The key being "any cost". I talked to them at one point, and was quoted a price for one of their devices that was about as much as my company pays in hardware lease, bandwidth and power for hosting 4 racks worth of high end servers for a year...
For most uses of md5 and sha1 in modern applications it makes very little difference that it's possible to manufacture collisions. That said, I'd really like to know what kind of applications requires enough md5 and sha1 generation steps that it causing enough load to be worth dedicated instructions.
What that means is that those of us who were kids when the movie opened are now right in the middle of the largest gaming demographic, and have lots of disposable cash.
And why do you think there's been so many superhero movies over the last few years all based on storylines from the 80's? I mean, I've hardly gone to a see a single superhero movie in the last ten years that's not been based heavily on storylines I remember from the comics I bought as a kid.
The timing is great - both in terms of the people who saw it in the cinemas and all of those of us who were too young and had to wait a few years to see it on TV or video.
But presumably they'd have to prove you actually had a key before they could punish you for not handing it over. Whereas the entire point of RIPA is to ensure that saying "I don't know what the key is" is NEVER a defense, even if it's true.
And that is exactly the problem with RIPA in the first place. The assumption is that if there's encrypted data you have the key and is liable if you can't produce it. Never mind if you don't have the key, or if there's no key to be had in the first place.
We'll see if this actually ends up in court and a judge actually upholds this provision, though, there's constant complaints about how "activist" British judges are when it comes to reinterpreting or setting aside laws they don't agree with.
They clearly sell enough of them to make money even though the number of people buying them today isn't a tenth of the numbers from 20 years ago.
In the US. Many other places in the world comics sell just as well. In Europe even small markets like Norway (4.5 million people) have comics that far outsell most US comics, though US style superhero comics don't appear to do that well despite much better presentation (both Marvel and DC comics get republished in Norway as magazines with anywhere from around 60-100 pages of the best material from the US versions, less the annoying advertizing, so you don't have to follow several different magazines for Spiderman for example - I stopped reading Marvel comics when I moved to the UK where the only thing available is the US imports).
You can keep hiding your head in the sand if you like, and ignore the fact that for lots of people Firefox gets unusable within hours of browsing due to memory usage. It won't make the bugs go away though. Firefox behavior is so bad that I currently have my Mac's system activity monitor permanently open so I can regularly see how much memory Firefox uses to know whether it's getting close to the level where I need to restart before my system will start trashing. Currently it's thankfully taking "only" 660MB after a couple of hours of browsing.
Well, I certainly see both "memory gobbling" and CPU hogging with 2.0.0.9. In fact I've seen no change in behavior in that respect over any of the latest versions. But seeing as developers have mostly pretended the memory leaks aren't there for a couple of years now (because they are hard to reproduce for a lot of people), I'm not surprised.
But how many of these projects are making money or are likely to ever make money? I've been approached by Google recruiters on a fairly regular basis over the last two years, and my biggest motivator for not even saying yes to an interview is that Google doesn't have a very good track record outside of it's core search, and it seems to me that they're just throwing more and more developers into the mix in the hope that something will stick.
Look at Gmail, for example. Despite all the PR and hype, they never got reasonable traction - it's still tiny compared to Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Look at Orkut... In fact, look at most of Google's projects outside of the search engine and adsense.
On one hand working for Google might be a good career move (as in it would look good on my CV) and who knows, the shared might still rise enough for an option package to be worth a bit, but it simply hasn't been an attractive enough proposition for me to consider it. If a company I worked for got acquired by Google, I'd certainly stay and do my best and maybe it would turn out I'm wrong about them, but I wouldn't bother applying for a job there as long as I've plenty of other alternatives to pick from.
Because you want a good reference? Because you don't want to get a reputation of being an asshole that can't be trusted?
There's a big difference between having a policy in place to take precautions in case there's ill will they don't know about in a completely impersonal way (that is, it's not about YOU, it's about risk management regardless of person) and someone targeting you personally.
And the UK is one of the worst in Europe in this regard - most other countries have far stronger protections.
Note that the protections you mention are very different if you are being made redundant (as in the company is removing your position) vs. being fired for cause though.
Generally you wouldn't get paid much extra for leaving immediately in the case of redundancy, unless it's in your contract, BUT if you and the company arrange to have a legal agreement signed that state that you mutually agree to terminate the employment agreement immediately for the consideration of three months pay, those three months pay can be usually be paid tax free (assuming the paperwork is done correctly). If you're being made redundant, it might be worthwhile being proactive about asking whether they'd consider this as they might not think about it. The benefit from the company point of view is that you sign away your right to dispute the redundancy, which takes away a risk of potentially large legal costs, and it doesn't cost them any more in cash other than a couple of hundred for the legal fees.
In the latter case of being fired for cause you have very little protection if they have followed proper procedure, but since proper procedure includes several warnings, and the possibility of you taking it to an employment tribunal, you'd know plenty of time in advance what's coming your way.
It's a mindset thing. You might intend to be perfectly loyal, but if you've gotten an offer and accepted a position with another company, it's hard for that not to be at the front of your mind, and you've just suddenly created a completely different level of temptation, whether it's just to look at code you'd never bothered to look at before even though you've had access.
Personally, if I was leaving to a direct competitor I'd want to take steps myself to ensure I didn't any longer have access to information I could take with me. Not because I'd ever take anything with me, but because I wouldn't want even the opportunity in case someone do leak something and I'd be further up the list of possible suspect than I otherwise would.
For the same reason I really want companies I leave to have a good policy of immediately changing passwords etc.. Not for the sake of the company, but for my sake. I don't want the risk of them coming to me a month later suspecting me of having used my access after leaving.
People should stop being so negative about the perp walk - it also creates a level of protection for you, as long as it's standard practice. Of course if you're being targeted, you should be pissed off.
Of course comparing it with involuntary servitude is ridiculous. It's a contract. As long as there is mutual consideration, calling it involuntary makes no more sense than calling any other contract term involuntary. Certainly noone can force you to serve out the time, but you can expect consequences if you don't, just as with violating any other contract term.
Note that in all countries I'm aware of that have longer notice periods a) it can be waived by mutual agreement, b) you can usually remove it from contracts as long as you provide sufficient consideration - typically that consideration must be greater to the employee as it's assumed the employee negotiates from a position of weakness unless it's a very high level position, c) it's mutual - that is, you have legal protection to ensure you at the very least get paid for the full notice period even if you get fired, and often to guarantee you actually is guaranteed the right to go to work during that period (though it's getting more common for workplaces to negotiate for some types of employees to leave immediately while still paying them).
In Norway the typical notice period is 3 months, and an employment contract that says elsewhere needs a LOT of care to be valid unless it's part time/fixed term contract or seasonal work. Basically, the employer would need to offer to compensate you for it, and just offering to pay for it regardless likely wouldn't be enough, as you have right to work during the notice period, not just to get paid.
And while certainly some of the motivation is gone while serving out your notice period, I've personally never seen someone be unprofessional about it - people do stick around and do their jobs properly, because it's what they were contracted to do. As the other poster I find US working practices completely bizarre.
Most airports are not "major airports", and most metropolitan areas have lots of smaller airfields. I'm willing to bet that there's several small airports around your area that you don't even know about, used primarily by light private aircraft and that most or all of them have a lot of spare capacity.
I'm currently in the Bay Area, and despite not living here, I know of at least 3 small airports that don't have regularly scheduled flights within easy driving distance from my current location.
Contrary to scheduled flights with larger planes, the infrastructure needed to support ultralights is far smaller, including far smaller runways.
Nothing is stopping those people from getting a sports pilot license today and flying an ultralight. However it wouldn't do them any good, since they'd just end up breaking a few windows and get smeared onto the sidewalk. If anyone wants to do significant damage with a tiny aircraft they'll need to fill it with explosives, in which case they'd be far better up filling a large truck with explosives instead given that we're talking of aircraft that at most can carry a few hundred kilos.
The only reason September 11th became such a major disaster was the huge mass and speed, combined with the huge volumes of jet fuel catching fire - neither which would be an issue with "flying cars".
You are making the assumption that people will be allowed to control their flying car themselves. But one of the problems with automatic drive for cars is that there are already millions of cars and other objects on the ground that aren't tied into a traffic control system and never will be that any automated system would have to deal with.
That problem is far less of an issue in the air - in fact, work is already underway to automate the air traffic control systems even more. Providing dedicated "lanes" for "flying cars" that use fully automated traffic control systems is likely to be a far simpler challenge than doing the same on the ground, especially as the 3D nature of things means you could enforce far greater distances between vehicles than on the ground and still avoid congestion.
The flaw in that thinking is that you might not be near the same airport. One of the problem with light aircraft is that you're a lot more dependent on good weather. An aircraft that can be driven on a normal road takes care of that - just land at the nearest airport and continue on ground -, but not if you have to leave a lot of crap behind that will need to get shipped back to you later.
So whats your point? The distribution of wage earners to total population isn't much different in Norway than it is in other industrialized countries with low birth rate, high life expectancy and low immigration (which translates into a rapidly aging population). And you end up paying pretty much the same.
I don't know about you, but I've done the maths. My "tax burden" in Norway was about the same as it is for me now in the UK, and both of them are pretty much the same as what it would cost me to live in areas in the US I'd be willing to consider when adding in private medical insurance and private pensions. In fact, many areas in the US would end up being more expensive for me. Why? Because what you consider "pickpocketing" is nothing more than insurance paying out. Insurance that you'd be paying for regardless if living in a country like the US unless you're too poor to afford it.
The difference is that really rich people are worse of in Norway (as in, you need to make well over a million kroner before it makes much of a difference) and really poor people are pretty much screwed in the US. For average earners and up to upper middle class, the differences aren't all that great.
Atheists frequently say that but I have yet to hear a good explanation for religion being opposed to aliens.
I'm sure most people would cling to their religions a bit longer. But it does raise problems for a number of religious people. For example, anyone clinging to literal interpretations of the Bible, or anyone who just believe the whole bit about us being created in gods image - if we find aliens that are nothing like us, the beliefs of a lot of people like that will inevitably be weakened.
But this is really no different from most other scientific advances. The more we know about the world around us, the less need people feel for retreating to their religious fantasyworld and the harder they find it to retain belief in something that isn't supported by evidence. All you need to do to see the signs of this is look at how secular societies with above average levels of education tends to get.
The development of intelligent life is such an unlikely coincidence that the fact that it happened more than once could be seen as the ultimate proof of a God.
Each additional planet with intelligent life we find can equally well be seen as proof that the development of intelligent life is more likely. You simply have no basis for claiming it's an "unlikely coincidence". For what we know it could be inevitable that intelligent life arises anywhere certain conditions are met, and we have no basis for judging what those conditions might be.
I'm not worrying if svscan will die either. It's never happened to me, in years of production use on tens of servers. However, the difference between daemontools and inetd is that daemontools can monitor running and logging of any type of service, while inetd is just for handling network connections, and provides tools for managing the various services and check their status.
That doesn't make things better. Norway, for example, has workable public transit systems for many tiny communities far outside the 80% of urban areas. Yes, people do depend on cars in the really rural areas, but even in many of the most rural communities you'll find well used bus routes.
Outside of the cities (ie the vast majority of the US), public transportation just isn't possible. I live in a town of 7000 people with about 100 miles of road. We have a grocery store in town but I need to go 15 miles (one way) to get a decent selection of food at a reasonable price (a large national chain and another regional chain), to buy clothes, etc. I need to go 25 miles in another direction to get to specialty stores. It's not economically feasible to build a million little stores to service a couple dozen people each.
You're funny. I've lived in towns roughly that size that had plenty of shops. The larger of them was in a county with about 25.000 people total, and had two (small-ish) shopping malls and at least half a dozen supermarkets in the centre, as well as a number of shops and small malls spread out over the rest of the county.
While there were certainly more people within a reasonable driving distance, this area also faced a huge competition from several large shopping malls within easy driving distance, as well as being within driving range of a larger city.
Even more remote parts of the county with just a couple of thousand people has it's own mall.
Public transport wise, it's served by a dozen or so local bus lines, and a couple of train stops. Outside the centre it'd be inconvenient without a car, but certainly not impossible.
In Norway this is nothing special. You'll certainly find lots of rural areas with population densities too small to make it practical to go everywhere you need without a car (Norway has a population density about 1/10th of the US if I remember correctly), but fewer than you'd think.
It may not be "possible" to do this in the US, but that is because you're so damn willing to drive for ages to get to larger shops that local stores face much harsher competition. It has everything to do with what choices you make about what kind of society you want.
Unfortunately I think the only thing that can change that in the US would be far higher fuel prices. Even then it would take decades for things to change - so many US towns are totally built around cars. Just try walking around in a dozen or so smaller US towns - often you get the feeling that even when they do make the odd concession to people walking, they don't actually bother testing the facilities, such as when sidewalks suddenly end, or you have to walk huge detours to safely cross a road. Similarly you find public transit systems many places that are obviously flawed, such as when there's no bus connections connecting downtown areas in small adjacent towns, and/or no bus routes fanning out to residential areas from train stations or central downtown locations.
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You stated "Yes, you can get that, but only in Central London and Manchester," which isn't remotely true.
The key being "any cost". I talked to them at one point, and was quoted a price for one of their devices that was about as much as my company pays in hardware lease, bandwidth and power for hosting 4 racks worth of high end servers for a year...
For most uses of md5 and sha1 in modern applications it makes very little difference that it's possible to manufacture collisions. That said, I'd really like to know what kind of applications requires enough md5 and sha1 generation steps that it causing enough load to be worth dedicated instructions.
And why do you think there's been so many superhero movies over the last few years all based on storylines from the 80's? I mean, I've hardly gone to a see a single superhero movie in the last ten years that's not been based heavily on storylines I remember from the comics I bought as a kid.
The timing is great - both in terms of the people who saw it in the cinemas and all of those of us who were too young and had to wait a few years to see it on TV or video.
But presumably they'd have to prove you actually had a key before they could punish you for not handing it over. Whereas the entire point of RIPA is to ensure that saying "I don't know what the key is" is NEVER a defense, even if it's true.
We'll see if this actually ends up in court and a judge actually upholds this provision, though, there's constant complaints about how "activist" British judges are when it comes to reinterpreting or setting aside laws they don't agree with.
In the US. Many other places in the world comics sell just as well. In Europe even small markets like Norway (4.5 million people) have comics that far outsell most US comics, though US style superhero comics don't appear to do that well despite much better presentation (both Marvel and DC comics get republished in Norway as magazines with anywhere from around 60-100 pages of the best material from the US versions, less the annoying advertizing, so you don't have to follow several different magazines for Spiderman for example - I stopped reading Marvel comics when I moved to the UK where the only thing available is the US imports).
You can keep hiding your head in the sand if you like, and ignore the fact that for lots of people Firefox gets unusable within hours of browsing due to memory usage. It won't make the bugs go away though. Firefox behavior is so bad that I currently have my Mac's system activity monitor permanently open so I can regularly see how much memory Firefox uses to know whether it's getting close to the level where I need to restart before my system will start trashing. Currently it's thankfully taking "only" 660MB after a couple of hours of browsing.
Well, I certainly see both "memory gobbling" and CPU hogging with 2.0.0.9. In fact I've seen no change in behavior in that respect over any of the latest versions. But seeing as developers have mostly pretended the memory leaks aren't there for a couple of years now (because they are hard to reproduce for a lot of people), I'm not surprised.
That would imply that these people are smarter than the rest of us, which is not an impression I'd like to leave in any case.
Look at Gmail, for example. Despite all the PR and hype, they never got reasonable traction - it's still tiny compared to Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Look at Orkut... In fact, look at most of Google's projects outside of the search engine and adsense.
On one hand working for Google might be a good career move (as in it would look good on my CV) and who knows, the shared might still rise enough for an option package to be worth a bit, but it simply hasn't been an attractive enough proposition for me to consider it. If a company I worked for got acquired by Google, I'd certainly stay and do my best and maybe it would turn out I'm wrong about them, but I wouldn't bother applying for a job there as long as I've plenty of other alternatives to pick from.
There's a big difference between having a policy in place to take precautions in case there's ill will they don't know about in a completely impersonal way (that is, it's not about YOU, it's about risk management regardless of person) and someone targeting you personally.
Note that the protections you mention are very different if you are being made redundant (as in the company is removing your position) vs. being fired for cause though.
Generally you wouldn't get paid much extra for leaving immediately in the case of redundancy, unless it's in your contract, BUT if you and the company arrange to have a legal agreement signed that state that you mutually agree to terminate the employment agreement immediately for the consideration of three months pay, those three months pay can be usually be paid tax free (assuming the paperwork is done correctly). If you're being made redundant, it might be worthwhile being proactive about asking whether they'd consider this as they might not think about it. The benefit from the company point of view is that you sign away your right to dispute the redundancy, which takes away a risk of potentially large legal costs, and it doesn't cost them any more in cash other than a couple of hundred for the legal fees.
In the latter case of being fired for cause you have very little protection if they have followed proper procedure, but since proper procedure includes several warnings, and the possibility of you taking it to an employment tribunal, you'd know plenty of time in advance what's coming your way.
Personally, if I was leaving to a direct competitor I'd want to take steps myself to ensure I didn't any longer have access to information I could take with me. Not because I'd ever take anything with me, but because I wouldn't want even the opportunity in case someone do leak something and I'd be further up the list of possible suspect than I otherwise would.
For the same reason I really want companies I leave to have a good policy of immediately changing passwords etc.. Not for the sake of the company, but for my sake. I don't want the risk of them coming to me a month later suspecting me of having used my access after leaving.
People should stop being so negative about the perp walk - it also creates a level of protection for you, as long as it's standard practice. Of course if you're being targeted, you should be pissed off.
Note that in all countries I'm aware of that have longer notice periods a) it can be waived by mutual agreement, b) you can usually remove it from contracts as long as you provide sufficient consideration - typically that consideration must be greater to the employee as it's assumed the employee negotiates from a position of weakness unless it's a very high level position, c) it's mutual - that is, you have legal protection to ensure you at the very least get paid for the full notice period even if you get fired, and often to guarantee you actually is guaranteed the right to go to work during that period (though it's getting more common for workplaces to negotiate for some types of employees to leave immediately while still paying them).
In Norway the typical notice period is 3 months, and an employment contract that says elsewhere needs a LOT of care to be valid unless it's part time/fixed term contract or seasonal work. Basically, the employer would need to offer to compensate you for it, and just offering to pay for it regardless likely wouldn't be enough, as you have right to work during the notice period, not just to get paid.
And while certainly some of the motivation is gone while serving out your notice period, I've personally never seen someone be unprofessional about it - people do stick around and do their jobs properly, because it's what they were contracted to do. As the other poster I find US working practices completely bizarre.
However that is assuming you're always flying between the same locations. People will pay extra for convenience.
I'm currently in the Bay Area, and despite not living here, I know of at least 3 small airports that don't have regularly scheduled flights within easy driving distance from my current location.
Contrary to scheduled flights with larger planes, the infrastructure needed to support ultralights is far smaller, including far smaller runways.
The only reason September 11th became such a major disaster was the huge mass and speed, combined with the huge volumes of jet fuel catching fire - neither which would be an issue with "flying cars".
That problem is far less of an issue in the air - in fact, work is already underway to automate the air traffic control systems even more. Providing dedicated "lanes" for "flying cars" that use fully automated traffic control systems is likely to be a far simpler challenge than doing the same on the ground, especially as the 3D nature of things means you could enforce far greater distances between vehicles than on the ground and still avoid congestion.
The flaw in that thinking is that you might not be near the same airport. One of the problem with light aircraft is that you're a lot more dependent on good weather. An aircraft that can be driven on a normal road takes care of that - just land at the nearest airport and continue on ground -, but not if you have to leave a lot of crap behind that will need to get shipped back to you later.
I don't know about you, but I've done the maths. My "tax burden" in Norway was about the same as it is for me now in the UK, and both of them are pretty much the same as what it would cost me to live in areas in the US I'd be willing to consider when adding in private medical insurance and private pensions. In fact, many areas in the US would end up being more expensive for me. Why? Because what you consider "pickpocketing" is nothing more than insurance paying out. Insurance that you'd be paying for regardless if living in a country like the US unless you're too poor to afford it.
The difference is that really rich people are worse of in Norway (as in, you need to make well over a million kroner before it makes much of a difference) and really poor people are pretty much screwed in the US. For average earners and up to upper middle class, the differences aren't all that great.
I'm sure most people would cling to their religions a bit longer. But it does raise problems for a number of religious people. For example, anyone clinging to literal interpretations of the Bible, or anyone who just believe the whole bit about us being created in gods image - if we find aliens that are nothing like us, the beliefs of a lot of people like that will inevitably be weakened. But this is really no different from most other scientific advances. The more we know about the world around us, the less need people feel for retreating to their religious fantasyworld and the harder they find it to retain belief in something that isn't supported by evidence. All you need to do to see the signs of this is look at how secular societies with above average levels of education tends to get.
The development of intelligent life is such an unlikely coincidence that the fact that it happened more than once could be seen as the ultimate proof of a God.
Each additional planet with intelligent life we find can equally well be seen as proof that the development of intelligent life is more likely. You simply have no basis for claiming it's an "unlikely coincidence". For what we know it could be inevitable that intelligent life arises anywhere certain conditions are met, and we have no basis for judging what those conditions might be.
I'm not worrying if svscan will die either. It's never happened to me, in years of production use on tens of servers. However, the difference between daemontools and inetd is that daemontools can monitor running and logging of any type of service, while inetd is just for handling network connections, and provides tools for managing the various services and check their status.
You're funny. I've lived in towns roughly that size that had plenty of shops. The larger of them was in a county with about 25.000 people total, and had two (small-ish) shopping malls and at least half a dozen supermarkets in the centre, as well as a number of shops and small malls spread out over the rest of the county.
While there were certainly more people within a reasonable driving distance, this area also faced a huge competition from several large shopping malls within easy driving distance, as well as being within driving range of a larger city.
Even more remote parts of the county with just a couple of thousand people has it's own mall.
Public transport wise, it's served by a dozen or so local bus lines, and a couple of train stops. Outside the centre it'd be inconvenient without a car, but certainly not impossible.
In Norway this is nothing special. You'll certainly find lots of rural areas with population densities too small to make it practical to go everywhere you need without a car (Norway has a population density about 1/10th of the US if I remember correctly), but fewer than you'd think.
It may not be "possible" to do this in the US, but that is because you're so damn willing to drive for ages to get to larger shops that local stores face much harsher competition. It has everything to do with what choices you make about what kind of society you want.
Unfortunately I think the only thing that can change that in the US would be far higher fuel prices. Even then it would take decades for things to change - so many US towns are totally built around cars. Just try walking around in a dozen or so smaller US towns - often you get the feeling that even when they do make the odd concession to people walking, they don't actually bother testing the facilities, such as when sidewalks suddenly end, or you have to walk huge detours to safely cross a road. Similarly you find public transit systems many places that are obviously flawed, such as when there's no bus connections connecting downtown areas in small adjacent towns, and/or no bus routes fanning out to residential areas from train stations or central downtown locations.