It took "mere seconds" to burn through the engine manifold.
Paint it white (specifically, something with high albedo in whatever frequency range the attacker favors) and you can probably increase that time by a factor of ten. Paint it with that retroreflective paint that they make street markings out of and you've blinded anyone near the firing station.
Laser weapons look effective now because nobody's taking rudimentary countermeasures against them (because they don't need to). But if these things start appearing on battlefields, there are some simple countermeasures that will make their life a lot more difficult.
The cop here said that his intent in making the jaywalking stop was to stall for backup in order to effect an arrest for the felony murder that Mr. Brown had just committed.
Remember: In the same way a Fireman runs into a burning building; this Officer is going to be running towards the gunfire if there's trouble, not away from it like the average youth on the street.
If my experience with the "youths on the street" in Baltimore is any indication, they'll be running toward the gunfire, fumbling for their cellphone cameras, chanting "World Star Hip Hop".
I know this advice, but I wound up not following it, and it turned out okay for me -- in one situation. I wish we could come around to a policing culture where every story could end like this one. Sadly, we don't, and in many places the police have made themselves out to be the enemy.
***
I got hungry for a burrito one night at midnight in Tucson (a city of about 800,000; mixed white/Hispanic). Good thing, too, since there was a burrito shop three blocks down the road. I was reading an e-book on my netbook, so I grabbed my netbook and tucked it under my arm, and headed for the Taco Shop. Well, it was colder than I expected, so I started jogging down the road. It didn't occur to me, of course, that I looked suspicious, running down the street with a laptop under my arm.
Well, four cops confront me in the parking lot of the Taco Shop, wanting to know what the deal was. They were professional, and didn't make any aggressive moves toward me, put a hand on weapons, or touch me, but made it plain that I wasn't free to leave. They asked where I lived and what I was doing, and I told them. I said "I guess that does look suspicious. But this is my laptop. Can I show you some documents on it with my name on them, and show you that they match the name on my driver's license?"
The cop tells me to go ahead, so I do, and he says "Huh, guess it is your computer, then. Enjoy your burrito" and leaves along with the others.
Thing is, this is exactly what you shouldn't do when stopped by police in many places, since as you say their goal (often) is to find people and put them in jail. I could have said nothing, been detained, called a lawyer, and wasted a whole bunch of my time and a whole bunch of theirs. But, thankfully, I was able to take a risk that the Tucson police were better than that and try to demonstrate my innocence on the spot, and it paid off.
(Three of the cops, incidentally, were Hispanic; this wasn't a "white cops let the white guy go" situation. But there is far less racial animosity in Tucson than there is in places like Washington DC.)
Well, if your assortment of leptons includes positrons, some of them will hit the neutrons and undergo inverse beta decay, and then the electrons in your Mixed Lepton Soup will bind with them and make atoms, and then chemistry. So you're not safe.
It's hilarious that smartphones, operating in data mode, can give me nearly transparent audio in a voip connection to the other side of the planet... and yet in "phone" mode, people in the same city can't hear each other.
"Hold on, let me call you back on my Skype app" is something that should never be uttered over a voice call.
How could anyone competent ever call scripting obsolete?
It is no more or less than a tool to tell the computer wtf you want it to do in precise terms. If you don't have that you're reduced to hoping someone already thought of the things you're trying to do and implemented the correct clicky bit for you to click on. If not, you're SOL.
Those of you know more than me can maybe advise: why the hell does this thing even exist? Why not stick with ordinary text files containing things like
# set the preferred meaning of life meaningoflife = 42
like sane OS's? Yes, okay, sometimes they're hard to find, but if you want to mimic the "registry" idea, make it standard practice to name them "foobar.ini" and symlink them into a central location.
The dumb thing is pinning a run command to the task bar: this requires both mouse input and keyboard input to do anything. It's far more sensible to use a keyboard shortcut for "run"; I can type alt-f2 (linux) or meta-R (windows) and then a program name and get it without reaching for the mouse.
Good call -- I was using "grandma" as a proxy for "people who aren't that computer-savvy", but I imagine my mother who's in her 60's runs Lubuntu just fine:)
No -- and, thus, I am not going to like Windows 9. I will hold my nose and use it for a few programs, but Microsoft's agenda is fundamentally incompatible with making the sort of OS I want to use.
1) Doesn't attempt to hide the workings of my computer from me -- in particular, don't hide the way that paths and directories really work. (As a bonus: remove the spaces from system directories, dammit, because I get real tired of escaping them when I access my NTFS partition from a real OS.)
2) When something goes wrong tell me what the fuck it was. "The internet connection has limited connectivity" doesn't tell me a damn thing. "DHCP timeout" tells me something. Include both messages, by all means, for the benefit of Grandma -- but Grandma likely can't fix her internet connection on her own anyway.
3) Don't be patronizing. Copying.mp3's to a phone shouldn't give a "Your phone might not be able to play this file, copy anyway?" message, and there are a thousand things like that in Windows.
4) Get rid of file locking, or at least allow an override. I can decide whether a file is sufficiently "in use" that I shouldn't delete it.
5) Don't attempt to push other MS products (cloud services, "stores", and the like) on me, and don't keep spewing Windows Media Player etc. icons around after I delete them once.
Is that $3 to replace a scratched screen, including all the AR coatings? At that price they might as well include three spare glass plates with every phone in case you scratch one.
As far as the rounded glass: I had a Nexus 3 with a curved screen and it was a good idea -- wish they still did that more.
We put multi-ton vehicles on the roads whizzing around a few feet from sidewalks, and out in the middle of people trying to ride bicycles. Sometimes people get hurt by them but by and large the utility of cars outweighs the risks.
Drones are likely to be far safer than cars on roads. Imagine the utility of replacing all those news helicopters with news drones to report on, say, the protests and riots in Ferguson?
Well, it depends. If you're in a place with limited government (like most places in the West), that's not really a freedom. In the US, you don't have the right to vote in a law that says that redheads can't own property, no matter how much you'd like to: the scope of things up for a vote isn't unlimited.
I live in a large US city (the District of Columbia) with both a conventional regulated taxi service and Uber/Lyft.
Let me look at your points one at a time:
--Insurance: The auto insurance market is developing insurance policies for these sorts of drivers. In any case, I imagine that the average Uber driver is a better driver than I am (it's her job, and just a means of transport for me); when I accept a ride from a driver, I know she might wreck and hurt me. If she does, her personal liability insurance (which she's required by law to carry, like any driver) will cover some of the cost, and my medical insurance will cover the rest.
--Technical inspections: Uber drivers' cars have to be no more than two years old. Technical inspections are required for *all* cars here.
--Reliable costs: Reliable costs mean unreliable service. Once there was an unexpected snowstorm and my mother needed a ride to the airport. There were no city taxicabs anywhere, but we could get her a ride on Uber, albeit for double the cost. Price signals let buyers and sellers communicate supply and demand, and are a good thing.
--Proper filing of taxes: Uber drivers have to report revenue earned from their work to the American tax authorities, just like the fellow selling fruit out of a truck by the side of the road. Nobody wants to shut down fruit stands because they might cheat on their taxes.
--Drivers can indeed form a labor union if they want -- they can get together and collectively bargain with Uber through a representative. They haven't yet, but they could if they wanted.
--Many employees in the US don't get health insurance, Social Security payments, or pensions. As independent contractors, the drivers are responsible for taking care of themselves; many have second jobs that do have these perks, and all of them know that there's no health insurance going in. It's no different than someone who owns a small business: if they want health insurance they can buy it separately, and if they want a pension or social insurance they can save money.
Then haul their asses to court for fraud (hoax bookings) and the other real crimes they've committed, if they've committed any. But these problems have nothing to do with Uber's business model.
"Negligent homicide" or something similar is a crime in many jurisdictions: "You didn't mean to kill the guy, but you did because you did something dumb that you should have known not to do."
Slashdot Mirror
It took "mere seconds" to burn through the engine manifold.
Paint it white (specifically, something with high albedo in whatever frequency range the attacker favors) and you can probably increase that time by a factor of ten. Paint it with that retroreflective paint that they make street markings out of and you've blinded anyone near the firing station.
Laser weapons look effective now because nobody's taking rudimentary countermeasures against them (because they don't need to). But if these things start appearing on battlefields, there are some simple countermeasures that will make their life a lot more difficult.
Part of the point of the internet is that it's a network of peers; how do you draw a bright line between end users and content providers?
And, yet, critical hardware runs on Linux all the time, like most of the world's supercomputers...
The cop here said that his intent in making the jaywalking stop was to stall for backup in order to effect an arrest for the felony murder that Mr. Brown had just committed.
I would hope men and women would carry guns if needed to protect their family, and that men and women would like respect at work.
(At work today, a physics professor asked a lady in the conference room "Ah, are you someone's wife?" No -- she is an English professor.)
Remember: In the same way a Fireman runs into a burning building; this Officer is going to be running towards the gunfire if there's trouble, not away from it like the average youth on the street.
If my experience with the "youths on the street" in Baltimore is any indication, they'll be running toward the gunfire, fumbling for their cellphone cameras, chanting "World Star Hip Hop".
I know this advice, but I wound up not following it, and it turned out okay for me -- in one situation. I wish we could come around to a policing culture where every story could end like this one. Sadly, we don't, and in many places the police have made themselves out to be the enemy.
***
I got hungry for a burrito one night at midnight in Tucson (a city of about 800,000; mixed white/Hispanic). Good thing, too, since there was a burrito shop three blocks down the road. I was reading an e-book on my netbook, so I grabbed my netbook and tucked it under my arm, and headed for the Taco Shop. Well, it was colder than I expected, so I started jogging down the road. It didn't occur to me, of course, that I looked suspicious, running down the street with a laptop under my arm.
Well, four cops confront me in the parking lot of the Taco Shop, wanting to know what the deal was. They were professional, and didn't make any aggressive moves toward me, put a hand on weapons, or touch me, but made it plain that I wasn't free to leave. They asked where I lived and what I was doing, and I told them. I said "I guess that does look suspicious. But this is my laptop. Can I show you some documents on it with my name on them, and show you that they match the name on my driver's license?"
The cop tells me to go ahead, so I do, and he says "Huh, guess it is your computer, then. Enjoy your burrito" and leaves along with the others.
Thing is, this is exactly what you shouldn't do when stopped by police in many places, since as you say their goal (often) is to find people and put them in jail. I could have said nothing, been detained, called a lawyer, and wasted a whole bunch of my time and a whole bunch of theirs. But, thankfully, I was able to take a risk that the Tucson police were better than that and try to demonstrate my innocence on the spot, and it paid off.
(Three of the cops, incidentally, were Hispanic; this wasn't a "white cops let the white guy go" situation. But there is far less racial animosity in Tucson than there is in places like Washington DC.)
In what ways do today's men behave like women that you'd like to stop, and in what ways do today's women behave like men?
How would you like to see men and women behave differently?
Well, if your assortment of leptons includes positrons, some of them will hit the neutrons and undergo inverse beta decay, and then the electrons in your Mixed Lepton Soup will bind with them and make atoms, and then chemistry. So you're not safe.
It's hilarious that smartphones, operating in data mode, can give me nearly transparent audio in a voip connection to the other side of the planet... and yet in "phone" mode, people in the same city can't hear each other.
"Hold on, let me call you back on my Skype app" is something that should never be uttered over a voice call.
How could anyone competent ever call scripting obsolete?
It is no more or less than a tool to tell the computer wtf you want it to do in precise terms. If you don't have that you're reduced to hoping someone already thought of the things you're trying to do and implemented the correct clicky bit for you to click on. If not, you're SOL.
The Registry.
Oh, god, the Registry.
Those of you know more than me can maybe advise: why the hell does this thing even exist? Why not stick with ordinary text files containing things like
# set the preferred meaning of life
meaningoflife = 42
like sane OS's? Yes, okay, sometimes they're hard to find, but if you want to mimic the "registry" idea, make it standard practice to name them "foobar.ini" and symlink them into a central location.
Why not give users the option to use both?
The dumb thing is pinning a run command to the task bar: this requires both mouse input and keyboard input to do anything. It's far more sensible to use a keyboard shortcut for "run"; I can type alt-f2 (linux) or meta-R (windows) and then a program name and get it without reaching for the mouse.
Good call -- I was using "grandma" as a proxy for "people who aren't that computer-savvy", but I imagine my mother who's in her 60's runs Lubuntu just fine :)
No -- and, thus, I am not going to like Windows 9. I will hold my nose and use it for a few programs, but Microsoft's agenda is fundamentally incompatible with making the sort of OS I want to use.
I want an OS that:
1) Doesn't attempt to hide the workings of my computer from me -- in particular, don't hide the way that paths and directories really work. (As a bonus: remove the spaces from system directories, dammit, because I get real tired of escaping them when I access my NTFS partition from a real OS.)
2) When something goes wrong tell me what the fuck it was. "The internet connection has limited connectivity" doesn't tell me a damn thing. "DHCP timeout" tells me something. Include both messages, by all means, for the benefit of Grandma -- but Grandma likely can't fix her internet connection on her own anyway.
3) Don't be patronizing. Copying .mp3's to a phone shouldn't give a "Your phone might not be able to play this file, copy anyway?" message, and there are a thousand things like that in Windows.
4) Get rid of file locking, or at least allow an override. I can decide whether a file is sufficiently "in use" that I shouldn't delete it.
5) Don't attempt to push other MS products (cloud services, "stores", and the like) on me, and don't keep spewing Windows Media Player etc. icons around after I delete them once.
Is that $3 to replace a scratched screen, including all the AR coatings? At that price they might as well include three spare glass plates with every phone in case you scratch one.
As far as the rounded glass: I had a Nexus 3 with a curved screen and it was a good idea -- wish they still did that more.
We put multi-ton vehicles on the roads whizzing around a few feet from sidewalks, and out in the middle of people trying to ride bicycles. Sometimes people get hurt by them but by and large the utility of cars outweighs the risks.
Drones are likely to be far safer than cars on roads. Imagine the utility of replacing all those news helicopters with news drones to report on, say, the protests and riots in Ferguson?
Well, it depends. If you're in a place with limited government (like most places in the West), that's not really a freedom. In the US, you don't have the right to vote in a law that says that redheads can't own property, no matter how much you'd like to: the scope of things up for a vote isn't unlimited.
So, in other words, any law is a good law, even if it exists for the protection of a cartel?
Well, good -- but this shouldn't extend to banning Uber or services like it.
I live in a large US city (the District of Columbia) with both a conventional regulated taxi service and Uber/Lyft.
Let me look at your points one at a time:
--Insurance: The auto insurance market is developing insurance policies for these sorts of drivers. In any case, I imagine that the average Uber driver is a better driver than I am (it's her job, and just a means of transport for me); when I accept a ride from a driver, I know she might wreck and hurt me. If she does, her personal liability insurance (which she's required by law to carry, like any driver) will cover some of the cost, and my medical insurance will cover the rest.
--Technical inspections: Uber drivers' cars have to be no more than two years old. Technical inspections are required for *all* cars here.
--Reliable costs: Reliable costs mean unreliable service. Once there was an unexpected snowstorm and my mother needed a ride to the airport. There were no city taxicabs anywhere, but we could get her a ride on Uber, albeit for double the cost. Price signals let buyers and sellers communicate supply and demand, and are a good thing.
--Proper filing of taxes: Uber drivers have to report revenue earned from their work to the American tax authorities, just like the fellow selling fruit out of a truck by the side of the road. Nobody wants to shut down fruit stands because they might cheat on their taxes.
--Drivers can indeed form a labor union if they want -- they can get together and collectively bargain with Uber through a representative. They haven't yet, but they could if they wanted.
--Many employees in the US don't get health insurance, Social Security payments, or pensions. As independent contractors, the drivers are responsible for taking care of themselves; many have second jobs that do have these perks, and all of them know that there's no health insurance going in. It's no different than someone who owns a small business: if they want health insurance they can buy it separately, and if they want a pension or social insurance they can save money.
Then haul their asses to court for fraud (hoax bookings) and the other real crimes they've committed, if they've committed any. But these problems have nothing to do with Uber's business model.
"Negligent homicide" or something similar is a crime in many jurisdictions: "You didn't mean to kill the guy, but you did because you did something dumb that you should have known not to do."
A body camera is a tiny, tiny fraction of the salary of a cop, and will probably make up its cost very quickly in the bullshit that it cuts out.