Welcome to the notion of a superior human species touched by God.
"Hmmmm. Let's wander off on a completely orthogonal bullshit tangent (whatever it is) and try and make myself look clever."
You kind of prove my point.
You mean that I, as a member of one of the six self-aware (though by no means "as intelligent as us") species on this planet (and perhaps
anywhere), using a tool that allows me to disagree with you from (potentially) the opposite side of the planet in mere milliseconds,
demonstrate the non-superiority of a species that can, if it so chooses (and has in the past), eradicate any other single species (or for
that matter, all of them)?
I suppose we'll have to just "agree to disagree" on that one. I won't claim the power of destruction as the greatest thing ever, but
it sure as hell beats the other end of the stick.
I sometimes wonder how some people would react to a stronger species if it actually came along.
That particular drama has played out countless times throughout history, so we really don't need to wonder all that
much - The weaker side fights back, loses, appeals to the stronger's mercy. If the stronger side has none, the
weaker side ceases to exist, simple as that.
You might care to explain why that happened.
"Every morning, a gazelle wakes up knowing it must outrun the fastest lion, or be killed.
Every morning, a lion wakes up knowing it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or starve to death.
It doesn't matter if you are the gazelle or the lion: When the Sun comes up, you'd better be running."
So did they use that money to fix it so that it is now incorrect again?
Probably not, fines like that almost never go to actual repairs.
Even if the government does restore the sign to its incorrect original state, however, these heroes need not fear their efforts went unappreciated - I fully expect we can look forward to a wave of copycats correcting atrocious grammar wherever it may lurk. And I for one thank them for their sacrifice, for the sake of all of us.
As for the "work of art" angle - Sorry, no. Someone famous proving they can't spell does not make for art, any more than Pollock pissing on a canvas does. These guys fixed a typo, period, and the government should reward them for their work.
Just put one on top of another and but a steel ball so it keeps
passing from one portal to another until it gets so hot to ignites the air.
The portals don't actually increase the velocity of what passes through
them, they just redirect it. So the trick of putting two portals vertically
aligned basically simulates "falling" for a much greater distance.
You would still (if in an atmosphere) reach terminal velocity rather quickly, however,
so no vaporized metal (or human) explosions will happen.
I don't think we have any more individual 'intelligence' than other animals.
Welcome to the end result of a Politically Correct(tm) education, folks. Years
of considering the strong and the weak as somehow magically "equal", and we arrive
at this as the pinnacle (as in, highest point before we plunge off the
evolutionary cliff) of Western culture.
I have to admit, though, that idea does logically derive from the false premise
that we all have some innate equality and value. Still doesn't make it true,
but a valid conclusion.
When you can see things from another individual's perspective and exchange
ideas, it makes the world of difference.
No. You want to know why "we" won and the neanderthals ceased to exist? Because,
at some point, we wanted their stuff, and they didn't want to give it to us. So,
we applied our tool-making skills to the task of killing, and did it just a little
bit better than they did. And then we wiped them out and took their stuff. Almost
exactly the opposite of the "empathy" you would praise.
"The system is about to take a sweeping technological turn, doing away with booths,
baskets, cash and relying on video cameras to bill drivers."
How exactly do they plan to do that? Not everyone passing through their state lives
there, or near enough to realistically expect them to sign up for EZ-Pass. Personally,
I don't have it because, while I live in a state that does use EZ-Pass, I only go
through the tolls perhaps twice a year.
Clearly, the states would much rather switch to all electronic tolls (they seem
to make a game of making the cash-accepting lanes as difficult to find as possible),
but to do away with cash altogether? Not possible.
We've already moved manufacturing south of the border because the
punch press standards have basically become "only GM can comply with
these; don't even try."
Funny, my employer, a pretty small-scale (in the big picture - rather large
locally) manufacturer, has no problems using them safely.
Or do you just mean to whine that robber-baron manufacturers can no longer
send children into running machines to do minor repairs, thereby avoiding
downtime at the trifling risk of a few fingers?
3. For both enterprises and individuals, there doesn't
seem to be any cost justification for upgrading to IPv6.
What's the benefit? It works now, right?
You left out "4. We have no need for IPV6 yet, or anywhere in the near future".
Put simply, I haven't switched because it does nothing for me, while
making addresses harder to remember as the sole reward.
In the modern world, most machines have a private address connecting via a single
externally-visible address. That applies to both homes and companies. You
want more addresses? Take away the class-A blocks from the likes of Halliburton,
Boeing, HP, and dozens of others that almost never need more than a routeable class-B
(if even that much). And that whole "multicast" BS... Sounded great on paper,
but I have never seen anything actually use it. 16 class-A blocks sitting
unused right there.
We don't need more addresses, we just need better use of the ones we have.
Judging from his mugshot he looks to be suffering the effects of radiation exposure
Just to clarify - Skin lesions like that don't result from radiation poisoning far in the past
(though on the short term from acute exposure, perhaps).
More likely, he inhaled/ingested/absorbed waaaaay more Thorium than does the body good, which
does lead to skin lesions (not to mention other nuissances like bone cancer).
Remember kids, as much of a PITA we all consider OSHA, their standards usually err on the
side of the employer, not actual safety. If they say "use a dust mask" to work with
something, you probably want nothing short of a negative-pressure glove-box.
Photo's used to be precious, they carried a real cost (film, development and
printing), and because of that, you used to think about what was worth taking
a picture of.
Although somewhat true, I have literally dozens of boxes of old photos and slides from
my grandparents, mostly of the most mundane-looking scenes. Clearly the expense (my
grandparents in no way counted as wealthy) and time didn't keep them from clicking away
furiously while on vacation.
I do, however, have to agree with you, in part... Thanks to having each picture
basically "free" on a modern digital, with near-infinite capacity, I'll snap off
a 3-burst at just about anything that even vaguely interests me. As a result, I
have a far lower ratio of "good" pictures overall, but a much, much higher
ratio of truly stunning ones. While in all those boxes I've found perhaps ten that
elicit a "wow" of awe, on my last vacation alone I managed perhaps twice that many.
Already, I've found myself frustrated and drowning in thousands of mediocre pictures.
Yes, the ease of shooting off 300 pictures means you have plenty of crap to go through at
the end of the day... But thanks to the ease not only of taking those pictures, but of
viewing and deleting them, I can go through the whole lot in under ten minutes.
And as for drowning in thousands of them - Delete the crap! Simple as that. If you take a
burst, only keep the best of the group. If you take something blurry, gone. If you
take 50 shots of the same whale only to notice later that you can't tell it from a
bit of driftwood, delete the whole lot of 'em (except perhaps one to make fun of).
You can think of it as a sort of "composition after the fact" - Shoot first
and ask questions later.
There is something about a box full of old, fading photographs that digital
photo's just can't offer.
Am I the only one thinking this is like someone saying they want privacy then running around
butt naked then wondering how they can keep their privacy at the same time.
Erm... No.
Although he described it with way too much complexity, he just wants to do an "rsync -ac" using FTP
as a transport and a source-encrypting input filter.
He wants to do this because, in a move that should amaze most Slashdotters, he actually wants to
keep good backups rather than mistaking softRAID across a few cheap SATA drives as a "backup" solution.
Finally, he understands that off-site backups beat on-site backups, but secure offsite hosting doesn't
come cheap. Easy solution? He plans to secure his own data, and store it in a relatively
unprotected (but cheap) place.
Honestly, it surprises me this hasn't come up more often. He has a good idea, and just wants to know if
any single tools exist to do it better than rolling his own solution.
Re:Boost epitomizes everything that is wrong with
on
Boost 1.36 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Rather than design a new language that does support that functionality, or build external tools
to provide it, they contort the template semantics of the language in order to try and squeeze that functionality out of nothing.
Wait - You actually mean to say you'd rather see an entirely new language appear to address
mere oversights in an existing one, than extend the single most widely supported (in the sense of
"used" and "dev tools exist on platform-X") language to do a few new tricks?
As an aside, I don't use Boost. But if it does what I needed, you can bet the farm I'd use it
rather than waiting for Programming-Language-Du-Jour support on a given platform... For a frame of
reference, consider the classic comeback to the apologist's "but Java runs on so many platforms"
argument: "And how did you compile the JVM?".
NBC doesn't seem to think that nobody's watching. They're claiming American Idol-esque numbers so far.
Which means, comparatively, that nobody watched.
American Idol and various other record-breaking series' don't even come close to the
numbers for major events like the superbowl or the olympics. Claiming that this year's olympics
"only" did as well as American idol amounts to a record-breaking poor viewership.
You've proven the case for multimedia on the Web. Not Flash.
Okay, so other than Flash (or any other proprietary browser plug in such as Quicktime or Real), how
do you propose to get that multimedia on the web? A large unpadded table with Javascript
updating the colors? I hope you like 320x240 at 2fps...
Put simply, Flash solves a major shortcoming of the web in general - Namely, the lack of any
really powerful client-side multimedia-oriented code execution in a more-or-less
sandboxed environment. Until you can say how to do it better (and I'd love it if
you would, since I don't claim to "like" Flash except as the best of a sorry lot).
Therefore, we should all store and distribute.doc files instead of an open standard.
No one has said we should put up with Flash because of all the good it has done; only that it
fills an otherwise rather empty niche.
I see two major flaws with applying this behavior to crime...
First, bees live in an essentially homogenous environment - They generally travel less than a mile, and
have a more-or-less equal chance of finding something yummy in any direction from the hive. Most humans tend to
live in population clusters (aka "cities"), with those preferring (or needing) solitude (ie, serial killers) tending
toward the outskirts of the cities. Thus, their "hunting ground" would have a strong bias toward the city,
with little correlation between where they live and where they kill.
Second, humans don't blindly follow instinct. They have the capacity to very carefully consider what the distribution
of bodies says about them (with some of the most famous serial killers using that very distribution to send their message).
They even have the capacity, knowing that the police will look for geographical patterns, to "frame" other people
by carefully leaving bodies in the right places.
It sounds great to say that if a killer randomly goes out once a week, at least five miles from home, then kills the first
convenient target, that you can pinpoint where he originates from. In practice, I don't see that as even remotely
plausible.
Others, though, see the entire episode as yet another example of irresponsible, publicity-hungry
security researchers trying to grab a few headlines."
Let me add another, somewhat more cynical voice to the debate...
Why should security researchers disclose their discoveries to the original author first?
That would only make sense if we assume all security researchers do what they do for the sake
of improving software for which have no financial incentive to improve, out of pure benevolence.
While such people might exist, only a fool would naively expect that as the majority,
much less all of them.
So, why do security researchers do their thing? Two words: "fame" and "money". And even such
"noble" goals still leave out the true blackhats, who do it for the sake of finding new,
unpatched exploits they can use.
Considering that, does it make any sense to talk about a mythical "obligation" to disclose vulnerabilities
to the right people? IMO, not at all. If we want to have a sensible conversation on this topic, we
should instead focus on how best to shift the motivation to more on the money and less on the fame.
Which sounds more motivating, "bounties for bugs" or "report it to the proper channels"?
Why do we always need someone to blame? All the sides involved have their own valid way of seeing the situation...
The content creator wants to "protect" their work; The end user wants to keep a copy for a variety
of reasons. The container/transport producer gets paid by the content producer (usually); and the
crackers don't actually count as a separate group, they just reflect knowledgeable end-users who
have the power to make sure they can keep a copy.
Who in that chain do we call "wrong" for what they do? The creator we can perhaps call "overprotective", thinking
that once the baby grows up and leaves home they can still tell it what to do. The middlemen perhaps should
perhaps advise their customers better, but at the end of the day they need to eat too. The end users should of
course reimburse the creators for the content, but I would consider "free" the least of the reasons to have
a local copy.
Or looking at it from a slightly different angle... At every step, the situation boils down to pure self-interest.
And put bluntly, I value my interests above yours - just as you value your own interests above mine.
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in
cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
Most companies trade at a P/E much, much greater than 1. Historically,
a P/E of 14 counts as "fair value", the point considered neither high
nor low. For comparison, the average for the tech
sector as a whole varies over time between 40 (at the height of the
bubble) and 25 (currently in that range). Apple, at 35, falls a bit
higher than its sector, but not so much that you'd call it extreme.
"Professional" hourly workers (and I mean outside the IT world) generally don't bother with
time cards, except as a once-a-week formality ("You worked 40hrs?" "Yup" "okay").
I hate being told I can't do something (ie: work 80 hours this week then work 20 the next).
Well, can't help you with that one, except to say that it depends on the averaging period for what your
employer calls "full time". If they strictly insist you must work 40/wk for full-time status, then yeah, you
just need to use some of your PTO. More often, they average that biweekly or monthly, so yes, you can
still do exactly what you describe.
I like not having to deal with an ever changing income flow depending on how much overtime I took that particular month.
Um, hello? It only varies upward as a result of OT. I'd take that in a heartbeat over having my effective
hourly rate start slowly dropping after I hit 40 hours for the week, since my pay won't change no matter how
long I stay... But wow does my motivation level start dropping at that point.
If I thought I was being paid too little then I'd talk to my manager and/or find another job.
Managers and HR departments have learned the fine art of pushing "just barely okay". I agree with you, if
I worked 60hrs a week every week, I'd find a new job. But, liking my job otherwise, will I quit because I find
myself pushing 45 hours more often than not? Unlikely.
And before you ask I can do this because I'm not an idiot and I put saving for a rainy day above everything else.
Totally different topic. This doesn't involve hourly wage-slaves working for $8/hr at Wallyworld. Whether salaried
or hourly, IT professionals generally make decent money. Most of us have the option of finding a new job relatively
quickly; The uncertaintly, hassle, vesting schedules, and the fact that most companies pull the same BS, make
looking for a new job not all that appealing except in the worst cases.
we mostly look at Masters students [...] we didn't have a single American citizen apply for an internship last year
Ah, I think I see your problem.
You want to hire, as interns, people who have already gotten their BS and have the option of taking a "real"
job with most other companies (at least, most companies outside Silicon Valley).
But don't worry, absurd expectation or not, it will still look good when you have to justify using all H1Bs.
Now, you didn't mention what your company does... If you specialize in something like bioinformatics and want
non-CS Masters/PhD people, I withdraw my vitriol. But outside academia and pure research, higher degrees
in CS should stand out as a red flag, not a resume greenlight.
Really, if you don't tell us what OS you are using, it will be hard to suggest software. Not all/.ers still run slackware.
Well, sure, not on all of them... Gotta admit, that young upstart Debian makes a heck of a desktop machine. But still
Slackware on all the "important" machines, naturally.
If price was no big deal, wouldn't the airlines raise prices and get rid of all this red ink?
I didn't say price doesn't matter - I said price comes quite a few notches from the top of the list of
reasons not to fly.
Yes, given two comparable flights to the same destination at the same time, people will pick the
cheapest one. And yes, flying costs enough that most people will slightly shift their schedule
around by a day or two to cut their airfare in half.
But if the brats want to go to Disney, taking them to "Fred's World of Furries" instead simply
doesn't cut it.
They will choose a different destination that has a cheaper fare, or find a vacation that is close to home
I would agree with you that many people will, and have, done so, though IMO more to avoid the hell of
air travel than to save money. But you can only do that when you don't want to go somewhere specific.
Set it too low, and the plane would be full but the fares wouldn't cover costs. Too high, and you wouldn't have enough
passengers. But a mix of passengers some paying more than others can be profitable.
"Are you really that clueless?"
Although the ultra-cheap business commuter flights may count as "optional", for most Americans, we simply
don't have the option of driving across the country in our one week of actual vacation each year (the
other going to things like doctors appointments and anniversaries) just to visit cheesy-kids-trap-X.
Currently the price counts as the least of the reasons not to fly. I'd put Security Theatre and
packing-us-in-like-cattle well above "merely" paying an extra hundred or so.
Re:Can we still blame pollution for this?
on
Hot Water, Hot Earth
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Seriously, though, wouldn't the water just convert to steam at that point,
even if it WAS under that much water?
The term "supercritical" doesn't just make a nice-sounding buzzword to toss into
the article.
It literally means that you can make no meaningful distinction between the liquid and
gaseous phases of the water at that pressure and temperature - You have something
between the two phases with no phase-change energy transition separating them.
As an aside, humans use supercritical water all the time, in power plants. This only
counts as interesting because we've never seen it occur naturally before (most
likely because we don't tend to hang out a lot in places at pressures above 22MPa).
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the notion of a superior human species touched by God.
"Hmmmm. Let's wander off on a completely orthogonal bullshit tangent (whatever it is) and try and make myself look clever."
You kind of prove my point.
You mean that I, as a member of one of the six self-aware (though by no means "as intelligent as us") species on this planet (and perhaps anywhere), using a tool that allows me to disagree with you from (potentially) the opposite side of the planet in mere milliseconds, demonstrate the non-superiority of a species that can, if it so chooses (and has in the past), eradicate any other single species (or for that matter, all of them)?
I suppose we'll have to just "agree to disagree" on that one. I won't claim the power of destruction as the greatest thing ever, but it sure as hell beats the other end of the stick.
I sometimes wonder how some people would react to a stronger species if it actually came along.
That particular drama has played out countless times throughout history, so we really don't need to wonder all that much - The weaker side fights back, loses, appeals to the stronger's mercy. If the stronger side has none, the weaker side ceases to exist, simple as that.
You might care to explain why that happened.
"Every morning, a gazelle wakes up knowing it must outrun the fastest lion, or be killed.
Every morning, a lion wakes up knowing it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or starve to death.
It doesn't matter if you are the gazelle or the lion: When the Sun comes up, you'd better be running."
That about do it for ya?
So did they use that money to fix it so that it is now incorrect again?
Probably not, fines like that almost never go to actual repairs.
Even if the government does restore the sign to its incorrect original state, however, these heroes need not fear their efforts went unappreciated - I fully expect we can look forward to a wave of copycats correcting atrocious grammar wherever it may lurk. And I for one thank them for their sacrifice, for the sake of all of us.
As for the "work of art" angle - Sorry, no. Someone famous proving they can't spell does not make for art, any more than Pollock pissing on a canvas does. These guys fixed a typo, period, and the government should reward them for their work.
Just put one on top of another and but a steel ball so it keeps passing from one portal to another until it gets so hot to ignites the air.
The portals don't actually increase the velocity of what passes through them, they just redirect it. So the trick of putting two portals vertically aligned basically simulates "falling" for a much greater distance.
You would still (if in an atmosphere) reach terminal velocity rather quickly, however, so no vaporized metal (or human) explosions will happen.
I don't think we have any more individual 'intelligence' than other animals.
Welcome to the end result of a Politically Correct(tm) education, folks. Years of considering the strong and the weak as somehow magically "equal", and we arrive at this as the pinnacle (as in, highest point before we plunge off the evolutionary cliff) of Western culture.
I have to admit, though, that idea does logically derive from the false premise that we all have some innate equality and value. Still doesn't make it true, but a valid conclusion.
When you can see things from another individual's perspective and exchange ideas, it makes the world of difference.
No. You want to know why "we" won and the neanderthals ceased to exist? Because, at some point, we wanted their stuff, and they didn't want to give it to us. So, we applied our tool-making skills to the task of killing, and did it just a little bit better than they did. And then we wiped them out and took their stuff. Almost exactly the opposite of the "empathy" you would praise.
"The system is about to take a sweeping technological turn, doing away with booths, baskets, cash and relying on video cameras to bill drivers."
How exactly do they plan to do that? Not everyone passing through their state lives there, or near enough to realistically expect them to sign up for EZ-Pass. Personally, I don't have it because, while I live in a state that does use EZ-Pass, I only go through the tolls perhaps twice a year.
Clearly, the states would much rather switch to all electronic tolls (they seem to make a game of making the cash-accepting lanes as difficult to find as possible), but to do away with cash altogether? Not possible.
We've already moved manufacturing south of the border because the punch press standards have basically become "only GM can comply with these; don't even try."
Funny, my employer, a pretty small-scale (in the big picture - rather large locally) manufacturer, has no problems using them safely.
Or do you just mean to whine that robber-baron manufacturers can no longer send children into running machines to do minor repairs, thereby avoiding downtime at the trifling risk of a few fingers?
3. For both enterprises and individuals, there doesn't seem to be any cost justification for upgrading to IPv6. What's the benefit? It works now, right?
You left out "4. We have no need for IPV6 yet, or anywhere in the near future". Put simply, I haven't switched because it does nothing for me, while making addresses harder to remember as the sole reward.
In the modern world, most machines have a private address connecting via a single externally-visible address. That applies to both homes and companies. You want more addresses? Take away the class-A blocks from the likes of Halliburton, Boeing, HP, and dozens of others that almost never need more than a routeable class-B (if even that much). And that whole "multicast" BS... Sounded great on paper, but I have never seen anything actually use it. 16 class-A blocks sitting unused right there.
We don't need more addresses, we just need better use of the ones we have.
Judging from his mugshot he looks to be suffering the effects of radiation exposure
Just to clarify - Skin lesions like that don't result from radiation poisoning far in the past (though on the short term from acute exposure, perhaps).
More likely, he inhaled/ingested/absorbed waaaaay more Thorium than does the body good, which does lead to skin lesions (not to mention other nuissances like bone cancer).
Remember kids, as much of a PITA we all consider OSHA, their standards usually err on the side of the employer, not actual safety. If they say "use a dust mask" to work with something, you probably want nothing short of a negative-pressure glove-box.
Photo's used to be precious, they carried a real cost (film, development and printing), and because of that, you used to think about what was worth taking a picture of.
Although somewhat true, I have literally dozens of boxes of old photos and slides from my grandparents, mostly of the most mundane-looking scenes. Clearly the expense (my grandparents in no way counted as wealthy) and time didn't keep them from clicking away furiously while on vacation.
I do, however, have to agree with you, in part... Thanks to having each picture basically "free" on a modern digital, with near-infinite capacity, I'll snap off a 3-burst at just about anything that even vaguely interests me. As a result, I have a far lower ratio of "good" pictures overall, but a much, much higher ratio of truly stunning ones. While in all those boxes I've found perhaps ten that elicit a "wow" of awe, on my last vacation alone I managed perhaps twice that many.
Already, I've found myself frustrated and drowning in thousands of mediocre pictures.
Yes, the ease of shooting off 300 pictures means you have plenty of crap to go through at the end of the day... But thanks to the ease not only of taking those pictures, but of viewing and deleting them, I can go through the whole lot in under ten minutes.
And as for drowning in thousands of them - Delete the crap! Simple as that. If you take a burst, only keep the best of the group. If you take something blurry, gone. If you take 50 shots of the same whale only to notice later that you can't tell it from a bit of driftwood, delete the whole lot of 'em (except perhaps one to make fun of). You can think of it as a sort of "composition after the fact" - Shoot first and ask questions later.
There is something about a box full of old, fading photographs that digital photo's just can't offer.
Yeah - Dust. Lots of it.
Am I the only one thinking this is like someone saying they want privacy then running around butt naked then wondering how they can keep their privacy at the same time.
Erm... No.
Although he described it with way too much complexity, he just wants to do an "rsync -ac" using FTP as a transport and a source-encrypting input filter.
He wants to do this because, in a move that should amaze most Slashdotters, he actually wants to keep good backups rather than mistaking softRAID across a few cheap SATA drives as a "backup" solution.
Finally, he understands that off-site backups beat on-site backups, but secure offsite hosting doesn't come cheap. Easy solution? He plans to secure his own data, and store it in a relatively unprotected (but cheap) place.
Honestly, it surprises me this hasn't come up more often. He has a good idea, and just wants to know if any single tools exist to do it better than rolling his own solution.
Rather than design a new language that does support that functionality, or build external tools to provide it, they contort the template semantics of the language in order to try and squeeze that functionality out of nothing.
Wait - You actually mean to say you'd rather see an entirely new language appear to address mere oversights in an existing one, than extend the single most widely supported (in the sense of "used" and "dev tools exist on platform-X") language to do a few new tricks?
As an aside, I don't use Boost. But if it does what I needed, you can bet the farm I'd use it rather than waiting for Programming-Language-Du-Jour support on a given platform... For a frame of reference, consider the classic comeback to the apologist's "but Java runs on so many platforms" argument: "And how did you compile the JVM?".
NBC doesn't seem to think that nobody's watching. They're claiming American Idol-esque numbers so far.
Which means, comparatively, that nobody watched.
American Idol and various other record-breaking series' don't even come close to the numbers for major events like the superbowl or the olympics. Claiming that this year's olympics "only" did as well as American idol amounts to a record-breaking poor viewership.
You've proven the case for multimedia on the Web. Not Flash.
.doc files instead of an open standard.
Okay, so other than Flash (or any other proprietary browser plug in such as Quicktime or Real), how do you propose to get that multimedia on the web? A large unpadded table with Javascript updating the colors? I hope you like 320x240 at 2fps...
Put simply, Flash solves a major shortcoming of the web in general - Namely, the lack of any really powerful client-side multimedia-oriented code execution in a more-or-less sandboxed environment. Until you can say how to do it better (and I'd love it if you would, since I don't claim to "like" Flash except as the best of a sorry lot).
Therefore, we should all store and distribute
No one has said we should put up with Flash because of all the good it has done; only that it fills an otherwise rather empty niche.
I see two major flaws with applying this behavior to crime...
First, bees live in an essentially homogenous environment - They generally travel less than a mile, and have a more-or-less equal chance of finding something yummy in any direction from the hive. Most humans tend to live in population clusters (aka "cities"), with those preferring (or needing) solitude (ie, serial killers) tending toward the outskirts of the cities. Thus, their "hunting ground" would have a strong bias toward the city, with little correlation between where they live and where they kill.
Second, humans don't blindly follow instinct. They have the capacity to very carefully consider what the distribution of bodies says about them (with some of the most famous serial killers using that very distribution to send their message). They even have the capacity, knowing that the police will look for geographical patterns, to "frame" other people by carefully leaving bodies in the right places.
It sounds great to say that if a killer randomly goes out once a week, at least five miles from home, then kills the first convenient target, that you can pinpoint where he originates from. In practice, I don't see that as even remotely plausible.
Others, though, see the entire episode as yet another example of irresponsible, publicity-hungry security researchers trying to grab a few headlines."
Let me add another, somewhat more cynical voice to the debate...
Why should security researchers disclose their discoveries to the original author first? That would only make sense if we assume all security researchers do what they do for the sake of improving software for which have no financial incentive to improve, out of pure benevolence. While such people might exist, only a fool would naively expect that as the majority, much less all of them.
So, why do security researchers do their thing? Two words: "fame" and "money". And even such "noble" goals still leave out the true blackhats, who do it for the sake of finding new, unpatched exploits they can use.
Considering that, does it make any sense to talk about a mythical "obligation" to disclose vulnerabilities to the right people? IMO, not at all. If we want to have a sensible conversation on this topic, we should instead focus on how best to shift the motivation to more on the money and less on the fame. Which sounds more motivating, "bounties for bugs" or "report it to the proper channels"?
Who is to blame?
Why do we always need someone to blame? All the sides involved have their own valid way of seeing the situation...
The content creator wants to "protect" their work; The end user wants to keep a copy for a variety of reasons. The container/transport producer gets paid by the content producer (usually); and the crackers don't actually count as a separate group, they just reflect knowledgeable end-users who have the power to make sure they can keep a copy.
Who in that chain do we call "wrong" for what they do? The creator we can perhaps call "overprotective", thinking that once the baby grows up and leaves home they can still tell it what to do. The middlemen perhaps should perhaps advise their customers better, but at the end of the day they need to eat too. The end users should of course reimburse the creators for the content, but I would consider "free" the least of the reasons to have a local copy.
Or looking at it from a slightly different angle... At every step, the situation boils down to pure self-interest. And put bluntly, I value my interests above yours - just as you value your own interests above mine.
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
Most companies trade at a P/E much, much greater than 1. Historically, a P/E of 14 counts as "fair value", the point considered neither high nor low. For comparison, the average for the tech sector as a whole varies over time between 40 (at the height of the bubble) and 25 (currently in that range). Apple, at 35, falls a bit higher than its sector, but not so much that you'd call it extreme.
As of right now, 55% do.
And as of making it to the \. FP, that has reversed.
is the tracker mine if I discover it before they remove it?
Your lips move so strangely when you say "please tase me" - Almost, but not quite, like you said something else.
Well, don't worry, no chance the guy at the trigger will misunderstand...
I hate having to deal with time-cards
"Professional" hourly workers (and I mean outside the IT world) generally don't bother with time cards, except as a once-a-week formality ("You worked 40hrs?" "Yup" "okay").
I hate being told I can't do something (ie: work 80 hours this week then work 20 the next).
Well, can't help you with that one, except to say that it depends on the averaging period for what your employer calls "full time". If they strictly insist you must work 40/wk for full-time status, then yeah, you just need to use some of your PTO. More often, they average that biweekly or monthly, so yes, you can still do exactly what you describe.
I like not having to deal with an ever changing income flow depending on how much overtime I took that particular month.
Um, hello? It only varies upward as a result of OT. I'd take that in a heartbeat over having my effective hourly rate start slowly dropping after I hit 40 hours for the week, since my pay won't change no matter how long I stay... But wow does my motivation level start dropping at that point.
If I thought I was being paid too little then I'd talk to my manager and/or find another job.
Managers and HR departments have learned the fine art of pushing "just barely okay". I agree with you, if I worked 60hrs a week every week, I'd find a new job. But, liking my job otherwise, will I quit because I find myself pushing 45 hours more often than not? Unlikely.
And before you ask I can do this because I'm not an idiot and I put saving for a rainy day above everything else.
Totally different topic. This doesn't involve hourly wage-slaves working for $8/hr at Wallyworld. Whether salaried or hourly, IT professionals generally make decent money. Most of us have the option of finding a new job relatively quickly; The uncertaintly, hassle, vesting schedules, and the fact that most companies pull the same BS, make looking for a new job not all that appealing except in the worst cases.
we mostly look at Masters students [...] we didn't have a single American citizen apply for an internship last year
Ah, I think I see your problem.
You want to hire, as interns, people who have already gotten their BS and have the option of taking a "real" job with most other companies (at least, most companies outside Silicon Valley).
But don't worry, absurd expectation or not, it will still look good when you have to justify using all H1Bs.
Now, you didn't mention what your company does... If you specialize in something like bioinformatics and want non-CS Masters/PhD people, I withdraw my vitriol. But outside academia and pure research, higher degrees in CS should stand out as a red flag, not a resume greenlight.
Really, if you don't tell us what OS you are using, it will be hard to suggest software. Not all /.ers still run slackware.
Well, sure, not on all of them... Gotta admit, that young upstart Debian makes a heck of a desktop machine. But still Slackware on all the "important" machines, naturally.
If price was no big deal, wouldn't the airlines raise prices and get rid of all this red ink?
I didn't say price doesn't matter - I said price comes quite a few notches from the top of the list of reasons not to fly.
Yes, given two comparable flights to the same destination at the same time, people will pick the cheapest one. And yes, flying costs enough that most people will slightly shift their schedule around by a day or two to cut their airfare in half.
But if the brats want to go to Disney, taking them to "Fred's World of Furries" instead simply doesn't cut it.
They will choose a different destination that has a cheaper fare, or find a vacation that is close to home
I would agree with you that many people will, and have, done so, though IMO more to avoid the hell of air travel than to save money. But you can only do that when you don't want to go somewhere specific.
Set it too low, and the plane would be full but the fares wouldn't cover costs. Too high, and you wouldn't have enough passengers. But a mix of passengers some paying more than others can be profitable.
"Are you really that clueless?"
Although the ultra-cheap business commuter flights may count as "optional", for most Americans, we simply don't have the option of driving across the country in our one week of actual vacation each year (the other going to things like doctors appointments and anniversaries) just to visit cheesy-kids-trap-X.
Currently the price counts as the least of the reasons not to fly. I'd put Security Theatre and packing-us-in-like-cattle well above "merely" paying an extra hundred or so.
Seriously, though, wouldn't the water just convert to steam at that point, even if it WAS under that much water?
The term "supercritical" doesn't just make a nice-sounding buzzword to toss into the article.
It literally means that you can make no meaningful distinction between the liquid and gaseous phases of the water at that pressure and temperature - You have something between the two phases with no phase-change energy transition separating them.
As an aside, humans use supercritical water all the time, in power plants. This only counts as interesting because we've never seen it occur naturally before (most likely because we don't tend to hang out a lot in places at pressures above 22MPa).