Yes... it's true.. low wattage is fairly inept for cooking especially, and limited for forced air.
However, electricity was not originally used for cooking, refrigeration, or air conditioning.
Light bulbs were the application that really got the technology deployed.
Electric ovens and heaters were incremental additions that came over 20 years after the 1st commercial lightbulbs.
These were incremental additions and additional revenue streams the electric company made possible by infrastructure that was being built to provide lights; electrical lighting that was safer and had many obvious benefits over oil lamps and candles...
electrical heating, not so much.
At the time of electricity being introduced, popular heating and cooking technology already existed that wasn't dependent upon electricity, and an electric oven or heater would have been a very expensive investment for households, as a 1st introduction to electricity.
It would be a suggestion that everyone would suddenly go throw out their gas powered stove, in favor of purchasing a brand new electric one at great cost, so they could try the latest tech?
Electric heating and cooking would have been a much harder sell to justify the buildout of an electrical distribution system... the equipment cost would be prohibitive to the average person, without clear benefit, probably resulting in few buyers, and no positive ROI for the power company.
Now later concepts, such as automatic coffee pots, vacuum cleaners, power tools, electric well pumps, could persuade a corporation to fund a build out in the absence of lights.
But would those things have been commercialized if not for the snowball started by lightbulbs?
We might have some brilliant thermal isolation, low-wattage heating, refrigeration, and cooking technology that is completely unknown to us humans, today, or one of those clean / safe reactor / fuel cell technologies that lets every house be its own power plant:)
They have no in-house programmers, no help desk software, and no budget to purchase one.
No budget to purchase one likely means definitely no budget to pay a developer the going pay rate skilled developers are paid to build one. Usually it costs more to properly build a product than to buy it, and it's a bit of management decision to determine whether to use company time or resources to build/acquire one; although often the choice to buy software is an IT manager choice..
But no budget to buy software almost certainly means no budget to pay a non-developer extra $$$; this will be difficult to justify, even if you can justify the $$$, management may have simply not chosen to allocate it like you think they would.
Question your organization's management (carefully), and with the proper attitude if you must, don't go behind management's back and expect to come out ahead in the end.
A happy boss is a lot better than some happy coworkers.
Oh, but if a helpdesk or IT employee does build an app related to helpdesk work, then your development is in "scope of work"; therefore (probably) owned by the company.
You stand a good chance of being fired (best case); if you let management know what you have developed but refuse to hand over.
In worser cases, employees have been sued over such things, a very expensive ordeal for the employee.
streamlined a lot of processes and took a lot of the burden off my team, freeing them up to handle what I deem to be more challenging items on their respective punch lists and a better utilization of their time and respective skills.
This is the kind of thing you could put on a resume / job history info to get hired.
Your average manager would love "Streamlines processes" "Reduces costs"
Your best bet is to share your code, and if management won't compensate you for it, take the compensation in the form of a good resume line, and good references from your coworkers and maybe immediate manager/boss/supervisor who benefitted the most from your work.
Unless you think you can partner with someone else, productize your work, and sell it back to your own company as a purchase decision they get to make or not; I don't think you're actually going to get what you want.
You need an adequate description of the value your development actually adds above what an IT admin would be expected to do
Building a web page that provides access to many systems in one place is just the sort of thing a senior IT admin would be expected to do or assign to someone else.
There is plenty of free FAQ management software available, and most organizations would expect an IT admin to implement best practices at best cost / benefit ratio to the company, or at lowest cost.
Also, Just because you met your job objectives and have "downtime"; doesn't
suddenly mean you should not still be working.
Using that time to work on improving your job or assist coworkers is well within the job scope of almost any employment.
Unless your job is to be ready at "standby", such as 'on call' for incident handling / support, and not to engage in work unrelated to education / preparation for such matters, then you should be doing work of some kind to help your department or organization better / more efficiently achieve its mission.
There's no excuse for "downtime" in IT, unless you've already worked many more hours than you are supposed to, and you
want / require some rest.
I'm a moderate PHP and MySQL programmer on the side and am easily capable of writing something to meet their needs, but do not believe I should be A) asked to or B) required to, as my job description and employment terms are not based upon this skill set.
When you were awarded the job, did you provide information about your skills as a PHP or MySQL programmer?
These are applicable skills. That is, they are in scope for IT admin duties, especially of a senior IT admin.
AC is really a stepping stone, as far as power distribution technology goes.
Even so... the basic notion here is if scientists were playing around with semiconductors first,
and discovered LEDs, photovoltaics, and batteries before lightbulbs... there's a good chance local power generators could have become king, and the concept of power grids and wires for distributing power across long distances never coming into being.
Because long electrical cables are really really expensive.
The infrastructure build out was massive, and resulted only from the popularity and efficiency of lightbulbs.
As we know... arrays of LEDs can be built to generate light much more efficiently, as long as you can obtain the proper materials; a household with 5 1 watt LED arrays has microscopic power requirements
compared to a household with 5 15 watt electric lightbulbs.
Below a certain amount of wattage; the concept of municipal distribution simply doesn't
make any sense from an efficiency perspective; just use a local solar collector for each block.....
neither IC's nor the transistor arose from people researching how to improve computers.
However, supposing there were mechanical computers, and they were useful; there would be an impetus to improve upon the capabilities / efficiency of the mechanical computers.
The availability of computers to scientists could have had a great effect on their studies, and it's difficult to predict what the results of that would have been.
The transistor could have been discovered a lot earlier, if inventors were looking for options,
in efforts to find ways of adapting computation mechanisms into electric circuits; once all cost-effective improvements had been considered, computing would stagnate.
The transistor might have been discovered much earlier.
LEDs might have been discovered, without a lightbulb ever having been invented -- Tesla might have never come to the US, AC may have not been discovered or put to practical use, even to date....
World War I and II might not have happened; because technology had a role in events leading up to them.
With no real moving pictures or radio to use as propaganda tools; low-speed media communication,
WWII and WWI are simply unlikely to have sparked...
With no world wars, no cold war, therefore no real investment in space travel, no NASA; no satellites, rockets, GPS, many technologies not existing.
Today, there might be no such thing as personal computers or Cell phones... no radio, no wireless communication, no television, but no PCs = no internet, just a small global network of big companies' number crunchers at most.
I suppose the whaler's solution then would be camouflage to make the ship look smaller from above; to disguise the ship as something other than a whale boat, or to mod the whale boats into partially or fully submersible craft; so they could hunt whale, take the carcass on board for processing, and then submerge to prevent overhead drones from locating them.
These are civilian fishing ships. CIWS systems are weapons of war, and not something civillian fisherman will want on their boat, or be allowed to carry when they go into port.
Anti-GPS radio beams . . . ? Laser pointers to blind the pilots back at the command base . . . ?
How about large numbers of decoy vessels and whaling drone ships?
Instead of a few gigantic ships... many
smaller whaling ships equipped with cameras and automated harpoon systems, that are harder for flying drones to detect
than uberly massive factory ships.
These things... well they are tiny. Finding them is ridiculously difficult, even for advanced military hardware.
Hard to find by looking at the sky; easy to find by searching for a radio signal, since they require one continuously to send their video feed, possibly easy to jam and confuse.
And if the drone is high in the sky then just guns won't make it, you'd need some missile. Would whale fishing cover the costs of firing perhaps several guided missiles on each trip ?
Not a guided missile. A harpoon with an EMP payload on it.
2. Even if he did, read YOUR homeowners / renters insurance - "acts of God" are not covered.
Getting hit by debris fallen from a man made satellite does not fall under "acts of God";
it's a man-made disaster, and the responsible party is the organization that launched the satellite and failed to contain debris -- the crashing of debris is an entirely forseeable reslult of launching a satelite, and the crashing debris is a result of human error.
An act of god is when you have an earthquake,or lightning strikes a healthy tree in your yard, and the tree falls over, crashing into your house, a tornado touches down and rips your roof off, or a volcano erupts and turns your house into a barren lava field.
Selling software bundled is OK as well as long as you distribute sources and retain the GPL, of course. In this case it's a little questionable how they are advertising it and there is no immediately available source they are linking to
You don't have to distribute sources and provide the GPL license unless you distribute the software.
In case the only way they are selling this is as a 'supported solution' where you host a site with them, and they set the script up on your site, it's possible they never actually distribute the code to you.
In case you can buy a copy of the PHP module from them and receive the PHP script, they are required under the GPL to provide distribution of source code to the PHP script and distribute a copy of the GPL with the software.
They don't have to provide a link or distribute sources to the general public, for privately redistributed software, that's not a GPL requirement.
And i'm not personally about to pay them $50, to see if I get a copy of the script, and to see if they will provide source;
that sounds like an expensive exercise.
So all we have for sure at this point as a community is -- no strong evidence Crossmedia folks acted negligently or in violation of the GPL, a suggestion that might be result of author disapproval of non-infringing activities / a preconceived notion achieved through the fact they're charging a fee, and the way they have chosen to use the plugin / advertise.
I suppose the author might have evidence/ information/experience against Crossmedia not discussed in the article.
So it's quite possible they are still on the wrong side of the line, but that the actually pertinent info wasn't shown to Slashdot.
In the case of a script, which is what this seems to be, source code is provided automatically. Provide the script and you've provided the source as required.
Unless he obfuscates PHP code that is distributed by garbling it using ionCube Encoder, or converts it to bytecode using Zend Optimizer.
It is possible to be in violation of the GPL's source code redistribution requirement, when redistributing scripts.
It will generally mean you are using a private or third party tool to modify your source code into a different format
before providing it to the end user.
Earlier today I discovered that a Drupal user was selling the module from their website for $49 and claiming it was their custom-made module. I'm no lawyer, but my perspective is this violates both the spirit and law of GPLv2
It is perfectly fine to sell someone else's GPLv2 module for $49;
the GPLv2 specifically allows you to sell software.
There's also no GPLv2 problem with the part about "We are providing complete support, configuration and installation for this module."; the GPL doesn't restrict what extra services can be bundled with software.
Now there would be a problem if they distribute the GPLv2 software, with your copyright notices remove,
or attempt to redistribute under more restrictive terms than the GPLv2.
If what they are selling is USE of a GPLv2 module through their drupal hosting service,
where the software is not actually ever distributed to the end user, then well, the GPLv2's redistribution
requirement that redistributions be under the GPL doesn't come to bear until they actually distribute the code.
They'd be in the exact same relative position every time, and each photo would have some kind of symbol or character on it, so the person could write down the sequence on a sticky note for the short time until they memorized it.
Then when they were confident they memorized their sequence of pictures, they could turn off the symbol/character assist.
The studies really don't say much... first of all, it's the child's activity level by their parents' measure that matters; that the child is not becoming "clinically hyperactive"; does not mean sugar has not had an effect on the situation.
If their kid is often at a low activity level (possibly abnormally low), it will be perceived as normal.
If their kid is excited or at a higher level of activity after seeing sugary foods, then this can be labelled
as sugar-high.
It's not necessarily an argument that the sugar actually chemically causes hyperactivity; the
mere act of seeing or tasting pleasant food can cause increased activity, and the taste of pleasant food has the possibility of pronounced emotional effect, resulting from fulfillment and happiness.
It's not a myth... the studies are just flawwed.
They don't anticipate that some children want and sugary food more than others, therefore
have a different level of excitement when seeing sugary foods, that they might get to have.
Of course there are plenty of children who are not excited at the thought of eating sugary foods, therefore,
there could be no reaction.
This might even be 90% of the population that is not excited by the thought of eating sugary foods,
therefore, the study could have a result that is fundamentally flawwed, for the 10% of the population
that sugar highs apply to.
Studies usually say very little about minority populations that cannot easily be selected,
and about portions of the population that are statistical anomaly.
How about simple emotional excitement caused by the taste of food?
Possibly, with the child having not eaten recently, therefore being hungry possibly
resulting in an abnormally depressed / low-energy state.
If parents view their child's normal behavior as "hyperactive"; then the rapidity of the return
to a normal state after eating, could be perceived as hyperactivity; in other words, many
parents might be deciding their child is hyperactive, when it's just a change of their
child's activity level that they are seeing --- the parent perceiving the abnormally low level of
activity as "normal" for their child, just a miscalculation.
If a business is making profits, and there is enough demand for their product or service, why wouldn't they hire another person? Presumable a new hire will be able to take on enough responsibility to make the company enough new cash flow to pay for themself.
Because, they have to front money for the new hire, long before the new hire can generate more cash flow, which comes at great risk. The risk is only worth it if a certain reward is met. Greater taxes reduces the reward, and results in the risk making less sense, whether the money is reinvested, or will be borrowed -- the reward has to be worth it after taxes and costs (such as interest payments).
The cash is not available for fronting, if the owner has to withdraw more of it for their personal needs, due to the increased outflow towards taxes. Higher tax rate on profits = more money that the owner will want to withdraw from the business = less money reinvested in the business = in the long term, less increase in profits generated by the business, but less risk too, and with high probability, greater reward for the owner, since even if the risk panned out from them, the higher taxes would make the investment not worth the level of risk.
Oh yeah... and the government doesn't have to actually raise taxes to cause this... they just have to promote the idea they might raise taxes. That will create sufficient uncertainty regarding the risk/reward of greater investment, to stave off / postpone the idea of hiring more people.
You're lucky. I work in an IT-related position on a network that controls infrastructure. If it goes down, downtown might not have water...
It may be true, but it's up to you to negotiate to ensure you are not expected to be available outside work hours if you don't want that. It's not your problem to solve if management fails to properly staff operations of a critical network, so that there is always someone whose job is to be on duty, and that there is always a backup available in case a key staff member cannot assist.
That is, it's your manager's job to make sure someone would be available,
and that contingencies are in place.
They can ask you to do it. If you refuse, they have to investigate other options, such as hiring additional people and having on-call schedules.
A danger is they might decide it's less expensive if they just find someone who will do what they want, and can then fire/replace you.
Since it costs less to pay one person who will do all the extra free work, than to hire more people and make the existing person happy.
I don't expect this to catch on...either that or it will move to some other social media vehicle like Twitter. Most companies LIKE the fact that they can get their employees free efforts after hours!
In a rough economy though, they might be able to save money by doing this;
supposing they run their servers on something like the Amazon cloud
If they don't operate e-mail services off hours, then that means, they can turn off their instances, and thus save instance hours and electricity.
For a car manufacturer, this just might work.
For companies that need to provide 24x7 customer support, I don't think so...
I don't see Ecommerce sites like Amazon shutting off off-hours email either; unless IT is an exception,
e.g. if it's just receipt of new low-priority messages to off-call workers' smart phones that gets turned off.
Then you can use the actual password on the on-screen keyboard.
And if they use the on-screen password to mistype the actual password intentionally, enough times to get the unit to lock out / self-destruct, as their form of deviousness ?
The problem with entering an actual password using an on-screen keyboard, is that this is easily videotaped.
And therefore insecure.... oh wait...
Its not about the probability of other fingerprints on the device - all you need is a fairly good idea of where someone has been tapping on a photo, and from the photo you will probably be able to guess which points they've used.
So don't just have them tap on parts of a photo. Present a display showing 255 photos, each
arranged into a little icon. And ask the user to "touch" the right icon.
Once they've touched the first photo, show another display of 254 more photos, the photo they picked before can no longer be picked.
After the user's chosen four different photos, from four disjoint lists of 255 photos, show a fifth photo that is algorithmically derived from their previous two choices.
Their previous four choices combined with the points on the photo they select, form a password that is much more secure than what the average person uses and can remember as a password.
there were at least 255 * 254 * 253 * 252 (4 billion) possible choices of photos they can pick,
if the order of selection matters, and then after you add the unique points they chose on the fifth photo.
You have a password that is much better than the person's daughter's name, or their middle name + phone number
NO, I think you technically always need a real control group receiving a placebo for it to be real science.
Not for it to be real science. But you do ultimately need some studies with a control group with a placebo for it to be a double blind study and therefore to meet FDA standards.
And the FDA has very high standards; not only does a vaccine/drug treatment have to be validated and understood to doing nothing seriously harmful, it also has to be essentially rigorously proven to work to the highest scientific standard, against the greatest possible amount of doubt that a critic or skeptic could show against the results.
That is: there are a lot of things that are reasonable science but won't pass as a study for purposes of validating a drug, because the standard of assurance / probability of the treatment actually having an effect is too low.
The validity of the vaccine won't be accepted until shown with several repeatable experiments that have a control group that is from the sample population and receives control treatment.
Don't you find it interesting, that it will take them 3 years of study just to find out if the vaccine they have already developed will pass?
As a software engineer.... I would say this is a glacial pace for product testing.
Imagine if the Windows '98 testing was required to last 3 years, before a Federal agency
would license Microsoft to distribute this software, so windows '98 would have been released in 2001.
Windows XP would have been released in 2004; Vista would still be getting tested.
Not only would Microsoft have to show there are no majorly harmful side-effects of the upgrade treatment,
no permanent crashing of the computer, no bugs allowing serious data loss to occur indirectly,
but they'd also have to have control groups... with two upgrade disks, one upgrade disk that just ran
an installer that did nothing, and one that upgraded
They would then have to show that the population that ran the upgrade
had a statistically significant improvement in performance, a statistically significant
reduction in system errors, or other provable net improvement, before they would be licensed or
allowed to distribute their software update.
Innovation would be crippled, and it would take forever to get new software out,
due to the overbearing standards.
Computers would still crash, but instead of the reason being crashes due to the new versions,
it would be crashes, because the fix hasn't been allowed yet, has to wait 3 years for testing to finish.
They believe that they are now potentially immune, meaning we have every reason to believe they will act completely different from any other conceivable group on the earth bar other test patients who where given a placebo for HIV.
Perhaps it would be better to just tell the subjects, they are studying a vaccine's effectiveness against diseases they may be at risk for
HIV would be on the list of potential things it might be a vaccine for, but if the subject isn't told a specific disease, then maybe they don't now think they might be immune to HIV?
I assume they won't inject their subjects with any disease to test vaccine effectiveness...
but will simply study HIV infection rates of their at-risk sample population...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... it's true.. low wattage is fairly inept for cooking especially, and limited for forced air.
However, electricity was not originally used for cooking, refrigeration, or air conditioning. Light bulbs were the application that really got the technology deployed.
Electric ovens and heaters were incremental additions that came over 20 years after the 1st commercial lightbulbs.
These were incremental additions and additional revenue streams the electric company made possible by infrastructure that was being built to provide lights; electrical lighting that was safer and had many obvious benefits over oil lamps and candles...
electrical heating, not so much.
At the time of electricity being introduced, popular heating and cooking technology already existed that wasn't dependent upon electricity, and an electric oven or heater would have been a very expensive investment for households, as a 1st introduction to electricity.
It would be a suggestion that everyone would suddenly go throw out their gas powered stove, in favor of purchasing a brand new electric one at great cost, so they could try the latest tech?
Electric heating and cooking would have been a much harder sell to justify the buildout of an electrical distribution system... the equipment cost would be prohibitive to the average person, without clear benefit, probably resulting in few buyers, and no positive ROI for the power company.
Now later concepts, such as automatic coffee pots, vacuum cleaners, power tools, electric well pumps, could persuade a corporation to fund a build out in the absence of lights.
But would those things have been commercialized if not for the snowball started by lightbulbs?
We might have some brilliant thermal isolation, low-wattage heating, refrigeration, and cooking technology that is completely unknown to us humans, today, or one of those clean / safe reactor / fuel cell technologies that lets every house be its own power plant :)
They have no in-house programmers, no help desk software, and no budget to purchase one.
No budget to purchase one likely means definitely no budget to pay a developer the going pay rate skilled developers are paid to build one. Usually it costs more to properly build a product than to buy it, and it's a bit of management decision to determine whether to use company time or resources to build/acquire one; although often the choice to buy software is an IT manager choice..
But no budget to buy software almost certainly means no budget to pay a non-developer extra $$$; this will be difficult to justify, even if you can justify the $$$, management may have simply not chosen to allocate it like you think they would.
Question your organization's management (carefully), and with the proper attitude if you must, don't go behind management's back and expect to come out ahead in the end.
A happy boss is a lot better than some happy coworkers.
Oh, but if a helpdesk or IT employee does build an app related to helpdesk work, then your development is in "scope of work"; therefore (probably) owned by the company.
You stand a good chance of being fired (best case); if you let management know what you have developed but refuse to hand over. In worser cases, employees have been sued over such things, a very expensive ordeal for the employee.
streamlined a lot of processes and took a lot of the burden off my team, freeing them up to handle what I deem to be more challenging items on their respective punch lists and a better utilization of their time and respective skills.
This is the kind of thing you could put on a resume / job history info to get hired. Your average manager would love "Streamlines processes" "Reduces costs"
Your best bet is to share your code, and if management won't compensate you for it, take the compensation in the form of a good resume line, and good references from your coworkers and maybe immediate manager/boss/supervisor who benefitted the most from your work.
Unless you think you can partner with someone else, productize your work, and sell it back to your own company as a purchase decision they get to make or not; I don't think you're actually going to get what you want. You need an adequate description of the value your development actually adds above what an IT admin would be expected to do
Building a web page that provides access to many systems in one place is just the sort of thing a senior IT admin would be expected to do or assign to someone else.
There is plenty of free FAQ management software available, and most organizations would expect an IT admin to implement best practices at best cost / benefit ratio to the company, or at lowest cost.
Also, Just because you met your job objectives and have "downtime"; doesn't suddenly mean you should not still be working. Using that time to work on improving your job or assist coworkers is well within the job scope of almost any employment.
Unless your job is to be ready at "standby", such as 'on call' for incident handling / support, and not to engage in work unrelated to education / preparation for such matters, then you should be doing work of some kind to help your department or organization better / more efficiently achieve its mission.
There's no excuse for "downtime" in IT, unless you've already worked many more hours than you are supposed to, and you want / require some rest.
I'm a moderate PHP and MySQL programmer on the side and am easily capable of writing something to meet their needs, but do not believe I should be A) asked to or B) required to, as my job description and employment terms are not based upon this skill set.
When you were awarded the job, did you provide information about your skills as a PHP or MySQL programmer?
These are applicable skills. That is, they are in scope for IT admin duties, especially of a senior IT admin.
By the way, Se
AC is really a stepping stone, as far as power distribution technology goes.
Even so... the basic notion here is if scientists were playing around with semiconductors first, and discovered LEDs, photovoltaics, and batteries before lightbulbs... there's a good chance local power generators could have become king, and the concept of power grids and wires for distributing power across long distances never coming into being.
Because long electrical cables are really really expensive. The infrastructure build out was massive, and resulted only from the popularity and efficiency of lightbulbs.
As we know... arrays of LEDs can be built to generate light much more efficiently, as long as you can obtain the proper materials; a household with 5 1 watt LED arrays has microscopic power requirements compared to a household with 5 15 watt electric lightbulbs.
Below a certain amount of wattage; the concept of municipal distribution simply doesn't make any sense from an efficiency perspective; just use a local solar collector for each block.....
neither IC's nor the transistor arose from people researching how to improve computers.
However, supposing there were mechanical computers, and they were useful; there would be an impetus to improve upon the capabilities / efficiency of the mechanical computers.
The availability of computers to scientists could have had a great effect on their studies, and it's difficult to predict what the results of that would have been.
The transistor could have been discovered a lot earlier, if inventors were looking for options, in efforts to find ways of adapting computation mechanisms into electric circuits; once all cost-effective improvements had been considered, computing would stagnate.
The transistor might have been discovered much earlier. LEDs might have been discovered, without a lightbulb ever having been invented -- Tesla might have never come to the US, AC may have not been discovered or put to practical use, even to date....
World War I and II might not have happened; because technology had a role in events leading up to them. With no real moving pictures or radio to use as propaganda tools; low-speed media communication, WWII and WWI are simply unlikely to have sparked...
With no world wars, no cold war, therefore no real investment in space travel, no NASA; no satellites, rockets, GPS, many technologies not existing.
Today, there might be no such thing as personal computers or Cell phones... no radio, no wireless communication, no television, but no PCs = no internet, just a small global network of big companies' number crunchers at most.
I suppose the whaler's solution then would be camouflage to make the ship look smaller from above; to disguise the ship as something other than a whale boat, or to mod the whale boats into partially or fully submersible craft; so they could hunt whale, take the carcass on board for processing, and then submerge to prevent overhead drones from locating them.
Denon makes the AKDL1 link cable a Cable that's listed for $10,000; a RJ45/8P8C patch cable, and there are reviewers who swear it's faster, really...
So I guess no... a $1000 cable isn't really any better; to get the real goods you need $10,000 for a cable.
These are civilian fishing ships. CIWS systems are weapons of war, and not something civillian fisherman will want on their boat, or be allowed to carry when they go into port.
Anti-GPS radio beams . . . ? Laser pointers to blind the pilots back at the command base . . . ?
How about large numbers of decoy vessels and whaling drone ships?
Instead of a few gigantic ships... many smaller whaling ships equipped with cameras and automated harpoon systems, that are harder for flying drones to detect than uberly massive factory ships.
These things ... well they are tiny. Finding them is ridiculously difficult, even for advanced military hardware.
Hard to find by looking at the sky; easy to find by searching for a radio signal, since they require one continuously to send their video feed, possibly easy to jam and confuse.
And if the drone is high in the sky then just guns won't make it, you'd need some missile. Would whale fishing cover the costs of firing perhaps several guided missiles on each trip ?
Not a guided missile. A harpoon with an EMP payload on it.
2. Even if he did, read YOUR homeowners / renters insurance - "acts of God" are not covered.
Getting hit by debris fallen from a man made satellite does not fall under "acts of God"; it's a man-made disaster, and the responsible party is the organization that launched the satellite and failed to contain debris -- the crashing of debris is an entirely forseeable reslult of launching a satelite, and the crashing debris is a result of human error.
An act of god is when you have an earthquake,or lightning strikes a healthy tree in your yard, and the tree falls over, crashing into your house, a tornado touches down and rips your roof off, or a volcano erupts and turns your house into a barren lava field.
Selling software bundled is OK as well as long as you distribute sources and retain the GPL, of course. In this case it's a little questionable how they are advertising it and there is no immediately available source they are linking to
You don't have to distribute sources and provide the GPL license unless you distribute the software.
In case the only way they are selling this is as a 'supported solution' where you host a site with them, and they set the script up on your site, it's possible they never actually distribute the code to you.
In case you can buy a copy of the PHP module from them and receive the PHP script, they are required under the GPL to provide distribution of source code to the PHP script and distribute a copy of the GPL with the software.
They don't have to provide a link or distribute sources to the general public, for privately redistributed software, that's not a GPL requirement.
And i'm not personally about to pay them $50, to see if I get a copy of the script, and to see if they will provide source; that sounds like an expensive exercise.
So all we have for sure at this point as a community is -- no strong evidence Crossmedia folks acted negligently or in violation of the GPL, a suggestion that might be result of author disapproval of non-infringing activities / a preconceived notion achieved through the fact they're charging a fee, and the way they have chosen to use the plugin / advertise.
I suppose the author might have evidence/ information/experience against Crossmedia not discussed in the article.
So it's quite possible they are still on the wrong side of the line, but that the actually pertinent info wasn't shown to Slashdot.
In the case of a script, which is what this seems to be, source code is provided automatically. Provide the script and you've provided the source as required.
Unless he obfuscates PHP code that is distributed by garbling it using ionCube Encoder, or converts it to bytecode using Zend Optimizer.
It is possible to be in violation of the GPL's source code redistribution requirement, when redistributing scripts.
It will generally mean you are using a private or third party tool to modify your source code into a different format before providing it to the end user.
Earlier today I discovered that a Drupal user was selling the module from their website for $49 and claiming it was their custom-made module. I'm no lawyer, but my perspective is this violates both the spirit and law of GPLv2
It is perfectly fine to sell someone else's GPLv2 module for $49; the GPLv2 specifically allows you to sell software.
There's also no GPLv2 problem with the part about "We are providing complete support, configuration and installation for this module."; the GPL doesn't restrict what extra services can be bundled with software.
Now there would be a problem if they distribute the GPLv2 software, with your copyright notices remove, or attempt to redistribute under more restrictive terms than the GPLv2.
If what they are selling is USE of a GPLv2 module through their drupal hosting service, where the software is not actually ever distributed to the end user, then well, the GPLv2's redistribution requirement that redistributions be under the GPL doesn't come to bear until they actually distribute the code.
They'd be in the exact same relative position every time, and each photo would have some kind of symbol or character on it, so the person could write down the sequence on a sticky note for the short time until they memorized it.
Then when they were confident they memorized their sequence of pictures, they could turn off the symbol/character assist.
The studies really don't say much... first of all, it's the child's activity level by their parents' measure that matters; that the child is not becoming "clinically hyperactive"; does not mean sugar has not had an effect on the situation.
If their kid is often at a low activity level (possibly abnormally low), it will be perceived as normal. If their kid is excited or at a higher level of activity after seeing sugary foods, then this can be labelled as sugar-high.
It's not necessarily an argument that the sugar actually chemically causes hyperactivity; the mere act of seeing or tasting pleasant food can cause increased activity, and the taste of pleasant food has the possibility of pronounced emotional effect, resulting from fulfillment and happiness.
It's not a myth... the studies are just flawwed. They don't anticipate that some children want and sugary food more than others, therefore have a different level of excitement when seeing sugary foods, that they might get to have.
Of course there are plenty of children who are not excited at the thought of eating sugary foods, therefore, there could be no reaction. This might even be 90% of the population that is not excited by the thought of eating sugary foods, therefore, the study could have a result that is fundamentally flawwed, for the 10% of the population that sugar highs apply to.
Studies usually say very little about minority populations that cannot easily be selected, and about portions of the population that are statistical anomaly.
How about simple emotional excitement caused by the taste of food?
Possibly, with the child having not eaten recently, therefore being hungry possibly resulting in an abnormally depressed / low-energy state.
If parents view their child's normal behavior as "hyperactive"; then the rapidity of the return to a normal state after eating, could be perceived as hyperactivity; in other words, many parents might be deciding their child is hyperactive, when it's just a change of their child's activity level that they are seeing --- the parent perceiving the abnormally low level of activity as "normal" for their child, just a miscalculation.
"Awww" "Shaddup kid, and go get me some pudding from that machine over there, then maybe we'll talk about your allowance"
If a business is making profits, and there is enough demand for their product or service, why wouldn't they hire another person? Presumable a new hire will be able to take on enough responsibility to make the company enough new cash flow to pay for themself.
Because, they have to front money for the new hire, long before the new hire can generate more cash flow, which comes at great risk. The risk is only worth it if a certain reward is met. Greater taxes reduces the reward, and results in the risk making less sense, whether the money is reinvested, or will be borrowed -- the reward has to be worth it after taxes and costs (such as interest payments).
The cash is not available for fronting, if the owner has to withdraw more of it for their personal needs, due to the increased outflow towards taxes. Higher tax rate on profits = more money that the owner will want to withdraw from the business = less money reinvested in the business = in the long term, less increase in profits generated by the business, but less risk too, and with high probability, greater reward for the owner, since even if the risk panned out from them, the higher taxes would make the investment not worth the level of risk.
Oh yeah... and the government doesn't have to actually raise taxes to cause this... they just have to promote the idea they might raise taxes. That will create sufficient uncertainty regarding the risk/reward of greater investment, to stave off / postpone the idea of hiring more people.
You're lucky. I work in an IT-related position on a network that controls infrastructure. If it goes down, downtown might not have water...
It may be true, but it's up to you to negotiate to ensure you are not expected to be available outside work hours if you don't want that. It's not your problem to solve if management fails to properly staff operations of a critical network, so that there is always someone whose job is to be on duty, and that there is always a backup available in case a key staff member cannot assist.
That is, it's your manager's job to make sure someone would be available, and that contingencies are in place.
They can ask you to do it. If you refuse, they have to investigate other options, such as hiring additional people and having on-call schedules.
A danger is they might decide it's less expensive if they just find someone who will do what they want, and can then fire/replace you. Since it costs less to pay one person who will do all the extra free work, than to hire more people and make the existing person happy.
I don't expect this to catch on...either that or it will move to some other social media vehicle like Twitter. Most companies LIKE the fact that they can get their employees free efforts after hours!
In a rough economy though, they might be able to save money by doing this; supposing they run their servers on something like the Amazon cloud
If they don't operate e-mail services off hours, then that means, they can turn off their instances, and thus save instance hours and electricity.
For a car manufacturer, this just might work. For companies that need to provide 24x7 customer support, I don't think so...
I don't see Ecommerce sites like Amazon shutting off off-hours email either; unless IT is an exception, e.g. if it's just receipt of new low-priority messages to off-call workers' smart phones that gets turned off.
Then you can use the actual password on the on-screen keyboard.
And if they use the on-screen password to mistype the actual password intentionally, enough times to get the unit to lock out / self-destruct, as their form of deviousness ?
The problem with entering an actual password using an on-screen keyboard, is that this is easily videotaped. And therefore insecure.... oh wait...
Its not about the probability of other fingerprints on the device - all you need is a fairly good idea of where someone has been tapping on a photo, and from the photo you will probably be able to guess which points they've used.
So don't just have them tap on parts of a photo. Present a display showing 255 photos, each arranged into a little icon. And ask the user to "touch" the right icon.
Once they've touched the first photo, show another display of 254 more photos, the photo they picked before can no longer be picked.
After the user's chosen four different photos, from four disjoint lists of 255 photos, show a fifth photo that is algorithmically derived from their previous two choices.
Their previous four choices combined with the points on the photo they select, form a password that is much more secure than what the average person uses and can remember as a password.
there were at least 255 * 254 * 253 * 252 (4 billion) possible choices of photos they can pick, if the order of selection matters, and then after you add the unique points they chose on the fifth photo.
You have a password that is much better than the person's daughter's name, or their middle name + phone number
NO, I think you technically always need a real control group receiving a placebo for it to be real science.
Not for it to be real science. But you do ultimately need some studies with a control group with a placebo for it to be a double blind study and therefore to meet FDA standards.
And the FDA has very high standards; not only does a vaccine/drug treatment have to be validated and understood to doing nothing seriously harmful, it also has to be essentially rigorously proven to work to the highest scientific standard, against the greatest possible amount of doubt that a critic or skeptic could show against the results.
That is: there are a lot of things that are reasonable science but won't pass as a study for purposes of validating a drug, because the standard of assurance / probability of the treatment actually having an effect is too low.
The validity of the vaccine won't be accepted until shown with several repeatable experiments that have a control group that is from the sample population and receives control treatment.
Don't you find it interesting, that it will take them 3 years of study just to find out if the vaccine they have already developed will pass?
As a software engineer.... I would say this is a glacial pace for product testing.
Imagine if the Windows '98 testing was required to last 3 years, before a Federal agency would license Microsoft to distribute this software, so windows '98 would have been released in 2001. Windows XP would have been released in 2004; Vista would still be getting tested.
Not only would Microsoft have to show there are no majorly harmful side-effects of the upgrade treatment, no permanent crashing of the computer, no bugs allowing serious data loss to occur indirectly, but they'd also have to have control groups... with two upgrade disks, one upgrade disk that just ran an installer that did nothing, and one that upgraded
They would then have to show that the population that ran the upgrade had a statistically significant improvement in performance, a statistically significant reduction in system errors, or other provable net improvement, before they would be licensed or allowed to distribute their software update.
Innovation would be crippled, and it would take forever to get new software out, due to the overbearing standards.
Computers would still crash, but instead of the reason being crashes due to the new versions, it would be crashes, because the fix hasn't been allowed yet, has to wait 3 years for testing to finish.
They believe that they are now potentially immune, meaning we have every reason to believe they will act completely different from any other conceivable group on the earth bar other test patients who where given a placebo for HIV.
Perhaps it would be better to just tell the subjects, they are studying a vaccine's effectiveness against diseases they may be at risk for
HIV would be on the list of potential things it might be a vaccine for, but if the subject isn't told a specific disease, then maybe they don't now think they might be immune to HIV?
I assume they won't inject their subjects with any disease to test vaccine effectiveness... but will simply study HIV infection rates of their at-risk sample population...