And YouTube will tag your video as having pirated sound even if the music is Creative Commons. I've had this happen - they didn't silence the video or take it down, but they did remove the ability to download the video. Using their counterclaim form didn't get this changed either.
A few years ago I was on a very large project (over 1MLOC of C++ code in the end). The customer required us to be using and audited to at least SEI CMM level 3 (I think this is called something different now) and so we underwent putting in all the processes in place. We all predicted we'd hate all the formal process, but an interesting side effect is we got very good at sizing new features and the various other change requests we'd get, and the consequence of this was it was very rare we actually needed to do overtime.
I think this had a huge positive impact on the quality of our code - our defect rate was well below what was expected of a project this size, and I think a lot of this was because developers were well rested when they arrived for work the next day and also got time to unwind, which in the 60+ hr/wk days wasn't happening. Unfortunately management forgot this lesson and put in a sort of back door mandatory overtime rule (despite it not being necessary) by making everyone commit to a certain "utilization rate" (100% would mean you never took any vacation, sick days, nor national holidays nor did any admin work, and they wanted everyone to commit to 95% utilization which meant realistically 60 hour weeks). Fortunately, I left at that point. Others have also left since because of this policy (I left for other reasons, but I'm not sure I would have wanted to stay too much longer).
Because like a baby's nappy, a politician who is around for too long starts to get smelly and stained. Not literally (like the nappy) but they do tend to get increasingly out of touch and increasingly damaging to their own nation.
We've seen this happen in recent British history. Thatcher was prime minister for too long and her policies became more and more out of touch with reality towards the end until her party finally had to force her out of office, and the same thing happened with Tony Blair. Term limits are a good thing.
Since when was the Commodore 64 a 16 bit machine? It used a 6502 derivative (6510 if I remember right), a 8 bit processor with only three 8 bit registers and an 8 bit data bus (internally and externally). Even if you added a Z80 second processor (IIRC, one later model of the machine did this), while the Z80 can perform some 16 bit operations, it accomplishes this through register pairing and everything is still actually 8 bit inside.
My car is an Audi A4 which I bought used (I've never bought a new car) for quarter of the price that it sold new. I've owned it for 11 years now. In that time, if I add up all the repairs for worn out stuff together (including a fairly major transmission job) PLUS all the normal servicing PLUS the price I paid for it, it doesn't even add up to just the depreciation cost from new to the point where I bought it - in other words, the car has been much cheaper for me to run for 11 years than the original owner for 7 years. I don't do my own work on it - I drop it off at a local garage and pick it up when it's done.
Sorry, you're factually incorrect. There are plenty of cars made in Germany with a US badge. Ford and GM both have factories building US-badged cars in Germany.
The very first piece of internet malware was a worm that exploited sendmail on several operating systems, way back in the late 1980s and spread without user interaction (it wasn't an MUA worm like pretty much all of the email worms since, but a worm that really did exploit bugs in the MTA).
How often does that happen? Pretty infrequently I'd wager - at least not frequently enough to warrant the inevitable privacy battle with the unions and the much higher installation cost of a fingerprint system when compared to an RFID reader based system (especially given you already have maintenance staff with expertise of RFID systems given they are maintaining the Oyster system already).
Since I'd bet the cleaners have to wear an identification badge and will continue having to do so after any fingerpirnting system were to be put in, put the RFID chip in the badge and the additional cost of the badges is pretty close to zero. Additionally an RFID badge can be dual-purposed to work on the Oyster system for when cleaners need to go through the ticket barriers.
Basically, fingerprinting is a bad idea because: 1. The cost of fighting it with the union vs the trivial savings a fingerprint reader system can possibly give over an RFID badge system. (Given that the cleaners and their union are not computer experts - how do they know to trust the company when it says "We only store hashed versions of your fingerprint, not the actual image"? They can't verify it. Not even the person installing it can verify exactly what's being done with the images before hashing given the software is going to be closed source. And in any case, an image does go to the server before hashing and if a server is compromised, the fingerprint images can still be siphoned off by the intruder as they come off the readers. 2. The cost of the fingerprint readers and maintaining them, especially considering cleaners will probably often have dirty hands because of the nature of their job and that the readers are likely to be in conditions that are not very good for optical systems - dirt, high humidity etc. 3. RFID system will still prevent the most popular form of abuse, phoning a mate to sign in for you if you're late. You're not going to get your RFID card to your mate already at work any quicker than getting yourself + RFID card to work. 4. Given the stations all have CCTV it won't be hard in any case to prove that someone has been touching in for someone else when it is noticed by a supervisor.
Basically a fingerprint based signin solution is expensive and overcomplex when compared to its possible benefits over a much cheaper RFID card in the ID badges that the cleaners almost certainly already have to wear to work.
The initial hardware for card based systems is far far cheaper though. The cost difference will probably buy an awful lot of cards. The London Underground also has a huge existing network of card readers too, so it's likely they get a very good bulk discount on RFID readers. Millions of commuters manage to find their card while walking to and from a tube train, workers can manage it too (the RFID cards will work through a wallet, you don't even need to get the card out).
It's extremely unlikely the fingerprint scanner device itself does any mathematical transform, much more likely an image is sent to whatever the fingerprint reader is connected to, and code running on this system does the actual work (it makes for a cheaper embedded system if you can use a less powerful microcontroller and offload the work to the server that must be present for the system to work). Compromise the server and you can get the images as they come off the scanner. Or the police can request to management that code is put into the system to send the images of fingerprints to them.
The fingerprint scanners I've worked with are also perfectly capable of giving you an actual image of the fingerprint. How is the employee to know that the police haven't asked London Underground to also capture all the images they get and send it to them for a fishing expedition? They can't.
To be pedantic, it would have been a PAL television (625 vertical lines) since it was the UK. It's likely the Prestel set wasn't built into the TV, it's a lot more likely this was a set top box, but the reporter didn't know how Prestel and other Videotex services were typically used back then. The TV may have been full of vacuum tubes (we call them "valves" here).
My first computer was connected to a TV. In the mid-late 80s, I had a modem for it - but we always had cast off TVs from TV rental places since my grandfather was a TV engineer. So my computer screen (just a standard TV) was full of valves and there was nothing remotely digital about it. It took about a minute and a half to warm up. In 1987 though I was buying games by download via Micronet 800 - which was doing much of what Steam does now except for DRM.
Actually, Greece has been fucked over by the Greek government and the complicity of Wall Street. When joining the euro, Wall Street (Goldman Sachs, mainly) actively helped the government conceal the level of debt (which would disqualify them from being in the euro). The eurozone didn't do their full due diligence due to the breathless headlong rush to get the Euro under way, making it ridiculously easy for the Greeks to hide their debt problem.
And now it has come back to bite the eurozone (and the Greeks much harder) on the ass.
It's a lot easier to do that than place the basis of an entire industrial society (what you would need to mine the moon and make the materials to build a spacecraft) on the Moon.
I'd like to see that demonstrated, hearing 20kHz at any age is pretty unusual.
I have a function generator at home, I've occasionally hooked it up to good headphones, set it to sine and turned the knob without looking at it until I could not hear the tone (and then done it in the other direction, just to make sure). About 3 years ago I could get to 17kHz (late 30s) but now that's down to 14.5kHz.
You're unfortunately probably just hearing harmonics tricking you into thinking you can go that high if you've not tested with a pure sine wave and headphones good enough to reproduce it.
All the Sony Digital-8 cameras I know of have two things:
1. Firewire 2. Composite video out
Firewire cards are still pretty easy to get hold of. Video editing software that reads via Firewire isn't hard to get hold of either. Or you can just use an analogue capture card and the composite video.
The Doomsday Book was not permanently lost. I think there's a copy on the BBC website that you can browse. There used to be another website with it on (but the operator of that site died, and the site died with them - a shame because it was more like the original than the BBC's website).
But endianness is trival to sort out, just reverse it. There's only a fairly limited range of reasonable different things that can be done to PCM, and if the worst comes to the worst, it's actually practical to try every single one of them until you hear some kind of sound.
Quite a lot of them are flown for aerial photography. I have a T-Rex 700 (electric hell, rotor disc of about 1.7 metres) with special skids (taller and wider) to allow a digital SLR camera to be carried on a gimbal. The previous owner used it for photography business.
However, he was the one with the transmitter, he was the one solely responsible for flying that model close enough to where he was standing he couldn't get out the way when it went wrong. Even if the equipment malfunctioned, there is no failure mode that makes an RC heli chase you down and kill you - an equipment malfunction will only take you out if you chose to fly the heli close enough to where you were standing you can't get out the way before it hits you.
I fly radio controlled helis, I have a 700 size electric (rotor span of about 1.7 metres) and I have enormous respect for the deadly amount of energy the rotor system carries - and because of that I won't have it fly dangerously close to myself or anyone else because that's how equipment failures result in serious injury. Keep it far enough away that you can get out the way if the radio should fail in such a manner it suddenly flies at you and you don't get injured. Only the guy holding the transmitter is responsible for that, no one else.
It's tragic he got killed, but it doesn't change the fact he was flying it too close to where he was standing.
It doesn't change the fact that it was (almost certainly) his fault. Just because it sucks to get killed, it doesn't absolve you of the responsibility especially when you personally control most of the risks.
I fly radio controlled helicopters. A 700-size electric heli is not a toy (and it's not people trying not to be thought of as being "childish" when RC modellers insist their models are not toys) but something that carries quite a lot of energy. The blade tip speeds on a typical 700 size (nitro or electric) that's set up for aggressive 3D is on the order of 400 km/h. They are made from carbon fibre (with a metal weight in the leading edge) and must be respected enormously. Deaths are very uncommon (I think this is only the second death caused by a radio controlled helicopter) but injuries are rather less common and the majority of them are because someone didn't take proper precautions. Only the person with the transmitter is responsible for this. He was the person with the transmitter, he was the commander, he was responsible however much it sucks. It wasn't merely bad luck. It wasn't "luck" that he was flying the heli close enough to where he was standing he couldn't get out the way if things went pear shaped. That was his own, deliberate choice.
The radio manufacturers go to great lengths to try and prevent radio problems leading to runaway models (signal integrity checking and failsafes). Component failures are pretty rare but they do happen. But all of these things won't hurt you if you take the simple precaution of flying the model far enough away from you that if everything goes tits up, you can get out of the way.
Yeah it sucks that he's dead, especially for his family and I have a great deal of sympathy for them but at the same time it is most likely he was personally responsible for his own demise. He was the one with the transmitter, he was the one commanding the model to fly close to where he was in the first place.
...and that's with KSP making it far easier to get to orbit too (2 km/s orbital speed rather than 8 km/s as for Earth, and a planet whose atmosphere ends at 70km, with 1/10th of the radius of Earth)
The first search engine I used was the World Wide Web Worm (probably in 1994, I think). Before that, I used to use Archie quite a lot, which was a search engine for FTP sites (which you accessed via telnet).
The World Wide Web Worm found me a quite a few research papers which I needed to read to prepare the dissertation we had to do in the final year of our degree course. It saved many many hours of shuffling through paper in the library.
Slashdot Mirror
And YouTube will tag your video as having pirated sound even if the music is Creative Commons. I've had this happen - they didn't silence the video or take it down, but they did remove the ability to download the video. Using their counterclaim form didn't get this changed either.
A few years ago I was on a very large project (over 1MLOC of C++ code in the end). The customer required us to be using and audited to at least SEI CMM level 3 (I think this is called something different now) and so we underwent putting in all the processes in place. We all predicted we'd hate all the formal process, but an interesting side effect is we got very good at sizing new features and the various other change requests we'd get, and the consequence of this was it was very rare we actually needed to do overtime.
I think this had a huge positive impact on the quality of our code - our defect rate was well below what was expected of a project this size, and I think a lot of this was because developers were well rested when they arrived for work the next day and also got time to unwind, which in the 60+ hr/wk days wasn't happening. Unfortunately management forgot this lesson and put in a sort of back door mandatory overtime rule (despite it not being necessary) by making everyone commit to a certain "utilization rate" (100% would mean you never took any vacation, sick days, nor national holidays nor did any admin work, and they wanted everyone to commit to 95% utilization which meant realistically 60 hour weeks). Fortunately, I left at that point. Others have also left since because of this policy (I left for other reasons, but I'm not sure I would have wanted to stay too much longer).
Because like a baby's nappy, a politician who is around for too long starts to get smelly and stained. Not literally (like the nappy) but they do tend to get increasingly out of touch and increasingly damaging to their own nation.
We've seen this happen in recent British history. Thatcher was prime minister for too long and her policies became more and more out of touch with reality towards the end until her party finally had to force her out of office, and the same thing happened with Tony Blair. Term limits are a good thing.
Since when was the Commodore 64 a 16 bit machine? It used a 6502 derivative (6510 if I remember right), a 8 bit processor with only three 8 bit registers and an 8 bit data bus (internally and externally). Even if you added a Z80 second processor (IIRC, one later model of the machine did this), while the Z80 can perform some 16 bit operations, it accomplishes this through register pairing and everything is still actually 8 bit inside.
My car is an Audi A4 which I bought used (I've never bought a new car) for quarter of the price that it sold new. I've owned it for 11 years now. In that time, if I add up all the repairs for worn out stuff together (including a fairly major transmission job) PLUS all the normal servicing PLUS the price I paid for it, it doesn't even add up to just the depreciation cost from new to the point where I bought it - in other words, the car has been much cheaper for me to run for 11 years than the original owner for 7 years. I don't do my own work on it - I drop it off at a local garage and pick it up when it's done.
Sorry, you're factually incorrect. There are plenty of cars made in Germany with a US badge. Ford and GM both have factories building US-badged cars in Germany.
The very first piece of internet malware was a worm that exploited sendmail on several operating systems, way back in the late 1980s and spread without user interaction (it wasn't an MUA worm like pretty much all of the email worms since, but a worm that really did exploit bugs in the MTA).
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
How often does that happen? Pretty infrequently I'd wager - at least not frequently enough to warrant the inevitable privacy battle with the unions and the much higher installation cost of a fingerprint system when compared to an RFID reader based system (especially given you already have maintenance staff with expertise of RFID systems given they are maintaining the Oyster system already).
Since I'd bet the cleaners have to wear an identification badge and will continue having to do so after any fingerpirnting system were to be put in, put the RFID chip in the badge and the additional cost of the badges is pretty close to zero. Additionally an RFID badge can be dual-purposed to work on the Oyster system for when cleaners need to go through the ticket barriers.
Basically, fingerprinting is a bad idea because:
1. The cost of fighting it with the union vs the trivial savings a fingerprint reader system can possibly give over an RFID badge system. (Given that the cleaners and their union are not computer experts - how do they know to trust the company when it says "We only store hashed versions of your fingerprint, not the actual image"? They can't verify it. Not even the person installing it can verify exactly what's being done with the images before hashing given the software is going to be closed source. And in any case, an image does go to the server before hashing and if a server is compromised, the fingerprint images can still be siphoned off by the intruder as they come off the readers.
2. The cost of the fingerprint readers and maintaining them, especially considering cleaners will probably often have dirty hands because of the nature of their job and that the readers are likely to be in conditions that are not very good for optical systems - dirt, high humidity etc.
3. RFID system will still prevent the most popular form of abuse, phoning a mate to sign in for you if you're late. You're not going to get your RFID card to your mate already at work any quicker than getting yourself + RFID card to work.
4. Given the stations all have CCTV it won't be hard in any case to prove that someone has been touching in for someone else when it is noticed by a supervisor.
Basically a fingerprint based signin solution is expensive and overcomplex when compared to its possible benefits over a much cheaper RFID card in the ID badges that the cleaners almost certainly already have to wear to work.
The initial hardware for card based systems is far far cheaper though. The cost difference will probably buy an awful lot of cards. The London Underground also has a huge existing network of card readers too, so it's likely they get a very good bulk discount on RFID readers. Millions of commuters manage to find their card while walking to and from a tube train, workers can manage it too (the RFID cards will work through a wallet, you don't even need to get the card out).
It's extremely unlikely the fingerprint scanner device itself does any mathematical transform, much more likely an image is sent to whatever the fingerprint reader is connected to, and code running on this system does the actual work (it makes for a cheaper embedded system if you can use a less powerful microcontroller and offload the work to the server that must be present for the system to work). Compromise the server and you can get the images as they come off the scanner. Or the police can request to management that code is put into the system to send the images of fingerprints to them.
The fingerprint scanners I've worked with are also perfectly capable of giving you an actual image of the fingerprint. How is the employee to know that the police haven't asked London Underground to also capture all the images they get and send it to them for a fishing expedition? They can't.
To be pedantic, it would have been a PAL television (625 vertical lines) since it was the UK. It's likely the Prestel set wasn't built into the TV, it's a lot more likely this was a set top box, but the reporter didn't know how Prestel and other Videotex services were typically used back then. The TV may have been full of vacuum tubes (we call them "valves" here).
My first computer was connected to a TV. In the mid-late 80s, I had a modem for it - but we always had cast off TVs from TV rental places since my grandfather was a TV engineer. So my computer screen (just a standard TV) was full of valves and there was nothing remotely digital about it. It took about a minute and a half to warm up. In 1987 though I was buying games by download via Micronet 800 - which was doing much of what Steam does now except for DRM.
The local oscillators of radio receivers can be detected, and what they give off can infer which frequency band is being listened to.
Actually, Greece has been fucked over by the Greek government and the complicity of Wall Street. When joining the euro, Wall Street (Goldman Sachs, mainly) actively helped the government conceal the level of debt (which would disqualify them from being in the euro). The eurozone didn't do their full due diligence due to the breathless headlong rush to get the Euro under way, making it ridiculously easy for the Greeks to hide their debt problem.
And now it has come back to bite the eurozone (and the Greeks much harder) on the ass.
It's a lot easier to do that than place the basis of an entire industrial society (what you would need to mine the moon and make the materials to build a spacecraft) on the Moon.
I'd like to see that demonstrated, hearing 20kHz at any age is pretty unusual.
I have a function generator at home, I've occasionally hooked it up to good headphones, set it to sine and turned the knob without looking at it until I could not hear the tone (and then done it in the other direction, just to make sure). About 3 years ago I could get to 17kHz (late 30s) but now that's down to 14.5kHz.
You're unfortunately probably just hearing harmonics tricking you into thinking you can go that high if you've not tested with a pure sine wave and headphones good enough to reproduce it.
All the Sony Digital-8 cameras I know of have two things:
1. Firewire
2. Composite video out
Firewire cards are still pretty easy to get hold of. Video editing software that reads via Firewire isn't hard to get hold of either. Or you can just use an analogue capture card and the composite video.
The Doomsday Book was not permanently lost. I think there's a copy on the BBC website that you can browse. There used to be another website with it on (but the operator of that site died, and the site died with them - a shame because it was more like the original than the BBC's website).
But endianness is trival to sort out, just reverse it. There's only a fairly limited range of reasonable different things that can be done to PCM, and if the worst comes to the worst, it's actually practical to try every single one of them until you hear some kind of sound.
Quite a lot of them are flown for aerial photography. I have a T-Rex 700 (electric hell, rotor disc of about 1.7 metres) with special skids (taller and wider) to allow a digital SLR camera to be carried on a gimbal. The previous owner used it for photography business.
I have huge sympathy for his family.
However, he was the one with the transmitter, he was the one solely responsible for flying that model close enough to where he was standing he couldn't get out the way when it went wrong. Even if the equipment malfunctioned, there is no failure mode that makes an RC heli chase you down and kill you - an equipment malfunction will only take you out if you chose to fly the heli close enough to where you were standing you can't get out the way before it hits you.
I fly radio controlled helis, I have a 700 size electric (rotor span of about 1.7 metres) and I have enormous respect for the deadly amount of energy the rotor system carries - and because of that I won't have it fly dangerously close to myself or anyone else because that's how equipment failures result in serious injury. Keep it far enough away that you can get out the way if the radio should fail in such a manner it suddenly flies at you and you don't get injured. Only the guy holding the transmitter is responsible for that, no one else.
It's tragic he got killed, but it doesn't change the fact he was flying it too close to where he was standing.
It doesn't change the fact that it was (almost certainly) his fault. Just because it sucks to get killed, it doesn't absolve you of the responsibility especially when you personally control most of the risks.
I fly radio controlled helicopters. A 700-size electric heli is not a toy (and it's not people trying not to be thought of as being "childish" when RC modellers insist their models are not toys) but something that carries quite a lot of energy. The blade tip speeds on a typical 700 size (nitro or electric) that's set up for aggressive 3D is on the order of 400 km/h. They are made from carbon fibre (with a metal weight in the leading edge) and must be respected enormously. Deaths are very uncommon (I think this is only the second death caused by a radio controlled helicopter) but injuries are rather less common and the majority of them are because someone didn't take proper precautions. Only the person with the transmitter is responsible for this. He was the person with the transmitter, he was the commander, he was responsible however much it sucks. It wasn't merely bad luck. It wasn't "luck" that he was flying the heli close enough to where he was standing he couldn't get out the way if things went pear shaped. That was his own, deliberate choice.
The radio manufacturers go to great lengths to try and prevent radio problems leading to runaway models (signal integrity checking and failsafes). Component failures are pretty rare but they do happen. But all of these things won't hurt you if you take the simple precaution of flying the model far enough away from you that if everything goes tits up, you can get out of the way.
Yeah it sucks that he's dead, especially for his family and I have a great deal of sympathy for them but at the same time it is most likely he was personally responsible for his own demise. He was the one with the transmitter, he was the one commanding the model to fly close to where he was in the first place.
...and that's with KSP making it far easier to get to orbit too (2 km/s orbital speed rather than 8 km/s as for Earth, and a planet whose atmosphere ends at 70km, with 1/10th of the radius of Earth)
Being able to write in shorthand is good and all... but how is that going to help?
(Or did you mean steganography?)
The first search engine I used was the World Wide Web Worm (probably in 1994, I think). Before that, I used to use Archie quite a lot, which was a search engine for FTP sites (which you accessed via telnet).
The World Wide Web Worm found me a quite a few research papers which I needed to read to prepare the dissertation we had to do in the final year of our degree course. It saved many many hours of shuffling through paper in the library.