How do you get the WPA key from the parking lot? Please, do
tell. You can become quite famous and probably make some good
money if you can answer this question.
Just as soon as someone finds the answer to that, or more
likely, finds a way to get around needing it (let's not
insult each other and pretend it will never happen), they
can have the fame, I don't want it.
I understand your point, but it doesn't change the fact that, however
strong you claim cryptosystem-X, I can still assert with 100%
accuracy that running it over wires instead of broadcast RF greatly
improves that strength.
Wireless is far more secure than wired. To listen on your wired
network all I have to do is get access to a cable. To listen on your
WPA-secured wireless network I have to get access to a copy of your
WPA key (assuming PSK for simplicity, but similar difficulties apply
to the other modes).
One of those you can do from the parking lot (or with a good antenna,
quite a good distance away). One you need physical access for.
Thanks, but I'll run encryption over my wires before I'll switch to
trusting the same broadcast to everyone in the area.
Because IT exists to serve our users, not the other way around
(though don't take that as my believing "the customer is
always right" - If I didn't know my job better a whole lot
better than the majority of my users, the company wouldn't
need me; at the same time, if I always played the BOFH,
they wouldn't want me).
Blocking people from ill-behaved programs with a dozen alternatives,
I can justify as "for your own good". Forcing everyone to learn an
entirely new base platform, only to trade one set of problems for
another, would not help anyone (including me).
Like it or not, most people know how to use Windows and MS Office - Not
to mention far too many "productivity" and enterprise apps
only come in a Windows flavor. And since the company already
paid its MS tax, I can't even offer a strong financial incentive to
switch to Linux (though if Vista keeps sucking so hard, perhaps in
a few years when XP goes EOL). I may use it at home, but at work,
I choose the solution that will work best for everyone, not
just myself.
Google, absolutely not (except directly, as a web page).
Adobe, you can "break" its phone-home aspects simply by replacing
the updater executable (the name of which seems to change with
each version) with a stub exe that simply returns 0 (the standard
Unix "true" program, if I can say that without causing an argument
about true vs. Posixly-true).
And believe me, if I could ban Adobe products, I most certainly
would. For supposedly high-quality, nearly-ubiquitous software, that
crap causes me more headaches than just about anything except a
POS POS (both interpretations intended) program we use. Unfortunately,
at least Acrobat falls into a category approaching my "Microsoft"
exemption for importance to the company.
As a member of a small corporate IT department, I can tell you that (except for
Microsoft itself), software phoning home for anything other than updates means
instant banning of your product.
If so, what data is appropriate to report on? The license key?
If you insist on going down that path, what information would really help
you reduce piracy? Keep in mind that, merely during the initial evaluation of
your software, the same license may get used a dozen times without any intended
piracy... "Yup, works on XP. Yup, works on 2k... Oops, blows a gasket on 98...
Doesn't seem to like server versions...".
Should I disable license keys for small amounts of piracy, like when there's 3 active
installations of the software? What about widespread piracy where we detect dozens or
hundreds of uses of the same license key?
That gets tricky... IANAL, but only the big boys like Microsoft can get away with that
BS. If you try it, you should probably prepare to get sued.
Now, you do have one chance to block it - At installation. Even I'll allow
(grudgingly) most products a one-time online activation. If at that time you deny
activation and give an EASY way to contact you to resolve the problem (you can expect
them to lie, and should probably just give them a new code, but it might serve
as a reminder to the users that they shouldn't make too many more copies), okay,
fair game. After-the-fact, though? YOu'll just piss legitimate users off.
This won't happen tomorrow or next week... Talkin' a year or five down the
road. "They" can wait for you to need to buy a new player; for your pathetic
60GB spinning-platter drive to look laughable next to all your friends' 1+ TB
flash-based drives; for the next standard in device interoperability to make
it as easy to find a USB or 1394 port as finding an 5.25" floppy drive today.
If you insisted on buying a digital personal audio player which
only plays non-DRM'd music - well, I guess you're going to have to
find someone who'll sell you that.
...Or just rip it yourself. Worst case, via line-in from a friend's
"authorized" player if you can only find a DRM'd version.
Good luck if your tastes include anyone who's signed
to a major record label.
I have a strong suspicion that as the music industry fragments
between different major labels, vendors, and DRM schemes, you'll
have a much easier time getting arbitrary-song-X to play
on a DRM'less player (despite the increasing lack of availability
of such content - and players) than you will of getting it to play
on any given DRM-enabled player.
When you extend the current idea of "DRM-enabled player", you
presume to much by believing they will continue to support their
own DRM and unprotected content. Oh, silly lad... That
whole "DRM-less content" loophole will close any time now, leaving
you stuck with disHarmony or PlayFair or PlaysForShit or whatever
devil you choose as your only playable format. Your favorite
artist changed vendors? Looks like you either get to carry two
players, or re-buy your entire "can't live without" music library
for the new DRM scheme.
So how does one start their own business without
"wasted time and money"?
Well, technically it costs somewhere around $30 to make
official in most places, but you can usually do most
forms of contracting without actually bothering to pay
the extortion for a "business license". So that comes
pretty close to "without money". Varies by state (and
possibly by town), though, so YMMV, IANAL, etc.
As for "without time"... In your accidental highlighting
of my point, I can't help but think that you perhaps
missed it completely. Read the GP and GGP, and
then re-read my post with your sarcasm detector enbabled.
Yes, because being a business grad with a sack of
money makes you a qualified game designer?
No, it makes him "The Boss".
Don't Like it? Save yourself years of wasted time and
money, and don't even bother getting that degree. Start your
own business and make a fortune (or die in the gutter of starvation).
Want a regular paycheck, instead? Get whatever paper Boss most
values, and expect the occasional BS in your job. Careful selection
of Boss should minimize that, some even have a clue.
If things weren't so horribly intrusive and capable of tracking
a user's entire internet experience, for the sole purpose of selling
you stuff, people wouldn't bitch.
Not entirely true - They can set all the cookies they want; I have FireFox
set to automatically delete them when I close the browser.
Personally, I object to three aspects of ads:
1) They take up part of my screen. Offhand, I see no possible fix
for this, and so will always block any ads larger than my
threshhold-of-annoyance (usually around a 10% top or sidebar). Google
ads get a few percent pass because of their special "low annoyance"
qualities (ie, text-only, nothing flashes or beeps or moves).
2) They take longer to load. I don't mean the extra 4ms it should
take to download a 17KB jpeg over a broadband connection, I mean half
the ads on a given page usually come from badly overloaded servers just
as likely to make me wait for it to timeout as to actually serve an ad.
3) I simply don't buy things from ads. When I want a product, I seek it
out myself. I research the field, find the best available, then try to
find the inflection in the price/quality curve. Nevermind individual
products, ads just don't even influence me (except possibly negatively,
for especially annoying ads) toward entire brands or stores.
If a company wants to make a positive impression on me, they need only
post complete specs of their products in an easy-to-access place
on their website. If I have to hunt for more than 30 seconds just to
find out what type of batteries Product-X takes, I cross it off my list
and move on to Product-Y.
First, this was from June, and second, I recall seeing this out here earlier.
Oh good, I haven't lost my mind!
I do have to express a bit of paranoia here, though... I remember reading about this
just a few months ago, as well as reading it in some other in-print publication (something
big, too, not fringe, like SciAm).
Yet, a Google search for (for example) "satellite ephemeris unlisted" turned up... Meaningless unsorted
wordlists! And not just a few, a LOT of them! And even stranger, on pages having meaningful
titles on a variety of topics.
Call me crazy, but it looks like some (cough, cough, ahem) undisclosed
organization has decided to run interference against the power of Google.
So shooting a laser beam to blind something non-existent shouldn't be a problem.
A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there - Why would anyone care if you shoot down
our own super-secret spy satellites? You need to understand the rules of the game before
you can even play, nevermind win; and in this particular game, "deniability" and "saving
face" count for waaaaaaay more points than merely blowing up someone's cool toys
in a way they can't publically acknowledge (though don't act surprised when you get a
visit from the NSA for a noncomittal "violating interplanetary airspace" or something
absurd like that).
Or, to paraphrase the Doritos catchphrase, "Blast all you want, we'll make more!"
You say that like you intend it as a selling point, rather than
as a downside.
Regardless of your stance on adults choosing to consume one of the oldest
and safest intoxicants known to mankind for pure and simple recreation,
keep in mind that your pet issue here suffers from the same people that
recently made it substantially more annoying for 100% law-abiding allergy
sufferers to obtain the single most effective non-intoxicating substance (pseudoephedrine)
that safely (compared to, say, phenylephrine, an older drug that doesn't work as
well and causes significantly greater increase in blood pressure) relieves their
symptoms, all in the name of stopping idiots already willing to risk their lives
from manufacturing methamphetamine, a substance that we should praise for its
great work in narrowing the field of Darwin-award recipients.
[catches breath in one great long inhalation].
As long as borded college kids can't smoke weed, your cause of industrial
hemp will remain DOA.
And these were life-threatening cases of interference, including
ventilators being switched off and pacemakers running at the wrong
rhythm.
First, one bit of nit-picking... From your link, "Critical care equipment
is vulnerable to electromagnetic interference by new-generation wireless
telecommunication technologies with median distances of about 3 centimeters."
Three centimeters away. Not from the lobby, not from outside, not even
from the same room... Basically all-but-physical contact with the "sensitive"
equipment.
Second, and you can call this an irrelevant hypothetical if you want,
WHY would large, coarse machines such as ventilators, respond
to such low levels of RF? The GP's example of an ECG, I can see (though
as I pointed out, such devices already have rather impressive compensation
for high levels of background noise). Something that deliberately uses
RF (an MRI, for example, which provides its own shielding), sure. But even
something as "big" as a pacemaker?
Even if you're not using GPRS, it's not a hospital's job to go
around testing different cell phone networks to see if they interfere
with their equipment.
Agreed - That responsibility generally falls on the equipment manufacturer,
using standardized tests and defined by the FCC (or appropriate governmental
regulatory body).
I find it somewhat ironic (and indeed, scary) that medical devices
go through so much more rigorous testing (and have a price to
show it) than my clock/radio, yet don't even have the same resilience
(in the FCC-Part-15 sense) as a $4.99 throwaway Walmart special.
You can't magically design a machine that's picking up miniscule
electrical currents like this and have it unaffected when some idiot
brings in a portable radio transceiver
Actually, yes, you can. AEDs found outside hospital settings
don't magically make all RF sources in the area stop before
taking their readings - They work just like
99.9% of the electronic devices in our environment, and just deal
with "harmful intereference" while doing their best not to make
any.
The bigger problem here involves insurance, not the devices
themselves. Cell phones don't kill people in hospitals, or crash
airplanes, or magically blow up at gas stations. But because we
have a one-in-a-million chance of something happening, which
under the worst of situations could hypothetically cause a death/crash/fire,
we have insulting signs all over the place warning us to turn off the
phone.
AMD says it won't use the ACP number to compare the power
consumption of its processors against Intel's.
Before everyone slams them for coming up with yet another
cheesy marketing gimmick, I would point out that Intel has
done this ever since the first of the power-sucking P4 line.
They did it a bit less up-front, however, choosing to
redefine "TDP" in their specs rather than give their numbers
a new term (such as "ACP").
This still won't make for a completely fair direct comparison,
because Intel's TDP refers to a sort of third quartile
case rather than the mean. But better, anyway.
Perhaps more usefully, since AMD has published the ACP spec,
even though they may refuse to run similar tests on Intel
chips, you can bet the farm that 3rd-party results will
come out over the next few days.
End users are the only ones that know what's good for them
End users don't even know what they want, much less what they need.
In one breath they'll complain that they don't have enough access to foo, then turn around
and whine that they shouldn't have had enough permission to delete all their foo data.
As a business, the goal is to give the customer what the customer
will buy, and if that means web 2.0, then do web 2.0.
...Regardless of whether or not Buzzword 2.0 will get their personal
info stolen and your company sued?
It sounds like nice management ass-kiss-speak to call the customer always
right. But when the lawsuits start rolling in, guess which heads end up
on the chopping block first?
If users flock to it, then it must be filling a need.
Yeah - Just like heroin or crack or meth, right? Users want it,
so let them have it! Only a right bastard would deny the users
what they want. All those IT weenies just have no work ethic (despite
the 50+ hour work weeks) and don't want to enter the new paradigm of
dynamic confrabulations that will proactively empower us to
transcend conventional limitations to compete in the global marketplace
(despite the fact that "we" only sell physical items/services from a brick-n'-mortar
to walk-in customers from the surrounding 10 miles).
As the saying goes, "You can't polish a turd". If you have
nothing but absolute shit to sell, offering free gift-wrapping won't
sell more of it.
javascript is the devil. I think it has some of the most flawed type casting
Look, I agree with almost everything you said, even planned to post something similar until I
saw it already here. I even agree so far as to greatly dislike JavaScript.
The fact that it doesn't count as type-safe, however, falls to the very bottom of the
list of problems with it. Because if you want to get picky, 99% (pulled that OOMA, but almost
certainly a conservative estimate) of the software running on your computer used C or C++ as
the language. And you just don't get any less type-safe than them short of using a functional
language like Scheme or Tcl.
Just one more minor peeve...
I would suggest something like the OLPC as an everything
Old people will take a brand new 24" LCD widescreen monitor and run
it at 800x600 to make things look bigger. They can't tell that it
looks horrible off-native res, or that they've destroyed any hope of
a good aspect ratio.
In short, our eyes wear out as we age.
Get them a machine with svideo out (or a largeish TV with VGA in),
and let them use a 30-40" "monitor" at a hideously low resolution.
It will cost less (presuming they already have a decent TV) and
make them much happier.:)
In any case, even if he WASN'T driving, he's still required, by law, to produce ID if he has any.
...In some states. Not nation-wide.
And if, as many posters have suggested, he deliberately did this to make a scene,
I suspect he may have researched his rights in his own state. This appears supported
by the fact that they arrested him not for refusal to show ID, but for a
BS "didn't jump as high as I said" charge.
Umm, maybe the same one as when in the workplace you are given a corporate email?
I use my corporate email for work-related communication only. For everything else,
I use one of several external accounts based on importance and probability of getting spam.
This big brother paranoia is going through the roof on/.
As soon as Big Brother shows some good faith, I'll take off my beanie. Until
then...
Local storage means much faster access times than external provider
You haven't used a school computer in quite a few years, have you? Think of how
efficient and knowledgeable you consider your local broadband provider. Now lower
that by a factor of ten.
The best school networks have the kids running them as a hobby. Anything
"official" in that area means "massively overpriced and slow-if-not-outright-broken".
if it fails, you have a legitimate reason to not produce your homework or project
that was stored or submitted there.
My school used to give out late slips when the busses showed up late. You expect
them to care about, much less understand, system downtime? I can just hear my
11th grade English teacher now - "How ever do you suppose Dickens managed to
produce such a notable body of work without the computers working properly? Yet you
cannot manage to produce a three page essay using a pencil and paper, or god forbid,
a library computer?"
If you want to send something without being monitored, don't use the school system
for that particular message, just as you wouldn't use your work email unless you expect
it to be monitored by your employer.
Again, you apparently forget the experience, but schools have a long history of
massively overstepping their bounds. To "encourage" students to focus more on
their work, how long do you suppose it will take this district to make "use of any
account not provided by the administration" a punishable offense"? Of course, they'll
impose that at school as the first step, since they actually have that authority;
But the first time one student harasses another, or cheats on a test, or posts unflattering
commentary about a teacher to MySpace - Bam, they'll try to make it stick 24/7.
The linked article has a picture of a breadboard covered in neat rows of ancient
DIP chips (probably ALUs or memory). Then talks about a cool new technique
for getting a 60nm grid on next-gen CPUs.
Why do they bother wasting bandwidth with such a useless stock picture?
"Well, this involves microchips... Those look like microchips, I guess,
so let's stick it in the article".
On the other hand, he's obviously a dick for refusing to show any of his information.
Why? When did "you have no basis to harass me, good bye" go from the default norm,
to "he's obviously a dick"?
We have two separate "offenses" here, neither of which Righi committed: First, the
store manager mistook a refusal to play games after checking out, as some sort of proof of
a crime sufficient to risk a lawsuit by detaining a customer against his will; Second,
a cop mistook a refusal to play games over a legal document only required for
the purpose of driving a motor vehicle on public roads, as some sort of proof of a
crime sufficient to risk a lawsuit by detaining a US citizen against his will.
Righi's only "crime" involved a low threshhold for BS. I routinely do the same
things he did, not to act like a "dick", but because I don't humor other people's
power trips. I've just never had it escalate to actually getting arrested (most
store managers have enough sense to realize they don't really have a "right" to search
anyone without permission, and when they don't, most cops kindly correct them on the matter).
Some managers (and some cops) think they can pull this crap only
because we let them get away with it. STOP ACTING LIKE SHEEP, PEOPLE!
If every single time a store tried to search you, or a cop tries to
waste your time, you stood up for your rights - Stories like this would vanish
overnight (Well, okay, they'd probably skyrocket overnight, then vanish within
a few days as everyone involved learned what "rights" they really do or don't have).
Not true. Put on about one gravity of acceleration and
you can reach any point in the universe in a few years.
Sure, no problem - That acceleration just takes an infinite amount of
force to maintain as you approach the speed of light. As soon as we
solve that problem, the rest falls into place.;-)
Although I dearly love SciFi, I meant to keep my comments
within the realm of the possible. I sincerely hope that we
someday find a way to "cheat" Einstein and (effectively) travel
faster than the speed of light. But as we understand things today,
not happenin'.
a lawsuit filed by TorrentSpy against the MPAA, accusing
it of intercepting the company's private e-mails
We already know that the **AA can get away with whatever it wants,
and that most judges have as much integrity as most politicians.
But what I want to know here - Why did TorrentSpy sue
rather than pressing charges? This doesn't sounds like
a civil offense, it sounds like an outright criminal action on
the parts of both the MPAA and Anderson.
We should have people looking at going to prison over this,
not having some petty countersuit thrown out of court.
Even learning that the universe
has some underlying structure would somehow seem a lot
more comforting.
Really? How come?
Well, because in the absence of some anomaly in the structure
of the universe, or a drastic oversight in the theory of
relativity - We'll never leave the neighborhood.
I mean, we might make it all the way to "nearby" stars
in a generation-ship, but any sort of interstellar communication,
nevermind trade, will not ever happen if we actually live
in a flat Euclidean universe with c as the immutable
speed-limit.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you get the WPA key from the parking lot? Please, do tell. You can become quite famous and probably make some good money if you can answer this question.
Just as soon as someone finds the answer to that, or more likely, finds a way to get around needing it (let's not insult each other and pretend it will never happen), they can have the fame, I don't want it.
I understand your point, but it doesn't change the fact that, however strong you claim cryptosystem-X, I can still assert with 100% accuracy that running it over wires instead of broadcast RF greatly improves that strength.
Wireless is far more secure than wired. To listen on your wired network all I have to do is get access to a cable. To listen on your WPA-secured wireless network I have to get access to a copy of your WPA key (assuming PSK for simplicity, but similar difficulties apply to the other modes).
One of those you can do from the parking lot (or with a good antenna, quite a good distance away). One you need physical access for.
Thanks, but I'll run encryption over my wires before I'll switch to trusting the same broadcast to everyone in the area.
Why do they get a pass?
Because IT exists to serve our users, not the other way around (though don't take that as my believing "the customer is always right" - If I didn't know my job better a whole lot better than the majority of my users, the company wouldn't need me; at the same time, if I always played the BOFH, they wouldn't want me).
Blocking people from ill-behaved programs with a dozen alternatives, I can justify as "for your own good". Forcing everyone to learn an entirely new base platform, only to trade one set of problems for another, would not help anyone (including me).
Like it or not, most people know how to use Windows and MS Office - Not to mention far too many "productivity" and enterprise apps only come in a Windows flavor. And since the company already paid its MS tax, I can't even offer a strong financial incentive to switch to Linux (though if Vista keeps sucking so hard, perhaps in a few years when XP goes EOL). I may use it at home, but at work, I choose the solution that will work best for everyone, not just myself.
So you guys don't use Adobe or Google products?
Google, absolutely not (except directly, as a web page).
Adobe, you can "break" its phone-home aspects simply by replacing the updater executable (the name of which seems to change with each version) with a stub exe that simply returns 0 (the standard Unix "true" program, if I can say that without causing an argument about true vs. Posixly-true).
And believe me, if I could ban Adobe products, I most certainly would. For supposedly high-quality, nearly-ubiquitous software, that crap causes me more headaches than just about anything except a POS POS (both interpretations intended) program we use. Unfortunately, at least Acrobat falls into a category approaching my "Microsoft" exemption for importance to the company.
Is it acceptable for the software to phone home?
As a member of a small corporate IT department, I can tell you that (except for Microsoft itself), software phoning home for anything other than updates means instant banning of your product.
If so, what data is appropriate to report on? The license key?
If you insist on going down that path, what information would really help you reduce piracy? Keep in mind that, merely during the initial evaluation of your software, the same license may get used a dozen times without any intended piracy... "Yup, works on XP. Yup, works on 2k... Oops, blows a gasket on 98... Doesn't seem to like server versions...".
Should I disable license keys for small amounts of piracy, like when there's 3 active installations of the software? What about widespread piracy where we detect dozens or hundreds of uses of the same license key?
That gets tricky... IANAL, but only the big boys like Microsoft can get away with that BS. If you try it, you should probably prepare to get sued.
Now, you do have one chance to block it - At installation. Even I'll allow (grudgingly) most products a one-time online activation. If at that time you deny activation and give an EASY way to contact you to resolve the problem (you can expect them to lie, and should probably just give them a new code, but it might serve as a reminder to the users that they shouldn't make too many more copies), okay, fair game. After-the-fact, though? YOu'll just piss legitimate users off.
So, um, don't upgrade the firmware?
This won't happen tomorrow or next week... Talkin' a year or five down the road. "They" can wait for you to need to buy a new player; for your pathetic 60GB spinning-platter drive to look laughable next to all your friends' 1+ TB flash-based drives; for the next standard in device interoperability to make it as easy to find a USB or 1394 port as finding an 5.25" floppy drive today.
If you insisted on buying a digital personal audio player which only plays non-DRM'd music - well, I guess you're going to have to find someone who'll sell you that.
...Or just rip it yourself. Worst case, via line-in from a friend's
"authorized" player if you can only find a DRM'd version.
Good luck if your tastes include anyone who's signed to a major record label.
I have a strong suspicion that as the music industry fragments between different major labels, vendors, and DRM schemes, you'll have a much easier time getting arbitrary-song-X to play on a DRM'less player (despite the increasing lack of availability of such content - and players) than you will of getting it to play on any given DRM-enabled player.
When you extend the current idea of "DRM-enabled player", you presume to much by believing they will continue to support their own DRM and unprotected content. Oh, silly lad... That whole "DRM-less content" loophole will close any time now, leaving you stuck with disHarmony or PlayFair or PlaysForShit or whatever devil you choose as your only playable format. Your favorite artist changed vendors? Looks like you either get to carry two players, or re-buy your entire "can't live without" music library for the new DRM scheme.
So how does one start their own business without "wasted time and money"?
Well, technically it costs somewhere around $30 to make official in most places, but you can usually do most forms of contracting without actually bothering to pay the extortion for a "business license". So that comes pretty close to "without money". Varies by state (and possibly by town), though, so YMMV, IANAL, etc.
As for "without time"... In your accidental highlighting of my point, I can't help but think that you perhaps missed it completely. Read the GP and GGP, and then re-read my post with your sarcasm detector enbabled.
Yes, because being a business grad with a sack of money makes you a qualified game designer?
No, it makes him "The Boss".
Don't Like it? Save yourself years of wasted time and money, and don't even bother getting that degree. Start your own business and make a fortune (or die in the gutter of starvation).
Want a regular paycheck, instead? Get whatever paper Boss most values, and expect the occasional BS in your job. Careful selection of Boss should minimize that, some even have a clue.
If things weren't so horribly intrusive and capable of tracking a user's entire internet experience, for the sole purpose of selling you stuff, people wouldn't bitch.
Not entirely true - They can set all the cookies they want; I have FireFox set to automatically delete them when I close the browser.
Personally, I object to three aspects of ads:
1) They take up part of my screen. Offhand, I see no possible fix for this, and so will always block any ads larger than my threshhold-of-annoyance (usually around a 10% top or sidebar). Google ads get a few percent pass because of their special "low annoyance" qualities (ie, text-only, nothing flashes or beeps or moves).
2) They take longer to load. I don't mean the extra 4ms it should take to download a 17KB jpeg over a broadband connection, I mean half the ads on a given page usually come from badly overloaded servers just as likely to make me wait for it to timeout as to actually serve an ad.
3) I simply don't buy things from ads. When I want a product, I seek it out myself. I research the field, find the best available, then try to find the inflection in the price/quality curve. Nevermind individual products, ads just don't even influence me (except possibly negatively, for especially annoying ads) toward entire brands or stores.
If a company wants to make a positive impression on me, they need only post complete specs of their products in an easy-to-access place on their website. If I have to hunt for more than 30 seconds just to find out what type of batteries Product-X takes, I cross it off my list and move on to Product-Y.
First, this was from June, and second, I recall seeing this out here earlier.
Oh good, I haven't lost my mind!
I do have to express a bit of paranoia here, though... I remember reading about this just a few months ago, as well as reading it in some other in-print publication (something big, too, not fringe, like SciAm).
Yet, a Google search for (for example) "satellite ephemeris unlisted" turned up... Meaningless unsorted wordlists! And not just a few, a LOT of them! And even stranger, on pages having meaningful titles on a variety of topics.
Call me crazy, but it looks like some (cough, cough, ahem) undisclosed organization has decided to run interference against the power of Google.
So shooting a laser beam to blind something non-existent shouldn't be a problem.
A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there - Why would anyone care if you shoot down our own super-secret spy satellites? You need to understand the rules of the game before you can even play, nevermind win; and in this particular game, "deniability" and "saving face" count for waaaaaaay more points than merely blowing up someone's cool toys in a way they can't publically acknowledge (though don't act surprised when you get a visit from the NSA for a noncomittal "violating interplanetary airspace" or something absurd like that).
Or, to paraphrase the Doritos catchphrase, "Blast all you want, we'll make more!"
You don't get high from smoking industrial hemp.
You say that like you intend it as a selling point, rather than as a downside.
Regardless of your stance on adults choosing to consume one of the oldest and safest intoxicants known to mankind for pure and simple recreation, keep in mind that your pet issue here suffers from the same people that recently made it substantially more annoying for 100% law-abiding allergy sufferers to obtain the single most effective non-intoxicating substance (pseudoephedrine) that safely (compared to, say, phenylephrine, an older drug that doesn't work as well and causes significantly greater increase in blood pressure) relieves their symptoms, all in the name of stopping idiots already willing to risk their lives from manufacturing methamphetamine, a substance that we should praise for its great work in narrowing the field of Darwin-award recipients.
[catches breath in one great long inhalation].
As long as borded college kids can't smoke weed, your cause of industrial hemp will remain DOA.
And these were life-threatening cases of interference, including ventilators being switched off and pacemakers running at the wrong rhythm.
First, one bit of nit-picking... From your link, "Critical care equipment is vulnerable to electromagnetic interference by new-generation wireless telecommunication technologies with median distances of about 3 centimeters."
Three centimeters away. Not from the lobby, not from outside, not even from the same room... Basically all-but-physical contact with the "sensitive" equipment.
Second, and you can call this an irrelevant hypothetical if you want, WHY would large, coarse machines such as ventilators, respond to such low levels of RF? The GP's example of an ECG, I can see (though as I pointed out, such devices already have rather impressive compensation for high levels of background noise). Something that deliberately uses RF (an MRI, for example, which provides its own shielding), sure. But even something as "big" as a pacemaker?
Even if you're not using GPRS, it's not a hospital's job to go around testing different cell phone networks to see if they interfere with their equipment.
Agreed - That responsibility generally falls on the equipment manufacturer, using standardized tests and defined by the FCC (or appropriate governmental regulatory body).
I find it somewhat ironic (and indeed, scary) that medical devices go through so much more rigorous testing (and have a price to show it) than my clock/radio, yet don't even have the same resilience (in the FCC-Part-15 sense) as a $4.99 throwaway Walmart special.
You can't magically design a machine that's picking up miniscule electrical currents like this and have it unaffected when some idiot brings in a portable radio transceiver
Actually, yes, you can. AEDs found outside hospital settings don't magically make all RF sources in the area stop before taking their readings - They work just like 99.9% of the electronic devices in our environment, and just deal with "harmful intereference" while doing their best not to make any.
The bigger problem here involves insurance, not the devices themselves. Cell phones don't kill people in hospitals, or crash airplanes, or magically blow up at gas stations. But because we have a one-in-a-million chance of something happening, which under the worst of situations could hypothetically cause a death/crash/fire, we have insulting signs all over the place warning us to turn off the phone.
AMD says it won't use the ACP number to compare the power consumption of its processors against Intel's.
Before everyone slams them for coming up with yet another cheesy marketing gimmick, I would point out that Intel has done this ever since the first of the power-sucking P4 line. They did it a bit less up-front, however, choosing to redefine "TDP" in their specs rather than give their numbers a new term (such as "ACP").
This still won't make for a completely fair direct comparison, because Intel's TDP refers to a sort of third quartile case rather than the mean. But better, anyway.
Perhaps more usefully, since AMD has published the ACP spec, even though they may refuse to run similar tests on Intel chips, you can bet the farm that 3rd-party results will come out over the next few days.
End users are the only ones that know what's good for them
...Regardless of whether or not Buzzword 2.0 will get their personal
info stolen and your company sued?
End users don't even know what they want, much less what they need.
In one breath they'll complain that they don't have enough access to foo, then turn around and whine that they shouldn't have had enough permission to delete all their foo data.
As a business, the goal is to give the customer what the customer will buy, and if that means web 2.0, then do web 2.0.
It sounds like nice management ass-kiss-speak to call the customer always right. But when the lawsuits start rolling in, guess which heads end up on the chopping block first?
If users flock to it, then it must be filling a need.
Yeah - Just like heroin or crack or meth, right? Users want it, so let them have it! Only a right bastard would deny the users what they want. All those IT weenies just have no work ethic (despite the 50+ hour work weeks) and don't want to enter the new paradigm of dynamic confrabulations that will proactively empower us to transcend conventional limitations to compete in the global marketplace (despite the fact that "we" only sell physical items/services from a brick-n'-mortar to walk-in customers from the surrounding 10 miles).
As the saying goes, "You can't polish a turd". If you have nothing but absolute shit to sell, offering free gift-wrapping won't sell more of it.
javascript is the devil. I think it has some of the most flawed type casting
:)
Look, I agree with almost everything you said, even planned to post something similar until I saw it already here. I even agree so far as to greatly dislike JavaScript.
The fact that it doesn't count as type-safe, however, falls to the very bottom of the list of problems with it. Because if you want to get picky, 99% (pulled that OOMA, but almost certainly a conservative estimate) of the software running on your computer used C or C++ as the language. And you just don't get any less type-safe than them short of using a functional language like Scheme or Tcl.
Just one more minor peeve...
I would suggest something like the OLPC as an everything
Old people will take a brand new 24" LCD widescreen monitor and run it at 800x600 to make things look bigger. They can't tell that it looks horrible off-native res, or that they've destroyed any hope of a good aspect ratio.
In short, our eyes wear out as we age.
Get them a machine with svideo out (or a largeish TV with VGA in), and let them use a 30-40" "monitor" at a hideously low resolution. It will cost less (presuming they already have a decent TV) and make them much happier.
In any case, even if he WASN'T driving, he's still required, by law, to produce ID if he has any.
...In some states. Not nation-wide.
And if, as many posters have suggested, he deliberately did this to make a scene, I suspect he may have researched his rights in his own state. This appears supported by the fact that they arrested him not for refusal to show ID, but for a BS "didn't jump as high as I said" charge.
Umm, maybe the same one as when in the workplace you are given a corporate email?
/.
I use my corporate email for work-related communication only. For everything else, I use one of several external accounts based on importance and probability of getting spam.
This big brother paranoia is going through the roof on
As soon as Big Brother shows some good faith, I'll take off my beanie. Until then...
Local storage means much faster access times than external provider
You haven't used a school computer in quite a few years, have you? Think of how efficient and knowledgeable you consider your local broadband provider. Now lower that by a factor of ten.
The best school networks have the kids running them as a hobby. Anything "official" in that area means "massively overpriced and slow-if-not-outright-broken".
if it fails, you have a legitimate reason to not produce your homework or project that was stored or submitted there.
My school used to give out late slips when the busses showed up late. You expect them to care about, much less understand, system downtime? I can just hear my 11th grade English teacher now - "How ever do you suppose Dickens managed to produce such a notable body of work without the computers working properly? Yet you cannot manage to produce a three page essay using a pencil and paper, or god forbid, a library computer?"
If you want to send something without being monitored, don't use the school system for that particular message, just as you wouldn't use your work email unless you expect it to be monitored by your employer.
Again, you apparently forget the experience, but schools have a long history of massively overstepping their bounds. To "encourage" students to focus more on their work, how long do you suppose it will take this district to make "use of any account not provided by the administration" a punishable offense"? Of course, they'll impose that at school as the first step, since they actually have that authority; But the first time one student harasses another, or cheats on a test, or posts unflattering commentary about a teacher to MySpace - Bam, they'll try to make it stick 24/7.
The linked article has a picture of a breadboard covered in neat rows of ancient DIP chips (probably ALUs or memory). Then talks about a cool new technique for getting a 60nm grid on next-gen CPUs.
Why do they bother wasting bandwidth with such a useless stock picture? "Well, this involves microchips... Those look like microchips, I guess, so let's stick it in the article".
On the other hand, he's obviously a dick for refusing to show any of his information.
Why? When did "you have no basis to harass me, good bye" go from the default norm, to "he's obviously a dick"?
We have two separate "offenses" here, neither of which Righi committed: First, the store manager mistook a refusal to play games after checking out, as some sort of proof of a crime sufficient to risk a lawsuit by detaining a customer against his will; Second, a cop mistook a refusal to play games over a legal document only required for the purpose of driving a motor vehicle on public roads, as some sort of proof of a crime sufficient to risk a lawsuit by detaining a US citizen against his will.
Righi's only "crime" involved a low threshhold for BS. I routinely do the same things he did, not to act like a "dick", but because I don't humor other people's power trips. I've just never had it escalate to actually getting arrested (most store managers have enough sense to realize they don't really have a "right" to search anyone without permission, and when they don't, most cops kindly correct them on the matter).
Some managers (and some cops) think they can pull this crap only because we let them get away with it. STOP ACTING LIKE SHEEP, PEOPLE! If every single time a store tried to search you, or a cop tries to waste your time, you stood up for your rights - Stories like this would vanish overnight (Well, okay, they'd probably skyrocket overnight, then vanish within a few days as everyone involved learned what "rights" they really do or don't have).
Not true. Put on about one gravity of acceleration and you can reach any point in the universe in a few years.
;-)
Sure, no problem - That acceleration just takes an infinite amount of force to maintain as you approach the speed of light. As soon as we solve that problem, the rest falls into place.
Although I dearly love SciFi, I meant to keep my comments within the realm of the possible. I sincerely hope that we someday find a way to "cheat" Einstein and (effectively) travel faster than the speed of light. But as we understand things today, not happenin'.
a lawsuit filed by TorrentSpy against the MPAA, accusing it of intercepting the company's private e-mails
We already know that the **AA can get away with whatever it wants, and that most judges have as much integrity as most politicians.
But what I want to know here - Why did TorrentSpy sue rather than pressing charges? This doesn't sounds like a civil offense, it sounds like an outright criminal action on the parts of both the MPAA and Anderson.
We should have people looking at going to prison over this, not having some petty countersuit thrown out of court.
I mean, we might make it all the way to "nearby" stars in a generation-ship, but any sort of interstellar communication, nevermind trade, will not ever happen if we actually live in a flat Euclidean universe with c as the immutable speed-limit.