"Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it?... And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Grunt'! That's it! Grunt! Ha!
I wonder if it'll be friends with me?"
Admit it, "Phobos Grunt" sounds like Douglas Adams jokingly came up with the name.
Be sure to mention her passing to your neighbor and her daughter when you get a chance.
Earlier today I was surprised to learn that another famous writer lived a LOT longer and later than I had ever thought (their heyday was decades before I was born), and that I was young enough to not notice their passing.
Came here to also say idiocy was rampant in 70's, and my grandma had a dim view of her peer group in the 1910-30 time frame. Then there's that “Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.” -- a quote widely attributed to Edison. So, he saw it. I've heard it said about Japanese teenagers, so it's international. And great literature is littered with writers mocking contemporary idiocy (Moliere, Swift, Ovid), so I'm thinking it's pretty steadily the nature of humanity.
I've also noticed that we all tend to gloss over our own denser moments, or those of friends, more kindly than that of strangers. To bastardize a running joke from Yes Prime Minister (Brit-com from about 1980) , "Oh, it's one of those irregular verbs: I find it uninteresting, you hadn't noticed, and they're just idiots".
Disagree with adjacent comment on whether public education is broken to the core. First, the word 'public' implies that private schools are better, which is laughable at best. Second, the better term is 'deeply flawed'. A broken mechanism doesn't work AT ALL.
As a former (and probably future) volunteer first responder, I'm ok with us (government of/by/for the people) spending an extra $250 for my old coworkers' vaccines, rather than kill even one in TENS of thousands of first responders..
This story smells like more 'how to lie with statistics' by some reactionary rightwing think tank. Typical day on slashdot, alas.
Everyone else has good tech suggestions... but also have a talk with your SO regularly to solve the problem without just throwing tech at it. If she's a light sleeper, the tech might be needed. If she's able to adapt, the problem may solve itself or take some minor shift like telling her 'kick me when you hear a work pager' (i.e., she becomes part of your alarm mechanism -- there's no fooling the spouse-as-snoozebar)
Wife used to notice stuff like this. Then the first baby came along and we started divvying out the labor: I feed the last bottle, she does the wee hours stuff and I do the early dawn stuff. This has evolved into kids, old cats gackking up hairballs, txts or calls about server issues, weather-related sounds (storm: close the windows), my insomnia and god knows how many other minor overnight interrupts.
Oh, and we got a kingsize bed (just that few inches more separation disturbs her less when I get out of bed) and I got rid of the boss who skimped on everything, then thought they owned me 24x7 to compensate.
Nowadays, we'll *RARELY* just be affected by these things. When that happens, we mention the problem and quickly adjust. But most triggers get ignored without even waking up. OTOH, if I need my wife awake, I can play her ringtone on my phone or speak her name loudly or make a sound like a cat hurking up dinner and *PRESTO*. (I know better than to ever abuse that knowledge -- I think my wife'd turn into the angry spawn of Shiva and Cthulu if I did it as a prank. I choose life.)
Most importantly, try to rein in the late night calls: they shouldn't be a habit unless you get compensated incredibly well for also doing off-hours support. Don't let employers abuse you. Rule of thumb: If the calls seem lame or about preventable issues, and if the company won't pay extra for prevention, you're being abused.
But what happens to all that code once it's written? It Bitrots
Do you just ship it and move on? yes
Do your metrics take into account time spent refactoring or documenting existing code? no
Is it even possible to devise metrics for these activities? maybe
Are developers who take time to train and mentor other teams about the latest code changes considered less productive than ones who stay heads-down at their desks and never reach out to their peers? probably
How about teams that take time at the beginning of a project to coordinate with other teams for code reuse, versus those who charge ahead blindly? Definitely
Can any automated tool measure these kinds of best practices? possibly
Possibly?! More like 'Not Very Damn Likely'. Even peer-ratings metrics geared to get a sense of who on the team is most valued get gamed.
Nice try, Mr Koch. Pretend like your pet AGW-denier scientist didn't review the data and find that researchers didn't abuse the data, didn't overstate the risk, and did seem to have a valid point.
And let's not even get into 'inexpensively adjust'... when drought, coastal flooding and famines happen, refugees hardly consider the impact inexpensive.
Everything about this reads like every AGW geek I've encountered. Most get it from church or their employment -- I've never seen such a widespread mess of what Aldous Huxley called 'Vincible Ignorance' as is currently getting shovelled by American conservatives right now. As a scientist and engineer, it's truly depressing as hell.
A countercase exists for Memoirs, trade secrets, very sensitive (military) research, and data that is incredibly expensive to reproduce all qualify for 'more than 20 years' protection.
Twain wanted decades beyond the death of anyone involved in some of his memoirs. Nixon probably wouldn't have disagreed. Ditto RandomJoe's pron archive.
Companies like Coca Cola and manufacturers with proprietary manufacturing steps keep things proprietary expressly because that information's value might last longer than a patent's 17 years.
Securing data based on governmental research (nuclear power design) is the difference between [Canada, Iran, Russia, India, China, North Korea, Belgium, USA, etc] spending immense money to reinvent reactor fuel configuration designs that increase maritime reactor duty cycles tenfold (6m running:2 years in the drydock vs. 2+ years running, 6m in the drydock). That qualifies for both of my last examples above.
And then there's the obvious one: Espionage / diplomatic information might easily have a lifetime beyond 20 years. The effects of leakage can range from a pissed off Israeli PM to covers blown and people killed in retribution. This applies whether it involves governments, drug cartels, or encrypted bank transactions by despots. For those last 2, it may not matter WHEN the money moved -- the existence of the money is enough to awaken a search.
(I'm not in favor of all of these... just aware of times when things matter for lifetimes).
I'll buy that linux may be more susceptible to destructive userspace problems, but are you really saying that the other *nixes aren't vulnerable to forkbombs? At all? Really?!
Seems to me that forkbombs are like disease, memory leaks, vulns and idiots -- no matter what you do to protect against 'em worse ones inevitably come along.
Wait a minute... it's a clipboard (i.e, stiff enough to write on), and bulletproof, but you think your scissors will shear it? Comparison to a thin sheet of tyvek or kevlar probably means they're only at risk to a really big set of shears (not scissors) with massive force. Meanwhile, stabby weapons do pose a piercing risk to kevlar.
Meh, the Combinatorics don't work for a 6-player battle. Each person has 5 ways to win or lose, and there's no uniform distribution for the 25 possible non-identity (rock-vs-rock) states. Someone has to have 3 winning combinations or more, someone else gets stuck with at best 2.
We either have to have a 7th participant (or at least an odd one), or Spock Must Die* (sorry, couldn't resist the TOS reference) to get us back to 5, which had that elegant pentagram diagram that gave each participant 2 wins and 2 losses.
* yeah, I could have chosen the clipboard to die, but that obviates this whole discussion, and a 6-player game shows everyone else nicely balanced at winning 2 and losing 3 states.
You do understand that you and I (IT guy that I was/am) are a *very* small percentage of the user base?
Heh, then why don't car companies design cars for little old ladies from Pasadena, and not for performance geeks. Hell, aside from backwater stretches in UT and MT, where in the US do most cars even need a speedometer that shows more than 80 MPH? Why do most office apps have deep functionality reserved for mail-merge, legal forms, dynamic embedding, cross functionality like functions in docs and database queries in spreadsheets, code-driven customizations, etc, if most of us never touch 90% of that crap? Why have all those extraneous buttons on my microwave? Why have advanced ANYTHING, since only a very small percentage of users care about even HALF of the functions on any such system or device.
I'll tell you why: My mom right-clicks for SOME functions. My sister doesn't care about 9/10ths of the UI, but is passionate about a few advanced features that niche neatly into her daily workflow. And ditto for everyone I know: each of us has a generic common usage footprint and a few unique specialties out of the advanced features that call for more depth or nuance than touch on a small tablet so far provides.
tl;dr: just because every function in an advanced-feature product is ignored by the majority of users by itself does not mean most people do NONE of that stuff.
PS: I never left Ub 10.10 as my primary workstation, and am migrating my working habits to a Mint VM. When I'm sure it does most of what I need, I'm gone -- It has taken Canonical/Ubuntu less than a year to push me from biggest fan to confused detractor and soon-to-be-ex-user. WTF, Shuttleworth?!
I guess someone didn't turn down that neon-blue "romulan ale" being passed around at Defcon back in *AUGUST*. And damn, it must have been potent...
Seriously, I've had some long benders, fierce hangovers, and have one friend who started their current drugs-n-alcohol extravaganza during the Clinton years, but it's an amazing coincidence that submitter AND/.'s editors have collectively been this far out of it since the news of Prison SCADA risks made the national news around that time.
Hey, editors: be on the lookout for two other SCADA stories you've no doubt missed since August: the SCADA security work done by my friends at Idaho National Laboratory and the Duqu worm (aka spawn-of-Stuxnet).
Spurious grounds: opinion, not yet held up in court. I was around for the first Look n Feel lawsuit, and I didn't have skin in the game like Jobs... once you've been burned by the legal system like that, you're an idiot if you don't learn SOME sort of lesson.
sweatshops: tarring Jobs with that is a cheap shot. My Tevas' manufacture went overseas. Ditto every other bit of outdoor gear I buy. Design in america, make in (insert cheap nation). Congressmen get tens of thousands of dollars per cycle from Samoa businessmen running sweatshops in international free trade zones there. My accountant has data entry done in India; if I checked, I bet my medical records are similarly transcribed/maintained. And most importantly, you are just as guilty of supporting sweatshops if you're BUYING that shit as he is for making it.
Am confused: GP compared a handful of phones that exist, then described an existing device sans downloadable apps (which everyone that owns an iphone knows, since that's how an iphone looks when purchased).
You seem to be comparing a phone that just released this morning to vaporware from a company that's struggling.
No disrespect, but your comparison does seem pretty pointless. Theirs, OTOH, seems valid except for it being one anecdote. Statistically, the CEO in GGP (chill)'s story ups the count to two. Our org's explosion of 'droid, iphone, win-mobile devices definitely confirms the exodus from blackberry.
What were you trying to call out as a bad comparison?
As is so plainly evidenced by his eagerness to sit in line overnight with other iphone-geeking gadget-happy wonks. He could get another phone delivered, and he's hanging out all night.
<sarc> Yeah, the dude has so-oo completely forgotten what it is to be a nerd. </sarc>
Also, check out Smile For The Grenade! "Camera Go Bang!" Vlad Gostom and Joshua Marpet have been at Derbycon, Defcon, etc their work toward a flare-gun-launched camera. When they presented their 'Firefly' at BSides LV this year, they acknowledged they're still struggling against acceleration-related problems, and consider their work at version 0.1 level.
But the ideas have promise, and a flaregun launcher design offers greater range than throwing, uses tech already in nonmilitary use, has search-and-rescue and other nonmilitary uses, and will be much cheaper than the military devices (if memory serves, down from $2000 per round single-use, down to $200 and a possibility of reuse). And making it into a throwable device that lands upright would be child's play compared to the 'survive being fired out of a gun' logisitical challenges.
Yeah, I base my product evaluations entirely on whether the version number goes from N to N.1 vs. N to N+1. It's a goddamned VERSION number folks.
Sheesh, the antifanboi-ism is almost as insane as the fanboi ranting. I'm a 3g owner that has waited far too long to upgrade in part because I was hoping for a worthy webOS working-grade phone (not some pixie whosit). To me, they've said the 4s improvements are: faster better camera, better antenna (the 4's antenna is a dealbreaker where I've tested it), good cloud integration, better chip, better battery life, and voice-driven functionality. It sure smells like the rumored iphone 5 from where I'm sitting. Better, not a slam dunk win over new droids, and enough to make me mildly want it, in spite of my techno-tinkering ways making me more of an android kind of user.
Oh, and it stuck with same form-factor, meaning docks and protective cases and other accessories won't set me back as much as the phone itself. That's a big damn deal, IMHO.
Meh, I'll toss in a token 'get over yourself, kid' for all of us grumpy oldsters that were taught to touch-type with 2 spaces after each sentence (. or ? or !). Doublespacing periods isn't a sin. It's not 'flat out wrong'. It's an innocuous habit I still have due to decades of typing and an edge case: I go back and forth between monospace code and publishable material like this post. I could do a lot worse. For starters, I could be a grammar nazi while (squints at screen) typing 2 sentence fragments and a -- sweet web-formatting jesus, did you really use just 12 words to anchor a link while telling us 2 *INVISIBLE* spaces is bad juju?! Get the Hell. Off. My. Lawn.
tl;dr: parent = grammar nazi post that has mistakes. There ought to be a meme for this...
Nice idea, but not realistic. For one, there's a huge economic impact to political assassinations. There's the raft of people traveling with the president. There's the people supporting the people whose job it is to travel with the president and never miss a thing (can't step away to do X). There's staff dedicated to continuity of military control (every military general has a rather sizable entourage, and this guy's their CO). Once you make every waking moment a press event, there's planners and 'advance' teams, and there are people to tear things down afterward. F***ing zoo, but it has become this steadily over 50 years.
IMHO, the entirety of Washington DC has that problem, right down to the absurd barricade ratmaze y'all have turned your streets into. Jefferson would be appalled. If it were me, I'd decentralize all the admin offices, I'd put congressional sessions into regional enclaves and videoconference tech, bump the congresscritter count up to... meh... 50k or so, and make congress a part-time role. Oh, and I'd felonize fundraising -- treat it as the bribery that it is.
As for patents and a lot of other old laws (elections, copyright, campaigning, import/export), they're due for real revamping. Which an established system will never allow. I suspect this is a crux part of what inevitably kills empires, but I keep hoping I'm wrong...
If I can politely disagree, you may not know *completely*, but you can infer with great accuracy a LOT about a law that is widely in use elsewhere. You can make a priority list of desired goals and try to gap-analyze the legislation against that list to see what it is likely to fix, and what isn't even mentioned. You can look at business examples (or call 'em Use Cases). You can measure the bureaucratic load. You can ask people familiar with the process to review and provide feedback.
Of course, you can also let lobbyists suggest crapola legislation, then feign surprise when the devil appears out of the details.
Agree with most of your comment, although I'd insist that software copyright (copyright in general) needs a much shorter window of protection, or some other public-interest adjustment.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: Wired says Joe Weiss thinks it was a hack, or that at least something fishy is going on.
Ask a wide cross-section of SCADA geeks what they think of Joe.
No, the message was:
"Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? ... And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Grunt'! That's it! Grunt! Ha!
I wonder if it'll be friends with me?"
Admit it, "Phobos Grunt" sounds like Douglas Adams jokingly came up with the name.
Be sure to mention her passing to your neighbor and her daughter when you get a chance.
Earlier today I was surprised to learn that another famous writer lived a LOT longer and later than I had ever thought (their heyday was decades before I was born), and that I was young enough to not notice their passing.
Came here to also say idiocy was rampant in 70's, and my grandma had a dim view of her peer group in the 1910-30 time frame. Then there's that “Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.” -- a quote widely attributed to Edison. So, he saw it. I've heard it said about Japanese teenagers, so it's international. And great literature is littered with writers mocking contemporary idiocy (Moliere, Swift, Ovid), so I'm thinking it's pretty steadily the nature of humanity.
I've also noticed that we all tend to gloss over our own denser moments, or those of friends, more kindly than that of strangers. To bastardize a running joke from Yes Prime Minister (Brit-com from about 1980) , "Oh, it's one of those irregular verbs: I find it uninteresting, you hadn't noticed, and they're just idiots".
Disagree with adjacent comment on whether public education is broken to the core. First, the word 'public' implies that private schools are better, which is laughable at best. Second, the better term is 'deeply flawed'. A broken mechanism doesn't work AT ALL.
As a former (and probably future) volunteer first responder, I'm ok with us (government of/by/for the people) spending an extra $250 for my old coworkers' vaccines, rather than kill even one in TENS of thousands of first responders..
This story smells like more 'how to lie with statistics' by some reactionary rightwing think tank. Typical day on slashdot, alas.
Everyone else has good tech suggestions... but also have a talk with your SO regularly to solve the problem without just throwing tech at it. If she's a light sleeper, the tech might be needed. If she's able to adapt, the problem may solve itself or take some minor shift like telling her 'kick me when you hear a work pager' (i.e., she becomes part of your alarm mechanism -- there's no fooling the spouse-as-snoozebar)
Wife used to notice stuff like this. Then the first baby came along and we started divvying out the labor: I feed the last bottle, she does the wee hours stuff and I do the early dawn stuff. This has evolved into kids, old cats gackking up hairballs, txts or calls about server issues, weather-related sounds (storm: close the windows), my insomnia and god knows how many other minor overnight interrupts.
Oh, and we got a kingsize bed (just that few inches more separation disturbs her less when I get out of bed) and I got rid of the boss who skimped on everything, then thought they owned me 24x7 to compensate.
Nowadays, we'll *RARELY* just be affected by these things. When that happens, we mention the problem and quickly adjust. But most triggers get ignored without even waking up. OTOH, if I need my wife awake, I can play her ringtone on my phone or speak her name loudly or make a sound like a cat hurking up dinner and *PRESTO*. (I know better than to ever abuse that knowledge -- I think my wife'd turn into the angry spawn of Shiva and Cthulu if I did it as a prank. I choose life.)
Most importantly, try to rein in the late night calls: they shouldn't be a habit unless you get compensated incredibly well for also doing off-hours support. Don't let employers abuse you. Rule of thumb: If the calls seem lame or about preventable issues, and if the company won't pay extra for prevention, you're being abused.
Lets see...
Possibly?! More like 'Not Very Damn Likely'. Even peer-ratings metrics geared to get a sense of who on the team is most valued get gamed.
Nice try, Mr Koch. Pretend like your pet AGW-denier scientist didn't review the data and find that researchers didn't abuse the data, didn't overstate the risk, and did seem to have a valid point.
And let's not even get into 'inexpensively adjust'... when drought, coastal flooding and famines happen, refugees hardly consider the impact inexpensive.
Everything about this reads like every AGW geek I've encountered. Most get it from church or their employment -- I've never seen such a widespread mess of what Aldous Huxley called 'Vincible Ignorance' as is currently getting shovelled by American conservatives right now. As a scientist and engineer, it's truly depressing as hell.
A countercase exists for Memoirs, trade secrets, very sensitive (military) research, and data that is incredibly expensive to reproduce all qualify for 'more than 20 years' protection.
Twain wanted decades beyond the death of anyone involved in some of his memoirs. Nixon probably wouldn't have disagreed. Ditto RandomJoe's pron archive.
Companies like Coca Cola and manufacturers with proprietary manufacturing steps keep things proprietary expressly because that information's value might last longer than a patent's 17 years.
Securing data based on governmental research (nuclear power design) is the difference between [Canada, Iran, Russia, India, China, North Korea, Belgium, USA, etc] spending immense money to reinvent reactor fuel configuration designs that increase maritime reactor duty cycles tenfold (6m running:2 years in the drydock vs. 2+ years running, 6m in the drydock). That qualifies for both of my last examples above.
And then there's the obvious one: Espionage / diplomatic information might easily have a lifetime beyond 20 years. The effects of leakage can range from a pissed off Israeli PM to covers blown and people killed in retribution. This applies whether it involves governments, drug cartels, or encrypted bank transactions by despots. For those last 2, it may not matter WHEN the money moved -- the existence of the money is enough to awaken a search.
(I'm not in favor of all of these... just aware of times when things matter for lifetimes).
I'll buy that linux may be more susceptible to destructive userspace problems, but are you really saying that the other *nixes aren't vulnerable to forkbombs? At all? Really?!
Seems to me that forkbombs are like disease, memory leaks, vulns and idiots -- no matter what you do to protect against 'em worse ones inevitably come along.
Wait a minute... it's a clipboard (i.e, stiff enough to write on), and bulletproof, but you think your scissors will shear it? Comparison to a thin sheet of tyvek or kevlar probably means they're only at risk to a really big set of shears (not scissors) with massive force. Meanwhile, stabby weapons do pose a piercing risk to kevlar.
Meh, the Combinatorics don't work for a 6-player battle. Each person has 5 ways to win or lose, and there's no uniform distribution for the 25 possible non-identity (rock-vs-rock) states. Someone has to have 3 winning combinations or more, someone else gets stuck with at best 2.
We either have to have a 7th participant (or at least an odd one), or Spock Must Die* (sorry, couldn't resist the TOS reference) to get us back to 5, which had that elegant pentagram diagram that gave each participant 2 wins and 2 losses.
* yeah, I could have chosen the clipboard to die, but that obviates this whole discussion, and a 6-player game shows everyone else nicely balanced at winning 2 and losing 3 states.
Heh, then why don't car companies design cars for little old ladies from Pasadena, and not for performance geeks. Hell, aside from backwater stretches in UT and MT, where in the US do most cars even need a speedometer that shows more than 80 MPH? Why do most office apps have deep functionality reserved for mail-merge, legal forms, dynamic embedding, cross functionality like functions in docs and database queries in spreadsheets, code-driven customizations, etc, if most of us never touch 90% of that crap? Why have all those extraneous buttons on my microwave? Why have advanced ANYTHING, since only a very small percentage of users care about even HALF of the functions on any such system or device.
I'll tell you why: My mom right-clicks for SOME functions. My sister doesn't care about 9/10ths of the UI, but is passionate about a few advanced features that niche neatly into her daily workflow. And ditto for everyone I know: each of us has a generic common usage footprint and a few unique specialties out of the advanced features that call for more depth or nuance than touch on a small tablet so far provides.
tl;dr: just because every function in an advanced-feature product is ignored by the majority of users by itself does not mean most people do NONE of that stuff.
PS: I never left Ub 10.10 as my primary workstation, and am migrating my working habits to a Mint VM. When I'm sure it does most of what I need, I'm gone -- It has taken Canonical/Ubuntu less than a year to push me from biggest fan to confused detractor and soon-to-be-ex-user. WTF, Shuttleworth?!
DUPE.
I guess someone didn't turn down that neon-blue "romulan ale" being passed around at Defcon back in *AUGUST*. And damn, it must have been potent...
Seriously, I've had some long benders, fierce hangovers, and have one friend who started their current drugs-n-alcohol extravaganza during the Clinton years, but it's an amazing coincidence that submitter AND /.'s editors have collectively been this far out of it since the news of Prison SCADA risks made the national news around that time.
Hey, editors: be on the lookout for two other SCADA stories you've no doubt missed since August: the SCADA security work done by my friends at Idaho National Laboratory and the Duqu worm (aka spawn-of-Stuxnet).
Wait, your wingnuts are atheists without guns?
Well, THAT explains why they never emigrated...
Spurious grounds: opinion, not yet held up in court. I was around for the first Look n Feel lawsuit, and I didn't have skin in the game like Jobs... once you've been burned by the legal system like that, you're an idiot if you don't learn SOME sort of lesson.
sweatshops: tarring Jobs with that is a cheap shot. My Tevas' manufacture went overseas. Ditto every other bit of outdoor gear I buy. Design in america, make in (insert cheap nation). Congressmen get tens of thousands of dollars per cycle from Samoa businessmen running sweatshops in international free trade zones there. My accountant has data entry done in India; if I checked, I bet my medical records are similarly transcribed/maintained. And most importantly, you are just as guilty of supporting sweatshops if you're BUYING that shit as he is for making it.
Am confused: GP compared a handful of phones that exist, then described an existing device sans downloadable apps (which everyone that owns an iphone knows, since that's how an iphone looks when purchased).
You seem to be comparing a phone that just released this morning to vaporware from a company that's struggling.
No disrespect, but your comparison does seem pretty pointless. Theirs, OTOH, seems valid except for it being one anecdote. Statistically, the CEO in GGP (chill)'s story ups the count to two. Our org's explosion of 'droid, iphone, win-mobile devices definitely confirms the exodus from blackberry.
What were you trying to call out as a bad comparison?
As is so plainly evidenced by his eagerness to sit in line overnight with other iphone-geeking gadget-happy wonks. He could get another phone delivered, and he's hanging out all night.
<sarc> Yeah, the dude has so-oo completely forgotten what it is to be a nerd. </sarc>
Also, check out Smile For The Grenade! "Camera Go Bang!" Vlad Gostom and Joshua Marpet have been at Derbycon, Defcon, etc their work toward a flare-gun-launched camera. When they presented their 'Firefly' at BSides LV this year, they acknowledged they're still struggling against acceleration-related problems, and consider their work at version 0.1 level.
But the ideas have promise, and a flaregun launcher design offers greater range than throwing, uses tech already in nonmilitary use, has search-and-rescue and other nonmilitary uses, and will be much cheaper than the military devices (if memory serves, down from $2000 per round single-use, down to $200 and a possibility of reuse). And making it into a throwable device that lands upright would be child's play compared to the 'survive being fired out of a gun' logisitical challenges.
Yeah, I base my product evaluations entirely on whether the version number goes from N to N.1 vs. N to N+1. It's a goddamned VERSION number folks.
Sheesh, the antifanboi-ism is almost as insane as the fanboi ranting. I'm a 3g owner that has waited far too long to upgrade in part because I was hoping for a worthy webOS working-grade phone (not some pixie whosit). To me, they've said the 4s improvements are: faster better camera, better antenna (the 4's antenna is a dealbreaker where I've tested it), good cloud integration, better chip, better battery life, and voice-driven functionality. It sure smells like the rumored iphone 5 from where I'm sitting. Better, not a slam dunk win over new droids, and enough to make me mildly want it, in spite of my techno-tinkering ways making me more of an android kind of user.
Oh, and it stuck with same form-factor, meaning docks and protective cases and other accessories won't set me back as much as the phone itself. That's a big damn deal, IMHO.
ObClassicSNL: "That mare had a foal?!"
To be fair, two spaces after a sentence close is normal
Flat-out wrong. Two spaces after a period only if you're using an actual, physical typewriter or a monospaced font.
Meh, I'll toss in a token 'get over yourself, kid' for all of us grumpy oldsters that were taught to touch-type with 2 spaces after each sentence (. or ? or !). Doublespacing periods isn't a sin. It's not 'flat out wrong'. It's an innocuous habit I still have due to decades of typing and an edge case: I go back and forth between monospace code and publishable material like this post. I could do a lot worse. For starters, I could be a grammar nazi while (squints at screen) typing 2 sentence fragments and a -- sweet web-formatting jesus, did you really use just 12 words to anchor a link while telling us 2 *INVISIBLE* spaces is bad juju?! Get the Hell. Off. My. Lawn.
tl;dr: parent = grammar nazi post that has mistakes. There ought to be a meme for this...
Yeah, because not only do we get all the fun of repressing our views, but They will hear us via our silence, in some sort of pseudo-zen handwavy way.
For me, voicing or acting to make clear one's disagreement with policies is never gratuitous. It's civic duty.
Nice idea, but not realistic. For one, there's a huge economic impact to political assassinations. There's the raft of people traveling with the president. There's the people supporting the people whose job it is to travel with the president and never miss a thing (can't step away to do X). There's staff dedicated to continuity of military control (every military general has a rather sizable entourage, and this guy's their CO). Once you make every waking moment a press event, there's planners and 'advance' teams, and there are people to tear things down afterward. F***ing zoo, but it has become this steadily over 50 years.
IMHO, the entirety of Washington DC has that problem, right down to the absurd barricade ratmaze y'all have turned your streets into. Jefferson would be appalled. If it were me, I'd decentralize all the admin offices, I'd put congressional sessions into regional enclaves and videoconference tech, bump the congresscritter count up to ... meh... 50k or so, and make congress a part-time role. Oh, and I'd felonize fundraising -- treat it as the bribery that it is.
As for patents and a lot of other old laws (elections, copyright, campaigning, import/export), they're due for real revamping. Which an established system will never allow. I suspect this is a crux part of what inevitably kills empires, but I keep hoping I'm wrong...
If I can politely disagree, you may not know *completely*, but you can infer with great accuracy a LOT about a law that is widely in use elsewhere. You can make a priority list of desired goals and try to gap-analyze the legislation against that list to see what it is likely to fix, and what isn't even mentioned. You can look at business examples (or call 'em Use Cases). You can measure the bureaucratic load. You can ask people familiar with the process to review and provide feedback.
Of course, you can also let lobbyists suggest crapola legislation, then feign surprise when the devil appears out of the details.
Agree with most of your comment, although I'd insist that software copyright (copyright in general) needs a much shorter window of protection, or some other public-interest adjustment.