You jest, but if the fixtures are cheap enough, it's a great way to do wireless networking *without* the myriad of security issues that plague traditional RF-based WiFi - namely, the signal escaping your house. Knowing the Li-Fi signal stops at the wall (and can probably be tuned so very little spills out the windows) means to actually break into the network requires physical presence.
But why should you do evil and work for the criminals in the financial sector? Have you no sense of ethics ?
Just because an inner city kid is poor and needs a free education doesn't mean he should do the dirty work.
Depends on the goal. Why do people keep wanting to be videogame developers (enough so that the likes of EA can basically pay less than minimum wage and 100 hour weeks)?
You tell a kid who grew up in poverty that they can get an education that gets them into places like JPMorgan and such? Well damn, the dollar signs light up - from nothing to an in with the financial sector - it's the American Dream! Sure it requires holding your nose a bit (something they probably won't find out until they actually start), and the pay isn't that great (IT is a cost center - unless you're a trader making the money, you're draining the company), but damn, working in finance!
Of course, the real goal is to train more code monkeys to create excess supply...
the lack of quality and skill exhibited by our police force
The problem with policing is well, the pool of candidates is pretty small. Everytime you hear a call for "more police on the streets", the question you should be asking is "where are they going to find those people?". Most departments are understaffed, and the necessity to hire means the standards of hiring get *really* low.
Because face it - it's not a good job at all - you face all sorts of lowlifes all the time. This already screens out the good candidates who realize they could get better (read: safer and maybe higher paying) jobs in a different, but related field. So you're pretty much left with the bottom of the barrel, power hungry abusive people who really ought to not get the job.
Heck, some of the biggest lowlifes are those on the traffic beat - you want to see abuse? Watch how otherwise average middle-age middle-to-upper class people react to getting a ticket.
Reading about this whole Terry Childs thing on Slashdot has always amazed me. For what seemed like years, whenever this topic came up every post was flooded with "zOMG Terry Childs was justified because the mayor didn't know how to secure his servers!!!!" rhetoric. It seemed to make no sense except for geeks rooting for a fellow geek, regardless of what the real issues at stake were. Same goes for the teeming Slashbot hordes who insisted for months and months on Hans Reiser's innocence and how he was FRAMED, I TELL YOU. Or the people who previously would have condemned Kim Dotcom as a fraudster and spammer but who lionized him because the copyright police came after him. And frankly the same goes for the "zOMG Julian Assange was FRAMED by the CIA and the NSA because the MPAA owns Sweden or whatever" crowd. Occam's razor folks - if the US government wants to get their hands on somebody, they do what they tried to do to Edward Snowden, i.e. attempt to extradite them, not somehow make up fake rape charges in a separate country that doesn't even really like the US anyway.
I suspect it's because we "tech geeks" as a group tend to self-identify and tend to think of us as "smarter than the rest of them". Except of course, we're not. Sure we know our ways around everything technological, but I'm sure there's plenty that don't know law (try getting the three sides of IP law straight - a lot of/. flamewars erupt from confusing patents with copyright and trademarks). Or medicine. Or any other thing, really.
It's not unique to geeks either - I'm sure your local doctor's group or lawyer's group also think they as a whole are so much smarter than the rest of the world. Except of course, they're not - they know their field really well, but enter another field (try helping a doctor or lawyer with computer problems?) and boy are they clueless.
It's the same with geeks.
And unfortunately, sometimes this plays out badly - we think we know "the system" better than everyone, but then get slapped and made a fool of (see Hans Reiser, Terry Childs - ZOMG they know how to work the system!). Of course, all that happens is the prosecution takes advantage of this and easily paints a negative image on the person before the trial even begins. Of course, they were probably guilty, but damn, we didn't have to make it easier for them. (See Aaron Schwartz on how NOT to behave - you can be "on the right side" but if you act in ways the general public knowingly disproves of, you get vilified in the court of public opinion and make a prosecutor's job REALLY easy.).
Some advice - learn etiquette and how "the proles" want you to behave (if that means having to wear a suit and dressing up, so be it), Even though everyone shouldn't "judge a book by its cover" guess what? Juries and prosecutors do. Don't make their life simpler by making it easy to paint you as an outcast who believes they're above social norms. And especially don't act smarter than the group, because you'll just come along and sound like a smartass instead.
I fairly understand that for there to be value in bitcoin there must be scarcity and that this scarcity is created via the mining mechanisms. But what I wonder is if there be any other way to create value for a virtual currency?
I ask because to me the most interesting thing about virtual currencies and specifically bitcoin is NOT the mining aspect, but rather the distributed database. The fact the hosting or provision of the database is fundamentally bound to the value-creation process seems to be the problem here. The problem seems not to necessarily be virtual currency or distributed databases themselves. The problem seems to be that value creation is based on artificial scarcity which can be manipulated through collusion.
There has to be another way to establish value for a virtual currency.
Oh, there's lots of ways to "create value" out of nothing. BTC so far is a bit too small to really attract the attention of the big money guys (except say, the Winklevoss twins who claim to own about 2M BTC themselves).
Once the finance guys figure it out, you can expect BTC will be used to create monetary value by the big guys who can play the exchanges off each other and other things.
Another way, though, is to use an $80 Unity plugin attached to your game to mine bitcoins using mobile CPUs. Yes, developers can now embed a BTC miner with their mobile app to earn Bitcoins using your phone's CPU. Naturally, the company behind it fails to tell you the impact to your battery life...
are they going to make "unreliable transistors" that, upon failure, simply decode a pixel incorrectly, rather than, oh, I don't know, branching the program to an unspecified memory address in the middle of nowhere and borking everything.
They'd have to completely re-architect whatever chip is doing the calculations. You'd need three classes of "data" - instructions, important data (branch addresses, etc), and unimportant data. Only one of these could be run on unreliable transistors.
I can't imagine a way of doing that where the overhead takes less time than actually using decent transistors in the first place.
Oh, wait. It's a software lab that's doing this. Never mind, they're not thinking about the hardware at all.
More properly, the language takes care of it.
You declare variables to be "approximate" - where errors are tolerated and you can use lower power hardware to do it (it turns out reliability means having to use higher voltages which raise power consumption, and lower clock speeds which keeps cores powered up longer rather than race them to sleep as fast as possible).
So a counter would be "exact" and have to use the high-powered reliable hardware mode, while the pixel data will be inexact and use low power mode. Even a counter that iterates over the pixel array has to be exact.
And you can easily transition from exact data to inexact data, but transitions back are limited and explicity - you can't test inexact values - you have to promote the inexact data (because there will always be times when you need to deal with it).
Of course, it's a new programming language because existing ones model reliable systems.
If its 'information overload', perhaps they should be using color displays. It might be better to separate different information types or alert levels by color.
The problem of this is the nature of the display.
HUDs aren't green because it's convenient, but because they're easy on night vision (it takes time to acclimate to the darkness of a cockpit and blinding bright lights are a great way to ruin it). Additionally, a HUD works because it's only reflective to the color of the display (because the data is projected on the glass and reflected to your eyes). Of course, it also has to pass through the rest of the world (it's transparent).
A material that supports color reflections also has a nasty habit of reflecting everything else - including light reflecting off your face, cockpit, etc.
It's less for a helmet because you can seal off most light sources, but there's still going to be some face reflection showing up caused by the indicators.
Funniest thing about backdoors is that almost every mobile device in the world has an ARM chip, designed in Cambridge, UK. That's Cambridge as in MI5 open recruiting ground and MI6 clandestine recruiting ground.
Devices manufactured in China, using a British-designed chip, routed through British Telecom using Huawei equipment... as you said, what could possibly go wrong?
If I were the conspiratorial sort, I might have reason to suspect Cambridge-recruited personnel of working for the other side.
Nope.
If you're Apple, Qualcomm or Marvell, your ARM chips don't come from Cambridge. They come from your own design house. That's because those companies own a microarchitecture license, which lets them implement the ARM ISA in any way they specify - they just get a bunch of docs saying what each instruction does, the encodings, and test suites, and are free to implement it as XScale (Marvell), Krait (Qualcomm) or Cyclone/etc (Apple).
Now if you're Samsung, Allwinner, Broadcom, TI, etc., you're screwed because your silicon design comes from Cambridge and you're not allowed to inspect it.
If more med schools open or expand to train more doctors, prices should fall. That accomplished, more doctors might actually create competition for patients (when is the last time you heard of a doctor not new to the area doing anything to attract new patients). For that matter, when is the last time you went to the doctor, found an empty waiting room and were told to go right back? Or called to set an appointment and were told any day is fine, morning or afternoon.
This is one (of many) reasons healthcare is unaffordable in the U.S.
A doctor's pay is high because they're well, doctors. By the time they graduate and earn their first real dollar, they're already in the their 30s. Most university graduates can earn money with just a bachelor's, but a MD goes on far longer.
As such, they are in school practically a decade longer, make minimal amounts of money while in school, and have a decade less productive earning time.
And GP's not much easier - they may early $120-200K a year, but most of that goes into the office, the records, the nurse and other ancillary staff. Unless you're a top billing doctor, you need to take on partners so the office expenses can be paid for.
Want to know why waiting rooms are full? That's because you cannot be idle - idling means costs going out but no money coming in.
This is one situation where perhaps a more communist system can prevail - med school, housing, etc., are all paid for by the state, but then again, you're also not earning $100K - you're earning $30K or whatever because the state gives you an office, staff, etc. No big student loans, just a few years of indentured servitude when you're done. And cheap doctors for all.
One thing I find OpenBSD is head and shoulders above other *nix OSs at: the documentation. Virtually every service, binary, config, library,/etc/*, what-have-you has a thorough manpage included. The emphasis on security and "correctness" shows everywhere: pf is fantastic (iptables is a cancer by comparison), the built-in IPSec is great, it's OpenSSH's "home OS", etc.
Technically, documentation is required to ensure correctness - because if it's not documented, how do you know it's working correctly?
The fact that OpenBSD has excellent documentation is not because the project cares about documentation, it's that correctness demands it, and you cannot verify correctness if you don't know what the correct thing to do is.
It's a case of where the documentation describes the intentions of the program, while the source code is the implementation of those intentions. Those who argue that "source code is the ultimate document" ignore that fact because source code is just one possible implementation. Who knows if a bug in source code is really a bug (doesn't meet intentions), or is designed to be there (bug is in the intention itself)? Without documentation, you cannot be sure.
It sounds a lot like a specification, right? Well, a specification is just one type of documentation. But there are often more detailed documents you need - configuration files are also a specification and have to be documented to verify behavior. It's not enough to say "option foo mirrors command line option -F" without saying how to enable or disable it (do I do "foo=on", "foo=y"? Or just "foo" and comment it out to disable?).
And since OpenBSD prides itself on its code audits, part of it is to ensure the code mirrors the docs.
Most of upper management is on their crackberry when anything remotely technical pops up in a meeting.
I think the primary problem is "meeting" is undefined.
For a 2-person meeting (i.e., you and someone else), I think it's completely rude to text with a third person (that includes crackberries) - a one-on-one is a rare enough event that the person you're with should get your full attention. The rules get relaxed in more informal situations, but a formal business meeting with your boss, or your client, or whatever, no.
For small group meetings, I suppose it's OK as long as it's not distracting. Especially if you're not really needed or not participating much. If you're a critical speaker, then don't waste everyone else's time by answering texts while everyone's waiting on you.
For larger meetings, fine go along with it - half the people there already are. Just be cognizant of people around you and move to the back or something so you disturb less people.
Yes, it's different rules for different situations. In small settings, no, it's completely a bad idea. In larger settings, it doesn't matter so much. If you want to play Angry Birds, go for it, as long as those around you aren't disturbed.
So why are the shareholders against Larry's compensation package? The use of stock options means that Larry only gets paid if the company is doing well; or rather more specifically if the company's shares are doing well, which is all the shareholders are going to care about in the first place
Because it encourages short-term thinking. As in, next-quarter-results. Stockholders care about next quarter, but they also care about next fiscal year, next 10 fiscal years, etc. Taking a hit this quarter to enable even more growth for the next 20 quarters is something you'd do if this quarter wasn't important.
It's why Tim Cook only gets stock doled out over a 10+ year period - the point is to encourage long term growth over short term numbers
As long as you keep the total value of what you are importing under $1000, you don't get hit with GST. If you were to, say, buy a PC overseas that costs over $1000, prepare to get slugged when it comes in through the post. If you have someone send something over, make sure that they price it as $999 on the customs form. I sent myself a computer from overseas and in my honesty/stupidity, priced it over the magic $1000 value and ended up paying about $200 in duties.
You will also probably want to make sure the insured value is LOWER than the customs value in this case. Customs takes a VERY dim view if you insure an item for $3000 and you only declare it for $999 - basically what is so special that it's worth so much more. It can trigger an inspection (and if they catch the invoice inside...), or they can assess for full insured rather than declared value.
This will mean you probably should break up your order into several orders (and tell the store to NOT combine them - some will do so to save you money in shipping) so the insured value never exceeds AUD$999 as well. It would really suck to lose a $2000 item because it was declared at $999, and the insurance company only pays what it was declared for, i.e., $999, thus you lose $1001.
And if Customs catches you doing this, they can reassess the goods, seize it (no, you won't get your insurance payout), charge you, or refuse its entry. If they find out a particular store keeps doing this, they may turn the default to inspecting those packages and seizing it, which is why a lot of stores refuse to falsify customs forms - it leaves them completely liable.
Insurance is also a funny thing - because the payout is to the sender, and only up to provable value - usually the cost to the seller - what THEY paid for it wholesale, not what you paid for it! A very nasty scam it is.
I'm probably a borderline Google apologist, but FFS, Google, stop posting "real" information on Blogspot - where dozes of workplace content filtering software block access to out of the box.
Why? They own it, it's their official blog platform, after all.
Just because it's mostly misused by a bunch of emo teens wanking off doesn't make it any less legit of a site. Especially one that Google owns directly.
You might as well complain as to why Google is still serving pop ups, pop unders and all that other nasty stuff ads.
I find it interesting they are sustaining the physical disk format as it seems to lend its self to being ripped, while a purely digital format could possibly have "better" drm?
Well, Blu-ray has several protections for that embedded in the disc itself, including identifying marks (what type - factory, BD-R, BD-RE, etc, including ID codes for factory pressed discs identifying the factory and timestamps).
And the last time digital only was suggested, everyone was up in arms, despite several advantages to the physical-assisted digital only stream (e.g., It offered the ability to actually sell used digital copies, even those purchased completely online without a physical disc. As a unintended benefit, nothing was ever out of print - you could simply torrent a copy and pay the digital license fee to get the game). The disc in that case was purely used only to aid you if you can't download 25/50GB of data.
But of course, everyone bitched and moaned, and we're back to the old style of game distribution - discs you can resell used, online "digital" purchases you can't.
Heck, Sony even mocked it.
As for ripping and all that - expect it after it's hacked. Both next-gens are really like the original Xbox - and likely there are going to be plenty of holes to exploit.
Then again, Microsoft discovered making it easy to homebrew on the Xbox360 made it less vulnerable to hacking (it was modded to play pirated games, but those had severe limitations), while Sony discovered that while homebrewers were happy on the PS3, the moment they took it away, they started breaking its rather weak security.
Even with PGP, the SMPT headers are unencrypted. This allows an attacker to build a graph of who talks to who. The central weakness of traditional email is that messages are passed around through multiple untrusted servers before they reach their destination.
It's a central problem if you want two arbitrary people to talk to each other. Or if you just want to do a "blind broadcast".
Which makes those hacks to AIS and ADS-B really uninteresting because encrypting and authenticating the transfers is impossible - if everyone needs the key to decrypt the message, well that's pointless to the extreme since none of the parties has a way to fetch additional keys (so you can't verify the transmission anyhow - by the time you can do it, it's useless information). Sure, you could mandate PKI, but then everyone needs the same encrypting key so everyone else can decrypt it, and a hacker can easily get at the key. If you sign it, again, how do you verify it without the key? In this case, you might as well send it in the clear because encrypting it just means you'll have to get at a well known key and adds an unnecessary step.
And yes, as long as two random parties have to communicate, it's always vulnerable to metadata analysis.
This system depends on creating an encrypted link (presumably with tor-like indirection) and only passing messages direct from sender to receiver. The downside is that both parties have to be online to effect the transfer. The instant messaging aspect is used to notify a sender's server when a receiver is available to accept new (possibly cached) messages.
This cannot work because there are times when you'll be online and the recipient not, so you'll end up playing very fancy games of phone tag.
And even if encrypted, most protocols have sufficient "leakiness" that one can guess at what's going on.
And direct connections are subject to metadata analysis as well.
You're far better off encrypting the message and doing something like Tor to move it between machines - not only does this spread out the connections, but each node can only see the next node in line, and cannot be sure if the next node is the destination or relay.
Of course, the problem with that is it requires knowing the entire routing table in advance, and for reliability you probably want to send the same message through different paths and you need a way to identify when duplicates arrive.
Despite some of the roles he has played, he's not an idiot. He's still probably more of a publicity hire than anything else, but I wouldn't rush to judge him before you see any actual work of his.
Of course it's a publicity hire. Think of it - Lenovo just hired Steve Jobs! (Well, the actor who played him in the awful biopic...)
I guess Lenovo might revive the whole "I'm a PC. I'm a Mac" ads...
I think the public figures "if I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care about spying". The idea that they are only targeting terrorists and criminals gives people the illusion that our privacy is not truly at risk. It's when they misinterpret information and target the innocent people is when they get upset. It's a false sense of security not fully understanding the larger scope of spying and archiving information.
Or the public figured it out that by doing ANYTHING online already makes you part of a million different tracking things. Besides the NSA spying on you, you have Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other people tracking you (mostly Google through its advertiser subsiaries).
It's not "I'm not doing anything wrong", it's "it's public ".
It's why "privacy controls" and "privacy settings" are a joke (they DO NOT EXIST - you cannot make private anything you post online - the only way is to NOT POST IT ONLINE. After all, it's private, right?). The whole notion of "privacy online" is marketing - it gets people to drop their guard down. Or for Facebook, to get people to post crap online they wouldn't otherwise post (the entire point).
What's public is public.
Of course, the creepy factor is when people come in and combine all that information together...
If you can physically access and modify a machine, you can change the way it behaves. Is this really news? Can they do it wirelessly? Over the internet?
Or in this case, when you're in front of the kiosk. Wirelessly is nice, over the internet is nice, but can I, when I'm about to insert my money, update the firmware from that side of the machine? If not, and I have to break into the kiosk to get at it, well, it's not a very interesting hack anymore.
Google and China are on "Fuck You" terms so I don't see why Google would bother making China happy.
Technically, Google is banned in China - so Google Maps doesn't even have to care. It's also why Android phones sold in China have to come with third party app stores because Play store isn't available, and why Chinese phones usually end up with epidemics of Android malware. (The Chinese app stores are really bad about cleaning their crap up and often accept cracked and pirated apps).
It's just another thing anyone who does a map has to deal with in the end.
Why? Because the majority of GPS navigation software calculates speed based on delta-lattitude and delta-longitude only (well, with lattitude correction), completely ignoring delta-altitude. Apparently 3D velocity vectors are too hard for the average software engineer to calculate.
Except GPS altitude resolution is far worse than lat/long. Without SA, 2D positioning is roughly anywhere from 3-10 meters. Altitude positioning is at a minimum, +/- 100 meters or more.
Using 3D vectors would result in wildly inaccurate GPS speed readings because your GPS altitude while standing still can vary quite significantly.
Additionally, unless you're on a particularly steep slope (like say, Lombard street), the amount of vertical altitude gained wouldn't really throw the results out too badly. A normal slope is usually under 5% or so (100m long, 5m up,). Doing Pythagoras reveals the hypotenuse is 100.12m, or about 12cm longer, or a 0.12% error, well below the positioning error of GPS.
On airliners they're willing to spend just a little more on extremely reliable and redundant hardware than they are on cars. Makes a difference. It also helps if you code to extremely stringent standards like DO-178B Level A, which costs a fortune. Light aircraft don't use fly-by-wire, why do cars need it?
AFAIK the main argument for fly-by-wire on airliners is that it allows for a reduced stability aerodynamic design, which reduces drag and hence fuel consumption. Considering the amount of fuel an airliner consumes, it's worth spending a king's ransom on fly-by-wire. The payback is definitely there. I know of no similar argument for most of the current generation of electronics in cars, and they're certainly not willing to pay the price.
Safety critical systems in automotive applications are fairly rigourous as well. The airbag controller, for example, has a power reserve (a big honkin' cap) so it can trigger the airbags even if the power systems are mangled, dual accellerometers (in case one fails), logging of data, etc.
Brakes are almost always hydraulic with a mechanical backup - malfunctioning ABS cannot defeat the system, etc.
The ECU may not be redundant, but it doesn't matter because if the ECU fails, the engine dies and you try to pull over safely. (in aircraft, you don't want engine failure due to computer failure, so they require dual computers, or computer/magneto).
And fly-by-wire on military jets lets you have better dynamic stability because an unstable aircraft maneuvers faster. Commercial jets are traditional stable designs to begin with. The reason they went fly-by-wire was wire is a LOT lighter than miles of cables, rods, pulleys, hydraulic fluid, etc and has way less error modes (a cable system can fail simply because someone forgot to balance the lengths properly), and makes mechanical assistance much easier to do.
Airbus uses it to avoid having pilot inputs exceed the flight envelope as well.
64-bit is available in the nightly builds. It's not in the main tree because more people would have problems with it (most plugins, like flash, are 32-bit only)
It's why the default browser even on 64-bit OSes is 32-bit - plugin compatibility. Unless you're Google which ships Flash with every version of Chrome and can thus ship a 64-bit version with the 64-bit version.
Doing so in Firefox would just lead to a bunch of support tickets on why Flash refuses to work.
Slashdot Mirror
You jest, but if the fixtures are cheap enough, it's a great way to do wireless networking *without* the myriad of security issues that plague traditional RF-based WiFi - namely, the signal escaping your house. Knowing the Li-Fi signal stops at the wall (and can probably be tuned so very little spills out the windows) means to actually break into the network requires physical presence.
Depends on the goal. Why do people keep wanting to be videogame developers (enough so that the likes of EA can basically pay less than minimum wage and 100 hour weeks)?
You tell a kid who grew up in poverty that they can get an education that gets them into places like JPMorgan and such? Well damn, the dollar signs light up - from nothing to an in with the financial sector - it's the American Dream! Sure it requires holding your nose a bit (something they probably won't find out until they actually start), and the pay isn't that great (IT is a cost center - unless you're a trader making the money, you're draining the company), but damn, working in finance!
Of course, the real goal is to train more code monkeys to create excess supply...
Depends how you define win. It will win 100% if it means it never loses.
Of course, if you add ties to the mix, the win percentage will be much lower.
If it plays itself, it will probably continually tie itself. If you don't count ties, that's basically still "winning".
The problem with policing is well, the pool of candidates is pretty small. Everytime you hear a call for "more police on the streets", the question you should be asking is "where are they going to find those people?". Most departments are understaffed, and the necessity to hire means the standards of hiring get *really* low.
Because face it - it's not a good job at all - you face all sorts of lowlifes all the time. This already screens out the good candidates who realize they could get better (read: safer and maybe higher paying) jobs in a different, but related field. So you're pretty much left with the bottom of the barrel, power hungry abusive people who really ought to not get the job.
Heck, some of the biggest lowlifes are those on the traffic beat - you want to see abuse? Watch how otherwise average middle-age middle-to-upper class people react to getting a ticket.
I suspect it's because we "tech geeks" as a group tend to self-identify and tend to think of us as "smarter than the rest of them". Except of course, we're not. Sure we know our ways around everything technological, but I'm sure there's plenty that don't know law (try getting the three sides of IP law straight - a lot of /. flamewars erupt from confusing patents with copyright and trademarks). Or medicine. Or any other thing, really.
It's not unique to geeks either - I'm sure your local doctor's group or lawyer's group also think they as a whole are so much smarter than the rest of the world. Except of course, they're not - they know their field really well, but enter another field (try helping a doctor or lawyer with computer problems?) and boy are they clueless.
It's the same with geeks.
And unfortunately, sometimes this plays out badly - we think we know "the system" better than everyone, but then get slapped and made a fool of (see Hans Reiser, Terry Childs - ZOMG they know how to work the system!). Of course, all that happens is the prosecution takes advantage of this and easily paints a negative image on the person before the trial even begins. Of course, they were probably guilty, but damn, we didn't have to make it easier for them. (See Aaron Schwartz on how NOT to behave - you can be "on the right side" but if you act in ways the general public knowingly disproves of, you get vilified in the court of public opinion and make a prosecutor's job REALLY easy.).
Some advice - learn etiquette and how "the proles" want you to behave (if that means having to wear a suit and dressing up, so be it), Even though everyone shouldn't "judge a book by its cover" guess what? Juries and prosecutors do. Don't make their life simpler by making it easy to paint you as an outcast who believes they're above social norms. And especially don't act smarter than the group, because you'll just come along and sound like a smartass instead.
Oh, there's lots of ways to "create value" out of nothing. BTC so far is a bit too small to really attract the attention of the big money guys (except say, the Winklevoss twins who claim to own about 2M BTC themselves).
Once the finance guys figure it out, you can expect BTC will be used to create monetary value by the big guys who can play the exchanges off each other and other things.
Another way, though, is to use an $80 Unity plugin attached to your game to mine bitcoins using mobile CPUs. Yes, developers can now embed a BTC miner with their mobile app to earn Bitcoins using your phone's CPU. Naturally, the company behind it fails to tell you the impact to your battery life...
More properly, the language takes care of it.
You declare variables to be "approximate" - where errors are tolerated and you can use lower power hardware to do it (it turns out reliability means having to use higher voltages which raise power consumption, and lower clock speeds which keeps cores powered up longer rather than race them to sleep as fast as possible).
So a counter would be "exact" and have to use the high-powered reliable hardware mode, while the pixel data will be inexact and use low power mode. Even a counter that iterates over the pixel array has to be exact.
And you can easily transition from exact data to inexact data, but transitions back are limited and explicity - you can't test inexact values - you have to promote the inexact data (because there will always be times when you need to deal with it).
Of course, it's a new programming language because existing ones model reliable systems.
The problem of this is the nature of the display.
HUDs aren't green because it's convenient, but because they're easy on night vision (it takes time to acclimate to the darkness of a cockpit and blinding bright lights are a great way to ruin it). Additionally, a HUD works because it's only reflective to the color of the display (because the data is projected on the glass and reflected to your eyes). Of course, it also has to pass through the rest of the world (it's transparent).
A material that supports color reflections also has a nasty habit of reflecting everything else - including light reflecting off your face, cockpit, etc.
It's less for a helmet because you can seal off most light sources, but there's still going to be some face reflection showing up caused by the indicators.
Well, I suppose they finally found a way to get rid of people playing Angry Birds while in the government.
Nope.
If you're Apple, Qualcomm or Marvell, your ARM chips don't come from Cambridge. They come from your own design house. That's because those companies own a microarchitecture license, which lets them implement the ARM ISA in any way they specify - they just get a bunch of docs saying what each instruction does, the encodings, and test suites, and are free to implement it as XScale (Marvell), Krait (Qualcomm) or Cyclone/etc (Apple).
Now if you're Samsung, Allwinner, Broadcom, TI, etc., you're screwed because your silicon design comes from Cambridge and you're not allowed to inspect it.
A doctor's pay is high because they're well, doctors. By the time they graduate and earn their first real dollar, they're already in the their 30s. Most university graduates can earn money with just a bachelor's, but a MD goes on far longer.
As such, they are in school practically a decade longer, make minimal amounts of money while in school, and have a decade less productive earning time.
And GP's not much easier - they may early $120-200K a year, but most of that goes into the office, the records, the nurse and other ancillary staff. Unless you're a top billing doctor, you need to take on partners so the office expenses can be paid for.
Want to know why waiting rooms are full? That's because you cannot be idle - idling means costs going out but no money coming in.
This is one situation where perhaps a more communist system can prevail - med school, housing, etc., are all paid for by the state, but then again, you're also not earning $100K - you're earning $30K or whatever because the state gives you an office, staff, etc. No big student loans, just a few years of indentured servitude when you're done. And cheap doctors for all.
Technically, documentation is required to ensure correctness - because if it's not documented, how do you know it's working correctly?
The fact that OpenBSD has excellent documentation is not because the project cares about documentation, it's that correctness demands it, and you cannot verify correctness if you don't know what the correct thing to do is.
It's a case of where the documentation describes the intentions of the program, while the source code is the implementation of those intentions. Those who argue that "source code is the ultimate document" ignore that fact because source code is just one possible implementation. Who knows if a bug in source code is really a bug (doesn't meet intentions), or is designed to be there (bug is in the intention itself)? Without documentation, you cannot be sure.
It sounds a lot like a specification, right? Well, a specification is just one type of documentation. But there are often more detailed documents you need - configuration files are also a specification and have to be documented to verify behavior. It's not enough to say "option foo mirrors command line option -F" without saying how to enable or disable it (do I do "foo=on", "foo=y"? Or just "foo" and comment it out to disable?).
And since OpenBSD prides itself on its code audits, part of it is to ensure the code mirrors the docs.
I think the primary problem is "meeting" is undefined.
For a 2-person meeting (i.e., you and someone else), I think it's completely rude to text with a third person (that includes crackberries) - a one-on-one is a rare enough event that the person you're with should get your full attention. The rules get relaxed in more informal situations, but a formal business meeting with your boss, or your client, or whatever, no.
For small group meetings, I suppose it's OK as long as it's not distracting. Especially if you're not really needed or not participating much. If you're a critical speaker, then don't waste everyone else's time by answering texts while everyone's waiting on you.
For larger meetings, fine go along with it - half the people there already are. Just be cognizant of people around you and move to the back or something so you disturb less people.
Yes, it's different rules for different situations. In small settings, no, it's completely a bad idea. In larger settings, it doesn't matter so much. If you want to play Angry Birds, go for it, as long as those around you aren't disturbed.
Because it encourages short-term thinking. As in, next-quarter-results. Stockholders care about next quarter, but they also care about next fiscal year, next 10 fiscal years, etc. Taking a hit this quarter to enable even more growth for the next 20 quarters is something you'd do if this quarter wasn't important.
It's why Tim Cook only gets stock doled out over a 10+ year period - the point is to encourage long term growth over short term numbers
You will also probably want to make sure the insured value is LOWER than the customs value in this case. Customs takes a VERY dim view if you insure an item for $3000 and you only declare it for $999 - basically what is so special that it's worth so much more. It can trigger an inspection (and if they catch the invoice inside...), or they can assess for full insured rather than declared value.
This will mean you probably should break up your order into several orders (and tell the store to NOT combine them - some will do so to save you money in shipping) so the insured value never exceeds AUD$999 as well. It would really suck to lose a $2000 item because it was declared at $999, and the insurance company only pays what it was declared for, i.e., $999, thus you lose $1001.
And if Customs catches you doing this, they can reassess the goods, seize it (no, you won't get your insurance payout), charge you, or refuse its entry. If they find out a particular store keeps doing this, they may turn the default to inspecting those packages and seizing it, which is why a lot of stores refuse to falsify customs forms - it leaves them completely liable.
Insurance is also a funny thing - because the payout is to the sender, and only up to provable value - usually the cost to the seller - what THEY paid for it wholesale, not what you paid for it! A very nasty scam it is.
Why? They own it, it's their official blog platform, after all.
Just because it's mostly misused by a bunch of emo teens wanking off doesn't make it any less legit of a site. Especially one that Google owns directly.
You might as well complain as to why Google is still serving pop ups, pop unders and all that other nasty stuff ads.
Well, Blu-ray has several protections for that embedded in the disc itself, including identifying marks (what type - factory, BD-R, BD-RE, etc, including ID codes for factory pressed discs identifying the factory and timestamps).
And the last time digital only was suggested, everyone was up in arms, despite several advantages to the physical-assisted digital only stream (e.g., It offered the ability to actually sell used digital copies, even those purchased completely online without a physical disc. As a unintended benefit, nothing was ever out of print - you could simply torrent a copy and pay the digital license fee to get the game). The disc in that case was purely used only to aid you if you can't download 25/50GB of data.
But of course, everyone bitched and moaned, and we're back to the old style of game distribution - discs you can resell used, online "digital" purchases you can't.
Heck, Sony even mocked it.
As for ripping and all that - expect it after it's hacked. Both next-gens are really like the original Xbox - and likely there are going to be plenty of holes to exploit.
Then again, Microsoft discovered making it easy to homebrew on the Xbox360 made it less vulnerable to hacking (it was modded to play pirated games, but those had severe limitations), while Sony discovered that while homebrewers were happy on the PS3, the moment they took it away, they started breaking its rather weak security.
It's a central problem if you want two arbitrary people to talk to each other. Or if you just want to do a "blind broadcast".
Which makes those hacks to AIS and ADS-B really uninteresting because encrypting and authenticating the transfers is impossible - if everyone needs the key to decrypt the message, well that's pointless to the extreme since none of the parties has a way to fetch additional keys (so you can't verify the transmission anyhow - by the time you can do it, it's useless information). Sure, you could mandate PKI, but then everyone needs the same encrypting key so everyone else can decrypt it, and a hacker can easily get at the key. If you sign it, again, how do you verify it without the key? In this case, you might as well send it in the clear because encrypting it just means you'll have to get at a well known key and adds an unnecessary step.
And yes, as long as two random parties have to communicate, it's always vulnerable to metadata analysis.
This cannot work because there are times when you'll be online and the recipient not, so you'll end up playing very fancy games of phone tag.
And even if encrypted, most protocols have sufficient "leakiness" that one can guess at what's going on.
And direct connections are subject to metadata analysis as well.
You're far better off encrypting the message and doing something like Tor to move it between machines - not only does this spread out the connections, but each node can only see the next node in line, and cannot be sure if the next node is the destination or relay.
Of course, the problem with that is it requires knowing the entire routing table in advance, and for reliability you probably want to send the same message through different paths and you need a way to identify when duplicates arrive.
Of course it's a publicity hire. Think of it - Lenovo just hired Steve Jobs! (Well, the actor who played him in the awful biopic...)
I guess Lenovo might revive the whole "I'm a PC. I'm a Mac" ads...
Or the public figured it out that by doing ANYTHING online already makes you part of a million different tracking things. Besides the NSA spying on you, you have Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other people tracking you (mostly Google through its advertiser subsiaries).
It's not "I'm not doing anything wrong", it's "it's public ".
It's why "privacy controls" and "privacy settings" are a joke (they DO NOT EXIST - you cannot make private anything you post online - the only way is to NOT POST IT ONLINE. After all, it's private, right?). The whole notion of "privacy online" is marketing - it gets people to drop their guard down. Or for Facebook, to get people to post crap online they wouldn't otherwise post (the entire point).
What's public is public.
Of course, the creepy factor is when people come in and combine all that information together...
Or in this case, when you're in front of the kiosk. Wirelessly is nice, over the internet is nice, but can I, when I'm about to insert my money, update the firmware from that side of the machine? If not, and I have to break into the kiosk to get at it, well, it's not a very interesting hack anymore.
Maps are never a fun job. Especially over disputed regions.
Hell, Microsoft had the problem when they allowed people to select the time zone using the map (as may Linux distributions do these days). There were huge fights over a few pixels.
Except GPS altitude resolution is far worse than lat/long. Without SA, 2D positioning is roughly anywhere from 3-10 meters. Altitude positioning is at a minimum, +/- 100 meters or more.
Using 3D vectors would result in wildly inaccurate GPS speed readings because your GPS altitude while standing still can vary quite significantly.
Additionally, unless you're on a particularly steep slope (like say, Lombard street), the amount of vertical altitude gained wouldn't really throw the results out too badly. A normal slope is usually under 5% or so (100m long, 5m up,). Doing Pythagoras reveals the hypotenuse is 100.12m, or about 12cm longer, or a 0.12% error, well below the positioning error of GPS.
Safety critical systems in automotive applications are fairly rigourous as well. The airbag controller, for example, has a power reserve (a big honkin' cap) so it can trigger the airbags even if the power systems are mangled, dual accellerometers (in case one fails), logging of data, etc.
Brakes are almost always hydraulic with a mechanical backup - malfunctioning ABS cannot defeat the system, etc.
The ECU may not be redundant, but it doesn't matter because if the ECU fails, the engine dies and you try to pull over safely. (in aircraft, you don't want engine failure due to computer failure, so they require dual computers, or computer/magneto).
And fly-by-wire on military jets lets you have better dynamic stability because an unstable aircraft maneuvers faster. Commercial jets are traditional stable designs to begin with. The reason they went fly-by-wire was wire is a LOT lighter than miles of cables, rods, pulleys, hydraulic fluid, etc and has way less error modes (a cable system can fail simply because someone forgot to balance the lengths properly), and makes mechanical assistance much easier to do.
Airbus uses it to avoid having pilot inputs exceed the flight envelope as well.
64-bit is available in the nightly builds. It's not in the main tree because more people would have problems with it (most plugins, like flash, are 32-bit only)
It's why the default browser even on 64-bit OSes is 32-bit - plugin compatibility. Unless you're Google which ships Flash with every version of Chrome and can thus ship a 64-bit version with the 64-bit version.
Doing so in Firefox would just lead to a bunch of support tickets on why Flash refuses to work.