Well, for the lack of government offered health insurance, you can thank the fine legislators who refused to support the act with the public option, as well as the general obstructionist attitude that the GOP has represented in talks about this and any other bills that look to move our country forward.
There were 51 senators in favor of having a public option. That's a majority. However, since we had, at the time, 40 people who refused to participate in the legislative process, there had to be unanimity among the remainder to get anything done. Had just 9 of those 40 (22.5%) decided, hey, this law is going to happen, and I can help it happen, and get my input into making it better, then it could have been a better law.
We have 100 elected senators whose job it is to represent the people, discuss and debate topics of importance to the country, and work to create legislation that comes from those discussions, those debates. If we continue to elect people that are not only going to actively refuse to participate in these debates and discussions, but who are going to try to sandbag the people who ARE trying to actively solve the problems of our country, then it's not a surprise that people are unhappy about certain parts of it.
Netflix isn't discriminating. They're selling a product. Whether that product is of use to someone with a particular disability is going to decide whether or not they purchase that product.
If you're deaf, and if you know that you're not going to get captions out of something you purchase, are you going to buy it? Are they going to require that every single thing that is bought or sold in our country specifically accommodates deaf people?
By that nature, are auto manufacturers going to be required to provide cars that can be driven by the blind? Is Nike going to have to make shoes that can be worn by quadruple amputees? It's a slippery slope when you dictate what a company is or is not allowed to sell.
Without closed captions, a video is not as valuable to someone who can't hear the attached audio. At that point, a decision can be made to purchase or not purchase the product. Netflix isn't fraudulently claiming that their videos contain captions when they don't. There is no barrier that stops people with disabilities from purchasing their product. There is nothing that stops people from using their own third party software to convert speech to captions.
With that in mind, people who are hard of hearing or deaf have a choice. They can purchase the product, which is advertised as is, or they can choose not to. The ADA requires that accommodations are available for accessibility of stores - it makes no claims over whether the products said stores are selling needs to be what people with disabilities would want. Otherwise, Wal-Mart would be in violation for selling pogo sticks, because clearly, a quadraplegic would not be able to use one. Barnes and Noble would be in violation for selling books, because illiterate people who are such because of a learning disability would not be able to read them. Certainly Best Buy can't sell car stereos without requiring that they have a display that shows all of the lyrics of every song they play.
One good discount method - AMC has some "Premium" theatres (YMMV, as there may not be one near you). It's about $20 a ticket, but you get free soda and popcorn, which makes it worthwhile if you were planning to get that anyway. They also have more comfortable seating than their normal theatres, and don't allow kids in. The way to go if you're planning to go into a diabetic coma and eat fattening popcorn with lots of fake butter while you watch a movie.
Precedent has shown that you are 100% correct, even when the alternative is not a bomb here, but a loss of lives in military conflict there.
However, given that Stuxnet and Flame both clearly were successfully deployed, infiltrated the relevant systems, and didn't cause a meltdown, is a pretty good indication that they weren't intended to cause a meltdown. Given the nature of what they're working with, I'd say it's likely (although not a guarantee) that they were coded in a way to not affect failsafe systems.
If you're planning on getting one, it's worth looking at your OS, too. If you use Vista or an earlier Windows OS, you're not going to have support to TRIM commands (without which future write operations can be slowed).
It's also worth looking at some settings. If you have concerns about the shelf life of your drive, you could be exacerbating that if your SSD is used for virtual memory, since there's a significant amount of reading/writing going on with the paging file.
From a purely anecdotal standpoint, I can say that the reliability is not an issue. I've had an OCZ 60GB SSD for my operating system and a couple of frequently used games, while using an HDD for the volume storage, and have been using it for almost two years without running into any issues from the drive. The performance impact is noticeable (as far as games go, load screens go by much more quickly, other than that, the big issue is that it will take your system a hell of a lot less time to boot up).
I'm going to daresay that the ones who only work a few hours a year are going to be the ones who are well above the median chance of 20% as far as getting caught goes. Doing it right takes a little preparation.
For current devices, USB/SATA really don't tend to be the biggest bottlenecks.
It's nice that they're developing technology to improve this. But I have a feeling adoption of this is going to be slow going, since there's no immediate benefit and it increases the expense. I could see this quickly going the way of FireWire.
...it's a scary thought to see how much could be done if they used this a pre-cog. Conceivably, if you searched for something on a 'banned list', they could report it to the police, track your location via your Android phone so that police can find you, or, maybe even have your car drive you to the nearest police station (with their fine self-driving vehicles). Or spot you via one of their Street View patrols, combined with facial recognition software. Never mind if you also emailed a friend about the potential crime from your Gmail account.
The "guns don't kill people" argument has been around for a long while. And while I'm going to go out and say that I support the right to bear arms, I think it's an absolutely fallacious argument.
While you can argue that guns don't kill all day, you have to keep in mind what they were designed to do. They were designed to kill. There is no other valid function for them. You can't use them to cut your steak up (like a knife). You can't use them to do anything but kill (unless of course you count target practice, which, ultimately, is practicing to kill).
So yes, it takes a person behind the gun to actually point it and pull the trigger to perpetrate a murder with a gun. And the ultimate issue at hand isn't gun ownership. But the cavalier attitude of "guns don't kill people" overlooks the entire reasons guns exist - to kill. Keeping in mind the gravity of that, and accepting the responsibility that comes with that, is something that every gun owner would do well to think about.
As bad as insurance rates are, in general, the insurance market doesn't "rake folks over the coals".
Insurance is a very unique business model in which the cost to 'make' the product isn't known at the time of sale. But there's a lot of information that can be used to determine what it's going to cost. And scientific information on rising sea levels is among that information.
Raking over the coals implies a certain gouging. What's going to happen is that insurance is going to be expensive, but it's because the insurance companies will be reasonably certain that it's going to cost a hell of a lot in future claims. And that's just good business.
It sounds way too much like this guy is trying to make a living off of being Tom Smykowski from Office Space. Let everyone else do your job for you, and make money off of it. Quite a dream, eh?
At the end of the day, there's a hell of a lot more to being a legislator than taking the votes from the people and giving them to the senate. It's about taking complex problems, and coming up with complex solutions, combined with the sales component of convincing people that that's how they would have wanted it to be solved.
I'm at one of those companies. In my 30s, I'm one of the younger folks. Older software companies are where you're apt to find a lot more stability and reasonable working hours, perhaps at the expense of a gaudy starting salary.
I'm hoping that it has redundancy involved - the same way there's a backup BIOS on some mobos so that you don't brick it if there's an error while flashing. Maybe the initial version of it permanently flashed on a ROM, that it will use if a later version is corrupted (which can be checked by CRC or something as such).
Considering that this is a remote thing, you especially have to consider the possibility that the vehicle can go out of range to receive additional parts of the update, etc, so there's a lot of ways that this could go wrong if they haven't thought through the possibilities. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that they've considered that.
The bigger concern I have is that they had better make sure that their software QC does not get lazy with this option available. A lot of times, that is the case - you figure if you mess up, you can always send a new patch with minimal error, but within a critical system such as a car, if you mess up badly enough and don't catch it before it ships, you can kill someone. Let's hope someone up top at corporate isn't thinking that this means they can reduce costs from a QC standpoint.
This is a far cry from a fair shelter for terrorists and kiddie pornographers. An IP address, in and of itself, isn't going to get you convicted of terrorism or possession of child pornography. It's something that points police in the right direction, then further investigation is what identifies the actual criminal.
Now, let's say that, for example, Bob Al Qaeda uses a public wifi connection at McDonald's to plot a terrorist attack. Do you think it's appropriate that the FBI arrest the franchiser of the McDonald's for terrorism, and call it a day? Or that they send said franchiser a letter demanding that they pay money or they will be sued? Or do you think, that, instead, they should use that as a starting point, find out who was using the connection to plot the terrorist attack, and arrest that person?
I'm going to say the latter is far more effective at not only preventing terrorism, but imprisoning the people responsible. And that's the point of this - the IP address does not identify the perpetrator, and copyright holders need to understand this in making efforts to protect their copyrights.
Do you understand how the concept of tax rates work?
Let's say, for argument's sake, that Blizzard's corporate tax rate, is 30%.
They sell a server for $250, and spend $100 of that money to ship it. They then donate the remaining $150 to charity.
Assuming, then, that they could write off the $250, that means they save $75 on their taxes.
So, let's look at it. They take in $250, they pay $100 for shipping, pay $150 to charities, and get to keep $75 of that. Sounds great, right? Amazing moneygrab from the company that's making about $153 million a month in subscription costs.
Now, let's suppose that they were the capitalist scoundrels that you're alleging they are (given, they do a lot of things to grab money, but framing this as one of them is silly).
They sell the server at auction for the same $250. They pay $100 of that to ship it. Let's assume, again, that they can write off shipping in the costs. So boom, they save $30 on taxes. $250 in income, $30 in saved taxes, minus $100 for the shipping cost. They've then gained $180.
So effectively, even after the tax implications are figured, they still could have earned more money by keeping the money for themselves than giving it to charity.
How dare those scumbags give the money to a hospital for kids.
At the end of the day, 300 MS latency can either be perfectly acceptable, or absolutely horrendous.
If you're playing an online game, 300 MS latency means that there's more than a half second delay between when something happens server side, and when you react to it. That's enough to get you killed in an FPS or MMO, even though half a second, in theory, doesn't sound like all that long. That's absolutely unacceptable.
If you have to wait half a second before a web page starts loading or a download begins, that's a different story altogether.
It also depends on what's causing the latency, and whether or not that level of latency is a regular occurrence or an unusual circumstance. From the sound of it, this has been a month that you've been seeking resolution, so it sounds like this is a regular occurrence. How are you measuring the latency? Is there a particular site / game / etc that it's this high for, and not necessarily all the time? Are you using a wireless network, or wired? What is your latency to the router?
If it is all the time, and if you're using it for gaming, or other situations in which higher levels of latency are severely impacting you, it's a good time to shop for a different ISP.
FWIW, I usually sit, give or take, around 20 ms latency with FIOS. There have been spikes of much, much worse, sometimes for as long as a day or two, but that hasn't been for quite a while, and has never been sustained long-term.
In theory, if the system is working properly, a search warrant has a list of specific things that can and can not be searched for. If they're searching your home, there is a scope - they're looking for things specifically related to the crime that they have probable cause to search for.
So in the same working theory, let's say that they obtain a search warrant to look specifically for images, videos, and web history relating to pornographic images of children (or however they want to word this). In the perfect world, that means that anything they find outside of that scope is inadmissible in a court of law, and, that if they investigate further solely based on the information found there, anything they find is inadmissible.
Colloquially, it's called "Fruit of the poisonous tree".
Same as with any search warrant, they have to establish probable cause to search or seize property.
If they don't know what it contains, then they don't have probable cause to search it.
Copy protection like that was cracked by enterprising people with access to a debugger well before anyone went to the Internet to pirate things.
(As in, the solution from years ago, was, in and of itself, solved years ago. Hell, maybe even decades ago.)
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Well, for the lack of government offered health insurance, you can thank the fine legislators who refused to support the act with the public option, as well as the general obstructionist attitude that the GOP has represented in talks about this and any other bills that look to move our country forward.
There were 51 senators in favor of having a public option. That's a majority. However, since we had, at the time, 40 people who refused to participate in the legislative process, there had to be unanimity among the remainder to get anything done. Had just 9 of those 40 (22.5%) decided, hey, this law is going to happen, and I can help it happen, and get my input into making it better, then it could have been a better law.
We have 100 elected senators whose job it is to represent the people, discuss and debate topics of importance to the country, and work to create legislation that comes from those discussions, those debates. If we continue to elect people that are not only going to actively refuse to participate in these debates and discussions, but who are going to try to sandbag the people who ARE trying to actively solve the problems of our country, then it's not a surprise that people are unhappy about certain parts of it.
Netflix isn't discriminating. They're selling a product. Whether that product is of use to someone with a particular disability is going to decide whether or not they purchase that product.
If you're deaf, and if you know that you're not going to get captions out of something you purchase, are you going to buy it? Are they going to require that every single thing that is bought or sold in our country specifically accommodates deaf people?
By that nature, are auto manufacturers going to be required to provide cars that can be driven by the blind? Is Nike going to have to make shoes that can be worn by quadruple amputees? It's a slippery slope when you dictate what a company is or is not allowed to sell.
Without closed captions, a video is not as valuable to someone who can't hear the attached audio. At that point, a decision can be made to purchase or not purchase the product. Netflix isn't fraudulently claiming that their videos contain captions when they don't. There is no barrier that stops people with disabilities from purchasing their product. There is nothing that stops people from using their own third party software to convert speech to captions.
With that in mind, people who are hard of hearing or deaf have a choice. They can purchase the product, which is advertised as is, or they can choose not to. The ADA requires that accommodations are available for accessibility of stores - it makes no claims over whether the products said stores are selling needs to be what people with disabilities would want. Otherwise, Wal-Mart would be in violation for selling pogo sticks, because clearly, a quadraplegic would not be able to use one. Barnes and Noble would be in violation for selling books, because illiterate people who are such because of a learning disability would not be able to read them. Certainly Best Buy can't sell car stereos without requiring that they have a display that shows all of the lyrics of every song they play.
One good discount method - AMC has some "Premium" theatres (YMMV, as there may not be one near you). It's about $20 a ticket, but you get free soda and popcorn, which makes it worthwhile if you were planning to get that anyway. They also have more comfortable seating than their normal theatres, and don't allow kids in. The way to go if you're planning to go into a diabetic coma and eat fattening popcorn with lots of fake butter while you watch a movie.
Precedent has shown that you are 100% correct, even when the alternative is not a bomb here, but a loss of lives in military conflict there.
However, given that Stuxnet and Flame both clearly were successfully deployed, infiltrated the relevant systems, and didn't cause a meltdown, is a pretty good indication that they weren't intended to cause a meltdown. Given the nature of what they're working with, I'd say it's likely (although not a guarantee) that they were coded in a way to not affect failsafe systems.
If you're planning on getting one, it's worth looking at your OS, too. If you use Vista or an earlier Windows OS, you're not going to have support to TRIM commands (without which future write operations can be slowed).
It's also worth looking at some settings. If you have concerns about the shelf life of your drive, you could be exacerbating that if your SSD is used for virtual memory, since there's a significant amount of reading/writing going on with the paging file.
From a purely anecdotal standpoint, I can say that the reliability is not an issue. I've had an OCZ 60GB SSD for my operating system and a couple of frequently used games, while using an HDD for the volume storage, and have been using it for almost two years without running into any issues from the drive. The performance impact is noticeable (as far as games go, load screens go by much more quickly, other than that, the big issue is that it will take your system a hell of a lot less time to boot up).
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=03052007 There's a good story arc in the Achewood comic that covers a masterfully baited scam artist. Yes, it's fiction, but still a great read.
I'm going to daresay that the ones who only work a few hours a year are going to be the ones who are well above the median chance of 20% as far as getting caught goes. Doing it right takes a little preparation.
For current devices, USB/SATA really don't tend to be the biggest bottlenecks. It's nice that they're developing technology to improve this. But I have a feeling adoption of this is going to be slow going, since there's no immediate benefit and it increases the expense. I could see this quickly going the way of FireWire.
And only got the response: "That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage."
...it's a scary thought to see how much could be done if they used this a pre-cog. Conceivably, if you searched for something on a 'banned list', they could report it to the police, track your location via your Android phone so that police can find you, or, maybe even have your car drive you to the nearest police station (with their fine self-driving vehicles). Or spot you via one of their Street View patrols, combined with facial recognition software. Never mind if you also emailed a friend about the potential crime from your Gmail account.
The "guns don't kill people" argument has been around for a long while. And while I'm going to go out and say that I support the right to bear arms, I think it's an absolutely fallacious argument.
While you can argue that guns don't kill all day, you have to keep in mind what they were designed to do. They were designed to kill. There is no other valid function for them. You can't use them to cut your steak up (like a knife). You can't use them to do anything but kill (unless of course you count target practice, which, ultimately, is practicing to kill).
So yes, it takes a person behind the gun to actually point it and pull the trigger to perpetrate a murder with a gun. And the ultimate issue at hand isn't gun ownership. But the cavalier attitude of "guns don't kill people" overlooks the entire reasons guns exist - to kill. Keeping in mind the gravity of that, and accepting the responsibility that comes with that, is something that every gun owner would do well to think about.
As bad as insurance rates are, in general, the insurance market doesn't "rake folks over the coals".
Insurance is a very unique business model in which the cost to 'make' the product isn't known at the time of sale. But there's a lot of information that can be used to determine what it's going to cost. And scientific information on rising sea levels is among that information.
Raking over the coals implies a certain gouging. What's going to happen is that insurance is going to be expensive, but it's because the insurance companies will be reasonably certain that it's going to cost a hell of a lot in future claims. And that's just good business.
If things go wrong with the connection, will they send Karl Hungus to fix it?
That's why they send him. He's an expert.
It sounds way too much like this guy is trying to make a living off of being Tom Smykowski from Office Space. Let everyone else do your job for you, and make money off of it. Quite a dream, eh?
At the end of the day, there's a hell of a lot more to being a legislator than taking the votes from the people and giving them to the senate. It's about taking complex problems, and coming up with complex solutions, combined with the sales component of convincing people that that's how they would have wanted it to be solved.
That post was Insightful, you insensitive clod.
I'm at one of those companies. In my 30s, I'm one of the younger folks. Older software companies are where you're apt to find a lot more stability and reasonable working hours, perhaps at the expense of a gaudy starting salary.
There are plenty of hard-working, non-droid, Americans who understand the binary language of moisture vaporators, you insensitive clod.
I'm hoping that it has redundancy involved - the same way there's a backup BIOS on some mobos so that you don't brick it if there's an error while flashing. Maybe the initial version of it permanently flashed on a ROM, that it will use if a later version is corrupted (which can be checked by CRC or something as such). Considering that this is a remote thing, you especially have to consider the possibility that the vehicle can go out of range to receive additional parts of the update, etc, so there's a lot of ways that this could go wrong if they haven't thought through the possibilities. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that they've considered that. The bigger concern I have is that they had better make sure that their software QC does not get lazy with this option available. A lot of times, that is the case - you figure if you mess up, you can always send a new patch with minimal error, but within a critical system such as a car, if you mess up badly enough and don't catch it before it ships, you can kill someone. Let's hope someone up top at corporate isn't thinking that this means they can reduce costs from a QC standpoint.
This is a far cry from a fair shelter for terrorists and kiddie pornographers. An IP address, in and of itself, isn't going to get you convicted of terrorism or possession of child pornography. It's something that points police in the right direction, then further investigation is what identifies the actual criminal. Now, let's say that, for example, Bob Al Qaeda uses a public wifi connection at McDonald's to plot a terrorist attack. Do you think it's appropriate that the FBI arrest the franchiser of the McDonald's for terrorism, and call it a day? Or that they send said franchiser a letter demanding that they pay money or they will be sued? Or do you think, that, instead, they should use that as a starting point, find out who was using the connection to plot the terrorist attack, and arrest that person? I'm going to say the latter is far more effective at not only preventing terrorism, but imprisoning the people responsible. And that's the point of this - the IP address does not identify the perpetrator, and copyright holders need to understand this in making efforts to protect their copyrights.
Do you understand how the concept of tax rates work? Let's say, for argument's sake, that Blizzard's corporate tax rate, is 30%. They sell a server for $250, and spend $100 of that money to ship it. They then donate the remaining $150 to charity. Assuming, then, that they could write off the $250, that means they save $75 on their taxes. So, let's look at it. They take in $250, they pay $100 for shipping, pay $150 to charities, and get to keep $75 of that. Sounds great, right? Amazing moneygrab from the company that's making about $153 million a month in subscription costs. Now, let's suppose that they were the capitalist scoundrels that you're alleging they are (given, they do a lot of things to grab money, but framing this as one of them is silly). They sell the server at auction for the same $250. They pay $100 of that to ship it. Let's assume, again, that they can write off shipping in the costs. So boom, they save $30 on taxes. $250 in income, $30 in saved taxes, minus $100 for the shipping cost. They've then gained $180. So effectively, even after the tax implications are figured, they still could have earned more money by keeping the money for themselves than giving it to charity. How dare those scumbags give the money to a hospital for kids.
At the end of the day, 300 MS latency can either be perfectly acceptable, or absolutely horrendous. If you're playing an online game, 300 MS latency means that there's more than a half second delay between when something happens server side, and when you react to it. That's enough to get you killed in an FPS or MMO, even though half a second, in theory, doesn't sound like all that long. That's absolutely unacceptable. If you have to wait half a second before a web page starts loading or a download begins, that's a different story altogether. It also depends on what's causing the latency, and whether or not that level of latency is a regular occurrence or an unusual circumstance. From the sound of it, this has been a month that you've been seeking resolution, so it sounds like this is a regular occurrence. How are you measuring the latency? Is there a particular site / game / etc that it's this high for, and not necessarily all the time? Are you using a wireless network, or wired? What is your latency to the router? If it is all the time, and if you're using it for gaming, or other situations in which higher levels of latency are severely impacting you, it's a good time to shop for a different ISP. FWIW, I usually sit, give or take, around 20 ms latency with FIOS. There have been spikes of much, much worse, sometimes for as long as a day or two, but that hasn't been for quite a while, and has never been sustained long-term.
Someone wrote him in as "Slick". Although that's not his name.
In theory, if the system is working properly, a search warrant has a list of specific things that can and can not be searched for. If they're searching your home, there is a scope - they're looking for things specifically related to the crime that they have probable cause to search for. So in the same working theory, let's say that they obtain a search warrant to look specifically for images, videos, and web history relating to pornographic images of children (or however they want to word this). In the perfect world, that means that anything they find outside of that scope is inadmissible in a court of law, and, that if they investigate further solely based on the information found there, anything they find is inadmissible. Colloquially, it's called "Fruit of the poisonous tree".
Same as with any search warrant, they have to establish probable cause to search or seize property. If they don't know what it contains, then they don't have probable cause to search it.
Copy protection like that was cracked by enterprising people with access to a debugger well before anyone went to the Internet to pirate things. (As in, the solution from years ago, was, in and of itself, solved years ago. Hell, maybe even decades ago.)