Two or three years ago, he may have been right. But he totally missed that he iPod has gone mainstream. When I go to the gym in the morning, most of the people sporting iPods are pretty well paid professionals in their mid 20s to mid 30s. And like my friends and aquaintances who have iPods, they actually use it to carry their Cd collection around in a much handier format. Now that might not be true for the 15 year old Valley Girl or the 18 year old college nerd, but how is this soo much different from the CD swapping, or tape swapping that we all were doign in school.
Yeah, I know, someone can download a million sogs of the internet. But 95% of the students I know are basically after the same 10-20 CDs worth of stuff (Brittney, Christina, Eminem, Donnas, some rap, some punk rock,...).
You *are* aware that the Dasani water that Coca Cola is selling in the US is purified tab water, too, are you? Maybe tat just shows that the US consumer-or the US media-are bigger suckers than the ones in the UK.
"A much more probable explanation is that you behave differently depending on who you talkt to, not which language you use. When you talk Japanese, you most probably are talking with someone from Japan."
Actually, no. I am bilingual (German/English) and live in the US. On business trips to Europe, I wa ssurprised to notice that my presentation style is very different, depending on the language I give it in. Even if I walk into the auditorium not knowing which langage I am giving it in in advance. That happens occasionally when I speak in front of a group in a German speaking country and realize that non-German speakers are part of the audience.
Even weirder, I have to keep myself from lapsing back into English when I talk about my work to Germans. This never happens when I talk about anything else. Seems like my work is intimately associated with English.
YANAL. The much more likely scenario in a US courtroom would be: some dead drunk idiot with an expired license runs a stop light in his 25 year old Ford 150 and crashes into your car. The cop on the scene forgets to take a blood test or someone screws up and it gets thrown out. His old pile of crap doesn't have insurance or one of those boxes, so his defense lawyer from 1-800-AMBL-CHSE subpoenas your black box and convinces the jury that you are at faul because you drove 56 miles on a highway.
I'd migrate to Thunderbird in a second and take a lot of colleagues with me if only it would finally not crash when trying to import nontrivial amounts of email from Outlook (not Outlook Express). Thunderbird is fine up to a few thousand messages, but anyting larger gets you a never ending onslaught of error messages.
Actually, apart from the view screen and the physiological modelling, the German Army started issuing a very similar kit (German only) a few months ago. GPS receiver, night vision goggles, PDA, tactical radio, new load bearing west with velcro on/off body armour, laser target designator, laser range finder...
The stuff is actually lighter than what I had to jump out of planes with.
You are "frustrated" because an article in Popular Mechanics seems amateurish?
Newsflash: PM is not a scientific or engineering magazine, it's basically the nerdy guy/Redneck mechanic version of supermarket tabloids like News Of The World, or the Star. Try looking at some back issues and you'll figure out pretty soon that this rag is just recycling the same badly written, factually wrong and unrepentantly gush-y articles every year. (Oh, it's June--let's do the supersonic plane again. July--the Navy's next generation invisible war ship. November--flying cars are back in season.)
I've heard rumors that PM was once a serious and useful publication, but that must have been more than 15 years ago. Nowadays, it's crappy reviews, braindead and inaccurate futurology, and 50 Jackass-approved ways of using WD 50.
Yes, Germany has a codified law system, so individual decisions of judges don't have the same impact on future decisions. That being said, though, most judges use decisions made by higher courts into account.
This decisions was made by a fairly low level court, so it might be of interest to other judges, but doesn't really set a precendent.
The basic way this works:
-Decisions by the constitutional court are binding for all German judges -Decisions by the 7 federal courts are not binding due to article 97 of the German constituion that states that judges are only bound by law, not by precendent or any other means. But for all intents and purposes, they are setting precedent simply because any conflicting ruling would almost definitely struck down on appeal. These are not like Federal Circuit Courts in the US, though. With the exception of the BGH, they are specialized courts like the Federal Labor Court, the Patent Court, the Financial Court, and so on. -Decisions by the 20 Oberlandesgerichte (one per state) are usually followed by lower courts for pretty much the same reasons. The Oberlandesgerichte or OLG are very similar to fedral circuit courts in the US. -Decisions by any court lower than the OLGs and the state constitutional courts are maybe getting looked at by other judges, but don't have a huge influence on further decisions one way or the other.
Does anyone know if any imporvements to Thunderbird's email import from Outlook have been made in 0.9.1? I'd switch in a second, but at least until 0.9, Thunderbird crashes half way through each time I try to import my old 250,000 emails from Outlook.
I did use Brainforest for a number of years and really liked it, it was nice and simple and worked on my PC, Mac and Palm. Its biggest shortcoming was that the outlines didn't allow for hyperlinks. Which sucks if half your tasks are "look at the following web page and fix it".
But nowadays, I just use the ouliner in my word processor.
The Christian in the Chrsitian Democratic Party and the Christion Social Party is just historic. It's holdover from when the Christian Democrats were founded in the 19th century. They don't have any kind of religious agendas nowadays.
It's might be incoceivable to Americans, but religion plays a much much much smaller role in European politics than in the US, even before Dubya.
That was just an unfortunate comment by the original poster and the/. editors.
The German polical system in 1 minute:
-There are four main politcal parties in Germany -The two largest ones (about 30-45% of the vote each) are the SPD (Social Democrats) and the CDU/CSU (Christian Democrats) -The two smaller national parties are the FDP (Free Democrats) andf the Green Party. Both get between 3-10%, depending on the individual election. -In the former East Germany, the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) a successor to the former socialist party that ran the GDR until reunification is getting about 15-25% of the vote in local and state elections.
-Seats in the Bundestag, the more powerful lower house are awarded by the total number of votes a party gets, as long as they get more than 5% of the total vote, or win three electorial districts outright. So there are usually 4-5 parties in the lower house and they have to form coalitions to get a majority.
-Currently, the majority in the lower house is a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party. The chancellor is a Social Democrat, the foreign secretary and vice chancellor is from the Green Party
-Most state governments are either Christian Democrats or coalitions of the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats. -Since the members of the upper house are nominated by the state governments, the above also have a majority in the upper house.
-The Social Democrats got basically vaporized by the Christian Democrats in the European elections last week. -There are some more fringe and single issue parties, but none that has any influence on the state or federal level. -All of the parties above are well to the left of the US Republican Party, the Christian Democrats are the most conservative, along the lines of the more centrist wing of the US Democrats, the Social Democrats are best compared to the left wing of the US Democtatic Party, the Free Democrats are more free market, which would put them closer to Republican positions, but more liberal socially. The Green Party is a green party, but less nuts than Nader, and the PDS are unabashed socialists.
What does this have to do with this decision in Munich? Nothing whatsoever. This decision was made by the city government, which is domianted by Social Democrats and the Green Party. The Christian Democrats have an overwhelming majority in the Bavarian state government, but it is purely up to the city government what software their employeers use.
A cell phone that hooks up to a virtual retinal display and includes a projection keyboard. In the near future, both memory and processor speed in even a small form factor phone would be more than good enough for things like web surfing, taking notes and even watching movies. What is limiting the size is the need to intrgrate usable input devices and readable displays.
With a virtual goggels and virtual keyboard setup, I could have a small phone, but still watch movies and surf the net with, say, a built in trackball. And I could take notes, or work on files on any flat surface when I get stuck in O'Hare again.
Actually, you need to figure out that she has an account at bank X, find her, get her to give you her login and password, and then sneak up behind her, knook her out with a blackjack, hide her body in a dark corner, and then drain her account.
That's a lot harder than spamming a few million people to give you some nitwits who go to your site to tell you all their secrets or scam some passwords. Also, the blackjack part carries a higher risk of ending up in jail for the better part of the next few decades.
I know there is a lot of hysteria about RFID cards, but a well implemented RFID card can be a lot more secure than the current system. Say the card does an encrypted challenge response, is limiting itself to one transaction per second, _and_ you still need a pin.
For example:
purchase enter pin terminal hashes to pin with some random number card responds to the challenge by hashing the random number with the time and your card ID number (public key) card puts itself into sleep mode for a second terminal sends the card response to MasterCard computer which uses MC's private key to verify the response
I haven't done a deep analysis of this, so it might not be totally secure, or you might not need the random number and could just challenge with the time up to a millisecond, but I still think this is more secure than giving everyone your credit card or swipe through a magnetic reader.
The huge advantage is that the sales person does not see your credit card number or your security code, and it would be almost impossible to copy the card with magnetic stripe readers.
Actually,/. is really terrific for predicting the success of consumer products. Almost any product that gets ripped a new one when it's introduced is going to be a success (iMac, iPod, Windows XP, OS X, Photoshop...). And anyone that gets lots of favorable comments it going to fail miserably as far as mass adoption is concerned most of the time (OggVobis, the Linux-based Zaurus, GIMP, Linux on the desktop, the WiFi internet...). The only one better at being wrong than the/. consent is Taco who's track record is basically pefect.
Re:The problem starts with the programmers...
on
Exploiting Software
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know why this got voted insightful, but you are making a very good point, although involuntarily: "Security WON'T work until software engineers and programmers get it into their heads that complicated, invasive security procedures don't work if there are any humans around."
If the security procedures are transparent and easy to use from the user standpoint, they will expend and extraordinary amount of ingenuity and cunning to get around them. Usually more than any product designer can spend to develop the product in the first place. This doesn't only aply to software, but to everything else. If you put a different combilation lock on each filing cabinet (very secure), your office workers will tape a list to the bottom of one desk with all the combinations. If you put a different lock on every door, they'll duct tape over the bolts to keep them from engaging.
The same applies to software. Get over it and develop a protocol that doesn't hurt the user and is secure. It's hard, but not impossible.
Re:My favourite book is...
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 1
I agree for the most part. It's reasonably small, very clearly written and it is one of the few that doesn't start by teaching C and then telling you to forget most of what you know when they switch to C++.
The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is the stupid framing program in Chapter 1 and 2. I mean _come_ on_ writing a program to frame text output on an ASCII terminal? They should really be able to come up with a better example.
"What matters is if there is a net gain in energy, i.e. if it is an efficient enough way to collect solar energy, that we don't wind up using more energy to produce the fuel than we get from using it."
What you mean is "that we don't wind up using more non-renewable fuel to product the fuel". Given that even Homer Simpson obeys the second law of thermodynamics, you will always spend more energy to create fuel than you'll ever be able to get out of it.
I know that statistic and I don't doubt that ADM (35 miles west of here, by the way) and the corn farmers are ripping off taxpayers. But how much energy does it take to make one gallon of 89 octane gas? It's not like you siphon crude straight into your car. You have to transport it, crack it, refine it.... . Allof which is somewhat energy intensive.
I guess what I am asking is: Does it take more energy to run a car 100 miles on ethanol or 100 miles on gas?
Slashdot Mirror
Two or three years ago, he may have been right. But he totally missed that he iPod has gone mainstream. When I go to the gym in the morning, most of the people sporting iPods are pretty well paid professionals in their mid 20s to mid 30s. And like my friends and aquaintances who have iPods, they actually use it to carry their Cd collection around in a much handier format. Now that might not be true for the 15 year old Valley Girl or the 18 year old college nerd, but how is this soo much different from the CD swapping, or tape swapping that we all were doign in school.
Yeah, I know, someone can download a million sogs of the internet. But 95% of the students I know are basically after the same 10-20 CDs worth of stuff (Brittney, Christina, Eminem, Donnas, some rap, some punk rock,...).
You *are* aware that the Dasani water that Coca Cola is selling in the US is purified tab water, too, are you?
Maybe tat just shows that the US consumer-or the US media-are bigger suckers than the ones in the UK.
Timer chip - $1.50
Digital camera - $100
Remote controlled airplane - $250
Having the FBI raid your house at 3am - priceless
There are always the classics. Mine is a Mac SE model and has been working flawlessly since 1997.
Actually, no. I am bilingual (German/English) and live in the US. On business trips to Europe, I wa ssurprised to notice that my presentation style is very different, depending on the language I give it in. Even if I walk into the auditorium not knowing which langage I am giving it in in advance. That happens occasionally when I speak in front of a group in a German speaking country and realize that non-German speakers are part of the audience.
Even weirder, I have to keep myself from lapsing back into English when I talk about my work to Germans. This never happens when I talk about anything else. Seems like my work is intimately associated with English.
YANAL. The much more likely scenario in a US courtroom would be: some dead drunk idiot with an expired license runs a stop light in his 25 year old Ford 150 and crashes into your car. The cop on the scene forgets to take a blood test or someone screws up and it gets thrown out. His old pile of crap doesn't have insurance or one of those boxes, so his defense lawyer from 1-800-AMBL-CHSE subpoenas your black box and convinces the jury that you are at faul because you drove 56 miles on a highway.
I'd migrate to Thunderbird in a second and take a lot of colleagues with me if only it would finally not crash when trying to import nontrivial amounts of email from Outlook (not Outlook Express). Thunderbird is fine up to a few thousand messages, but anyting larger gets you a never ending onslaught of error messages.
One word: searching. Searching in Outlook is so slow that it is completely useless if you have more than a few dozen emails and folders.
It's not 10 times slower than Eudora or Thunderbird, it's orders of magnitudes slower.
Actually, apart from the view screen and the physiological modelling, the German Army started issuing a very similar kit (German only) a few months ago. GPS receiver, night vision goggles, PDA, tactical radio, new load bearing west with velcro on/off body armour, laser target designator, laser range finder... The stuff is actually lighter than what I had to jump out of planes with.
Newsflash: PM is not a scientific or engineering magazine, it's basically the nerdy guy/Redneck mechanic version of supermarket tabloids like News Of The World, or the Star. Try looking at some back issues and you'll figure out pretty soon that this rag is just recycling the same badly written, factually wrong and unrepentantly gush-y articles every year. (Oh, it's June--let's do the supersonic plane again. July--the Navy's next generation invisible war ship. November--flying cars are back in season.)
I've heard rumors that PM was once a serious and useful publication, but that must have been more than 15 years ago. Nowadays, it's crappy reviews, braindead and inaccurate futurology, and 50 Jackass-approved ways of using WD 50.The battery life of my watch is 10 years, it's about a week for my phone
I can see it without fumbling for my phone
My last phone didn't show the time while scuba diving
My phone doesn't work too well when I am mountain biking/working out/traveling abroad
I like the way my watch feels
Occasionally, I really want to be away from my phone
My cell phone has completely replaced my PDA, though.Yes, Germany has a codified law system, so individual decisions of judges don't have the same impact on future decisions. That being said, though, most judges use decisions made by higher courts into account.
This decisions was made by a fairly low level court, so it might be of interest to other judges, but doesn't really set a precendent.
The basic way this works:
-Decisions by the constitutional court are binding for all German judges
-Decisions by the 7 federal courts are not binding due to article 97 of the German constituion that states that judges are only bound by law, not by precendent or any other means. But for all intents and purposes, they are setting precedent simply because any conflicting ruling would almost definitely struck down on appeal. These are not like Federal Circuit Courts in the US, though. With the exception of the BGH, they are specialized courts like the Federal Labor Court, the Patent Court, the Financial Court, and so on.
-Decisions by the 20 Oberlandesgerichte (one per state) are usually followed by lower courts for pretty much the same reasons. The Oberlandesgerichte or OLG are very similar to fedral circuit courts in the US.
-Decisions by any court lower than the OLGs and the state constitutional courts are maybe getting looked at by other judges, but don't have a huge influence on further decisions one way or the other.
Does anyone know if any imporvements to Thunderbird's email import from Outlook have been made in 0.9.1? I'd switch in a second, but at least until 0.9, Thunderbird crashes half way through each time I try to import my old 250,000 emails from Outlook.
Way to complicated:
...
1: Roomba
2: 42 razor blades
3: glue gun
5: profit
You might want to take out the particle bin, though.
I did use Brainforest for a number of years and really liked it, it was nice and simple and worked on my PC, Mac and Palm. Its biggest shortcoming was that the outlines didn't allow for hyperlinks. Which sucks if half your tasks are "look at the following web page and fix it". But nowadays, I just use the ouliner in my word processor.
The Christian in the Chrsitian Democratic Party and the Christion Social Party is just historic. It's holdover from when the Christian Democrats were founded in the 19th century. They don't have any kind of religious agendas nowadays.
It's might be incoceivable to Americans, but religion plays a much much much smaller role in European politics than in the US, even before Dubya.
That was just an unfortunate comment by the original poster and the /. editors.
The German polical system in 1 minute:
-There are four main politcal parties in Germany
-The two largest ones (about 30-45% of the vote each) are the SPD (Social Democrats) and the CDU/CSU (Christian Democrats)
-The two smaller national parties are the FDP (Free Democrats) andf the Green Party. Both get between 3-10%, depending on the individual election.
-In the former East Germany, the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) a successor to the former socialist party that ran the GDR until reunification is getting about 15-25% of the vote in local and state elections.
-Seats in the Bundestag, the more powerful lower house are awarded by the total number of votes a party gets, as long as they get more than 5% of the total vote, or win three electorial districts outright. So there are usually 4-5 parties in the lower house and they have to form coalitions to get a majority.
-Currently, the majority in the lower house is a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party. The chancellor is a Social Democrat, the foreign secretary and vice chancellor is from the Green Party
-Most state governments are either Christian Democrats or coalitions of the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats.
-Since the members of the upper house are nominated by the state governments, the above also have a majority in the upper house.
-The Social Democrats got basically vaporized by the Christian Democrats in the European elections last week.
-There are some more fringe and single issue parties, but none that has any influence on the state or federal level.
-All of the parties above are well to the left of the US Republican Party, the Christian Democrats are the most conservative, along the lines of the more centrist wing of the US Democrats, the Social Democrats are best compared to the left wing of the US Democtatic Party, the Free Democrats are more free market, which would put them closer to Republican positions, but more liberal socially. The Green Party is a green party, but less nuts than Nader, and the PDS are unabashed socialists.
What does this have to do with this decision in Munich? Nothing whatsoever. This decision was made by the city government, which is domianted by Social Democrats and the Green Party. The Christian Democrats have an overwhelming majority in the Bavarian state government, but it is purely up to the city government what software their employeers use.
A cell phone that hooks up to a virtual retinal display and includes a projection keyboard. In the near future, both memory and processor speed in even a small form factor phone would be more than good enough for things like web surfing, taking notes and even watching movies. What is limiting the size is the need to intrgrate usable input devices and readable displays. With a virtual goggels and virtual keyboard setup, I could have a small phone, but still watch movies and surf the net with, say, a built in trackball. And I could take notes, or work on files on any flat surface when I get stuck in O'Hare again.
Actually, you need to figure out that she has an account at bank X, find her, get her to give you her login and password, and then sneak up behind her, knook her out with a blackjack, hide her body in a dark corner, and then drain her account.
That's a lot harder than spamming a few million people to give you some nitwits who go to your site to tell you all their secrets or scam some passwords. Also, the blackjack part carries a higher risk of ending up in jail for the better part of the next few decades.
I know there is a lot of hysteria about RFID cards, but a well implemented RFID card can be a lot more secure than the current system. Say the card does an encrypted challenge response, is limiting itself to one transaction per second, _and_ you still need a pin.
For example:
purchase
enter pin
terminal hashes to pin with some random number
card responds to the challenge by hashing the random number with the time and your card ID number (public key)
card puts itself into sleep mode for a second
terminal sends the card response to MasterCard computer which uses MC's private key to verify the response
I haven't done a deep analysis of this, so it might not be totally secure, or you might not need the random number and could just challenge with the time up to a millisecond, but I still think this is more secure than giving everyone your credit card or swipe through a magnetic reader.
The huge advantage is that the sales person does not see your credit card number or your security code, and it would be almost impossible to copy the card with magnetic stripe readers.
Actually, /. is really terrific for predicting the success of consumer products. Almost any product that gets ripped a new one when it's introduced is going to be a success (iMac, iPod, Windows XP, OS X, Photoshop...). And anyone that gets lots of favorable comments it going to fail miserably as far as mass adoption is concerned most of the time (OggVobis, the Linux-based Zaurus, GIMP, Linux on the desktop, the WiFi internet...). The only one better at being wrong than the /. consent is Taco who's track record is basically pefect.
I don't know why this got voted insightful, but you are making a very good point, although involuntarily:
"Security WON'T work until software engineers and programmers get it into their heads that complicated, invasive security procedures don't work if there are any humans around."
If the security procedures are transparent and easy to use from the user standpoint, they will expend and extraordinary amount of ingenuity and cunning to get around them. Usually more than any product designer can spend to develop the product in the first place. This doesn't only aply to software, but to everything else. If you put a different combilation lock on each filing cabinet (very secure), your office workers will tape a list to the bottom of one desk with all the combinations. If you put a different lock on every door, they'll duct tape over the bolts to keep them from engaging.
The same applies to software. Get over it and develop a protocol that doesn't hurt the user and is secure. It's hard, but not impossible.
I agree for the most part. It's reasonably small, very clearly written and it is one of the few that doesn't start by teaching C and then telling you to forget most of what you know when they switch to C++.
The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is the stupid framing program in Chapter 1 and 2. I mean _come_ on_ writing a program to frame text output on an ASCII terminal? They should really be able to come up with a better example.
"What matters is if there is a net gain in energy, i.e. if it is an efficient enough way to collect solar energy, that we don't wind up using more energy to produce the fuel than we get from using it."
What you mean is "that we don't wind up using more non-renewable fuel to product the fuel". Given that even Homer Simpson obeys the second law of thermodynamics, you will always spend more energy to create fuel than you'll ever be able to get out of it.
I know that statistic and I don't doubt that ADM (35 miles west of here, by the way) and the corn farmers are ripping off taxpayers. But how much energy does it take to make one gallon of 89 octane gas? It's not like you siphon crude straight into your car. You have to transport it, crack it, refine it.... . Allof which is somewhat energy intensive.
I guess what I am asking is: Does it take more energy to run a car 100 miles on ethanol or 100 miles on gas?