I'm a gamer, and there is flat-out no way this stigma will be removed in my lifetime. When you get right down to it, we're playing pretend. Unless it's couched in layers of indirection, that's just not going to be socially acceptable until the average person has a lot more leisure time.
Yeah, who wants to pretend? Now I've got to go feed my farmville.
The average person thinks of "Monopoly" and "Game of life" when they think of games. They don't think of Ticket to Ride, Settlers, etc.
Sure, sonic booms are (more than just) annoying, but that's not why we're highly unlikely to ever see supersonic commercial flight again.
The problem is that supersonic flight requires too damned much fuel for too little gain. Airlines are struggling to make a profit with today's already-fast airliners as fuel costs skyrocket. Cutting a six-hour flight (with a hour of "secure" groping before takeoff and another hour each to get to and from the airport) to a four-hour flight (with the same groping and pre- and post-travel times) just isn't that big of a deal.
Heathrow to Singapore is currently 14 hours. Increase the range, double the speed, and you're saving a lot of money.
Concorde was never for you and me. It's for people that don't blink about prices. A walk on return fare from LHR-JFK is about $15k. People pay that without blinking.
Concorde might work if 1) Range + boom meant you could fly longer, like NYC-SIN/DXB, LHR-DXB, maybe even IAH-DXB. 6 hours New york to dubai rather than 13? Currently Emirates share $20k for that trip. Would people pay $50k to save 7 hours? An extra $5k an hour. 2) Internals were remodelled with decent seats (Something like Emirates F suites, or even just a plain old BA club world seat) to make a 6 hour flight comfortable
Well, first off, nothing stopped LA->melbourne. In fact, other than a few routes overland (i.e. LA->NYC), there are very few routes passing over land that required supersonic speeds for major savings.
Europe to anywhere in the east. If it was really about flying over populated areas, and not just a political move, then London/Paris to Japan would have worked (Siberia being fairly empty).
Concorde's range was limited too, about 4,500 miles. LAX-MEL is 8,000 miles, that's longer than most flights.
LHR-DXB would have worked distance wise, but is entirely land based. LHR-JFK obviously worked technically, just not commercially. DXB to SIN/HKG/PVG would work, without the ban over land, but is the market there?
sigh. OT: I really do know the difference between 'safe' and 'save'. so why did I type 'save' on that post? I don't know,;but I'm not alone in this problem and I see lots of people type one thing when they were thinking another. its a real problem. brain rate != finger rate? lost sync in the clock and data streams? something like that.
If he'd have said "keep up:wq" would that have been better?
rather than hiring new employees. Why incur the cost of more overhead then? The largest overhead is medical benefits, about $10K a family. then comes other benefits, office space, computers, etc.
What you want is some form of nationalised health system. It means that the business owner doesn't have to pay such ridiculous costs.
If the US and UK hadn't intervened and overthrown the democratically elected government of Iran just because said government decided it was going to kick out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (one of the ancestors of the modern BP oil company) and take full control over Iranian oil, its likely that Iran would have continued as a democratic constitutional monarchy instead of becoming the strict Muslim state it is today.
If William the Conqueror hadn't invaded in 1066, the UK would be different, the U.S. wouldn't exist, Israel wouldn't have been created, and Iran wouldn't have had their government overthrown.
We can always go back far enough to blame someone else.
Any place that does not have freedom of speech can not be called a democracy, no matter how much they vote.
What good is freedom of speech if you can't be heard? Unlike the 1780s, where it was reasonable to believe that a middle-class charistmatic person had a chance to influence a sizeable proportion of voters, nowadays you need access to big media, for a long time, and all levels, and the PR skills to use that access to further your goals.
Ranting on your blog to 2000 followers isn't going to help.
One problem is pretty obvious. If the TSA has anything less than 100% successful 'terrorist' detection rate, then all the would-be terrorist organization has to do is submit multiple terrorists to the 'bypass' program until they get enough who pass it to accomplish whatever nefarious scheme they have in mind.
The TSA have already stated there are only 3 "terrorists" attempting to board planes in the U.S. each year.
I'm not going to post the filename here.. you'll have to dig it out yourself. but I googled it.. and My jaw fell open in astonishment. They threw Matheson in jail for 5 days over this?
It's really time to have that TrueCrypt dual password system installed on all portable devices now. This is crazy.
If you're crossing a border with ANYTHING on a laptop besides the operating system, you're just asking for trouble.... The secret to staying out of jail is pretty simple - don't be lazy, don't be stupid, don't poke the bear.
Yeah. The thousands of people an hour that land at JFK, LHR, SIN, even PEK, really do this.
How many times have you had your laptop taken by customs?
Everything runs on Linux over here, you are not even allowed in the door, and if you try to enter you will be escorted out by a HUGE man that hates authority figures, (i hired him because he is the type that hates authority figures)
be used to calculate average speed over a section of road (to enforce speed limits)
As someone who has been up and down the motorways of the country at quite a lot faster than would activate your regular speed camera I can state that, unless they are marked as used for speed enforcement, they aren't used for speed enforcement. Yes, the kit is there, and it might be possible, but it isn't done.
Hmmm... Should probably check that "Post Anonymously" box.
ANPR is used to enforce speed limits in roadworks (Say the M1 J10-13 at the moment, or M62 J8-11) and a few other specific areas (North of the M11 comes to mind, and tower bridge). The cameras will be painted in bright yellow, and there will be signs saying that average cameras apply.
Two problems with it 1) People speedos under-read, so you get idiots in cars doing 45 while the lorries barrel past at 50 2) Foreign vehicles (usually lorries) are effectively exempt, so are happy doing 56 (or more!) while everyone else is stuck at 50.
Outside of those areas, you're unlikely to be pulled over unless you're doing over 80, probably even 90. Not that it makes a difference, I haven't seen a police car on the motorway for years.
So completely random is still better in this sense. Just hard to remember and maybe hard to input. xkcd compared "uncommon word + common substitutions + a couple random characters".
Fine. Use 5 random words. Will be a hell of a lot easier to remember than a truly random 8 letter string.
If you're really keen on generating a fairly easy to remember password that's as secure as 16 character passwords from a set of 102, choose 23 lowercase characters, choose 10 from a common set or words, or concattenate the following.
I think the best investment my parents ever made in us kids was buying an encyclopedia. I can't tell you how many hours I sat in our library
Yes, I too spent a *lot* of time reading as a kid. Britanica, the Times world atlas, varios almanacs, not to mention a fair amount of fiction. About the age of 11 this turned into a lot of time on a computer as we got one at home, and about 16 we no longer had to pay by the minute for internet, and that's what ended up taking my time -- making websites, writing on slashdot, etc.
I don't want my kids to go anywhere near computers until they're in high school, however I won't have that choice, between well-meaning schools forcing 4 year olds to practice "keyboard skills" and peer pressure.
It's pretty simple. When publishers stop making fixed-price games, I stop buying their products. I won't pay a subscription fee for games I play casually (read, all games), and if you think I am going to accept yet another advertising Trojan into my house, think again.
I think I spent £5 on a (re-relase) of monkey island (and monkey island 2) on the iphone. I missed them the first time round. I'd glady play £5 for a re-release of sam and max, and day of the tentacle, as I don't really remember them.
I don't often get a clear half hour to sit down and play a game any more. I do get the time to do it on the phone though, waiting in queues, elevators, etc. I'm still waiting to get a chance to install civ4. When I was younger I spent days playing civ 1, 2 and 3, but I just don't have the time to sit in front of a computer for long enough any more.
*sigh* Technically, yes, but when there is a general election, it is known that the leader of the winning party will become prime minister. People vote for the party they wish to be in power, and a major part of each party's campaign revolves around the leader who will become prime minister if the party wins a majority. Ergo people do effectively vote for a prime minister.
Except in cases like Brown's, when the incumbent decides to hang up his towel and his deputy becomes prime minister. Then we say he is an unelected prime minister, because the people voted for the other guy (even though, yes, technically they only voted for the other guy's party). This is what parent is referring to.
Thanks for the Wikipedia quote though. The British often need outsiders to explain how their political system works on paper, lest we ignore that and just talk about how it works in practice.
Blair made it quite clear he wasn't going to serve the full 05-10 term. It was also clear that Brown would be next in line. People did vote in Brown in 2005, certainly more the american public voted for in LBJ in 1963, or even more Gerald Ford in 1973.
In 1990 it was a bit of a shock that Major took the reigns, although he still had been voted in by his constituency. There's more of an argument he was "unelected", however as he then won in 1992, I suppose you might say he's more "legitimate".
Singaporeans liked the concept of Daylight Saving so much that in 1982 they moved to it permanently. Geographically they should be UTC+7 but they currently work off UTC+8.
</ useless trivia >
I can sort of see the justification for daylight "saving" nearer the poles, but for equatorial countries where the length of day varies by about 10 minutes it makes no sense. Pick a time and stick with it.
There's plenty of anomalies with time zones. In December, Moscow was 2 hours ahead of Israel despite being pretty much the same longitude. Spain is 1 hour ahead of the UK despite parts of it geographically fitting into UK-1.
Gaza has 2 spring forwards and 2 fall backs a year. At some points in the year, Israel, 1000 miles east of greece, is an hour behind.
And now we've got a confusing situation of New York being 4 hours behind London, rather than 5. Due to travel (in the u.s this weekend, back in the uk af the end of the month) I get to have my clocks go forward twice this year, and last year I missed out on the benefit of clocks going backwards as I was somewhere out east -- Israel or India or somewhere (you know you travel too much when you can't remember what countries you've been to in a given year).
I see no difference between the two search engines. However I like Bing presents a beautiful picture everyday.
You use the front page of a search engine? Isn't that what your browser's for. I have a little google/bing search thing in the top right of firefox and I believe IE.
Doesn't work for me. Although things did get better since Google first required that JavaScript to be enabled.
Just tried it and I get this message:
Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.
Just used lynx, disallowed cookies, only problems 1) No adverts 2) The 1..10 buttons at the bottom are on separate lines 3) Image search isn't brilliant in lynx
It sounds like your internet connection has been hijacked.
Seems like Slashdot is going downhill quicker than I expected. I'm obviously no M$ shill. Being a Google shill just makes you (people) look stupid. I'm glad I "closed" my account here (threw away the password).
Good riddance.
Slashdot has being going down hill since the 1990s, yet I still keep coming here. As do you.
There can be a naming standard that is applied to all devices, network, servers, storage, so on, that help simplify how an IT organization works. This has to be driven by management.
Naming things by some arbitrary set of characters from your favorite story does not scale well, to say the least.
Lets create a standard that scales like a mofo:
ie, SJN1FIDBSW0001 The goal would be to have each device identified by a location (SJN), location code (1), businessorg (FI), zone (DB) device type (SW),,logical identifer (0), physical device # (001)
The problem with that naming convention is you get very similar named servers, which might only differ by a single character in the middle of a hard-to-scan blob of text.
On colleague of mine has managed to flatten a production oracle server because he connected to the Manchester one, not the Washington one. The difference was embedded in the middle of the all-caps dns. Several people have restarted services on the wrong server too, again a single character difference in 15.
Since then I've instituted a policy of changing PS1 to prepend the hostname with the location in plain text.
When it comes to outside addressing, heigherarchial dns and cnames allow easy addressing. oracle1.washington.mycorp.com, web1.gaza.mycorp.com is fairly clear where the box is and what the function is, and when it comes time to reassign functions, you just update the cname.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a gamer, and there is flat-out no way this stigma will be removed in my lifetime. When you get right down to it, we're playing pretend. Unless it's couched in layers of indirection, that's just not going to be socially acceptable until the average person has a lot more leisure time.
Yeah, who wants to pretend? Now I've got to go feed my farmville.
The average person thinks of "Monopoly" and "Game of life" when they think of games. They don't think of Ticket to Ride, Settlers, etc.
Sure, sonic booms are (more than just) annoying, but that's not why we're highly unlikely to ever see supersonic commercial flight again.
The problem is that supersonic flight requires too damned much fuel for too little gain. Airlines are struggling to make a profit with today's already-fast airliners as fuel costs skyrocket. Cutting a six-hour flight (with a hour of "secure" groping before takeoff and another hour each to get to and from the airport) to a four-hour flight (with the same groping and pre- and post-travel times) just isn't that big of a deal.
Heathrow to Singapore is currently 14 hours. Increase the range, double the speed, and you're saving a lot of money.
Concorde was never for you and me. It's for people that don't blink about prices. A walk on return fare from LHR-JFK is about $15k. People pay that without blinking.
Concorde might work if
1) Range + boom meant you could fly longer, like NYC-SIN/DXB, LHR-DXB, maybe even IAH-DXB. 6 hours New york to dubai rather than 13? Currently Emirates share $20k for that trip. Would people pay $50k to save 7 hours? An extra $5k an hour.
2) Internals were remodelled with decent seats (Something like Emirates F suites, or even just a plain old BA club world seat) to make a 6 hour flight comfortable
Well, first off, nothing stopped LA->melbourne. In fact, other than a few routes overland (i.e. LA->NYC), there are very few routes passing over land that required supersonic speeds for major savings.
Europe to anywhere in the east. If it was really about flying over populated areas, and not just a political move, then London/Paris to Japan would have worked (Siberia being fairly empty).
Concorde's range was limited too, about 4,500 miles. LAX-MEL is 8,000 miles, that's longer than most flights.
LHR-DXB would have worked distance wise, but is entirely land based. LHR-JFK obviously worked technically, just not commercially. DXB to SIN/HKG/PVG would work, without the ban over land, but is the market there?
Why would they spend so much money when they could just buy a wrench? http://xkcd.com/538/
"keep us save".
sigh. OT: I really do know the difference between 'safe' and 'save'. so why did I type 'save' on that post? I don't know,;but I'm not alone in this problem and I see lots of people type one thing when they were thinking another. its a real problem. brain rate != finger rate? lost sync in the clock and data streams? something like that.
If he'd have said "keep up :wq" would that have been better?
rather than hiring new employees. Why incur the cost of more overhead then? The largest overhead is medical benefits, about $10K a family. then comes other benefits, office space, computers, etc.
What you want is some form of nationalised health system. It means that the business owner doesn't have to pay such ridiculous costs.
If the US and UK hadn't intervened and overthrown the democratically elected government of Iran just because said government decided it was going to kick out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (one of the ancestors of the modern BP oil company) and take full control over Iranian oil, its likely that Iran would have continued as a democratic constitutional monarchy instead of becoming the strict Muslim state it is today.
If William the Conqueror hadn't invaded in 1066, the UK would be different, the U.S. wouldn't exist, Israel wouldn't have been created, and Iran wouldn't have had their government overthrown.
We can always go back far enough to blame someone else.
Any place that does not have freedom of speech can not be called a democracy, no matter how much they vote.
What good is freedom of speech if you can't be heard? Unlike the 1780s, where it was reasonable to believe that a middle-class charistmatic person had a chance to influence a sizeable proportion of voters, nowadays you need access to big media, for a long time, and all levels, and the PR skills to use that access to further your goals.
Ranting on your blog to 2000 followers isn't going to help.
You are right about stoning. Capital punishment is unethical, and should not be tolerated anywhere.
Nothing wrong with being stoned though
One problem is pretty obvious. If the TSA has anything less than 100% successful 'terrorist' detection rate, then all the would-be terrorist organization has to do is submit multiple terrorists to the 'bypass' program until they get enough who pass it to accomplish whatever nefarious scheme they have in mind.
The TSA have already stated there are only 3 "terrorists" attempting to board planes in the U.S. each year.
It's ALMOST worth it... except for the fact that you have to pay the $100 every year, if I recall correctly.
The cost of my flights so far this year is about $16,000.
I read through the documents filed by the lawyers, trying to understand what was confusing the border inspectors. I found it, buried in the document here: http://cbldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Charter-Notice.pdf
I'm not going to post the filename here.. you'll have to dig it out yourself. but I googled it.. and My jaw fell open in astonishment. They threw Matheson in jail for 5 days over this?
It's really time to have that TrueCrypt dual password system installed on all portable devices now. This is crazy.
If that image is child pornography, then So's "love is"
If you're crossing a border with ANYTHING on a laptop besides the operating system, you're just asking for trouble. ...
The secret to staying out of jail is pretty simple - don't be lazy, don't be stupid, don't poke the bear.
Yeah. The thousands of people an hour that land at JFK, LHR, SIN, even PEK, really do this.
How many times have you had your laptop taken by customs?
Everything runs on Linux over here, you are not even allowed in the door, and if you try to enter you will be escorted out by a HUGE man that hates authority figures, (i hired him because he is the type that hates authority figures)
How does he feel about his boss?
be used to calculate average speed over a section of road (to enforce speed limits)
As someone who has been up and down the motorways of the country at quite a lot faster than would activate your regular speed camera I can state that, unless they are marked as used for speed enforcement, they aren't used for speed enforcement. Yes, the kit is there, and it might be possible, but it isn't done.
Hmmm... Should probably check that "Post Anonymously" box.
ANPR is used to enforce speed limits in roadworks (Say the M1 J10-13 at the moment, or M62 J8-11) and a few other specific areas (North of the M11 comes to mind, and tower bridge). The cameras will be painted in bright yellow, and there will be signs saying that average cameras apply.
Two problems with it
1) People speedos under-read, so you get idiots in cars doing 45 while the lorries barrel past at 50
2) Foreign vehicles (usually lorries) are effectively exempt, so are happy doing 56 (or more!) while everyone else is stuck at 50.
Outside of those areas, you're unlikely to be pulled over unless you're doing over 80, probably even 90. Not that it makes a difference, I haven't seen a police car on the motorway for years.
Why not just put a 100 gallon tank on a small pickup and refuel every two months?
Because that's illegal -- each time you go to the petrol station you can fuel
2x5l (1.5gal) plastic containers
OR
1x10l (3gal) metal container
AND
your vehicle
Containers must be made to an approved standard
Besides, 100 gallons would cost $830 at the moment, and the petrol station ain't going to let you have that much on credit.
It's more secure than 5#f^x902 in almost every way, except that it's easier to shoulder-surf in one try because it's a proper sentence.
Chances are "5#f^x902" will be on a postit on the monitor
Aren't those exponents reversed?
2048^4 vs 102^8?
1.7 * 10^13 vs 1.1 * 10^16?
So completely random is still better in this sense. Just hard to remember and maybe hard to input. xkcd compared "uncommon word + common substitutions + a couple random characters".
Fine. Use 5 random words. Will be a hell of a lot easier to remember than a truly random 8 letter string.
If you're really keen on generating a fairly easy to remember password that's as secure as 16 character passwords from a set of 102, choose 23 lowercase characters, choose 10 from a common set or words, or concattenate the following.
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words|grep "^[a-zA-Z]*$"|wc -l /usr/share/dict/words|grep "^[a-zA-Z]*$"|random 750|head -7"
74059
$ alias randompass="cat
$ randompass
but if you really think that 7-aRkHc1_m!%4"£$ is rememberable enough that you don't need to write it down, good on you.
I think the best investment my parents ever made in us kids was buying an encyclopedia. I can't tell you how many hours I sat in our library
Yes, I too spent a *lot* of time reading as a kid. Britanica, the Times world atlas, varios almanacs, not to mention a fair amount of fiction. About the age of 11 this turned into a lot of time on a computer as we got one at home, and about 16 we no longer had to pay by the minute for internet, and that's what ended up taking my time -- making websites, writing on slashdot, etc.
I don't want my kids to go anywhere near computers until they're in high school, however I won't have that choice, between well-meaning schools forcing 4 year olds to practice "keyboard skills" and peer pressure.
It's pretty simple. When publishers stop making fixed-price games, I stop buying their products. I won't pay a subscription fee for games I play casually (read, all games), and if you think I am going to accept yet another advertising Trojan into my house, think again.
I think I spent £5 on a (re-relase) of monkey island (and monkey island 2) on the iphone. I missed them the first time round. I'd glady play £5 for a re-release of sam and max, and day of the tentacle, as I don't really remember them.
I don't often get a clear half hour to sit down and play a game any more. I do get the time to do it on the phone though, waiting in queues, elevators, etc. I'm still waiting to get a chance to install civ4. When I was younger I spent days playing civ 1, 2 and 3, but I just don't have the time to sit in front of a computer for long enough any more.
*sigh* Technically, yes, but when there is a general election, it is known that the leader of the winning party will become prime minister. People vote for the party they wish to be in power, and a major part of each party's campaign revolves around the leader who will become prime minister if the party wins a majority. Ergo people do effectively vote for a prime minister.
Except in cases like Brown's, when the incumbent decides to hang up his towel and his deputy becomes prime minister. Then we say he is an unelected prime minister, because the people voted for the other guy (even though, yes, technically they only voted for the other guy's party). This is what parent is referring to.
Thanks for the Wikipedia quote though. The British often need outsiders to explain how their political system works on paper, lest we ignore that and just talk about how it works in practice.
Blair made it quite clear he wasn't going to serve the full 05-10 term. It was also clear that Brown would be next in line. People did vote in Brown in 2005, certainly more the american public voted for in LBJ in 1963, or even more Gerald Ford in 1973.
In 1990 it was a bit of a shock that Major took the reigns, although he still had been voted in by his constituency. There's more of an argument he was "unelected", however as he then won in 1992, I suppose you might say he's more "legitimate".
Singaporeans liked the concept of Daylight Saving so much that in 1982 they moved to it permanently. Geographically they should be UTC+7 but they currently work off UTC+8.
</ useless trivia >
I can sort of see the justification for daylight "saving" nearer the poles, but for equatorial countries where the length of day varies by about 10 minutes it makes no sense. Pick a time and stick with it.
There's plenty of anomalies with time zones. In December, Moscow was 2 hours ahead of Israel despite being pretty much the same longitude. Spain is 1 hour ahead of the UK despite parts of it geographically fitting into UK-1.
Gaza has 2 spring forwards and 2 fall backs a year. At some points in the year, Israel, 1000 miles east of greece, is an hour behind.
And now we've got a confusing situation of New York being 4 hours behind London, rather than 5. Due to travel (in the u.s this weekend, back in the uk af the end of the month) I get to have my clocks go forward twice this year, and last year I missed out on the benefit of clocks going backwards as I was somewhere out east -- Israel or India or somewhere (you know you travel too much when you can't remember what countries you've been to in a given year).
I see no difference between the two search engines. However I like Bing presents a beautiful picture everyday.
You use the front page of a search engine? Isn't that what your browser's for. I have a little google/bing search thing in the top right of firefox and I believe IE.
Doesn't work for me. Although things did get better since Google first required that JavaScript to be enabled.
Just tried it and I get this message:
Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.
Just used lynx, disallowed cookies, only problems
1) No adverts
2) The 1..10 buttons at the bottom are on separate lines
3) Image search isn't brilliant in lynx
It sounds like your internet connection has been hijacked.
Seems like Slashdot is going downhill quicker than I expected. I'm obviously no M$ shill. Being a Google shill just makes you (people) look stupid. I'm glad I "closed" my account here (threw away the password).
Good riddance.
Slashdot has being going down hill since the 1990s, yet I still keep coming here. As do you.
There can be a naming standard that is applied to all devices, network, servers, storage, so on, that help simplify how an IT organization works. This has to be driven by management.
Naming things by some arbitrary set of characters from your favorite story does not scale well, to say the least.
Lets create a standard that scales like a mofo:
ie, SJN1FIDBSW0001 ,logical identifer (0), physical device # (001)
The goal would be to have each device identified by a location (SJN), location code (1), businessorg (FI), zone (DB) device type (SW),
The problem with that naming convention is you get very similar named servers, which might only differ by a single character in the middle of a hard-to-scan blob of text.
On colleague of mine has managed to flatten a production oracle server because he connected to the Manchester one, not the Washington one. The difference was embedded in the middle of the all-caps dns. Several people have restarted services on the wrong server too, again a single character difference in 15.
Since then I've instituted a policy of changing PS1 to prepend the hostname with the location in plain text.
When it comes to outside addressing, heigherarchial dns and cnames allow easy addressing. oracle1.washington.mycorp.com, web1.gaza.mycorp.com is fairly clear where the box is and what the function is, and when it comes time to reassign functions, you just update the cname.