As someone above just posted, they do acquire them...specifically so that they *can* do field trials. They buy 1 or a few, and then test them...and those tests indicate that they're a hoax. But the company that makes them proudly proclaims that they've been bought by X organization or tested by Y organization, in their marketing materials.
He probably would have lumped that in as well, except it's a lot easier to test for fraud in such circumstances. Just turning on a geiger counter will get you results, from background radiation. It's a lot harder to get your hands on a bomb to test against.
Actually, the basic premise seems to be that Nielsen is irrelevant as a metric because of these outlets, and that premise is wrong. The whole and sole point of Nielsen isn't to determine how many people are actually watching the show...it's actually to figure out how many people are watching the advertising. Yes, yes, I know...they talk about who's watching what show, and all that, but in reality that isn't the important thing, and isn't the point...the money is in the advertising, and the ratings are used as the way to judge the value of those spots. Remember, ads are how broadcast makes its money...and what you can charge for your advertising is directly linked to the share you have for prior or similar programming. Now, for Hulu, they have clear metrics; you can tell when X account watches Y ad. Netflix doesn't have ads (at least not for me), so that isn't a factor, but both Hulu Plus and Netflix are paid models and they still have consumption metrics. Apple TV isn't real, in this equation; that's like calling out "Samsung DVD players" as a category, since all it does is process content by other avenues like Hulu or iTunes or Netflix. But for all of these alternate avenues, and the fact that the times are, actually, a'changing, broadcast is still a huge business, and the way most Americans consume content. So that's not really what's going on.
What I think IS hurting Nielsen...badly...is the DVR. I know many, many people who practically never watch anything live anymore, and who skip through the commercials with the greatest of ease. These cases break the Nielsen model because for the first time, people are actually watching the broadcast content, but not being subjected to the ads at all. There are some exceptions to this...if we see a new Allstate Mayhem ad, for example, we'll freakin' watch it...because they are entertaining as hell. So, here's the upside of this change...TV ads which are annoying may go the way of the dinosaur, because people are starting to have a choice.
A one-time payout at departure...particularly departure for failure...is less than the cumulative pay over time. And it's something he was going to get sooner or later. It's not like departing under good conditions pays worse than departing under bad ones.
So, don't have a free press? Don't have a right to trial by jury or the concept of innocent until proven guilty? Dude, are you seriously trying to state that the US is one of the worse countries in the world for human rights? Because you'll be contradicting every human rights NGO in the free world if that's the case.
The US doesn't have a favourable stance on human rights either. Obama is cleared to bomb civilians in his own country without a trial. What is your point?
Being allowed to do something...but not doing it...is hardly a failing on human rights. Actions violate human rights, not possibilities. Based on this logic, anyone with a gun is a serial killer. Oh, and it's the President, not Obama...there are no laws that specifically give only Obama power. Oh, and also...you're completely wrong about the bombing thing in the USA; Posse Comitatus still holds sway, as does the charter of the CIA that prohibits domestic operations...so there goes the entire capacity of the executive branch to bomb people here.
Maybe you didn't notice but there has been a cold war going on for ages now. The US has been spying on China pretty aggressively, and China regularly blocks US spy satellites with blinding lasers. The CIA is a para-military organization, not part of the military but doing missions similar to what other country's military intelligence branches do. The US also launched the first salvo in the cyber war.
Actually, you have a couple of things wrong. One, China blinded a US satellite once, as a test/demonstration. And saying that the CIA is a para-military (as opposed to intelligence) organization because it performs missions similar to what military intelligence organizations do is like saying that the Department of Labor is a para-military organization simply because both their headquarters and the Pentagon have cafeterias. There's a reason that the word "intelligence" is in the phrase "military intelligence."
So it's wrong when they do it but not when the US does it, is that what you're saying?
There's a difference between taking action against a military target and taking action against a civilian entity. When Country A has its military attack civilian and military entities of Country B, but Country B's military only attacks Country B's military, this means two things: 1, Country B is following widely-accepted norms around military action (and Country A is not), and 2, Country B is unlikely to be the primary (initial) aggressor. Counterforce actions have almost always been the realm of a defending nation, while countervalue actions have belonged to aggressive nations.
Well, they can afford plenty of beer; I drink with a lot of NASCAR fans. There are NASCAR parties in most bars around here today.
Yeah, I love how well after the crash has ended and everyone has assessed the injured in the crowd, someone is still holding their Bud Light. Makes you want to say "Put down the brewski, asshole, and help the injured." Fucking hick.
Using your own camera, since this is where it will matter, and empty, freshly-formatted cards... Turn off autofocus (you don't care if the pictures are blurry; you just want them to happen as fast as possible) Turn on continuous shooting Hold down the button until the time between shots increases (sign of a full buffer in the camera) Check how many pictures you shot off. Keep in mind that you'll need to have the same number of slow shots as well, lest you skew the results slightly; I find that 3-5 shots is enough to include reaction time, a calculation of how many slow shots went off, and time to stop shooting
I used this in a camera store when evaluating different cards, and found that there was actually a significant difference. Of course, this was with a very new Nikon shooting in RAW, so that was a hell of a lot of data per frame shooting like a machine gun. Your mileage may vary...which is the whole point of this test in the first place.
RTFA. The contract was awarded to EDS; EDS was a good integrator. Unfortunately, that was back in 2007, just before HP fucked up *backspacebackspacebackspace* bought EDS. (I was there.) HP's applied manufacturing-based practices to the service-based business...things like getting rid of headcount (in cases where those people are 100% dedicated and billable to an account, generating both revenue and profit while fulfilling contractual obligations). So, account after account is now complaining while the people who still work on those accounts are leaving in droves or are miserable.
On a side note, I saw Ericka Floyd mentioned in the article...that's a bummer. I worked with her a few times when at EDS/HP, and she's a great person. It sucks to see her caught up in the midst of this kind of bullshit. I never quite got what the real purpose of PR people was until she interceded and saved my ass with regard to an analyst that was asking WAY too many of the wrong questions...like asking about how electricity is delivered to military installations.
Check out the latest edition of the ICS-CERT journal. Replacing Ethernet with USB drives or other media...and you cannot do offsite backups without them, mind you, nor can you offload data for analytics, reporting, or support any other way...is not really an air gap. All it does is remove some degree of vulnerability while greatly hindering your ability to do things like patch management, security monitoring (are you going to put a separate Nitro Security or ArcSight instance into every power plant, with its own dedicated staff? Good luck getting funding for that...), antivirus updates (hint: this was what went wrong in the incident described by ICS-CERT because of the airgap) and remote emergency management. Oh, and also say good bye to grid balancing, AMI, energy trading, remote dispatching...what else am I forgetting, because there are a whole lot of different functions that are critical to the power grid that require data exchange.
Even nuclear power plants aren't airgapped anymore. They use data diodes to help protect themselves...but unfortunately, that solution is beyond the budgets of what power companies have for each of their environments, and a lot of what they need to do requires two-way communications as well. It's very easy to say "oh, air gap it...if you don't, you're a moron." The reality, however, is that you can't actually do that in the power industry anymore, for the same kinds of reasons why financial institutions gave up on that long ago.
I don't see how it exactly solves the problem, though...it is interesting, however. My take on it is that it helps abstract some of the SPF and DKIM management, making it a good bit more manageable. But the issue isn't entirely about that; it's also about the fact that most organizations don't have any methodologies around managing this kind of thing at all in the first place. A better, easier-to-use steering wheel doesn't help if there's neither a driver nor a driver's seat to sit in.
Maybe a bigger problem is shockwatch patches can cost $3 each. It makes sense for expensive packages,but not your $10 amazon.com order with free shipping.
Though to be fair, now figure out what a bluetooth dongle is going to cost.
From the article, the device is $2. BUT...they don't include the "coin battery" that it runs on...I'm guessing a 2032 or 2025, which will cost close to as much as the rest of the device. I do wonder how they get the cost of the unit that low, though...
Ooh, big words like "modicum." I'm impressed. I'll let the modding history of my comments versus yours stand as third-party assessment of who grasps things more fully here. And I recognized that your question was intended to be rhetorical, but surprise...there was actually an answer other than the one you assumed to be valid, and which directly tapped into what my point was about commercial enterprises being the basis of financial support for all...not most, all..large open source projects.
Here's the problem, and it's a fundamental problem with the SPF framework, as a business process. The consequences of error should reside with the entity that has the most direct control over what causes or prevents that error. What is happening here is that Entity A has their SPF set up wrong, but potentially all the impact could land on Entity B. SPF isn't rocket science, but it's the kind of thing that needs to be checked periodically and tied tightly into change control processes...in other words, a perfect example of a system that will have issues, in modern IT environments. I don't really have a suggestion, other than a standardized process for detecting events like this and reporting them to the sending organization. But it's hard to notify a company to let them know that their website has been hacked; I imagine it must be horrendously hard to find whomever is in charge of their mail infrastructure to point out to him that he's doing SPF wrong.
I'm pro-open-source for the reasons that open source is good...openness. I'm anti-people-wanting-a-free-lunch, which is all this topic is really about. He doesn't care about openness, he just wants something for free. Open source is not about getting something for nothing, it's about sharing information so that things may progress and the common good can be served. But apparently, you're not intelligent enough to grasp the difference.
So...noticed you didn't answer my question about sending Linux Torvalds (yes, that's how it's spelled by the way...get the man's name right, at least?) a check. Is that a no?
" But don't you think that if it takes a bit of hard work to come up with a solution, the people who did the work should get compensated? "
When was the last time you sent Linus Torvolds a check? If people want to write and offer Open Source code for free, why would you feel the need to complain about it, especially given the fact that the answer to my question is undoubtedly that you never have sent Linus a check.
And...you entirely missed every point I stated. Nothing I said was anti-open-source. I even stated that I favor it. But you need to be realistic as well. And it's a well-known fact that even open source is supported by commercial enterprises. I've bought Transmeta processor-driven devices in the past, for example. So yes, I have sent Linus Torvalds a check.
First of all, as stated by another...DUH, it's full of helium. Helium is a noble gas, and does not burn. But even if it were filled with hydrogen, AND you hit it with an incendiary round of some sort, I doubt very much that anything would be on fire by the time it landed, from that high up. If you look at the footage of the Hindenburg, you can see that it didn't take terribly long for the hydrogen to burn itself out...now imagine that airship starting its burn 2 miles up instead of less than 100 feet up, and guess how bad the flames would be by the time it landed?
Second of all, fired upon by whom, exactly, and using what? The stats operate at 10,000 feet...that's close to 2 miles. That's further away than any but the very best snipers in the world can shoot, and even then they require exotic hardware like a.50 caliber rifle (of a few types) or the Chey-Tac Intervention system...and they're shooting horizontally, instead of straight up. There's no way to judge crosswinds...which will be of multiple speeds in the intervening distance. And if you shoot from an angle, instead of straight up (because let's face it, the anchor for the stat won't exactly be something you can walk up to...or anywhere near it, and keep in mind how people will come running once they hear the deafening report of a high-power rifle) then the range gets even worse. You're not going to sneak up on it with a plane, obviously, and if you fired at it with a MANPADS (if you can even find one with that range...most cannot hit something that far away) you will miss because it doesn't have a significant heat signature. And if you are a bad guy and have one of the better MANPADS available to you while you're walking around in Washington, DC...why are you shooting at a blimp?
Okay, so yet again, another Slashdot question along the lines of this:
"I have something that I want to do that is demanding, and which at its core uses technology that had to be specially developed to fill a niche. But I don't want to pay for it." *waves open-source flag* "How about something open-source? Can you guys do the legwork for me and tell me how to get this for fre*backspaces a lot* using open-source?"
I favor open software and open standards. But don't you think that if it takes a bit of hard work to come up with a solution, the people who did the work should get compensated? These questions...the kind I'm referring to...are not related to commodity items like firewalls or an operating system or a text editor. They're all niche specialty functions with unique and significant challenges. Slashdot should stop encouraging the monkeys who care more about getting something for nothing than they do about open source.
What's most true about most substances and also caffeine is "that lethal limit can vary widely from person to person." Yeah, that's true of most things; hence the standard measure of toxicity for anything is called "LD50," which stands for "lethal dose, 50%". It's the dosage in mass of substance/kg of body weight that will kill 50% of people who ingest/breathe/snort/whatever it. So why this is some kind of huge challenge is beyond me. For some substances the deviation from LD50 is smaller (botulinus toxin) and for others it's larger, but you still have a good means of measuring it, and the LD50 for caffeine is 192mg/kg for rats, 224 mg/kg for rabbits, 127 mg/kg for mice, and so on. (I'll know the LD50 for Bob as soon as he stops twitching... *turns to look behind me* "Settle down Bob, this will all be over soon. There's no sense trying to chew through the duct tape; I used too much of it for you to be able to get away.")
It also seems that what matters isn't the half-life of caffeine. Caffeine is absorbed almost instantly within the gut; it will actually travel through your skin, if you rub it on your body, it's so easily absorbed. So the peak concentration in the blood is pretty easy to predict, coming at just after the time of peak dosage consumption. Anything after that is lower, unless you consume mor....ahhh, I get it now.
Why not get rid of robocalling altogether? These are not the days where it was difficult to get the word out to the public for fundraising or other reasons. The reason that robocalls are increasingly made up of scammer activities is that legitimate uses of the technology have gone elsewhere, to email or other online methods which are far cheaper and which leverage existing multipurpose infrastructure...and which, unlike telephone-based communications, also provides for more robust metrics regarding responses.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone above just posted, they do acquire them...specifically so that they *can* do field trials. They buy 1 or a few, and then test them...and those tests indicate that they're a hoax. But the company that makes them proudly proclaims that they've been bought by X organization or tested by Y organization, in their marketing materials.
should of called them geiger counters
He probably would have lumped that in as well, except it's a lot easier to test for fraud in such circumstances. Just turning on a geiger counter will get you results, from background radiation. It's a lot harder to get your hands on a bomb to test against.
Actually, the basic premise seems to be that Nielsen is irrelevant as a metric because of these outlets, and that premise is wrong. The whole and sole point of Nielsen isn't to determine how many people are actually watching the show...it's actually to figure out how many people are watching the advertising. Yes, yes, I know...they talk about who's watching what show, and all that, but in reality that isn't the important thing, and isn't the point...the money is in the advertising, and the ratings are used as the way to judge the value of those spots. Remember, ads are how broadcast makes its money...and what you can charge for your advertising is directly linked to the share you have for prior or similar programming. Now, for Hulu, they have clear metrics; you can tell when X account watches Y ad. Netflix doesn't have ads (at least not for me), so that isn't a factor, but both Hulu Plus and Netflix are paid models and they still have consumption metrics. Apple TV isn't real, in this equation; that's like calling out "Samsung DVD players" as a category, since all it does is process content by other avenues like Hulu or iTunes or Netflix. But for all of these alternate avenues, and the fact that the times are, actually, a'changing, broadcast is still a huge business, and the way most Americans consume content. So that's not really what's going on.
What I think IS hurting Nielsen...badly...is the DVR. I know many, many people who practically never watch anything live anymore, and who skip through the commercials with the greatest of ease. These cases break the Nielsen model because for the first time, people are actually watching the broadcast content, but not being subjected to the ads at all. There are some exceptions to this...if we see a new Allstate Mayhem ad, for example, we'll freakin' watch it...because they are entertaining as hell. So, here's the upside of this change...TV ads which are annoying may go the way of the dinosaur, because people are starting to have a choice.
A one-time payout at departure...particularly departure for failure...is less than the cumulative pay over time. And it's something he was going to get sooner or later. It's not like departing under good conditions pays worse than departing under bad ones.
Someone at a high level paying the price for DRM-incurred failure. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, asshole.
So, don't have a free press? Don't have a right to trial by jury or the concept of innocent until proven guilty? Dude, are you seriously trying to state that the US is one of the worse countries in the world for human rights? Because you'll be contradicting every human rights NGO in the free world if that's the case.
The US doesn't have a favourable stance on human rights either. Obama is cleared to bomb civilians in his own country without a trial. What is your point?
Being allowed to do something...but not doing it...is hardly a failing on human rights. Actions violate human rights, not possibilities. Based on this logic, anyone with a gun is a serial killer. Oh, and it's the President, not Obama...there are no laws that specifically give only Obama power. Oh, and also...you're completely wrong about the bombing thing in the USA; Posse Comitatus still holds sway, as does the charter of the CIA that prohibits domestic operations...so there goes the entire capacity of the executive branch to bomb people here.
Maybe you didn't notice but there has been a cold war going on for ages now. The US has been spying on China pretty aggressively, and China regularly blocks US spy satellites with blinding lasers. The CIA is a para-military organization, not part of the military but doing missions similar to what other country's military intelligence branches do. The US also launched the first salvo in the cyber war.
Actually, you have a couple of things wrong. One, China blinded a US satellite once, as a test/demonstration. And saying that the CIA is a para-military (as opposed to intelligence) organization because it performs missions similar to what military intelligence organizations do is like saying that the Department of Labor is a para-military organization simply because both their headquarters and the Pentagon have cafeterias. There's a reason that the word "intelligence" is in the phrase "military intelligence."
So it's wrong when they do it but not when the US does it, is that what you're saying?
There's a difference between taking action against a military target and taking action against a civilian entity. When Country A has its military attack civilian and military entities of Country B, but Country B's military only attacks Country B's military, this means two things: 1, Country B is following widely-accepted norms around military action (and Country A is not), and 2, Country B is unlikely to be the primary (initial) aggressor. Counterforce actions have almost always been the realm of a defending nation, while countervalue actions have belonged to aggressive nations.
Well, they can afford plenty of beer; I drink with a lot of NASCAR fans. There are NASCAR parties in most bars around here today.
Yeah, I love how well after the crash has ended and everyone has assessed the injured in the crowd, someone is still holding their Bud Light. Makes you want to say "Put down the brewski, asshole, and help the injured." Fucking hick.
Quick test:
Using your own camera, since this is where it will matter, and empty, freshly-formatted cards...
Turn off autofocus (you don't care if the pictures are blurry; you just want them to happen as fast as possible)
Turn on continuous shooting
Hold down the button until the time between shots increases (sign of a full buffer in the camera)
Check how many pictures you shot off. Keep in mind that you'll need to have the same number of slow shots as well, lest you skew the results slightly; I find that 3-5 shots is enough to include reaction time, a calculation of how many slow shots went off, and time to stop shooting
I used this in a camera store when evaluating different cards, and found that there was actually a significant difference. Of course, this was with a very new Nikon shooting in RAW, so that was a hell of a lot of data per frame shooting like a machine gun. Your mileage may vary...which is the whole point of this test in the first place.
RTFA. The contract was awarded to EDS; EDS was a good integrator. Unfortunately, that was back in 2007, just before HP fucked up *backspacebackspacebackspace* bought EDS. (I was there.) HP's applied manufacturing-based practices to the service-based business...things like getting rid of headcount (in cases where those people are 100% dedicated and billable to an account, generating both revenue and profit while fulfilling contractual obligations). So, account after account is now complaining while the people who still work on those accounts are leaving in droves or are miserable.
On a side note, I saw Ericka Floyd mentioned in the article...that's a bummer. I worked with her a few times when at EDS/HP, and she's a great person. It sucks to see her caught up in the midst of this kind of bullshit. I never quite got what the real purpose of PR people was until she interceded and saved my ass with regard to an analyst that was asking WAY too many of the wrong questions...like asking about how electricity is delivered to military installations.
Check out the latest edition of the ICS-CERT journal. Replacing Ethernet with USB drives or other media...and you cannot do offsite backups without them, mind you, nor can you offload data for analytics, reporting, or support any other way...is not really an air gap. All it does is remove some degree of vulnerability while greatly hindering your ability to do things like patch management, security monitoring (are you going to put a separate Nitro Security or ArcSight instance into every power plant, with its own dedicated staff? Good luck getting funding for that...), antivirus updates (hint: this was what went wrong in the incident described by ICS-CERT because of the airgap) and remote emergency management. Oh, and also say good bye to grid balancing, AMI, energy trading, remote dispatching...what else am I forgetting, because there are a whole lot of different functions that are critical to the power grid that require data exchange.
Even nuclear power plants aren't airgapped anymore. They use data diodes to help protect themselves...but unfortunately, that solution is beyond the budgets of what power companies have for each of their environments, and a lot of what they need to do requires two-way communications as well. It's very easy to say "oh, air gap it...if you don't, you're a moron." The reality, however, is that you can't actually do that in the power industry anymore, for the same kinds of reasons why financial institutions gave up on that long ago.
I don't see how it exactly solves the problem, though...it is interesting, however. My take on it is that it helps abstract some of the SPF and DKIM management, making it a good bit more manageable. But the issue isn't entirely about that; it's also about the fact that most organizations don't have any methodologies around managing this kind of thing at all in the first place. A better, easier-to-use steering wheel doesn't help if there's neither a driver nor a driver's seat to sit in.
Maybe a bigger problem is shockwatch patches can cost $3 each. It makes sense for expensive packages,but not your $10 amazon.com order with free shipping.
Though to be fair, now figure out what a bluetooth dongle is going to cost.
From the article, the device is $2. BUT...they don't include the "coin battery" that it runs on...I'm guessing a 2032 or 2025, which will cost close to as much as the rest of the device. I do wonder how they get the cost of the unit that low, though...
Ooh, big words like "modicum." I'm impressed. I'll let the modding history of my comments versus yours stand as third-party assessment of who grasps things more fully here. And I recognized that your question was intended to be rhetorical, but surprise...there was actually an answer other than the one you assumed to be valid, and which directly tapped into what my point was about commercial enterprises being the basis of financial support for all...not most, all..large open source projects.
Here's the problem, and it's a fundamental problem with the SPF framework, as a business process. The consequences of error should reside with the entity that has the most direct control over what causes or prevents that error. What is happening here is that Entity A has their SPF set up wrong, but potentially all the impact could land on Entity B. SPF isn't rocket science, but it's the kind of thing that needs to be checked periodically and tied tightly into change control processes...in other words, a perfect example of a system that will have issues, in modern IT environments. I don't really have a suggestion, other than a standardized process for detecting events like this and reporting them to the sending organization. But it's hard to notify a company to let them know that their website has been hacked; I imagine it must be horrendously hard to find whomever is in charge of their mail infrastructure to point out to him that he's doing SPF wrong.
I'm pro-open-source for the reasons that open source is good...openness. I'm anti-people-wanting-a-free-lunch, which is all this topic is really about. He doesn't care about openness, he just wants something for free. Open source is not about getting something for nothing, it's about sharing information so that things may progress and the common good can be served. But apparently, you're not intelligent enough to grasp the difference.
So...noticed you didn't answer my question about sending Linux Torvalds (yes, that's how it's spelled by the way...get the man's name right, at least?) a check. Is that a no?
Appears none of you faggots know the difference between further and farther. What a bunch of losers.
Better than not knowing how to act like a decent human being. I can fix that one thing in five minutes...tomorrow, you'll still be an asshole :)
When was the last time you sent Linus Torvolds a check? If people want to write and offer Open Source code for free, why would you feel the need to complain about it, especially given the fact that the answer to my question is undoubtedly that you never have sent Linus a check.
And...you entirely missed every point I stated. Nothing I said was anti-open-source. I even stated that I favor it. But you need to be realistic as well. And it's a well-known fact that even open source is supported by commercial enterprises. I've bought Transmeta processor-driven devices in the past, for example. So yes, I have sent Linus Torvalds a check.
Have you?
First of all, as stated by another...DUH, it's full of helium. Helium is a noble gas, and does not burn. But even if it were filled with hydrogen, AND you hit it with an incendiary round of some sort, I doubt very much that anything would be on fire by the time it landed, from that high up. If you look at the footage of the Hindenburg, you can see that it didn't take terribly long for the hydrogen to burn itself out...now imagine that airship starting its burn 2 miles up instead of less than 100 feet up, and guess how bad the flames would be by the time it landed?
Second of all, fired upon by whom, exactly, and using what? The stats operate at 10,000 feet...that's close to 2 miles. That's further away than any but the very best snipers in the world can shoot, and even then they require exotic hardware like a .50 caliber rifle (of a few types) or the Chey-Tac Intervention system...and they're shooting horizontally, instead of straight up. There's no way to judge crosswinds...which will be of multiple speeds in the intervening distance. And if you shoot from an angle, instead of straight up (because let's face it, the anchor for the stat won't exactly be something you can walk up to...or anywhere near it, and keep in mind how people will come running once they hear the deafening report of a high-power rifle) then the range gets even worse. You're not going to sneak up on it with a plane, obviously, and if you fired at it with a MANPADS (if you can even find one with that range...most cannot hit something that far away) you will miss because it doesn't have a significant heat signature. And if you are a bad guy and have one of the better MANPADS available to you while you're walking around in Washington, DC...why are you shooting at a blimp?
Okay, so yet again, another Slashdot question along the lines of this:
"I have something that I want to do that is demanding, and which at its core uses technology that had to be specially developed to fill a niche. But I don't want to pay for it." *waves open-source flag* "How about something open-source? Can you guys do the legwork for me and tell me how to get this for fre*backspaces a lot* using open-source?"
I favor open software and open standards. But don't you think that if it takes a bit of hard work to come up with a solution, the people who did the work should get compensated? These questions...the kind I'm referring to...are not related to commodity items like firewalls or an operating system or a text editor. They're all niche specialty functions with unique and significant challenges. Slashdot should stop encouraging the monkeys who care more about getting something for nothing than they do about open source.
"Microsoft Goose Simulator 2014"
What's most true about most substances and also caffeine is "that lethal limit can vary widely from person to person." Yeah, that's true of most things; hence the standard measure of toxicity for anything is called "LD50," which stands for "lethal dose, 50%". It's the dosage in mass of substance/kg of body weight that will kill 50% of people who ingest/breathe/snort/whatever it. So why this is some kind of huge challenge is beyond me. For some substances the deviation from LD50 is smaller (botulinus toxin) and for others it's larger, but you still have a good means of measuring it, and the LD50 for caffeine is 192mg/kg for rats, 224 mg/kg for rabbits, 127 mg/kg for mice, and so on. (I'll know the LD50 for Bob as soon as he stops twitching... *turns to look behind me* "Settle down Bob, this will all be over soon. There's no sense trying to chew through the duct tape; I used too much of it for you to be able to get away.")
It also seems that what matters isn't the half-life of caffeine. Caffeine is absorbed almost instantly within the gut; it will actually travel through your skin, if you rub it on your body, it's so easily absorbed. So the peak concentration in the blood is pretty easy to predict, coming at just after the time of peak dosage consumption. Anything after that is lower, unless you consume mor....ahhh, I get it now.
Why not get rid of robocalling altogether? These are not the days where it was difficult to get the word out to the public for fundraising or other reasons. The reason that robocalls are increasingly made up of scammer activities is that legitimate uses of the technology have gone elsewhere, to email or other online methods which are far cheaper and which leverage existing multipurpose infrastructure...and which, unlike telephone-based communications, also provides for more robust metrics regarding responses.