Delay all email deliveries for one hour. What could possibly go wrong?
Not much more than happens at moment. Our email systems typically delay incoming email from previously-unknown senders for up to an hour anyway; assuming that the message will go through straight away (let alone be read immediately) is definitely a losing proposition.
Debt is intrinsically bad when it's gov't debt, because gov't is not supposed to be a business.
That sounds like you've bought into that position as an a priori assumption. While I'd agree that governments aren't businesses, to say that all government borrowing is therefore bad is foolishness. The purpose of good borrowing is so that investment can be made so as to increase income in the future that will repay the debt and ensure more money to do other things with. When applied to a government, the purpose has got to primarily be to invest in steps that will lead to increased total tax take in the future, generally through increasing overall economic activity in some way.
This is all independent of how wisely governments in your locale are spending, taxing or borrowing. If you're going to make an argument, it helps to start out from an intellectually-sound basis, which saying that "government borrowing is bad" is not. Reality just doesn't allow for such simple distinctions, and any sane policy must be at least grounded in reality.
Trains need 1 or 2 miles to brake to a complete stop depending on their speed and charge
You need the phrase "up to" in there or your sentence looks ridiculous. If a short passenger train is only doing 5mph, it can stop pretty quickly (obviously!) Mind you, as I understand it the key to stopping a train quickly is to have brakes on many wheels, and some types of brakes are better than others. (Basically, the harder you can brake in normal service, the more you can cut travel times on passenger rail routes, and operators like that a lot.)
20+ billion dollars is worth 2000+ 100 million dollar movies.
You fail by an order of magnitude. Two thousand times $100M is 200 billion dollars. (This leads to a critical failure in the rest of your argument, I'm sorry to say, despite my wanting to agree with it.)
Now, Napolitano says body scans, and Your Papers Please will be required to ride a train, boat, or bus, what's next, walk on the sidewalk?
Your fellow citizens will try to put a stop to walking long before the TSA gets around to it. (Seriously, I've never seen anywhere else as hostile to getting around on foot. I suppose a lot of the problem is due to putting all those damn parking lots in front of everything even vaguely like a public amenity. Walking in the 'burbs is just impractical in the US.)
They do pay in the form of sales tax to buy things to keep the business running.
They don't pay that in Ireland because they're using European VAT rules, which effectively allow companies to reclaim sales taxes. For most companies those rules make a lot of sense, since they're taxing the value added by the company, but sometimes they come out more than a little odd. It's quite possible that Google are using one of those oddnesses...
The symbol used to indicate parts of the network that you have no knowledge of.
That's the definition as it pertains to networking. It's now been extended to other types of hardware and certain types of software, and it all works on the concept of "I don't know where it is or what it looks like, but I do know that if I wave my hands like this then it all works just fine." As long as things actually do work, then that's a good thing: you're saved the effort of thinking about lots of frankly irrelevant crap (well, irrelevant to you; someone cares about it...)
Honestly, HTTPS / SSL is The Ultimate Theater of Security.
Umm, no. What it isn't is a system that is make it impossible for governments to do shenanigans; it's more aimed towards stopping other types of threats (e.g., random fraudsters with computers) and it most certainly raises the bar for that much more commonplace issue. Yes, it's possible to have a PKI that is mostly government-proof (using just your own root CA) but that's not much good for communicating with anyone outside your local chapter of the tinfoil hat brigade. The practicalities of the wider world (e.g., not having a particular CA able to hold their customers over a barrel) pretty much requires losing some safety, and at some point it becomes necessary to couple to real-world identities anyway (and governments naturally are concerned with that, especially for taxation and in the judicial branch).
The big difference this time is that Facebook will actually embed the thing into their existing platform, so the "I don't know anyone to Wave with" hurdle that plagued Wave will be curled right over.
But it will still suck. GW sucked because it was difficult to find out what's going on in a branching conversation; you'd end up lost in the page, trying to find what changed and work out whether you care.
Cut the stone with angle grinder, polish the cut, show us the picture. Meteorites have quite distinctive texture.
Also try getting some shavings from the inside of the lump and heating them strongly in a flame (a small blowtorch is ideal for this). The color of flame created will indicate what metals/metal ions are involved (OK, cruder than using a spectroscope, but easy to do with stuff that many people have lying around).
When you say "react with", you mean "dissolve, usually quite slowly, in".
Tends to be a fast reaction by comparison with almost any other rock. Sandstone lasts much longer despite being relatively easy to erode mechanically, and volcanic rocks (granite, basalt) are much more durable.
Objective-C compiles just fine with the GNU compiler on my Linux machine, friend.
But why would you bother? Without the libraries to link against, you're having to build lots of stuff from scratch or bridge to libs that people have written in other languages (e.g., C or C++) and in that case you might as well use those other languages directly. Doing everything yourself is just... well, just dumb.
(Of course, developing in Obj-C for the Apple family of systems where the libraries are already done, well that makes a bunch of sense. In fact, my previous platform really says nothing at all about how good a language or platform is, as it's really about how fitting in with an existing ecosystem of language(s), platform(s) and libraries is the shortest route to success.)
This actually isn't true. The electrical grid, as wires, is about 95% efficient. However, the power plants aren't very efficient, ranging from 30% to 60%. This is because of the Carnot limits that impact the conversion of heat to work in a heat engine.
Modern thermal power stations are large and run very hot and have many stages to recover energy from the heat precisely to deal with these things (running hotter increases the theoretical max, being larger and having more turbines in series increases the actual amount of energy extracted). In this, they are much more efficient than a small power plant such as a combustion engine. Once you've converted into electrical energy, you can't use Carnot-style calculations to do the calculation (you've not a thermal distribution so you're not satisfying the starting assumptions); energy losses are due to resistance and impedance in the cables.
The only thing that it's not a good idea to do with electrical power is heating; at that point, it's better to move the fuel itself to where it is needed.
A brute force attack shouldn't be that much of a concern with a login password, assuming that the system limits how often and how many times the brute force attack can retry.
That makes you very vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. Hmm...
Great advice...can you please force banks, etc., to allow such passwords?
Example 1: I recently signed up to be able to pay my car payment online, and the requirements were that both the username and password be at least 8 characters long but no longer than 12 characters, have at least one letter and one number, with no non-alphanumeric allowed. Although you could use mixed case, it was not a requirement.
Example 2: A set of integrated systems at a client use Active Directory as a single sign-on to authenticate. The AD password requires at least one of lower, upper, number, and symbols, and must be at least 8 characters long. But, because some of the systems that use AD to validate the authentication are broken, you can't use a password of more than 8 characters, and some of the input systems don't allow every special character to be typed, so you definitely can't use Unicode characters.
I've also encountered single-sign-on systems that didn't permit different cases, or rather would normalize the case of your password for you... sometimes, but not always. All lower was the only way to make it work reliably, and boy! did it take a lot of effort on our part to find out just how broken it was. (Yes, it was a very stupid system, and I hope its authors have bad cases of haemorrhoids for a few years as compensation.)
so... let me get this straight: it's okay to kill people but it's not okay to be creative and innovative?
It's great to be creative and innovative, provided you then give all rights to benefit from "your" creation to some big business executive so they can spend it on hookers and blow. You? You should be glad that they let you keep breathing, you ungrateful git! </cynical>
An application basically has to be written for the amazon cloud in order to function on top of it.
That depends crucially on the details of the application. The main factor usually seems to be what the details of the IO are – you don't want to be shipping large datasets in and out of Amazon frequently if you can help it – together with how much extra stuff you feel like wrapping round the front end and what your method for recovering the costs is.
So there are lots of extremely non-trivial costs associated with doing what you say.
Indeed, but a lot of people seem to discount the costs of the alternatives too easily too. It's hard to come in under the price of Amazon for the sorts of thing that they offer without dishonest accounting shenanigans or cutting some important corners (but there's many things that they don't offer which might well justify actually paying more).
Isn't "throw money at the problem" the whole point of "extensible" cloud computing?
Yes. "Scalable" in cloud computing is usually interpreted to mean "scales linearly with amount of money applied". As long as the amount of benefit you're getting from it is also scaling at least linearly, that's an acceptable trade-off.
Slashdot Mirror
Delay all email deliveries for one hour. What could possibly go wrong?
Not much more than happens at moment. Our email systems typically delay incoming email from previously-unknown senders for up to an hour anyway; assuming that the message will go through straight away (let alone be read immediately) is definitely a losing proposition.
Debt is intrinsically bad when it's gov't debt, because gov't is not supposed to be a business.
That sounds like you've bought into that position as an a priori assumption. While I'd agree that governments aren't businesses, to say that all government borrowing is therefore bad is foolishness. The purpose of good borrowing is so that investment can be made so as to increase income in the future that will repay the debt and ensure more money to do other things with. When applied to a government, the purpose has got to primarily be to invest in steps that will lead to increased total tax take in the future, generally through increasing overall economic activity in some way.
This is all independent of how wisely governments in your locale are spending, taxing or borrowing. If you're going to make an argument, it helps to start out from an intellectually-sound basis, which saying that "government borrowing is bad" is not. Reality just doesn't allow for such simple distinctions, and any sane policy must be at least grounded in reality.
"Pant-shitting"
Ah, Brown Alert. I think we'll be keeping that one...
Trains need 1 or 2 miles to brake to a complete stop depending on their speed and charge
You need the phrase "up to" in there or your sentence looks ridiculous. If a short passenger train is only doing 5mph, it can stop pretty quickly (obviously!) Mind you, as I understand it the key to stopping a train quickly is to have brakes on many wheels, and some types of brakes are better than others. (Basically, the harder you can brake in normal service, the more you can cut travel times on passenger rail routes, and operators like that a lot.)
20+ billion dollars is worth 2000+ 100 million dollar movies.
You fail by an order of magnitude. Two thousand times $100M is 200 billion dollars. (This leads to a critical failure in the rest of your argument, I'm sorry to say, despite my wanting to agree with it.)
Now, Napolitano says body scans, and Your Papers Please will be required to ride a train, boat, or bus, what's next, walk on the sidewalk?
Your fellow citizens will try to put a stop to walking long before the TSA gets around to it. (Seriously, I've never seen anywhere else as hostile to getting around on foot. I suppose a lot of the problem is due to putting all those damn parking lots in front of everything even vaguely like a public amenity. Walking in the 'burbs is just impractical in the US.)
If you keep the leaves, they'll kill the grass and the acorns/maple spinners will take root.
So mulch the leaves and use them to suppress winter weeds in your flower (or vegetable) beds. Nutrients recycled, lawn preserved.
They do pay in the form of sales tax to buy things to keep the business running.
They don't pay that in Ireland because they're using European VAT rules, which effectively allow companies to reclaim sales taxes. For most companies those rules make a lot of sense, since they're taxing the value added by the company, but sometimes they come out more than a little odd. It's quite possible that Google are using one of those oddnesses...
100GB+ is not a large dataset.
A dataset is large when the quickest way of getting it across the country involves Fedexing a box of harddrives.
Yes, it's a VERY VERY bad thing if your business and it's reputation relies on said infrastructure.
You mean, like how they utterly rely on the network (true of many businesses) and so are their own ISP?
The symbol used to indicate parts of the network that you have no knowledge of.
That's the definition as it pertains to networking. It's now been extended to other types of hardware and certain types of software, and it all works on the concept of "I don't know where it is or what it looks like, but I do know that if I wave my hands like this then it all works just fine." As long as things actually do work, then that's a good thing: you're saved the effort of thinking about lots of frankly irrelevant crap (well, irrelevant to you; someone cares about it...)
Honestly, HTTPS / SSL is The Ultimate Theater of Security.
Umm, no. What it isn't is a system that is make it impossible for governments to do shenanigans; it's more aimed towards stopping other types of threats (e.g., random fraudsters with computers) and it most certainly raises the bar for that much more commonplace issue. Yes, it's possible to have a PKI that is mostly government-proof (using just your own root CA) but that's not much good for communicating with anyone outside your local chapter of the tinfoil hat brigade. The practicalities of the wider world (e.g., not having a particular CA able to hold their customers over a barrel) pretty much requires losing some safety, and at some point it becomes necessary to couple to real-world identities anyway (and governments naturally are concerned with that, especially for taxation and in the judicial branch).
The big difference this time is that Facebook will actually embed the thing into their existing platform, so the "I don't know anyone to Wave with" hurdle that plagued Wave will be curled right over.
But it will still suck. GW sucked because it was difficult to find out what's going on in a branching conversation; you'd end up lost in the page, trying to find what changed and work out whether you care.
Maybe not at your trade school.
FTFY!
If it's metal, and it reacts with water, this more than likely isn't the best advice to give.
I did say shavings. Putting the whole lot in would be dumb and unscientific too.
Cut the stone with angle grinder, polish the cut, show us the picture. Meteorites have quite distinctive texture.
Also try getting some shavings from the inside of the lump and heating them strongly in a flame (a small blowtorch is ideal for this). The color of flame created will indicate what metals/metal ions are involved (OK, cruder than using a spectroscope, but easy to do with stuff that many people have lying around).
Carbonate rock will react with water.
When you say "react with", you mean "dissolve, usually quite slowly, in".
Tends to be a fast reaction by comparison with almost any other rock. Sandstone lasts much longer despite being relatively easy to erode mechanically, and volcanic rocks (granite, basalt) are much more durable.
Objective-C compiles just fine with the GNU compiler on my Linux machine, friend.
But why would you bother? Without the libraries to link against, you're having to build lots of stuff from scratch or bridge to libs that people have written in other languages (e.g., C or C++) and in that case you might as well use those other languages directly. Doing everything yourself is just... well, just dumb.
(Of course, developing in Obj-C for the Apple family of systems where the libraries are already done, well that makes a bunch of sense. In fact, my previous platform really says nothing at all about how good a language or platform is, as it's really about how fitting in with an existing ecosystem of language(s), platform(s) and libraries is the shortest route to success.)
This actually isn't true. The electrical grid, as wires, is about 95% efficient. However, the power plants aren't very efficient, ranging from 30% to 60%. This is because of the Carnot limits that impact the conversion of heat to work in a heat engine.
Modern thermal power stations are large and run very hot and have many stages to recover energy from the heat precisely to deal with these things (running hotter increases the theoretical max, being larger and having more turbines in series increases the actual amount of energy extracted). In this, they are much more efficient than a small power plant such as a combustion engine. Once you've converted into electrical energy, you can't use Carnot-style calculations to do the calculation (you've not a thermal distribution so you're not satisfying the starting assumptions); energy losses are due to resistance and impedance in the cables.
The only thing that it's not a good idea to do with electrical power is heating; at that point, it's better to move the fuel itself to where it is needed.
If she'd won the primary, McCain would have won
Pure supposition. You don't know that. Maybe it would have happened, but there's insufficient evidence to make the call either way.
A brute force attack shouldn't be that much of a concern with a login password, assuming that the system limits how often and how many times the brute force attack can retry.
That makes you very vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. Hmm...
Great advice...can you please force banks, etc., to allow such passwords?
Example 1: I recently signed up to be able to pay my car payment online, and the requirements were that both the username and password be at least 8 characters long but no longer than 12 characters, have at least one letter and one number, with no non-alphanumeric allowed. Although you could use mixed case, it was not a requirement.
Example 2: A set of integrated systems at a client use Active Directory as a single sign-on to authenticate. The AD password requires at least one of lower, upper, number, and symbols, and must be at least 8 characters long. But, because some of the systems that use AD to validate the authentication are broken, you can't use a password of more than 8 characters, and some of the input systems don't allow every special character to be typed, so you definitely can't use Unicode characters.
I've also encountered single-sign-on systems that didn't permit different cases, or rather would normalize the case of your password for you... sometimes, but not always. All lower was the only way to make it work reliably, and boy! did it take a lot of effort on our part to find out just how broken it was. (Yes, it was a very stupid system, and I hope its authors have bad cases of haemorrhoids for a few years as compensation.)
so... let me get this straight: it's okay to kill people but it's not okay to be creative and innovative?
It's great to be creative and innovative, provided you then give all rights to benefit from "your" creation to some big business executive so they can spend it on hookers and blow. You? You should be glad that they let you keep breathing, you ungrateful git! </cynical>
An application basically has to be written for the amazon cloud in order to function on top of it.
That depends crucially on the details of the application. The main factor usually seems to be what the details of the IO are – you don't want to be shipping large datasets in and out of Amazon frequently if you can help it – together with how much extra stuff you feel like wrapping round the front end and what your method for recovering the costs is.
So there are lots of extremely non-trivial costs associated with doing what you say.
Indeed, but a lot of people seem to discount the costs of the alternatives too easily too. It's hard to come in under the price of Amazon for the sorts of thing that they offer without dishonest accounting shenanigans or cutting some important corners (but there's many things that they don't offer which might well justify actually paying more).
Isn't "throw money at the problem" the whole point of "extensible" cloud computing?
Yes. "Scalable" in cloud computing is usually interpreted to mean "scales linearly with amount of money applied". As long as the amount of benefit you're getting from it is also scaling at least linearly, that's an acceptable trade-off.