I use Google Wallet where it lets me, in that I like the bonus layer of a virtual card. No need to panic every time a home improvement store gets hacked, or worry who gets my card info when I buy a Coke from a vending machine...
Given the way Google Wallet work, you may not be as protected as you think. Google Wallet works by being a virtual debit card - they use Host Emulation to be a chip card to a (I think) Bank of America debit account. So when you pay, the merchant sees a NFC debit card, and does the transaction that way. Bank of America then takes those payment details, forwards it to Google and Google demands payment from you.
If someone grabs that debit account number, that could be problematic because that's a debit account in your name. It also means Google must absorb a fee somewhere because the retailer believes they're charging a debit card and pays that fee, but Google needs to charge your card and Google must eat that fee.
It's also why no bank will create Google Wallet as a card-present payment - because Google is still charging your card similar to an online payment.
Apple Pay is really just a slick implementation of EMV which means the retailer sees a very expensive credit card and because that credit card was presented, gets the Card Present rates. The only "secret sauce" Apple adds is a slick way of adding cards.
Since I was born with speech and hearing impediments. However, I can socialize online decently (like this/. post) but many people don't like those.:(
The impediments are only impediments if you treat them as such. If you want to talk to people, do. Social skills are social skills, and if you're a genuinely interesting person to talk to, people will accommodate.
It may help to just talk (and talk and talk to exercise the speech path) and try to normalize your speaking to aid comprehension, but if you're someone who people want to talk to for whatever reason, a speech impediment isn't. And the more you do it, the better you'll be at overcoming it.
This system (which brings the shelves to the workers, as workers are MUCH better at plucking small, irregularly-shaped items out of boxes) has fascinating challenges all of it's own, mainly related to traffic control, safety, and where to put the shelves after you are done. (A fixed location is very inefficient, but neither do you want to stick the shelf in the first available space.)
The shelves are movable like you said. The position of the shelves within the warehouse can change depending on the hotness and coldness of the items within.
You have to remember the robots are not autonomous - they are controlled by a central computer tied to the ordering and inventory databases. The central computer is also responsible for knowing where all the robots are in the warehouse, what they're doing, and where they're going. And human traffic is easy to detect since the robots have traditional bump, IR and other sensors (which the computer can look at the path planning and stop other robots headed towards a collision with the first robot).
And this leads to the idea of hot and cold shelves - because the shelves are movable, they can be put anywhere. And in Amazon's warehouse (as is everyone else's using the robots), the shelves are arranged from hot to cold with hotter shelves towards the packers and colder shelves towards the far end of the warehouse. The computer adjusts the location of the shelves dynamically as need be - as a shelf gets hotter, its position in the warehouse changes.
Yes, it means that a company like Amazon can't tell you WHERE in the warehouse something is without consulting the inventory database because that location changes constantly. Probably easier to just have a robot bring you the item than to look it up and pick it manually.
Have you compared the average car in Germany with the ones in the USA? Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections. Also, getting a driver license in Germany is HARD, and the average Autobahn driver is very well disciplined compared to his USA counterpart (exceptions exist, I know I know...)
Plus, in Europe, generally speaking there's a very good public transportation system that one doesn't NEED a license to go anywhere. So drivers who do drive generally drive because they like to drive.
If you hate driving, you have a perfectly usable option of public transportation.
In North America, that's generally not an option except in a few areas, so the end result is you have a bunch of people forced to drive who would rather be doing other things. (Like say, texting, or prepping for the party or other activity).
So yes, they drive better not because they're better drivers, but those who don't want to drive have viable options of getting around, leaving the roads filled with people who like to drive, enjoy it, and are generally more skilled because they like the challenge. Not some soccer mom who'd rather be gossiping with friends or doing their nails instead of driving.
And that includes getting around between cities too - between buses and cheap flights, you can do a lot in Europe without setting foot behind the wheel.
I hate to be pedantic but....ahh fuck it, I LOVE to be pedantic....the propagation delay of signals in anything other than a vacuum is always a fraction of c. So the speed of the signals through a cable can be anything from 65% to >90% of light speed in a vacuum.
But at the end of the day, the propagation delay in the cable itself is still way way less than 1 microsecond, which is not perceptible in the slightest for a human. The electronics at either end of the cable are a whole different ballgame, and are the cause of perceptible lag and delays in a system.
Instead of guessing, you could calculate it, or rely on Adm. Grace Hopper's famous "1 nanosecond". At c, that's just under a foot. Adding 10 feet of cabling means the signal takes just over 10ns longer. If you add in velocity factor,.66 is convenient for copper wiring, that's really 15ns in the end.
And a microsecond is 1000ns. Or just under 1000' at c.
Thanks for the clarification.. I guess I'm just depressed that artists have to deal with this kind of sh*t in the first place, at all, ever. Music is art, and these matters should be (in my idealistic opinion anyway) dealt with within the art community instead of in the courtroom.. What's a better punishment for ripping someone off as a musician: your own music community shunning you, or having to pay money?
And yet "ripping off" music is common and even popularized. Rap was created this way when a drum riff intro was repeated over and over and over again (from Aerosmith? I can't recall). We consider it a legitimate form of music today (for varying degrees of "legitimate"), yet its origins are in copyright infringement. And there have been many a sampler musician who has made great music despite sampling being literally copyright infringement.
And shunning only works if the community is small, and extremely difficult in something as subjective as art. You can shun, but there is a chance that someone actually likes it, and despite shunning, embraces the "theft" or infringement. Then it's a case of which community is larger or who can grow and evolve taste.
Perhaps if those webpages were not laden down with masses of Javascript, doing who knows what, the pages would be faster to load. All that Javascript has to be downloaded from a server somewhere and executed in the browser. It all takes resources.
Many website developers today seem to think that his/her web pages only need to load on the fastest computers as the sole page open in the browser. I think of them as "greedy" websites, because they are greedy with the end-users' compute resources.
The problem is that developer PCs are often some of the most powerful in the company because they are developers and can demand it. I mean, give a developer, web or otherwise a bog standard PC with less RAM that "average" people have and you'll get nothing but an endless stream of complaints.
So yeah, web developers with Haswell 3.5GHz i7s and 16/32GB of RAM designing webpages. yeah, it loads fast, but bogs down someone with a 4 year old PC and barely 4GB of RAM.
Then there's all the preparation for traffic - yeah, they get all the static CDNs up and running, the database servers are beefed up and the dynamic servers are beefy. Then they forget one script they have on every page references some dinky little server everyone forgot about. That server keels over and the page coding is such that the browser isn't able to render the rest of the page while loading it in the background. So now the pages load slower and slower and slower and everyone thinks it's either the static CDNs, the database or the dynamic views being generated, and not the server handling that one script which is vastly underpowered because it's hidden in the corner of the datacentre and forgotten about.
Get a less noisy system. How hard is that to figure out?
Get a case that has one or two 120mm or larger fans for airflow. They generate much MUCH less noise than 80mm fans and still push enough air to keep the thing chilled.
Switch CPU/GPU fans to ones that only turn on when needed, and are off while the system is at a cool idle temp.
I built an HTPC recenty and used some high-end parts because they were on sale and well, at their target load it would mean their fans are basically not running.
I also invested a lot in Noctua fans - the motherboard supported speed control (4 pin) so I bought 4 pin fans that go from slow to moderately fast. The heatsink on the CPU takes a whopping 150mm fan, and the fan itself can do 200-800RPM. Most of the time at the load it's at it's at 200RPM, and it turns out the tachometer thinks less than 300RPM is stopped - so I kept getting fan-stopped alarms because the fan was running so slow.
Likewise, the case needed 80mm fans, I used ones that went from 400-1000RPM, they usually idle at 400RPM.
In fact, the noisiest it gets is about 3 seconds on resume as things spin up then go silent (it has an SSD for the OS, and a HDD for media - storing multi-gig files on the HDD doesn't cause much seeking and the drive is virtually silent). Yes, the PC is in sleep mode most of the time which ensures the noise is at a minimum.
It's not hard. It just requires a bit of work choosing quiet components. Case fans are a big source of noise, so pick 120mm or larger if you can, or pick speed-controllable ones if you can't. And go for airflow designed ones like the Noctuas - the blades and case are designed to cause as little turbulence as possible to reduce noise.
And if you're choosing a case, choose one that has wire fan grills rather than ones made from stamped metal. Stamped metal is cheap but adds turbulence.
Power supplies - Seasonic makes some of the most quiet ones, but 120mm ones generally are quiet. If you can, there are even passive fanless ones!
I know it would add cost but as someone else said why doesn't the FAA require a license and transponders on drones so that everyone knows what's in the air and who owns it?
The FAA has proposed just that - currently for commercial use. Right now commercial use of a drone is restricted, but the FAA is planning on requiring a licensed pilot be in control of a commercial drone.
They haven't gotten around to regulating recreational use just yet - given the commercial variety tend to be able to carry more mass and be able to be in the air longer (and also cost in the 5 digit range, which is relatively cheap).
Recreational use is tricky because the FAA doesn't want to limit those cheap $150 ones that can't go above 50 feet or last more than 5 minutes, but wants to go after those more sophisticated ones like DJI Phantoms that can reach a couple of thousand feet and be there for 10s of minutes at a time, and filtering between the two is really hard.
Plus they're so easy to (mis)use and fly that people really don't think they need a pilot's license for them. And it's the major reason we're seeing all this right now - they're cheap, they're easy, and everyone with $1000 can get one. And common sense is well, less than common given what we see in other fields (e.g., computing). Hell, I'm sure this holiday season some teens and pre-teens even will have Phantoms under the tree.
Airport databases don't work too well - new aerodromes and such come into and pop out of existence on an almost daily basis (the major airports are easy - there's only around 100 of them, but there are thousands of public use GA airports, and probably 10s of thousands of aerodromes, private and public). It's one reason why there's a 56-day cycle on materials And even then the FAA doesn't have a full listing - they do for public use ones, but private aerodromes don't necessarily show up.
I can't get to the study but it seems like the sample size was one secondary school class. That's routhly 30 children. How is this considered a scientific study?
What, you have to do a complete double-blind study with thousands of people just to see if a hypothesis MIGHT be true? Or just to see what happens?
Here's how the real world works. You have a hypothesis. You design a test to try to test it (this is hard and you may inadvertently introduce an unknown that you're actually measuring). Next comes the expensive bit - data gathering.
But if your hypothesis isn't cut and dry and your experiment isn't necessarily well controlled (common most of the time because you're not testing stuff like "is the sky blue?" but more open-ended ones like "can girls write nicer than boys?"), you're not going to run a test on thousands because it costs too much. And you may find a flaw in your test that invalidates the whole result.
So you run a small scale test, and do your data gathering and analysis. Like say, you do it on a class. It won't be well controlled nor a population sample, but it will reveal several things. First, it will tell you if you're blowing smoke up your ass by having a hypothesis that's invalid. Second, it can help reveal issues with your data gathering. Third, it helps you do data analysis quickly - far easier to ensure your results are accurate when you're only analyzing 30 people versus 3000. The former is small enough that you can double-check your analysis programs with manual hand calculations.
Plenty of research fails because the expected hypothesis was wrong to begin with. Better to have done it and wasted a few thousand dollars than tens of thousands or more. If you're trying to present something to a grant committee, it's far easier to have small scale results that show promise than hand-waving "we thinks".
And yes, it's possible a larger scale study proves no significant difference. Which isn't a failure - it means you forgot to control a variable. Which means it's still a result and you analyze why you got the results you did that you didn't get int he later study.
And, a small scale test may even reveal more questions to ask so when you enlarge the dataset, you can do more analysis and maybe if your original hypothesis is invalid, you can still salvage something. Plenty of science was done by doing a study and "hey, that's kinda interesting..."
30 people may not be population representative, but it certainly produces a result worth studying further, no? You can even do secondary studies like what's the gender population at this level, and compare it a few years later. We always ask why there aren't more females in IT, and inevitably people say "why should we care?" If the population isn't as skewed in the early years, longer term studies can be performed that see why it gets skewed later on. Is it a structural problem, a societal problem, or is it even a problem with IT workers purposely discouraging females from joining? The first we can't do much about (in which case the "why should we bother" crowd is correct), the second we can look at, and the third points the blame solely at IT workers as the main problem (where perhaps it's "IT workers are a bunch of immature boy cliques that treat females as having the cooties").
I'm kind of hopeful that the Ubuntu people will consider dropping Debian for Devuan, and that perhaps the Devuan project can start working more closely with the Ubuntu people, possibly even becoming a dev distro from which the desktop distro is derived, kind of like what Ubuntu does with Debian now. If I read it correctly, they moved to systemd because Debian did, not because they wanted to.
Ubuntu also moved to systemd because everyone was moving to systemd. Before that, Ubuntu has their own init system called Upstart, and there was much debate in Debian on whether to use systemd or Upstart.
Of course, in the end, even people wanting sysvinit are obviously doing something wrong because they're not using sysvinit properly. Sysvinit has a daemon manager built into it yet it's only used for one daemon typically (getty).
Instead, we abuse it to run shell scripts that barely replicate that functionality that is already built into sysvinit. I mean, init monitors the processes it runs, restarts them as necessary, and if they fail by restarting too quickly, init waits 5 minutes before trying again. Which his what daemon management is.
I think it was joke vis-a-vis Apple making "phablet" phones after spending years insisting that people wouldn't like them because they can't use them with only one hand. Add to the fact that the iPhone 6 Plus looks kind of like a Galaxy S5 with less-rounded corners and there you go.
So yeah, people in North America and Europe go for the more practically sized 6, while Asians go for the numerical bigger is better and buy on screen size.
My mind boggles over the sheer amount of engineering on this which actually worked, and the massive number of things which are lurking to go wrong.
Not to meniion how many things were not just right, but unknown when we started. Could we harpoon a comet? We didn't know, so let's try it! Could we screw into a comet? Again, we don't know it's true composition, but let's throw it in because what the hell.
There were plenty of unknowns in this mission so even though it didn't go 100%, we still learned a ton. And we still don't know if could harpoon it, because the launcher failed. But still we learned.
It was one of those missions where we learned a lot even if we didn't make it beyond the launchpad because our knowledge of comets is very limited.
Not quite, It is more Apple ruined them by promising to buy their product and then not following through after they had already heavily invested in meeting the supply for that promise. regardless they need to accept responsibility for entering into such a lopsided agreement. You make stupid decisions and stupid things happen. Why would you trust any company in this way, especially apple.
Well, the other problem was the sapphire wasn't of sufficient quality. Apple's contract said they'd buy it if it was of a certain quality and it failed to meet the bar.
And while lopsided, Apple did lend over $1B as part of the contract to build the factory and merely demanded repayment on a schedule.
Now, Apple is claiming innocence to the fact that they didn't know of the troubles - saying if they knew they would've worked with GTAT to fix issues. Whether it's true or not, we don't know.
Apple bears part of the blame for coming up with the lopsided agreement in the first place. That's not to detract from the blame GT deserves for signing.
Well, Apple has lawyers draw up the contract. GTAT has lawyers to review the contract. It's not Apple presenting a contract to a 1-man shop - it's an organization that's been around and has the resources to scrutinize and negotiate. If GTAT only saw dollar signs when they were handed the contract and didn't review it closely, that's their fault. This isn't a big supplier going after a lone inventor (who may be given leeway for not completely understanding the deal).
We just want to make our money off your app store purchases.
Look, we'll give you the thing for cost if you'll just buy our crap.
*LOL*
Except Apple doesn't make much off of app sales, or media sales for that matter. Even the dwindling iPod sales outclasses the iTunes sales.
Amazon however will sell hardware at or below cost because they plan on selling content, which is why the thing is so tied to Amazon's ecosystem.
Apple, doesn't really care. You could buy your videos off iTunes, or Amazon or even Google Play or whatever. All the content does is help drive hardware sales, which is where Apple makes money. And just use the Kindle app or Nook app or Kobo app for books.
Drives like this exist, I don't know if any are being sold at the moment but they've certainly been made. I believe the strategy has been used both for dual-attach and for increasing throughput. Some drives also used to read/write multiple tracks (that is, on multiple platters) at a time, but (as has been covered elsewhere in this thread) it got to be too complicated to keep everything aligned as the temperatures and rotational velocities increased.
Alignment isn't an issue - there's no alignment on a modern drive. Instead, at the factory, they write a set of servo tracks all over the platters which do the aligning for you - basically the head seeks to approximately the right position and starts reading, and the servo track tells it where it actually is, so feedback gets the head to the right track.
Old hard drives were open-loop - you said seek to track N, it went to track N by using a stepper motor. Modern hard drives are closed loop in that they are constantly looking for servo tracks to tell them where the head is to pinpoint the right track. It also allows for individual platters to have their own servo tracks before being assembled, as well as handling thermal expansion dynamically (old hard drives would do a scan every 30 seconds or so to find out where the tracks were - called "thermal recalibration". Modern ones don't need this since feedback automatically gets them there, which has the advantage that drive accesses are not paused during the recalibration). This was important if you were streaming data to or from the drive, which was why the early ones were called "A/V" drives - they were designed to do the recalibration on the fly so you can constantly write or read data.
No, the bigger reason why two actuators didn't work is far simpler - think multiprocess programming. Both actuators could read or write data to the platters (of which there was one set) and if you screwed up the order of the accesses, you could easily write the wrong thing (think you do a read then a write of a sector - and the sector happens to be under the actuator doing the write). And yet, if you serialized the accesses, you're back to square 1. So maintaining data consistency was incredibly difficult and at higher datarates, unmanageable.
OP asked for "biometric" ID, okay? RFID, cards, NFC, etc. are not biometric. The reasonable assumption -- unlike yours -- is that he had an actual REASON for asking for biometrics. People don't usually say things for no reason.
Probably because biometrics are easy. You're pretty much guaranteed to have a face or a finger that can be scanned inside the cleanroom. Except of course, you're wearing gloves, and no mention if they have to put on the burka-like hoods as well (which eliminate all but iris scans, which may not be possible if it's an enclosed hood).
Basically the problem is they need fast logins that preferably they don't have to type usernames and passwords (which can be hard on clean-room capable keyboards), so an RFID badge can easily solve the problem since they're usually already clipped to the badge holder on the suit.
And given it's a cleanroom, that usually means it's in a more secured area so primary screening can validate badge against other measures, so unless one also planned on swapping or swiping a badge post-entrance, you can be reasonably sure the credentials are valid.
Plus, usually for stuff involving computers, you either use a login and password, or biometrics. RFID cards or ID badges don't typically come to mind when wanting an authentication solution.
Or do you think Microsoft desperately wants a share of that market?
Actually, Microsoft does. Because that's a heck of a lot of PCs, and if they are running Windows and Office, that's a heck of a lot of PCs not running Linux, OpenOffice or other software. Even if Windows and Office are pirated.
All the big commercial vendors pretty much say as such - it's better to have the software pirated than to have those users seek out the competition, whatever it may be.
So even if a user uses pirated Windows, that makes them less likely to use Linux instead. Because if they try the competition, they may like it.
We have lots of experience trying to keep people alive while what's left of their immune system defeats the virus.
It helps if the people who catch it are fit and well before they catch it.
You know most diseases aren't cured by drugs, but by the immune system. The drugs just help out by making you feel better so you don't feel so terrible and harm your immune system. E.g., the painkillers and all that make it easier to get rest so you're not so worn down that your immune system is compromised.
And Ebola talk died down because people were freaking out over it, when in fact they're far more likely to die of influenza than Ebola. Yes, the flu has killed an order of magnitude more people in the US than Ebola has worldwide.
Oh yeah, it helps if you catch the flu that you're fit and well too. The people that die from the flu generally are immunocompromised or vulnerable. Enterovirus D68 (part of the influenza family) is particularly deadly to children and it's huge so far.
Ebola outcomes are more successful in the western world because we have access to clean drinking water - Ebola works by wreaking havoc by causing the blood vessels to leak, so being able to get fluids into the body means the person has a fighting chance at living.
I used to work at an LTO manufacturer and asked why we never drove the older generations down into the SMB space and it is simply this - the components are *really* expensive, the majority of the component cost of the drive is the R/W head, that alone probably accounts for 25% of the drive and you just can't push the price down much further, it costs what it costs. Also, the HUGE majority of these things go into libraries with hundreds of drives, thousands of slots and robots that can move upwards of 90km per hour.
Why? Is the head made of exotic materials that cost a lot?
I mean, a hard drive has a read-write head that is tiny and made to fine precision, but because of the immense R&D that went into production and simply mass production forced optimizations in cost and production methods that drove the price down so much that you can pick up a ton of storage for not a lot of money. Like 2TB portable hard drives for under $100. And that neglects the fact that the mechanical parts of said hard drive are far tinier and have tight tolerances in order to stuff that much storage in the space smaller than a single tape.
The price is probably expensive because no one's ever bothered to scale it from the thousands to millions of units.
uck naming shit to appeal to the plebes and media. It's not a popularity contest. It's a fucking security vulnerability that needs to be patched. You don't get points for media mentions.
I know, I mean, if they didn't call it "heartbleed" there would be millions of easily exploitable servers and security appliances out there to rip data from. instead they had to get media attention and force people to actually examine their systems and update them. After all, a few months later about 80% of vulnerable machines were patched.
And stuff like OpenVPN would be much easier to break into if people didn't force updates to their VPN appliances and stuff.
I agree that the people who do it for a job have more reason to cheat. You get almost nothing out of cheating in games for recreation.
On occasion, I used to play on servers that allowed cheats. When I played with them, the experience was interesting at first, but inevitably got boring very fast. In the end, all you do is remove the work done to generate good levels and turn it into a super-flat experience where your ping, cpu, and possibly your actual aim/weapon skill matters. If there are auto aim or other weapon hacks, there isn't even the weapon skill.
So, it gets boring. Especially against other people with the same hacks. It is probably marginally more entertaining when you are playing against people who don't have hacks and don't know that you have them.
However, ultimately, what is the point of playing a game if you don't actually play the game? There are people out there who enjoy trolling, but I can't see that being as interesting as trying to beat other people on a well-designed map.
Getting hacks is easy, although using them covertly is dangerous due to VAC and possible bans. For all of that, it's just a waste of your time, other than perhaps to understand a little of the mechanics of how the game works and how hackers might be using hacks on you.
Even if you don't do it professionally (i.e., compete in tournaments) you can still benefit financially from the cheats.
So that's a good motivator - you obviously cannot play in a controlled environment like the final tournament, but if you can get "up there" in the local tournament, you can end up being a local celebrity and get various low-level sponsorships and other things. Do it well enough that you make a name for yourself so you can get on YouTube and get paid for videos on topics not related to what you're cheating in and you're in a good spot.
You may not be able to get the $5M grand prize in a tournament (that requires work), but you can probably make a half-decent living on sponsorships, content sales and other things, without doing too much, either.
Here's THE answer. Google [name of game] hacks. Download the hacking utilities that everyone else is using. Look at what directory it installs to or what DLLs go where. Have the game check for those files in the next patch. Permanently ban everyone with the hack installed and ban them from Steam so basically those cheating pieces of shit aren't allowed to play video games anymore.
Trust me, those things aren't static. And I'm sure Valve already does that - they purchase the cheats (cheats at this level are sold on a subscription basis) and they ensure that simple measures to detect them don't work.
Yes, it can also include rootkits, or transparent network proxies, DLLs and executables whose name changes every load to avoid detection, etc.
And I'm sure SteamOS will make things worse as wasn't kernel hacking "encouraged" for being an open system? Doesn't take a genius to realize if you can replace the kernel, you can easily break any anti-cheat system. (And userspace can do zilch about it since the kernel can easily lie).
I agree with you, but I also agree with his idea that information should be set free. We The People enable, protect, and to a large part even pay for the production of mass media content due to Hollywood's and Big Music's creative accounting practices which show them losing money or breaking even on clearly profitable media. And the same goes for the telecommunications infrastructure: We The People largely paid for that, not just by paying for services but actually through government grants and the like, and it's used against us to milk us of every possible cent while providing the lowest possible standard of service. The fact that we still pay more to send calls across town than to send them across the country is just ridiculous and it's based on legislation bought by the telecoms industry.
Bullcrap. No one believes in "information should be free" because otherwise they're all hypocrites.
I mean, if information should be free, then where's his banking information? Passwords, transits, account numbers, etc? That's information, it should be free. Likewise identity card information, photos, alarm codes and key details to his mansion.
Now, it's true the content industries of the US have screwed people many times over, but let's not confuse "I want my content for free" with "information should be free". Or even "Copyright should be eliminated" (which a lot of people aren't for, either).
I'm sure even open-source advocates don't even want that - because free information means that their precious copyleft is invalid as well. I mean, if Linux is supposed to be free, then I should be free to do anything I want with it, without restrictions.
And yes without copyright, the GPL is useless (the GPL is a true license in that if you don't agree, you get basic legal rights granted by legislation. If you do agree, though, you get additional rights, unlike most licenses which seek to reduce your legal rights).
There is currently quite a bit of hysteria from some consumers in the BluRay field over it because apparently 100% of the people upset about it have kids who ruin their discs and now they "can't make copies". I say that with sarcasm. Well, you can make copies, you just can't make BluRay copies. Non-BluRay players are not required to detect or honor Cinavia, so ripping your BluRays and making MKVs out of them without conversion works fine. Even most BluRay players will happily play such files without checking for Cinavia.
Actually, a lot of Blu-Ray players and media players in North America DO check for Cinevia, even if the source is no longer Blu-Ray. A lot of players outside do not, however, including many cheap Chinese ones.
Back so Sony, one could wonder if it's a bit much just for a single movie, since Sony Pictures dropped the Steve Jobs movie recently.
On a more serious note, one wonders if it's the result of poor security practices. After all, just a few years ago Sony suffered a major breach of their Playstation Network servers, and now their entire Sony Pictures group is out of commission. Could just be a case of corporate poor security practices.
Or maybe someone's just wanting the PS4 master key.
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Given the way Google Wallet work, you may not be as protected as you think. Google Wallet works by being a virtual debit card - they use Host Emulation to be a chip card to a (I think) Bank of America debit account. So when you pay, the merchant sees a NFC debit card, and does the transaction that way. Bank of America then takes those payment details, forwards it to Google and Google demands payment from you.
If someone grabs that debit account number, that could be problematic because that's a debit account in your name. It also means Google must absorb a fee somewhere because the retailer believes they're charging a debit card and pays that fee, but Google needs to charge your card and Google must eat that fee.
It's also why no bank will create Google Wallet as a card-present payment - because Google is still charging your card similar to an online payment.
Apple Pay is really just a slick implementation of EMV which means the retailer sees a very expensive credit card and because that credit card was presented, gets the Card Present rates. The only "secret sauce" Apple adds is a slick way of adding cards.
The impediments are only impediments if you treat them as such. If you want to talk to people, do. Social skills are social skills, and if you're a genuinely interesting person to talk to, people will accommodate.
It may help to just talk (and talk and talk to exercise the speech path) and try to normalize your speaking to aid comprehension, but if you're someone who people want to talk to for whatever reason, a speech impediment isn't. And the more you do it, the better you'll be at overcoming it.
The shelves are movable like you said. The position of the shelves within the warehouse can change depending on the hotness and coldness of the items within.
You have to remember the robots are not autonomous - they are controlled by a central computer tied to the ordering and inventory databases. The central computer is also responsible for knowing where all the robots are in the warehouse, what they're doing, and where they're going. And human traffic is easy to detect since the robots have traditional bump, IR and other sensors (which the computer can look at the path planning and stop other robots headed towards a collision with the first robot).
And this leads to the idea of hot and cold shelves - because the shelves are movable, they can be put anywhere. And in Amazon's warehouse (as is everyone else's using the robots), the shelves are arranged from hot to cold with hotter shelves towards the packers and colder shelves towards the far end of the warehouse. The computer adjusts the location of the shelves dynamically as need be - as a shelf gets hotter, its position in the warehouse changes.
Yes, it means that a company like Amazon can't tell you WHERE in the warehouse something is without consulting the inventory database because that location changes constantly. Probably easier to just have a robot bring you the item than to look it up and pick it manually.
Plus, in Europe, generally speaking there's a very good public transportation system that one doesn't NEED a license to go anywhere. So drivers who do drive generally drive because they like to drive.
If you hate driving, you have a perfectly usable option of public transportation.
In North America, that's generally not an option except in a few areas, so the end result is you have a bunch of people forced to drive who would rather be doing other things. (Like say, texting, or prepping for the party or other activity).
So yes, they drive better not because they're better drivers, but those who don't want to drive have viable options of getting around, leaving the roads filled with people who like to drive, enjoy it, and are generally more skilled because they like the challenge. Not some soccer mom who'd rather be gossiping with friends or doing their nails instead of driving.
And that includes getting around between cities too - between buses and cheap flights, you can do a lot in Europe without setting foot behind the wheel.
Instead of guessing, you could calculate it, or rely on Adm. Grace Hopper's famous "1 nanosecond". At c, that's just under a foot. Adding 10 feet of cabling means the signal takes just over 10ns longer. If you add in velocity factor, .66 is convenient for copper wiring, that's really 15ns in the end.
And a microsecond is 1000ns. Or just under 1000' at c.
And yet "ripping off" music is common and even popularized. Rap was created this way when a drum riff intro was repeated over and over and over again (from Aerosmith? I can't recall). We consider it a legitimate form of music today (for varying degrees of "legitimate"), yet its origins are in copyright infringement. And there have been many a sampler musician who has made great music despite sampling being literally copyright infringement.
And shunning only works if the community is small, and extremely difficult in something as subjective as art. You can shun, but there is a chance that someone actually likes it, and despite shunning, embraces the "theft" or infringement. Then it's a case of which community is larger or who can grow and evolve taste.
The problem is that developer PCs are often some of the most powerful in the company because they are developers and can demand it. I mean, give a developer, web or otherwise a bog standard PC with less RAM that "average" people have and you'll get nothing but an endless stream of complaints.
So yeah, web developers with Haswell 3.5GHz i7s and 16/32GB of RAM designing webpages. yeah, it loads fast, but bogs down someone with a 4 year old PC and barely 4GB of RAM.
Then there's all the preparation for traffic - yeah, they get all the static CDNs up and running, the database servers are beefed up and the dynamic servers are beefy. Then they forget one script they have on every page references some dinky little server everyone forgot about. That server keels over and the page coding is such that the browser isn't able to render the rest of the page while loading it in the background. So now the pages load slower and slower and slower and everyone thinks it's either the static CDNs, the database or the dynamic views being generated, and not the server handling that one script which is vastly underpowered because it's hidden in the corner of the datacentre and forgotten about.
I built an HTPC recenty and used some high-end parts because they were on sale and well, at their target load it would mean their fans are basically not running.
I also invested a lot in Noctua fans - the motherboard supported speed control (4 pin) so I bought 4 pin fans that go from slow to moderately fast. The heatsink on the CPU takes a whopping 150mm fan, and the fan itself can do 200-800RPM. Most of the time at the load it's at it's at 200RPM, and it turns out the tachometer thinks less than 300RPM is stopped - so I kept getting fan-stopped alarms because the fan was running so slow.
Likewise, the case needed 80mm fans, I used ones that went from 400-1000RPM, they usually idle at 400RPM.
In fact, the noisiest it gets is about 3 seconds on resume as things spin up then go silent (it has an SSD for the OS, and a HDD for media - storing multi-gig files on the HDD doesn't cause much seeking and the drive is virtually silent). Yes, the PC is in sleep mode most of the time which ensures the noise is at a minimum.
It's not hard. It just requires a bit of work choosing quiet components. Case fans are a big source of noise, so pick 120mm or larger if you can, or pick speed-controllable ones if you can't. And go for airflow designed ones like the Noctuas - the blades and case are designed to cause as little turbulence as possible to reduce noise.
And if you're choosing a case, choose one that has wire fan grills rather than ones made from stamped metal. Stamped metal is cheap but adds turbulence.
Power supplies - Seasonic makes some of the most quiet ones, but 120mm ones generally are quiet. If you can, there are even passive fanless ones!
The FAA has proposed just that - currently for commercial use. Right now commercial use of a drone is restricted, but the FAA is planning on requiring a licensed pilot be in control of a commercial drone.
They haven't gotten around to regulating recreational use just yet - given the commercial variety tend to be able to carry more mass and be able to be in the air longer (and also cost in the 5 digit range, which is relatively cheap).
Recreational use is tricky because the FAA doesn't want to limit those cheap $150 ones that can't go above 50 feet or last more than 5 minutes, but wants to go after those more sophisticated ones like DJI Phantoms that can reach a couple of thousand feet and be there for 10s of minutes at a time, and filtering between the two is really hard.
Plus they're so easy to (mis)use and fly that people really don't think they need a pilot's license for them. And it's the major reason we're seeing all this right now - they're cheap, they're easy, and everyone with $1000 can get one. And common sense is well, less than common given what we see in other fields (e.g., computing). Hell, I'm sure this holiday season some teens and pre-teens even will have Phantoms under the tree.
Airport databases don't work too well - new aerodromes and such come into and pop out of existence on an almost daily basis (the major airports are easy - there's only around 100 of them, but there are thousands of public use GA airports, and probably 10s of thousands of aerodromes, private and public). It's one reason why there's a 56-day cycle on materials And even then the FAA doesn't have a full listing - they do for public use ones, but private aerodromes don't necessarily show up.
What, you have to do a complete double-blind study with thousands of people just to see if a hypothesis MIGHT be true? Or just to see what happens?
Here's how the real world works. You have a hypothesis. You design a test to try to test it (this is hard and you may inadvertently introduce an unknown that you're actually measuring). Next comes the expensive bit - data gathering.
But if your hypothesis isn't cut and dry and your experiment isn't necessarily well controlled (common most of the time because you're not testing stuff like "is the sky blue?" but more open-ended ones like "can girls write nicer than boys?"), you're not going to run a test on thousands because it costs too much. And you may find a flaw in your test that invalidates the whole result.
So you run a small scale test, and do your data gathering and analysis. Like say, you do it on a class. It won't be well controlled nor a population sample, but it will reveal several things. First, it will tell you if you're blowing smoke up your ass by having a hypothesis that's invalid. Second, it can help reveal issues with your data gathering. Third, it helps you do data analysis quickly - far easier to ensure your results are accurate when you're only analyzing 30 people versus 3000. The former is small enough that you can double-check your analysis programs with manual hand calculations.
Plenty of research fails because the expected hypothesis was wrong to begin with. Better to have done it and wasted a few thousand dollars than tens of thousands or more. If you're trying to present something to a grant committee, it's far easier to have small scale results that show promise than hand-waving "we thinks".
And yes, it's possible a larger scale study proves no significant difference. Which isn't a failure - it means you forgot to control a variable. Which means it's still a result and you analyze why you got the results you did that you didn't get int he later study.
And, a small scale test may even reveal more questions to ask so when you enlarge the dataset, you can do more analysis and maybe if your original hypothesis is invalid, you can still salvage something. Plenty of science was done by doing a study and "hey, that's kinda interesting..."
30 people may not be population representative, but it certainly produces a result worth studying further, no? You can even do secondary studies like what's the gender population at this level, and compare it a few years later. We always ask why there aren't more females in IT, and inevitably people say "why should we care?" If the population isn't as skewed in the early years, longer term studies can be performed that see why it gets skewed later on. Is it a structural problem, a societal problem, or is it even a problem with IT workers purposely discouraging females from joining? The first we can't do much about (in which case the "why should we bother" crowd is correct), the second we can look at, and the third points the blame solely at IT workers as the main problem (where perhaps it's "IT workers are a bunch of immature boy cliques that treat females as having the cooties").
Ubuntu also moved to systemd because everyone was moving to systemd. Before that, Ubuntu has their own init system called Upstart, and there was much debate in Debian on whether to use systemd or Upstart.
Of course, in the end, even people wanting sysvinit are obviously doing something wrong because they're not using sysvinit properly. Sysvinit has a daemon manager built into it yet it's only used for one daemon typically (getty).
Instead, we abuse it to run shell scripts that barely replicate that functionality that is already built into sysvinit. I mean, init monitors the processes it runs, restarts them as necessary, and if they fail by restarting too quickly, init waits 5 minutes before trying again. Which his what daemon management is.
According to sales data, in North America Apple is correct - people are eschewing the iPhone 6+ in favor of the iPhone 6 (about 1:4 6+:6 sales ratio, or 20% 6+, 80% 6). In Asia, though, apparently bigger is better because the 6+ is selling in significantly larger proportions (1:2 or so 37% 6+, 63% 6).
So yeah, people in North America and Europe go for the more practically sized 6, while Asians go for the numerical bigger is better and buy on screen size.
Not to meniion how many things were not just right, but unknown when we started. Could we harpoon a comet? We didn't know, so let's try it! Could we screw into a comet? Again, we don't know it's true composition, but let's throw it in because what the hell.
There were plenty of unknowns in this mission so even though it didn't go 100%, we still learned a ton. And we still don't know if could harpoon it, because the launcher failed. But still we learned.
It was one of those missions where we learned a lot even if we didn't make it beyond the launchpad because our knowledge of comets is very limited.
Well, the other problem was the sapphire wasn't of sufficient quality. Apple's contract said they'd buy it if it was of a certain quality and it failed to meet the bar.
And while lopsided, Apple did lend over $1B as part of the contract to build the factory and merely demanded repayment on a schedule.
Now, Apple is claiming innocence to the fact that they didn't know of the troubles - saying if they knew they would've worked with GTAT to fix issues. Whether it's true or not, we don't know.
Well, Apple has lawyers draw up the contract. GTAT has lawyers to review the contract. It's not Apple presenting a contract to a 1-man shop - it's an organization that's been around and has the resources to scrutinize and negotiate. If GTAT only saw dollar signs when they were handed the contract and didn't review it closely, that's their fault. This isn't a big supplier going after a lone inventor (who may be given leeway for not completely understanding the deal).
Interestingly, Apple is keeping the plant and planning on re-hiring laid off workers. GTAT will be selling off the furnaces but Apple paid ofr the factory and is keeping it to manufacture... something.
Except Apple doesn't make much off of app sales, or media sales for that matter. Even the dwindling iPod sales outclasses the iTunes sales.
Amazon however will sell hardware at or below cost because they plan on selling content, which is why the thing is so tied to Amazon's ecosystem.
Apple, doesn't really care. You could buy your videos off iTunes, or Amazon or even Google Play or whatever. All the content does is help drive hardware sales, which is where Apple makes money. And just use the Kindle app or Nook app or Kobo app for books.
Alignment isn't an issue - there's no alignment on a modern drive. Instead, at the factory, they write a set of servo tracks all over the platters which do the aligning for you - basically the head seeks to approximately the right position and starts reading, and the servo track tells it where it actually is, so feedback gets the head to the right track.
Old hard drives were open-loop - you said seek to track N, it went to track N by using a stepper motor. Modern hard drives are closed loop in that they are constantly looking for servo tracks to tell them where the head is to pinpoint the right track. It also allows for individual platters to have their own servo tracks before being assembled, as well as handling thermal expansion dynamically (old hard drives would do a scan every 30 seconds or so to find out where the tracks were - called "thermal recalibration". Modern ones don't need this since feedback automatically gets them there, which has the advantage that drive accesses are not paused during the recalibration). This was important if you were streaming data to or from the drive, which was why the early ones were called "A/V" drives - they were designed to do the recalibration on the fly so you can constantly write or read data.
No, the bigger reason why two actuators didn't work is far simpler - think multiprocess programming. Both actuators could read or write data to the platters (of which there was one set) and if you screwed up the order of the accesses, you could easily write the wrong thing (think you do a read then a write of a sector - and the sector happens to be under the actuator doing the write). And yet, if you serialized the accesses, you're back to square 1. So maintaining data consistency was incredibly difficult and at higher datarates, unmanageable.
Probably because biometrics are easy. You're pretty much guaranteed to have a face or a finger that can be scanned inside the cleanroom. Except of course, you're wearing gloves, and no mention if they have to put on the burka-like hoods as well (which eliminate all but iris scans, which may not be possible if it's an enclosed hood).
Basically the problem is they need fast logins that preferably they don't have to type usernames and passwords (which can be hard on clean-room capable keyboards), so an RFID badge can easily solve the problem since they're usually already clipped to the badge holder on the suit.
And given it's a cleanroom, that usually means it's in a more secured area so primary screening can validate badge against other measures, so unless one also planned on swapping or swiping a badge post-entrance, you can be reasonably sure the credentials are valid.
Plus, usually for stuff involving computers, you either use a login and password, or biometrics. RFID cards or ID badges don't typically come to mind when wanting an authentication solution.
Actually, Microsoft does. Because that's a heck of a lot of PCs, and if they are running Windows and Office, that's a heck of a lot of PCs not running Linux, OpenOffice or other software. Even if Windows and Office are pirated.
All the big commercial vendors pretty much say as such - it's better to have the software pirated than to have those users seek out the competition, whatever it may be.
So even if a user uses pirated Windows, that makes them less likely to use Linux instead. Because if they try the competition, they may like it.
You know most diseases aren't cured by drugs, but by the immune system. The drugs just help out by making you feel better so you don't feel so terrible and harm your immune system. E.g., the painkillers and all that make it easier to get rest so you're not so worn down that your immune system is compromised.
And Ebola talk died down because people were freaking out over it, when in fact they're far more likely to die of influenza than Ebola. Yes, the flu has killed an order of magnitude more people in the US than Ebola has worldwide.
Oh yeah, it helps if you catch the flu that you're fit and well too. The people that die from the flu generally are immunocompromised or vulnerable. Enterovirus D68 (part of the influenza family) is particularly deadly to children and it's huge so far.
Ebola outcomes are more successful in the western world because we have access to clean drinking water - Ebola works by wreaking havoc by causing the blood vessels to leak, so being able to get fluids into the body means the person has a fighting chance at living.
Why? Is the head made of exotic materials that cost a lot?
I mean, a hard drive has a read-write head that is tiny and made to fine precision, but because of the immense R&D that went into production and simply mass production forced optimizations in cost and production methods that drove the price down so much that you can pick up a ton of storage for not a lot of money. Like 2TB portable hard drives for under $100. And that neglects the fact that the mechanical parts of said hard drive are far tinier and have tight tolerances in order to stuff that much storage in the space smaller than a single tape.
The price is probably expensive because no one's ever bothered to scale it from the thousands to millions of units.
I know, I mean, if they didn't call it "heartbleed" there would be millions of easily exploitable servers and security appliances out there to rip data from. instead they had to get media attention and force people to actually examine their systems and update them. After all, a few months later about 80% of vulnerable machines were patched.
And stuff like OpenVPN would be much easier to break into if people didn't force updates to their VPN appliances and stuff.
Even if you don't do it professionally (i.e., compete in tournaments) you can still benefit financially from the cheats.
So that's a good motivator - you obviously cannot play in a controlled environment like the final tournament, but if you can get "up there" in the local tournament, you can end up being a local celebrity and get various low-level sponsorships and other things. Do it well enough that you make a name for yourself so you can get on YouTube and get paid for videos on topics not related to what you're cheating in and you're in a good spot.
You may not be able to get the $5M grand prize in a tournament (that requires work), but you can probably make a half-decent living on sponsorships, content sales and other things, without doing too much, either.
Trust me, those things aren't static. And I'm sure Valve already does that - they purchase the cheats (cheats at this level are sold on a subscription basis) and they ensure that simple measures to detect them don't work.
Yes, it can also include rootkits, or transparent network proxies, DLLs and executables whose name changes every load to avoid detection, etc.
And I'm sure SteamOS will make things worse as wasn't kernel hacking "encouraged" for being an open system? Doesn't take a genius to realize if you can replace the kernel, you can easily break any anti-cheat system. (And userspace can do zilch about it since the kernel can easily lie).
Bullcrap. No one believes in "information should be free" because otherwise they're all hypocrites.
I mean, if information should be free, then where's his banking information? Passwords, transits, account numbers, etc? That's information, it should be free. Likewise identity card information, photos, alarm codes and key details to his mansion.
Now, it's true the content industries of the US have screwed people many times over, but let's not confuse "I want my content for free" with "information should be free". Or even "Copyright should be eliminated" (which a lot of people aren't for, either).
I'm sure even open-source advocates don't even want that - because free information means that their precious copyleft is invalid as well. I mean, if Linux is supposed to be free, then I should be free to do anything I want with it, without restrictions.
And yes without copyright, the GPL is useless (the GPL is a true license in that if you don't agree, you get basic legal rights granted by legislation. If you do agree, though, you get additional rights, unlike most licenses which seek to reduce your legal rights).
Actually, a lot of Blu-Ray players and media players in North America DO check for Cinevia, even if the source is no longer Blu-Ray. A lot of players outside do not, however, including many cheap Chinese ones.
Back so Sony, one could wonder if it's a bit much just for a single movie, since Sony Pictures dropped the Steve Jobs movie recently.
On a more serious note, one wonders if it's the result of poor security practices. After all, just a few years ago Sony suffered a major breach of their Playstation Network servers, and now their entire Sony Pictures group is out of commission. Could just be a case of corporate poor security practices.
Or maybe someone's just wanting the PS4 master key.