Change 'hobby' to 'social drinking'. How about we take this logic and apply it to alcohol (as it relates to deaths due to drunk driving)? Any takers? If not, why not?
Well, although the UK haven't taken the extreme measure of banning alcohol, the penalties for driving or attempting to drive with excess alcohol are quite severe. The minimum penalty is a 1 year driving ban for a first offence (3 years ban if previously convicted within 10 years) and a fine of 125% of relevant weekly income (maximum £5,000), rising to a maximum of 5 years driving ban, and 6 months imprisionment (just for the driving offence, not taking into account any penalties for any other crimes committed at the time).
I do my part, as a European I actively boycott travel to the USA. There have been several opportunities for both myself and others to take trips to the USA, and I have proposed and worked with alternative plans every time. It's not a lot, but it's what I can do.
As long as the USA has insane paranoid immigration policies and the TSA I will not travel there, and neither will my immediate family. (I did go to Miami many years ago for a conference, but that was back when things were still sensible)
"Visa Waiver" my ass, that's just a visa-lite. If I need to apply to enter, they can forget it. The last countries I needed to request a visa to enter were Mauritania, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and as far as I could tell that was just a glorified way of squeezing extra cash out of visitors - and at least they didn't demand fingerprints and invasive grilling by border-guards. Mauritania border guards just wanted a small cash donation, and the others were happy with a ballpoint pen, an apple (he actually wanted sweets, but all we had was fruit) and an empty fuel-canister.
(yes, in our household we still use wooden blocks and other toys that don't come in fancy packaging, and yes our kids can pretend that just about anything is phone, or a car, or a plane)
That's kids for you - my 1 yo daughter recently grabbed a pack of toothbrushes from the shopping trolley as we went around the supermarket, and started babbling into it as if it were a cellphone.
-- Pete.
Oh, and where the hell is the "per post" checkbox to indicate not to use the Karma Bonus? I know it used to exist, and some of my posts just aren't worthy of the +1. I don't want to turn it off on all my posts, but it's nice to sometimes preemptively mod myself down to 1.
And if you buy AppleCare you not only get Apple warranty for three years instead of one, but free phone support on top of that.
I live in Belgium, and my first year warranty came up on Monday this week for my MacBookPro Retina. I came very close to buying AppleCare, but I baulked at the cost at the last moment (340 Euro). With this new ruling, I'm glad I gave it a miss, if it only gives me 1 additional year of coverage, and free support calls that I won't use anyway...
Having said that, I've had quite a bad run with AppleCare, I bought it for my first MacBookPro, which was then stolen 1 week after I activated the AppleCare - AppleCare doesn't help much for a stolen laptop... I then didn't buy it for my replacement MacBookPro, which developed a fault (pink areas on the screen that should be white) after about 2 years and 360 days...doh.
It was whoever that posted that ridiculous Tweet that deserved to be fired
She was fired. The two people who were fired was one of the devlopers making the jokes, and the woman who ignited a firestorm by tweeting it. Check the article carefully.
It was once promoted with some really annoying blinking pop-up ads for the X10 wireless control system. Around 2001, X10 was the fourth most popular property on the web. You can still buy X10 gear. It works fine. Nobody cares.
Thanks to those ads back in the day X10 made it onto my "never ever buy" list. Whenever I hear about X10 (even now) those ads are the first thing that jump into my mind, and I suddenly become highly disinterested in purchasing.
My point is that it is *incredibly* trivial to connect to a wireless router that has DHCP enabled and just use an IP address of your choosing
I recently ran into issues at home due to relying on this. I bought a firewall for my network, and assigned it as the DHCP server, I planned to have a DHCP allocation higher in the subnet, and to have most of my devices self-allocate an IP address lower down in the subnet (so I didn't need to have a static allocation via DHCP). To my surprise the self-allocated IPs weren't working, and couldn't get an outside connection, but anything allocated via DHCP could.
It seems that my firewall by default drops anything coming from an address not assigned via DHCP (which is nice actually, as it stops the behaviour listed in the quote). So I had to reserve DHCP addresses for my "known" devices, and have them assigned that way. Once I have everything assigned, I can restrict DHCP to the range of known devices, so anything else trying to connect will need to spoof a MAC to get an IP, and runs a very strong change of colliding (hence alerting me, and disrupting the offending traffic).
I have my own ideas about patents, I think there should be categories, rather than all patents being valid for the same term.
Patent duration should be related to the amount of R&D needed to develop and turn into a meaningful product, so if we absolutely have to have software patents, then they should have a duration of 1 or maybe 2 years - but a pharmacutical patent with a long development process and high costs can have the full existing term.
This would maintain the purpose of patents to allow the "inventor" to control their product within a reasonable time, but it would not stifle innovation where other new developments are trapped by a massive maze of existing patents in a fast moving field.
I have my own ideas about patents, I think there should be categories, rather than all patents being valid for the same term.
Patent duration should be related to the amount of R&D needed to develop and turn into a meaningful product, so if we absolutely have to have software patents, then they should have a duration of 1 or maybe 2 years - but a pharmacutical patent with a long development process and high costs can have the full existing term.
This would maintain the purpose of patents to allow the "inventor" to control their product within a reasonable time, but it would not stifle innovation where other new developments are trapped by a massive maze of existing patents in a fast moving field.
I am buying all my reading material as e-books where possible now - I have an iPad and a Kindle, but I only use the iPad for reading large page PDF files, the Kindle is used for novels etc.
My main irritation is when I see e-books priced more expensively than hardcover books. Sure, I understand that ebooks are taxed at full rate in the UK as opposed to a reduced rate for paper books, but on the flip side there's no printing, materials, quality control, shipping, etc which is needed with physical goods. If I try and buy an ebook and it's above the price of the printed copy, then it's off my list of things to buy for a few years until it becomes reasonably priced.
In a room of about 20 people you have a 50/50 chance of having the same birthday as someone else in the room.
No, no, no, no, no! In a room of about 20 people there is a 50/50 chance of having two people with the same birthday. This is absolutely different of you having the same birthday as someone else, which is about 5.5% chance.
Ahh, I remember Sabena, I flew with them on fairly frequent flights from Brussels to UK in 2001, tickets were cheap as dirt, and the plane was almost empty as no-one trusted that the airline would still be in business the next week. I didn't mind one bit (I saved more than enough on my flights, and paid via credit card in case they went bust - if I lost a flight it wouldn't be the end of the world) - on a couple of flights the flight attendants outnumbered the passengers, so there was excellent service.
Of course they did eventually go bust in November 2001, and SN Brussels Airlines rose from the ashes, later becoming Brussels Airlines.
Hence the other part of my comment which you didn't quote: "and if I was running in an enterprise with a DS1512+ then I would certainly consider running in RAID6" (although at the time of writing I was actually thinking of the DS1812+ which is more suited to RAID6 as it holds more disks)
I have seen a RAID5 fail whilst waiting for a vendor to replace a disk in a corporate environment - let's just say the vendor had some explaining to do...
If performance is paramount, use SSD disks, and still use RAID5 or RAID6. The performance gains of RAID0 are absolutely not worth the risks in an enterprise environment.
Also if you're looking for ultimate performance, then you'll connect to the NAS via eSATA and not on the network (the Synology NAS in question has 2xeSATA ports).
I don't think a law firm is going to need such screaming fast disk access anyway.
Oh, and much as I hate replying to myself, I just remembered another very handy nice feature of Synology NAS boxes, they have a nice easy-to-use mechanism to backup the contents to another Synology box over the network. This is handy in upgrading, and in an enterprise environment it's a nice way to have an up-to-date redundant solution in case the worst happens. So if you have the budget and you want to have belt-and-braces (and in a law firm I hope both of these are the case) then I'd probably recommend getting 2 boxes, and back one up to the other.
Agree with the recommendation for Synology; they're hard to beat on value although you can find cheaper NAS boxes. I presently have both a DS207 (1TB) and a DS211 (6TB), and they work like a charm. Both are configured with a pair of disks in RAID0 so they're fairly quick...
I also definitely recommend Synology NAS solutions - very capable machines and the company is committed to follow-up with their software updates. You buy the NAS now, and as they release continual updates to their firmware, it just gets better and better "for free".
On the other hand, I would never recommend running a NAS with disks in RAID0 - you run a NAS to store your data and to be completely reliable, I configure my DS508 in RAID5, and if I was running in an enterprise with a DS1512+ then I would certainly consider running in RAID6. I have "lost" a disk in my RAID5, and the NAS rebuilt easily once I replaced it - but if you lose a disk in RAID0, then wave goodbye to your data. Unfortunately disks are not 100% reliable, and the speed increase means nothing as soon as you start accessing the NAS over a network.
When you hear names like "tomtom", "garmin" and so on, these companies do not actually provide maps. They provide UI shells and minor map modifications but licence actual maps either from navteq or tele atlas (two biggest providers of mapping data in the world).
The links are long since broken (and I said Russia, but it could equally of been China, I wasn't 100% sure where I was), but here are links to two of the photos that I put back online recently:
For instance, it is often said the US has high crime rates. WRONG, the murder rate in the US vs Holland is pretty much the same.
What a load of bull - check the statistics, and you'll find the murder rate in the USA is approximately 5 times higher per capita than in the Netherlands.
Or for something a little more recent and a lot less complex (and less deadly) there's Minecraft. No saves, every change to the world is changed as and when it happens - if a creeper happens to blow the front of your house apart then you're going to need to rebuild it.
Now they just need to enter an option for perma-death rather than having death just respawn you naked back on your starting square. Restart the world and it's randomly generated from scratch.
I'd love to see minecraft become more nethacky with complexity to discover, perma-death, and a very dangerous series of steps to get to some sort of objective...
I'm typing on a Belgian keyboard, and I would put an accent over an E by hitting ` or first, then typing the appropriate letter - È or É both typed without caps lock - I can't imagine French keyboards being any different.
First, don't visit -- not just "don't fly, but don't even visit -- the U.S. There are a lot of idiots saying this with the tone of, "If you don't like our policies, stay the **** out!", but that's not what I mean. If our country sees a significant decline in tourism, hopefully the decline in tourism revenues will help influence national policy.
This has been my approach to the USA ever since they started with the fingerprinting on entry policy. I will not travel to the USA for any purpose until they implement sane immigration policies.
Last year alone I set foot in 20 different countries in total, within Africa, Europe, and South America, and not one of them wanted fingerprints, and only third world countries wanted advance notice of travel (aka visas) - Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso...
Sorry, but I can't see myself travelling to the USA in the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, although the UK haven't taken the extreme measure of banning alcohol, the penalties for driving or attempting to drive with excess alcohol are quite severe. The minimum penalty is a 1 year driving ban for a first offence (3 years ban if previously convicted within 10 years) and a fine of 125% of relevant weekly income (maximum £5,000), rising to a maximum of 5 years driving ban, and 6 months imprisionment (just for the driving offence, not taking into account any penalties for any other crimes committed at the time).
-- Pete.
I do my part, as a European I actively boycott travel to the USA. There have been several opportunities for both myself and others to take trips to the USA, and I have proposed and worked with alternative plans every time. It's not a lot, but it's what I can do.
As long as the USA has insane paranoid immigration policies and the TSA I will not travel there, and neither will my immediate family. (I did go to Miami many years ago for a conference, but that was back when things were still sensible)
"Visa Waiver" my ass, that's just a visa-lite. If I need to apply to enter, they can forget it. The last countries I needed to request a visa to enter were Mauritania, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and as far as I could tell that was just a glorified way of squeezing extra cash out of visitors - and at least they didn't demand fingerprints and invasive grilling by border-guards. Mauritania border guards just wanted a small cash donation, and the others were happy with a ballpoint pen, an apple (he actually wanted sweets, but all we had was fruit) and an empty fuel-canister.
-- Pete.
That's kids for you - my 1 yo daughter recently grabbed a pack of toothbrushes from the shopping trolley as we went around the supermarket, and started babbling into it as if it were a cellphone.
-- Pete.
Oh, and where the hell is the "per post" checkbox to indicate not to use the Karma Bonus? I know it used to exist, and some of my posts just aren't worthy of the +1. I don't want to turn it off on all my posts, but it's nice to sometimes preemptively mod myself down to 1.
I live in Belgium, and my first year warranty came up on Monday this week for my MacBookPro Retina. I came very close to buying AppleCare, but I baulked at the cost at the last moment (340 Euro). With this new ruling, I'm glad I gave it a miss, if it only gives me 1 additional year of coverage, and free support calls that I won't use anyway...
Having said that, I've had quite a bad run with AppleCare, I bought it for my first MacBookPro, which was then stolen 1 week after I activated the AppleCare - AppleCare doesn't help much for a stolen laptop... I then didn't buy it for my replacement MacBookPro, which developed a fault (pink areas on the screen that should be white) after about 2 years and 360 days...doh.
-- Pete.
She was fired. The two people who were fired was one of the devlopers making the jokes, and the woman who ignited a firestorm by tweeting it. Check the article carefully.
-- Pete.
Thanks to those ads back in the day X10 made it onto my "never ever buy" list. Whenever I hear about X10 (even now) those ads are the first thing that jump into my mind, and I suddenly become highly disinterested in purchasing.
-- Pete.
I recently ran into issues at home due to relying on this. I bought a firewall for my network, and assigned it as the DHCP server, I planned to have a DHCP allocation higher in the subnet, and to have most of my devices self-allocate an IP address lower down in the subnet (so I didn't need to have a static allocation via DHCP). To my surprise the self-allocated IPs weren't working, and couldn't get an outside connection, but anything allocated via DHCP could.
It seems that my firewall by default drops anything coming from an address not assigned via DHCP (which is nice actually, as it stops the behaviour listed in the quote). So I had to reserve DHCP addresses for my "known" devices, and have them assigned that way. Once I have everything assigned, I can restrict DHCP to the range of known devices, so anything else trying to connect will need to spoof a MAC to get an IP, and runs a very strong change of colliding (hence alerting me, and disrupting the offending traffic).
-- Pete.
I have my own ideas about patents, I think there should be categories, rather than all patents being valid for the same term.
Patent duration should be related to the amount of R&D needed to develop and turn into a meaningful product, so if we absolutely have to have software patents, then they should have a duration of 1 or maybe 2 years - but a pharmacutical patent with a long development process and high costs can have the full existing term.
This would maintain the purpose of patents to allow the "inventor" to control their product within a reasonable time, but it would not stifle innovation where other new developments are trapped by a massive maze of existing patents in a fast moving field.
-- Pete.
I have my own ideas about patents, I think there should be categories, rather than all patents being valid for the same term.
Patent duration should be related to the amount of R&D needed to develop and turn into a meaningful product, so if we absolutely have to have software patents, then they should have a duration of 1 or maybe 2 years - but a pharmacutical patent with a long development process and high costs can have the full existing term.
This would maintain the purpose of patents to allow the "inventor" to control their product within a reasonable time, but it would not stifle innovation where other new developments are trapped by a massive maze of existing patents in a fast moving field.
-- Pete.
I am buying all my reading material as e-books where possible now - I have an iPad and a Kindle, but I only use the iPad for reading large page PDF files, the Kindle is used for novels etc.
My main irritation is when I see e-books priced more expensively than hardcover books. Sure, I understand that ebooks are taxed at full rate in the UK as opposed to a reduced rate for paper books, but on the flip side there's no printing, materials, quality control, shipping, etc which is needed with physical goods. If I try and buy an ebook and it's above the price of the printed copy, then it's off my list of things to buy for a few years until it becomes reasonably priced.
-- Pete.
No, no, no, no, no! In a room of about 20 people there is a 50/50 chance of having two people with the same birthday. This is absolutely different of you having the same birthday as someone else, which is about 5.5% chance.
-- Pete.
Ahh, I remember Sabena, I flew with them on fairly frequent flights from Brussels to UK in 2001, tickets were cheap as dirt, and the plane was almost empty as no-one trusted that the airline would still be in business the next week. I didn't mind one bit (I saved more than enough on my flights, and paid via credit card in case they went bust - if I lost a flight it wouldn't be the end of the world) - on a couple of flights the flight attendants outnumbered the passengers, so there was excellent service.
Of course they did eventually go bust in November 2001, and SN Brussels Airlines rose from the ashes, later becoming Brussels Airlines.
-- Pete.
I have "lost" a disk in my RAID5, and the NAS rebuilt easily once I replaced it - but if you lose a disk in RAID0, then wave goodbye to your data.
With modern drives sized in terabytes, the same thing can happen to RAID5 if you lose a disk while rebuilding.
Hence the other part of my comment which you didn't quote: "and if I was running in an enterprise with a DS1512+ then I would certainly consider running in RAID6" (although at the time of writing I was actually thinking of the DS1812+ which is more suited to RAID6 as it holds more disks)
I have seen a RAID5 fail whilst waiting for a vendor to replace a disk in a corporate environment - let's just say the vendor had some explaining to do...
-- Pete.
If performance is paramount, use SSD disks, and still use RAID5 or RAID6. The performance gains of RAID0 are absolutely not worth the risks in an enterprise environment.
Also if you're looking for ultimate performance, then you'll connect to the NAS via eSATA and not on the network (the Synology NAS in question has 2xeSATA ports).
I don't think a law firm is going to need such screaming fast disk access anyway.
-- Pete.
Oh, and much as I hate replying to myself, I just remembered another very handy nice feature of Synology NAS boxes, they have a nice easy-to-use mechanism to backup the contents to another Synology box over the network. This is handy in upgrading, and in an enterprise environment it's a nice way to have an up-to-date redundant solution in case the worst happens. So if you have the budget and you want to have belt-and-braces (and in a law firm I hope both of these are the case) then I'd probably recommend getting 2 boxes, and back one up to the other.
-- Pete.
Agree with the recommendation for Synology; they're hard to beat on value although you can find cheaper NAS boxes. I presently have both a DS207 (1TB) and a DS211 (6TB), and they work like a charm. Both are configured with a pair of disks in RAID0 so they're fairly quick...
I also definitely recommend Synology NAS solutions - very capable machines and the company is committed to follow-up with their software updates. You buy the NAS now, and as they release continual updates to their firmware, it just gets better and better "for free".
On the other hand, I would never recommend running a NAS with disks in RAID0 - you run a NAS to store your data and to be completely reliable, I configure my DS508 in RAID5, and if I was running in an enterprise with a DS1512+ then I would certainly consider running in RAID6. I have "lost" a disk in my RAID5, and the NAS rebuilt easily once I replaced it - but if you lose a disk in RAID0, then wave goodbye to your data. Unfortunately disks are not 100% reliable, and the speed increase means nothing as soon as you start accessing the NAS over a network.
-- Pete.
When you hear names like "tomtom", "garmin" and so on, these companies do not actually provide maps. They provide UI shells and minor map modifications but licence actual maps either from navteq or tele atlas (two biggest providers of mapping data in the world).
TomTom bought TeleAtlas in 2008...
-- Pete.
My flight was via Frankfurt I think - I was flying via a connecting flight, and although I'm from the UK, I didn't live there then (or now!).
-- Pete.
These structures absolutely exist...
Here's a slashdot post by myself from 2001
The links are long since broken (and I said Russia, but it could equally of been China, I wasn't 100% sure where I was), but here are links to two of the photos that I put back online recently:
-- Pete.
They're both electric car sharing efforts, and just because the one is Paris is bigger, that doesn't make it "first".
Or are you one of those people who also think that the iPod was the "first" portable mp3 player?
-- Pete.
And looking at a more recent example I've been seeing Zen Cars around Brussels recently too.
This is definitely not a "World's First"...
-- Pete.
What a load of bull - check the statistics, and you'll find the murder rate in the USA is approximately 5 times higher per capita than in the Netherlands.
I suggest you do some research and adjust your world view.
-- Pete.
Or for something a little more recent and a lot less complex (and less deadly) there's Minecraft. No saves, every change to the world is changed as and when it happens - if a creeper happens to blow the front of your house apart then you're going to need to rebuild it.
Now they just need to enter an option for perma-death rather than having death just respawn you naked back on your starting square. Restart the world and it's randomly generated from scratch.
I'd love to see minecraft become more nethacky with complexity to discover, perma-death, and a very dangerous series of steps to get to some sort of objective...
-- Pete.
I'm typing on a Belgian keyboard, and I would put an accent over an E by hitting ` or first, then typing the appropriate letter - È or É both typed without caps lock - I can't imagine French keyboards being any different.
-- Pete.
This has been my approach to the USA ever since they started with the fingerprinting on entry policy. I will not travel to the USA for any purpose until they implement sane immigration policies.
Last year alone I set foot in 20 different countries in total, within Africa, Europe, and South America, and not one of them wanted fingerprints, and only third world countries wanted advance notice of travel (aka visas) - Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso...
Sorry, but I can't see myself travelling to the USA in the foreseeable future.
-- Pete.