I don't think I ever saw tablets being particularly useful for tasks other than web browsing, but early-on, they were fantastic for that. I can't put my finger on all the reasons, but modern pages just don't seem to work as well on the tablet format. Part of it is that advertisers have adapted to intrusively grab your attention with slide-overs, and delayed pop-overs. Another might be a departure from columniation. Whatever the reasons, the convenience is gone, readability is down, and the whole experience just seems more cumbersome than it did in 2010.
Are you freakin' kidding me? How is a developer supposed to develop software that "requires administrator privileges" if he or she can't write to arbitrary directories and / or registry keys during normal, post-installation use? While you're at it, you might as well require your developers to use a 1080p screen, thus restricting their interfaces to actually rendering correctly on the displays of 99% of their users! What's next? Requiring the end product to run in an amount of memory likely to be supported on a single-socket motherboard and asking that code manipulating a database not be executed on the database server itself!!? Wow, just wow.
I wouldn't want to work for a company that would even considering a retro-active review of a person's credentials that were not forged. They are hired, all that matters is performance. I wouldn't care if their degree came from Shithole University, if they performed well then good for them.
I'm with you but the problem is, that in today's world, you aren't expected to take and keep a job for any consequential length of time. In the blink of an eye, all of ITT's graduates will be subject to automated resume parsing and job application scoring. They will immediately fall prey to what the various HR software providers call "knock out" questions. If you haven't heard of these, they're essentially immediate disqualifiers that prevent your resume or application from ever bothering a busy HR admin due to running afoul of some education-tied rule, lack of an experience keyword, etc. I've been involved in a number of demos lately and have been horrified both by the ubiquity of this feature and the vendors' zeal for including them in product demos.
"Clean diesel" is not something I've even heard of I don't believe. The word diesel its-self conjures images of soot spitting oily monster machines. The aforementioned ban is a good step in the right direction, albeit a decade or two later than it should have come.
I imagine that someone who saw early gasoline engines spewing black smoke a century ago would have had similar thoughts about them.
No wonder I always feel lost when I use Microsoft products. They can't even make a proper navigation tree.
If they didn't put the options in a different place and a layer deeper with each release, you wouldn't feel like you got any value when you're finally forced to upgrade.
Except I outsourced the manufacturing of the weapon to Ruger (LCP) and the "looks like a cell phone" aspect comes from keeping it in a pocket holster with an iPhone 4 back glass to reduce printing. Oh, you know what else helps its concealability? Being comfortable with it staying in my pocket. Always....not wanting to parade it around to find opportunities to preach about my rights or get approving nods from Bubba and Cletus. Jesus, redneck America, stop fondling your effing guns! Not only will they go unnoticed, but the people around you will be safer as well.
... I haven't seen any definitive information indicating whether the update can be done OTA or must be done via a USB cable and booting into a low level mode. Either way, the fact that a device can have it's software and/or firmware updated without user intervention is a security hole...
The court order specifically suggests several methods that Apple might use to comply. All ultimately involve physical possession of the phone in order for either Apple or the FBI to implement. For OTA and physical access alike, user intervention (authorized or not) is required. Furthermore, the integrity of the use of Apple's signing key is part of the security model, particularly for older devices such as the 5c in question. (Load whatever you'd like on newer ones - the hardware will still thwart brute force attacks.) If the government asks Apple to sign malware, even for good cause, they are asking them to intentionally weaken that model. Perhaps there are even issues of free speech involved since the government wants to force Apple to say (with its signing key) "This is legitimate, trustworthy software." in regard to something that is clearly not.
Cable card may be less than ideal in implementation as far as open source is concerned, but at least there, if you've got a cooperating cable provider, you can access much of that content in it's digital form, which is better than the previous options of analog capture.
So the question we need to ask is whether, from an open source perspective, this is actually going to improve things for us (I'm definitely skeptical on that), keep it about the same, or make it worse.
Didn't the cable companies finally kill CableCARD a year or two ago? Obviously, most will still give you one, but isn't the mandate dead? If so, it's only a matter of time before the remaining cooperation winds down.
Regardless, I think a robust market for consumer-owned set-top boxes is better for the DVR community than CableCARD ever was. Let's face it, no such mandate is going to be open source-friendly, so why not have a variety of commercial products that actually have to compete with one another for customers? In the end, open source projects such as mythTV and the wonderful (but in desperate need of an installer) Sage TV will benefit through the variety of work-arounds and hacks that develop. If nothing else, I can see someone developing a recording and playback peripheral device that "protects" the content while allowing scheduling and UI to be handled by software of the user's choice.
Uh.... no. The NES only had 64K of addressable memory. Only a fraction of that was available for games. Super Mario Bros used a 32KB cartridge.
More than 64K of effective memory on a cartridge was possible with bank switching (up to 1MB, switched in at 32K at a time), but Super Mario Bros did not use that.
Hardware limitations will tame bloat like nothing else. However, given some memory and CPU coupled with a drop-in framework for just about anything imaginable and the growth quickly becomes exponential. My Mario-comparable iOS "masterpiece" Cletus Land tallies in at 35MB. It's easy to get there and beyond when you start adding-in things like a physics engine, many times the screen resolution, quadruple the bits for color, support for several different screen layouts, etc. As I've earned about as much as the SuperTux developers, I'm thankful it didn't take me a decade to get to release.
In the old days, prior to ubiquitous hardware virtualization, you would have paid for more CPU time or more sessions. The key point being that your provider would have placed your workload on a shared system with greater capacity than necessary. How could they justify this excess capacity? Easy! By charging you dearly for access to it when you needed it on short notice. Hmmm... Sure sounds familiar.
Wow. That is possibly the dumbest thing I have read on here. Keep moving, or you will get fired? Who is going to hire someone who keeps switching jobs constantly? I'm sure you will be modded to +5 Insightful though.
I've been interviewing candidates for a high-end generalist position for six months now. (We're cheap and no-name) One thing that has struck me is that few people stay at an IT job for more than 18 months to 2 years. I'm an exception, having been here for 7 years and at my previous job for 9. But what really surprises me is that I've started to consider those 18 month stints as normal. Now, when I look at a resume where someone has been at the same place for 3 or 4 years, I ask myself "What's wrong with this person that they couldn't find another job?" It never crosses my mind that they, like me, might simply have found a relaxed environment in which they're comfortable and not expected to hold down a desk for 9 hours before doing the real work after everyone else goes home. It's scary. I'm both the senior technical person at my organization and my IT department's hiring manager... and by my own standards, I'm practically unhirable.
flash is an inextricable touchstone of practically every KVM in the datacenter that doesnt show up on a rickety cart.
Flash is the mandatory model of how VMWare has decided (infuriatingly and incorrectly i might stress) we shall all interact with their products.
Flash still powers billboards and advertisement hardware for countless products.
and most important: Flash is still required to view a substantial amount of internet pornography.
Ironically, I can only find fault with the last point. Internet pornographers are actually surprisingly ahead of the curve here as compared to the likes of VMWare and other IT vendors.
POTS lines are still there, I still have one that I don't use...
Nah, you most likely have something else entirely that is terminated in a POTS hand-off. The digital switches you describe and the various DSL or optical backhauls along with the nodes that break them out into subscriber lines at the edge of neighborhoods are they very reason "POTS is dead". You're right though, the POTS of old would make little to no difference in an EMP event.
... Group work teaches that the few talented kids should be careful not to delegate important work to their teammates, and most kids learn they can lean on the talented kids to do most of the work. One could say this helps teach delegation, but I have delegated in college and in the workplace and they are not comparable experiences.
I'm envious of your work experience. In mine, college group work as you describe it is the perfect preparation for employment. Perhaps it's different in other fields, but it's most certainly the case in IT. Easily 80% of the IT workforce can't program, engineer, architect or admin their way out of a wet paper bag. They turn to the other 20% who struggle to strike some balance between doing great work themselves and spoon-feeding snippets of reasoning and problem solving technique back to the first group.
Nuclear satellites and probes use tiny reactors only capable of watts of output.
THAT would be cool. The reality is a little more boring but a lot more safe and practical. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators are nothing more than a high-efficiency version of those pots that charge a cell phone from the heat of your camp fire. They use what most here would recognize as Peltier coolers, though optimized for operation in reverse. (generating electricity from a heat differential.) There is no nuclear reaction taking place, only the natural decay of radioisotopes. And that, only for a fairly low-level heat source.The devices could work off any heat source. It doesn't even take much, given the differential created against the cold of space. Certain radioisotopes just happen to do so reasonably consistently for the length of time the missions require. (Heat output declines as the material decays.)
Similar to the camp fire pots, they require a large temperature differential relative to the energy they produce. You're not going to power a colony off of them, at least not one that is reasonably self-sufficient, complete with manufacturing capability.
Including student loans I have a net worth of negative 75 thousand.... I start a 80K job next quarter, so I won't stay there long, but I'm still there now.
That's just precious. Bless your heart.
Remember this post when you become rich next quarter. Remember it ten years down the road when you realize that you've been working at one or more "good" jobs for a decade and still own outright little more than some clothes and consumer electronics.
The jobs we're constantly being told are well-paying, desirable jobs are no longer capable of paying for a modest home in a decent neighborhood in under a full life's work. Sure, they look great compared to a job that pays half as much, but it's only the difference between brick and a half bath in the end.
Here's the real power of being born into wealth: Any productive thing you do immediately compounds your net worth. You aren't born with one or more handicaps, be it need of schooling, housing, or whatever that need to be fully serviced before your income can actually accumulate. Being born into even modest wealth means immediate traction.
No, laser light is very directional, and having it pointed at you during nightime flying is a very definite experience. Search youtube for "helicopter lasers" to see what I mean.
I don't need to watch a video because we agree. Lasers are very directional. Having even a low power one pointed into your eyes can be temporarily disabling or even catastrophic if you're doing sensitive work like keeping an aircraft or vehicle under control. I also fully believe that people are doing this. What I don't believe is that, with cheap (sub-$5) red pointers having been readily available for about 15 years, there's only now a sudden jump in occurrences. An explanation that makes far more sense is that with cheap green lasers (which can produce a visible beam) now widely available, pilots are reporting many more instances of "beam sightings" in addition to "direct hits." If a red laser pointer, which generally does not have a visible beam, misses your aircraft, you never know it. If a green one does, perhaps even at a considerable distance, you might still see it and have something to get excited about and report.
So we should ban green laser pointers, right?
I know you asked sarcastically, but there are "soft-band" options that society may have to consider if the problem grows. For instance, using green lasers for stargazing could be outlawed (e.g., forcing laser makers to not use this as a selling point). Additionally, pen/pointer-shaped form factors could be prohibited. Gun-mounted green lasers could be forced to have a rail switch. Hopefully the laws don't have to go this far though.
You made me consider a point I hadn't before and that's that the visibility of green lasers' beams likely encourages people to point them into the night sky. With a red pointer, there's not much visual incentive to do so. I hate it when I make a big long point and then have to consider changing my mind.:)
1. most of the people caught pointing green lasers at aircraft have admitted to such.
Seems likely to me. How many people have been caught caught though? A dozen? A few hundred? By God, there's an epidemic of thousands upon thousands of people pointing lasers at aircraft and it's been skyrocketing over the last 3-5 years. (Even though the first readily available and stupidly-cheap red pointers were being sold for a couple of bucks at gas stations and the like 15 years ago.)
2. Yes, you can see the laser even if it isn't pointed directly at the aircraft. but in many cases the pilots report not seeing the pointer but the effects of the lasers on the cockpit windows. Keep in mind for example that over Los Angeles and surrounding areas there are probably at least one first time at night soloing Private Helictoper Pilot every week. If he were to lose sight of the horizon for even a minute or two that helicopter is coming down...
The first part of this statement, for me, only re-afirms my belief that people in general tend to report problems with the most dire, sensationalist spin because they feel like it's more likely to illicit a response. The latter sentence sounds as if you think you're arguing with someone who thinks it's ok for a pilot to have lasers shined into his eyes. For the record, I do not. I only believe the rash of reported incidents is exaggerated by the beam visibility of some non-red (often green) laser pointers.
3. Responsible people wouldn't be point lasers at the sky when they live near busy airports.
Agreed. Though, responsible people also wouldn't put 55W purple HID headlight bulbs into all 6 (low, high, fog) reflector-style housings on the front of their SUVs, nor would they bike around with a 1500 lumen strobe light strapped to their handle bars. Unfortunately, we have a shortage of responsible people.
So we should ban green laser pointers, right? Clearly, they're the problem since this wasn't happening when red pointers were all but the only option. No. The problem is that pilots, in the pitch black of night can see beams of green laser pointers off somewhere in the distance. With no useful reference for actual distance and nothing else in the night sky to compare it to, the pilots assume they're very nearby and must be being pointed at them. I have no doubt that some aircraft have had a beam enter the cabin or that some small number of pilots have witnessed a brief flash as a beam quickly crossed one of his or her eyes. That said, this is only now epidemic because pointers with visible beams are commonplace.
I find it interesting that this comes just as Amazon has fallen in love with hybrid shipping services such as UPS Mail Innovations and FedEx SmartPost for Prime delivery. These services utilize UPS or FedEx only to the destination city where your package is then handed off to the USPS for delivery. As a result, Prime "guaranteed" 2-day delivery has become "often 2-day" or "occasional 2-day"...and now, they feel like this is worth more? Wow.
Oh, they still haven't dropped the magic word "guaranteed". Their offering to satisfy the guarantee is an additional month of inconsistent, slower than stated service.
I haven't had to play with it, but our desktop support folks say that the XP virtualization in Windows 7 is fairly seamless. If they did something like that for an ARM version to have backwards compatibility I could see it working out. I don't know if that's even feasible though, since I assume hardware virtualization is a pretty big leap from OS virtualization.
Be careful to not confuse virtualization with emulation. To run x86 apps on ARM you'd need emulation which is an altogether different thing than virtualization. (at least in the common IT use of the terms) Unlike virtualization, emulation is very CPU-intensive so they'd be cutting the battery life of the RT down to at most that of the Pro while providing the user experience of a Pentium II. Their real mistake is taking their chance to start with a clean slate (ARM, RT) and slapping the Windows brand on. If they hadn't done that, every RT review wouldn't have an obligatory paragraph about how the thing runs "Windows" but it can't actually use any of the software you already have.
Why yes, we should trust CarrierIQ at their word for what their software does and does not do. Being closed source makes it quite difficult to verify their claims...
True, the closed-source nature limits third party evaluation to sniffing LAN traffic. I'll be interested to hear more as the digging continues. As of now, all I've seen is that there are "references" to CarrierIQ in iOS. Lots of people seem to be making a leap that CarrierIQ's software is running on iOS. It's possible, but it doesn't seem likely for the company that completely shut-down the possibility of carrier-mandated apps on their phones.
the (free, open) Android version is more akin to a rootkit
Carrier IQ is not free or open. The post you responded to was arguing that closed source is more difficult to analyse, which is clearly true. If Carrier IQ were open source, we would have known about it years ago, and we wouldn't need to reverse engineer it to figure out what, when and how it's doing what it does, and under what conditions the logs get transferred to remote servers, etc.
I would also argue that, as much as we dislike Carrier IQ, it isn't really a rootkit - the software itself makes no effort to hide its presence, which is one of the defining characteristics of a rootkit. Also, you say that the Android version has a "backdoor" - could you provide a reference for this? As far as I can see, this is not actually true, as it doesn't enable any secret authentication-bypassing remote access (which would be the very definition of a backdoor).
You're right and though the discussion was leaning that way, I didn't actually mean to take a position on open versus closed. No, the software in question doesn't technically meet the definition of a rootkit but I maintain that it's "akin" to one. It is not part of Android as released by Google, and although it doesn't alter APIs to hide itself (such as removing itself from process lists or filesystem calls), it's not an application that shows-up in the launcher, nor do users have any meaningful control over it. A backdoor provides a means for bypassing access control... and this software, as it's been seen on many Android devices, is a secret means of accessing data stored on or passed by (even over SSL) potentially PIN-secured, filesystem-encryped devices. It doesn't seem to be remotely initiated so maybe it's not a backdoor so much as a back window. They can't come in but they can stand outside and see everything you do.
You might want to re-think what you said. How would we even KNOW about Carrier IQ if Android wasn't open enough to find out?
Um, by reading the "diagnostic and logging" screen that pops-up during the initial configuration of my phone? By looking at the logged data in the settings menu? The only thing that we've learned today is that the diagnostics and logging system in iOS is vaguely-tied to CarrierIQ. It's not been a secret that it's there and there's no evidence that it does anything more than what it discloses to every new user. Yesterday, it didn't have a name. Today, it does.
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I don't think I ever saw tablets being particularly useful for tasks other than web browsing, but early-on, they were fantastic for that. I can't put my finger on all the reasons, but modern pages just don't seem to work as well on the tablet format. Part of it is that advertisers have adapted to intrusively grab your attention with slide-overs, and delayed pop-overs. Another might be a departure from columniation. Whatever the reasons, the convenience is gone, readability is down, and the whole experience just seems more cumbersome than it did in 2010.
Are you freakin' kidding me? How is a developer supposed to develop software that "requires administrator privileges" if he or she can't write to arbitrary directories and / or registry keys during normal, post-installation use? While you're at it, you might as well require your developers to use a 1080p screen, thus restricting their interfaces to actually rendering correctly on the displays of 99% of their users! What's next? Requiring the end product to run in an amount of memory likely to be supported on a single-socket motherboard and asking that code manipulating a database not be executed on the database server itself!!? Wow, just wow.
I wouldn't want to work for a company that would even considering a retro-active review of a person's credentials that were not forged. They are hired, all that matters is performance. I wouldn't care if their degree came from Shithole University, if they performed well then good for them.
I'm with you but the problem is, that in today's world, you aren't expected to take and keep a job for any consequential length of time. In the blink of an eye, all of ITT's graduates will be subject to automated resume parsing and job application scoring. They will immediately fall prey to what the various HR software providers call "knock out" questions. If you haven't heard of these, they're essentially immediate disqualifiers that prevent your resume or application from ever bothering a busy HR admin due to running afoul of some education-tied rule, lack of an experience keyword, etc. I've been involved in a number of demos lately and have been horrified both by the ubiquity of this feature and the vendors' zeal for including them in product demos.
"Clean diesel" is not something I've even heard of I don't believe. The word diesel its-self conjures images of soot spitting oily monster machines. The aforementioned ban is a good step in the right direction, albeit a decade or two later than it should have come.
I imagine that someone who saw early gasoline engines spewing black smoke a century ago would have had similar thoughts about them.
No wonder I always feel lost when I use Microsoft products. They can't even make a proper navigation tree.
If they didn't put the options in a different place and a layer deeper with each release, you wouldn't feel like you got any value when you're finally forced to upgrade.
Except I outsourced the manufacturing of the weapon to Ruger (LCP) and the "looks like a cell phone" aspect comes from keeping it in a pocket holster with an iPhone 4 back glass to reduce printing. Oh, you know what else helps its concealability? Being comfortable with it staying in my pocket. Always. ...not wanting to parade it around to find opportunities to preach about my rights or get approving nods from Bubba and Cletus. Jesus, redneck America, stop fondling your effing guns! Not only will they go unnoticed, but the people around you will be safer as well.
... I haven't seen any definitive information indicating whether the update can be done OTA or must be done via a USB cable and booting into a low level mode. Either way, the fact that a device can have it's software and/or firmware updated without user intervention is a security hole ...
The court order specifically suggests several methods that Apple might use to comply. All ultimately involve physical possession of the phone in order for either Apple or the FBI to implement. For OTA and physical access alike, user intervention (authorized or not) is required. Furthermore, the integrity of the use of Apple's signing key is part of the security model, particularly for older devices such as the 5c in question. (Load whatever you'd like on newer ones - the hardware will still thwart brute force attacks.) If the government asks Apple to sign malware, even for good cause, they are asking them to intentionally weaken that model. Perhaps there are even issues of free speech involved since the government wants to force Apple to say (with its signing key) "This is legitimate, trustworthy software." in regard to something that is clearly not.
Cable card may be less than ideal in implementation as far as open source is concerned, but at least there, if you've got a cooperating cable provider, you can access much of that content in it's digital form, which is better than the previous options of analog capture.
So the question we need to ask is whether, from an open source perspective, this is actually going to improve things for us (I'm definitely skeptical on that), keep it about the same, or make it worse.
Didn't the cable companies finally kill CableCARD a year or two ago? Obviously, most will still give you one, but isn't the mandate dead? If so, it's only a matter of time before the remaining cooperation winds down.
Regardless, I think a robust market for consumer-owned set-top boxes is better for the DVR community than CableCARD ever was. Let's face it, no such mandate is going to be open source-friendly, so why not have a variety of commercial products that actually have to compete with one another for customers? In the end, open source projects such as mythTV and the wonderful (but in desperate need of an installer) Sage TV will benefit through the variety of work-arounds and hacks that develop. If nothing else, I can see someone developing a recording and playback peripheral device that "protects" the content while allowing scheduling and UI to be handled by software of the user's choice.
Uh.... no. The NES only had 64K of addressable memory. Only a fraction of that was available for games. Super Mario Bros used a 32KB cartridge.
More than 64K of effective memory on a cartridge was possible with bank switching (up to 1MB, switched in at 32K at a time), but Super Mario Bros did not use that.
Hardware limitations will tame bloat like nothing else. However, given some memory and CPU coupled with a drop-in framework for just about anything imaginable and the growth quickly becomes exponential. My Mario-comparable iOS "masterpiece" Cletus Land tallies in at 35MB. It's easy to get there and beyond when you start adding-in things like a physics engine, many times the screen resolution, quadruple the bits for color, support for several different screen layouts, etc. As I've earned about as much as the SuperTux developers, I'm thankful it didn't take me a decade to get to release.
In the old days, prior to ubiquitous hardware virtualization, you would have paid for more CPU time or more sessions. The key point being that your provider would have placed your workload on a shared system with greater capacity than necessary. How could they justify this excess capacity? Easy! By charging you dearly for access to it when you needed it on short notice. Hmmm... Sure sounds familiar.
Wow. That is possibly the dumbest thing I have read on here. Keep moving, or you will get fired? Who is going to hire someone who keeps switching jobs constantly? I'm sure you will be modded to +5 Insightful though.
I've been interviewing candidates for a high-end generalist position for six months now. (We're cheap and no-name) One thing that has struck me is that few people stay at an IT job for more than 18 months to 2 years. I'm an exception, having been here for 7 years and at my previous job for 9. But what really surprises me is that I've started to consider those 18 month stints as normal. Now, when I look at a resume where someone has been at the same place for 3 or 4 years, I ask myself "What's wrong with this person that they couldn't find another job?" It never crosses my mind that they, like me, might simply have found a relaxed environment in which they're comfortable and not expected to hold down a desk for 9 hours before doing the real work after everyone else goes home. It's scary. I'm both the senior technical person at my organization and my IT department's hiring manager... and by my own standards, I'm practically unhirable.
flash is an inextricable touchstone of practically every KVM in the datacenter that doesnt show up on a rickety cart.
Flash is the mandatory model of how VMWare has decided (infuriatingly and incorrectly i might stress) we shall all interact with their products.
Flash still powers billboards and advertisement hardware for countless products.
and most important: Flash is still required to view a substantial amount of internet pornography.
Ironically, I can only find fault with the last point. Internet pornographers are actually surprisingly ahead of the curve here as compared to the likes of VMWare and other IT vendors.
POTS lines are still there, I still have one that I don't use ...
Nah, you most likely have something else entirely that is terminated in a POTS hand-off. The digital switches you describe and the various DSL or optical backhauls along with the nodes that break them out into subscriber lines at the edge of neighborhoods are they very reason "POTS is dead". You're right though, the POTS of old would make little to no difference in an EMP event.
... Group work teaches that the few talented kids should be careful not to delegate important work to their teammates, and most kids learn they can lean on the talented kids to do most of the work. One could say this helps teach delegation, but I have delegated in college and in the workplace and they are not comparable experiences.
I'm envious of your work experience. In mine, college group work as you describe it is the perfect preparation for employment. Perhaps it's different in other fields, but it's most certainly the case in IT. Easily 80% of the IT workforce can't program, engineer, architect or admin their way out of a wet paper bag. They turn to the other 20% who struggle to strike some balance between doing great work themselves and spoon-feeding snippets of reasoning and problem solving technique back to the first group.
Nuclear satellites and probes use tiny reactors only capable of watts of output.
THAT would be cool. The reality is a little more boring but a lot more safe and practical. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators are nothing more than a high-efficiency version of those pots that charge a cell phone from the heat of your camp fire. They use what most here would recognize as Peltier coolers, though optimized for operation in reverse. (generating electricity from a heat differential.) There is no nuclear reaction taking place, only the natural decay of radioisotopes. And that, only for a fairly low-level heat source.The devices could work off any heat source. It doesn't even take much, given the differential created against the cold of space. Certain radioisotopes just happen to do so reasonably consistently for the length of time the missions require. (Heat output declines as the material decays.)
Similar to the camp fire pots, they require a large temperature differential relative to the energy they produce. You're not going to power a colony off of them, at least not one that is reasonably self-sufficient, complete with manufacturing capability.
Including student loans I have a net worth of negative 75 thousand. ... I start a 80K job next quarter, so I won't stay there long, but I'm still there now.
That's just precious. Bless your heart.
Remember this post when you become rich next quarter. Remember it ten years down the road when you realize that you've been working at one or more "good" jobs for a decade and still own outright little more than some clothes and consumer electronics.
The jobs we're constantly being told are well-paying, desirable jobs are no longer capable of paying for a modest home in a decent neighborhood in under a full life's work. Sure, they look great compared to a job that pays half as much, but it's only the difference between brick and a half bath in the end.
Here's the real power of being born into wealth: Any productive thing you do immediately compounds your net worth. You aren't born with one or more handicaps, be it need of schooling, housing, or whatever that need to be fully serviced before your income can actually accumulate. Being born into even modest wealth means immediate traction.
No, laser light is very directional, and having it pointed at you during nightime flying is a very definite experience. Search youtube for "helicopter lasers" to see what I mean.
I don't need to watch a video because we agree. Lasers are very directional. Having even a low power one pointed into your eyes can be temporarily disabling or even catastrophic if you're doing sensitive work like keeping an aircraft or vehicle under control. I also fully believe that people are doing this. What I don't believe is that, with cheap (sub-$5) red pointers having been readily available for about 15 years, there's only now a sudden jump in occurrences. An explanation that makes far more sense is that with cheap green lasers (which can produce a visible beam) now widely available, pilots are reporting many more instances of "beam sightings" in addition to "direct hits." If a red laser pointer, which generally does not have a visible beam, misses your aircraft, you never know it. If a green one does, perhaps even at a considerable distance, you might still see it and have something to get excited about and report.
So we should ban green laser pointers, right?
I know you asked sarcastically, but there are "soft-band" options that society may have to consider if the problem grows. For instance, using green lasers for stargazing could be outlawed (e.g., forcing laser makers to not use this as a selling point). Additionally, pen/pointer-shaped form factors could be prohibited. Gun-mounted green lasers could be forced to have a rail switch. Hopefully the laws don't have to go this far though.
You made me consider a point I hadn't before and that's that the visibility of green lasers' beams likely encourages people to point them into the night sky. With a red pointer, there's not much visual incentive to do so. I hate it when I make a big long point and then have to consider changing my mind. :)
1. most of the people caught pointing green lasers at aircraft have admitted to such.
Seems likely to me. How many people have been caught caught though? A dozen? A few hundred? By God, there's an epidemic of thousands upon thousands of people pointing lasers at aircraft and it's been skyrocketing over the last 3-5 years. (Even though the first readily available and stupidly-cheap red pointers were being sold for a couple of bucks at gas stations and the like 15 years ago.)
2. Yes, you can see the laser even if it isn't pointed directly at the aircraft. but in many cases the pilots report not seeing the pointer but the effects of the lasers on the cockpit windows. Keep in mind for example that over Los Angeles and surrounding areas there are probably at least one first time at night soloing Private Helictoper Pilot every week. If he were to lose sight of the horizon for even a minute or two that helicopter is coming down...
The first part of this statement, for me, only re-afirms my belief that people in general tend to report problems with the most dire, sensationalist spin because they feel like it's more likely to illicit a response. The latter sentence sounds as if you think you're arguing with someone who thinks it's ok for a pilot to have lasers shined into his eyes. For the record, I do not. I only believe the rash of reported incidents is exaggerated by the beam visibility of some non-red (often green) laser pointers.
3. Responsible people wouldn't be point lasers at the sky when they live near busy airports.
Agreed. Though, responsible people also wouldn't put 55W purple HID headlight bulbs into all 6 (low, high, fog) reflector-style housings on the front of their SUVs, nor would they bike around with a 1500 lumen strobe light strapped to their handle bars. Unfortunately, we have a shortage of responsible people.
So we should ban green laser pointers, right? Clearly, they're the problem since this wasn't happening when red pointers were all but the only option. No. The problem is that pilots, in the pitch black of night can see beams of green laser pointers off somewhere in the distance. With no useful reference for actual distance and nothing else in the night sky to compare it to, the pilots assume they're very nearby and must be being pointed at them. I have no doubt that some aircraft have had a beam enter the cabin or that some small number of pilots have witnessed a brief flash as a beam quickly crossed one of his or her eyes. That said, this is only now epidemic because pointers with visible beams are commonplace.
I find it interesting that this comes just as Amazon has fallen in love with hybrid shipping services such as UPS Mail Innovations and FedEx SmartPost for Prime delivery. These services utilize UPS or FedEx only to the destination city where your package is then handed off to the USPS for delivery. As a result, Prime "guaranteed" 2-day delivery has become "often 2-day" or "occasional 2-day" ...and now, they feel like this is worth more? Wow.
Oh, they still haven't dropped the magic word "guaranteed". Their offering to satisfy the guarantee is an additional month of inconsistent, slower than stated service.
I haven't had to play with it, but our desktop support folks say that the XP virtualization in Windows 7 is fairly seamless. If they did something like that for an ARM version to have backwards compatibility I could see it working out. I don't know if that's even feasible though, since I assume hardware virtualization is a pretty big leap from OS virtualization.
Be careful to not confuse virtualization with emulation. To run x86 apps on ARM you'd need emulation which is an altogether different thing than virtualization. (at least in the common IT use of the terms) Unlike virtualization, emulation is very CPU-intensive so they'd be cutting the battery life of the RT down to at most that of the Pro while providing the user experience of a Pentium II. Their real mistake is taking their chance to start with a clean slate (ARM, RT) and slapping the Windows brand on. If they hadn't done that, every RT review wouldn't have an obligatory paragraph about how the thing runs "Windows" but it can't actually use any of the software you already have.
Apple: ...non-English language support is in beta.
Media: Siri is in beta.
Suckers: I'll get Siri on my old iPhone when it comes out of beta!
Why yes, we should trust CarrierIQ at their word for what their software does and does not do. Being closed source makes it quite difficult to verify their claims ...
True, the closed-source nature limits third party evaluation to sniffing LAN traffic. I'll be interested to hear more as the digging continues. As of now, all I've seen is that there are "references" to CarrierIQ in iOS. Lots of people seem to be making a leap that CarrierIQ's software is running on iOS. It's possible, but it doesn't seem likely for the company that completely shut-down the possibility of carrier-mandated apps on their phones.
the (free, open) Android version is more akin to a rootkit
Carrier IQ is not free or open. The post you responded to was arguing that closed source is more difficult to analyse, which is clearly true. If Carrier IQ were open source, we would have known about it years ago, and we wouldn't need to reverse engineer it to figure out what, when and how it's doing what it does, and under what conditions the logs get transferred to remote servers, etc.
I would also argue that, as much as we dislike Carrier IQ, it isn't really a rootkit - the software itself makes no effort to hide its presence, which is one of the defining characteristics of a rootkit. Also, you say that the Android version has a "backdoor" - could you provide a reference for this? As far as I can see, this is not actually true, as it doesn't enable any secret authentication-bypassing remote access (which would be the very definition of a backdoor).
You're right and though the discussion was leaning that way, I didn't actually mean to take a position on open versus closed. No, the software in question doesn't technically meet the definition of a rootkit but I maintain that it's "akin" to one. It is not part of Android as released by Google, and although it doesn't alter APIs to hide itself (such as removing itself from process lists or filesystem calls), it's not an application that shows-up in the launcher, nor do users have any meaningful control over it. A backdoor provides a means for bypassing access control... and this software, as it's been seen on many Android devices, is a secret means of accessing data stored on or passed by (even over SSL) potentially PIN-secured, filesystem-encryped devices. It doesn't seem to be remotely initiated so maybe it's not a backdoor so much as a back window. They can't come in but they can stand outside and see everything you do.
You might want to re-think what you said. How would we even KNOW about Carrier IQ if Android wasn't open enough to find out?
Um, by reading the "diagnostic and logging" screen that pops-up during the initial configuration of my phone? By looking at the logged data in the settings menu? The only thing that we've learned today is that the diagnostics and logging system in iOS is vaguely-tied to CarrierIQ. It's not been a secret that it's there and there's no evidence that it does anything more than what it discloses to every new user. Yesterday, it didn't have a name. Today, it does.