"He told me that I could go to jail for six to twelve months for what I had just done and if I didnâ(TM)t agree to meet with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement he was going to call the RCMP and have me arrested. So I signed the agreement."
You're an idiot. You signed something under threat of prison / arrest without bothering to consult a lawyer. No amount of mention of poverty, trust, or even just plain intimidation should have made you do such a thing without first consulting a lawyer.
And, as such, your legal position is not significantly weakened because, by talking to the media, you've BREACHED that non-disclosure agreement that you voluntarily signed and would now have to prove duress in a court to invalidate that.
You're an idiot. Don't sign anything, and if you do abide by what you sign. If they threaten you with police if you DON'T sign anything, pick up the phone and call the police (or lawyer) yourself. Duress to sign a contract is extremely important. Signing an NDA (of all things) "voluntarily" and then claiming it was done under duress in a public statement (that mentions the NDA you've just agreed you won't mention) is idiotic. Call a lawyer: it's the ONLY sensible option at that point.
And if you'd done that? Sure, it would have cost you a few hundred to get them in, but there's no way on earth that you'd be where you are now (i.e. having to hire lawyers to get back into school, for instance). In fact, likely the matter would all quickly become a "misunderstanding" that was hastily swept up out of the press.
You're an idiot. All you've done is shown a court that what you did was so grey-area that you'd rather hastily sign a contract than have the police look into it, and then you've gone and broken that exact contract, and admitted doing just that in the most public way possible.
Most sensible countries have specific laws about what happens when not enough people vote - i.e. the vote is invalid and special action have to be taken.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for a known evil.
d) The guy who owns the company that would be contracted to do it is the golf-buddy of the guy who makes the decision.
Unfortunately, that particular link I have witnessed on scales from the education secretary down to local headteachers in everything from primary schools to academies (privatised schools that break the rules that state schools aren't allowed to break, and get private "sponsorship" which allows them to sign exclusive, long-term contracts with manufacturers owned by the guy from the same army regiment as the "superhead" appointed by a parliamentary Lord to run the academy).
The councillor in charge of waste management in my local London borough "just happens" to own the independent waste management company that they contract out all their services to. It's declared on something called the "Register of Interests" but I can't help feeling that that's a conflict of interest whether you state it or not.
It's really that common in politics and the only question is whether you can prove it or not. I've worked in places where it was literally so bad, we used to Google the directors of the company of any van that pulled into the car park. Glaziers, carpet-fitters, electricians, IT cabling guys, you name it, we managed to find direct links back to those people authorised the contracts (and, in some cases, they directly profited from the companies that were employed to do those contracts - but it was all "okay" because they declared their interests in some obscure paperwork that was almost impossible to find).
Not a lot. Certainly no more than building cities and skyscrapers over hundreds of years.
The energy in the wind is ENORMOUS. Stupendous. On a scale we can't even begin to imagine. Huge masses of air going higher than mountains and pushing things over at huge velocities without even trying.
But our harnessing of it is pathetic. It's like putting a child's windmill into a wind test tunnel, but actually much, much worse. Sure, we get useful energy "for free" but we don't take 1% of 1% of 1% out of the power of the wind (if you want to see why, just work out how much volume a wind turbine takes up out of, say, the entire atmosphere above your country. It's literally lost in the measurement error. Multiply by even a million and it's still nothing, and beaten by the change in wind pattern generated by, say, a small avalanche on a high mountain).
The biggest problem is: what sort of impact does having to add all that infrastructure have on the "greenness" of the project? What energy are you using to produce it, and cope with its losses, and what water will you use and how will you filter it (if at all) to get efficient transfer and how will you maintain it (if it's offshore - that's yet-another thing that has to be maintained at great expense and someone has to use a diesel-powered boat to get to it and check on it every so often, etc.). It's all small stuff but it all eats away at the efficiency of the system and we're already at the point where the efficiency of the system has now been admitted to be INADEQUATE after decades of investment and now needs this new "energy store" to make it more efficient.
Really? These people who want to put a binary into your computer, as a fully privileged user, interacting with every part of your system in order to improve graphical performance - with full access to all design documents, chipset manuals, and source code - couldn't work out that FPS could potentially be "spiky" and that just a single figure wasn't an accurate representation of how a human perceived their extraordinarily complex and expensive graphics, and that's why things didn't look or work smoothly?
And it took them YEARS to work this out? And only really weeks to "fix"?
I haven't used or purchased or recommended or approved a purchase that used ATI/AMD cards in years. The last one I personally used was an Xpert@Work many, many years ago. It was cheap and cheerful but did the job if you were prepared to put up with the driver hassle (never really got any sort of performance out of it on Linux, but that was true of a lot of cards back then).
Not because of a framerate issue that I ever perceived but because I just stopped trusting them with my computer after numerous driver issues and being "abandoned" once I had an old card. This just reinforces my belief that it was the right decision.
You can post a comment in the comments section, and point people at it, or add an FAQ.
Fact is, the person answering the Kickstarter queries isn't doing them favours with those sorts of responses (this answer is better - still not perfect, but better).
mth - I don't know if you know the history of the OpenPandora project, which I referenced in my question, but your answer just rings too many bells for me. Chinese production (with people uncertain or not giving details on how that's going on the kickstarter), business-side run mainly by a reseller of obscure console (exactly the same thing was the cause of many of the OP problems - Craig from OP ran a large shop specialising in just the same and "distribution" is not the same as "production", as we found out on OP).
The "clean" kernel sounds good but I'm not sure about just relying on SDL to do things on the framebuffer on its own. Most devices require a kind of SDL "driver", if you like, to accelerate even simple things like blits - the GP2X had just such a library (Paeryn's SDL was the one I used which was a derivative of a more "optimised" SDL for the device) and benefitted enormously from things like accelerated screen scaling (trust me, you'll be doing a lot of screen-scaling if you're porting apps to a 320x240 screen!).
OpenGL ES would be good for others, and that's stated on the kickstarter page too, I believe.
It's a *better* answer. I have kept the project on my Kickstarter "starred" list and will check back now. But my worries are still another OP-repeat.
And, if anything, ED, you're the only person I would have trusted on OpenPandora anyway. But the fact remains that the project as a whole has suffered serious setbacks in its customer relations, not all due to volcanoes and rogue companies.
Personally, I'd have distanced myself from the whole thing years ago if I were you. I still don't quite get why you do anything at all in that way - there can't be much profit in it for you any more.
But, early customers, investors, community people - quite a lot of people were given a bum deal in all of these and got burned. You've done your best to salvage what you can, done a marvellous job at that, and I'd have gladly gone with you at first if it had been you running things, but I fear that your side of the project has become a recovery and that only too late. I wouldn't want to see that happen to another project and have another good idea and good product ruined by poor business management.
Meanwhile Craig is off selling joypads for iPhones or whatever that other thing is (also a kickstarter project, I believe), and ignoring people who have given him money because he knows he doesn't have it (or products) to give back.
The trouble is that you've lost the community, and lost literally thousands of potential customers. I'd have had one, even today, if things had gone differently but the project will always have a bad smell about it in other's memories.
Kudos to you for picking up the pieces, but I don't think that alone is enough to salvage the product or the name. 4 years ago, you could have made a fortune, unquestionably, but the lack of business experience, managing the contractors (did anyone ever get to the bottom of exactly what was on paper with them?), liaison with other companies etc. just meant it went from one disaster to another. And the fix? The fix was to produce it in Germany, years later, for the prices that were rejected as being "too high" which had caused production go to China/US/wherever else originally.
Craig can sell. You can pick up the pieces. But it took you both 4 years to work out who fit where and could do what and who couldn't. And still we never really got to the bottom of simple things like organising customer lists, etc. so that they could actually satisfy customer requests without you having to spend months answering email.
I trust the product is good. I trust the delivery can now happen now you've had a little "coup" and taken control of the reins. I trust that you'll get through your remaining orders. But I didn't trust from the start the so-called business acumen of those involved. And while things are good now (providing you are a new customer and haven't been waiting years while someone held your money "to ransom"), I can't trust that you've considered everything or that another problem won't set us back where we were.
I'd employ you in a second, because you're the type of person who gets things done, even if they are outside your normal comfort zone. But I can't risk personal cash on an pure luxury product that's suffered so much bad history.
Do you not know what the OpenPandora was? Same thing, but stemming from the GP2X, really, and even the Dingoo in part.
The units exists but in terms of actually delivering, I doubt they qualify as having done that well. First day pre-orderers from four years ago still have no units (well, they can get one, if they pay hundreds of dollars again to someone else now). The software available is all pretty much OS stuff recompiled. In four years, they never really got to the sort of stability and popularity of even the GP2X they meant to replace.
And it was supposed to be an "open" project, by the community, etc. etc. etc. Go ask the community how that worked out (you can't, really, because the ones who still linger there are the ones who didn't just pull out after years of waiting and years of excuses, and most of the original community left before they could do anything useful).
I see no reason that this can't be the same. "The community" doing something doesn't mean they'll do it any better than the big-guns. Take community wifi as one example - sure, there are outstanding projects out there that have been running for years and made money - but they are the exception rather than the rule.
P.S. I have ported software to the GP2X (I own two of the original F100's without touchscreen), some people then subsequently ported my work to the A320 and other devices (even the PSP at one point), I frequented the OpenPandora site for years hoping for the magic turning point where I could buy one with confidence. I'm hardly an outsider or an automatic nay-sayer. And this project looks set to follow the same route, I have to say.
I posted a question on their kickstarter, asking what they would do to avoid being another OpenPandora fiasco (four years later, first-day pre-orderers are still without hardware and being asked to stump up again for the device to be delivered and refund requests ignored), what sort of experience they have in the area, what sort of business acumen and supplier management they have in the project, etc.
i.e. I trust you can BUILD the device, how are you going to buy the parts, pay someone to put it together, distribute it, sell it, etc. I also inquired about the status of SDL libraries, hardware acceleration in those libraries, etc.
The reply I got is below, in its entirety:
"I have a bussiness degree and have former game studio president for consulting with, I also have a tech school willing to assist with flashing and QA of the console in the works. Yes there are sdl libs in our os if you look in the updates we have released our source for the kernel. Any other questions please consult with MTH our lead developer on irc.freenode.net the channel is #GCW"
Geeks make good hardware, they don't get it into people's hands well enough, though - and I avoided OpenPandora, despite coming from the GP2X community onto it, precisely because of the non-existent customer support and the fact that they could just never deliver what they promised.
I didn't bother to follow up, or put money into the kickstarter. You may feel differently, though. I though the device was really pretty cool though, and would probably have paid for one outright if the answers had been different (or even answered most of my real queries, rather than a brush-off by telling me that someone has a "bussiness degree" - I can name lots of people with those. Most of them have never run a business in their lives).
ABS: As someone pointed out, the first really primitive ABS was mechanical. I'm not sure it would pass any modern safety test, however, or be cost-effective. And as ABS is mandated on your car to a certain standard, it basically has to be electrical (as I stated).
This isn't a "let's just sell lots of ABS" factor so much as - done properly - it just makes THAT much difference under normal driving conditions (the only ones where it's really outperformed by a skilled driver in a non-ABS car would be on loose gravel, I believe).
Salt water won't really make a difference except to the length of time it powers the circuit (possibly higher "short-circuit" conductivity will lead to a loss of time, but still not enough to make a 50-100Ah lead-acid battery just give up instantly, or else the explosion of the battery from that short-circuit would be much more dangerous to you than anything in the water).
And you can always find a flaw in a Mythbusters test, but I'm not sure that you'll find a *relevant* one. Obviously it's not scientific and you'd need to retest and retest and even try different models of car, even, but it's done better than your own personal "I don't know, let's try it for real" tests. Finding something that actually changes the result dramatically is rare.
Your window won't open from the hand-crank, and not just because of junky plastic teeth (my car-supplied jack has a plastic screw as the basis of it, and that car is using 15 years old technology - my father has been a mechanic for lorry fleets and run his own garage for about 40 years, and he HATES using that jack and has warned me off it, even though you should never put any part of yourself under a car that's on a jack and not proper supports).
The pressure pushes on ALL parts of the car. It's like having people all push their hands against every part of your car simultaneously. They don't need to lever and push with all their strength and put their weight behind it in order to make it almost impossible to open the window by a hand crank, because you just have "enough" weight on it to move it out of line and make the gear-teeth chink over each other. Water is surprisingly heavy - the pressures on even a small household fish aquarium are HUGE.
And the mechanism for a window opening basically assumes free flight (except for the rubber water seal) all the way down. I have broken hand-cranks in my own car just because I went too mad with them in my haste to get them down, or the rubber seal slipped inside the door frame and provided enough friction to stop the window.
One problem is that the gearing is junk (because it's basically designed to be), but even if you made it solid iron, the pressures are the same and all parts of the mechanism will be subject to the same pressure. Hell, most window cranks are held into the door frame by a few tiny screws or even just plastic "pop" connectors, so you're talking lots of reinforcement no matter what you do.
And the effort to crack the first bit of the window down is huge, and then you have water coming in against you at a rate that the rest of the window hardly matters - you'll be submerged before you make a hole big enough to get out of. The water pushing against every part of a large window (largely unsupported, don't forget - it basically is fixed at the bottom and slides in a groove up and down) is a lot to overcome for what is basically an inefficient handle. Even the motorised window will struggle, to be honest. I wouldn't even be surprised if you could get the window to break - think of a half-open window, water on the outside, pouring over the top into a void, with someone desperately trying to get out. A face-full of wet glass isn't an impossibility.
It's not a "cheap fix", it's an extreme situation that isn't without danger no matter what you do, all the "common sense" things you've been told for years are wrong (do NOT wait for it to sink!), all the things you can do are limited by simple physics and having a clear head and patience in an
I drop every gadget I've ever owned. Some of them multiple times every day. And I mean, drop, as in pull something out of my pocket and my satnav/phone/etc. goes flying out with it at high speed and whacks against a wall and then hits the floor.
I have yet to actually BREAK a gadget like that. I have scratched screens slightly but never to the point they were unusable. Hell, most of my gadgets end up going through the washing machine and dryer at least once in their life.
A flexible phone just seems to have other ways to break it - flexing it too far, applying pressure at odd angles when flexed, etc. Unless I can actually fold it like paper, it's going to have a point where it breaks. And if I can fold it like paper, then it's going to have to suffer what a piece of paper (like a receipt) can go through in the bottom of your pocket afresh EVERY DAY without problems.
Hell, most paper receipts in my pocket don't last 24 hours without tearing or being so folded and smudged that they are unreadable. I can't imagine a plastic device of any material tolerating that at all.
If a phone is "flexible", it has to be VERY flexible. Almost ridiculously flexible. I don't think this generation or even the next of flexible gadgets will be. But if it's solid, it only has to be quite solid, and have a little band of rubber in the right place and it's nigh-on invincible in daily use, and we already know how to do that (whether manufacturer's BOTHER to do it is another matter, I'm still waiting for a laptop with decent hinges on the screen because that's killed every laptop I've ever owned).
I honestly don't think that if I took one of these "flexible" phones and tried to fold it in half along a sharp crease that it would work afterwards. And that's exactly the kind of thing that would happen in my pocket with my large bunch of keys, wallet, GPS, etc. in it at various times of the day.
All being flexible does is give you ways to put even more pressure on the materials. Solid devices cannot occupy each other's spaces, and internal materials are protected by an external core (which means only half your things have to be able to take abuse).
But a flexible phone, thrown in my pocket, will uncurl, curve, twist and bend as I walk and EVERY component has to suffer that. Then when I throw my keys in or ram a chocolate bar into my pocket, it's going to put huge pressure on the edges of those curves and make things bend perpendicular to anything it's already experiencing and that's going to snap it, break it, pop it (I imagine if you flex one area, it will have to "pop" into a shape to relief the stress, like those squidgy-balls-in-a-net), or just make the internals wear to the point that a vital connection stops working.
Seriously, the "gentle-wibble" that I see in demos today isn't flexibility that's practical. Show me a phone you can screw up like a piece of paper while in the heat of the moment and then just throw, and it survives it thousands of times over, then you might have a material that can live up to public consumption.
My car aerial is "flexible", but I can't get it back to straight if I kink it. That's the sort of flexible they are selling, but not the sort they are promising.
"just became" = "might, possibly, maybe, years in the future, when the economies of scale bring this down to the same price as a 'normal' battery"
Personally, I'd just rather we worked out how to reduce the weight of batteries. It would have much, much more effect and wins all round. Second would be power capacity, but that's obvious and comes as part of the reduction of weight too.
It also means a much more custom-shaped battery which could also mean either smaller devices (with weird shaped batteries) or impossible-to-source replacement batteries.
You're right, in that I'd much rather have 1% more battery life than anything flexible, but you can also see why some companies would love this technology to exist.
"Flexible" is the new "tablet" which only took 20+ years to appear after it first became viable and probably won't last another 5 before it's superceded by something else.
What you're saying is that the people wanting to murder will do it another way anyway if we take their guns away. So you should take their guns away, if nothing else that the ONLY other difference is a reduced risks of accidents and carelessness (e.g. toddlers blowing their heads open). It makes no difference to the murderers, but it does to the ordinary everyday risks of having a gun.
Similarly, those people who fall asleep while driving through carelessness will do so anyway. So we might as well fit "drowsy driver" detectors anyway - we won't save any of those who are careless anyway, but if we will save even a handful of accidents through the ones who weren't careless but were overcome by fumes, etc. then it's only a win-win situation.
Or alcohol detectors on ignitions. Or a myriad other safety features that have been approved under similar circumstances.
If it really won't stop those willing to break the law to do it anyway, it doesn't make sense to say "let's just abandon all the laws around this". What you do is tighten up the laws anyway to cover the OTHER situations that it presents, that you CAN do something about.
"It is my duty to ensure that only those people who _should_ be in possession of a handgun _are_ in possession of a handgun, in doing this I must judge their character.
With this duty in mind I have but two questions for anyone who comes asking such a licence; Would you like to own a gun? and, if I were to issue this licence, will you then take that licence and use it to procure said weapon?
If the applicant answers to both in the affirmative, then I deem that they are not really the sort of person who I feel should be in possession of a gun."
It's as unpopular a view to state in front of Americans and it is a popular one to state in front of non-gun-owning countries. The usual comeback is what would happen if someone breaks into my house with a weapon, don't I wish I had a gun then? Yes, but I wish harder that the other guy never was able to get hold of a gun in the first place, and that's made much easier by gun control for private hands.
In my entire life, I have never discharged a weapon. I have never held a weapon. I have never seen a real, live weapon except in an airport where the police are routinely armed. I have never seen a live weapon discharged in my entire life. I have lived and worked in some of the most horrible, manky, poor, deprived, crime-ridden areas of my country. I have had people try to walk into my house past me, and have had physical threats against my person.
And not once did I ever think "What this situation really needs is another gun".
I can't emphasise it enough, if you point a gun in my direction, accidentally or not, I will do anything up to and including killing you to stop that situation occurring or continuing. But owning a gun expressly for that purpose will only cause the same reaction from the other party.
1) Chinese data protection, software licensing, copyright and other laws are similar to, compatible with, and followed by, the Chinese programmers.
Because otherwise all you've done is saved money by breaking the law (i.e. stealing others code, letting others steal your code, giving a foreign entity access to a domestic data without a suitable contract covering what they may do with that data, etc.).
It's "cheaper" for me to hire some guys from the local building site to come to my house, rip out the asbestos and patch up the work. But if it means that the building falls down, that the work has to be redone, that those builders weren't allowed to work in my country at all, that I broke the law by exposing the asbestos in an unregulated fashion, or a myriad other things, it doesn't mean "I save money" or "Builders in my country are over-priced". It just means I didn't do the job as required (i.e. in compliance with the law for a start), and thus THAT'S how I made money, while in actual fact causing the company to spend TEN TIMES THAT to clear up the mess later when it all comes out.
In any properly written compiler, both are pretty equivalent and in almost all cases there wouldn't even be a difference in generated assembler, let alone performance.
case is basically a lot of else-if's, and else-if's are basically a single-path case.
Although I agree with your point, I don't agree with your examples.
ABS only operates electronically. We can't design a mechanical system that will do the job as well and if we could, it would have a very limited life or be stupidly expensive and require constant calibration. It has to monitor wheel speeds and pulse brakes at fractions of a second, and adjust accordingly in extreme braking situations and we just don't have the engineering to do that. If we did, there would have been ABS on cars 50 years ago. Fact is, ABS is an electronic technology.
And window cranks? The hypothetical scenario of not being able to wind the windows down is just that. First, don't drive off the road into water, that avoids 99.9% of all water-based problems.
Where that's not possible, if you can't open the door, then you're stuffed (trying to swim out the window is harder than you think unless the water is crystal clear, and the car is flooded to the roof anyway - and there the door will open!). And if you wait for the car to sink, you're stuffed (do it before the car even STARTS to take on water and it's no more difficult than opening the door).
And you have other worries than the window (i.e. seatbelts, door locks, child seats, etc.). By the time you have all occupants of the car ready to go, you won't smash the window, no. But neither will the button not work. Try it. The conductivity of the electricity in the wires from the battery will not be affected much by the short-circuit of the water, and will open the window underwater. This is why you always see the car headlights on underwater in the movies. Hell, if it's a diesel you might even find the engine keeps running and churns up the mud making things worse!
In fact, the recommended procedure (after getting out before the car sinks below the surface which takes 20-30 seconds) is to turn the headlights on if you plunge into water and it looks like you're going to sink so you can see underwater to get out.
And if you can open the windows, you can open the door - the pressure on an electric window underwater is immense under the water levels equalise and it just won't open anyway. The motor isn't strong enough to wind the window against the SIDE-pressure pushing inwards. But the pressure isn't great when the water has filled the car, and you are only advised to open the window in order to LET WATER IN, so you can open the door with even pressure on both sides.
Literally, past a certain point, you have to let the car sink and wait for the water to fill the car until you're ready to go (how do you intend to swim against the flow of water into the window without the car being full of water within a second anyway?). Anything in between those two scenarios and you waste energy trying to open a door/window that would never open against the pressures anyway, or just hasn't the transition to a more dangerous state and panic you.
But your biggest problems are a) getting everyone out of their seats ready to swim in a confined, moving, sinking, dark, panicked environment, b) swimming further back to the surface with them, the longer you wait and c) being in a damn dangerous situation that not much else will save you anyway.
If we make car manufacturers take account of junk like that, we'd be unable to afford a damn car at all.
But,as I say, I agree with your point.
P.S. You can buy a "car-window-smasher" tool for $1 in any cheap shop that you can keep in your door pocket (like they have on trains to smash windows in case of an accident). Evidence suggests you'll never use it and, if you do need it, it won't work very well from a confined, seated stance in a panic situation. If it does work perfectly, you'll end up winding yourself from the force of water smashing into your face from the extreme pressure change, probably knocking the breath out of you and making it harder to survive. Or you could have just waited and then opened the door. Or, even better, opened the door before it sunk. Or, even better, not driven into the water.
Which is why, since I was quite young, my rule has always been:
Until I can buy a unit of it, by a convenient method, with guaranteed delivery, it doesn't exist.
There's no point cooing over something that's "coming soon". You just add to hype around a product that may not even exist and - even if it does - you can't yet buy anyway. Until it is directly purchasable and will arrive at your door on a guaranteed date, it means nothing.
The number of products I've seen that never were (Phantom console, etc.), the number of products that were junk by they time they came out (e.g. Duke Nukem Forever, etc.), the number of products that just never reached critical mass or got into a reasonable price bracket (e.g. Optimus OLED keyboards, the "open source" graphics cards that are still based on a PCI/AGP architecture, etc.), and even the number of existing-but-completely-mismanaged projects that would have had me kicking myself for ever buying into (e.g. OpenPandora where pre-orderers are still waiting to receive units four years later having paid twice as much as those who can just order one from Germany today with guaranteed delivery, with little chance of a refund or unit without paying again) - it's just astounding. I would have wasted SO MUCH money on them if I didn't have my rule.
So I ignore everything that isn't purchasable. It might be as cool as anything, solve all my problems and do everything I always dreamed of. Great. Give me a call back when I can buy one. These affordable 40" OLED TV's I was promised nearly a decade ago? Still £20,000 from what I see.
I was promised tablet PC's back in the XP era. They've JUST come to fruition at one-tenth the cost (so actually affordable now), don't use Windows (well, soon they will, but that's very new), you can get them everywhere now, and I can't say that I see the use of them. If I'd bought in back in the XP era, I'd be really disappointed.
Am I disinterested in new products? Of course not. I was one of the first owners of a Raspberry Pi (as soon as they offered guaranteed orders + delivery) and had one before anyone else I know (was in the first batch, which meant you had to order within minutes of the announcement).
And I do support some kickstarters, but those where I will get the product or something worthwhile (e.g. Defense Grid 2 for a small backing - I got a DG1 key GUARANTEED and a video card GUARANTEED that I gave to my brother for Christmas that was worth the price alone, plus I get DG 1.5 next week I think - there are already at the Steam-key phase for deploying that, and I get DG2 whenever it comes out) and where they have manufacturing all sorted and ready to go and guaranteed dates.
I can't support those where the product doesn't even exist yet, or they offer you only "backing" for the project. I *have* supported some products purely on the basis of trust but we're talking literally a few dollars - and I'm GUARANTEED a copy of the game if it comes out. That's breaking my rule but never happens for anything of any significant value (if the projects existed in a working, deliverable state, I would happily back 10 times the amount I did without even thinking).
I can remember as a kid being disappointed so many times at the cool things I thought were coming "this year" and hanging on and waiting and waiting and checking up and waiting and never hearing of them again (even up to today!). All the great inventions and marvellous products and cool services. Nothing. And the ones that DID succeed, they succeed at the point you can buy them - and at that point, you can buy them and get them delivered and know what you are buying.
I think Aliens:Colonial Marines looks really nice and it looks like the game I've been promised and wanted since the days of Aliens (US) on the ZX Spectrum (damn, that movie is old!). It's on pre-purchase now. But I've not yet seen it. It's already been delayed a year from it's original date, and then a month again just now (was originally January). An
If everyone pays insurance by the risk that they personally pose, we all just end up paying for our own costs. Thus, "insurance" in that sense becomes just a middle-man who takes a percentage of what we have to pay anyway.
Insurance is intended to cover lots of people because the 1% who actually have an accident that month are covered by the 99% who didn't but still paid a (small) premium anyway.
The problem is not the equality, but the way the insurance companies DO NOT PASS those savings on to customers (i.e. if they have 50% male and 50% female drivers, say, the female drivers will pay and subsidise the males and, by comparison, the males pay the same but have more accidents so get a better deal). The question is really why does a bad woman driver get a better insurance than a good male driver when everything is recorded and added up? That's the problem that was solved by the equality legislation, and the insurer's profiteering from it is the INSURER'S being arseholes.
Any "insurance" where you end up paying more than others isn't insurance (US medical insurance is another example - if I have to pay more because I have condition X, then why would I pay it to an insurance company when I could just put it in a bank and pay it direct? Hence most people who need insurance, don't have it, which ruins the point of medical insurance - it just becomes easy-money for the insurer's because the high-risk pay their own bills, effectively, and the low-risk pay every month for nothing).
It's just red-tape around paying what you owe anyway. And most modern "insurance" is exactly like that. If we ALL paid flood insurance, it would cost us 2p each a year. If only those who live in flood plains pay it, they might as well just put it in the bank and pay costs of each flood as it happens because it's only the high-risk people who are subsidising the majority of the insurance anyway. Some countries have blanket car insurance, because of this - every driver pays exactly the same and is insured to the same level. They can buy MORE insurance if they want, but everyone benefits from the basic insurance and pays less than they otherwise would.
And then people wonder why there are areas of London, say, where you cannot get insurance for your car because NOBODY there has insurance (Tottenham was in the news just last year for this - it's so hard to get insurance, because nobody else has it in the local area and it costs the insurer's money to pursue them when there's an accident, that nobody has insurance - something like 40% of drivers registered to Tottenham addresses are uninsured!).
Insurance isn't about "you cost me more, so I charge you more". Insurance is a blanket cover that covers the total costs of everyone it insures, paid for by everyone contributing an equal amount. Anything else is red-tape and bullshit. Notice, then, that car insurance rising because women have the pay the same as men now (i.e. closer to "real" insurance), is red-tape and bullshit and not related to the legislation at all.
Just wait for the trials about age discrimination on the same thing - why should someone get discriminated against because they are 20 with 10 years of driving experience, compared to someone who is 50 with 5 years of driving experience? And then they'll be a trial about where-you-live not being good enough to judge your insurance risk (especially if you drive around the country a lot), etc. etc. etc. and we'll slowly creep our way back to "proper" insurance.
Using a stock device, and some external software that's easily available and can send certain commands, you can modify the device remotely and run arbitrary code on it.
Sounds like a jailbre, ak on a closed to me. It's like saying that plugging in a USB device into a laptop gives you admin access, or that you can send certain packets over the network to a machine and end up with admin access.
Those functions shouldn't be available remotely, the processes should have permission to modify kernel memory and there shouldn't be a magic binary switch that lets you run arbitrary programs - if MS are actually serious about locking down the machine.
This is no different to any other jailbreak, some of which are as simple as getting to an internal command prompt, some of which involve exploiting save game files to cause a crash. But they all gain access to a "locked-down" machine using nothing but what's installed on the machine and a remote device.
Physical access to a machine is game-over, anyway. We all know this. But this is about something which doesn't require anything more than a USB cable or network connection and sending the right packets to the remote debugging service to gain full access.
On their own phones, they just install a browser and their own trusted wildcard cert.
Then anything you browse to, the browser trusts and encrypts but just to the "wrong" destination.
On any decent machine, or decent browser under your own control, you wouldn't let it happen. And if you did, SSL would be similarly "broken".
SSL is a trust mechanism only. If your phone trusts Nokia, the padlock icon means nothing beyond that you're talking to Nokia. If your phone DIDN'T trust Nokia, it wouldn't be an issue and they would have to pass your traffic through unchanged (and still encrypted!) to the destination servers or risk SSL warnings on your browser.
This is why you don't ignore browser certificate warnings, and why you NEVER install a certificate on your computer (or allow software to). I've seen software that installs a trust certificate for the vendor when installed (as administrator), that would be show up and be allowed in the IE certificate store too (so browsing to any site with a cert signed by that cert would let you think you were talking to Google, etc.)
See also Google's TURKTRUST issue lately - if you trusted TURKTRUST, you thought you were talking to Google and weren't. If you didn't, you would just have got an error and still been secure.
1) No recruitment process mirrors what is required in the job. Don't expect it to.
2) Most recruitment processes generate only a single metric in a particular way.
3) That metric may not be what you think ("What did he do in the last ten minutes of the impossible task we set? Panic? Make stuff up and waffle? Or state that the problem required further time and an interesting avenue for development seemed to be X?" - you'll probably find that your code ends up in a bin within minutes of the test after a brief "Yeah, looks reasonable" check)
4) That metric, if it IS the sole basis of the recruitment process, will result in candidates being hired who are good at that metric, not the job (e.g. managers who are good at bullshitting other managers rather than managing, coders good at churning out stuff that looks right but is horrendous to use or wrong, etc.). If that's the case, you won't get the job, and wouldn't want to work there if you did (those people would be your co-workers, and your managers would think they'd done a good job of hiring them in the first place, and wonder why you have a problem with them).
5) The bulk of the recruitment process otherwise is about weeding out the chaff so they have more time to talk to YOU and find out whether you're actually suitable. Large companies get idiots who can't turn a computer on apply for datacentre systems administrator posts, and the test is there to save them time. Cut out the chaff, get a handful of candidates worthy of interview from THOUSANDS who applied (CV's written in crayon or with spelling mistakes = first stage bin, people who don't have relevant experience / qualifications = second stage bin, people who don't turn up to interview, or turn up late or scruffy = third stage bin, people who can't pass the test = fourth stage bin, the rest are interviewed properly - it's quite easy to get to the interview stage, or to manage the applications up to the interview stage, knowing NOTHING about the job at all).
6) I would hire the guy who approaches me on the day of the test and quietly says "I don't think that's enough time, but I'll try my best, okay?" if he has one ounce of relevant experience / qualification / skill.
Slashdot Mirror
"He told me that I could go to jail for six to twelve months for what I had just done and if I didnâ(TM)t agree to meet with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement he was going to call the RCMP and have me arrested. So I signed the agreement."
You're an idiot. You signed something under threat of prison / arrest without bothering to consult a lawyer. No amount of mention of poverty, trust, or even just plain intimidation should have made you do such a thing without first consulting a lawyer.
And, as such, your legal position is not significantly weakened because, by talking to the media, you've BREACHED that non-disclosure agreement that you voluntarily signed and would now have to prove duress in a court to invalidate that.
You're an idiot. Don't sign anything, and if you do abide by what you sign. If they threaten you with police if you DON'T sign anything, pick up the phone and call the police (or lawyer) yourself. Duress to sign a contract is extremely important. Signing an NDA (of all things) "voluntarily" and then claiming it was done under duress in a public statement (that mentions the NDA you've just agreed you won't mention) is idiotic. Call a lawyer: it's the ONLY sensible option at that point.
And if you'd done that? Sure, it would have cost you a few hundred to get them in, but there's no way on earth that you'd be where you are now (i.e. having to hire lawyers to get back into school, for instance). In fact, likely the matter would all quickly become a "misunderstanding" that was hastily swept up out of the press.
You're an idiot. All you've done is shown a court that what you did was so grey-area that you'd rather hastily sign a contract than have the police look into it, and then you've gone and broken that exact contract, and admitted doing just that in the most public way possible.
Then don't vote.
Most sensible countries have specific laws about what happens when not enough people vote - i.e. the vote is invalid and special action have to be taken.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for a known evil.
d) The guy who owns the company that would be contracted to do it is the golf-buddy of the guy who makes the decision.
Unfortunately, that particular link I have witnessed on scales from the education secretary down to local headteachers in everything from primary schools to academies (privatised schools that break the rules that state schools aren't allowed to break, and get private "sponsorship" which allows them to sign exclusive, long-term contracts with manufacturers owned by the guy from the same army regiment as the "superhead" appointed by a parliamentary Lord to run the academy).
The councillor in charge of waste management in my local London borough "just happens" to own the independent waste management company that they contract out all their services to. It's declared on something called the "Register of Interests" but I can't help feeling that that's a conflict of interest whether you state it or not.
It's really that common in politics and the only question is whether you can prove it or not. I've worked in places where it was literally so bad, we used to Google the directors of the company of any van that pulled into the car park. Glaziers, carpet-fitters, electricians, IT cabling guys, you name it, we managed to find direct links back to those people authorised the contracts (and, in some cases, they directly profited from the companies that were employed to do those contracts - but it was all "okay" because they declared their interests in some obscure paperwork that was almost impossible to find).
Not a lot. Certainly no more than building cities and skyscrapers over hundreds of years.
The energy in the wind is ENORMOUS. Stupendous. On a scale we can't even begin to imagine. Huge masses of air going higher than mountains and pushing things over at huge velocities without even trying.
But our harnessing of it is pathetic. It's like putting a child's windmill into a wind test tunnel, but actually much, much worse. Sure, we get useful energy "for free" but we don't take 1% of 1% of 1% out of the power of the wind (if you want to see why, just work out how much volume a wind turbine takes up out of, say, the entire atmosphere above your country. It's literally lost in the measurement error. Multiply by even a million and it's still nothing, and beaten by the change in wind pattern generated by, say, a small avalanche on a high mountain).
The biggest problem is: what sort of impact does having to add all that infrastructure have on the "greenness" of the project? What energy are you using to produce it, and cope with its losses, and what water will you use and how will you filter it (if at all) to get efficient transfer and how will you maintain it (if it's offshore - that's yet-another thing that has to be maintained at great expense and someone has to use a diesel-powered boat to get to it and check on it every so often, etc.). It's all small stuff but it all eats away at the efficiency of the system and we're already at the point where the efficiency of the system has now been admitted to be INADEQUATE after decades of investment and now needs this new "energy store" to make it more efficient.
Really? These people who want to put a binary into your computer, as a fully privileged user, interacting with every part of your system in order to improve graphical performance - with full access to all design documents, chipset manuals, and source code - couldn't work out that FPS could potentially be "spiky" and that just a single figure wasn't an accurate representation of how a human perceived their extraordinarily complex and expensive graphics, and that's why things didn't look or work smoothly?
And it took them YEARS to work this out? And only really weeks to "fix"?
I haven't used or purchased or recommended or approved a purchase that used ATI/AMD cards in years. The last one I personally used was an Xpert@Work many, many years ago. It was cheap and cheerful but did the job if you were prepared to put up with the driver hassle (never really got any sort of performance out of it on Linux, but that was true of a lot of cards back then).
Not because of a framerate issue that I ever perceived but because I just stopped trusting them with my computer after numerous driver issues and being "abandoned" once I had an old card. This just reinforces my belief that it was the right decision.
You can post a comment in the comments section, and point people at it, or add an FAQ.
Fact is, the person answering the Kickstarter queries isn't doing them favours with those sorts of responses (this answer is better - still not perfect, but better).
mth - I don't know if you know the history of the OpenPandora project, which I referenced in my question, but your answer just rings too many bells for me. Chinese production (with people uncertain or not giving details on how that's going on the kickstarter), business-side run mainly by a reseller of obscure console (exactly the same thing was the cause of many of the OP problems - Craig from OP ran a large shop specialising in just the same and "distribution" is not the same as "production", as we found out on OP).
The "clean" kernel sounds good but I'm not sure about just relying on SDL to do things on the framebuffer on its own. Most devices require a kind of SDL "driver", if you like, to accelerate even simple things like blits - the GP2X had just such a library (Paeryn's SDL was the one I used which was a derivative of a more "optimised" SDL for the device) and benefitted enormously from things like accelerated screen scaling (trust me, you'll be doing a lot of screen-scaling if you're porting apps to a 320x240 screen!).
OpenGL ES would be good for others, and that's stated on the kickstarter page too, I believe.
It's a *better* answer. I have kept the project on my Kickstarter "starred" list and will check back now. But my worries are still another OP-repeat.
And, if anything, ED, you're the only person I would have trusted on OpenPandora anyway. But the fact remains that the project as a whole has suffered serious setbacks in its customer relations, not all due to volcanoes and rogue companies.
Personally, I'd have distanced myself from the whole thing years ago if I were you. I still don't quite get why you do anything at all in that way - there can't be much profit in it for you any more.
But, early customers, investors, community people - quite a lot of people were given a bum deal in all of these and got burned. You've done your best to salvage what you can, done a marvellous job at that, and I'd have gladly gone with you at first if it had been you running things, but I fear that your side of the project has become a recovery and that only too late. I wouldn't want to see that happen to another project and have another good idea and good product ruined by poor business management.
Meanwhile Craig is off selling joypads for iPhones or whatever that other thing is (also a kickstarter project, I believe), and ignoring people who have given him money because he knows he doesn't have it (or products) to give back.
The trouble is that you've lost the community, and lost literally thousands of potential customers. I'd have had one, even today, if things had gone differently but the project will always have a bad smell about it in other's memories.
Kudos to you for picking up the pieces, but I don't think that alone is enough to salvage the product or the name. 4 years ago, you could have made a fortune, unquestionably, but the lack of business experience, managing the contractors (did anyone ever get to the bottom of exactly what was on paper with them?), liaison with other companies etc. just meant it went from one disaster to another. And the fix? The fix was to produce it in Germany, years later, for the prices that were rejected as being "too high" which had caused production go to China/US/wherever else originally.
Craig can sell. You can pick up the pieces. But it took you both 4 years to work out who fit where and could do what and who couldn't. And still we never really got to the bottom of simple things like organising customer lists, etc. so that they could actually satisfy customer requests without you having to spend months answering email.
I trust the product is good. I trust the delivery can now happen now you've had a little "coup" and taken control of the reins. I trust that you'll get through your remaining orders. But I didn't trust from the start the so-called business acumen of those involved. And while things are good now (providing you are a new customer and haven't been waiting years while someone held your money "to ransom"), I can't trust that you've considered everything or that another problem won't set us back where we were.
I'd employ you in a second, because you're the type of person who gets things done, even if they are outside your normal comfort zone. But I can't risk personal cash on an pure luxury product that's suffered so much bad history.
Do you not know what the OpenPandora was? Same thing, but stemming from the GP2X, really, and even the Dingoo in part.
The units exists but in terms of actually delivering, I doubt they qualify as having done that well. First day pre-orderers from four years ago still have no units (well, they can get one, if they pay hundreds of dollars again to someone else now). The software available is all pretty much OS stuff recompiled. In four years, they never really got to the sort of stability and popularity of even the GP2X they meant to replace.
And it was supposed to be an "open" project, by the community, etc. etc. etc. Go ask the community how that worked out (you can't, really, because the ones who still linger there are the ones who didn't just pull out after years of waiting and years of excuses, and most of the original community left before they could do anything useful).
I see no reason that this can't be the same. "The community" doing something doesn't mean they'll do it any better than the big-guns. Take community wifi as one example - sure, there are outstanding projects out there that have been running for years and made money - but they are the exception rather than the rule.
P.S. I have ported software to the GP2X (I own two of the original F100's without touchscreen), some people then subsequently ported my work to the A320 and other devices (even the PSP at one point), I frequented the OpenPandora site for years hoping for the magic turning point where I could buy one with confidence. I'm hardly an outsider or an automatic nay-sayer. And this project looks set to follow the same route, I have to say.
I posted a question on their kickstarter, asking what they would do to avoid being another OpenPandora fiasco (four years later, first-day pre-orderers are still without hardware and being asked to stump up again for the device to be delivered and refund requests ignored), what sort of experience they have in the area, what sort of business acumen and supplier management they have in the project, etc.
i.e. I trust you can BUILD the device, how are you going to buy the parts, pay someone to put it together, distribute it, sell it, etc. I also inquired about the status of SDL libraries, hardware acceleration in those libraries, etc.
The reply I got is below, in its entirety:
"I have a bussiness degree and have former game studio president for consulting with, I also have a tech school willing to assist with flashing and QA of the console in the works. Yes there are sdl libs in our os if you look in the updates we have released our source for the kernel. Any other questions please consult with MTH our lead developer on irc.freenode.net the channel is #GCW"
Geeks make good hardware, they don't get it into people's hands well enough, though - and I avoided OpenPandora, despite coming from the GP2X community onto it, precisely because of the non-existent customer support and the fact that they could just never deliver what they promised.
I didn't bother to follow up, or put money into the kickstarter. You may feel differently, though. I though the device was really pretty cool though, and would probably have paid for one outright if the answers had been different (or even answered most of my real queries, rather than a brush-off by telling me that someone has a "bussiness degree" - I can name lots of people with those. Most of them have never run a business in their lives).
ABS: As someone pointed out, the first really primitive ABS was mechanical. I'm not sure it would pass any modern safety test, however, or be cost-effective. And as ABS is mandated on your car to a certain standard, it basically has to be electrical (as I stated).
This isn't a "let's just sell lots of ABS" factor so much as - done properly - it just makes THAT much difference under normal driving conditions (the only ones where it's really outperformed by a skilled driver in a non-ABS car would be on loose gravel, I believe).
Salt water won't really make a difference except to the length of time it powers the circuit (possibly higher "short-circuit" conductivity will lead to a loss of time, but still not enough to make a 50-100Ah lead-acid battery just give up instantly, or else the explosion of the battery from that short-circuit would be much more dangerous to you than anything in the water).
And you can always find a flaw in a Mythbusters test, but I'm not sure that you'll find a *relevant* one. Obviously it's not scientific and you'd need to retest and retest and even try different models of car, even, but it's done better than your own personal "I don't know, let's try it for real" tests. Finding something that actually changes the result dramatically is rare.
Your window won't open from the hand-crank, and not just because of junky plastic teeth (my car-supplied jack has a plastic screw as the basis of it, and that car is using 15 years old technology - my father has been a mechanic for lorry fleets and run his own garage for about 40 years, and he HATES using that jack and has warned me off it, even though you should never put any part of yourself under a car that's on a jack and not proper supports).
The pressure pushes on ALL parts of the car. It's like having people all push their hands against every part of your car simultaneously. They don't need to lever and push with all their strength and put their weight behind it in order to make it almost impossible to open the window by a hand crank, because you just have "enough" weight on it to move it out of line and make the gear-teeth chink over each other. Water is surprisingly heavy - the pressures on even a small household fish aquarium are HUGE.
And the mechanism for a window opening basically assumes free flight (except for the rubber water seal) all the way down. I have broken hand-cranks in my own car just because I went too mad with them in my haste to get them down, or the rubber seal slipped inside the door frame and provided enough friction to stop the window.
One problem is that the gearing is junk (because it's basically designed to be), but even if you made it solid iron, the pressures are the same and all parts of the mechanism will be subject to the same pressure. Hell, most window cranks are held into the door frame by a few tiny screws or even just plastic "pop" connectors, so you're talking lots of reinforcement no matter what you do.
And the effort to crack the first bit of the window down is huge, and then you have water coming in against you at a rate that the rest of the window hardly matters - you'll be submerged before you make a hole big enough to get out of. The water pushing against every part of a large window (largely unsupported, don't forget - it basically is fixed at the bottom and slides in a groove up and down) is a lot to overcome for what is basically an inefficient handle. Even the motorised window will struggle, to be honest. I wouldn't even be surprised if you could get the window to break - think of a half-open window, water on the outside, pouring over the top into a void, with someone desperately trying to get out. A face-full of wet glass isn't an impossibility.
It's not a "cheap fix", it's an extreme situation that isn't without danger no matter what you do, all the "common sense" things you've been told for years are wrong (do NOT wait for it to sink!), all the things you can do are limited by simple physics and having a clear head and patience in an
Oh come on, Slashdot.
150 comments and not a mention of Triffid oil?
I'm disappointed. What has this site come to?
I drop every gadget I've ever owned. Some of them multiple times every day. And I mean, drop, as in pull something out of my pocket and my satnav/phone/etc. goes flying out with it at high speed and whacks against a wall and then hits the floor.
I have yet to actually BREAK a gadget like that. I have scratched screens slightly but never to the point they were unusable. Hell, most of my gadgets end up going through the washing machine and dryer at least once in their life.
A flexible phone just seems to have other ways to break it - flexing it too far, applying pressure at odd angles when flexed, etc. Unless I can actually fold it like paper, it's going to have a point where it breaks. And if I can fold it like paper, then it's going to have to suffer what a piece of paper (like a receipt) can go through in the bottom of your pocket afresh EVERY DAY without problems.
Hell, most paper receipts in my pocket don't last 24 hours without tearing or being so folded and smudged that they are unreadable. I can't imagine a plastic device of any material tolerating that at all.
If a phone is "flexible", it has to be VERY flexible. Almost ridiculously flexible. I don't think this generation or even the next of flexible gadgets will be. But if it's solid, it only has to be quite solid, and have a little band of rubber in the right place and it's nigh-on invincible in daily use, and we already know how to do that (whether manufacturer's BOTHER to do it is another matter, I'm still waiting for a laptop with decent hinges on the screen because that's killed every laptop I've ever owned).
I honestly don't think that if I took one of these "flexible" phones and tried to fold it in half along a sharp crease that it would work afterwards. And that's exactly the kind of thing that would happen in my pocket with my large bunch of keys, wallet, GPS, etc. in it at various times of the day.
All being flexible does is give you ways to put even more pressure on the materials. Solid devices cannot occupy each other's spaces, and internal materials are protected by an external core (which means only half your things have to be able to take abuse).
But a flexible phone, thrown in my pocket, will uncurl, curve, twist and bend as I walk and EVERY component has to suffer that. Then when I throw my keys in or ram a chocolate bar into my pocket, it's going to put huge pressure on the edges of those curves and make things bend perpendicular to anything it's already experiencing and that's going to snap it, break it, pop it (I imagine if you flex one area, it will have to "pop" into a shape to relief the stress, like those squidgy-balls-in-a-net), or just make the internals wear to the point that a vital connection stops working.
Seriously, the "gentle-wibble" that I see in demos today isn't flexibility that's practical. Show me a phone you can screw up like a piece of paper while in the heat of the moment and then just throw, and it survives it thousands of times over, then you might have a material that can live up to public consumption.
My car aerial is "flexible", but I can't get it back to straight if I kink it. That's the sort of flexible they are selling, but not the sort they are promising.
"just became" = "might, possibly, maybe, years in the future, when the economies of scale bring this down to the same price as a 'normal' battery"
Personally, I'd just rather we worked out how to reduce the weight of batteries. It would have much, much more effect and wins all round. Second would be power capacity, but that's obvious and comes as part of the reduction of weight too.
A flexible battery, means flexible devices.
It also means a much more custom-shaped battery which could also mean either smaller devices (with weird shaped batteries) or impossible-to-source replacement batteries.
You're right, in that I'd much rather have 1% more battery life than anything flexible, but you can also see why some companies would love this technology to exist.
"Flexible" is the new "tablet" which only took 20+ years to appear after it first became viable and probably won't last another 5 before it's superceded by something else.
What you're saying is that the people wanting to murder will do it another way anyway if we take their guns away. So you should take their guns away, if nothing else that the ONLY other difference is a reduced risks of accidents and carelessness (e.g. toddlers blowing their heads open). It makes no difference to the murderers, but it does to the ordinary everyday risks of having a gun.
Similarly, those people who fall asleep while driving through carelessness will do so anyway. So we might as well fit "drowsy driver" detectors anyway - we won't save any of those who are careless anyway, but if we will save even a handful of accidents through the ones who weren't careless but were overcome by fumes, etc. then it's only a win-win situation.
Or alcohol detectors on ignitions. Or a myriad other safety features that have been approved under similar circumstances.
If it really won't stop those willing to break the law to do it anyway, it doesn't make sense to say "let's just abandon all the laws around this". What you do is tighten up the laws anyway to cover the OTHER situations that it presents, that you CAN do something about.
To quote Rowan Atkinson in The Thin Blue Line:
"It is my duty to ensure that only those people who _should_ be in possession of a handgun _are_ in possession of a handgun, in doing this I must judge their character.
With this duty in mind I have but two questions for anyone who comes asking such a licence; Would you like to own a gun? and, if I were to issue this licence, will you then take that licence and use it to procure said weapon?
If the applicant answers to both in the affirmative, then I deem that they are not really the sort of person who I feel should be in possession of a gun."
It's as unpopular a view to state in front of Americans and it is a popular one to state in front of non-gun-owning countries. The usual comeback is what would happen if someone breaks into my house with a weapon, don't I wish I had a gun then? Yes, but I wish harder that the other guy never was able to get hold of a gun in the first place, and that's made much easier by gun control for private hands.
In my entire life, I have never discharged a weapon. I have never held a weapon. I have never seen a real, live weapon except in an airport where the police are routinely armed. I have never seen a live weapon discharged in my entire life. I have lived and worked in some of the most horrible, manky, poor, deprived, crime-ridden areas of my country. I have had people try to walk into my house past me, and have had physical threats against my person.
And not once did I ever think "What this situation really needs is another gun".
I can't emphasise it enough, if you point a gun in my direction, accidentally or not, I will do anything up to and including killing you to stop that situation occurring or continuing. But owning a gun expressly for that purpose will only cause the same reaction from the other party.
Only if:
1) Chinese data protection, software licensing, copyright and other laws are similar to, compatible with, and followed by, the Chinese programmers.
Because otherwise all you've done is saved money by breaking the law (i.e. stealing others code, letting others steal your code, giving a foreign entity access to a domestic data without a suitable contract covering what they may do with that data, etc.).
It's "cheaper" for me to hire some guys from the local building site to come to my house, rip out the asbestos and patch up the work. But if it means that the building falls down, that the work has to be redone, that those builders weren't allowed to work in my country at all, that I broke the law by exposing the asbestos in an unregulated fashion, or a myriad other things, it doesn't mean "I save money" or "Builders in my country are over-priced". It just means I didn't do the job as required (i.e. in compliance with the law for a start), and thus THAT'S how I made money, while in actual fact causing the company to spend TEN TIMES THAT to clear up the mess later when it all comes out.
In any properly written compiler, both are pretty equivalent and in almost all cases there wouldn't even be a difference in generated assembler, let alone performance.
case is basically a lot of else-if's, and else-if's are basically a single-path case.
Although I agree with your point, I don't agree with your examples.
ABS only operates electronically. We can't design a mechanical system that will do the job as well and if we could, it would have a very limited life or be stupidly expensive and require constant calibration. It has to monitor wheel speeds and pulse brakes at fractions of a second, and adjust accordingly in extreme braking situations and we just don't have the engineering to do that. If we did, there would have been ABS on cars 50 years ago. Fact is, ABS is an electronic technology.
And window cranks? The hypothetical scenario of not being able to wind the windows down is just that. First, don't drive off the road into water, that avoids 99.9% of all water-based problems.
Where that's not possible, if you can't open the door, then you're stuffed (trying to swim out the window is harder than you think unless the water is crystal clear, and the car is flooded to the roof anyway - and there the door will open!). And if you wait for the car to sink, you're stuffed (do it before the car even STARTS to take on water and it's no more difficult than opening the door).
And you have other worries than the window (i.e. seatbelts, door locks, child seats, etc.). By the time you have all occupants of the car ready to go, you won't smash the window, no. But neither will the button not work. Try it. The conductivity of the electricity in the wires from the battery will not be affected much by the short-circuit of the water, and will open the window underwater. This is why you always see the car headlights on underwater in the movies. Hell, if it's a diesel you might even find the engine keeps running and churns up the mud making things worse!
In fact, the recommended procedure (after getting out before the car sinks below the surface which takes 20-30 seconds) is to turn the headlights on if you plunge into water and it looks like you're going to sink so you can see underwater to get out.
And if you can open the windows, you can open the door - the pressure on an electric window underwater is immense under the water levels equalise and it just won't open anyway. The motor isn't strong enough to wind the window against the SIDE-pressure pushing inwards. But the pressure isn't great when the water has filled the car, and you are only advised to open the window in order to LET WATER IN, so you can open the door with even pressure on both sides.
Literally, past a certain point, you have to let the car sink and wait for the water to fill the car until you're ready to go (how do you intend to swim against the flow of water into the window without the car being full of water within a second anyway?). Anything in between those two scenarios and you waste energy trying to open a door/window that would never open against the pressures anyway, or just hasn't the transition to a more dangerous state and panic you.
But your biggest problems are a) getting everyone out of their seats ready to swim in a confined, moving, sinking, dark, panicked environment, b) swimming further back to the surface with them, the longer you wait and c) being in a damn dangerous situation that not much else will save you anyway.
If we make car manufacturers take account of junk like that, we'd be unable to afford a damn car at all.
But,as I say, I agree with your point.
P.S. You can buy a "car-window-smasher" tool for $1 in any cheap shop that you can keep in your door pocket (like they have on trains to smash windows in case of an accident). Evidence suggests you'll never use it and, if you do need it, it won't work very well from a confined, seated stance in a panic situation. If it does work perfectly, you'll end up winding yourself from the force of water smashing into your face from the extreme pressure change, probably knocking the breath out of you and making it harder to survive. Or you could have just waited and then opened the door. Or, even better, opened the door before it sunk. Or, even better, not driven into the water.
Which is why, since I was quite young, my rule has always been:
Until I can buy a unit of it, by a convenient method, with guaranteed delivery, it doesn't exist.
There's no point cooing over something that's "coming soon". You just add to hype around a product that may not even exist and - even if it does - you can't yet buy anyway. Until it is directly purchasable and will arrive at your door on a guaranteed date, it means nothing.
The number of products I've seen that never were (Phantom console, etc.), the number of products that were junk by they time they came out (e.g. Duke Nukem Forever, etc.), the number of products that just never reached critical mass or got into a reasonable price bracket (e.g. Optimus OLED keyboards, the "open source" graphics cards that are still based on a PCI/AGP architecture, etc.), and even the number of existing-but-completely-mismanaged projects that would have had me kicking myself for ever buying into (e.g. OpenPandora where pre-orderers are still waiting to receive units four years later having paid twice as much as those who can just order one from Germany today with guaranteed delivery, with little chance of a refund or unit without paying again) - it's just astounding. I would have wasted SO MUCH money on them if I didn't have my rule.
So I ignore everything that isn't purchasable. It might be as cool as anything, solve all my problems and do everything I always dreamed of. Great. Give me a call back when I can buy one. These affordable 40" OLED TV's I was promised nearly a decade ago? Still £20,000 from what I see.
I was promised tablet PC's back in the XP era. They've JUST come to fruition at one-tenth the cost (so actually affordable now), don't use Windows (well, soon they will, but that's very new), you can get them everywhere now, and I can't say that I see the use of them. If I'd bought in back in the XP era, I'd be really disappointed.
Am I disinterested in new products? Of course not. I was one of the first owners of a Raspberry Pi (as soon as they offered guaranteed orders + delivery) and had one before anyone else I know (was in the first batch, which meant you had to order within minutes of the announcement).
And I do support some kickstarters, but those where I will get the product or something worthwhile (e.g. Defense Grid 2 for a small backing - I got a DG1 key GUARANTEED and a video card GUARANTEED that I gave to my brother for Christmas that was worth the price alone, plus I get DG 1.5 next week I think - there are already at the Steam-key phase for deploying that, and I get DG2 whenever it comes out) and where they have manufacturing all sorted and ready to go and guaranteed dates.
I can't support those where the product doesn't even exist yet, or they offer you only "backing" for the project. I *have* supported some products purely on the basis of trust but we're talking literally a few dollars - and I'm GUARANTEED a copy of the game if it comes out. That's breaking my rule but never happens for anything of any significant value (if the projects existed in a working, deliverable state, I would happily back 10 times the amount I did without even thinking).
I can remember as a kid being disappointed so many times at the cool things I thought were coming "this year" and hanging on and waiting and waiting and checking up and waiting and never hearing of them again (even up to today!). All the great inventions and marvellous products and cool services. Nothing. And the ones that DID succeed, they succeed at the point you can buy them - and at that point, you can buy them and get them delivered and know what you are buying.
I think Aliens:Colonial Marines looks really nice and it looks like the game I've been promised and wanted since the days of Aliens (US) on the ZX Spectrum (damn, that movie is old!). It's on pre-purchase now. But I've not yet seen it. It's already been delayed a year from it's original date, and then a month again just now (was originally January). An
I think you forget what insurance is.
If everyone pays insurance by the risk that they personally pose, we all just end up paying for our own costs. Thus, "insurance" in that sense becomes just a middle-man who takes a percentage of what we have to pay anyway.
Insurance is intended to cover lots of people because the 1% who actually have an accident that month are covered by the 99% who didn't but still paid a (small) premium anyway.
The problem is not the equality, but the way the insurance companies DO NOT PASS those savings on to customers (i.e. if they have 50% male and 50% female drivers, say, the female drivers will pay and subsidise the males and, by comparison, the males pay the same but have more accidents so get a better deal). The question is really why does a bad woman driver get a better insurance than a good male driver when everything is recorded and added up? That's the problem that was solved by the equality legislation, and the insurer's profiteering from it is the INSURER'S being arseholes.
Any "insurance" where you end up paying more than others isn't insurance (US medical insurance is another example - if I have to pay more because I have condition X, then why would I pay it to an insurance company when I could just put it in a bank and pay it direct? Hence most people who need insurance, don't have it, which ruins the point of medical insurance - it just becomes easy-money for the insurer's because the high-risk pay their own bills, effectively, and the low-risk pay every month for nothing).
It's just red-tape around paying what you owe anyway. And most modern "insurance" is exactly like that. If we ALL paid flood insurance, it would cost us 2p each a year. If only those who live in flood plains pay it, they might as well just put it in the bank and pay costs of each flood as it happens because it's only the high-risk people who are subsidising the majority of the insurance anyway. Some countries have blanket car insurance, because of this - every driver pays exactly the same and is insured to the same level. They can buy MORE insurance if they want, but everyone benefits from the basic insurance and pays less than they otherwise would.
And then people wonder why there are areas of London, say, where you cannot get insurance for your car because NOBODY there has insurance (Tottenham was in the news just last year for this - it's so hard to get insurance, because nobody else has it in the local area and it costs the insurer's money to pursue them when there's an accident, that nobody has insurance - something like 40% of drivers registered to Tottenham addresses are uninsured!).
Insurance isn't about "you cost me more, so I charge you more". Insurance is a blanket cover that covers the total costs of everyone it insures, paid for by everyone contributing an equal amount. Anything else is red-tape and bullshit. Notice, then, that car insurance rising because women have the pay the same as men now (i.e. closer to "real" insurance), is red-tape and bullshit and not related to the legislation at all.
Just wait for the trials about age discrimination on the same thing - why should someone get discriminated against because they are 20 with 10 years of driving experience, compared to someone who is 50 with 5 years of driving experience? And then they'll be a trial about where-you-live not being good enough to judge your insurance risk (especially if you drive around the country a lot), etc. etc. etc. and we'll slowly creep our way back to "proper" insurance.
Take a simpler view of it.
Using a stock device, and some external software that's easily available and can send certain commands, you can modify the device remotely and run arbitrary code on it.
Sounds like a jailbre, ak on a closed to me. It's like saying that plugging in a USB device into a laptop gives you admin access, or that you can send certain packets over the network to a machine and end up with admin access.
Those functions shouldn't be available remotely, the processes should have permission to modify kernel memory and there shouldn't be a magic binary switch that lets you run arbitrary programs - if MS are actually serious about locking down the machine.
This is no different to any other jailbreak, some of which are as simple as getting to an internal command prompt, some of which involve exploiting save game files to cause a crash. But they all gain access to a "locked-down" machine using nothing but what's installed on the machine and a remote device.
Physical access to a machine is game-over, anyway. We all know this. But this is about something which doesn't require anything more than a USB cable or network connection and sending the right packets to the remote debugging service to gain full access.
Show me where you can edit the list of trusted SSL certificates and I'll concede and call it a user's phone.
Your idealisms are unfortunately blocked by fact, and that knowledge was reflected in my post.
On their own phones, they just install a browser and their own trusted wildcard cert.
Then anything you browse to, the browser trusts and encrypts but just to the "wrong" destination.
On any decent machine, or decent browser under your own control, you wouldn't let it happen. And if you did, SSL would be similarly "broken".
SSL is a trust mechanism only. If your phone trusts Nokia, the padlock icon means nothing beyond that you're talking to Nokia. If your phone DIDN'T trust Nokia, it wouldn't be an issue and they would have to pass your traffic through unchanged (and still encrypted!) to the destination servers or risk SSL warnings on your browser.
This is why you don't ignore browser certificate warnings, and why you NEVER install a certificate on your computer (or allow software to). I've seen software that installs a trust certificate for the vendor when installed (as administrator), that would be show up and be allowed in the IE certificate store too (so browsing to any site with a cert signed by that cert would let you think you were talking to Google, etc.)
See also Google's TURKTRUST issue lately - if you trusted TURKTRUST, you thought you were talking to Google and weren't. If you didn't, you would just have got an error and still been secure.
1) No recruitment process mirrors what is required in the job. Don't expect it to.
2) Most recruitment processes generate only a single metric in a particular way.
3) That metric may not be what you think ("What did he do in the last ten minutes of the impossible task we set? Panic? Make stuff up and waffle? Or state that the problem required further time and an interesting avenue for development seemed to be X?" - you'll probably find that your code ends up in a bin within minutes of the test after a brief "Yeah, looks reasonable" check)
4) That metric, if it IS the sole basis of the recruitment process, will result in candidates being hired who are good at that metric, not the job (e.g. managers who are good at bullshitting other managers rather than managing, coders good at churning out stuff that looks right but is horrendous to use or wrong, etc.). If that's the case, you won't get the job, and wouldn't want to work there if you did (those people would be your co-workers, and your managers would think they'd done a good job of hiring them in the first place, and wonder why you have a problem with them).
5) The bulk of the recruitment process otherwise is about weeding out the chaff so they have more time to talk to YOU and find out whether you're actually suitable. Large companies get idiots who can't turn a computer on apply for datacentre systems administrator posts, and the test is there to save them time. Cut out the chaff, get a handful of candidates worthy of interview from THOUSANDS who applied (CV's written in crayon or with spelling mistakes = first stage bin, people who don't have relevant experience / qualifications = second stage bin, people who don't turn up to interview, or turn up late or scruffy = third stage bin, people who can't pass the test = fourth stage bin, the rest are interviewed properly - it's quite easy to get to the interview stage, or to manage the applications up to the interview stage, knowing NOTHING about the job at all).
6) I would hire the guy who approaches me on the day of the test and quietly says "I don't think that's enough time, but I'll try my best, okay?" if he has one ounce of relevant experience / qualification / skill.