It's much easier to track people by cell phone. The advantage is that you can do that from a mile away, rather than an inch.
Yeah, but what if you know the guy, but don't know his cellphone? Being able to tie a name to a face, an NFC identifier, AND a cellphone turns it into the ultimate cookie.
He changes phones? Well, he's unlikely to change those NFC chips in his hand, so you simply detect nearby cellphones when you scan his NFC tag. Do it a few times and you can narrow down which cellphone it is.
What would typically be the source of the whine/buzz behind a convector heater (non-fan), and an LCD monitor, and an LED bulb?
Header - surprisingly, AC current on a regular wire heater. The coils of heating element do act like an inductor and cause it to vibrate some. Depending on the mount, that vibration can translate into actual vibration of the chassis causing the buzzes.
LCD monitor - the switch mode power supply is generally the cause of it. Practically everything with a SMPS is vulnerable to buzzes/whines because of the way they operate.
The problem is, I just bought a Hershey bar at the store for 99 cents. If it had been 2 or 3 dollars, I would not have even reached for it.
That's retail pricing - you can probably go to Costco and get a box of bars for 1/3rd the price or so. So even if the price went up, the retail price might go up, but maybe not as much as it seems.
Geeks have real issues with the concepts of knowledge and intent mattering in the law. They think something is either ok, or not ok, and if it is ok it is ok in all situations. Of course that's not how the law work. Intent in particular matters a hell of a lot. Something can be illegal or legal just based off of intent, or can be a different level of crime. Likewise if you know you are helping someone commit a crime, that can get you in trouble whereas doing the same thing unknowingly can be fine.
It is complex, because it varies, there are crimes that don't require intent, or crimes where even doing it unknowingly will get you in trouble, but there are others that are not. It is complex with various shades of gray, which I guess is why geeks can't understand it. Many seem to be very binary thinkers and want absolutes in rules, which the law frequently doesn't have.
Easy, because computers are only 0 or 1, black or white, ok or not ok. So geek thinking generally follows that of a computer - always OK, always not OK. Fine shades of grey are an analog thing that has no place in a digital world.
Of course, this leads to interface errors since the real world is most definitely analog and in no way black or white. Even worse, fine shades of grey do certainly matter - you can't just ignore the LSB anymore because that can make all the difference.
Yep - Japan is (or at least was, the last was retired in 2006) the only country in the world to use 747 derivatives essentially as commuter aircraft.
Well, I think they use 777s now. Or other widebody jets.
The reason is there are just so many people per trip that they have to use widebody jets just to keep up. It's not that they need the long-range capacity of the aircraft - they just need the fact those can carry lots of people at one time.
Boeing actually makes a special manual for Japanese customers on how to best load their planes for efficient operations - since those aircraft never reach their regular cruising altitude where they're designed to operate best (the trip is too short). Partial fuel and how to calculate the best altitude for most efficient flight.
Boeing also uses the aircraft for research - since those aircraft accumulate cycles far quicker, they can study and check for long term issues relatively quickly and fix the fleet before it becomes a problem.
Now you not only have to concern yourself with the personal sanitary habits of those with whom you shake hands, but whether they've "cleaned you out", as well.
Question is - does it not seem like a really good way to track someone?
Sure it's not like they can ping you from space to get your coordinates, but it's like license plate readers - they can identify you and where you were when you were scanned.
I just worry that all these Netflix wannabes is going to fracture the content market (with content being hopelessly split amongst competing streaming services thanks to a morass of exclusive deals). It's fine now, with just Netflix and Amazon Prime being serious contenders (and Hulu's half-assed effort pulling up the distant rear). But I see a possible future where I've got 300 different streaming services on my box, all of them wanting a monthly fee--and with me trying to remember which one of those 300 has the movie or TV show I want to watch tonight.
That's the point. No one provider will "have it all" and the content producers have intentionally done it this way. The movie industry saw what iTunes did to the music industry when it basically became the way to get music and the immense power Apple had to force the industry to accept its terms.
So the movie industry is intentionally splitting their catalog across multiple services - Netflix gets some, Amazon gets others, etc., so no one of them will end up being a monopsony.
As for finding which one of the servers? Multi-library search should be available on popular devices. I mean, the Xbox can do it (it you search for a movie or TV show, it'll show you which providers have it), and I think Amazon's FireTV can too as well.
its just that they are a very difficult engineering problem. How many devices with continuously moving parts do you know that operate maintenance-free for years or decades? It's not impossible, but is really hard.
That's the big problem. Mechanical devices wear down, and even without maintenance, going for years is difficult. Think of things like your hard drive bearings, or fans that work for years without maintenance, but having them work for a decade is a more iffy proposition reliably.
Plus, there's also vibration - you still have pistons jiggling back and forth, and that can easily mess up instruments and more importantly, make photos and visuals blurry. Of course the equipment can handle it, but usually not when taking a photo or doing an experiment (since all the jiggling is long over when that happens)
No they don't - they have auto stabilisation and thats it. You fly a drone in any kind of wind and it'll drift and you have to constantly adjust the throttle to keep it at the right height. Perhaps the really expensive kit has GPS and can keep itself at a certain location and height but the cheap ones most certainly do not.
You might want to reacquaint yourself with modern drones. They HAVE altitude control. Throttle? You have two buttons, "Up" and "Down". They do everything for you. And you don't need GPS to stay in one place - a downward pointing camera is more than adequate for position holding.
And that's a cheap sub-$300 toy drone. There are plenty of open-source Arducopter ones that for under $1000 give you GPS, camera platforms and hex- octa- rotor configurations. And that's all in, too, save the PC you use to control it (waypoint control, fpv, the open-source stuff is pretty impressive).
You know what? A modern drone costs less than getting into R/C helicopters after you add in the cost of the kit, engine, good radio, gyro, servos, etc. Bit more than R/C planes, maybe.
Heck, they're going to approach the cost of those cheap toy helicopters soon.
In the USA, I believe that we classify a drone as a flying vehicle which can be remotely piloted via either instrument or visual feedback. Anything else is just R/C stuff. I believe that is what these craft are. Although I did see one listed at frys.com going for $250 USD that had FPV video included in the controller. But I digress, my point is that anyone operating these type of craft "drones" should be operating like they would any other flying vehicle and be aware of their surroundings. It's a damn quad-copter with FPV feedback!, why the hell wouldn't you be constantly looking around? If more parents had taught their ignorant children, people would know better, but Nooooo. Some idiot has to shit in the gene pool.
The problem is that R/C and your modern drone are completely different beasts.
In the R/C world, you're constantly controlling your vehicle - because if you don't, you'll either bust airspace or it'll crash. You have to FLY an RC vehicle.
Modern drones though, basically do "all the hard stuff" for you. You basically tell it to take off, and boom, it's in a stable hover 1m above the ground in front of you, and it'll do that with zero input from you until the batteries or fuel runs out. The autopilot on board keeps it in a stable position.
The user of a drone basically just commands the drone to go to places, while the onboard computer figures out how to do that and maintain stable flight. There isn't much more to ones that can go from GPS waypoint to waypoint.
The fact that the user doesn't really need to "fly" the vehicle leads to dumb users (they are REALLY that simple to fly) to do stupid things. FPV gets addicting, so they're concentrating on that rather than watching what their drone is doing, and oh, you just crashed into something you didn't see because your eyes were on the camera feed and not on the craft. (In the R/C world, you can never take your eyes off the aircraft or you can lose it).
Basically the ability of the drones to fly themselves results in the pilots going from having to learn how to fly (and learning the rules and regulations as a side effect) to basically ordering it off of Amazon, opening the box, clicking "fly", and boom they're in the landing path of aircraft.
Reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Sidewhow Bob jumps in a fighter plane, sees how the Air Force has dumbed it down to "Fly" and "Stop" buttons. The modern drone is just like that.
No it didn't, you only have to look at Microsoft's balance sheet to know that. Microsoft will continue to do everything it possibility can to hold back change, for the simple reason that the status quo is that huge piles of profit continue to arrive every month for doing very little work. Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to maintain that status quo.
Except when the game changes.
In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone It wasn't particularly remarkable, I mean, it was just a phone, a web browser and an iPod.
Yet prior to 2007, Microsoft was a dominant player in the mobile market - Windows Mobile was everyone - on phones, PDAs, and even PDA-phones. So was Palm. And Nokia. HTC was making Windows Mobile devices (as an ODM).
Now, none of those old market makers are there anymore. HTC had to evolve into an Android ODM and makes their own phones now. Blackberry is barely surviving. Samsung, LG, and others grew up making featurephones to smartphones running Android.
Literally overnight the old "status quo" was replaced with a new status quo with NEW entrants - iOS and Android.
One could argue that Apple saw the writing on the wall for computers being the primary computing device and released the iPad. We still need computers, but instead of everyone buying multiple computers at home (remember netbooks? They were popular because now you could equip everyone with their own computer for cheap), we start consolidating computers - instead of everyone needing their own PC, everyone can start reducing their PC count while their "PC tasks" was replaced with tablets.
And Microsoft was investing a lot of money into Windows for tablets.
Trying to keep the status quo just means a competitor can come around an upset the apple cart when you're least prepared. I'm sure Microsoft would love to go to the 2006 days where it was on the top. But then Apple blindsided them and a new ecosystem arose. And Android then took that stake and twisted to until the "old guard" was dead.
Even Apple is aware that markets can shift from under it - in the early 2000's, Apple derived an unhealthy large amount of revenue from iPods. These days it's iPhones and the iPods are barely anything. anymore. And their Mac sales are dwindling, along with every other PC manufacturer.
Kind of hard to pause something the said they wanted to do. Which means they didn't even start it. Maybe notes on the back of a napkin. But that would be giving them to much credit.
This is about holding customers hostage on promised upgrades and throwing a tantrum over possible Title II reclassification. Even though they already enjoy the benefits of Title II (subsidies) without having to be classified as such.
Exactly.
It's all about politics. Even if AT&T never had any plans for gigabit internet, just saying they are "pausing" puts pressure on the government.
Because now the other party will just go and say "Look, it kills jobs and investment" even though it killed 0 jobs and $0 investment because they never intended to do it. It's just to say "look, we WERE going to, but this new legislation makes it hard for us to justify, so no".
Strictly a political play - try to call them out on it by saying "we'll refund you the cost of the equipment you already ordered when you made the announcement" and you'll find there were no POs issued, no supplier got any order from AT&T for gigabit-capable equipment, etc.
Actually it's toxic to us as well, just a bit less so. If you eat a lot of raw, unprocessed chocolate (which has a higher concentration of toxic theobromine than most processed forms), you're likely to have some problems yourself.
Well, we have two things going for us.
First, we can tolerate a lot more theobromine. Second, we're heavier and thus we can take in a lot more theobromine on an absolute basis.
Third, our livers process theobromine a lot faster - a dog or cat's problem with chocolate is that they can't tolerate a lot of it, they don't have a lot of mass, and they can't process it fast enough for the amount they nibble on.
Still, it's funny how the difference between "echocolate" and "echolocate" is swapping two letters. Though I don't want to experience fake eChocolates, I'd prefer the real stuff myself.
Answering your post got me thinking about another point of curiosity - the whole Lacrosse thing from a few years ago appeared to me as if Duke has a faculty full of people who think the worst of their students and/or hate them. In this CS incident, if they don't have any actual proof here this would seem to be in keeping with my prior perception. Are witch hunts common at Duke?
Kinda funny since I actually had a class with said CS prof (Owen L. Astrachan). He (this was over 15 years ago) was a visiting prof at our university teaching us... data structures and algorithms. So he's not the idiot prof who's looking for a witch hunt - if you really did cheat, he did know because there are characteristics to look for. And hell, he drilled in the academic policy and expectations at the start of the class so even claiming ignorance isn't an excuse).
In fact, plagiarism was still detectable even before the days of TurnItIn.
I'd say there's a good chance the cheaters fell into three camps. First are the insanely obvious ones where it's painfully obvious copying went on, then there are not-so-obvious but clear it was copied, and the borderline cases.
There are very subtle clues to look for - code styling, commenting and whitespacing generally are what they look for - if you normally comment one way and then copy code, the change in commenting style and comments can be quite revealing. Even white spacing - do you smush everything together (and often get dinged?) or do you space everything out, where you put the braces, etc.,
Of course, the best way is the one that causes the students most harm. Just make assignments worth barely 10% of the market, the midterm 20%, and the final exam 70%. Cheating doesn't help the last two marks and most students are used to such harsh grading anyways. If you cheat, you likely didn't learn the material, so it's also plainly obvious when your grade and your work don't line up.
Of course, kinda funny to be reading about your old prof a decade and a half later. I enjoyed that class.
This could have been avoided if the authors had used LaTeX for writing their paper. It allows for comments in the text that don't become part of the formatted output.
% Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?
There are also various LaTeX packages for writing comments, adding annotations and tracking changes that could be useful when peer-reviewing a paper.
Even if they use Microsoft Word, they could use the "comment" feature that puts up a comment in the margins with a arrow and highlight. And which can be omitted in the print (if you print with comments, you find the page gets shrunk to 75% to make space for the comment margin, which should be a big clue because the comment box will stick out as the only thing there).
Of course, if you use track changes, they too get comment boxes in the comment margin, which should be a big clue to turn off comments.
I accept cash, cash or cash. No credit or debit cards of any kind.
I save a lot of money on fees that I would otherwise have to pay to banks for accepting their cards, and I don't have to hassle around with payment terminals and the like.
You're also not moving a lot of cash, because it costs you little enough that the risk is worth it. (And no, $1000/day isn't a lot of money.
Because once you start racking up the dollars, you start having to spend dollars to protect those dollars - which is the true cost of handling cash. (Plus, you probably only have 1 or 2 cashiers, and a system based around a regular dumb cash register, and are fairly loose with cash).
In other companies, cash control is king - to handle cash requires you to get special training and trust, while doing a credit transaction means any floor lackey can do the transaction because the backend computer can verify the money.
So yeah, as a small mom and pop, cash works because at most you're out a day's take if you get mugged making the deposit. But since the day's take is relatively small, you're not a huge target either, especially if you make multiple runs to the bank during the day (if you can) so the amount you carry is low and amount you can lose is low.
But take a much larger company like a big-box retailer, and cash handling does cost money - a real cashier gets paid more than minimum wage (you need to trust them with cash, plus train them on how to handle it and having your register and box out significantly can be a fireable offense). Plus, significant cash transactions mandate measures for cash protection. E.g., when a big game is released, the stores selling it may easily do $50K or more in cash in one day which means rolling out an armored vehicle to transfer that money to a bank, which cost hundreds of dollars in an of itself (if it costs $500, that's already 1% of the cash take!). So those businesses handling cash can cost more money than credit (because credit just transparently goes into their account with full reporting and correlation with the register).
For the longest time it was 000000000000000000000. Now we are "told" it was replaced with a computer secure code... And seeing the old machine it runs onto with 7 inches floppy, my feeling is that t is not a 16384 symmetrical key but something far simpler.
I believe it's actually the decryption key to the warhead.
Nuclear warheads don't actually go boom in a generic fashion - you actually need very specific set of timings in order to get the core to go critical (otherwise you're likely to get a fizzle). The timings vary by warhead due to manufacturing differences, and what happens is the computer holding the timings holds it in an encrypted fashion.
In the past, the launch code was a simple comparison that if it succeeded would let the computer use the key to decrypt the timing. I believe modern warheads use the launch code as the decryption key itself, so if you enter it wrong, the warhead goes fizzle because the computer can't time it right.
BTW, the technical term is Permissive Action Link, or PAL. I think modern PALs are coded to the missile they're on so even stealing one doesn't mean you can activate any random warhead, unlike say the movies where terrorists will seal a warhead and it's the hero's job to keep them from stealing a PAL.
This is one of the most irritating thing in IT. People think they can figure out law, accounting, fiscality, politics, marketing or diplomacy by using what they perceive as "common sense".
Call it IT doublespeak.
IT people constantly rag on people for not wanting to learn about computers. Yet those are the same people who aren't willing to learn about law (or even details about IP law - how many have confused copyrights, trademarks and patents?), economics (there's a reason why we have both MICROeconomics and MACROeconomics and things that apply to one do not necessarily cross over), etc.
I'm sure the lawyers and accountants and economists think computing should work according to "common sense" rules as well.
Surely you have to treat the machines on the other end of the vpn as hostile. You don't have them inside your controlled network 100% of the time (not to mention even if you did you should treat them as hostile). How is it that even if someone managed to gain access to a vpn connection that they could hit the database servers for that much data?
I'm sure I am missing something but I would have thought there should be an application layer between any user and the raw data and that you would have to know how that application requested the information to get an output.
Hey, if a user has access to that information, that information can be leaked. It may not be convenient in that you have to take screenshots every time (e.g., if you demand telecommuters work in a secured remote desktop session thus protecting the network from the user).
And why they may have it? Well, your telecommuter can be anyone - perhaps it's the application developer who has access to the database? (Aren't IT guys one of the biggest complainers if telecommuting is restricted?) HR folks who need access to personnel records? Perhaps you ban programmers and IT guys telecommuting because they have access to servers with sensitive data and source code? Or add HR bans as well because HR has access to sensitive data? At which point you can pretty much exclude everyone from telecommuting.
Perhaps you're part of the sysadmin team and someone does a deployment - are you going to mandate everyone come into the office because something might go wrong, or let everyone telecommute in? Perhaps the DBA needs to do something to the production database because something went wrong - are you going to make them drive in or let them log in remotely and fix it? Oh, he has access to the production database!
During a crisis, everyone lower expenses, and the economy enter a vicious slow down cycle. The government is the only actor able to act counter-cyclically. By maintaining expenses, it can restart activity. Hence it is not surprising we see a peak of government expenses these years. Remove it and things will get really ugly. See Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and now even Germany and France.
See Great Depression.
That was one the chief reasons the Great Depression happened - economic activity slows down, and the government spending slows down. Which causes people to be out of work and they stop spending, which slows down activity even more. And then you spiral down until someone wakes up and decides to spend massive amounts of money.
An economy works when money is moving through it. If money stops moving, that's when economic failure happens. A slow down means money slows down its movement through the economy which results in problems.
It's why deflation is not a good thing (it slows down the economy because people save), slight inflation is desirable (under 2% or so), and massive inflation is horrible (because it results in people not being able to spend their money, slowing down the economy).
If you want to see why people are angry at the 1%, it's because those people generally hoard money - they don't want to spend, and the same goes with multinational corporations. They're just not big spenders, which means they're artificially slowing down the economy.
The economy works when money moves. Savings is a vehicle in which you store money for spending later and is a good thing (you're banking economic activity). But hoarding money which is acquiring money without spending it harms the economy.
Yes, carrying around cash is lower risk than a credit card with $0 liability limits. Or not. I'll stick to credit cards. Safer for me. Worse for the retailer. They are likely hoping this legislation will lower liability for the retailer, and push it on the banks or customers.
And there's the REAL reason.
The customer getting their CC stolen is a minor inconvenience of having to reset their auto-payment systems. But a retailer hit with a chargeback? Big problem.
If credit cards keep getting leaked out, eventually they're going to be used by someone and it could hit the retailer. Who doesn't find out until they charge it and the bank tells them that no, they were a victim, too bad, so sad.
Card Not Present transactions (mail order, online) are the most riskiest transaction of all - even swiping is more secure as you can verify the embossed number against the stored number, and the CVV. Then there's Chip+PIN and EMV which are the most secure methods we have now (they're not super super super secure, but on a relative scale, they are the most secure).
And online retailers want data protection laws because eventually they're going to be a victim.
I know when my bank called me, some guy racked up $1000 worth of stuff, including $500 at some drum store. That's $500 in inventory that that retailer lost - hope they have the transaction details so they could trace where the product fraudulently went.
And yes, in the 14 years I've had a credit card, I've had 2 legit chargebacks - 1 was for a product they never shipped, and another was a product that never arrived. In the past 3 years, I've changed my credit card about 5 times already. Total loss to me? Maybe about $200 in cash that I had to run to the bank to pay off a bill because the replacement card didn't arrive in time to be billed to the card. (and likewise, a $200 less charged to my credit card. Since I pay it off every month, it washes out).
Retailers will probably demand some sort of EMV system for online purchases where most likely either you use an app on your phone to enter transaction details (merchant ID, transaction ID, amount transacted, etc) and it spits back a hash for that transaction that verifies the card. Fancier cards will have the electronics to do it on the card to do that so all you have to do is whip out your card. (The card can be powered by a battery - since the cards are only good for 3 years, the battery only has to last at least that long, and it's something we're able to do since regular digital watches with fancy interfaces can often last 7-10 years on an itty-bitty battery).
Want to know why game studios aren't going the last mile?
Because of money.
The era of the PS2, PS3, Xbox and Xbox360 signaled a huge change in the gaming market - suddenly consoles were popular, and profitable No longer did game developers had to rely on the fickle PC market and its absurdly high piracy rate (90%+) to make money - they could rely on consoles to make money (and most consoles have a reasonably low piracy rate - 10% or under on the Xbox 360, fair bit higher on PS3, but not more than 20%).
They don't have to deal with technical support, they don't have to deal with doing DRM (or the issues that arise from it), and other things. Valve helped out by releasing one of the first "app stores" which had built in DRM, but by then the transition had happened. The PC was no longer the primary platform - it was now a secondary one, and only worthy of getting a port from the console version. At least through Steam and traditional sales most PC ports made back their money, and piracy was still an issue, but when console games "got it first", it really didn't matter too much as you're just going for scraps.
So the emphasis is on - what do game makers get for optimizing on Linux? Remember, it's easy to get 90% there quickly, but the last 10% will take a lot more time and effort.
So if you can release a half-assed port that mostly works on Linux, it may sell. Optimize it and may sell better, but given the low-hanging fruit is gone, the profitability becomes suspect because the increase in sales may not be bigger than the increase in effort.
Hey, I said half-assed. You know what? Most PC ports the past few years of AAA games? They were half-assed, and often didn't even remove console assets! And this was way before SteamOS.
Each November the foundation releases their financial statement. When preparing this financial statement and the last one, they must have seen that the reliance on Google is a problem. They made some small deals with other companies, like including Bing as an _option_ users can set as their default search, but the other deals don't come close to covering their expenses. So to stop being completely reliant on Google, they need some other revenue stream. Somebody sketched a proposal for how they could run ads in a fairly unobtrusive way, in a way that doesn't seem sneaky or underhanded, and that revenue could cover their expenses.
I don't want ads in my browser. I think clumsily adding ads to Firefox could backfire in a huge way. I also think it would be stupid for the Firefox devs to NOT be looking at clever ways to include fairly acceptable ads, new ideas on how they could generate ad revenue if needed without pissing everyone off.
' Except short of running your own ad network, you're going to end up taking Google's money anyways because Google owns pretty much all the legitimate ad networks online. Google may even own some of the sketchier ones that you see on torrent sites and the like.
So it's either take Google's money out of the generousity of Google, or take Google's money by showing ads from a Google-owned ad network. And I'm fairly certain Mozilla is NOT going to pick those sketchier ad networks that let you make $80/day working from home.
Though really, if Mozilla would stop fucking with the interface of Firefox and making it a Chrome clone, perhaps people would stop leaving Firefox. We have muscle memory and we expect things to work certain ways. Changing it just annoys the user base.
Hell, I don't think Chrome has messed with their UI too much - at least, it hasn't disturbed the way I've been using it.
Reminds me of Silo, a neat little short film about a caretaker of an ICBM (who does a very poor job) and is forced to fix up the place... and well, any more and I'd be spoiling. You're best watching it...
What we need is for Apple, Google, Microsoft and others to just sit down and agree to a single messaging service. We have a single standard for email, for the Web, for images (JPEG, PNG, GIF), why is messaging still messed-up after all those years?
Well, why was there ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, YIM, etc? Why did they all make incompatible messaging protocols?
Because no one bothered to try to standardize something. Sure someone made XMPP, but damn if Google didn't drop support for it as well and make their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but what if you know the guy, but don't know his cellphone? Being able to tie a name to a face, an NFC identifier, AND a cellphone turns it into the ultimate cookie.
He changes phones? Well, he's unlikely to change those NFC chips in his hand, so you simply detect nearby cellphones when you scan his NFC tag. Do it a few times and you can narrow down which cellphone it is.
Header - surprisingly, AC current on a regular wire heater. The coils of heating element do act like an inductor and cause it to vibrate some. Depending on the mount, that vibration can translate into actual vibration of the chassis causing the buzzes.
LCD monitor - the switch mode power supply is generally the cause of it. Practically everything with a SMPS is vulnerable to buzzes/whines because of the way they operate.
LED bulb - a lot of them use a SMPS, so ditto.
That's retail pricing - you can probably go to Costco and get a box of bars for 1/3rd the price or so. So even if the price went up, the retail price might go up, but maybe not as much as it seems.
Easy, because computers are only 0 or 1, black or white, ok or not ok. So geek thinking generally follows that of a computer - always OK, always not OK. Fine shades of grey are an analog thing that has no place in a digital world.
Of course, this leads to interface errors since the real world is most definitely analog and in no way black or white. Even worse, fine shades of grey do certainly matter - you can't just ignore the LSB anymore because that can make all the difference.
Well, I think they use 777s now. Or other widebody jets.
The reason is there are just so many people per trip that they have to use widebody jets just to keep up. It's not that they need the long-range capacity of the aircraft - they just need the fact those can carry lots of people at one time.
Boeing actually makes a special manual for Japanese customers on how to best load their planes for efficient operations - since those aircraft never reach their regular cruising altitude where they're designed to operate best (the trip is too short). Partial fuel and how to calculate the best altitude for most efficient flight.
Boeing also uses the aircraft for research - since those aircraft accumulate cycles far quicker, they can study and check for long term issues relatively quickly and fix the fleet before it becomes a problem.
Question is - does it not seem like a really good way to track someone?
Sure it's not like they can ping you from space to get your coordinates, but it's like license plate readers - they can identify you and where you were when you were scanned.
That's the point. No one provider will "have it all" and the content producers have intentionally done it this way. The movie industry saw what iTunes did to the music industry when it basically became the way to get music and the immense power Apple had to force the industry to accept its terms.
So the movie industry is intentionally splitting their catalog across multiple services - Netflix gets some, Amazon gets others, etc., so no one of them will end up being a monopsony.
As for finding which one of the servers? Multi-library search should be available on popular devices. I mean, the Xbox can do it (it you search for a movie or TV show, it'll show you which providers have it), and I think Amazon's FireTV can too as well.
That's the big problem. Mechanical devices wear down, and even without maintenance, going for years is difficult. Think of things like your hard drive bearings, or fans that work for years without maintenance, but having them work for a decade is a more iffy proposition reliably.
Plus, there's also vibration - you still have pistons jiggling back and forth, and that can easily mess up instruments and more importantly, make photos and visuals blurry. Of course the equipment can handle it, but usually not when taking a photo or doing an experiment (since all the jiggling is long over when that happens)
You might want to reacquaint yourself with modern drones. They HAVE altitude control. Throttle? You have two buttons, "Up" and "Down". They do everything for you. And you don't need GPS to stay in one place - a downward pointing camera is more than adequate for position holding.
And that's a cheap sub-$300 toy drone. There are plenty of open-source Arducopter ones that for under $1000 give you GPS, camera platforms and hex- octa- rotor configurations. And that's all in, too, save the PC you use to control it (waypoint control, fpv, the open-source stuff is pretty impressive).
You know what? A modern drone costs less than getting into R/C helicopters after you add in the cost of the kit, engine, good radio, gyro, servos, etc. Bit more than R/C planes, maybe.
Heck, they're going to approach the cost of those cheap toy helicopters soon.
The problem is that R/C and your modern drone are completely different beasts.
In the R/C world, you're constantly controlling your vehicle - because if you don't, you'll either bust airspace or it'll crash. You have to FLY an RC vehicle.
Modern drones though, basically do "all the hard stuff" for you. You basically tell it to take off, and boom, it's in a stable hover 1m above the ground in front of you, and it'll do that with zero input from you until the batteries or fuel runs out. The autopilot on board keeps it in a stable position.
The user of a drone basically just commands the drone to go to places, while the onboard computer figures out how to do that and maintain stable flight. There isn't much more to ones that can go from GPS waypoint to waypoint.
The fact that the user doesn't really need to "fly" the vehicle leads to dumb users (they are REALLY that simple to fly) to do stupid things. FPV gets addicting, so they're concentrating on that rather than watching what their drone is doing, and oh, you just crashed into something you didn't see because your eyes were on the camera feed and not on the craft. (In the R/C world, you can never take your eyes off the aircraft or you can lose it).
Basically the ability of the drones to fly themselves results in the pilots going from having to learn how to fly (and learning the rules and regulations as a side effect) to basically ordering it off of Amazon, opening the box, clicking "fly", and boom they're in the landing path of aircraft.
Reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Sidewhow Bob jumps in a fighter plane, sees how the Air Force has dumbed it down to "Fly" and "Stop" buttons. The modern drone is just like that.
Except when the game changes.
In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone It wasn't particularly remarkable, I mean, it was just a phone, a web browser and an iPod.
Yet prior to 2007, Microsoft was a dominant player in the mobile market - Windows Mobile was everyone - on phones, PDAs, and even PDA-phones. So was Palm. And Nokia. HTC was making Windows Mobile devices (as an ODM).
Now, none of those old market makers are there anymore. HTC had to evolve into an Android ODM and makes their own phones now. Blackberry is barely surviving. Samsung, LG, and others grew up making featurephones to smartphones running Android.
Literally overnight the old "status quo" was replaced with a new status quo with NEW entrants - iOS and Android.
One could argue that Apple saw the writing on the wall for computers being the primary computing device and released the iPad. We still need computers, but instead of everyone buying multiple computers at home (remember netbooks? They were popular because now you could equip everyone with their own computer for cheap), we start consolidating computers - instead of everyone needing their own PC, everyone can start reducing their PC count while their "PC tasks" was replaced with tablets.
And Microsoft was investing a lot of money into Windows for tablets.
Trying to keep the status quo just means a competitor can come around an upset the apple cart when you're least prepared. I'm sure Microsoft would love to go to the 2006 days where it was on the top. But then Apple blindsided them and a new ecosystem arose. And Android then took that stake and twisted to until the "old guard" was dead.
Even Apple is aware that markets can shift from under it - in the early 2000's, Apple derived an unhealthy large amount of revenue from iPods. These days it's iPhones and the iPods are barely anything. anymore. And their Mac sales are dwindling, along with every other PC manufacturer.
Exactly.
It's all about politics. Even if AT&T never had any plans for gigabit internet, just saying they are "pausing" puts pressure on the government.
Because now the other party will just go and say "Look, it kills jobs and investment" even though it killed 0 jobs and $0 investment because they never intended to do it. It's just to say "look, we WERE going to, but this new legislation makes it hard for us to justify, so no".
Strictly a political play - try to call them out on it by saying "we'll refund you the cost of the equipment you already ordered when you made the announcement" and you'll find there were no POs issued, no supplier got any order from AT&T for gigabit-capable equipment, etc.
Well, we have two things going for us.
First, we can tolerate a lot more theobromine. Second, we're heavier and thus we can take in a lot more theobromine on an absolute basis.
Third, our livers process theobromine a lot faster - a dog or cat's problem with chocolate is that they can't tolerate a lot of it, they don't have a lot of mass, and they can't process it fast enough for the amount they nibble on.
Still, it's funny how the difference between "echocolate" and "echolocate" is swapping two letters. Though I don't want to experience fake eChocolates, I'd prefer the real stuff myself.
Kinda funny since I actually had a class with said CS prof (Owen L. Astrachan). He (this was over 15 years ago) was a visiting prof at our university teaching us... data structures and algorithms. So he's not the idiot prof who's looking for a witch hunt - if you really did cheat, he did know because there are characteristics to look for. And hell, he drilled in the academic policy and expectations at the start of the class so even claiming ignorance isn't an excuse).
In fact, plagiarism was still detectable even before the days of TurnItIn.
I'd say there's a good chance the cheaters fell into three camps. First are the insanely obvious ones where it's painfully obvious copying went on, then there are not-so-obvious but clear it was copied, and the borderline cases.
There are very subtle clues to look for - code styling, commenting and whitespacing generally are what they look for - if you normally comment one way and then copy code, the change in commenting style and comments can be quite revealing. Even white spacing - do you smush everything together (and often get dinged?) or do you space everything out, where you put the braces, etc.,
Of course, the best way is the one that causes the students most harm. Just make assignments worth barely 10% of the market, the midterm 20%, and the final exam 70%. Cheating doesn't help the last two marks and most students are used to such harsh grading anyways. If you cheat, you likely didn't learn the material, so it's also plainly obvious when your grade and your work don't line up.
Of course, kinda funny to be reading about your old prof a decade and a half later. I enjoyed that class.
Even if they use Microsoft Word, they could use the "comment" feature that puts up a comment in the margins with a arrow and highlight. And which can be omitted in the print (if you print with comments, you find the page gets shrunk to 75% to make space for the comment margin, which should be a big clue because the comment box will stick out as the only thing there).
Of course, if you use track changes, they too get comment boxes in the comment margin, which should be a big clue to turn off comments.
You're also not moving a lot of cash, because it costs you little enough that the risk is worth it. (And no, $1000/day isn't a lot of money.
Because once you start racking up the dollars, you start having to spend dollars to protect those dollars - which is the true cost of handling cash. (Plus, you probably only have 1 or 2 cashiers, and a system based around a regular dumb cash register, and are fairly loose with cash).
In other companies, cash control is king - to handle cash requires you to get special training and trust, while doing a credit transaction means any floor lackey can do the transaction because the backend computer can verify the money.
So yeah, as a small mom and pop, cash works because at most you're out a day's take if you get mugged making the deposit. But since the day's take is relatively small, you're not a huge target either, especially if you make multiple runs to the bank during the day (if you can) so the amount you carry is low and amount you can lose is low.
But take a much larger company like a big-box retailer, and cash handling does cost money - a real cashier gets paid more than minimum wage (you need to trust them with cash, plus train them on how to handle it and having your register and box out significantly can be a fireable offense). Plus, significant cash transactions mandate measures for cash protection. E.g., when a big game is released, the stores selling it may easily do $50K or more in cash in one day which means rolling out an armored vehicle to transfer that money to a bank, which cost hundreds of dollars in an of itself (if it costs $500, that's already 1% of the cash take!). So those businesses handling cash can cost more money than credit (because credit just transparently goes into their account with full reporting and correlation with the register).
I believe it's actually the decryption key to the warhead.
Nuclear warheads don't actually go boom in a generic fashion - you actually need very specific set of timings in order to get the core to go critical (otherwise you're likely to get a fizzle). The timings vary by warhead due to manufacturing differences, and what happens is the computer holding the timings holds it in an encrypted fashion.
In the past, the launch code was a simple comparison that if it succeeded would let the computer use the key to decrypt the timing. I believe modern warheads use the launch code as the decryption key itself, so if you enter it wrong, the warhead goes fizzle because the computer can't time it right.
BTW, the technical term is Permissive Action Link, or PAL. I think modern PALs are coded to the missile they're on so even stealing one doesn't mean you can activate any random warhead, unlike say the movies where terrorists will seal a warhead and it's the hero's job to keep them from stealing a PAL.
Call it IT doublespeak.
IT people constantly rag on people for not wanting to learn about computers. Yet those are the same people who aren't willing to learn about law (or even details about IP law - how many have confused copyrights, trademarks and patents?), economics (there's a reason why we have both MICROeconomics and MACROeconomics and things that apply to one do not necessarily cross over), etc.
I'm sure the lawyers and accountants and economists think computing should work according to "common sense" rules as well.
Hey, if a user has access to that information, that information can be leaked. It may not be convenient in that you have to take screenshots every time (e.g., if you demand telecommuters work in a secured remote desktop session thus protecting the network from the user).
And why they may have it? Well, your telecommuter can be anyone - perhaps it's the application developer who has access to the database? (Aren't IT guys one of the biggest complainers if telecommuting is restricted?) HR folks who need access to personnel records? Perhaps you ban programmers and IT guys telecommuting because they have access to servers with sensitive data and source code? Or add HR bans as well because HR has access to sensitive data? At which point you can pretty much exclude everyone from telecommuting.
Perhaps you're part of the sysadmin team and someone does a deployment - are you going to mandate everyone come into the office because something might go wrong, or let everyone telecommute in? Perhaps the DBA needs to do something to the production database because something went wrong - are you going to make them drive in or let them log in remotely and fix it? Oh, he has access to the production database!
See Great Depression.
That was one the chief reasons the Great Depression happened - economic activity slows down, and the government spending slows down. Which causes people to be out of work and they stop spending, which slows down activity even more. And then you spiral down until someone wakes up and decides to spend massive amounts of money.
An economy works when money is moving through it. If money stops moving, that's when economic failure happens. A slow down means money slows down its movement through the economy which results in problems.
It's why deflation is not a good thing (it slows down the economy because people save), slight inflation is desirable (under 2% or so), and massive inflation is horrible (because it results in people not being able to spend their money, slowing down the economy).
If you want to see why people are angry at the 1%, it's because those people generally hoard money - they don't want to spend, and the same goes with multinational corporations. They're just not big spenders, which means they're artificially slowing down the economy.
The economy works when money moves. Savings is a vehicle in which you store money for spending later and is a good thing (you're banking economic activity). But hoarding money which is acquiring money without spending it harms the economy.
And there's the REAL reason.
The customer getting their CC stolen is a minor inconvenience of having to reset their auto-payment systems. But a retailer hit with a chargeback? Big problem.
If credit cards keep getting leaked out, eventually they're going to be used by someone and it could hit the retailer. Who doesn't find out until they charge it and the bank tells them that no, they were a victim, too bad, so sad.
Card Not Present transactions (mail order, online) are the most riskiest transaction of all - even swiping is more secure as you can verify the embossed number against the stored number, and the CVV. Then there's Chip+PIN and EMV which are the most secure methods we have now (they're not super super super secure, but on a relative scale, they are the most secure).
And online retailers want data protection laws because eventually they're going to be a victim.
I know when my bank called me, some guy racked up $1000 worth of stuff, including $500 at some drum store. That's $500 in inventory that that retailer lost - hope they have the transaction details so they could trace where the product fraudulently went.
And yes, in the 14 years I've had a credit card, I've had 2 legit chargebacks - 1 was for a product they never shipped, and another was a product that never arrived. In the past 3 years, I've changed my credit card about 5 times already. Total loss to me? Maybe about $200 in cash that I had to run to the bank to pay off a bill because the replacement card didn't arrive in time to be billed to the card. (and likewise, a $200 less charged to my credit card. Since I pay it off every month, it washes out).
Retailers will probably demand some sort of EMV system for online purchases where most likely either you use an app on your phone to enter transaction details (merchant ID, transaction ID, amount transacted, etc) and it spits back a hash for that transaction that verifies the card. Fancier cards will have the electronics to do it on the card to do that so all you have to do is whip out your card. (The card can be powered by a battery - since the cards are only good for 3 years, the battery only has to last at least that long, and it's something we're able to do since regular digital watches with fancy interfaces can often last 7-10 years on an itty-bitty battery).
Want to know why game studios aren't going the last mile?
Because of money.
The era of the PS2, PS3, Xbox and Xbox360 signaled a huge change in the gaming market - suddenly consoles were popular, and profitable No longer did game developers had to rely on the fickle PC market and its absurdly high piracy rate (90%+) to make money - they could rely on consoles to make money (and most consoles have a reasonably low piracy rate - 10% or under on the Xbox 360, fair bit higher on PS3, but not more than 20%).
They don't have to deal with technical support, they don't have to deal with doing DRM (or the issues that arise from it), and other things. Valve helped out by releasing one of the first "app stores" which had built in DRM, but by then the transition had happened. The PC was no longer the primary platform - it was now a secondary one, and only worthy of getting a port from the console version. At least through Steam and traditional sales most PC ports made back their money, and piracy was still an issue, but when console games "got it first", it really didn't matter too much as you're just going for scraps.
So the emphasis is on - what do game makers get for optimizing on Linux? Remember, it's easy to get 90% there quickly, but the last 10% will take a lot more time and effort.
So if you can release a half-assed port that mostly works on Linux, it may sell. Optimize it and may sell better, but given the low-hanging fruit is gone, the profitability becomes suspect because the increase in sales may not be bigger than the increase in effort.
Hey, I said half-assed. You know what? Most PC ports the past few years of AAA games? They were half-assed, and often didn't even remove console assets! And this was way before SteamOS.
'
Except short of running your own ad network, you're going to end up taking Google's money anyways because Google owns pretty much all the legitimate ad networks online. Google may even own some of the sketchier ones that you see on torrent sites and the like.
So it's either take Google's money out of the generousity of Google, or take Google's money by showing ads from a Google-owned ad network. And I'm fairly certain Mozilla is NOT going to pick those sketchier ad networks that let you make $80/day working from home.
Though really, if Mozilla would stop fucking with the interface of Firefox and making it a Chrome clone, perhaps people would stop leaving Firefox. We have muscle memory and we expect things to work certain ways. Changing it just annoys the user base.
Hell, I don't think Chrome has messed with their UI too much - at least, it hasn't disturbed the way I've been using it.
Reminds me of Silo, a neat little short film about a caretaker of an ICBM (who does a very poor job) and is forced to fix up the place... and well, any more and I'd be spoiling. You're best watching it...
Well, why was there ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, YIM, etc? Why did they all make incompatible messaging protocols?
Because no one bothered to try to standardize something. Sure someone made XMPP, but damn if Google didn't drop support for it as well and make their own.