today you can store a ridiculous amount of detail including full HD video, but you're also dependent on modern technology to sustain that. If I had to leave my computer equipment for 10 years in a vault I figure my USB sticks and SSDs will have discharged and I wouldn't trust a HDD or a backup HDD to spin up again. Yes, maybe DVDs but they're too small and tapes are too expensive and rare. Or even if I could take care of them, that the supply of replacement parts is available. Take one WWIII class war where HDD factories are bombed to shit and and what's left is needed to store critical data, if I can't get a terabyte drive at a reasonable price my data is on death row.
I'm expecting that somebody is making a form of emergency vault though, putting the important things to archival grade microfilm in secure locations so that we don't revert back into the dark ages. But in all honestly, the world will go without all the crap I'm collecting. It'll go on without Hollywood, Bollywood, Elvis and Beatles and anything else that's fiction if it has to. I'd like to keep a little history but you could probably cull 99% of the minute details about who stole who's cows in the 1870s. The actual amount of hardcore science that we'd need to preserve human civilization is not that much. A text-only dump of Wikipedia still fits a dual layer DVD, and I doubt even one GB of that is strictly necessary to preserve.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to suffer inflation, there's a simple way of doing that: Don't keep money, always buy gold for your dollars and sell it right before you need dollars - inflation is over time so with no delta-t there's no inflation. In practice I assume you would buy parts of a gold bullion locked away in a vault, not actually handling it. If having money was such a sure way to lose money, why aren't everyone doing this? Oh, because you get interest or because it's invested in the economy. Your 97% loss only makes sense if you take that first dollar and put it in a vault to do nothing with it - which would probably be worth millions today as a collector's item by the way.
Well, there's the difference between mostly cashless and completely cashless. My salary is paid direct deposit, pretty much all my bills are paid electronically. I don't really care that the government knows I pay rent and insurance and electricity and broadband and groceries and that I purchase clothes and furniture and computer equipment and whatnot. But if I don't want the government to keep track of how much liquor I drink I can pay in cash at the liquor store. I can pay in cash when I'm out partying all night. Cash is for all those transactions which I don't think it's any of the damn government's business to know about.
Every so often people come up with the "now 9x% of all trade happens electronically, we should go cashless" but it's meaningless to measure it by volume. At work some 9x% I'm in the presence of coworkers, that doesn't mean I don't want privacy when I make a bathroom break. Same with all the shit people share on Facebook, even for those that share 9x% of their life there the rest matters. Yeah, it's annoying with the black market that doesn't pay taxes, but then put the effort into tracking those who make a living that way instead of taking everyone's privacy away. I don't know if I follow every detail of every paragraph in the tax code and I don't know if anyone could but it's 95%+ correct. And that damn well better be good enough.
Ex-CEO. That was Bill Watkins, who was replaced in 2009 by Stephen J. Luczo. And for all the candor of that statement "pirate more crap" would probably be even more honest...
There isn't really a story in this anyway, anyone who knows how warranties and defects liability work in the EU knows that Apple as a manufacturer can only be offering a voluntary warranty, and that the store where you actually buy the product is subject to defects liability, and it's not Apple's job as a manufacturer to explain that on its web site.
As long as Apple sells directly to customers, that's absolutely their job to explain the difference. Besides even if your rights are guaranteed in law I think all companies have a responsibility to clearly say what rights you have by law, that the warranty is not a replacement for that and what it actually offers that isn't already guaranteed by law.
As far as I know, most "EU law" is actually EU guidelines that are put into national laws by the member states. So the member states will have very similar laws, but it's not a single law that is applied to the entire EU.
A guideline is voluntary, EU directives most certainly not. A few choice quotes from the WP page:
A directive is a legislative act of the European Union, which requires member states to achieve a particular result without dictating the means of achieving that result. (...) If a member state fails to pass the required national legislation, or if the national legislation does not adequately comply with the requirements of the directive, the European Commission may initiate legal action against the member state in the European Court of Justice. (...) Also, in Francovich v. Italy, the court found that member states could be liable to pay damages to individuals and companies who had been adversely affected by the non-implementation of a directive.
Basically the national governments are rubber stamping it, it's just so that the same law can exist in different legal systems and to keep up the illusion of sovereignty. It may take a court case in each country but the EU requirements won't differ.
As I understand it LibreOffice nabs anything useful from OpenOffice anyway since it open source and LibreOffice doesn't need any copyright assignment. So in practice I just expect it to slowly die off like xfree86 did after everyone continued on as xorg. Maybe they get the name back or maybe they don't, but it'll practically be a rename not a merger.
Businesses yes for the most part, but Windows power users that would like a way to log in remotely - like Linux people ssh with X forwarding - often have RDC enabled and internet exposed. Plus if you can traverse the external firewall some other way, then launch RDC attacks on the computers that's a pretty big loophole too. Or if you're somehow on the inside already, in a big company that external wall is just a tiny bit of your defenses. Overall it's pretty critical.
You gotta wonder what the hell Linus is thinking on this.
Well, while he's a hard nail on code quality he's always been a pragmatic man. When it's an interface used on hundreds of millions of Android devices it's something worth supporting if he can do it as long as it doesn't interact badly with the mainline code. And that's exactly why something like wakelocks are still out while others are in. I don't think Linus believes in the one perfect system, if he has to support different IPCs then fine but maybe the implementation can share code and work towards supporting several approaches.
Remember it's not in anybody's interest to diverge just to diverge, it's just that sometimes it's better to do your own thing and show that it works rather than trying to get permission to change an old recipe. A lot of branches have lived in parallel to mainline and eventually gotten merged in as the real needs and differences - not just the NIH and semantics - have emerged. Getting over these hurdles and keeping the kernel from fracturing into smaller branches that each go their separate ways has always one of the true strengths of the project.
Oh boy, the same "it's not our fault for releasing KDE 4.0, it's the distros who ship it" just this time it's for KMail2. Distros ship what you release. Users use what you release. They only package it, if you release turds the users get gift-wrapped turds. If it's not a packaging issue - and a quick search indicates many distros share the pain so it's not - then it's a developer issue. Call it alpha, betas, previews, RCs, anything you want but when you call it a release then it's nobody's fault but your own that people think it's ready to upgrade from the old release.
There's the firehose but it doesn't do anything for stuff that's gotten on the front page. I'd like to see a moderation and a bar that listed the percentages like
[---- 43% Informative ---] [--- 22% Insightful ----] [11 % Interesting --- ] [--- 12% Troll ---] [--- 9% Flamebait --- ] [--- 3% other ---] of coursed sized to proportions.
That way you could easily see if other people thought this was worth reading or not, not just whether it passed the somewhat arbitrary submission process.
Yeah. And half of you are below average. THAT'S depressing!
When you know what the average is, yes. It's not exactly below average genius, if you get my drift...
Remembering who is who doesn't get any easier with email or QR or vCards or whatever you choose, so why bring that up at all? If you're running a eCommerce operation I can understand but for most of us dealing in the real world they're not going away anytime soon. For example when we give a presentation or attend some event with a bunch of students, we don't have their email. Any amount of techno-gadgetry won't replace a simple "We'd be very interested in talking to you about employment opportunities, here's my contact info". Same if we meet at a real world breakfast meeting / seminar / conference / training class or indeed anything else that doesn't happen online.
Even if I can just scan the code on the back with my smartphone and hand it back to you, it takes the whole complication out of the exchange. If they can easily convert it to electronic info, great and they can throw away the card. If they can't, well they have it on the card. To use the word "lugging" about a few grams of paper shows this is full of hyperbole and pointless eGadgetry. It's just creating a lot of possible technological issues and suddenly you're standing there fumbling with smart phones instead of doing what you should be doing, which is talking to people. That time is usually so precious that the expense and inconvenience of a card that you can just hand over is trivial by comparison.
How can an EULA supersede law?
Because the law says you can:
9 USC 2 - VALIDITY, IRREVOCABILITY, AND ENFORCEMENT OF AGREEMENTS TO ARBITRATE
A written provision in any maritime transaction or a contract evidencing a transaction involving commerce to settle by arbitration a controversy thereafter arising out of such contract or transaction, or the refusal to perform the whole or any part thereof, or an agreement in writing to submit to arbitration an existing controversy arising out of such a contract, transaction, or refusal, shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract.
In short: "A written provision in (...) a contract (...) to settle by arbitration (...) shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, (...)", the last part might save you if you claim the whole contract is unconscionable but not for your average dispute.
Shouldn't be mixing units. 60ns is time, c is velocity. That's like saying you were driving 3 minutes more than 55mph.
Actually in this case it was intended to be a limit, not a velocity. "Usually I drive by the speed limit (55mph) but today I arrived 3 minutes late." is a perfectly reasonable sentence. Of course you can't from this alone say neither distance or velocity, but you can say it went slower than expected which was the essential point.
In this particular case, I think the jury did the right thing by rejecting the hate crime charges. It seems as it Ravi was dumb, insensitve and certainly invasive of his roomates privacy but it doesn't seem like this was a crime intended to intimidate the community.
But if Ravi knew it would be far more embarrassing and hurtful for him to be outed as gay, as opposed to him necking with a girl? Does it have to be hurting him for being gay and so intimidating all gays, as opposed to by being gay? I mean if someone took a sneak picture of my naked chest they'd get a lot lower sentence than if someone took a sneak picture of a woman's naked chest because she's got tits. Hmm that's actually not such a bad analogy, it's worse yes but in no way a hate crime against women. I think I agree with you.
I always assumes the faster than light shit wasn't an actual claim, just lazy reporters trying to hype up some attention and web clicks or what not.
Of course that was the claim, but in a sane science to layman translation it'd be: "We have this crazy result here with neutrinos that seem to go 60ns faster than light speed. Pretty much all of established science goes against this, but we've double checked our equipment and figures and can't find the error. So we're telling you about it so someone else can run this experiment and see if they get crazy results too, meanwhile we'll triple check our equipment and figures." There's not a single scientist surprised by this eventually being proven to be just a fluke. Nor by journalists hearing "blah blah blah neutrinos blah faster than light blah blah blah", lets make a headline. Absolutely par for the course, as far as science reporting is concerned.
Yes and no, but mostly irrelevant in this context. I'd say in the Scandinavian countries in general there's very low tolerance for huge wage differences, that one person is so much more worth than another person. For example here in Norway probably the best paid CEO is Helge Lund, who leads an oil company with $90 billion USD in revenue and 30,000 employees - he's paid a little over $3 million USD - in a country where the average full time job pays around $80k so about 40 times that. The prime minister is paid about $240k or three times average wage.
However, I have no impression that people try to out-do each other that way at work. Working yourself into the ground isn't well regarded, it's seen as destructive and a sign of bad management. So yes, if I was upper middle class or beyond, I'd probably want to move to the US because there's more "I want to be like you" envy than "I despise you" envy, not to mention the tax rates are much better. But I think you would find that the normal person is quite happy, and despite the economic hangups far more socially liberal than most of the US. Freedom is highly regarded, but not showing off superiority.
What you need is a change in the "exempt" laws. Here in Norway the only people that are exempt are those in management and particularly independent positions, simply being a white collar worker is not sufficient. As long as you have fixed or semi-fixed working hours, as long as you have no power of delegation or to organize your own work (really free like where, when, how you want as long as you meet your deliverables) you are not exempt. There are also some laws on maximum overtime but in all honestly both employers and employees often ignore that as long as they get their overtime pay.
That gives the right incentive that employers would rather hire people at full rate than have people work for time and a half. That penalizes inefficient workers and slackers who can't make up for it by working extra time - forcing you to work extra time to stay "even" because employers lose money when you need overtime to finish what others finish in regular hours. As long as the US is full of "exempt" workers whose work is still measured in wall clock hours, you will continue to get screwed because another hour is a free hour. It's like trying to keep the flies away after dipping yourself in honey.
Which is why COBOL is still alive, too much legacy code and too many libraries to re-implement. That doesn't really say much about new languages though, C to C++ is more the exception to the rule here in that it was an extension to C but C itself kept living its own life. Most other languages just grow and grow with one new feature here and one there and a few things deprecated but never really gone. And that's really why most new languages appear, to get rid of all the crud. To get rid of all the legacy code. To get rid of unsafe methods, stupid interfaces, stupid syntax, stupid keywords, inheritance systems, constructors/initialization and whatnot. I program in Qt/C++... but I'd just love to redo it without all the C-isms and take the best from Java and C#, it'd just be a helluva job. Many of the popular languages have had a huge corporation backing them - Sun for Java (now Oracle), Microsoft for C#, it's not just a language but today I'd also expect a fairly complete standard library (which is why I said Qt/C++, I'd not do plain C++) and that's a lot of work.
No, it's almost as if a culture with a huge population of poor people encourages crime. It's cute to compare tiny little Holland to the US though.
Don't forget retarded people, because it's the only country I know that doesn't understand concepts like "per person", "per square kilometer" or other forms of normalization.
"Guns in nightstands protect against crime" "Here's some crime figures per 100,000 inhabitants" "Cute, but you can't compare a big and small country" "???"
"We can't build fast Internet in the US, the population is too thin." "Uh but this country does with a lower population density than yours (people/km^2)" "Cute, but you can't compare a big and small country" "???"
"We're not so bad polluters, China emits more CO2 than us" "Yes but China is 1.33 billion people and you're 300 million, per person you emit more than triple what a Chinese person does." "Hurr durr, I ignore what you said and China is worse". "???"
Arguing here I get enough stupid from both posters and moderators to make me want to tear my hair out and then I remember this is supposed to be the intelligentsia of the US, the nerds. I guess that's true when I see the support a guy like Santorum has, but you're over a hurdle about two inches high. Could someone please teach Slashdot some remedial math classes so my intelligence stops being insulted? Believe it or not, it is possible to compare the US to other countries even if they have different sizes and populations. Everywhere else this is accepted but here I sometimes feel like I just preached evolution in a southern baptist church group.
If you got friends or clan buddies on your team, chances are huge you also have them on audio coordinating what you do. That hugely increases your odds and is something most don't do with random strangers.
That's all well and nice, but people act on indicators not causation. To take an example I'm a male and most rapists are male and most rape victims are female. So if I happen to be walking in the same direction as a woman late at night she's got far more reason to fear that I'll drag her into the bushes and rape her than I got reason to fear that she'll drag me into the bushes and rape me. None of this has of course anything do to with causation, unless you're the kind who thinks women are "asking for it". Is it sexist or just good threat assessment? Now repeat the same with a potential mugger and a potential mugging victim, are you then a racist if you fear the black guy more than the white guy?
Of course we're all individuals, and I'm not guilty of anything because someone else who shares some physical or other characteristic with me commit crimes but you can't tell that from looking at me. Prejudice you can cure through knowledge, but what of statistical "truths"? Say you have two possible hires, practically identical resumes and interviews but you know one belongs to a group you know that's generally known to worker harder and complain less, which do you pick? Here in Norway we've had companies now pretty plainly state that they prefer Swedes for bars and restaurants and Poles for construction and industry and somehow that's not discrimination based on nationality - I guess it helps we're all white. But if someone were to say something of Somalis or Iraqis or Afghans, they'd be burned at the stake as racists.
In short my impression is that you get plenty discrimination, but only certain groups in certain situations gets to call foul and say it's racism. We're all equals but as usual some are more equal than others, the rest of us are just supposed to take it when we're being discriminated against. Why am I supposed to take blanket statements about us when I can't make the same kind of blanket statements about others? Same with our department of equality, you'd have to search long and hard to find a case where men were discriminated rather than women, sexism is another one-way street. But if you point that out it's STFU you're a white male, you got nothing to complain about - as if that wasn't the most racist, sexist remark of them all.
But if you publicly share the rips of DVDs/CDs/LPs/books/ whatever then you are breaking the law and there is no moral high ground there.
The law is not always just, certainly not all of the laws all of the time. Prohibition didn't end because everybody stopped drinking but so intensely persisted in their desire to drink alcohol. It ended because vast masses of the people broke the law, maybe that's not the moral high ground solution but it's a solution. It would not be the first nor the last time that the law has changed long after people stopped following the law. In a democracy the authority of the government and of the law is supposed to come from consent of the governed. Of course some profess the virtues of having a republic to thwart the will of the public, but I'd say in most cases the sabotage is not in the public's best interest but of special interest groups and lobbyists and the system itself. Refusing to obey the law is one of the lesser checks and balances we have on a system gone astray.
You can choose not to buy, but when they want more surveillance laws and handing out subscriber information to private companies and three strikes, you're out disconnections from the Internet you can't opt out of those. You can not opt out of the next Mickey Mouse protection acts which means the public domain practically ceased to exist sometime in the early 1900s. Being a pacifist in a war is certainly the moral high ground, but it's not going to stop you from being a victim. I certainly don't blame the people that see a system that has ceased to act in our best interest, that has ceased to promote the science and arts, that ought to be broken for the good of everyone. And are willing to give it a good push in that direction.
There are those trying to create the perception that nobody really wants to break the system, we're just doing it because we can get away with it and hide in the masses. That we all "know" this is wrong but do it because we're selfish cheapskates and for some I suppose that could be true. But I strongly disagree that being hidden implies it being wrong. The people who operated the underground railroad smuggling slaves out of the US sure didn't put up neon signs saying I break the law, come arrest me but they sure did it because they thought it was right. When you risk a million dollar conviction for sharing 24 songs (Thomas-Rasset case) then I understand those willing to break the law, but not volunteer for the firing squad.
My recommendation for a really secure pass phrase:
1. Pick a phrase like "maryhadalittlelamb"
2. Add (or replace) with one capital letter, one number, one special character. Don't use l33t-speak, just at random.
3. Remember your three weird words like "maVry" "li6ttle" and "lam!b", it's much easier than when it's all just a hopeless mess.
4. Your password is now "maVryhadali6ttlelam!b", there not a password cracker in the world that'll find this.
It's way, way too long and uses from all the character sets for a brute force attack. As for a dictionary attack, there's way, way too many permutations. It could just as easily be "mar#yha1dalittlelRamb" or "m%aryhadalitOtlela9mb" or a million other combinations based on "maryhadalittlelamb", even if you knew that was the basis. Of course the biggest risk is the computer you're typing it into, for example I feel my mail is now much safer now that I can log into it from my smartphone rather from any random webcafe/desktop/laptop I happen to have available. It's a lot more difficult to get a spy app installed or bug my hardware than if I type it in on machines I don't control.
If I remember correctly, this is how our university got breached once, they bugged a desktop in the computer lab, trashed the software a bit then waited for an admin to come and try cleaning things up with the admin password. Boom, they got admin rights to every desktop on the network. Against that it doesn't matter if your password is a kilometer long, if you can't trust the console it doesn't matter. It only matters if your data is stolen and they never got the password, which is of course one important vector with stolen laptops and all, but it doesn't protect against other threats. All in all I consider my password complexity as being a very low-risk threat. No point in a bullet proof blast door if a burglar would use the window.
If we go back 100 years, the best record you got of people is maybe a few photographs and a diary. Today you can store a ridiculous amount of detail including full HD video, but you're also dependent on modern technology to sustain that. If I had to leave my computer equipment for 10 years in a vault I figure my USB sticks and SSDs will have discharged and I wouldn't trust a HDD or a backup HDD to spin up again. Yes, maybe DVDs but they're too small and tapes are too expensive and rare. Or even if I could take care of them, that the supply of replacement parts is available. Take one WWIII class war where HDD factories are bombed to shit and and what's left is needed to store critical data, if I can't get a terabyte drive at a reasonable price my data is on death row.
I'm expecting that somebody is making a form of emergency vault though, putting the important things to archival grade microfilm in secure locations so that we don't revert back into the dark ages. But in all honestly, the world will go without all the crap I'm collecting. It'll go on without Hollywood, Bollywood, Elvis and Beatles and anything else that's fiction if it has to. I'd like to keep a little history but you could probably cull 99% of the minute details about who stole who's cows in the 1870s. The actual amount of hardcore science that we'd need to preserve human civilization is not that much. A text-only dump of Wikipedia still fits a dual layer DVD, and I doubt even one GB of that is strictly necessary to preserve.