Who really cares about the millimeter wave scanners?
Anyone who cares about personal privacy or actual security. The scanners are expensive security theater that do not demonstrably improve safety while simultaneously manage to violate our constitutional rights against unreasonable searches.
Is non-ionizing radiation something you worry about?
That is honestly the least of my concerns regarding the scanners.
So what's the best practice to tell whether a program that is useful both to the General Public and to an enterprise is being run by the General Public or by an enterprise?
Default to auto update if the ultimate end user is unclear and provide a convenient way to disable it during the installation. Enterprises can deal with that. General Public not so much. The user should ALWAYS have a choice regarding auto-update but I think we need to err on the side of providing the updates due to the volume of non-technical people out there.
I am still struggling with this one because my nature is to want Government to stay out of people's business, but when that business has the potential to have an effect on infrastructure or the livelihoods of others then sometimes it's a necessary evil.
It sounds like you understand the nuance of the situation nicely. Unlimited freedom is not always good and regulation is not always bad. Both can be taken too far with undesirable results. The notion of keeping regulation to a reasonable minimum is a very sensible idea. But you can cut regulation too far and the inevitable result is self interested behavior that hurts the common good. Our recent financial crisis was a good example of this. You cannot possible work in a job on Wall Street and not understand that some amount of regulation is very very necessary. Conversely it's not hard to have regulations that are so burdensome that they cause very real damage to people's lives and well being. Reasonable people can disagree about exactly where to draw the line but the fact is that there IS a line somewhere. Government does not exist for no reason at all. While I've done it myself, I think calling a "necessary evil" is wrong because it isn't evil, nor is it good. It is just necessary sometimes.
Ahhh, yes, I remember that. That was the Wonderful World of Windows. Things just auto-install themselves with little, if any, input from the user, or the administrator.
As opposed to me getting a panicked call from my father wondering what this "Java" thing is and me having to coach him through every security update. Or worse no security updates ever getting applied and then me having to remove a bunch of malware. No thanks. I'd much prefer a moderately sane set of automatic updates for any portion of the population that does not have an IT department on retainer.
In alternate realities, such as the Unixverse, the user must call up a program from which he searches for the particular package he wants to install. Or, he must be familiar enough with his package manager to call it up from a terminal. Auto-install has proven to be a Very_Bad_Thing, time and again.
Back here in the Real World we have huge numbers of people who do not and will not ever understand updates for any reason even if it is in their best interest. Updates for the General Public should be automatic by default with an easily enabled option to make them not automatic. Software for enterprises should be not automatic by default with the option to make it automatic. Yes, automatic updates aren't a perfect solution but for many users it is better than no updates.
Without correlation with a breathalyzer there is no real way for the cubes to be calibrated to your blood alcohol level even if the algorithm is accurate. (which is a HUGE if) Are you really going to go to the trouble to do that? Didn't think so.
As far as practical use, I don't see one. If you need something like that to tell you that you've had too much to drink then you probably aren't a responsible drinker. The logistics don't make sense for a bar - too hard to keep track of which glass goes with which customer AND the customers have to pair their phone AND the equipment will have to be cleaned AND the electronics will get stolen. And if you are drinking at home, what is the point? You're home so who cares? If you are drinking that much, getting drunk is likely to be the entire point.
Nor have I but I'd dealt directly with them almost daily at times. I've had wrenches thrown at me because I dared to produce a stopwatch. (I'm an industrial engineer - that's what we do) I don't hate unions but I think they've forgotten their real purpose and have become far too adversarial with the companies.
But honestly, if a German union and all its workers were suddenly transported here, with all the time off and other benefits they receive, can you imagine anything but mortal conflict with US management?
The benefits any pay for workers in certain unions such as the UAW are second to none. I've seen guys with no college degree who make upwards of $80-100K+ for an assembly line job. Until very recently average wages of a GM worker was $39.69/hour and benefits tacked another $33.58/hour on top of that. We're not talking about specialty skilled labor here either. Guys with little to no special skills used to be able to get jobs that paid far better than the requirements of the job dictated. That has proven to be unsustainable.
Blue collar America has taken an incredible beating with a huge decline in standard of living over the last 30 years, today's auto workers are lucky to make half of what their fathers did.
Their fathers got a deal that was out of line with what could actually be sustained by the profits of the companies. Blue collar america is simply experiencing a reversion to the mean. They've had a good run for a while and now the bill has come due.
What I want is for them to fix Crome's broken printing. I've had no end of problems printing from within Chrome. I realize it works for many people but not for us. Their default print preview will not print multiple copies, ignores color settings, sometimes ignores duplex settings, and has other problems besides. I've had problems and so has at least one other person in our company. We have to use the system dialog each time we print. I've sent in some problem reports but nothing has seemed to update in the last 6 months.
Few updates were ever produced for it and none were what I would describe as major improvements. It was a E70 which was a S60 phone. Nokia basically abandoned the phone. My experience with Nokia is that they spend all their time fussing with the hardware (which is usually decent) while they do nothing but checklist feature implementations that technically can do the job but are horrible software to actually have to use.
Earlier Nokia phones I owned required sending the phone to Nokia for a firmware update.
Same here, still using my 5630. I don't want these huge phones nowadays, with a battery life of a day or two.
Your mistake is that you are thinking of them as phones. Really they are pocket sized computers that happen to be able to make calls. If all you want is to be able to make calls then I agree smartphones are pointless. Obviously many people want something more than just a telephone, myself included.
My last Nokia phone (a Nokia E series phone) could technically do everything an iPhone or Android phone could do but it was a huge pain-in-the-a$$ to actually use. The interface sucked and was never updated. The software to communicate with my PC was horrible to the point of uselessness. We surfing was so bad it was pointless to try and email wasn't much better. Technically it had all the same features as the iPhone of the same period but it simply wasn't worth the trouble. It worked acceptably as a phone but with a smartphone what I really want is an easy to use computer that happens to be able to make calls. Nokia never really seemed to grasp this concept.
Of course I'm a bit old school, I prefer my phone to be functional rather then stylish.
The reason I don't use a Nokia phone anymore is precisely because it wasn't functional. As far as function vs style goes, there is no reason you cannot have both. Saying it is one or the other is a false dilemma. Furthermore having used Nokia phones for about 10 years, their software functionality pretty much sucked. I have no confidence that this will change so Nokia has probably lost my business for good.
The entire sport is giving each other concussions and you hear more complaints about the NFL than boxing these days
Not many people are in the sport of boxing. A few thousand nationwide maybe. Football on the other hand is wildly popular with participation counts likely in the millions. While your point is valid, we can prevent a lot more injuries by worrying about football.
There exist sensors that can be placed into the helment and detect hits that are potentially damaging.
If those are triggered then the damage is already done. More to the point if you are in a sport where that sort of thing is necessary, perhaps playing that sport isn't such a good idea. I have nothing particularly against american style football as a sport (heck I've taken boxing lessons) but if we're causing that much damage then maybe we should reconsider our entertainment choices.
I'm wondering how I'd change from a single-disk filesystem to one where certain apps are on a different disk.
With Windows the easiest thing is unfortunately to reinstall the apps. You can move everything over if you keep it on one volume but if you split volumes the only option I'm aware of is to uninstall the apps and reinstall them in the new drive configuration. There may be a better way but I certainly have never seen it.
I've been thinking about it...I wonder how I could transfer an existing Win7 install like that, in Linux it would just be a few lines in fstab...
Crucial sells a kit that lets you transfer the entire contents of a drive to a new one. Includes the hardware and software needed to hook up both drives. I did this with a Win7 laptop when I went to using a SSD. Worked great and did the whole job in about an hour.
With a Smart board he can progress through solving the equation, while what he is writing is either projected, and/or automatically recorded so it can be played back later.
You can do that with a pen based computer too. I've actually seen people do it reasonably effectively with a pen based Windows machine that was projected.
A tablet would be the perfect tool for certain types of presentations (think math class) and especially for note taking IF someone would develop one that could actually make good use of a stylus. (no one has yet) Fingers aren't very good at writing mathematical equations or entering text. Typing is fine if you just have text but no drawings or equations. But if you need drawings and/or equations nothing has yet been developed that improves on a pen and paper for input.
I understand why Apple and Google don't do it but I'd dearly love an iPad or Android tablet that I could take notes with. They are being dogmatic about the interface being just finger based because of all the really bad pen based apps that would be out there but we're missing out on a really useful tool as a result.
The biggest barriers to asteroid mining are the high cost of surface to orbit transit and a lack of orbital infrastructure.
While those are huge barriers the biggest barrier is the fact that returning materials from orbit in any meaningful quantity results in a weapon of mass destruction. Dropping several tons of metal from orbit has the same effect as a nuclear weapon. Do you think Russia or China or the US would be comfortable with regular transit of WMDs in orbit? Even an accident would have very bad consequences.
Sending mountains of mined ore back down is free. Don't give me that look.
Free? Explain to me how you are going to get a 10 ton chunk of iron down from orbit without the huge explosion when it hits the ground. Explain to me how you assure nation states that you really aren't going to drop that chunk of ore on their capital.
That'd work for people who already have a smart phone. But how much do you pay per year for service on your smart phone?
If you have a screen in your car odds are pretty high you have a smart phone too. The nav system in my truck cost about $3000 as an option. My smartphone data plan is covered for 4 years for the same price. If you can't afford a smart phone chances are extremely high you aren't worried about having a screen in your car.
What a criminal chooses to use a weapon for is not what was being discussed.
You are seriously going to claim that the motivation for this entire discussion is anything besides the recent mass murders? That's either incredibly naive or disingenuous. This whole topic is about how to stop criminals from using weapons to commit crimes. Specifically the (absurd) notion of using electronics in some overly complicated manner to try to disable a mechanical firearm that needs no electronics to function.
The topic is limited to the legal use of force to stop criminal acts.You are off topic.
You brought up the subject of the intentionality of those using a gun and argued that the purpose of using a gun is something other than to kill. If we are off topic it is because you brought us there.
You assume the purpose of shooting somebody is to kill them. That is not true. The purpose of shooting somebody is to stop them from doing what they are doing.
In cases like the recent mass shooting, what the school children were doing was living. The gun man decided he wanted to stop them from living.
Let's not pretend that the purpose of guns is not for killing. They are a tool and that is their purpose. You can kill a person or an animal to stop an action but that is the purpose of the person, not the tool. If you fire a gun at a person your expectation is that you will kill. There is an intentionality to firearms. Firearms are a weapon and the purpose of a weapon is to kill.
They just need to get the laptops down to 25.5W, then they could run off PoE+, and they'd be able to put decent battery life in them.
USB is more flexible. I can (and do) run Ethernet over USB. Harder to do it the other way around. Conceptually you are right though - as long as we can do away with the single purpose power cord I'm fine with USB or ethernet or something else. A cable that carries power but no data seems pointless to me.
It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue — the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal's high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer's Wall Street clients — deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for "public use, without just compensation
So instead the government should have let AIG go bankrupt and the shareholders and most bond holders would have received nothing at all. AIG shareholders did absolutely nothing to keep AIG from making the stupid and risky investments that got them and the rest of the economy in trouble. Last I checked something > nothing so I'm a little confused about how shareholders were deprived of something.
'I feel like in my personal faith walk, I have felt instructed not to get a flu vaccination, but it's also the whole matter of the right to choose what I put in my body...' adding that she has not had a flu vaccine for 30 years as a result of a choice she made because of her Christian faith
Of course she can choose to be vaccinated or not. That is her legal right. However when vaccination demonstrably reduces risk to fellow patients and co-workers then she is welcome to seek employment elsewhere. Her religion has NOTHING to do with this. If she can make a credible scientific argument that such a vaccination would be useless then fine but I don't give a crap about her particular brand of religious craziness. Hospitals require vaccinations for TB and a variety of other diseases and do so for very good reasons. Influenza is no different. If she really believes what she said in the quote above I don't want her anywhere near patients because she is a danger to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Who really cares about the millimeter wave scanners?
Anyone who cares about personal privacy or actual security. The scanners are expensive security theater that do not demonstrably improve safety while simultaneously manage to violate our constitutional rights against unreasonable searches.
Is non-ionizing radiation something you worry about?
That is honestly the least of my concerns regarding the scanners.
So what's the best practice to tell whether a program that is useful both to the General Public and to an enterprise is being run by the General Public or by an enterprise?
Default to auto update if the ultimate end user is unclear and provide a convenient way to disable it during the installation. Enterprises can deal with that. General Public not so much. The user should ALWAYS have a choice regarding auto-update but I think we need to err on the side of providing the updates due to the volume of non-technical people out there.
I am still struggling with this one because my nature is to want Government to stay out of people's business, but when that business has the potential to have an effect on infrastructure or the livelihoods of others then sometimes it's a necessary evil.
It sounds like you understand the nuance of the situation nicely. Unlimited freedom is not always good and regulation is not always bad. Both can be taken too far with undesirable results. The notion of keeping regulation to a reasonable minimum is a very sensible idea. But you can cut regulation too far and the inevitable result is self interested behavior that hurts the common good. Our recent financial crisis was a good example of this. You cannot possible work in a job on Wall Street and not understand that some amount of regulation is very very necessary. Conversely it's not hard to have regulations that are so burdensome that they cause very real damage to people's lives and well being. Reasonable people can disagree about exactly where to draw the line but the fact is that there IS a line somewhere. Government does not exist for no reason at all. While I've done it myself, I think calling a "necessary evil" is wrong because it isn't evil, nor is it good. It is just necessary sometimes.
Ahhh, yes, I remember that. That was the Wonderful World of Windows. Things just auto-install themselves with little, if any, input from the user, or the administrator.
As opposed to me getting a panicked call from my father wondering what this "Java" thing is and me having to coach him through every security update. Or worse no security updates ever getting applied and then me having to remove a bunch of malware. No thanks. I'd much prefer a moderately sane set of automatic updates for any portion of the population that does not have an IT department on retainer.
In alternate realities, such as the Unixverse, the user must call up a program from which he searches for the particular package he wants to install. Or, he must be familiar enough with his package manager to call it up from a terminal. Auto-install has proven to be a Very_Bad_Thing, time and again.
Back here in the Real World we have huge numbers of people who do not and will not ever understand updates for any reason even if it is in their best interest. Updates for the General Public should be automatic by default with an easily enabled option to make them not automatic. Software for enterprises should be not automatic by default with the option to make it automatic. Yes, automatic updates aren't a perfect solution but for many users it is better than no updates.
accurate readings for practical use.
"Accurate readings"? Remotely possible. "Practical use"? Highly doubtful.
Without correlation with a breathalyzer there is no real way for the cubes to be calibrated to your blood alcohol level even if the algorithm is accurate. (which is a HUGE if) Are you really going to go to the trouble to do that? Didn't think so.
As far as practical use, I don't see one. If you need something like that to tell you that you've had too much to drink then you probably aren't a responsible drinker. The logistics don't make sense for a bar - too hard to keep track of which glass goes with which customer AND the customers have to pair their phone AND the equipment will have to be cleaned AND the electronics will get stolen. And if you are drinking at home, what is the point? You're home so who cares? If you are drinking that much, getting drunk is likely to be the entire point.
Granted, I've never even worked in a union myself
Nor have I but I'd dealt directly with them almost daily at times. I've had wrenches thrown at me because I dared to produce a stopwatch. (I'm an industrial engineer - that's what we do) I don't hate unions but I think they've forgotten their real purpose and have become far too adversarial with the companies.
But honestly, if a German union and all its workers were suddenly transported here, with all the time off and other benefits they receive, can you imagine anything but mortal conflict with US management?
The benefits any pay for workers in certain unions such as the UAW are second to none. I've seen guys with no college degree who make upwards of $80-100K+ for an assembly line job. Until very recently average wages of a GM worker was $39.69/hour and benefits tacked another $33.58/hour on top of that. We're not talking about specialty skilled labor here either. Guys with little to no special skills used to be able to get jobs that paid far better than the requirements of the job dictated. That has proven to be unsustainable.
Blue collar America has taken an incredible beating with a huge decline in standard of living over the last 30 years, today's auto workers are lucky to make half of what their fathers did.
Their fathers got a deal that was out of line with what could actually be sustained by the profits of the companies. Blue collar america is simply experiencing a reversion to the mean. They've had a good run for a while and now the bill has come due.
What I want is for them to fix Crome's broken printing. I've had no end of problems printing from within Chrome. I realize it works for many people but not for us. Their default print preview will not print multiple copies, ignores color settings, sometimes ignores duplex settings, and has other problems besides. I've had problems and so has at least one other person in our company. We have to use the system dialog each time we print. I've sent in some problem reports but nothing has seemed to update in the last 6 months.
Perhaps you just forgot to update your phone?
Few updates were ever produced for it and none were what I would describe as major improvements. It was a E70 which was a S60 phone. Nokia basically abandoned the phone. My experience with Nokia is that they spend all their time fussing with the hardware (which is usually decent) while they do nothing but checklist feature implementations that technically can do the job but are horrible software to actually have to use.
Earlier Nokia phones I owned required sending the phone to Nokia for a firmware update.
Same here, still using my 5630. I don't want these huge phones nowadays, with a battery life of a day or two.
Your mistake is that you are thinking of them as phones. Really they are pocket sized computers that happen to be able to make calls. If all you want is to be able to make calls then I agree smartphones are pointless. Obviously many people want something more than just a telephone, myself included.
I still have a symbian phone. It works fine..
My last Nokia phone (a Nokia E series phone) could technically do everything an iPhone or Android phone could do but it was a huge pain-in-the-a$$ to actually use. The interface sucked and was never updated. The software to communicate with my PC was horrible to the point of uselessness. We surfing was so bad it was pointless to try and email wasn't much better. Technically it had all the same features as the iPhone of the same period but it simply wasn't worth the trouble. It worked acceptably as a phone but with a smartphone what I really want is an easy to use computer that happens to be able to make calls. Nokia never really seemed to grasp this concept.
Of course I'm a bit old school, I prefer my phone to be functional rather then stylish.
The reason I don't use a Nokia phone anymore is precisely because it wasn't functional. As far as function vs style goes, there is no reason you cannot have both. Saying it is one or the other is a false dilemma. Furthermore having used Nokia phones for about 10 years, their software functionality pretty much sucked. I have no confidence that this will change so Nokia has probably lost my business for good.
Do you want it to talk like a real person, or do you want it to use a swear filter?
Sounds like they want it to talk like Ned Flanders.
The entire sport is giving each other concussions and you hear more complaints about the NFL than boxing these days
Not many people are in the sport of boxing. A few thousand nationwide maybe. Football on the other hand is wildly popular with participation counts likely in the millions. While your point is valid, we can prevent a lot more injuries by worrying about football.
There exist sensors that can be placed into the helment and detect hits that are potentially damaging.
If those are triggered then the damage is already done. More to the point if you are in a sport where that sort of thing is necessary, perhaps playing that sport isn't such a good idea. I have nothing particularly against american style football as a sport (heck I've taken boxing lessons) but if we're causing that much damage then maybe we should reconsider our entertainment choices.
I'm wondering how I'd change from a single-disk filesystem to one where certain apps are on a different disk.
With Windows the easiest thing is unfortunately to reinstall the apps. You can move everything over if you keep it on one volume but if you split volumes the only option I'm aware of is to uninstall the apps and reinstall them in the new drive configuration. There may be a better way but I certainly have never seen it.
I've been thinking about it...I wonder how I could transfer an existing Win7 install like that, in Linux it would just be a few lines in fstab...
Crucial sells a kit that lets you transfer the entire contents of a drive to a new one. Includes the hardware and software needed to hook up both drives. I did this with a Win7 laptop when I went to using a SSD. Worked great and did the whole job in about an hour.
With a Smart board he can progress through solving the equation, while what he is writing is either projected, and/or automatically recorded so it can be played back later.
You can do that with a pen based computer too. I've actually seen people do it reasonably effectively with a pen based Windows machine that was projected.
A tablet would be the perfect tool for certain types of presentations (think math class) and especially for note taking IF someone would develop one that could actually make good use of a stylus. (no one has yet) Fingers aren't very good at writing mathematical equations or entering text. Typing is fine if you just have text but no drawings or equations. But if you need drawings and/or equations nothing has yet been developed that improves on a pen and paper for input.
I understand why Apple and Google don't do it but I'd dearly love an iPad or Android tablet that I could take notes with. They are being dogmatic about the interface being just finger based because of all the really bad pen based apps that would be out there but we're missing out on a really useful tool as a result.
The biggest barriers to asteroid mining are the high cost of surface to orbit transit and a lack of orbital infrastructure.
While those are huge barriers the biggest barrier is the fact that returning materials from orbit in any meaningful quantity results in a weapon of mass destruction. Dropping several tons of metal from orbit has the same effect as a nuclear weapon. Do you think Russia or China or the US would be comfortable with regular transit of WMDs in orbit? Even an accident would have very bad consequences.
Sending mountains of mined ore back down is free. Don't give me that look.
Free? Explain to me how you are going to get a 10 ton chunk of iron down from orbit without the huge explosion when it hits the ground. Explain to me how you assure nation states that you really aren't going to drop that chunk of ore on their capital.
That'd work for people who already have a smart phone. But how much do you pay per year for service on your smart phone?
If you have a screen in your car odds are pretty high you have a smart phone too. The nav system in my truck cost about $3000 as an option. My smartphone data plan is covered for 4 years for the same price. If you can't afford a smart phone chances are extremely high you aren't worried about having a screen in your car.
What a criminal chooses to use a weapon for is not what was being discussed.
You are seriously going to claim that the motivation for this entire discussion is anything besides the recent mass murders? That's either incredibly naive or disingenuous. This whole topic is about how to stop criminals from using weapons to commit crimes. Specifically the (absurd) notion of using electronics in some overly complicated manner to try to disable a mechanical firearm that needs no electronics to function.
The topic is limited to the legal use of force to stop criminal acts.You are off topic.
You brought up the subject of the intentionality of those using a gun and argued that the purpose of using a gun is something other than to kill. If we are off topic it is because you brought us there.
You assume the purpose of shooting somebody is to kill them. That is not true. The purpose of shooting somebody is to stop them from doing what they are doing.
In cases like the recent mass shooting, what the school children were doing was living. The gun man decided he wanted to stop them from living.
Let's not pretend that the purpose of guns is not for killing. They are a tool and that is their purpose. You can kill a person or an animal to stop an action but that is the purpose of the person, not the tool. If you fire a gun at a person your expectation is that you will kill. There is an intentionality to firearms. Firearms are a weapon and the purpose of a weapon is to kill.
I'm separated, and I can't think of any good reasons to be in a relationship again.
Probably because you haven't met the reason yet. It's ok to be single. If the right person comes along, wonderful. If not, enjoy whatever suits you.
They just need to get the laptops down to 25.5W, then they could run off PoE+, and they'd be able to put decent battery life in them.
USB is more flexible. I can (and do) run Ethernet over USB. Harder to do it the other way around. Conceptually you are right though - as long as we can do away with the single purpose power cord I'm fine with USB or ethernet or something else. A cable that carries power but no data seems pointless to me.
It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue — the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal's high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer's Wall Street clients — deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for "public use, without just compensation
So instead the government should have let AIG go bankrupt and the shareholders and most bond holders would have received nothing at all. AIG shareholders did absolutely nothing to keep AIG from making the stupid and risky investments that got them and the rest of the economy in trouble. Last I checked something > nothing so I'm a little confused about how shareholders were deprived of something.
What a bunch of a$$hats.
Or more accurately, her religion forbids her from holding that job.
Well stated. I think that expresses the situation nicely.
'I feel like in my personal faith walk, I have felt instructed not to get a flu vaccination, but it's also the whole matter of the right to choose what I put in my body...' adding that she has not had a flu vaccine for 30 years as a result of a choice she made because of her Christian faith
Of course she can choose to be vaccinated or not. That is her legal right. However when vaccination demonstrably reduces risk to fellow patients and co-workers then she is welcome to seek employment elsewhere. Her religion has NOTHING to do with this. If she can make a credible scientific argument that such a vaccination would be useless then fine but I don't give a crap about her particular brand of religious craziness. Hospitals require vaccinations for TB and a variety of other diseases and do so for very good reasons. Influenza is no different. If she really believes what she said in the quote above I don't want her anywhere near patients because she is a danger to them.