To be honest, back in the 1990's - 2000's this was a problem. But so was a lot of other stuff.
I'm no Windows fan, but I have had Windows XP and Windows 7 laptops for the last 6-7 years. Both basically live their lives in standby or hibernate and a full boot or BIOS screen means I forgot to charge it.
They got turned on in the morning to check websites before work. Put into suspend. Taken to work. Opened and used for 8+ hours. Put into suspend. Taken home. Gamed/browsed on for the next 8 hours. Put into suspend for the night. And they would literally go for MONTHS between reboots (and then only against my will, such as updates, batteries not being charged fully, etc.).
To be honest, I haven't even thought about it in years. It used to be a big deal. There was a time where I turned off all power states because it was just that ropey. I can't remember the last time I had to do that. A machine that can't go into and out of suspend instantly, or that needs full boots even once a week, is one I'd start diagnosing.
I work in schools - pretty much the same thing there. Teachers just leave their laptops in standby overnight or take them home in standby and use them and they rarely see a BIOS screen. We have to make sure that Truecrypt pops up on system resume because it's so easy to leave them for weeks in suspend while you use them.
Same for desktop machines nowadays. With Windows 8 you really notice it because it's instant on/off back to the login screen. Nobody complains about boot times because they never witness them.
I don't know about Linux - I tend to run Linux for servers only so power-states are not something you want to happen, and elsewhere I rarely have proprietary drivers, but I imagine it's pretty much the same situation. Linux always did a better job than Windows for power resume whenever I used it, and they have had suspend-to-RAM and all sorts for years now. Just about every ARM Linux device I've ever seen spends its life in suspend. Even my TomTom from 10 years ago still has perfect suspend/resume functionality and has gone at least three years of daily use without ever doing a full boot.
Honestly... in a few years from now, once Windows 8 becomes the norm, people will be asking me what the hell the BIOS screen is and why they only see it when they first buy the computer.
If you are using that kind of power, no it's not profit.
But have you not seen the ASIC miners that pay for themselves in a year, including electricity?
Running a general-purpose computer, even with a GPU, to mine is no longer feasible. Running a small, dedicated, embedded chip on a low-power board actually knocks it out of the park.
But, there, if the value of Bitcoin drops too much, then you may not end up paying back what it costs to buy them (some are $1000+). Which, of course, means it's not profit.
Like everything, it's all speculation for barter. If you buy a thousand toilet rolls expecting them to be worth more in the future they either 1) are, and thus you made a profit or 2) aren't, and thus you made a loss. Either way, you can claim it on taxes as the appropriate box. Just like anything else.
Then you have a choice - follow the contract, or break it.
Everywhere I've ever worked, it's been two MONTHS minimum. And, yeah, probably nobody would hunt you down if you didn't do it, but at some point almost every employer wants a reference and/or will contact your former employers.
I'm not sure I'd employ someone if I heard that they'd broken their contract. I'm not sure I'd employ someone who'd just walked out of their job (unless, and this quite critical, they then filed for unfair dismissal, or an untenable working environment similar - the fact that you BOTHER to go to court means that you didn't actual want to go).
I have been "poached" at least three times - once by a former client, and twice by another workplace. I was working, I was unhappy, I knew I wanted to leave, they offered a better situation, they were happy to take me there and then (and at least one specifically said they wouldn't care about me leaving my former job without notice).
I didn't. I did what I was contracted to do, moved on. In one case, I went above-and-beyond and negotiated one day a week at my previous job just to ease the transition for a few months. And, in fact, that particular one that I went back to help was the client that then - a year later - poached me back from that job (after they'd sorted out money and hours enough to meet my request).
Leaving without notice is rude, inconsiderate and potentially (in fact, almost certainly) breach-of-contract. The question is quite why are you leaving without notice and what risk you place on doing that to go somewhere else.
Personally, I see notice periods as the cleanup period. Hey, you don't want me. I'm going elsewhere. It's probably time for you to learn all that I did, hire a replacement, get some direct hand-off while I'm still here and not piss me off before I go. Then I won't leave loose ends, won't leave you in the lurch, will document all that odd crap that nobody got around to writing down, etc.
Some people are saying that your boss will make you work harder to spite you in the notice period. So what? They could have done that AT ANY TIME and are probably DOING that to make you leave anyway. Fulfill your contractual obligations. Ask them if they'd rather you left without notice. If they kick up a fuss - well, sorry, my contract says nothing about doing X, Y, Z and I finish at 5, and staying "for any reasonable unforeseen circumstance" (or whatever is in your contract) doesn't cover this situation - they can argue it in court if they like, but they won't. What are they going to do? Sack you? In your notice period? Yeah, that's just a perfect way to show your new employer that you were right to leave.
Suck it up. Be professional. Tell your new employer that you REFUSE to leave your former employer in the lurch or give them an excuse to blame you, so you're going to clean up all the loose ends by working your notice, no matter what. It infers integrity and honesty and that you can suffer fools. Do exactly as you are required to do, then move on.
Want to know how I know? I'm in the fourth case of doing this for myself at the moment. MASSIVE summer upgrades, in what's become a one-man-IT-show. Impossible deadlines, independent verification by my own employer's auditor that I need more help to meet demand, etc. all totally ignored. So I'm applying for jobs, and then will work to the completion of my current project (no matter what) and then I'll go, not before. Let's see anyone try to blame me for finishing up properly.
Just knowing that they will still have to pay me, will still be no better off without hiring two replacements for me, and that it will royally put a lot of people's noses out of joint actually makes it worth it. Once you've made the decision to go, the rest is just entertainment.
There's a lot of much simpler security measures that work a lot more effectively. Every time you hear someone come up with elaborate digital security, you have to go back to thinking of basics. Security is simple, and overthinking it is the best way to make it even worse.
Put ATM's in secure places. In the UK, they are almost always just out on the street where anyone can shoulder-surf your PIN. Like in Europe/US put them inside a room that is controlled and monitored.
Make ATM's show you what they should look like. All the time, the ATM should just show you a picture of what it SHOULD look like. This picture should move / flip every now and then so you can see if someone has tampered with the screen. A quick glance and you can tell if that random bit of green plastic on the card slot is SUPPOSED to be there or not (this pisses me off even with genuine ATM's and I don't use them if they have those green slots).
(Incidentally, why do credit card terminals, which have to talk to the bank, not send the card number - or some identifier from the card - to the bank, which sends back a PHOTOGRAPH of the CARD HOLDER which the genuine merchant can use to verify, at least in part, whether it's their card or misuse. Unfakeable, as the photo is from the bank, not from the card, so genuine merchants would be able to spot even wives using their husband's cards - which is still technically not allowed, but is currently ignored. Fuck Chip-and-PIN, give my photo to every merchant I use my credit card with so they know who is me and who isn't and can query if they are uncertain).
Put a shutter on the card slot. When the card is needed, open the shutter. When it's not, shut the shutter. Make it so that ANY device on the card slot would stop the shutter shutting, and this in itself would cause the ATM to disable itself and alarm. No worse a chance of losing the card for the customer than those ATM's who haven't been serviced in a while and the motors barely have the strength to push it back out.
Make fucking cards that can't be "skimmed" and that - without the PIN - are useless. This isn't difficult, and what Chip-and-PIN was always supposed to solve. Then you can skim my card to your heart's content because without my PIN being entered correctly NOTHING happens or provides useful data (we've already sacrificed mag-stripes, so this is no great burden as the cards should ALREADY be useless without the PIN).
SEND SMS MESSAGES to users on every use of their card. Almost every European bank already does this (except for the UK). My Italian girlfriend gets a text within seconds of touching her card anywhere, even in the UK, with details of the transaction. Her dad, too, when he was over here and bought £10 of stuff in a hardware store, and we were able to tell the SHOP STAFF that they'd duplicated the transaction by mistake because he got a text before he even got his card back.
Simple things. Put the cardholders back in control of their cards. The only reason NOT to is that you make money somehow out of not doing this. I can't believe billions of pounds worth of fraud isn't incentive enough to do things like send texts to cardholders, or put little motorised shutters (like some ATMs used to have anyway) on the card slot.
I'll pay you that £25 a month that you want me to pay to watch TV when:
- I can just watch EVERYTHING. No exclusives, specials or "just pay extra to see this".
- I can watch what I want. Old stuff, new stuff, nobody decides for me. You just put your whole archives online and I can watch them.
- I can not watch anything I don't want to watch. This includes adverts.
- I can watch it when I want. Sorry, but the days of me staying in of an evening to catch particular show X died with the video recorder and are just laughable nowadays. The kind of people / entertainment that such scheduling works for are those things that are just "on" when people slouch down in the sofa for the evening not intending to move, and the program is entertaining enough that people don't switch over - this has bred the entire Big Brother / X-Factor crap for the last 10 years.
- I can watch it how I want - online, on a TV, on a tablet, from abroad, etc. You NEED me to say things like "Oh, you have to see this program, look, watch this for a minute, it's great" and/or "we have this program in England, it's fabulous, here I'll load up an episode for you". Honestly. If I can't, then you will not get new people watching programs.
- I can watch it when it comes out. No preview, exclusives, region differences, etc. I can just watch it from the release time onwards, forever.
- You have to stop giving a shit about piracy. Honestly, every measure ever implemented has been next-to-useless. All it's done is stop genuine people watching things as much as delaying pirates. I still refuse to buy Disney DVD's because they JUST DON'T WORK in my daughter's laptop. Simple as that. End of. If you can't make your money from TV channels WANTING to show your stuff and the associated licensing / merchandising rights then you should just stop making it.
Honestly, I'm infinitely more likely to pay £50 direct to "thebigbangtheory.com" for a lifetime membership that lets me view any and all episodes than I am to pay £25 a month to a channel that occasionally bothers to screen random episodes of it years after they come out and that you get literally PENCE of licensing revenue from per viewing.
The fact that you STILL haven't picked up on this as a possibility - alongside the traditional methods - means that you just don't care about actually making money as much as we'd like to think. You just care about nothing more than holding the rights and having the power to decide what's "big" and what's not, which is what the whole anti-piracy game is. I don't blame the actors or the writers so much as all the middle-men involved in the process. And it's about time we just cut them out.
If you haven't noticed, this is how people buy video games nowadays. It would take about a month to work out how to use Steam to distribute video content in the same way. The day Steam lets me "buy" a season of my favourite program, and I can just double-click to download and view it offline on as many computers as I like and not have to worry about if it will play or not, TV is dead. And not because of piracy.
"Yes, heaven forbid somebody invent a driver interface because it's interesting to drive with, and not because it's good for keeping the car on the road."?
Exploring alternate interfaces is one thing. Claiming they are practical is quite another. An impractical interface is, pretty much by definition, worthless as an interface.
Sure, in terms of experimenting and looking at the problem from different angles, it's "interesting". But you always have to consider the practical use. Things without practical use are, basically, art projects. "Interesting to investigate" but utterly useless at actually getting anything done.
One can inspire the other, sure, but an interface like this is nothing more than a gimmick. Now, Kinect, Wii controllers, even those musical artists that "play" light or vegetables - they are interesting to investigate AND practical (for certain definitions of practical - the vegetable thing, for example, is nothing more than what we already do with touchscreens, measuring capacitance of objects to detect changes when they are touched). Maybe their early experiments weren't practical - but here's the clincher - YOU DID NOT HEAR ABOUT THEM. For good reason. And they certainly didn't make frontpage.
There's investigating alternatives, thinking outside the box, and going back to first principles and trying again. But this is just a very expensive and extremely impractical way to do things we already do much more efficiently with - critically - no hope of ever improving the contribution that this would make to those tasks.
"An organization wants me to send them my personal data by email."
"But they do have a pretty good IT department"
No. They don't. Or their IT department is seriously underpowered in terms of getting through to their staff. Don't send personal data by email. If they don't have a system to let you do this (e.g. secured web form, etc.) then their IT department is already a bit of a failure. If they do, their staff would use it and tell you about it.
If you want to ask, just ask. "I'm not going to send personal data by unencrypted email - what is your procedure for encrypted email?"
Chances are, they won't have one and will just ask you to send the details unencrypted or by another method entirely.
I don't wish to be the bearer of bad fortune here, but I have 499 games on Steam on Windows. And 83 on Linux when I log in there. The same as you.
That's not to say that Linux games aren't there, or don't exist, or aren't moving that way, but it's not a question of there being 50% of games on Steam supporting it (from my account, less than 17%). And I suspect most of those are actually Valve or humble bundle games, and other games that I don't have installed or only played once, rather than top-name titles.
It's a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure SteamBox is going to make a dent unless it's profitable for players. It has to be cheap, good, and run most of this stuff without hassle. That's not hard - a Linux machine with the barest of 3D cards and "Big Picture" mode on HDMI is more than enough for the most part. But the problem is that if it ISN'T like that, then SteamBox won't boost Linux gaming that much at all.
There's no good reason why Linux gaming can't be successful. In fact, the only reason really is 20+ years of not being the market leader in gaming, rather than any technical or political reason. But I don't think a lot of people would be happy to splash out on a SteamBox that can only play 17% of their games, and those in a way that's more convoluted and nothing they couldn't have built themselves.
Hell, why isn't there already a "Games" distro of Ubuntu where we can just install it and get our Steam libraries and/or desura, etc. loaded onto it with a couple of clicks? It's literally that easy, but we all seem to be waiting for Valve to actually produce a full machine that does it for us that few of us are likely to buy.
Hell, even my parents have a laptop of their own now that plugs into the HDMI TV they have. Why would they bother with a SteamBox?
Perhaps you missed that most of the British Royal Family have served and fought in wars at one time or another. Possible exception of the Queen Mother, I suppose.
One of the current princes was out flying Apache gunships and has spoken of gunning down terrorist camps in Afghanistan from it. His brother also served. And his father.
I'm about as far from a royalist as you can get, but you can't claim they don't serve - in fact they have more military time than anyone else I know - and not just as back-end colonels pushing about figures on a wargaming board like it used to be.
Try driving in spectacles that aren't supplementing your vision to the legally required standard. British driving tests have an eye test component but AT ANY POINT if you were driving while having vision unable to pass that same test, you are deemed unfit to drive. You have to tell the DVLA if you wear glasses to drive, or have eye issues (lots of people with laser treatment have fallen foul of this in accidents where they failed to notify the DVLA that they don't need glasses any more - it all resolves itself in court, or before that point, but it's one of the things that insurers check in big accidents and police check if they are called to an accident).
Try driving in sunglasses that are too dark at night (or windows too tinted - hell I've seen UK police with devices to test how tinted your windows are and they pulled people off the road, tested it, and removed the car if it was too much). You can get pulled and, same thing. Driving without due care and attention. It's without due care and attention to have something electronic ON and SHOWING in the car that is visible to the driver (e.g. sat-nav, TV, DVD, etc.) Yes, this includes your sat-nav if it is in the driver's eyeline. It's illegal. Read the warnings and booklets that come with any satnav sold in the EU / UK. You can click "I accept" all you like, it's still illegal.
The difference is: What are the chances of getting caught? But that's already a loaded question. It means: I'm doing wrong, but how much of a risk can I take to do wrong and get away with it?
When driving a fucking car, drive the fucking car. Don't have things switched on that do other things that stop you driving the fucking car. OF COURSE you're the best driver in the world and can do it all day long and not have an accident. So does EVERYONE else think that. Until you run over their little sister.
I haven't been to the cinema for nearly 10 years now. It's just too expensive to have some twat elbowing his way past you, kids screaming, teenager's throwing popcorn, etc.
That's AFTER I've queued for a long time, been accused of everything from smuggling in a camera, to bringing in my own drink, to supporting terrorism, sat through 20 minutes of trailers starting at the "movie start time", and wondered what the hell I'm sitting on.
Sorry, it's just not worth it. If I want to watch a movie with friends, I can't do it at the cinema for exactly the same reasons (and, really, why would you do that?). If I want to take a loved one, the same. All possible scenarios just make it more sensible to wait for it to come out on DVD and then watch it at home on even a 32" screen.
If at all. The junk that's on lately, I honestly haven't watched a "blockbuster" in years. I *JUST* saw the "new" Star Wars movies (i.e. Episode 1 etc.) on TV for free. God, I'm so glad I didn't pay. How the hell did they get to Episode 3?
I watched Avatar first on BBC iPlayer. I'm sure it's very "woooh" in 3D but I wouldn't pay for that either (my gf cannot see 3D due to an eye problem, and I have honestly been more impressed by a Dragon's Lair hologram from the 80's/90's than anything else I've ever seen in 3D).
The cinema is bouyed up by people bored out of their brain paying to see a movie so they can say they've seen it, and not even caring what it's about. My facebook "friends" post every week along the lines of "Went to see X. Quite good." for everything that's on in the cinema, and that's the kind of person that's keeping Hollywood afloat. I doubt they remember half of what they've ever seen.
I absolutely, 100%, totally detest arty-farty crap. My gf keeps trying to introduce me to various foreign films but, if anything, they go too far the other way - too much reflection and introspection and not enough actually happening.
As such, I abandoned Hollywood years ago. I've saved so much money I can't even begin to count. But I have bought DVD's, and have enjoyed (some) movies, and life has gone on just as before, pretty much. The difference is that I can have those movies at any time, lend them to friends, and watch as much as I like. As Hollywood tries to cut off that avenue for me, I've actually weaned myself off it rather than try to move with it.
There was a time when watching Saturday TV was THE thing to do on an evening. You waited all week for it. That's been slowly destroyed. There was a time when you listened to the radio hoping to hear your favourite artists. That's been slowly destroyed. And there was a time when you went to the movies because it was an experience you couldn't get any other way. That's been slowly destroyed.
I don't believe for a second that they won't make money for the next 50 years. But, honestly, they won't see my money. I'm just utterly amazed, still, that people bother to go to the cinema at all.
Please note: I'm a Brit. That nation that Americans love to berate as the 1984 of the modern world. I live in London, the most populous city in the country, 33 times more population dense than New York.
THE VERY FIRST TIME that a government (or organisation) sends an emergency alert to my phone that isn't related to a DIRECT DANGER that I am LIKELY to need to avoid, the system used to send it goes in the bin. Smartphone, email, web-interception, text message, phone call, whatever.
Solicited or not. Decreed from the top or not. Turn-off-able or not. As you can probably tell from my attitude - it has NEVER happened in 20+ years of me owning a mobile phone, or my lifetime of owning a landline. Not during bus bombings. Not during IRA attacks. Not during attacks on airports. Not even school attacks with guns.
If a child goes missing, put it on the news, with photos of the suspect and child.
If there's a tornado or fire that might burn my house down, send the police around to inform residents and evacuate them. Don't rely on the little old lady having a cellphone and answering it at 4am and evacuating herself.
If there's a chemical leak or terrorist attack that covers a huge area and endangers thousands of lives, sure. You can send a text message to **local** cell masts AND send round the police then.
If a school is taken hostage by a gun-toting maniac - quite what do you think a message that targets ANYONE but those on the school premises is going to do apart from incite panic and worsen the situation? Campus alerts? Never even HEARD of such a thing over here (I work in schools!), but we probably do have them in some places if you look hard enough even if they are never used.
But, hell, the very, very, very first time I ever get a text from an official source about an emergency where my life is not - in all probability - in danger, complaints will be made AND the device will go in the bin.
Emergency alerts to everyone in the middle of the night for a missing child? Sorry, with all the sympathy in the world for the parent's plight, you simply cannot do that on the scale of even a small city.
Plus, we've seen the hackability of these alerts already. How long until some rogue element tells people of an emergency, informs them to gather in the street at point X and then blows them all up / incites a riot / raids the bank vault while everyone is away?
Yet again, the US has accepted something as necessary and "the norm" that other countries would recoil in horror at the mere suggestion of putting the concept to the populous. I have no doubt we do have an emergency broadcast system of some kind. The fact is that we've NEVER used it, and certainly not for missing children.
We don't have as many natural disasters, granted. We have, however, had more terrorism against us in the last 100 years than the US has. Just the IRA bombings in London alone were so frequent and deadly that they lost all effectiveness in terms of "terror" ("What was that?" "Oh, probably just the IRA again - going to have to check the bloody Tube timetable again now to get to work on time..."), and the IRA eventually became politicians and rioters instead.
But missing-person alerts? Rogue nutters? Probably we have our fair share on the same scale. Hell, a soldier walking along a street in London was beheaded for no reason only the other day and the guy who did it gave interviews to the camera. It was a news story for a day. The funeral was a news story for a day. End of.
God, we'd jam our phones solid worrying about that kind of shit.
It seems a pretty obvious and common sense statement, I don't get why it's worthy of an article.
When your network falls into a broadcast loop, how do you "fix it"? You break the network. When your website is overwhelmed and the traffic is killing your other, necessary external connections, how do you fix it? Turn your website off and let people bounce off a 404. When your car oxygen sensor is broken and won't let you run the engine properly, how do you fix it (at least in some models) - disconnect the sensor from the ECU so it falls back into "limp-home" mode.
I don't see how this is a revolutionary idea. The fact is, though, that the relevance to any particular situation is dubious. It's not an automatic, first, go-to, response. It needs you to know what you're doing, what the problem is, and WHY you think breaking more things will fix it. Do it wrong, or hastily, or without thought and you can break more than you fix - same as anything else.
I set up Eclipse, personally. It's free. It detects and plugs into Cygwin, MinGW, gcc and I can add a cross-compiler by entering a gcc build prefix into a box (just set up a new Eclipse in a VM with the intention of cross-compiling code to ARM, GP2X (a particular ARM device), Linux (32- and 64-), Windows (32- and 64-). It took about 20 minutes to install, and the rest was faffing about getting libraries to compile the same in all architectures (but now it's just a drop-down box and click - and it cross compiles).
It works. It does what I need. It compiles. I can do it on Linux or Windows and it works the same.
It's also fast. God knows what you people are doing but with C99 code, I haven't managed to crash Eclipse or make it churn and I don't sit around waiting for it to do anything (from Helios through to Kepler, on Windows and Ubuntu). Maybe if you're running it on some old sloth of a machine, but if you're programming why don't you have an 8-core, 8Gb machine at minimum nowadays? Hell, my laptop beats that and it cost next to nothing in terms of good laptop prices (sub-£500). The Linux VM I set up for Eclipse has 2Gb RAM and 2 cores running under VMWare on the machine and I'm never really waiting for it to compile unless I do a clean build (and I don't see that compile time should ever really be a huge factor - if you're that worried and have that large a project, stop faffing about with "consumer" programming tools and distcc it or something).
Eclipse has little quirks of setup, like anything, but it's just the same as any other program of a similar complexity. Don't apt-get it. Just install it into a sub-folder in your home (an ultra-powerful feature in itself - keep Helious, Indigo, Juno and Kepler in separate folders and copy/paste/upgrade your whole IDE and workspace when a new version comes out).
Debugging is marvellous. Probably it doesn't do some things that the MS software does but, you know what, it's infinitely better value for money and a darn sight better than struggling with gdb directly.
I don't get it - maybe it USED to be a load of crap, I can't know that. But from Helios onwards, which was my first real exposure to it, it's become my IDE of choice. And you know what? If I want, I can give someone a copy of my VM that has my complete development environment and OS installed on it. 50% of handing off a compile is in the associated libraries, tools, setup and build config rather than what's in the source, and with an open-source environment and an OS IDE, you can just hand them your complete setup.
If I was writing a programming book, I'd bundle an Eclipse VM setup. Most of my first exposure to any language is pissing about for weeks getting the toolchain set up. The most off-putting thing when I was learning programming was all the hoops you have to jump through to get a compiler that knows what it's compiling, from where, and what to do with it.
I don't understand the gripes. Sure, I don't have a billion lines of code in there, but I have large multi-arch ports of gaming frameworks that tie into all sorts of bits. I have 20-30+ libraries inside a single program. I have 100,000 lines of my own C code in just one project. I know people might be doing a LOT more than me. But, fact is, Eclipse is damn-near perfect for that, especially for the amateur / beginner programmer, and you REALLY have to go some to outgrow it. I remember struggling along with some of the early Sun Java IDE's - it was actually easier to just not bother and code on the command-line for my university courses (especially as I'd already started on Java a few years before that on my own).
You can say "it's not for me", sure, but all this "it crashes" and "it's dog slow" crap - I'm not sure I buy it. If it's that easy - reproduce the crash and submit it.
To be honest, I'd be prepared to suffer quite a lot of performance problems when compiling just for the IDE-and-workspace-as-folders concept, the multiple platform availability, and the debugger interface to GDB itself. But I don't - because they aren't there for me at all.
That's quite impressive. The obvious "next step" in 3D printing, but how realistic is it to a home user? We already have myriad ways to lay circuits etc. out, and the point of 3D printing is not that we could never make little plastic shapes before, but that it's something I can do as much as I like if I buy a 3D printer, raw materials and some model plans, without requiring specialist knowledge or handling.
Does this let me add metals into my 3d plans? Does this allow me to print circuit boards (hmmm... sounds familiar....)? Or is it just an impractical way of doing the same things with a single alloy that we can do any number of other ways.
What's the killer application here? Could I 3D print a working set of Christmas lights without having to worry about bulbs, cables, wires, circuits boards, etc? Just have a device with two nozzles that does all the hard work and just churns out the completed product from a plan? I'm guessing not, or at least not before something else will come along and make that possible.
Britain and the EU have an odd relationship unlike almost any other country in the EU.
Yes, technically, we are part of it. But we're exempt from other parts associated with it (we don't use the Euro, etc.). We pump more money in than some others and, as compensation, we're allowed to opt-out of certain things.
Also, if you ask people in Britain what it means to go to Europe, it doesn't include touring around Britain. Britain and the EU are - to the British - two separate entities. Even more confusing you have things like the EC and the continent of Europe and lots of other definitions over the years that we are sometimes in, sometimes out.
However, GCHQ has hit a LOT of flak for its actions. The question really is - if what the US does is illegal, and the EU is doing it back, why do we have a formal legal statement of something else entirely? Why bother? Why not just legalise what we do or not? But, ultimately, the attitude is - if we DO share things with you, why distrust us and find things out illegally for your self? And if you do that, why should we bother to trust you or give you anything anyway?
The GCHQ involvement is a side-issue, and you can guarantee that whatever sanctions the US has imposed on it, those on GCHQ will be worse.
But, politics what it is, I find it hard to believe that anything will happen, certainly anything that will affect air travel. More likely a few trade agreements will have more lenient terms than they would have otherwise and promises to clean up, and that'll be the end of it.
Though, I swore off going to the US many years ago after they basically took liberties with what rights they think they have (which include this EU passenger data crap). If I was forced to enter the US now, I'd do so for as short a time as possible and carry no electronic equipment whatsoever and encrypt all communications home. That's the only sensible business choice and has been for years, and it just happens to be the complete antithesis of the intention to collect that data in the first place.
Publisher. For YEARS. Maybe the very new versions are different, but I have this every day with people bringing in old/new versions of Publisher files.
And no import filter is ever perfect, even if it was written by MS, for opening MS formats, for a MS application.
No. I'm not. My point is that Gigabit Ethernet over copper is not anywhere close to "state of the art", and hasn't been for a long time - given the fact that even the cheapest of netbooks comes with a Gigabit Ethernet port capable of similar things. Hell, 10G is buyable today if you know where to look, and 40G is on the way. Yes, it's over twisted pairs, but if you can do 40G over twisted pairs, it's because of the technique and the error correction methods - NOT THE CABLE. The cable helps - obviously - but is mainly designed to reduce interference at the frequencies you prefer, reduce cross-talk, etc. The techniques, however, apply in equally similar fashions to even one single POTS pair (if you can do 40G without interference, you can go 1G with interference, especially if you tweak the parameters to optimise for the cable that's in place).
My point isn't that you can string Cat6 down the road (though that CAN and HAS happened in certain community projects, because it's a perfectly viable method - what's the difference between wiring a site 100m with external Cat6 and wiring a village with houses 100m apart with external Cat6?) - that's not practical for a large scale project, however - my point is that this isn't a shock or something new that's never been done before. Hell, we can ALMOST do this over wireless nowadays, subject to regulatory approval.
This is like when people were crowing about getting fast connections to their cabinet 100m away, after several years of me using 10Mb Ethernet at home consisting of a BNC cable that I knocked up from a set of video connectors as a kid with cheap NE2000's on either end. There, the cabling was basically the same (modulo some interference), and it served so well that it was only supplanted when I had to upgrade to a PCI card which was 10/100 without BNC connectors.
You look, and you think - so what? I can heath-robinson something 10 times better over the same distance. I'm sure if we bothered to design it properly that 512Kb DSL to a cabinet down the road would be embarrassing by comparison.
And, as stated, it's the uplink that matters. If the cabinet doesn't give you what you can have, then it's not worth worrying about Gigabit DSL. Fact is, if I lived in a small village, with 100m at most between houses, I'd buy a leased line and cable / wireless people's houses for them if I was allowed. If we constrain ourselves to what we can achieve over 100m, you do have to compete - in people's minds at least - with Ethernet and the associated standards.
The real selling point for a tech like this would be that you could get 100Mb over 10km, not 1000Mb over 0.01km.
Over 100m, Gigabit over copper is already trivially possible. My computer has it built-in, so has anything you've bought in the last few years.
The problem of local connections such as 100m is solved. We're there. It's not a problem. Even a community project that threw Cat6a round the village could do a half-decent job of it at Gigabit speeds over even longer distances.
The problem is the link back to some Internet-connected point, as always. As you say, it's pointless (and quite easy) to have Gigabit in every house on some island in the middle of nowhere if you don't have a decent uplink to the rest of the world and all the intermediary connections.
Like my home network. I have Gigabit all round the house and wireless at stupendous speeds that don't get that far. But my connection to the Internet is 30Mbps, so apart from shifting files locally, it's pointless to worry about it. But if I had Gigabit to the Internet, you can be sure I wouldn't piss it away on 100Mbps connections around the house.
Any idiot can build a network at 100m distances. Community projects have proven that random people can easily work out how to cover a kilometer or so (farmers digging up their fields and laying their own copper/fibre). It's the joining that to the Internet in general (i.e. a leased line of some kind, with decent capacity to cope with everyone beyond it, connected direct to a major Internet hub) - that's the real problem.
As the data gets larger and the possibilities grow, the size of the information to reference that information gets as big as, if not bigger, than the information itself.
And, at best, you'd get something roughly equivalent to gzip'ing HTML pages, zipping up PDF's, or compressing images (all of which already happen as part of the standard protocols).
What happens for the VERY VERY FIRST TIME this sort of tampering is spotted?
What if we found something in Linux, or something in PKE, or something in anything we use?
Would we just go "Oh, well, that's the NSA for you" and then carry on as normal? No. Likely there'd be a complete fork from a clean workbase to start over again, a complete distrust of code from day one, and a complete overhaul of all existing systems.
It's just not something that, as a government agency, you'd want to get implicated in whatsoever. For a start, you have a backdoor into systems in the German government? Or the Koreans? Holy crap you're in trouble for it being found out.
And what purpose would it serve, above and beyond traditional spying? Not a lot. The effort and secrecy required, and the implications if you're found out EVER, is far too large-scale to reap any benefit from it.
It's much more incredibly likely that they are using standard spying techniques (i.e. let's tap X's computer because we know he's involved) than planting things into major pieces of open source software. Closed commercial? That's a different matter but - again - compared to just issuing an order that they do it for you and never speak about it, it's too difficult. And, even then, we've found out that that eventually comes out and has diplomatic effects on entire nations (including allies).
I don't believe they wouldn't try. I don't believe they wouldn't have some way into the system. I don't believe for a second, though, that they've backdoored something quite so open and visible, or that the people involved in reviewing it wouldn't - EVENTUALLY - spot it and the outcry from that having a 100 times greater impact on the world than anything some twat leaks from diplomatic cables.
I'd be so incredibly disappointed if that was the height of their capabilities, to do something some clumsy and ineffective, and that they couldn't choose their targets better.
These people are spies. I expect them to perform all manner of dirty manoeuvres as a routine job. But the fact is that good, old-fashioned spying is a million times more effective.
I would also have to say that an "enemy" of any description who has the capability to use only compiled-from-source software on regulated hardware, and uses them exclusively in whatever activities might be of interest to the NSA or GCHQ probably has the resources to verify that code or write it themselves.
And, you have to remember the old "fake-Moon-landings-Russians" argument - if your enemy is capable of DETECTING that you've done that, and they announce it to the world and show it was you that did it, they'd do it. Just to discredit you. Just to make you forget about the guy in the airport. Just to make you look like fools. Just to prove that THEY know what's going on and it's not so easy to get into their systems.
If you have a perfect government entity, then yes it's theoretically possible. But in real life, no, I'm sorry, it's just implausible on anything other than a trivial scale. They might get a "euid=root" type bug into the code if they try hard and find a weak target, but to be honest, it's not a concern.
And if I was really worried, I'd use FreeDOS. Or Minix. Or FreeBSD. Or whatever. And any "common point" like gcc, well you can verify those kinds of things with the double-compilation tricks or just using a different piece of software. Either they would have to have infected EVERYTHING or NOTHING. And I'll go with nothing.
Basically anything they are doing there, I could do and not get into trouble (so long as you stick to the DPA, etc., and there's no evidence to suggest they don't). Hell, Google already do it too, and just about any number of web crawlers.
That's a whole different ball game to "monitoring my conversations" when it comes to doing so by looking into the private records of my account, rather than what you can already find on Google.
Yes, it's a little closer to, say, reassembling a shredded document. If you shred it enough, of course it's just a bundle of characters that are really hard to piece together.
But if DNA really takes as long as stated to decompose even under ideal conditions, we are basically one half of the time required for it to decompose under those conditions to the point where it's probably not capable of reassembly. So we aren't stuffed, even without ideal conditions. And tying in with what we know of horse DNA, we're even less stuffed.
And putting huge amount of computation and DNA from the same animal through it, and we're even less stuffed. Seems to me to be a pretty damn useful technique, overall, even if it's only "statistically" correct.
And contamination? Sure it's possible. But the chances of modern DNA contamination are vanishingly small (that's why we have all those labs and things, and how you know your cancer result is yours and not that of the fly that flew into the hospital where you were being tested), and the ancient contaminations - unless they form the majority of the sample - will be pushed out by sheer probability and statistics.
Nobody is saying that this is 100% the exact DNA of this animal (and why would you WANT that? It might be a complete throw-back and have a one-off DNA coding that no other animal of its type has ever had). But it's so close to dammit, on average, that it's more than useful for scientific enquiry.
If you gather enough of a material, and it's in good enough condition, and you try hard enough to piece it all together, and get enough "overlaps" (which is the equivalent of a "fit" in terms of jigaws, shredded paper, etc.), then you can be pretty damn confident that this DNA is similar to that of the original animal. That's got implications, even if it's only 80% accurate, for everything from forensics to archaeology.
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To be honest, back in the 1990's - 2000's this was a problem. But so was a lot of other stuff.
I'm no Windows fan, but I have had Windows XP and Windows 7 laptops for the last 6-7 years. Both basically live their lives in standby or hibernate and a full boot or BIOS screen means I forgot to charge it.
They got turned on in the morning to check websites before work. Put into suspend. Taken to work. Opened and used for 8+ hours. Put into suspend. Taken home. Gamed/browsed on for the next 8 hours. Put into suspend for the night. And they would literally go for MONTHS between reboots (and then only against my will, such as updates, batteries not being charged fully, etc.).
To be honest, I haven't even thought about it in years. It used to be a big deal. There was a time where I turned off all power states because it was just that ropey. I can't remember the last time I had to do that. A machine that can't go into and out of suspend instantly, or that needs full boots even once a week, is one I'd start diagnosing.
I work in schools - pretty much the same thing there. Teachers just leave their laptops in standby overnight or take them home in standby and use them and they rarely see a BIOS screen. We have to make sure that Truecrypt pops up on system resume because it's so easy to leave them for weeks in suspend while you use them.
Same for desktop machines nowadays. With Windows 8 you really notice it because it's instant on/off back to the login screen. Nobody complains about boot times because they never witness them.
I don't know about Linux - I tend to run Linux for servers only so power-states are not something you want to happen, and elsewhere I rarely have proprietary drivers, but I imagine it's pretty much the same situation. Linux always did a better job than Windows for power resume whenever I used it, and they have had suspend-to-RAM and all sorts for years now. Just about every ARM Linux device I've ever seen spends its life in suspend. Even my TomTom from 10 years ago still has perfect suspend/resume functionality and has gone at least three years of daily use without ever doing a full boot.
Honestly... in a few years from now, once Windows 8 becomes the norm, people will be asking me what the hell the BIOS screen is and why they only see it when they first buy the computer.
If you are using that kind of power, no it's not profit.
But have you not seen the ASIC miners that pay for themselves in a year, including electricity?
Running a general-purpose computer, even with a GPU, to mine is no longer feasible. Running a small, dedicated, embedded chip on a low-power board actually knocks it out of the park.
But, there, if the value of Bitcoin drops too much, then you may not end up paying back what it costs to buy them (some are $1000+). Which, of course, means it's not profit.
Like everything, it's all speculation for barter. If you buy a thousand toilet rolls expecting them to be worth more in the future they either 1) are, and thus you made a profit or 2) aren't, and thus you made a loss. Either way, you can claim it on taxes as the appropriate box. Just like anything else.
Humble Bundles.
What are you contractually obliged to give?
Then you have a choice - follow the contract, or break it.
Everywhere I've ever worked, it's been two MONTHS minimum. And, yeah, probably nobody would hunt you down if you didn't do it, but at some point almost every employer wants a reference and/or will contact your former employers.
I'm not sure I'd employ someone if I heard that they'd broken their contract. I'm not sure I'd employ someone who'd just walked out of their job (unless, and this quite critical, they then filed for unfair dismissal, or an untenable working environment similar - the fact that you BOTHER to go to court means that you didn't actual want to go).
I have been "poached" at least three times - once by a former client, and twice by another workplace. I was working, I was unhappy, I knew I wanted to leave, they offered a better situation, they were happy to take me there and then (and at least one specifically said they wouldn't care about me leaving my former job without notice).
I didn't. I did what I was contracted to do, moved on. In one case, I went above-and-beyond and negotiated one day a week at my previous job just to ease the transition for a few months. And, in fact, that particular one that I went back to help was the client that then - a year later - poached me back from that job (after they'd sorted out money and hours enough to meet my request).
Leaving without notice is rude, inconsiderate and potentially (in fact, almost certainly) breach-of-contract. The question is quite why are you leaving without notice and what risk you place on doing that to go somewhere else.
Personally, I see notice periods as the cleanup period. Hey, you don't want me. I'm going elsewhere. It's probably time for you to learn all that I did, hire a replacement, get some direct hand-off while I'm still here and not piss me off before I go. Then I won't leave loose ends, won't leave you in the lurch, will document all that odd crap that nobody got around to writing down, etc.
Some people are saying that your boss will make you work harder to spite you in the notice period. So what? They could have done that AT ANY TIME and are probably DOING that to make you leave anyway. Fulfill your contractual obligations. Ask them if they'd rather you left without notice. If they kick up a fuss - well, sorry, my contract says nothing about doing X, Y, Z and I finish at 5, and staying "for any reasonable unforeseen circumstance" (or whatever is in your contract) doesn't cover this situation - they can argue it in court if they like, but they won't. What are they going to do? Sack you? In your notice period? Yeah, that's just a perfect way to show your new employer that you were right to leave.
Suck it up. Be professional. Tell your new employer that you REFUSE to leave your former employer in the lurch or give them an excuse to blame you, so you're going to clean up all the loose ends by working your notice, no matter what. It infers integrity and honesty and that you can suffer fools. Do exactly as you are required to do, then move on.
Want to know how I know? I'm in the fourth case of doing this for myself at the moment. MASSIVE summer upgrades, in what's become a one-man-IT-show. Impossible deadlines, independent verification by my own employer's auditor that I need more help to meet demand, etc. all totally ignored. So I'm applying for jobs, and then will work to the completion of my current project (no matter what) and then I'll go, not before. Let's see anyone try to blame me for finishing up properly.
Just knowing that they will still have to pay me, will still be no better off without hiring two replacements for me, and that it will royally put a lot of people's noses out of joint actually makes it worth it. Once you've made the decision to go, the rest is just entertainment.
There's a lot of much simpler security measures that work a lot more effectively. Every time you hear someone come up with elaborate digital security, you have to go back to thinking of basics. Security is simple, and overthinking it is the best way to make it even worse.
Put ATM's in secure places. In the UK, they are almost always just out on the street where anyone can shoulder-surf your PIN. Like in Europe/US put them inside a room that is controlled and monitored.
Make ATM's show you what they should look like. All the time, the ATM should just show you a picture of what it SHOULD look like. This picture should move / flip every now and then so you can see if someone has tampered with the screen. A quick glance and you can tell if that random bit of green plastic on the card slot is SUPPOSED to be there or not (this pisses me off even with genuine ATM's and I don't use them if they have those green slots).
(Incidentally, why do credit card terminals, which have to talk to the bank, not send the card number - or some identifier from the card - to the bank, which sends back a PHOTOGRAPH of the CARD HOLDER which the genuine merchant can use to verify, at least in part, whether it's their card or misuse. Unfakeable, as the photo is from the bank, not from the card, so genuine merchants would be able to spot even wives using their husband's cards - which is still technically not allowed, but is currently ignored. Fuck Chip-and-PIN, give my photo to every merchant I use my credit card with so they know who is me and who isn't and can query if they are uncertain).
Put a shutter on the card slot. When the card is needed, open the shutter. When it's not, shut the shutter. Make it so that ANY device on the card slot would stop the shutter shutting, and this in itself would cause the ATM to disable itself and alarm. No worse a chance of losing the card for the customer than those ATM's who haven't been serviced in a while and the motors barely have the strength to push it back out.
Make fucking cards that can't be "skimmed" and that - without the PIN - are useless. This isn't difficult, and what Chip-and-PIN was always supposed to solve. Then you can skim my card to your heart's content because without my PIN being entered correctly NOTHING happens or provides useful data (we've already sacrificed mag-stripes, so this is no great burden as the cards should ALREADY be useless without the PIN).
SEND SMS MESSAGES to users on every use of their card. Almost every European bank already does this (except for the UK). My Italian girlfriend gets a text within seconds of touching her card anywhere, even in the UK, with details of the transaction. Her dad, too, when he was over here and bought £10 of stuff in a hardware store, and we were able to tell the SHOP STAFF that they'd duplicated the transaction by mistake because he got a text before he even got his card back.
Simple things. Put the cardholders back in control of their cards. The only reason NOT to is that you make money somehow out of not doing this. I can't believe billions of pounds worth of fraud isn't incentive enough to do things like send texts to cardholders, or put little motorised shutters (like some ATMs used to have anyway) on the card slot.
The deal:
I'll pay you that £25 a month that you want me to pay to watch TV when:
- I can just watch EVERYTHING. No exclusives, specials or "just pay extra to see this".
- I can watch what I want. Old stuff, new stuff, nobody decides for me. You just put your whole archives online and I can watch them.
- I can not watch anything I don't want to watch. This includes adverts.
- I can watch it when I want. Sorry, but the days of me staying in of an evening to catch particular show X died with the video recorder and are just laughable nowadays. The kind of people / entertainment that such scheduling works for are those things that are just "on" when people slouch down in the sofa for the evening not intending to move, and the program is entertaining enough that people don't switch over - this has bred the entire Big Brother / X-Factor crap for the last 10 years.
- I can watch it how I want - online, on a TV, on a tablet, from abroad, etc. You NEED me to say things like "Oh, you have to see this program, look, watch this for a minute, it's great" and/or "we have this program in England, it's fabulous, here I'll load up an episode for you". Honestly. If I can't, then you will not get new people watching programs.
- I can watch it when it comes out. No preview, exclusives, region differences, etc. I can just watch it from the release time onwards, forever.
- You have to stop giving a shit about piracy. Honestly, every measure ever implemented has been next-to-useless. All it's done is stop genuine people watching things as much as delaying pirates. I still refuse to buy Disney DVD's because they JUST DON'T WORK in my daughter's laptop. Simple as that. End of. If you can't make your money from TV channels WANTING to show your stuff and the associated licensing / merchandising rights then you should just stop making it.
Honestly, I'm infinitely more likely to pay £50 direct to "thebigbangtheory.com" for a lifetime membership that lets me view any and all episodes than I am to pay £25 a month to a channel that occasionally bothers to screen random episodes of it years after they come out and that you get literally PENCE of licensing revenue from per viewing.
The fact that you STILL haven't picked up on this as a possibility - alongside the traditional methods - means that you just don't care about actually making money as much as we'd like to think. You just care about nothing more than holding the rights and having the power to decide what's "big" and what's not, which is what the whole anti-piracy game is. I don't blame the actors or the writers so much as all the middle-men involved in the process. And it's about time we just cut them out.
If you haven't noticed, this is how people buy video games nowadays. It would take about a month to work out how to use Steam to distribute video content in the same way. The day Steam lets me "buy" a season of my favourite program, and I can just double-click to download and view it offline on as many computers as I like and not have to worry about if it will play or not, TV is dead. And not because of piracy.
Did you honestly just say the equivalent of:
"Yes, heaven forbid somebody invent a driver interface because it's interesting to drive with, and not because it's good for keeping the car on the road."?
Exploring alternate interfaces is one thing. Claiming they are practical is quite another. An impractical interface is, pretty much by definition, worthless as an interface.
Sure, in terms of experimenting and looking at the problem from different angles, it's "interesting". But you always have to consider the practical use. Things without practical use are, basically, art projects. "Interesting to investigate" but utterly useless at actually getting anything done.
One can inspire the other, sure, but an interface like this is nothing more than a gimmick. Now, Kinect, Wii controllers, even those musical artists that "play" light or vegetables - they are interesting to investigate AND practical (for certain definitions of practical - the vegetable thing, for example, is nothing more than what we already do with touchscreens, measuring capacitance of objects to detect changes when they are touched). Maybe their early experiments weren't practical - but here's the clincher - YOU DID NOT HEAR ABOUT THEM. For good reason. And they certainly didn't make frontpage.
There's investigating alternatives, thinking outside the box, and going back to first principles and trying again. But this is just a very expensive and extremely impractical way to do things we already do much more efficiently with - critically - no hope of ever improving the contribution that this would make to those tasks.
"An organization wants me to send them my personal data by email."
"But they do have a pretty good IT department"
No. They don't. Or their IT department is seriously underpowered in terms of getting through to their staff. Don't send personal data by email. If they don't have a system to let you do this (e.g. secured web form, etc.) then their IT department is already a bit of a failure. If they do, their staff would use it and tell you about it.
If you want to ask, just ask. "I'm not going to send personal data by unencrypted email - what is your procedure for encrypted email?"
Chances are, they won't have one and will just ask you to send the details unencrypted or by another method entirely.
I don't wish to be the bearer of bad fortune here, but I have 499 games on Steam on Windows. And 83 on Linux when I log in there. The same as you.
That's not to say that Linux games aren't there, or don't exist, or aren't moving that way, but it's not a question of there being 50% of games on Steam supporting it (from my account, less than 17%). And I suspect most of those are actually Valve or humble bundle games, and other games that I don't have installed or only played once, rather than top-name titles.
It's a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure SteamBox is going to make a dent unless it's profitable for players. It has to be cheap, good, and run most of this stuff without hassle. That's not hard - a Linux machine with the barest of 3D cards and "Big Picture" mode on HDMI is more than enough for the most part. But the problem is that if it ISN'T like that, then SteamBox won't boost Linux gaming that much at all.
There's no good reason why Linux gaming can't be successful. In fact, the only reason really is 20+ years of not being the market leader in gaming, rather than any technical or political reason. But I don't think a lot of people would be happy to splash out on a SteamBox that can only play 17% of their games, and those in a way that's more convoluted and nothing they couldn't have built themselves.
Hell, why isn't there already a "Games" distro of Ubuntu where we can just install it and get our Steam libraries and/or desura, etc. loaded onto it with a couple of clicks? It's literally that easy, but we all seem to be waiting for Valve to actually produce a full machine that does it for us that few of us are likely to buy.
Hell, even my parents have a laptop of their own now that plugs into the HDMI TV they have. Why would they bother with a SteamBox?
Perhaps you missed that most of the British Royal Family have served and fought in wars at one time or another. Possible exception of the Queen Mother, I suppose.
One of the current princes was out flying Apache gunships and has spoken of gunning down terrorist camps in Afghanistan from it. His brother also served. And his father.
I'm about as far from a royalist as you can get, but you can't claim they don't serve - in fact they have more military time than anyone else I know - and not just as back-end colonels pushing about figures on a wargaming board like it used to be.
Er... yes.
Try driving in spectacles that aren't supplementing your vision to the legally required standard. British driving tests have an eye test component but AT ANY POINT if you were driving while having vision unable to pass that same test, you are deemed unfit to drive. You have to tell the DVLA if you wear glasses to drive, or have eye issues (lots of people with laser treatment have fallen foul of this in accidents where they failed to notify the DVLA that they don't need glasses any more - it all resolves itself in court, or before that point, but it's one of the things that insurers check in big accidents and police check if they are called to an accident).
Try driving in sunglasses that are too dark at night (or windows too tinted - hell I've seen UK police with devices to test how tinted your windows are and they pulled people off the road, tested it, and removed the car if it was too much). You can get pulled and, same thing. Driving without due care and attention. It's without due care and attention to have something electronic ON and SHOWING in the car that is visible to the driver (e.g. sat-nav, TV, DVD, etc.) Yes, this includes your sat-nav if it is in the driver's eyeline. It's illegal. Read the warnings and booklets that come with any satnav sold in the EU / UK. You can click "I accept" all you like, it's still illegal.
The difference is: What are the chances of getting caught? But that's already a loaded question. It means: I'm doing wrong, but how much of a risk can I take to do wrong and get away with it?
When driving a fucking car, drive the fucking car. Don't have things switched on that do other things that stop you driving the fucking car. OF COURSE you're the best driver in the world and can do it all day long and not have an accident. So does EVERYONE else think that. Until you run over their little sister.
I haven't been to the cinema for nearly 10 years now. It's just too expensive to have some twat elbowing his way past you, kids screaming, teenager's throwing popcorn, etc.
That's AFTER I've queued for a long time, been accused of everything from smuggling in a camera, to bringing in my own drink, to supporting terrorism, sat through 20 minutes of trailers starting at the "movie start time", and wondered what the hell I'm sitting on.
Sorry, it's just not worth it. If I want to watch a movie with friends, I can't do it at the cinema for exactly the same reasons (and, really, why would you do that?). If I want to take a loved one, the same. All possible scenarios just make it more sensible to wait for it to come out on DVD and then watch it at home on even a 32" screen.
If at all. The junk that's on lately, I honestly haven't watched a "blockbuster" in years. I *JUST* saw the "new" Star Wars movies (i.e. Episode 1 etc.) on TV for free. God, I'm so glad I didn't pay. How the hell did they get to Episode 3?
I watched Avatar first on BBC iPlayer. I'm sure it's very "woooh" in 3D but I wouldn't pay for that either (my gf cannot see 3D due to an eye problem, and I have honestly been more impressed by a Dragon's Lair hologram from the 80's/90's than anything else I've ever seen in 3D).
The cinema is bouyed up by people bored out of their brain paying to see a movie so they can say they've seen it, and not even caring what it's about. My facebook "friends" post every week along the lines of "Went to see X. Quite good." for everything that's on in the cinema, and that's the kind of person that's keeping Hollywood afloat. I doubt they remember half of what they've ever seen.
I absolutely, 100%, totally detest arty-farty crap. My gf keeps trying to introduce me to various foreign films but, if anything, they go too far the other way - too much reflection and introspection and not enough actually happening.
As such, I abandoned Hollywood years ago. I've saved so much money I can't even begin to count. But I have bought DVD's, and have enjoyed (some) movies, and life has gone on just as before, pretty much. The difference is that I can have those movies at any time, lend them to friends, and watch as much as I like. As Hollywood tries to cut off that avenue for me, I've actually weaned myself off it rather than try to move with it.
There was a time when watching Saturday TV was THE thing to do on an evening. You waited all week for it. That's been slowly destroyed. There was a time when you listened to the radio hoping to hear your favourite artists. That's been slowly destroyed. And there was a time when you went to the movies because it was an experience you couldn't get any other way. That's been slowly destroyed.
I don't believe for a second that they won't make money for the next 50 years. But, honestly, they won't see my money. I'm just utterly amazed, still, that people bother to go to the cinema at all.
Please note: I'm a Brit. That nation that Americans love to berate as the 1984 of the modern world. I live in London, the most populous city in the country, 33 times more population dense than New York.
THE VERY FIRST TIME that a government (or organisation) sends an emergency alert to my phone that isn't related to a DIRECT DANGER that I am LIKELY to need to avoid, the system used to send it goes in the bin. Smartphone, email, web-interception, text message, phone call, whatever.
Solicited or not. Decreed from the top or not. Turn-off-able or not. As you can probably tell from my attitude - it has NEVER happened in 20+ years of me owning a mobile phone, or my lifetime of owning a landline. Not during bus bombings. Not during IRA attacks. Not during attacks on airports. Not even school attacks with guns.
If a child goes missing, put it on the news, with photos of the suspect and child.
If there's a tornado or fire that might burn my house down, send the police around to inform residents and evacuate them. Don't rely on the little old lady having a cellphone and answering it at 4am and evacuating herself.
If there's a chemical leak or terrorist attack that covers a huge area and endangers thousands of lives, sure. You can send a text message to **local** cell masts AND send round the police then.
If a school is taken hostage by a gun-toting maniac - quite what do you think a message that targets ANYONE but those on the school premises is going to do apart from incite panic and worsen the situation? Campus alerts? Never even HEARD of such a thing over here (I work in schools!), but we probably do have them in some places if you look hard enough even if they are never used.
But, hell, the very, very, very first time I ever get a text from an official source about an emergency where my life is not - in all probability - in danger, complaints will be made AND the device will go in the bin.
Emergency alerts to everyone in the middle of the night for a missing child? Sorry, with all the sympathy in the world for the parent's plight, you simply cannot do that on the scale of even a small city.
Plus, we've seen the hackability of these alerts already. How long until some rogue element tells people of an emergency, informs them to gather in the street at point X and then blows them all up / incites a riot / raids the bank vault while everyone is away?
Yet again, the US has accepted something as necessary and "the norm" that other countries would recoil in horror at the mere suggestion of putting the concept to the populous. I have no doubt we do have an emergency broadcast system of some kind. The fact is that we've NEVER used it, and certainly not for missing children.
We don't have as many natural disasters, granted. We have, however, had more terrorism against us in the last 100 years than the US has. Just the IRA bombings in London alone were so frequent and deadly that they lost all effectiveness in terms of "terror" ("What was that?" "Oh, probably just the IRA again - going to have to check the bloody Tube timetable again now to get to work on time..."), and the IRA eventually became politicians and rioters instead.
But missing-person alerts? Rogue nutters? Probably we have our fair share on the same scale. Hell, a soldier walking along a street in London was beheaded for no reason only the other day and the guy who did it gave interviews to the camera. It was a news story for a day. The funeral was a news story for a day. End of.
God, we'd jam our phones solid worrying about that kind of shit.
It seems a pretty obvious and common sense statement, I don't get why it's worthy of an article.
When your network falls into a broadcast loop, how do you "fix it"? You break the network. When your website is overwhelmed and the traffic is killing your other, necessary external connections, how do you fix it? Turn your website off and let people bounce off a 404. When your car oxygen sensor is broken and won't let you run the engine properly, how do you fix it (at least in some models) - disconnect the sensor from the ECU so it falls back into "limp-home" mode.
I don't see how this is a revolutionary idea. The fact is, though, that the relevance to any particular situation is dubious. It's not an automatic, first, go-to, response. It needs you to know what you're doing, what the problem is, and WHY you think breaking more things will fix it. Do it wrong, or hastily, or without thought and you can break more than you fix - same as anything else.
Different people prefer different tools.
I set up Eclipse, personally. It's free. It detects and plugs into Cygwin, MinGW, gcc and I can add a cross-compiler by entering a gcc build prefix into a box (just set up a new Eclipse in a VM with the intention of cross-compiling code to ARM, GP2X (a particular ARM device), Linux (32- and 64-), Windows (32- and 64-). It took about 20 minutes to install, and the rest was faffing about getting libraries to compile the same in all architectures (but now it's just a drop-down box and click - and it cross compiles).
It works. It does what I need. It compiles. I can do it on Linux or Windows and it works the same.
It's also fast. God knows what you people are doing but with C99 code, I haven't managed to crash Eclipse or make it churn and I don't sit around waiting for it to do anything (from Helios through to Kepler, on Windows and Ubuntu). Maybe if you're running it on some old sloth of a machine, but if you're programming why don't you have an 8-core, 8Gb machine at minimum nowadays? Hell, my laptop beats that and it cost next to nothing in terms of good laptop prices (sub-£500). The Linux VM I set up for Eclipse has 2Gb RAM and 2 cores running under VMWare on the machine and I'm never really waiting for it to compile unless I do a clean build (and I don't see that compile time should ever really be a huge factor - if you're that worried and have that large a project, stop faffing about with "consumer" programming tools and distcc it or something).
Eclipse has little quirks of setup, like anything, but it's just the same as any other program of a similar complexity. Don't apt-get it. Just install it into a sub-folder in your home (an ultra-powerful feature in itself - keep Helious, Indigo, Juno and Kepler in separate folders and copy/paste/upgrade your whole IDE and workspace when a new version comes out).
Debugging is marvellous. Probably it doesn't do some things that the MS software does but, you know what, it's infinitely better value for money and a darn sight better than struggling with gdb directly.
I don't get it - maybe it USED to be a load of crap, I can't know that. But from Helios onwards, which was my first real exposure to it, it's become my IDE of choice. And you know what? If I want, I can give someone a copy of my VM that has my complete development environment and OS installed on it. 50% of handing off a compile is in the associated libraries, tools, setup and build config rather than what's in the source, and with an open-source environment and an OS IDE, you can just hand them your complete setup.
If I was writing a programming book, I'd bundle an Eclipse VM setup. Most of my first exposure to any language is pissing about for weeks getting the toolchain set up. The most off-putting thing when I was learning programming was all the hoops you have to jump through to get a compiler that knows what it's compiling, from where, and what to do with it.
I don't understand the gripes. Sure, I don't have a billion lines of code in there, but I have large multi-arch ports of gaming frameworks that tie into all sorts of bits. I have 20-30+ libraries inside a single program. I have 100,000 lines of my own C code in just one project. I know people might be doing a LOT more than me. But, fact is, Eclipse is damn-near perfect for that, especially for the amateur / beginner programmer, and you REALLY have to go some to outgrow it. I remember struggling along with some of the early Sun Java IDE's - it was actually easier to just not bother and code on the command-line for my university courses (especially as I'd already started on Java a few years before that on my own).
You can say "it's not for me", sure, but all this "it crashes" and "it's dog slow" crap - I'm not sure I buy it. If it's that easy - reproduce the crash and submit it.
To be honest, I'd be prepared to suffer quite a lot of performance problems when compiling just for the IDE-and-workspace-as-folders concept, the multiple platform availability, and the debugger interface to GDB itself. But I don't - because they aren't there for me at all.
That's quite impressive. The obvious "next step" in 3D printing, but how realistic is it to a home user? We already have myriad ways to lay circuits etc. out, and the point of 3D printing is not that we could never make little plastic shapes before, but that it's something I can do as much as I like if I buy a 3D printer, raw materials and some model plans, without requiring specialist knowledge or handling.
Does this let me add metals into my 3d plans? Does this allow me to print circuit boards (hmmm... sounds familiar....)? Or is it just an impractical way of doing the same things with a single alloy that we can do any number of other ways.
What's the killer application here? Could I 3D print a working set of Christmas lights without having to worry about bulbs, cables, wires, circuits boards, etc? Just have a device with two nozzles that does all the hard work and just churns out the completed product from a plan? I'm guessing not, or at least not before something else will come along and make that possible.
But, still, it's very nice to watch and dream.
Britain and the EU have an odd relationship unlike almost any other country in the EU.
Yes, technically, we are part of it. But we're exempt from other parts associated with it (we don't use the Euro, etc.). We pump more money in than some others and, as compensation, we're allowed to opt-out of certain things.
Also, if you ask people in Britain what it means to go to Europe, it doesn't include touring around Britain. Britain and the EU are - to the British - two separate entities. Even more confusing you have things like the EC and the continent of Europe and lots of other definitions over the years that we are sometimes in, sometimes out.
However, GCHQ has hit a LOT of flak for its actions. The question really is - if what the US does is illegal, and the EU is doing it back, why do we have a formal legal statement of something else entirely? Why bother? Why not just legalise what we do or not? But, ultimately, the attitude is - if we DO share things with you, why distrust us and find things out illegally for your self? And if you do that, why should we bother to trust you or give you anything anyway?
The GCHQ involvement is a side-issue, and you can guarantee that whatever sanctions the US has imposed on it, those on GCHQ will be worse.
But, politics what it is, I find it hard to believe that anything will happen, certainly anything that will affect air travel. More likely a few trade agreements will have more lenient terms than they would have otherwise and promises to clean up, and that'll be the end of it.
Though, I swore off going to the US many years ago after they basically took liberties with what rights they think they have (which include this EU passenger data crap). If I was forced to enter the US now, I'd do so for as short a time as possible and carry no electronic equipment whatsoever and encrypt all communications home. That's the only sensible business choice and has been for years, and it just happens to be the complete antithesis of the intention to collect that data in the first place.
Publisher. For YEARS. Maybe the very new versions are different, but I have this every day with people bringing in old/new versions of Publisher files.
And no import filter is ever perfect, even if it was written by MS, for opening MS formats, for a MS application.
"signs are looking positive."
I hope not. Wouldn't that rather spoil the point?
No. I'm not. My point is that Gigabit Ethernet over copper is not anywhere close to "state of the art", and hasn't been for a long time - given the fact that even the cheapest of netbooks comes with a Gigabit Ethernet port capable of similar things. Hell, 10G is buyable today if you know where to look, and 40G is on the way. Yes, it's over twisted pairs, but if you can do 40G over twisted pairs, it's because of the technique and the error correction methods - NOT THE CABLE. The cable helps - obviously - but is mainly designed to reduce interference at the frequencies you prefer, reduce cross-talk, etc. The techniques, however, apply in equally similar fashions to even one single POTS pair (if you can do 40G without interference, you can go 1G with interference, especially if you tweak the parameters to optimise for the cable that's in place).
My point isn't that you can string Cat6 down the road (though that CAN and HAS happened in certain community projects, because it's a perfectly viable method - what's the difference between wiring a site 100m with external Cat6 and wiring a village with houses 100m apart with external Cat6?) - that's not practical for a large scale project, however - my point is that this isn't a shock or something new that's never been done before. Hell, we can ALMOST do this over wireless nowadays, subject to regulatory approval.
This is like when people were crowing about getting fast connections to their cabinet 100m away, after several years of me using 10Mb Ethernet at home consisting of a BNC cable that I knocked up from a set of video connectors as a kid with cheap NE2000's on either end. There, the cabling was basically the same (modulo some interference), and it served so well that it was only supplanted when I had to upgrade to a PCI card which was 10/100 without BNC connectors.
You look, and you think - so what? I can heath-robinson something 10 times better over the same distance. I'm sure if we bothered to design it properly that 512Kb DSL to a cabinet down the road would be embarrassing by comparison.
And, as stated, it's the uplink that matters. If the cabinet doesn't give you what you can have, then it's not worth worrying about Gigabit DSL. Fact is, if I lived in a small village, with 100m at most between houses, I'd buy a leased line and cable / wireless people's houses for them if I was allowed. If we constrain ourselves to what we can achieve over 100m, you do have to compete - in people's minds at least - with Ethernet and the associated standards.
The real selling point for a tech like this would be that you could get 100Mb over 10km, not 1000Mb over 0.01km.
I have to echo this.
Over 100m, Gigabit over copper is already trivially possible. My computer has it built-in, so has anything you've bought in the last few years.
The problem of local connections such as 100m is solved. We're there. It's not a problem. Even a community project that threw Cat6a round the village could do a half-decent job of it at Gigabit speeds over even longer distances.
The problem is the link back to some Internet-connected point, as always. As you say, it's pointless (and quite easy) to have Gigabit in every house on some island in the middle of nowhere if you don't have a decent uplink to the rest of the world and all the intermediary connections.
Like my home network. I have Gigabit all round the house and wireless at stupendous speeds that don't get that far. But my connection to the Internet is 30Mbps, so apart from shifting files locally, it's pointless to worry about it. But if I had Gigabit to the Internet, you can be sure I wouldn't piss it away on 100Mbps connections around the house.
Any idiot can build a network at 100m distances. Community projects have proven that random people can easily work out how to cover a kilometer or so (farmers digging up their fields and laying their own copper/fibre). It's the joining that to the Internet in general (i.e. a leased line of some kind, with decent capacity to cope with everyone beyond it, connected direct to a major Internet hub) - that's the real problem.
What you're suggesting is compression.
As the data gets larger and the possibilities grow, the size of the information to reference that information gets as big as, if not bigger, than the information itself.
And, at best, you'd get something roughly equivalent to gzip'ing HTML pages, zipping up PDF's, or compressing images (all of which already happen as part of the standard protocols).
The question to ask is:
What happens for the VERY VERY FIRST TIME this sort of tampering is spotted?
What if we found something in Linux, or something in PKE, or something in anything we use?
Would we just go "Oh, well, that's the NSA for you" and then carry on as normal? No. Likely there'd be a complete fork from a clean workbase to start over again, a complete distrust of code from day one, and a complete overhaul of all existing systems.
It's just not something that, as a government agency, you'd want to get implicated in whatsoever. For a start, you have a backdoor into systems in the German government? Or the Koreans? Holy crap you're in trouble for it being found out.
And what purpose would it serve, above and beyond traditional spying? Not a lot. The effort and secrecy required, and the implications if you're found out EVER, is far too large-scale to reap any benefit from it.
It's much more incredibly likely that they are using standard spying techniques (i.e. let's tap X's computer because we know he's involved) than planting things into major pieces of open source software. Closed commercial? That's a different matter but - again - compared to just issuing an order that they do it for you and never speak about it, it's too difficult. And, even then, we've found out that that eventually comes out and has diplomatic effects on entire nations (including allies).
I don't believe they wouldn't try. I don't believe they wouldn't have some way into the system. I don't believe for a second, though, that they've backdoored something quite so open and visible, or that the people involved in reviewing it wouldn't - EVENTUALLY - spot it and the outcry from that having a 100 times greater impact on the world than anything some twat leaks from diplomatic cables.
I'd be so incredibly disappointed if that was the height of their capabilities, to do something some clumsy and ineffective, and that they couldn't choose their targets better.
These people are spies. I expect them to perform all manner of dirty manoeuvres as a routine job. But the fact is that good, old-fashioned spying is a million times more effective.
I would also have to say that an "enemy" of any description who has the capability to use only compiled-from-source software on regulated hardware, and uses them exclusively in whatever activities might be of interest to the NSA or GCHQ probably has the resources to verify that code or write it themselves.
And, you have to remember the old "fake-Moon-landings-Russians" argument - if your enemy is capable of DETECTING that you've done that, and they announce it to the world and show it was you that did it, they'd do it. Just to discredit you. Just to make you forget about the guy in the airport. Just to make you look like fools. Just to prove that THEY know what's going on and it's not so easy to get into their systems.
If you have a perfect government entity, then yes it's theoretically possible. But in real life, no, I'm sorry, it's just implausible on anything other than a trivial scale. They might get a "euid=root" type bug into the code if they try hard and find a weak target, but to be honest, it's not a concern.
And if I was really worried, I'd use FreeDOS. Or Minix. Or FreeBSD. Or whatever. And any "common point" like gcc, well you can verify those kinds of things with the double-compilation tricks or just using a different piece of software. Either they would have to have infected EVERYTHING or NOTHING. And I'll go with nothing.
Yeah.
Basically anything they are doing there, I could do and not get into trouble (so long as you stick to the DPA, etc., and there's no evidence to suggest they don't). Hell, Google already do it too, and just about any number of web crawlers.
That's a whole different ball game to "monitoring my conversations" when it comes to doing so by looking into the private records of my account, rather than what you can already find on Google.
Yes, it's a little closer to, say, reassembling a shredded document. If you shred it enough, of course it's just a bundle of characters that are really hard to piece together.
But if DNA really takes as long as stated to decompose even under ideal conditions, we are basically one half of the time required for it to decompose under those conditions to the point where it's probably not capable of reassembly. So we aren't stuffed, even without ideal conditions. And tying in with what we know of horse DNA, we're even less stuffed.
And putting huge amount of computation and DNA from the same animal through it, and we're even less stuffed. Seems to me to be a pretty damn useful technique, overall, even if it's only "statistically" correct.
And contamination? Sure it's possible. But the chances of modern DNA contamination are vanishingly small (that's why we have all those labs and things, and how you know your cancer result is yours and not that of the fly that flew into the hospital where you were being tested), and the ancient contaminations - unless they form the majority of the sample - will be pushed out by sheer probability and statistics.
Nobody is saying that this is 100% the exact DNA of this animal (and why would you WANT that? It might be a complete throw-back and have a one-off DNA coding that no other animal of its type has ever had). But it's so close to dammit, on average, that it's more than useful for scientific enquiry.
If you gather enough of a material, and it's in good enough condition, and you try hard enough to piece it all together, and get enough "overlaps" (which is the equivalent of a "fit" in terms of jigaws, shredded paper, etc.), then you can be pretty damn confident that this DNA is similar to that of the original animal. That's got implications, even if it's only 80% accurate, for everything from forensics to archaeology.