I disagree that water is a basic human right. It's a basic human necessity, sure, but it's also a commodity which we treat as property. Taking someone's water is theft, and there is no system in place that I'm aware of that ensures any human being access to water. It's something we have to figure out how to get for ourselves. Doing so is generally quite easy in the places people commonly live -- but that's because people generally don't go live places where there is no water (either naturally or imported via technological means).
No doubt. I had to buy my daughter a graphing calculator a few months ago, because she needed one for pre-calc and when I pulled out my old HP-48SX, it no longer works. So, off we went to the store, and based on what's happened to the price and capability of everything else electronic, I expected that we'd get something for $10-20 that was a couple of orders of magnitude more powerful than the 48S I purchased almost 20 years ago for $250. I mean... my current PC cost 1/5th as much as one I bought about the same time and has 1000 times more RAM, storage and processor speed.
I was shocked to discover that the calculators on the market still cost $100 and aren't significantly more powerful than what I had 20 years ago. The new one is a measly three times faster, has slightly less RAM and cost almost half as much. Something is seriously out of whack here.
Finally, we continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready. As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.
Shannon's notion of unicity distance is the length of the shortest ciphertext needed to rule out all but one possible decryption. The theoretical estimate of unicity distance depends on the entropy of the key space and the amount of redundancy in the plaintext. In this case, though, the "key" includes the cipher, since it is also unknown, and nothing is really known about the plaintext. Under reasonable assumptions about both, it's likely that the unicity distance (if it could be calculated) is significantly longer than the amount of ciphertext available.
What this means is that it's entirely possible that we could have thousands of distinct, reasonable decryptions, with no way to distinguish which is the right one. In other words, a huge number of those solutions flooding in could be "right", as far as anyone can tell.
For those who are skeptical of the number, see page 19. In 2000, traffic fatalities accounted for an estimated 1.26 million deaths worldwide, and 90% of them occurred in low- and middle-income countries. 35% of worldwide traffic fatalities occur in southeast Asia.
Why can't Google understand that I simply do not want to broadcast my searches to the world? I have been trusting Google with that information. If they want to use my click-throughs as part of their search algorithms, that's fine. But why do they want me to attach my name to it? Google keeps trying to go social and that goes against all the trust we put in Google's privacy policies.
Actually, they do get it. That's why you have to go out of your way to opt in to this by creating a public profile, and then clicking the "+1" button where applicable. The rest of us, who have no interest in it, can continue to use Search the way we always have.
You're fucking JOKING, right? Google may wave hands and publicly pretend to care about privacy, etc - but if you actually check what info they have about you on file via the never expiring cookie and your account (if signed in) its pretty damn invasive.
Google also provides an extensive set of privacy controls. Check out the Google privacy tools. You can opt out of ads tracking, personalized ads, etc. You can install a Google-provided plugin that ensures your opt-outs don't get lost and are always honored even if you're not logged in. You can look at the dashboard which shows you all of the information Google is tracking about you, and you can opt out of it.
Google's not perfect. Occasional significant mistakes are made, and there is a lot more that needs to be done, but Google does care about user privacy.
It's worth noting that the result of the FTC investigation is that Google will have to continue doing exactly what it's already doing. After the Buzz fiasco that drove this, Google has put in place a privacy design review process and established teams specifically focused on ensuring privacy is handled correctly across the whole company.
Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee, so I'm hardly a disinterested bystander. But I'm an engineer, not a spokesperson, and I'm an engineer whose spent most of his career on security and privacy work (this isn't what I do at Google). FWIW (not much, since I can't offer details), I'll also say that what I see from the inside about Google's focus on privacy is very impressive to me. I think the company is doing all the right things. There have been and will be missteps, but they'll be mistakes.
It's funny how that works. The bean counters manage to assign an actual cost to every bit of trivia and insist on tracking it and justifying every last penny. Except for accounting.
It's not just accountants.
Long ago, I worked on a project that had experienced some churn in project management. We got a new guy, and he wanted us to track our time in five minute increments.
I more of less told him that if that's what he wanted, 1-2 minutes out of every 5 minutes would be dedicated to tracking which bucket any particular task went into, and 1 minute of that five would be updating it. That left 1-2 minutes out of any given 5 minutes to actually work, but if he was OK with 20-40% productivity, we'd be happy to accommodate him.
If you're actually stopping work every few minutes to record what you're doing, you're doing it wrong.
I can tell you roughly to the second how much time I've spent on any of my tasks on any given day (including reading slashdot), and the overhead of tracking all of this activity is essentially negligible. How? I use a tool to record what task I'm working on now. When I switch tasks, I notify the tool and it clocks me out of the task I was previously working on and clocks me in to the new one. Total time for this operation never exceeds more than a few seconds, because the tool in question is integrated into the editor that I'm using all of the time anyway. But I don't count even those seconds as time wasted, because the clock-in/clock-out process is simply part of a larger task-switch overhead, which is to type up some notes on what I was doing. Those notes, of course, are a net time-saver, even though they mean that it takes me 2-3 minutes to switch tasks. Those notes cost me minutes but save me days.
(The tool, BTW, is Org mode in Emacs, and it's fantastic. A very powerful, very easy-to-use combined note-taking, time-recording, todo-list managing app -- and I'm dramatically understating its capability).
Beyond the question of tooling and process, whatever method you use, for software developers if there's a significant probability that the task in the current five-minute increment is different from the task in the previous five-minute increment, you're still doing it wrong. Productivity requires large slabs of uninterrupted time, because even if you don't have a context-switch process like I do, those switches are not cheap. I figure it takes me at least 15 minutes to fully re-enter a given design or coding task, and it can often take a great deal more than that to fully re-acquire the "task state". And I think I'm actually quicker at it than most.
If you're really changing tasks so often that the five-minute increments are burdensome to track, then I think your project manager was doing the right thing by helping you to discover how broken your methodology was, and it's too bad you didn't reap more benefit from his wisdom (even if he didn't understand how wise he was, which is likely).
This was one of my great discoveries when I first started using org mode to track my time in detail. I found that my time was very "fragmented", with lots of context switches for stuff like reading e-mail, etc. So, I changed my habits; I now only check my e-mail 3-4 times per day, unless there's some reason I have downtime (e.g. while waiting for a compile) which is too short to usefully apply on another significant task, but long enough to get through a bit of e-mail backlog. I've also been focusing on defragmenting meetings, trying to arrange my time so that I cluster meetings together. Again, when looking at my time logs the problem of meeting fragmentation was obvious.
My employer doesn't require me to track my time in detail. I'm required to provide quarterly reports on my activities, and encouraged to provide a weekly "snippet", which is 4-5 sentences about what I did that week. I do the detailed tracking on my own, because it makes me more efficient and saves time -- and because it makes writing my weekly snippets trivial.
Get this through your thick skull, the illegals would not be here if no one hired them. Make it a felony to hire one and fine 25k per day per illegal and that problem will sort itself right out.
Exactly. And to make your approach work even better, here's another tweak: Offer green cards to any illegals who turn in their boss. So the one person the boss absolutely can't fool about his workers' status is highly motivated to rat him out. I doubt we'd even have to hand out many green cards... the employers of illegals would become so terrified of their employees that they'd can them immediately.
Heh... They're going to screw it up. They managed to do an even worse law that effectively gives amnesty to illegal aliens that're in Utah- that even more desperately needs repealing than this botch job we're discussing.
You may disagree with it, but the "Utah Compact" wasn't a mistake, it was very deliberate. And it's getting a lot of positive attention nationwide, with many other states modeling their own laws on it.
Are you saying that your daughter needs more protection than boys, or did I pick that up wrong? Sounds like over protection in any case.
Yes, she needs more protection than my boys. This isn't a boys vs girls thing, this is a her vs them thing, because she is mentally ill and they are not.
Yes, my daughter knows about nearly all of the oversight, and she understands why -- which isn't to say she's happy about it, but she's unhappy about many things that are necessary to protect her from herself. There are specific reasons for the parts that she doesn't know about, too.
First, my daughter goes into occasional downward spirals of increasing negativism that eventually lead her to dangerously self-destructive actions. By "dangerously self-destructive" I mean "If unchecked would likely result in her death". But she's quite good at hiding it from us. When she's in a good place she recognizes that she needs to talk to us about those feelings, but when they actually come, she hides them. So, we watch her on-line activities for clues, and we also have many of her friends reporting to us when they see red flags.
In addition, she often blows off steam on-line in ways that are actually very helpful to her, but she'd hold back there if she knew we were watching as well. So by not telling her that we're looking over her shoulder, we both provide her the freedom to keep herself healthier and we gain insight about her mental and emotional state.
But discussing her is really something of a red herring, because she's mentally ill, not a normal case. The better examples from my post, I think, are the variety of approaches we use with her brothers. They're all different and different levels of oversight are appropriate.
I'm very glad that worked well for you. You should keep in mind, however, that not all kids are the same. I have four children, all of them raised in the same environment, with the same rules and in basically the same way. With one of them, I'd have no qualms about giving him his own, unmonitored, laptop and letting him use it anywhere he likes (in deference to issues of perceived fairness, I haven't done this -- he has to use the computer in the living room just like the other kids). With another, the approach you mentioned plus some software-enforced time limits (using timeoutd) is adequate. For a third, filtering and basic oversight have proven to be necessary and sufficient; as long as he knows there's a decent chance he'll be caught misbehaving, he doesn't.
For the fourth, I have configured vino on her account so that I can use VNC to watch her screen basically 100% of the time that she's on the computer (without her knowledge), we have full access to her Facebook and other on-line accounts, we read all of her texts and IM logs, etc. All of this very deep and invasive oversight is a condition of her right to use the computer, or the phone. Why? Because it's proven to be necessary. Without such intense oversight and frequent correction she gets herself in trouble. Granted that my daughter isn't a normal case; she struggles with severe clinical depression and an emotion disorder which often leads her to do self-destructive things.
But the point is that there is no one "right" approach to managing your children's computer use. Children are individuals, every one is unique and must be treated as such. Good parents strive to understand their children's needs and strike the appropriate balance between privacy and freedom on the one hand and oversight and control on the other. This is hard to do. In fact, it is almost certainly the hardest thing any parent EVER ever does in his or her life, and every parent gets it wrong, frequently. But parents who care and who work at it learn from their mistakes and adjust their approach.
Tools like keyloggers, VNC, chat logs, phone and text logs, etc. are all just tools. Good parents look for good tools and find the appropriate way to employ them. Good parents also weigh the pros and cons of full disclosure to their children of the degree of oversight being applied. In general, honesty and full disclosure is the best approach -- but there are exceptions to every rule.
The key is to understand your kids, as best you can, and then exercise good judgment, because you know their judgment is lacking. The best definition of wisdom that I've ever heard is "applied experience", and children do not have experience.
If concealed carry deters crime, wouldn't non-concealed carry deter it more? What are the advantages of concealed carry over open carry?
That's a good question, and a subject of much debate. I focused on concealed carry simply because it's less controversial than open carry, but I think there is a good argument to be made that open carry is a better deterrent.
Without going into a full exploration of all of the pros and cons, I'll highlight some of the key points on both sides (and, yes, this is an abbreviated list -- a full discussion would be much longer):
Opponents of open carry argue that criminals are deterred by concealed carry because they can't know if their victim is armed or not.
Proponents of open carry argue that open carry doesn't preclude concealed carry, so that part of the deterrent effect need not be lost, and argue that criminals are even more likely to be deterred if they actually see a gun.
Opponents of open carry argue that a criminal who is determined to commit the crime will see the openly-carried firearm and target that person first.
Proponents of open carry argue that criminals want easy targets and rather than targeting the open carrier will instead choose to go elsewhere. (I should say that I have yet to hear of a case where an open carrier other than a uniformed security guard or law enforcement officer was deliberately targeted, but the number of open carriers is also quite low, so it may be that it just hasn't happened yet.)
Opponents of open carry argue that it makes firearms too accessible to criminals who want a gun but don't have one.
Proponents of open carry argue that criminals who want guns have easier ways to get them, though they also recommend that those who want to open carry use a retention holster and practice techniques to defeat gun grabs.
Opponents of open carry argue that since police officers are most often shot with their own guns, open carriers are taking on the same risk.
Proponents of open carry argue that in practice that doesn't seem to happen.
Opponents of open carry argue that open carriers give up the tactical advantage of being able to surprise the criminal with their firearm.
Proponents of open carry argue that any loss in tactical advantage is more than offset by the strategic advantage of the deterrent effect. Said another way, they argue that concealed carry provides a better tactical situation should you have to deploy your gun, but open carry reduces the likelihood of having to use it at all.
Opponents of open carry argue that open carriers are just stroking their egos by displaying their guns.
Proponents of open carry argue that this isn't true, that they open carry for reasons of comfort, easy access to their firearm, as a form of speech in support of their firearms rights or to educate the public.
Personally, I'm a fan of open carry, and I open carry fairly occasionally. I do it primarily because of the opportunities it provides to educate the non-carrying public about the fact that ordinary, law-abiding people carry guns. On the other hand, when concealment is more socially convenient, I do that instead.
The idea that a well armed populace is safer is clearly a boy scout fantasy.
It's not at all clear to me, nor to many scholars who've studied the issue. I assume you've read John Lott's seminal work that kicked off an ongoing debate about the effect of widespread concealed carry, right? And the many other research papers that support his finding that the more law-abiding citizens are carrying firearms the less violent crime there is? And noted the fact that the (relatively few) studies that find to the contrary, with only a single exception, find that rather than more guns increasing crime, they have no significant effect? And I'm sure you've also read the FBI reports that analyze the question from the criminal's perspective, and conclude that citizen concealed carry is the largest single deterrent in the minds of most violent criminals. I can provide links, but all of this information is readily accessible via Google.
I think this is a case where what appears to be common sense is actually just ignorance. Real study of the issue shows that privately-owned, concealed firearms are a real deterrent to crime, and the numbers show that the otherwise law-abiding "hothead" who "flips out" and starts shooting people doesn't exist. In the case of Jared Loughner, I think the crowd is lucky he had a gun. Without that, he'd have had to fall back on simpler and far more deadly weapons -- like his truck. What would be even better, of course, is to identify mentally ill people like him beforehand and get them into treatment. People wouldn't die, and they'd have happier lives. But the presence or absence of guns doesn't significantly affect that dynamic.
It is time for the USA to join every other sober industrialized nation in the world and severely restrict guns. Reason will prevail, it always does. Even though we will pay a horrible price in senseless deaths until the stink finally gets too high. Eventually, too high even for those with an irrational religious conviction about the virtuousness of guns. The rest of us are waiting for you to finally come to their senses. We're not too patient though, we're sick of the carnage. Hurry up and figure it out.
What carnage?
Yes, approximately 30,000 people die in the US annually from gunshot wounds. That's terrible. But when you break down the numbers, you learn some interesting things.
First, approximately half of those deaths are suicides. Without access to a firearm, would those people still be alive? Perhaps some of them, only because guns tend to be a quite effective way to do yourself in. But they're hardly the only way.
Second, the vast majority of the deaths that remain are gang- and drug-related. If you want to eliminate most of those deaths, the solution is quite apparent: Legalize drugs. Regulate them tightly, but make them most readily available through legal channels and you'll cut the legs from under the gangs. Without drugs, they have no funding. Without funding, they die. We experienced all of this nearly a century ago, yet we continue paying a horrible price in senseless deaths and loss of civil liberties, and will continue paying it until we wise up and deal with drug abuse as a social and medical problem, not a criminal one.
Third, we get the portion that are really hard to address: domestic violence. There are about 4,000 deaths per year where an angry spouse/child/parent/whatever grabs a gun and starts shooting. Some of these people would not die if guns were unavailable, and I don't really know what we can do about it. More readily-available family counseling services, perhaps. More shelters and programs to help battered women and children escape a dangerous situation before their abuser grabs a gun and kills them -- or before they grab a gun and kill their abuser (though I have to say I find those outcomes less heartbreaking... not that they're the best outcomes, but they're better than many of the alternatives).
/64 isn't a subnet. It's the space allocated for a single host. The bottom 64 bits of the address are chosen by the stateless autoconfiguration. They may be the MAC address, they may be chosen at random, or a single host may even use a different address for every outbound connection it makes.
A/64 address block isn't even a subnet, it's the range intended for use by a single host. The plan has always been that the smallest subnet block is a/48. And why NOT give out/48s? You do realize that there are enough of them to give 31000 to every man, woman and child on the planet, right? If you want to be conservative, use/48s for businesses and/56s for homes. Giving only a/64 to a home is ridiculously parsimonious.
And here are 187 OpenOffice bugs and feature requests that received at least 25 votes.
Oh, cool. That must have taken a bit of time to put a link to each one of those bugs in your commen.... dear sweet-n-sour sassafras!!! are my eyes deceiving me or is that just one fu*cking huge URL in your comment there?
You know, slashdot does have support for the A-HREF tag...
What you don't realize is that he's using Chrome, so pasting doesn't work. It was a lot of work typing that URL, character by character, double-checking each one to make sure that he didn't make a mistake, and he wanted you to KNOW how much effort he'd put in on your behalf, so you could just click it.
if Excel were required to share the same format as other apps, it would by necessity also require sharing the same feature-set.
Nonsense.
First, most features don't require format changes. This is why Microsoft Word's format didn't change for more than a decade, in spite of the fact that several new versions were released. This is also why we can have a feature war among browsers even though they all consume and display the same formats.
Second, a well-designed format -- like ODF -- is extensible. Applications can add new structures to the format without impeding the ability of other applications to read and operate on the resulting files. The other applications simply ignore the part they don't understand, ideally saving it unmodified.
In short, I think requiring a particular application to use a particular format stinks to high heaven.
Yeah, because interoperability now, avoidance of monopoly rents and the ability to actually read your documents later are just terrible.
I am betting "No" - unless you are willing to submit to an independent forensic examination of all your storage media. The fake file is, after all, an admission that you were looking for the real one
But looking for the real file isn't a crime. Sharing the real file is the crime, and if you never got it you couldn't share it. Obviously, if there are other copyrighted files that you were actually sharing, and they can prove it, then you may still have a problem.
I guess that's why the documentation for the 2007/2010 (transitional) and future (strict) versions of the.docx/.xlsx/etc Office formats takes 6,000 pages - it's all so obfuscated, vague, and proprietary.
(Overcomplicated, I'll grant you...)
And why that massive 6,000-page document is, in fact, incomplete and underspecified, including numerous directives to do things in whatever way various MS proprietary versions did them, without spelling out what those ways were, ensuring that no one but Microsoft can completely and correctly implement the specification, in spite of its apparent "openness".
But, just in case, Microsoft has also carefully avoided correctly implementing even what the spec does say, thereby assuring that no competing implementation will ever work quite the way theirs does. And of course theirs is the de facto standard implementation, no matter what the documentation says.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree that water is a basic human right. It's a basic human necessity, sure, but it's also a commodity which we treat as property. Taking someone's water is theft, and there is no system in place that I'm aware of that ensures any human being access to water. It's something we have to figure out how to get for ourselves. Doing so is generally quite easy in the places people commonly live -- but that's because people generally don't go live places where there is no water (either naturally or imported via technological means).
No doubt. I had to buy my daughter a graphing calculator a few months ago, because she needed one for pre-calc and when I pulled out my old HP-48SX, it no longer works. So, off we went to the store, and based on what's happened to the price and capability of everything else electronic, I expected that we'd get something for $10-20 that was a couple of orders of magnitude more powerful than the 48S I purchased almost 20 years ago for $250. I mean... my current PC cost 1/5th as much as one I bought about the same time and has 1000 times more RAM, storage and processor speed.
I was shocked to discover that the calculators on the market still cost $100 and aren't significantly more powerful than what I had 20 years ago. The new one is a measly three times faster, has slightly less RAM and cost almost half as much. Something is seriously out of whack here.
With Honeycomb, doesn't Google have a history of saying things will be released as open source, and then not releasing the source?
No.
From http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/04/i-think-im-having-gene-amdahl-moment.html:
Finally, we continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready. As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.
Shannon's notion of unicity distance is the length of the shortest ciphertext needed to rule out all but one possible decryption. The theoretical estimate of unicity distance depends on the entropy of the key space and the amount of redundancy in the plaintext. In this case, though, the "key" includes the cipher, since it is also unknown, and nothing is really known about the plaintext. Under reasonable assumptions about both, it's likely that the unicity distance (if it could be calculated) is significantly longer than the amount of ciphertext available.
What this means is that it's entirely possible that we could have thousands of distinct, reasonable decryptions, with no way to distinguish which is the right one. In other words, a huge number of those solutions flooding in could be "right", as far as anyone can tell.
The US also has much safer roads and cars than the rest of the world. The real number is actually
http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/924156220X.pdf
Good link.
For those who are skeptical of the number, see page 19. In 2000, traffic fatalities accounted for an estimated 1.26 million deaths worldwide, and 90% of them occurred in low- and middle-income countries. 35% of worldwide traffic fatalities occur in southeast Asia.
Why can't Google understand that I simply do not want to broadcast my searches to the world? I have been trusting Google with that information. If they want to use my click-throughs as part of their search algorithms, that's fine. But why do they want me to attach my name to it? Google keeps trying to go social and that goes against all the trust we put in Google's privacy policies.
Actually, they do get it. That's why you have to go out of your way to opt in to this by creating a public profile, and then clicking the "+1" button where applicable. The rest of us, who have no interest in it, can continue to use Search the way we always have.
Also, if you'd like to go further, you can opt out of all Google tracking. See the Google privacy tools page: http://www.google.com/privacy/tools.html
You're fucking JOKING, right? Google may wave hands and publicly pretend to care about privacy, etc - but if you actually check what info they have about you on file via the never expiring cookie and your account (if signed in) its pretty damn invasive.
Google also provides an extensive set of privacy controls. Check out the Google privacy tools. You can opt out of ads tracking, personalized ads, etc. You can install a Google-provided plugin that ensures your opt-outs don't get lost and are always honored even if you're not logged in. You can look at the dashboard which shows you all of the information Google is tracking about you, and you can opt out of it.
Google's not perfect. Occasional significant mistakes are made, and there is a lot more that needs to be done, but Google does care about user privacy.
It's worth noting that the result of the FTC investigation is that Google will have to continue doing exactly what it's already doing. After the Buzz fiasco that drove this, Google has put in place a privacy design review process and established teams specifically focused on ensuring privacy is handled correctly across the whole company.
Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee, so I'm hardly a disinterested bystander. But I'm an engineer, not a spokesperson, and I'm an engineer whose spent most of his career on security and privacy work (this isn't what I do at Google). FWIW (not much, since I can't offer details), I'll also say that what I see from the inside about Google's focus on privacy is very impressive to me. I think the company is doing all the right things. There have been and will be missteps, but they'll be mistakes.
It's not just accountants.
Long ago, I worked on a project that had experienced some churn in project management. We got a new guy, and he wanted us to track our time in five minute increments.
I more of less told him that if that's what he wanted, 1-2 minutes out of every 5 minutes would be dedicated to tracking which bucket any particular task went into, and 1 minute of that five would be updating it. That left 1-2 minutes out of any given 5 minutes to actually work, but if he was OK with 20-40% productivity, we'd be happy to accommodate him.
If you're actually stopping work every few minutes to record what you're doing, you're doing it wrong.
I can tell you roughly to the second how much time I've spent on any of my tasks on any given day (including reading slashdot), and the overhead of tracking all of this activity is essentially negligible. How? I use a tool to record what task I'm working on now. When I switch tasks, I notify the tool and it clocks me out of the task I was previously working on and clocks me in to the new one. Total time for this operation never exceeds more than a few seconds, because the tool in question is integrated into the editor that I'm using all of the time anyway. But I don't count even those seconds as time wasted, because the clock-in/clock-out process is simply part of a larger task-switch overhead, which is to type up some notes on what I was doing. Those notes, of course, are a net time-saver, even though they mean that it takes me 2-3 minutes to switch tasks. Those notes cost me minutes but save me days.
(The tool, BTW, is Org mode in Emacs, and it's fantastic. A very powerful, very easy-to-use combined note-taking, time-recording, todo-list managing app -- and I'm dramatically understating its capability).
Beyond the question of tooling and process, whatever method you use, for software developers if there's a significant probability that the task in the current five-minute increment is different from the task in the previous five-minute increment, you're still doing it wrong. Productivity requires large slabs of uninterrupted time, because even if you don't have a context-switch process like I do, those switches are not cheap. I figure it takes me at least 15 minutes to fully re-enter a given design or coding task, and it can often take a great deal more than that to fully re-acquire the "task state". And I think I'm actually quicker at it than most.
If you're really changing tasks so often that the five-minute increments are burdensome to track, then I think your project manager was doing the right thing by helping you to discover how broken your methodology was, and it's too bad you didn't reap more benefit from his wisdom (even if he didn't understand how wise he was, which is likely).
This was one of my great discoveries when I first started using org mode to track my time in detail. I found that my time was very "fragmented", with lots of context switches for stuff like reading e-mail, etc. So, I changed my habits; I now only check my e-mail 3-4 times per day, unless there's some reason I have downtime (e.g. while waiting for a compile) which is too short to usefully apply on another significant task, but long enough to get through a bit of e-mail backlog. I've also been focusing on defragmenting meetings, trying to arrange my time so that I cluster meetings together. Again, when looking at my time logs the problem of meeting fragmentation was obvious.
My employer doesn't require me to track my time in detail. I'm required to provide quarterly reports on my activities, and encouraged to provide a weekly "snippet", which is 4-5 sentences about what I did that week. I do the detailed tracking on my own, because it makes me more efficient and saves time -- and because it makes writing my weekly snippets trivial.
Sounds like turn the other cheek to me.
Get this through your thick skull, the illegals would not be here if no one hired them. Make it a felony to hire one and fine 25k per day per illegal and that problem will sort itself right out.
Exactly. And to make your approach work even better, here's another tweak: Offer green cards to any illegals who turn in their boss. So the one person the boss absolutely can't fool about his workers' status is highly motivated to rat him out. I doubt we'd even have to hand out many green cards... the employers of illegals would become so terrified of their employees that they'd can them immediately.
Heh... They're going to screw it up. They managed to do an even worse law that effectively gives amnesty to illegal aliens that're in Utah- that even more desperately needs repealing than this botch job we're discussing.
You may disagree with it, but the "Utah Compact" wasn't a mistake, it was very deliberate. And it's getting a lot of positive attention nationwide, with many other states modeling their own laws on it.
Are you saying that your daughter needs more protection than boys, or did I pick that up wrong? Sounds like over protection in any case.
Yes, she needs more protection than my boys. This isn't a boys vs girls thing, this is a her vs them thing, because she is mentally ill and they are not.
Yes, my daughter knows about nearly all of the oversight, and she understands why -- which isn't to say she's happy about it, but she's unhappy about many things that are necessary to protect her from herself. There are specific reasons for the parts that she doesn't know about, too.
First, my daughter goes into occasional downward spirals of increasing negativism that eventually lead her to dangerously self-destructive actions. By "dangerously self-destructive" I mean "If unchecked would likely result in her death". But she's quite good at hiding it from us. When she's in a good place she recognizes that she needs to talk to us about those feelings, but when they actually come, she hides them. So, we watch her on-line activities for clues, and we also have many of her friends reporting to us when they see red flags.
In addition, she often blows off steam on-line in ways that are actually very helpful to her, but she'd hold back there if she knew we were watching as well. So by not telling her that we're looking over her shoulder, we both provide her the freedom to keep herself healthier and we gain insight about her mental and emotional state.
But discussing her is really something of a red herring, because she's mentally ill, not a normal case. The better examples from my post, I think, are the variety of approaches we use with her brothers. They're all different and different levels of oversight are appropriate.
I'm very glad that worked well for you. You should keep in mind, however, that not all kids are the same. I have four children, all of them raised in the same environment, with the same rules and in basically the same way. With one of them, I'd have no qualms about giving him his own, unmonitored, laptop and letting him use it anywhere he likes (in deference to issues of perceived fairness, I haven't done this -- he has to use the computer in the living room just like the other kids). With another, the approach you mentioned plus some software-enforced time limits (using timeoutd) is adequate. For a third, filtering and basic oversight have proven to be necessary and sufficient; as long as he knows there's a decent chance he'll be caught misbehaving, he doesn't.
For the fourth, I have configured vino on her account so that I can use VNC to watch her screen basically 100% of the time that she's on the computer (without her knowledge), we have full access to her Facebook and other on-line accounts, we read all of her texts and IM logs, etc. All of this very deep and invasive oversight is a condition of her right to use the computer, or the phone. Why? Because it's proven to be necessary. Without such intense oversight and frequent correction she gets herself in trouble. Granted that my daughter isn't a normal case; she struggles with severe clinical depression and an emotion disorder which often leads her to do self-destructive things.
But the point is that there is no one "right" approach to managing your children's computer use. Children are individuals, every one is unique and must be treated as such. Good parents strive to understand their children's needs and strike the appropriate balance between privacy and freedom on the one hand and oversight and control on the other. This is hard to do. In fact, it is almost certainly the hardest thing any parent EVER ever does in his or her life, and every parent gets it wrong, frequently. But parents who care and who work at it learn from their mistakes and adjust their approach.
Tools like keyloggers, VNC, chat logs, phone and text logs, etc. are all just tools. Good parents look for good tools and find the appropriate way to employ them. Good parents also weigh the pros and cons of full disclosure to their children of the degree of oversight being applied. In general, honesty and full disclosure is the best approach -- but there are exceptions to every rule.
The key is to understand your kids, as best you can, and then exercise good judgment, because you know their judgment is lacking. The best definition of wisdom that I've ever heard is "applied experience", and children do not have experience.
If concealed carry deters crime, wouldn't non-concealed carry deter it more? What are the advantages of concealed carry over open carry?
That's a good question, and a subject of much debate. I focused on concealed carry simply because it's less controversial than open carry, but I think there is a good argument to be made that open carry is a better deterrent.
Without going into a full exploration of all of the pros and cons, I'll highlight some of the key points on both sides (and, yes, this is an abbreviated list -- a full discussion would be much longer):
Personally, I'm a fan of open carry, and I open carry fairly occasionally. I do it primarily because of the opportunities it provides to educate the non-carrying public about the fact that ordinary, law-abiding people carry guns. On the other hand, when concealment is more socially convenient, I do that instead.
The idea that a well armed populace is safer is clearly a boy scout fantasy.
It's not at all clear to me, nor to many scholars who've studied the issue. I assume you've read John Lott's seminal work that kicked off an ongoing debate about the effect of widespread concealed carry, right? And the many other research papers that support his finding that the more law-abiding citizens are carrying firearms the less violent crime there is? And noted the fact that the (relatively few) studies that find to the contrary, with only a single exception, find that rather than more guns increasing crime, they have no significant effect? And I'm sure you've also read the FBI reports that analyze the question from the criminal's perspective, and conclude that citizen concealed carry is the largest single deterrent in the minds of most violent criminals. I can provide links, but all of this information is readily accessible via Google.
I think this is a case where what appears to be common sense is actually just ignorance. Real study of the issue shows that privately-owned, concealed firearms are a real deterrent to crime, and the numbers show that the otherwise law-abiding "hothead" who "flips out" and starts shooting people doesn't exist. In the case of Jared Loughner, I think the crowd is lucky he had a gun. Without that, he'd have had to fall back on simpler and far more deadly weapons -- like his truck. What would be even better, of course, is to identify mentally ill people like him beforehand and get them into treatment. People wouldn't die, and they'd have happier lives. But the presence or absence of guns doesn't significantly affect that dynamic.
It is time for the USA to join every other sober industrialized nation in the world and severely restrict guns. Reason will prevail, it always does. Even though we will pay a horrible price in senseless deaths until the stink finally gets too high. Eventually, too high even for those with an irrational religious conviction about the virtuousness of guns. The rest of us are waiting for you to finally come to their senses. We're not too patient though, we're sick of the carnage. Hurry up and figure it out.
What carnage?
Yes, approximately 30,000 people die in the US annually from gunshot wounds. That's terrible. But when you break down the numbers, you learn some interesting things.
First, approximately half of those deaths are suicides. Without access to a firearm, would those people still be alive? Perhaps some of them, only because guns tend to be a quite effective way to do yourself in. But they're hardly the only way.
Second, the vast majority of the deaths that remain are gang- and drug-related. If you want to eliminate most of those deaths, the solution is quite apparent: Legalize drugs. Regulate them tightly, but make them most readily available through legal channels and you'll cut the legs from under the gangs. Without drugs, they have no funding. Without funding, they die. We experienced all of this nearly a century ago, yet we continue paying a horrible price in senseless deaths and loss of civil liberties, and will continue paying it until we wise up and deal with drug abuse as a social and medical problem, not a criminal one.
Third, we get the portion that are really hard to address: domestic violence. There are about 4,000 deaths per year where an angry spouse/child/parent/whatever grabs a gun and starts shooting. Some of these people would not die if guns were unavailable, and I don't really know what we can do about it. More readily-available family counseling services, perhaps. More shelters and programs to help battered women and children escape a dangerous situation before their abuser grabs a gun and kills them -- or before they grab a gun and kill their abuser (though I have to say I find those outcomes less heartbreaking... not that they're the best outcomes, but they're better than many of the alternatives).
/64 isn't a subnet. It's the space allocated for a single host. The bottom 64 bits of the address are chosen by the stateless autoconfiguration. They may be the MAC address, they may be chosen at random, or a single host may even use a different address for every outbound connection it makes.
A /64 address block isn't even a subnet, it's the range intended for use by a single host. The plan has always been that the smallest subnet block is a /48. And why NOT give out /48s? You do realize that there are enough of them to give 31000 to every man, woman and child on the planet, right? If you want to be conservative, use /48s for businesses and /56s for homes. Giving only a /64 to a home is ridiculously parsimonious.
That's awesome!
i.e. IPv6 DHCP
Why did you go with DHCP rather than the simpler, faster and cooler stateless autoconfig with radvd?
I took it down shortly afterward, because I don't know about any security ramifications this would have
None, assuming you set up a firewall to block incoming IPv6 connections.
One can be motivated by short-term profit without actually achieving it.
And here are 187 OpenOffice bugs and feature requests that received at least 25 votes.
Oh, cool. That must have taken a bit of time to put a link to each one of those bugs in your commen.... dear sweet-n-sour sassafras!!! are my eyes deceiving me or is that just one fu*cking huge URL in your comment there?
You know, slashdot does have support for the A-HREF tag...
What you don't realize is that he's using Chrome, so pasting doesn't work. It was a lot of work typing that URL, character by character, double-checking each one to make sure that he didn't make a mistake, and he wanted you to KNOW how much effort he'd put in on your behalf, so you could just click it.
if Excel were required to share the same format as other apps, it would by necessity also require sharing the same feature-set.
Nonsense.
First, most features don't require format changes. This is why Microsoft Word's format didn't change for more than a decade, in spite of the fact that several new versions were released. This is also why we can have a feature war among browsers even though they all consume and display the same formats.
Second, a well-designed format -- like ODF -- is extensible. Applications can add new structures to the format without impeding the ability of other applications to read and operate on the resulting files. The other applications simply ignore the part they don't understand, ideally saving it unmodified.
In short, I think requiring a particular application to use a particular format stinks to high heaven.
Yeah, because interoperability now, avoidance of monopoly rents and the ability to actually read your documents later are just terrible.
I am betting "No" - unless you are willing to submit to an independent forensic examination of all your storage media. The fake file is, after all, an admission that you were looking for the real one
But looking for the real file isn't a crime. Sharing the real file is the crime, and if you never got it you couldn't share it. Obviously, if there are other copyrighted files that you were actually sharing, and they can prove it, then you may still have a problem.
Yeah, you're probably right.
I guess that's why the documentation for the 2007/2010 (transitional) and future (strict) versions of the .docx/.xlsx/etc Office formats takes 6,000 pages - it's all so obfuscated, vague, and proprietary.
(Overcomplicated, I'll grant you...)
And why that massive 6,000-page document is, in fact, incomplete and underspecified, including numerous directives to do things in whatever way various MS proprietary versions did them, without spelling out what those ways were, ensuring that no one but Microsoft can completely and correctly implement the specification, in spite of its apparent "openness".
But, just in case, Microsoft has also carefully avoided correctly implementing even what the spec does say, thereby assuring that no competing implementation will ever work quite the way theirs does. And of course theirs is the de facto standard implementation, no matter what the documentation says.
Even if they made people strip naked, it still wouldn't stop the first clever terrorist to shove the bomb up his ass.
Said "clever" terrorist won't be the first