Yeah, all you losers who enjoy coding in your spare time, are self employed, or otherwise do things differently than PLA does!
Pssst - My comment addressed the idea of doing "work" in my free time. Not coding for fun (which, FYI, I do - And I find a wider screen makes the task easier).
Aside from that - I can't count the thousands of average Joes I've seen using their laptops to write code on the bus/train. Clearly, you just have your finger on the pulse of society to a degree I'll never understand.
Can you believe those losers who aren't living their lives the PLA-optimized way?
No, actually, I can't. I work to live, I don't live to work. And I quite seriously can't understand why anyone would knowingly or willfully do the opposite.
Where did this obsession with Widescreen come from anyways?
Human eyes pan side-to-side very, very fast. They move vertically very, very slowly (relatively).
You can do a simple test to prove this to yourself... Go find a pair of online short stories of similar complexity (same author and topic). Read one with your browser window set to a portrait-mode size. Read the other one with the browser set to a landscape mode size. Optionally, read a third with your browser set to an absurdly wide size (like 3:1).
Your reading speed will increase with the wider format, and that trend continues until a single line of text takes up a whopping 80-90 degrees of your horizontal field of vision.
Now figure out how to carry a portrait monitor and power supply on the bus. I thought the whole point of having a laptop was to be able to work in a vehicle or in a restaurant.
Life: Get one.;)
Yes, I do primarily use my laptop (a netbook, actually, with an even smaller screen than TFA mentions) in vehicles or coffee shops or the like - But I sure as hell don't use it to work. I use it to waste a few hours on a trip; to check my email while away from home; To play emulated SNES games while sitting in a doctor's waiting room.
I do my work... At work. Sometimes I'll VPN in from home, under extreme circumstances and for a very short period of time. But basically, work=work and home=home and life=life, and I take great pains to keep the first separated from the rest.
But if you've encrypted the hard drive of your main computer, and you have to enter a password every time you start it... a jury isn't necessarily going to believe that you've suddenly conveniently 'forgotten it'.
If you have your boot drive encrypted, no, not really believable.
But this hardly amounts to just a case of "plausible deniability" - Case in point, I tend to keep a few personal things (nothing illegal, just personal info I might need, for example, to prove my identity to my credit card company during the work day) on my work computer in a TrueCrypt archive; I make a new one about every six months, and burn the old one to DVD.
If you asked me for the password to even the 2nd-to-last archive, well, give me my 16 weeks in PMITA, because, fucked if I know. And I say that as someone who has different, fairly strong passwords to every system/website I use. So to expect the average Joe to remember? This amounts to nothing more than one more way for the police to intimidate people, end of story.
They probably won't get Windows 7 until they buy a new computer.
Not necessarily. I still run XP, because it still works.
I do actually like Windows 7, but until I want to use my computer for something that I can't do on XP, I see no point in making a not-inconsiderable outlay of cash to upgrade just for bells and whistles. And as for the hardware, as you mention - XP runs a hell of a lot faster on older hardware. My computer doesn't count as obsolete by any stretch of the imagination, but I would most likely need to upgrade hardware to get anywhere near the same level of performance if I went to Win7.
So why bother?
But I do substantially agree with you - Looking at the bigger picture, I think Microsoft has a rather serious problem, not of their own making for a change. Even the last gen of PCs as "fast enough" for everything most people want to do. I very much don't mean this as a "640k should be enough for anyone", but do you really need quad core, over 4GB of RAM, and a video card that could render an older Pixar movie in realtime, just to check your email, surf the web, and play the occasional "casual" game? And if not... Why upgrade?
Seriously, what gives with the Slashdot front-page? Articles regularly appear (in this case, the one about the NY tech highschool sponsored by IBM) that, when you click, give a "nothing to see here" error. This particular FP about Windows XP hit the FP after that one did, but this works, and that doesn't.
We can't even blame editor error, since the Firehose pretty much automates the whole process at this point...
Seriously? What is this, 1997? Who still writes code vulnerable to those?
Seriously, you don't even want to know.
Over my past two jobs, all but one of the most important enterprise systems we used had zero protection from attacks like these. Talkin' accounting, inventory, POS - Even the Borg of ERP packages, MS Dynamics, still chokes on merely having apostrophes in most fields.
And from what I've seen of banking systems that I've had to interface with, I'd keep my money under my bed - Except many of them haven't quite caught up to all this
fancy "new" SQL tech. Nice safe 60s era COBOL code - And yes, they still use two digit years, because after all, we have another 90 years before the Y2K fixes will break.
I would use projectors not screens. Set up a whole wall of the room (or a large bordered portion) to act as a window.
...If he has no practical limit to cost.
I got rid of my TV and moved to a projector about two years ago (needed a new TV and discovered that a decent projector
costs about 2/3rds what a decent TV with half the screen size would). And I absolutely love it, no regrets, but I watch very little
TV, basically just one or two hours every other day or so, perhaps four hours on a rainy weekend day.
And compared to a modern TV, the biggest problem with projectors comes from the cost-per-hour, not the cost up front.
Between drawing 800W, and having a $300 bulb rated for only 2000 hours of use, you can realistically expect projector
to cost you $500 a year for "typical" American-style TV watching, or over $2000 a year for 24/7 use. And that ignores
the increased load on your AC, if you live somewhere warm (800W will easily raise the temperature of a small room
by 10-15F). And in the FP's case, multiply that by two.
So in this situation, even though I recommend to most of my friends that they switch to a projector next time they
upgrade the TV, I'd say go with an expensive-up-front 50-60" LCD TV (which still have backlights, but they draw 100-150W
and last for over 50K hours). It will save money in the first year alone.
I would take that statement not as a fact, but rather, as a condition.
The medium does not equal the message. Okay, so the Indian government (just like the Sauds recently, and just like the US government since always) wants access to the medium. Good for the government, they get what they want, RIM gets access to a market that dwarfs the US, and the (few) the people who really do "deserve" privacy will use GPG or similar, and have privacy - The rest never cared in the first place, and "deserve" whatever they get..
Yes, in an ideal world, RIM would have told every government (including the US) to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. In this world, RIM has a (legal) obligation to to choose the course of action most likely to maximize shareholder value - And since the number of people who sincerely care about privacy don't even appear as a blip on their radar, they have chosen, and will continue to choose, to roll over in order to gain access to new markets.
No, I completely understand that your armchair analysis based on a blurb on a tech site is going to trump the city's analysis in all cases.
With a metric of success based on number of $100 tickets issued, I think we can safely say that they don't expect increased compliance to pay
for this. And at $26 per ton, it would take a lot of increased compliance to equal a single ticket.
They may, however, need to deal with "accidental" success, as has happened with other "punitive" taxes such as on smoking or gasoline - Governments
get addicted to what they see as a guaranteed stream of income, then panic when they make those taxes so high that people actually do cut back / quit / start
complying more.
As an aside - Why do people not recycle their own metals? Okay, paper and plastics mostly don't pay enough to make it worth the fuel to
transport them. But clean metals pay hundreds on the ton (even common ol' steel goes in the range of $250/ton). Seems like a no brainer, IMO.
And this same news was posted expect for the fact that the magazine was substituted with website. "Before
the website's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents."
Self-debasing humor aside, you have rather a significant difference between a site like Slashdot selling
out, and a magazine for gay teens.
Most notably, paying for and receiving a physical magazine means the company has your name, CC info, and physical
address; Slashdot has a dynamic IP address, a largely anonymous handle, a throwaway contact email address that likely
filled with spam and died at least five years ago, and knows my default comment threshold.
Not to mention, society doesn't stigmatize geekdom (these days) quite the same way it does homosexuality. Although
I find the Slashdot crowd far more tolerant of such issues than the general public, our "perverse love" of
technology rarely gets us lynched.
What you are ACTUALLY saying is that you'd like not to pay for other people's kids
Actually, no. You have read far more into my comment than I put there.
I almost entirely agree with everything you've written (beyond your attribution of my motives). Society does
benefit when we raise kids properly. And society needs to explicitly address that - But to repeat my actual
point, that burden shouldn't rest on your employer.
Personally, I would like to see some sort of first child government-paid (and yes, I realize that means we-the-people end up
paying for it via taxes - Might as well put them to some good use) maternity leave where the mother (or father, but
let's keep this realistic) can take five years off (until the kid hits kindergarten) and receive something like UI-level
benefits just to raise the kid properly. But of course, realistically I know that will happen around the same time that
our problems in the Middle East go away (ie, never).
Spoken like someone who does not have children. Until you do, you have no idea what it takes, especially if it's not smooth sailing.
Look, if you choose to have kids, kudos to you for helping keep the species alive.
But put bluntly - Everything you say does not equal you employer's problem, nor does it describe the norm (which the GP nailed). If SOMEONE, of either gender,
has less reliability due to having a kid, guess who doesn't get the promotions?
In fact, you pretty much make the case against sexism - You will (on avegerage) make less than your peers due to choosing family over work. You have less
value to your employer than your coworkers without a newborn, simple as that.
It's true. The AFP also wanted a few other Facecook buttons: "Are my Papers OK?" and "Turn in My Parents".
Joking aside, in this specific situation, I say "give them exactly what they asked for" - A button at the top of every
facebook page that reports something directly to the police. The more it reports, the better.
And when, a week later, the police beg to stop having their inbox flooded with useless complaints about every troll and mean
comment posted around the world, then Facebook can take their time in a six-month review of the social, technological, and
procedural "implications" of the proposed change.
It's their damned platform and they can be as pricky as they want.
No. That argument already commits a serious error. You own the phone. You get to decide what runs on it. Even if you want
to argue that Apple decides the base platform, in this case (certainly not the first) they have reduced the functionality of a device
you own.
This sort of thing will work itself out. Likely not to Apple's long-term benefit, IMHO.
Steve Jobs could rape a busload of nuns and his fans would point out that some consider habits as fetishwear and anyway, they should have
flown instead of taking the bus.
All in all there is very little chance this has happened to either of you. Rather what we have here is the perfect demonstration of the tendency of the male of the species to talk absolute bollocks when it comes to the topic of driving experiences.
I don't know how you got modded informative, but I can easily address all of your points in one fairly common example - Sitting as the only car at a pointless light. Nothing to do for 30 seconds, and motion in the rearview has a pretty good chance of catching your attention.
Now, knowing the guy won't stop, I have to agree that amounts to a matter of opinion - Some people like to stop as abruptly as possible at a light, others seem to roll along for a quarter mile leading up to it. If, however, they reach the point where tires would squeal without appearing to slow, you can bet your ass that, with no opposing traffic, I'll run the light and risk a ticket. And have done so, Mr. skeptic.
But to call BS? BS. Just because it hasn't happened to you... As the GP said, count yourself lucky.
The day they actually implement this, I start caring about (and driving) "antique" (aka exempt) cars.
Seriously... Great idea in theory. In practice, how many times have you sat waiting for a light and suddenly had to move NOW? Either for
an ambulance, or some moron going too fast and turning far too widely, or a tractor trailer at a tight intersection that would otherwise have rolled
its back tires over your hood, or even suddenly having to run the light to avoid getting rear-ended by someone coming up behind you completely oblivious
to the light?
Good luck with all of those if the light itself has the power to kill your car. Oh, safety override, you say? Only if I can leave it on override
100% of the time.
It astounds me that people think they know better than an entire discipline and even more so that they get modded up for doing it.
But then again...it is the internet.
Funny thing about the internet... Believe it or not, some of us do actually count as experts in the domain of knowledge in question,
fully capable of calling BS even on all those magically-always-right PhDs out there.
In this case, I can't claim myself an expert (merely have a minor in math, concentrating on, of all things, proof theory). But I stand by
my statement - A proof with easily violated premises doesn't "prove" anything. It may remain valid for some subset of input sets, but
validity does not equal truth. And when your input set equals the real world, you can't just arbitrarily constrain it and still call it
true.
Various proofs show that if the quantum bit error rate is less than 20 percent, then the message is secure. However, these proofs assume that the errors are the result of noise from the environment.
Then they do not "prove" anything.
When you start from a false premise, you produce "garbage", not "proofs" (Actually,
you can produce some really useful counterfactuals that way, but you wouldn't present it in the context of a proof of the
original concept). Particularly when talking about security, what moron would assume any sources of error come from
the environment rather than the attacker???
If you had some kind of vibration sensor that measured vibration levels, couldn't it then talk back to code telling it to slow down because there's too much vibration?
I think you either overestimate the frequency of typical vibrations, or underestimate the speed at which your heads can theoretically seek.
A 15k drive can push around 180 IOPS. A typical human scream comes out at around 300Hz. 1.6 cycles really doesn't give enough of a sample to reliably detect (much less
correct for) even they most predictable of sources of interference.
The situation gets somewhat better for lower-speed drives, but consider that most real-world vibrations won't come from humans, but rather will involve some harmonic of 60HZ (or 50Hz,
depending on your local AC frequency). Even a 7200RPM drive can push 90IOPS, making a 120Hz source of interference come out to a mere 1.33 cycles.
So long story short - Yeah, you can detect (and correct for) fairly repetitive sources of vibration. The most common real-world sources of such vibrations, however, occur at a low enough
frequency that you won't see enough of the interference per seek to meaningfully do anything about it.
OK well how about a refrigerator that can access recipe sites via the web.
That sounds like a great feature... But if I want to play cheesy flash games or even look at porn while standing in front of my
refrigerator, my call, not Steverinos.
For the car example, you could arguably make a case that non-relevant browsing counts as a safety issue. But only while moving...
Again, if I want to play cheesy flash games or look at porn while parked in my garage, my choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, all you losers who enjoy coding in your spare time, are self employed, or otherwise do things differently than PLA does!
Pssst - My comment addressed the idea of doing "work" in my free time. Not coding for fun (which, FYI, I do - And I find a wider screen makes the task easier).
Aside from that - I can't count the thousands of average Joes I've seen using their laptops to write code on the bus/train. Clearly, you just have your finger on the pulse of society to a degree I'll never understand.
Can you believe those losers who aren't living their lives the PLA-optimized way?
No, actually, I can't. I work to live, I don't live to work. And I quite seriously can't understand why anyone would knowingly or willfully do the opposite.
Where did this obsession with Widescreen come from anyways?
Human eyes pan side-to-side very, very fast. They move vertically very, very slowly (relatively).
You can do a simple test to prove this to yourself... Go find a pair of online short stories of similar complexity (same author and topic). Read one with your browser window set to a portrait-mode size. Read the other one with the browser set to a landscape mode size. Optionally, read a third with your browser set to an absurdly wide size (like 3:1).
Your reading speed will increase with the wider format, and that trend continues until a single line of text takes up a whopping 80-90 degrees of your horizontal field of vision.
Now figure out how to carry a portrait monitor and power supply on the bus. I thought the whole point of having a laptop was to be able to work in a vehicle or in a restaurant.
;)
Life: Get one.
Yes, I do primarily use my laptop (a netbook, actually, with an even smaller screen than TFA mentions) in vehicles or coffee shops or the like - But I sure as hell don't use it to work. I use it to waste a few hours on a trip; to check my email while away from home; To play emulated SNES games while sitting in a doctor's waiting room.
I do my work... At work. Sometimes I'll VPN in from home, under extreme circumstances and for a very short period of time. But basically, work=work and home=home and life=life, and I take great pains to keep the first separated from the rest.
But if you've encrypted the hard drive of your main computer, and you have to enter a password every time you start it... a jury isn't necessarily going to believe that you've suddenly conveniently 'forgotten it'.
If you have your boot drive encrypted, no, not really believable.
But this hardly amounts to just a case of "plausible deniability" - Case in point, I tend to keep a few personal things (nothing illegal, just personal info I might need, for example, to prove my identity to my credit card company during the work day) on my work computer in a TrueCrypt archive; I make a new one about every six months, and burn the old one to DVD.
If you asked me for the password to even the 2nd-to-last archive, well, give me my 16 weeks in PMITA, because, fucked if I know. And I say that as someone who has different, fairly strong passwords to every system/website I use. So to expect the average Joe to remember? This amounts to nothing more than one more way for the police to intimidate people, end of story.
Wow, who did you piss off? You have a ton of fairly reasonable comments in this thread modded as troll.
;)
Strange, I usually only see that level of zealotry in the Apple threads.
They probably won't get Windows 7 until they buy a new computer.
Not necessarily. I still run XP, because it still works.
I do actually like Windows 7, but until I want to use my computer for something that I can't do on XP, I see no point in making a not-inconsiderable outlay of cash to upgrade just for bells and whistles. And as for the hardware, as you mention - XP runs a hell of a lot faster on older hardware. My computer doesn't count as obsolete by any stretch of the imagination, but I would most likely need to upgrade hardware to get anywhere near the same level of performance if I went to Win7.
So why bother?
But I do substantially agree with you - Looking at the bigger picture, I think Microsoft has a rather serious problem, not of their own making for a change. Even the last gen of PCs as "fast enough" for everything most people want to do. I very much don't mean this as a "640k should be enough for anyone", but do you really need quad core, over 4GB of RAM, and a video card that could render an older Pixar movie in realtime, just to check your email, surf the web, and play the occasional "casual" game? And if not... Why upgrade?
Seriously, what gives with the Slashdot front-page? Articles regularly appear (in this case, the one about the NY tech highschool sponsored by IBM) that, when you click, give a "nothing to see here" error. This particular FP about Windows XP hit the FP after that one did, but this works, and that doesn't.
We can't even blame editor error, since the Firehose pretty much automates the whole process at this point...
Anyone know?
Seriously? What is this, 1997? Who still writes code vulnerable to those?
Seriously, you don't even want to know.
Over my past two jobs, all but one of the most important enterprise systems we used had zero protection from attacks like these. Talkin' accounting, inventory, POS - Even the Borg of ERP packages, MS Dynamics, still chokes on merely having apostrophes in most fields.
And from what I've seen of banking systems that I've had to interface with, I'd keep my money under my bed - Except many of them haven't quite caught up to all this fancy "new" SQL tech. Nice safe 60s era COBOL code - And yes, they still use two digit years, because after all, we have another 90 years before the Y2K fixes will break.
I would use projectors not screens. Set up a whole wall of the room (or a large bordered portion) to act as a window.
...If he has no practical limit to cost.
I got rid of my TV and moved to a projector about two years ago (needed a new TV and discovered that a decent projector costs about 2/3rds what a decent TV with half the screen size would). And I absolutely love it, no regrets, but I watch very little TV, basically just one or two hours every other day or so, perhaps four hours on a rainy weekend day.
And compared to a modern TV, the biggest problem with projectors comes from the cost-per-hour, not the cost up front. Between drawing 800W, and having a $300 bulb rated for only 2000 hours of use, you can realistically expect projector to cost you $500 a year for "typical" American-style TV watching, or over $2000 a year for 24/7 use. And that ignores the increased load on your AC, if you live somewhere warm (800W will easily raise the temperature of a small room by 10-15F). And in the FP's case, multiply that by two.
So in this situation, even though I recommend to most of my friends that they switch to a projector next time they upgrade the TV, I'd say go with an expensive-up-front 50-60" LCD TV (which still have backlights, but they draw 100-150W and last for over 50K hours). It will save money in the first year alone.
PEOPLE (who deserve privacy) are your customers.
.
I would take that statement not as a fact, but rather, as a condition.
The medium does not equal the message. Okay, so the Indian government (just like the Sauds recently, and just like the US government since always) wants access to the medium. Good for the government, they get what they want, RIM gets access to a market that dwarfs the US, and the (few) the people who really do "deserve" privacy will use GPG or similar, and have privacy - The rest never cared in the first place, and "deserve" whatever they get.
Yes, in an ideal world, RIM would have told every government (including the US) to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. In this world, RIM has a (legal) obligation to to choose the course of action most likely to maximize shareholder value - And since the number of people who sincerely care about privacy don't even appear as a blip on their radar, they have chosen, and will continue to choose, to roll over in order to gain access to new markets.
No, I completely understand that your armchair analysis based on a blurb on a tech site is going to trump the city's analysis in all cases.
With a metric of success based on number of $100 tickets issued, I think we can safely say that they don't expect increased compliance to pay for this. And at $26 per ton, it would take a lot of increased compliance to equal a single ticket.
They may, however, need to deal with "accidental" success, as has happened with other "punitive" taxes such as on smoking or gasoline - Governments get addicted to what they see as a guaranteed stream of income, then panic when they make those taxes so high that people actually do cut back / quit / start complying more.
As an aside - Why do people not recycle their own metals? Okay, paper and plastics mostly don't pay enough to make it worth the fuel to transport them. But clean metals pay hundreds on the ton (even common ol' steel goes in the range of $250/ton). Seems like a no brainer, IMO.
And this same news was posted expect for the fact that the magazine was substituted with website. "Before the website's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents."
Self-debasing humor aside, you have rather a significant difference between a site like Slashdot selling out, and a magazine for gay teens.
Most notably, paying for and receiving a physical magazine means the company has your name, CC info, and physical address; Slashdot has a dynamic IP address, a largely anonymous handle, a throwaway contact email address that likely filled with spam and died at least five years ago, and knows my default comment threshold.
Not to mention, society doesn't stigmatize geekdom (these days) quite the same way it does homosexuality. Although I find the Slashdot crowd far more tolerant of such issues than the general public, our "perverse love" of technology rarely gets us lynched.
It was all a big Google (mistake) when exposed.
Uh, Mr. Balmer? You misspelled "Bing".
I'd simply pick the "or" option... "or "vigorously" responding to copyright infringement notices from copyright holders.'"
So close... Now apply a different interpretation of "vigorously respond" - As in "aggressively countersue any frivolous DMCA complaints".
Awww, the RIAA doesn't like having enemies they created that actually have teeth? Well then, perhaps they should have stuck to grannies and tweens.
What you are ACTUALLY saying is that you'd like not to pay for other people's kids
Actually, no. You have read far more into my comment than I put there.
I almost entirely agree with everything you've written (beyond your attribution of my motives). Society does benefit when we raise kids properly. And society needs to explicitly address that - But to repeat my actual point, that burden shouldn't rest on your employer.
Personally, I would like to see some sort of first child government-paid (and yes, I realize that means we-the-people end up paying for it via taxes - Might as well put them to some good use) maternity leave where the mother (or father, but let's keep this realistic) can take five years off (until the kid hits kindergarten) and receive something like UI-level benefits just to raise the kid properly. But of course, realistically I know that will happen around the same time that our problems in the Middle East go away (ie, never).
Spoken like someone who does not have children. Until you do, you have no idea what it takes, especially if it's not smooth sailing.
Look, if you choose to have kids, kudos to you for helping keep the species alive.
But put bluntly - Everything you say does not equal you employer's problem, nor does it describe the norm (which the GP nailed). If SOMEONE, of either gender, has less reliability due to having a kid, guess who doesn't get the promotions?
In fact, you pretty much make the case against sexism - You will (on avegerage) make less than your peers due to choosing family over work. You have less value to your employer than your coworkers without a newborn, simple as that.
It's true. The AFP also wanted a few other Facecook buttons: "Are my Papers OK?" and "Turn in My Parents".
Joking aside, in this specific situation, I say "give them exactly what they asked for" - A button at the top of every facebook page that reports something directly to the police. The more it reports, the better.
And when, a week later, the police beg to stop having their inbox flooded with useless complaints about every troll and mean comment posted around the world, then Facebook can take their time in a six-month review of the social, technological, and procedural "implications" of the proposed change.
It's their damned platform and they can be as pricky as they want.
No. That argument already commits a serious error. You own the phone. You get to decide what runs on it. Even if you want to argue that Apple decides the base platform, in this case (certainly not the first) they have reduced the functionality of a device you own.
This sort of thing will work itself out. Likely not to Apple's long-term benefit, IMHO.
Steve Jobs could rape a busload of nuns and his fans would point out that some consider habits as fetishwear and anyway, they should have flown instead of taking the bus.
All in all there is very little chance this has happened to either of you. Rather what we have here is the perfect demonstration of the tendency of the male of the species to talk absolute bollocks when it comes to the topic of driving experiences.
I don't know how you got modded informative, but I can easily address all of your points in one fairly common example - Sitting as the only car at a pointless light. Nothing to do for 30 seconds, and motion in the rearview has a pretty good chance of catching your attention.
Now, knowing the guy won't stop, I have to agree that amounts to a matter of opinion - Some people like to stop as abruptly as possible at a light, others seem to roll along for a quarter mile leading up to it. If, however, they reach the point where tires would squeal without appearing to slow, you can bet your ass that, with no opposing traffic, I'll run the light and risk a ticket. And have done so, Mr. skeptic.
But to call BS? BS. Just because it hasn't happened to you... As the GP said, count yourself lucky.
The day they actually implement this, I start caring about (and driving) "antique" (aka exempt) cars.
Seriously... Great idea in theory. In practice, how many times have you sat waiting for a light and suddenly had to move NOW? Either for an ambulance, or some moron going too fast and turning far too widely, or a tractor trailer at a tight intersection that would otherwise have rolled its back tires over your hood, or even suddenly having to run the light to avoid getting rear-ended by someone coming up behind you completely oblivious to the light?
Good luck with all of those if the light itself has the power to kill your car. Oh, safety override, you say? Only if I can leave it on override 100% of the time.
It astounds me that people think they know better than an entire discipline and even more so that they get modded up for doing it. But then again...it is the internet.
Funny thing about the internet... Believe it or not, some of us do actually count as experts in the domain of knowledge in question, fully capable of calling BS even on all those magically-always-right PhDs out there.
In this case, I can't claim myself an expert (merely have a minor in math, concentrating on, of all things, proof theory). But I stand by my statement - A proof with easily violated premises doesn't "prove" anything. It may remain valid for some subset of input sets, but validity does not equal truth. And when your input set equals the real world, you can't just arbitrarily constrain it and still call it true.
Various proofs show that if the quantum bit error rate is less than 20 percent, then the message is secure. However, these proofs assume that the errors are the result of noise from the environment.
Then they do not "prove" anything.
When you start from a false premise, you produce "garbage", not "proofs" (Actually, you can produce some really useful counterfactuals that way, but you wouldn't present it in the context of a proof of the original concept). Particularly when talking about security, what moron would assume any sources of error come from the environment rather than the attacker???
If you had some kind of vibration sensor that measured vibration levels, couldn't it then talk back to code telling it to slow down because there's too much vibration?
I think you either overestimate the frequency of typical vibrations, or underestimate the speed at which your heads can theoretically seek.
A 15k drive can push around 180 IOPS. A typical human scream comes out at around 300Hz. 1.6 cycles really doesn't give enough of a sample to reliably detect (much less correct for) even they most predictable of sources of interference.
The situation gets somewhat better for lower-speed drives, but consider that most real-world vibrations won't come from humans, but rather will involve some harmonic of 60HZ (or 50Hz, depending on your local AC frequency). Even a 7200RPM drive can push 90IOPS, making a 120Hz source of interference come out to a mere 1.33 cycles.
So long story short - Yeah, you can detect (and correct for) fairly repetitive sources of vibration. The most common real-world sources of such vibrations, however, occur at a low enough frequency that you won't see enough of the interference per seek to meaningfully do anything about it.
So you want to have the choice to let Adobe tell you which features of Apple's OS your apps can use.
That has so much wrong with it, I don't even know where to begin.
Okay, how about here - Can you explain how having the choice to use interpreted-language-X restricts me more than not having it available as a choice?
OK well how about a refrigerator that can access recipe sites via the web.
That sounds like a great feature... But if I want to play cheesy flash games or even look at porn while standing in front of my refrigerator, my call, not Steverinos.
For the car example, you could arguably make a case that non-relevant browsing counts as a safety issue. But only while moving... Again, if I want to play cheesy flash games or look at porn while parked in my garage, my choice.