Congratulations... you have more faith in human programmers than I do, part of which comes from my consistently having to fix system bugs that are introduced both by colleagues and occasionally errors that I missed in my own code. Also, as a former professional driver, I used to see the rolling box scenario quite often, sometimes several times in a day (note that I'm not saying I was in the box all those times, though it has happened a couple times when I wasn't paying attention to their pattern). The "victims" of such did not necessarily have to be right up on the tailgate of the truck to be slipstreaming either. 9 times out of 10, the truckers in these incidents weren't trying to perform the box intentionally as it was just how the convoy formation was moving, and often times a quick warning on the CB was all it took to make the guy on the left realize he needed to make an opening for the car. The 1 in ten case I would usually hear one of the members of the team call out "Make the box" or something similar over the CB before the formation started. This usually happened when the driver was following too close.
And actually, one can be in the slipstream even if you're 500-1000 feet back from the truck. Pro-Tip: If you feel your vehicle doing a slight side to side shimmy while you're behind the truck, and you know your front end is in good repair and proper alignment, you're in his stream and sucking his fuel. The Shimmy is even worse on the motorcycle. You could be cruising down the roadway and suddenly feel the bike wobbling side to side on a windless day. Look a mile down the road, and there's the Semi that's disturbing your corridor. Get within a half to three quarter mile of his tail, and the bike is inside his stream and getting mixed up like a bird in a hurricane. Close to less than one quarter mile away from him, and the bike is now stable in the stream.
What consumer good doesn't concern itself with audience, career, culture, education, art, entertainment, and connection? Every consumer good on the market has a demographic that it's marketed towards. Books are no different, so therefore the phrase "Yes they are" is flatly true. Books are like any other consumer good and must vie for the disposable income of the consumer in the exact same way, whether or not Hachette sees them that way or not.
That's the correct procedure to follow and answers the question of what does the car do in the situation, but you completely missed the mark of "How does it recognize that it's getting boxed in?" It's actually a special case problem that requires intuition and human reasoning. Not only that, but to maneuver out of the situation is going to generate a lot of conflicting sensor trips that human intuition and aggression would ignore to get out of the situation.
Drop your speed, rear proximity warning, the code to maintain clear distance behind kicks in and can't slow down anymore.
Distance closing, right lane not clear, left lane, no space for vehicle in traffic flow, signal left
adequate space identified in left lane traffic flow, vehicle power band inadequate to merge into identified available space
identified space slows, expands, and matches speed ahead of vehicle, accelerate.
proximity warning front, proximity warning rear, space is now smaller than vehicle, match speed with forward vehicle
Large mass on left, wall on right, proximity warning front, proximity warning rear, available room closing
game over
The question wasn't so much posed as "what should the car do?" but more as how does the car recognize and react? What sort of If-Then-Else logic does the car need to perform to override what some of its sensors are telling it? There are rare times when throwing caution to the wind will save a person, and if you find yourself in positions where you need to throw caution to the wind to get out of a bad predicament too often you probably need to check and evaluate yourself, but how do you program a machine to throw caution to the wind when it's necessary? What happens when the chaos of the world puts its full will to bare against the perfect order of mechanical procedure?
Finally, there's your point of automate everything on the roadway. Yes, that would be ideal, and for the truckers that would complain about the loss of freight jobs I say change is inevitable; but you can't argue that at least for a while you're going to have automated vehicles sharing the road with traditionally controlled vehicles. For this, a solution needs to be made. Personally, on the Interstates I would prefer to see automation only lanes with their own entrances and exits that travel parallel to the non-automated lanes. This would eliminate the chaos processing the cars would have to perform at high speed.
What I'd miss most when diving into automated travel is the decompression that comes with my daily commute to and from work. That's an hour each way when there's nothing to think about but me, the road, and the performance of my bike while taking in the scenery with the four cylinders humming nicely at 2800 RPM, 5th gear pushing me along at 45MPH.
If you are, what steps would you take to ensure that an automated vehicle would not allow itself to get caught in The Rolling Box? Let me go over the scenario with you.
You are cruising inside of a truck's slip stream at about 65 mph (automated vehicle, it's going to ride closer to the truck than recommended for humans by default and thus can take better economic advantage of the slipstream.) You have heavy bumper-bumper traffic moving to your left at about 75-80mph with less than a car length between them and a jersey barrier on your right, half a foot from the shoulder line so no room for your vehicle to go there. A Tractor trailer is coming up on you from behind and matches speed with you about a truck length behind the truck in front of you. Now they're starting a convoy shift so the truck that was in the tail for the last 10-20 miles will move to the front to start giving the front truck an economy boost through slip streaming. The truck performing the shift gets to be right beside you in his passing maneuver, and now you are in the kill box. Most likely, the truck will continue on and take his place at the front of the convoy, but at this critical moment when he is right beside you there's countless things that can go wrong, and every single one of those things WILL KILL you (especially in that little POS frame).
The truck directly ahead has a blow out. Congratulations, you now have a rubber alligator coming at you and no where to move. Hit the alligator (potentially causing a fatal flip on its own), get run over by the truck behind you. There is no option of moving left or right.
Traffic suddenly stops ahead due to an accident, congratulations your computer controlled vehicle was able to stop at the same rate or faster than the truck in front of you. You'll still have a closed coffin service because the truck behind you didn't get the message and will slam into you, and push your little toy UNDER the back of the trailer in front of you. Congratulations, you just lost your head.
Trucker to your left sees something that makes him decide to pull into your lane before he completes the full maneuver. He doesn't see you, and doesn't wait for the ok from the trucker behind. And...another closed coffin service for you.
Another way to end up in the same box is to have a truck pull up beside you first, then a third truck will pull in behind you and complete the box... though this one tends to be deliberate and happens more when a driver pisses off a trucker... such as when a driver slipstreams a trucker without getting permission.
So, Dave. What does your car do? How does it recognize that it's getting boxed in, especially in the latter case when it looks every bit like the truck is just going to pass you and the truck in front of you...but decides to build the box instead?
Ok dude... I'm a programmer in a company that supports Agriculture, which means that I get to meet a lot of farmers. If I can get a bunch of farmers pissed off about the kind of data service they're getting from their ISP, then it shouldn't be too difficult to get your businessmen, doctors, nurses, etc to realize they're not really getting what they pay for.
Of course, if you can't persuade people in a way that they would understand then maybe you need to look at yourself and see where your articulation is failing you. Perhaps you don't feel confident in your own knowledge and understanding of what this whole customer/Netflix/Comcast relationship entails. Rather than face your own lack of understanding, you'd prefer to give up before you even start and externalize that which you lack, projecting it upon the people around you with the rationalization that if someone of your brilliance cannot understand the concept, how can anyone else around you understand it. I completely understand this, and in a way it is true. It's a self fulfilling prophecy of a sorts. If you can't understand a concept it is a near impossibility for you to articulate the concept to a person who has less of a technical platform to use as a basis than you do.
So, rather than stating that I've lost 99% of the people with my psychoanalysis, please let me know how I can help you with your understanding of this subject that you may be armed with the persuasive weaponry that you can use on those around you that you may increase the size of the army that can stand against Comcast?
So what? Educate them. Show them the Correlation: User pays Comcast, Netflix pays their direct carrier, Comcast wants Netflix to pay them directly to guarantee QoS, Netflix gives in giving user better experience and subsequently a couple months down the line increases the rate on their service. This rate increase is to directly pay Comcast for the added service charge, which can be effectively presented to the user that Comcast is double dipping from the user via a third party (Netflix), and if Comcast hadn't tried to play the dirty pool, it's unlikely that their Netflix rate would have gone up.
There's a way to spin anything to get someone riled up. If they still cannot see the issue with this or worse, justify it with "If it makes my service better I'm all for paying a little extra", hit them with "Comcast didn't do anything to make your service better, they just stopped actively making your service worse to try and milk money Mafia style outta you and Netflix." If they still don't get it, just tell them that they're a part of the problem with jacked up data rates and leave it at that. If they don't understand by this point, they're hopeless and nothing will work.
One thing about all this is that we cannot give up. We need to make every effort to try to educate the people that will listen and understand why this is so bad. If we give up at the first sign of resistance, we're as bad as they are. If we give up after hammering the strongest point we have in the argument and they still won't change their beliefs, only then should we move on, possibly to revisit once there's stronger arguments. Advocating for change is hardly ever easy.
Engine fire (Sudden rise in temp gauge, check engine warning light). Accessory pulley bearing worn out and about to be thrown through the hood (indicated by sudden loud racket under the hood). Sudden loss of oil pressure from cracked block that can lead to seizing (oil or check engine warning light). Throwing a piston rod out the side of the engine (loud knocking sound coming from body of engine). These are all things that having an emergency kill switch would be beneficial for preventing when the normal ignition button fails to work. All motorcycles currently have this, why is it so hard for automakers to put this in vehicles?
If I lose power steering or braking I just have to steer or brake harder - ok, it sucks, but if you can't do that you shouldn't be driving
That's fine and dandy for hydraulic power boosting systems, but what about these cars coming out now with electronic fly by wire systems that don't seem to have any mechanical linkage between the control interface and the control surfaces?
I have a GM vehicle that has an electrical issue that regularly drains the battery where it needs to be cranked and run daily, or else it will need to be jumped. That is an issue in and of itself that GM hasn't really took seriously that isn't the focus of my discussion here. One such time I was running late for an appointment and found the car was yet again dead in the driveway, and I had to roll it down the hill to make room for me to get my motorcycle out of the garage. I discovered just how harrowing this car would be if it ever electrically died on the roadway.
When I unlocked the ignition, my break pedal went to the floor without any resistance and there was very little movement in the front wheels for the wide swaths I was making with the steering wheel...again with VERY little resistance lock to lock. I put my foot on the break, shifted to neutral and slowly released the Emergency/Parking brake. Without the e-brake, the breaks were pulsing and would not hold the vehicle, leaving a very jerky ride down a long hill. The steering wheel also had no means of controlling the direction, but luckily the drive is long and straight. Before I got to the end of the driveway, I slowly reengaged the emergency break and tried to shift out of neutral...NOPE. Transmission was locked into neutral now, AND my ignition couldn't be turned back to lock.
I then got out of the car, applied power from my bike's battery tender to the posts under the hood (the actual battery is under the passenger seat), deactivated the alarm that just woke up, was able to move all the control interfaces as expected with proper resistances, shift back into park, and retrieve my key.
I will be so glad when I can unload this thing and put the money into a new front suspension for my '96 Caprice Classic, like I wanted to do in the first place. Never ever ever buy a Traverse.
If it's e911 service, it's actually better than CallerID. I called 911 once from my cell phone for a medical emergency I was a witness to. Instead of me having to give the operator my location, he spouted it off to me to verify. I only had to give a minor correction as to the suite number of where the accident was in relation to where I was calling from.
even though the public likes to imagine that running out of gas in a plane means soaring gently until you land on a convenient 4-lane road or meticulously preened grass field
Ok, I get that a plane isn't going to glide as well as a glider that's designed for, well, gliding; but it's not going to drop like a stone either, unless you suck at buying planes and vetting designs. You control your airspeed with your pitch, and so long as you don't let it drop below the minimum airspeed to generate lift, you can keep a dead plane in the air for a while. Long enough that you can find someplace to put down where you'll get minimal damage for the area. Keep your head about you and keep from stalling the lift, always have an emergency landing target in mind, and so long as you haven't been hit by a missile you should be ok. Granted, it's probably not going to be the most gentile landing, and the likelihood that the plane will be able to fly again isn't too good unless you really get lucky on finding the perfect field/road/clearing to put down on, but that's why you keep emergency supplies on board for first aid, flares and rations... right?
You're confusing Debt/Asset and Deficit/Surplus. Debt is what we owe, Asset is what we Own free and clear. Deficit is what we are spending above what revenues are. Surplus is the amount of revenue above spending. Clinton, while raising the amount of Debt the country had, was able to get Congress to pass a budget that generated a Surplus. Over time, if the Surplus was maintained, it would have started eating up the Debt and hopefully may have eventually turned it into an Asset. Unfortunately, Bush had turned that all around in his first term and began marching up the Deficit again...thus increasing the Debt. At least Obama has reduced the Deficit, even though it is still raising the debt, just not as fast as it was when he started. You may ask, how can Obama be spending more but reduce the deficit? Simply because he didn't increase spending at a faster rate than the increase in GDP.
Your PCs would all still have GBE speed with each other since they're going to be physically connected through a GBE switch or several, depending on the number of your physical machines. The only place where you'd need wireless is between the Router that would be plugging into the DSL modem and the Access point / Wireless Bridge, which can be a unit that plugs directly into a surge Protector/Lightning Suppressor and has an Ethernet port that can run a cable to one of your GBE switches. No additional Wireless cards are needed as the Access Point would be the wireless card for the entire network. Also, if you get a model of Router and a model of Access Point that has removable antennae, you can swap the area antennae with a directional system. Using the directional system will improve your signal strength, which will in turn ensure that your Access Point/Bridge and Router are connecting at the maximum speed possible. It will also help to improve security of the connection on top of using WPA2 encryption due to being a very focused beam of radio waves instead of a spherical area. As already noted, this will also provide an Air Gap between the phone line equipment and your more expensive computer equipment, reducing the number of attack vectors a lightning strike can take to get to your more expensive machines.
If you're worried about loosing the GBE file transfers to remote servers through your DSL modem, don't. Your LAN is still GBE with all the computers still running at GBE speed with each other. Depending on if you get Wireless N or Wireless AC, you're going to have 300Mb/s to 800Mb/s link speeds respectively over the wireless. All of this is still going to be faster than whatever your ISP gives you (average ~3-7Mb/s on DSL, ~10-30Mb/s on Cable, give or take) so you never had GBE transfer over the internet... unless you're that lucky grandma in Europe (Sweden, I think?) that's getting 40Gb/s.
Try using a Wireless router connected to the modem and put your PC on an access point. That way you'll minimize the damage vector coming over your phone system, provided you have adequate suppression and grounding on your electrical system. If you're worried about signal strength you get an N based system or better and use a directional antenna system between the router and the access point. Doing it this way you shouldn't have any issues with online gaming as the network bottleneck is still going to be your DSL if online gaming is your cup of tea.
...enjoy some novel food, make new acquaintances that they wouldn't normally meet (i.e., networking), see old friends, and generally enjoy being alive...
Ahhhhh... reminds me of the good old days of Chess Club, Anime Club, and the good ole FFA.
There's more to life than the gladiatorial combat of men tossing balls up and down a field to the cheers of the masses.
It's about 8 Saturdays per year
Ok, 8 Saturdays of limited access to academic facilities. That's 8 Saturdays across 2 semesters, starting right about finals time of fall semester, where an academic who's going to school full time and working full time needs to do lab-work for his degree that happens to have weekly projects due every Monday, and winds up having to do a three mile hike to get to the science building, because the parking lot right next to it also happens to be the one closed off for game use. Oh... let's not mention that it's a three mile hike carrying a notebook, at least a few books, and potentially additional equipment. There's not much room for time Management and working around game schedules when your own workload is scheduled and enforced by other people who have no time for forgiveness.
Have your sports but keep them away from my path... because I now have the power that I can and will steamroll the field into a new parking lot for the science building because I too no longer have time for forgiveness.
Read the summary and you'll see that we're not talking about a high powered audio system; We're talking about built-in Laptop audio. I have yet to see a modern laptop with a hardware volume control potentiometer (volume knob) that controls the voltage going to the speakers. Instead, the manufactures hard wire the volume to a specific resistance so these speakers are running at a maximum limit 100% of the time that they are turned on. Understand that I'm not saying the manufacturers are having the speaker system running at full bore 100% of the time, but they're being hardware limited to what is supposed to be a safe level below that to ensure that the speakers don't blow themselves out. On these systems, the volume control buttons will operate the Volume Control applet of the Operating System to control the loudness within the range from mute to the hardware limited maximum.
In this way it would be theoretically possible, if the volume control hardware is defective in design and the Volume Control applet had the right vulnerabilities, to be able to build a malicious web page that could crank up the volume on the laptop and generate a waveform that would damage the user's speakers.
This leads me in the belief that Dell is covering up a defect in the laptop speaker control design to avoid having to perform a costly recall on the affected models.
I hope I can make the links you need to see the logic that other posters have been attempting to convey.
With non-sponsored open source software in most cases the developer is creating the software mostly for their own personal understanding of the concepts of software design or to develop their own personal tools for whatever other personal projects they are working on. At this level the software is unpolished, providing only enough of an interface for a single person to utilize. You can start to have other developers joining the project for their own personal growth and understanding. An interface design major might put a better GUI front end to the project. Someone who needs to learn about database design might put more robust SQL statements into the code, or make the code behave better with the APIs of a certain database engine. Regardless of who comes in and adds to the project, with non-sponsored open source, there is no vested interest beyond what a person puts in for their own personal growth and understanding. Also, everything with the development of an application is a serious might. At this level, it's not very often that people training in QA have any interest in getting involved as college classes on System Analysis tend to focus on Use Cases and hardly ever suggest students go out and find an open source project to test. Not that they would get anywhere with the egos that tend to be involved in many of the non-sponsored open-source projects. Coders at this level can, at times, have very strong emotional attachments to their code and take a criticism as a challenge to duel.
The next level is sponsored open source. At this level, you're going to have people putting money into a project to help make it as good as it can be. This incentives developers into producing cleaner code with better functionality that would appease a more wide spread audience. As the project grows and gets more monetary involvement a lead developer may look over the system he's building as a whole and try to identify areas that need to be improved and features that would be good to add. For this he may start looking to hire on people to start fulfilling the roles where he isn't necessarily the best fit in the interest of putting out a better project. Depending on the project lead's ability to take criticisms in the face of this goal, he may actually hire on some Analysts to perform QA and testing on the project to help it appeal to a wider audience as well as some form of tech support to help the end users in utilizing the application.
The last level is "sponsored" closed source (quotes denote redundancy). If a person or business is developing closed source, it's because they live or die by the code they're writing, and they have every intention on living by it. This code is either going to be in a product that is to be distributed to end users, or it is an internal application that is going to handle some aspect of internal business processes. In the former case it absolutely has to be easy to use, well documented, well tested, patched and maintained, and have support teams available to help the end user troubleshoot any problems that may be cropping up. If any part of this does not live to some kind of market standard, the product will fail. In the latter case much of the same philosophies apply with the addition of mission critical reliability. If internal software is regularly choking and losing customer records to a buffer overflow three times a week one can assume that if it isn't fixed in short order the entire business will very shortly wind up on the rocks. For both of these cases, companies that develop closed source software will set up an entire department of Quality Assurance and Testers to make sure that what gets put into production is the absolute best it can be.
I'm sure there may be some other aspects of these three tiers that I have completely missed the mark on, but this is what comes to mind the quickest for explaining the reasons why closed source software has the greater likelihood of being higher quality applications
It's fortunate in the same way as "The sun is going to nova and take out the inner solar system with it; fortunately I'll be dead long before that happens." In this case it's "Scammers and fraudsters are working hard to get your personal information and identity; fortunately with healthcare.gov our identities are available the world over and all our credit scores have become meaningless numbers overnight." Just think, you can wipe away all your worst financial decisions simply by stating "I had perfect credit until healthcare.gov went live." It'll be easier and cheaper than filing for bankruptcy!
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Congratulations... you have more faith in human programmers than I do, part of which comes from my consistently having to fix system bugs that are introduced both by colleagues and occasionally errors that I missed in my own code. Also, as a former professional driver, I used to see the rolling box scenario quite often, sometimes several times in a day (note that I'm not saying I was in the box all those times, though it has happened a couple times when I wasn't paying attention to their pattern). The "victims" of such did not necessarily have to be right up on the tailgate of the truck to be slipstreaming either. 9 times out of 10, the truckers in these incidents weren't trying to perform the box intentionally as it was just how the convoy formation was moving, and often times a quick warning on the CB was all it took to make the guy on the left realize he needed to make an opening for the car. The 1 in ten case I would usually hear one of the members of the team call out "Make the box" or something similar over the CB before the formation started. This usually happened when the driver was following too close.
And actually, one can be in the slipstream even if you're 500-1000 feet back from the truck. Pro-Tip: If you feel your vehicle doing a slight side to side shimmy while you're behind the truck, and you know your front end is in good repair and proper alignment, you're in his stream and sucking his fuel. The Shimmy is even worse on the motorcycle. You could be cruising down the roadway and suddenly feel the bike wobbling side to side on a windless day. Look a mile down the road, and there's the Semi that's disturbing your corridor. Get within a half to three quarter mile of his tail, and the bike is inside his stream and getting mixed up like a bird in a hurricane. Close to less than one quarter mile away from him, and the bike is now stable in the stream.
What consumer good doesn't concern itself with audience, career, culture, education, art, entertainment, and connection? Every consumer good on the market has a demographic that it's marketed towards. Books are no different, so therefore the phrase "Yes they are" is flatly true. Books are like any other consumer good and must vie for the disposable income of the consumer in the exact same way, whether or not Hachette sees them that way or not.
What if it starts with "The baker gives you a sweetroll..."?
That's the correct procedure to follow and answers the question of what does the car do in the situation, but you completely missed the mark of "How does it recognize that it's getting boxed in?" It's actually a special case problem that requires intuition and human reasoning. Not only that, but to maneuver out of the situation is going to generate a lot of conflicting sensor trips that human intuition and aggression would ignore to get out of the situation.
The question wasn't so much posed as "what should the car do?" but more as how does the car recognize and react? What sort of If-Then-Else logic does the car need to perform to override what some of its sensors are telling it? There are rare times when throwing caution to the wind will save a person, and if you find yourself in positions where you need to throw caution to the wind to get out of a bad predicament too often you probably need to check and evaluate yourself, but how do you program a machine to throw caution to the wind when it's necessary? What happens when the chaos of the world puts its full will to bare against the perfect order of mechanical procedure?
Finally, there's your point of automate everything on the roadway. Yes, that would be ideal, and for the truckers that would complain about the loss of freight jobs I say change is inevitable; but you can't argue that at least for a while you're going to have automated vehicles sharing the road with traditionally controlled vehicles. For this, a solution needs to be made. Personally, on the Interstates I would prefer to see automation only lanes with their own entrances and exits that travel parallel to the non-automated lanes. This would eliminate the chaos processing the cars would have to perform at high speed.
What I'd miss most when diving into automated travel is the decompression that comes with my daily commute to and from work. That's an hour each way when there's nothing to think about but me, the road, and the performance of my bike while taking in the scenery with the four cylinders humming nicely at 2800 RPM, 5th gear pushing me along at 45MPH.
Research. Learning. Curiosity. World Domination.
Dave, are you a programmer?
If you are, what steps would you take to ensure that an automated vehicle would not allow itself to get caught in The Rolling Box? Let me go over the scenario with you.
You are cruising inside of a truck's slip stream at about 65 mph (automated vehicle, it's going to ride closer to the truck than recommended for humans by default and thus can take better economic advantage of the slipstream.) You have heavy bumper-bumper traffic moving to your left at about 75-80mph with less than a car length between them and a jersey barrier on your right, half a foot from the shoulder line so no room for your vehicle to go there. A Tractor trailer is coming up on you from behind and matches speed with you about a truck length behind the truck in front of you. Now they're starting a convoy shift so the truck that was in the tail for the last 10-20 miles will move to the front to start giving the front truck an economy boost through slip streaming. The truck performing the shift gets to be right beside you in his passing maneuver, and now you are in the kill box. Most likely, the truck will continue on and take his place at the front of the convoy, but at this critical moment when he is right beside you there's countless things that can go wrong, and every single one of those things WILL KILL you (especially in that little POS frame).
Another way to end up in the same box is to have a truck pull up beside you first, then a third truck will pull in behind you and complete the box... though this one tends to be deliberate and happens more when a driver pisses off a trucker... such as when a driver slipstreams a trucker without getting permission.
So, Dave. What does your car do? How does it recognize that it's getting boxed in, especially in the latter case when it looks every bit like the truck is just going to pass you and the truck in front of you...but decides to build the box instead?
Ok dude... I'm a programmer in a company that supports Agriculture, which means that I get to meet a lot of farmers. If I can get a bunch of farmers pissed off about the kind of data service they're getting from their ISP, then it shouldn't be too difficult to get your businessmen, doctors, nurses, etc to realize they're not really getting what they pay for.
Of course, if you can't persuade people in a way that they would understand then maybe you need to look at yourself and see where your articulation is failing you. Perhaps you don't feel confident in your own knowledge and understanding of what this whole customer/Netflix/Comcast relationship entails. Rather than face your own lack of understanding, you'd prefer to give up before you even start and externalize that which you lack, projecting it upon the people around you with the rationalization that if someone of your brilliance cannot understand the concept, how can anyone else around you understand it. I completely understand this, and in a way it is true. It's a self fulfilling prophecy of a sorts. If you can't understand a concept it is a near impossibility for you to articulate the concept to a person who has less of a technical platform to use as a basis than you do.
So, rather than stating that I've lost 99% of the people with my psychoanalysis, please let me know how I can help you with your understanding of this subject that you may be armed with the persuasive weaponry that you can use on those around you that you may increase the size of the army that can stand against Comcast?
So what? Educate them. Show them the Correlation: User pays Comcast, Netflix pays their direct carrier, Comcast wants Netflix to pay them directly to guarantee QoS, Netflix gives in giving user better experience and subsequently a couple months down the line increases the rate on their service. This rate increase is to directly pay Comcast for the added service charge, which can be effectively presented to the user that Comcast is double dipping from the user via a third party (Netflix), and if Comcast hadn't tried to play the dirty pool, it's unlikely that their Netflix rate would have gone up.
There's a way to spin anything to get someone riled up. If they still cannot see the issue with this or worse, justify it with "If it makes my service better I'm all for paying a little extra", hit them with "Comcast didn't do anything to make your service better, they just stopped actively making your service worse to try and milk money Mafia style outta you and Netflix." If they still don't get it, just tell them that they're a part of the problem with jacked up data rates and leave it at that. If they don't understand by this point, they're hopeless and nothing will work.
One thing about all this is that we cannot give up. We need to make every effort to try to educate the people that will listen and understand why this is so bad. If we give up at the first sign of resistance, we're as bad as they are. If we give up after hammering the strongest point we have in the argument and they still won't change their beliefs, only then should we move on, possibly to revisit once there's stronger arguments. Advocating for change is hardly ever easy.
Engine fire (Sudden rise in temp gauge, check engine warning light). Accessory pulley bearing worn out and about to be thrown through the hood (indicated by sudden loud racket under the hood). Sudden loss of oil pressure from cracked block that can lead to seizing (oil or check engine warning light). Throwing a piston rod out the side of the engine (loud knocking sound coming from body of engine). These are all things that having an emergency kill switch would be beneficial for preventing when the normal ignition button fails to work. All motorcycles currently have this, why is it so hard for automakers to put this in vehicles?
That's fine and dandy for hydraulic power boosting systems, but what about these cars coming out now with electronic fly by wire systems that don't seem to have any mechanical linkage between the control interface and the control surfaces?
I have a GM vehicle that has an electrical issue that regularly drains the battery where it needs to be cranked and run daily, or else it will need to be jumped. That is an issue in and of itself that GM hasn't really took seriously that isn't the focus of my discussion here. One such time I was running late for an appointment and found the car was yet again dead in the driveway, and I had to roll it down the hill to make room for me to get my motorcycle out of the garage. I discovered just how harrowing this car would be if it ever electrically died on the roadway.
When I unlocked the ignition, my break pedal went to the floor without any resistance and there was very little movement in the front wheels for the wide swaths I was making with the steering wheel...again with VERY little resistance lock to lock. I put my foot on the break, shifted to neutral and slowly released the Emergency/Parking brake. Without the e-brake, the breaks were pulsing and would not hold the vehicle, leaving a very jerky ride down a long hill. The steering wheel also had no means of controlling the direction, but luckily the drive is long and straight. Before I got to the end of the driveway, I slowly reengaged the emergency break and tried to shift out of neutral...NOPE. Transmission was locked into neutral now, AND my ignition couldn't be turned back to lock.
I then got out of the car, applied power from my bike's battery tender to the posts under the hood (the actual battery is under the passenger seat), deactivated the alarm that just woke up, was able to move all the control interfaces as expected with proper resistances, shift back into park, and retrieve my key.
I will be so glad when I can unload this thing and put the money into a new front suspension for my '96 Caprice Classic, like I wanted to do in the first place. Never ever ever buy a Traverse.
As one who also associates as a raven-type... I have to agree with this statement.
If it's e911 service, it's actually better than CallerID. I called 911 once from my cell phone for a medical emergency I was a witness to. Instead of me having to give the operator my location, he spouted it off to me to verify. I only had to give a minor correction as to the suite number of where the accident was in relation to where I was calling from.
Ok, I get that a plane isn't going to glide as well as a glider that's designed for, well, gliding; but it's not going to drop like a stone either, unless you suck at buying planes and vetting designs. You control your airspeed with your pitch, and so long as you don't let it drop below the minimum airspeed to generate lift, you can keep a dead plane in the air for a while. Long enough that you can find someplace to put down where you'll get minimal damage for the area. Keep your head about you and keep from stalling the lift, always have an emergency landing target in mind, and so long as you haven't been hit by a missile you should be ok. Granted, it's probably not going to be the most gentile landing, and the likelihood that the plane will be able to fly again isn't too good unless you really get lucky on finding the perfect field/road/clearing to put down on, but that's why you keep emergency supplies on board for first aid, flares and rations... right?
Courtney is the dude on the left. Raija is the toothpick on the right. Yes, Courtney can be a guy's name.
I'm presuming the device your talking about is your wife? Marriage. Ain't it wonderful?
You're confusing Debt/Asset and Deficit/Surplus. Debt is what we owe, Asset is what we Own free and clear. Deficit is what we are spending above what revenues are. Surplus is the amount of revenue above spending. Clinton, while raising the amount of Debt the country had, was able to get Congress to pass a budget that generated a Surplus. Over time, if the Surplus was maintained, it would have started eating up the Debt and hopefully may have eventually turned it into an Asset. Unfortunately, Bush had turned that all around in his first term and began marching up the Deficit again...thus increasing the Debt. At least Obama has reduced the Deficit, even though it is still raising the debt, just not as fast as it was when he started. You may ask, how can Obama be spending more but reduce the deficit? Simply because he didn't increase spending at a faster rate than the increase in GDP.
Sources:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/25/barack-obama/obama-says-deficit-falling-fastest-rate-60-years/
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/05/obama_budget_sees_deficit_reduction_from_health_law.html
Your PCs would all still have GBE speed with each other since they're going to be physically connected through a GBE switch or several, depending on the number of your physical machines. The only place where you'd need wireless is between the Router that would be plugging into the DSL modem and the Access point / Wireless Bridge, which can be a unit that plugs directly into a surge Protector/Lightning Suppressor and has an Ethernet port that can run a cable to one of your GBE switches. No additional Wireless cards are needed as the Access Point would be the wireless card for the entire network. Also, if you get a model of Router and a model of Access Point that has removable antennae, you can swap the area antennae with a directional system. Using the directional system will improve your signal strength, which will in turn ensure that your Access Point/Bridge and Router are connecting at the maximum speed possible. It will also help to improve security of the connection on top of using WPA2 encryption due to being a very focused beam of radio waves instead of a spherical area. As already noted, this will also provide an Air Gap between the phone line equipment and your more expensive computer equipment, reducing the number of attack vectors a lightning strike can take to get to your more expensive machines.
If you're worried about loosing the GBE file transfers to remote servers through your DSL modem, don't. Your LAN is still GBE with all the computers still running at GBE speed with each other. Depending on if you get Wireless N or Wireless AC, you're going to have 300Mb/s to 800Mb/s link speeds respectively over the wireless. All of this is still going to be faster than whatever your ISP gives you (average ~3-7Mb/s on DSL, ~10-30Mb/s on Cable, give or take) so you never had GBE transfer over the internet... unless you're that lucky grandma in Europe (Sweden, I think?) that's getting 40Gb/s.
Try using a Wireless router connected to the modem and put your PC on an access point. That way you'll minimize the damage vector coming over your phone system, provided you have adequate suppression and grounding on your electrical system. If you're worried about signal strength you get an N based system or better and use a directional antenna system between the router and the access point. Doing it this way you shouldn't have any issues with online gaming as the network bottleneck is still going to be your DSL if online gaming is your cup of tea.
If I wanted to live among the emotionless , I'd move to Japan.
Ahhhhh... reminds me of the good old days of Chess Club, Anime Club, and the good ole FFA.
There's more to life than the gladiatorial combat of men tossing balls up and down a field to the cheers of the masses.
Ok, 8 Saturdays of limited access to academic facilities. That's 8 Saturdays across 2 semesters, starting right about finals time of fall semester, where an academic who's going to school full time and working full time needs to do lab-work for his degree that happens to have weekly projects due every Monday, and winds up having to do a three mile hike to get to the science building, because the parking lot right next to it also happens to be the one closed off for game use. Oh... let's not mention that it's a three mile hike carrying a notebook, at least a few books, and potentially additional equipment. There's not much room for time Management and working around game schedules when your own workload is scheduled and enforced by other people who have no time for forgiveness.
Have your sports but keep them away from my path... because I now have the power that I can and will steamroll the field into a new parking lot for the science building because I too no longer have time for forgiveness.
Read the summary and you'll see that we're not talking about a high powered audio system; We're talking about built-in Laptop audio. I have yet to see a modern laptop with a hardware volume control potentiometer (volume knob) that controls the voltage going to the speakers. Instead, the manufactures hard wire the volume to a specific resistance so these speakers are running at a maximum limit 100% of the time that they are turned on. Understand that I'm not saying the manufacturers are having the speaker system running at full bore 100% of the time, but they're being hardware limited to what is supposed to be a safe level below that to ensure that the speakers don't blow themselves out. On these systems, the volume control buttons will operate the Volume Control applet of the Operating System to control the loudness within the range from mute to the hardware limited maximum.
In this way it would be theoretically possible, if the volume control hardware is defective in design and the Volume Control applet had the right vulnerabilities, to be able to build a malicious web page that could crank up the volume on the laptop and generate a waveform that would damage the user's speakers.
This leads me in the belief that Dell is covering up a defect in the laptop speaker control design to avoid having to perform a costly recall on the affected models.
I hope I can make the links you need to see the logic that other posters have been attempting to convey.
With non-sponsored open source software in most cases the developer is creating the software mostly for their own personal understanding of the concepts of software design or to develop their own personal tools for whatever other personal projects they are working on. At this level the software is unpolished, providing only enough of an interface for a single person to utilize. You can start to have other developers joining the project for their own personal growth and understanding. An interface design major might put a better GUI front end to the project. Someone who needs to learn about database design might put more robust SQL statements into the code, or make the code behave better with the APIs of a certain database engine. Regardless of who comes in and adds to the project, with non-sponsored open source, there is no vested interest beyond what a person puts in for their own personal growth and understanding. Also, everything with the development of an application is a serious might. At this level, it's not very often that people training in QA have any interest in getting involved as college classes on System Analysis tend to focus on Use Cases and hardly ever suggest students go out and find an open source project to test. Not that they would get anywhere with the egos that tend to be involved in many of the non-sponsored open-source projects. Coders at this level can, at times, have very strong emotional attachments to their code and take a criticism as a challenge to duel.
The next level is sponsored open source. At this level, you're going to have people putting money into a project to help make it as good as it can be. This incentives developers into producing cleaner code with better functionality that would appease a more wide spread audience. As the project grows and gets more monetary involvement a lead developer may look over the system he's building as a whole and try to identify areas that need to be improved and features that would be good to add. For this he may start looking to hire on people to start fulfilling the roles where he isn't necessarily the best fit in the interest of putting out a better project. Depending on the project lead's ability to take criticisms in the face of this goal, he may actually hire on some Analysts to perform QA and testing on the project to help it appeal to a wider audience as well as some form of tech support to help the end users in utilizing the application.
The last level is "sponsored" closed source (quotes denote redundancy). If a person or business is developing closed source, it's because they live or die by the code they're writing, and they have every intention on living by it. This code is either going to be in a product that is to be distributed to end users, or it is an internal application that is going to handle some aspect of internal business processes. In the former case it absolutely has to be easy to use, well documented, well tested, patched and maintained, and have support teams available to help the end user troubleshoot any problems that may be cropping up. If any part of this does not live to some kind of market standard, the product will fail. In the latter case much of the same philosophies apply with the addition of mission critical reliability. If internal software is regularly choking and losing customer records to a buffer overflow three times a week one can assume that if it isn't fixed in short order the entire business will very shortly wind up on the rocks. For both of these cases, companies that develop closed source software will set up an entire department of Quality Assurance and Testers to make sure that what gets put into production is the absolute best it can be.
I'm sure there may be some other aspects of these three tiers that I have completely missed the mark on, but this is what comes to mind the quickest for explaining the reasons why closed source software has the greater likelihood of being higher quality applications
It's fortunate in the same way as "The sun is going to nova and take out the inner solar system with it; fortunately I'll be dead long before that happens." In this case it's "Scammers and fraudsters are working hard to get your personal information and identity; fortunately with healthcare.gov our identities are available the world over and all our credit scores have become meaningless numbers overnight." Just think, you can wipe away all your worst financial decisions simply by stating "I had perfect credit until healthcare.gov went live." It'll be easier and cheaper than filing for bankruptcy!
They're preventing Apple Pie???? CRUCIFY THEM!