Cat's eyes work for the distance your headlights reach, for curves and junctions (the colour of them changes for different road features - red, and green for the two sides, yellow for junctions, etc.). Decent headlights reach further than your braking distance at your car's legal top speed in those conditions (further if you "undip" them).
Anything beyond that is basically invisible anyway. If your headlights can't pick up a cat's eye in the distance (whether around a bend or not), it's because it's just not visible (behind trees, buildings, etc.). The angle does not have to be spot-on, the cat's eye will illuminate enough to either side of your path too.
A compliant set of headlights will illuminate everything you need (including cat's eyes and truck-level signs) to drive at 50+ mph through that environment with adequate braking distance (whether that a sensible speed or not in total darkness that a deer could leap out of at any moment is another matter entirely) .
I drove a lot in Scotland, and through some rural areas near me, in pitch-black with only my car lights and cat's eyes to guide me (and having to dip my headlights constantly for oncoming traffic). Not once did I need the cat's eyes to do more than they did and there there's a very real chance of plummeting down a cliff or driving into a loch with even a metre of error either side.
If the signs in your country don't illuminate (literally punching out of the darkness like they have bulbs behind them) just by your headlights approaching them, you need to send your highways departments back to school.
The same place all the other excess energy goes into - methods to try and store it and use it at slightly less efficiency later in the day.
The usual example is to pump water back up a reservoir that's being used for electricity generation. So when it falls down again tomorrow, you can get useful energy from it again at the right time and only lose a percentage of the energy to keep pumping it back up there until you need it.
Still doesn't mean it's efficient but the thing about electricity planning is that they KNOW when things are going to ramp up or slow down (even down to the timing of the adverts in the middle of big football matches!) and if they know, they can do their best to compensate.
More likely, if the motorways are switched off on a regular basis, they will power down a more flexible station during those times because they know they won't have to supply as high a peak. You can't "turn off" nuclear easily, but the infrastructure isn't all nuclear. You could easily keep them going all the time to supply the "base" current and deal with peaks and spikes (like the motorway lights being on) with other means and get to shut down OTHER types of station that you wouldn't normally be able to because of the demand required.
Never heard of cat's eyes? Simpler, cheaper, non-polluting and basically last forever (the UK ones spring down when you run over them and "clean themselves" in the pool of water that collects in a chamber underneath them). That's why all UK motorways and major roads have them already.
If we wanted to save extreme amounts of power, we could turn off all streetlights quite easily. Motorways wouldn't suffer, nor would back streets and most rural roads are unlit anyway. That's what headlights were FOR.
The point is to balance safety with power. It's SAFER to have lights on on the motorway but, if necessary, you don't compromise safety by adjusting them in varying levels of traffic. Still the road that you pull off the motorway and do 30mph in might be unlit, but that's a much slower road so it's much less of a risk.
It would be incredibly dangerous to remove cat's eyes or make them power-reliant. That's why they are there. Even a city-wide power-cut wouldn't stop us using the roads and motorways. But if we can switch off the MEGAWATTS of power that hundreds of miles of motorway uses when there's one or two cars per minute (try using even the M25 in the very early hours of the morning), that's an acceptable trade-off.
No more than they can opt of out paying for a lecturer they don't get on with, or a worksheet they didn't want, or a projector they didn't want to use in the lecture hall, or a piece of grass on the university grounds, or the rubbish collectors hired by the uni or any one of a million and one costs.
You bought into the uni, they had clear policies on what was and was not provided. Your problem. Sure, a uni that had an "open" policy might be more popular, but probably more expensive - but that's the choice you made when you signed up to that university.
Asking a stupid question will get you stupid answers.
"How can I bypass my University's IT policy against their wishes" isn't a question that requires an answer. It's like asking "How do I deploy an open telnetd running as root on the Internet?" or "How do I bypass the fact that my ISP allow me to put my unauthenticated Windows fileshares online?"
When you're doing something stupid, don't expect people to help directly. You think that telling someone they're doing it wrong isn't helping. It is. It helps them learn that they shouldn't NEED the answer to their question.
If someone phones up a garage and asks how they can wire the metal door-handles directly to the battery, or how they can illuminate the petrol tank with an uncovered candle, you'd expect them to be similarly unhelpful. Because it's a stupid thing to do, and if you want to do that, you're on your own. Our "help" is to tell you not to try.
Unfortunately, 90% of the headache of running a network is the userbase. Even in a small secondary school it can be difficult to keep people from abusing the connection (hell, I know I abused my uni's connection when I was there, not to mention their storage, FTP, CPU time, etc.) without policies like this.
They are providing you the service for things related to your work. Those sites you mention are not related to your work. Even if they were, the abuse of people using for things NOT related to their work is a burden that the IT department will be able to statistically measure. Otherwise they wouldn't bother with the hassle from students, staff, and technical problems associated with limiting your access.
It's not a question of "experts vs students", it's a question of different priorities. Even if you escalated it to the Dean themselves with the aid of staff, you would all end up sitting in a room with the IT guys who would explain exactly how much traffic that system cuts out, how many lost hours, how fewer abuse complaints they receive, how many more PC's they'd need to cope with the extra demand because of people hogging the computers for personal use, etc. and all for something that - if a site is genuinely vital to your work - they would gladly adjust to make sure it didn't interfere with your studies.
And then either you or the Dean would end up basically agreeing that what's in place isn't actually that draconian after all, and standard practice for most places for SEVERAL, very good, measurable, verifiable reasons. And every year you'd have the students/staff make the same argument and every year since the 90's it's been less of an issue because - as you point out - if you want unfiltered Internet for personal use, you can get it for next to nothing. And hell, in any university town I've ever been in, every cafe has free Internet to draw students in.
You have paid the uni, indirectly, to support your studies. If they are not supporting your studies, you can complain. But you can't complain that they aren't other personal Internet services to all X thousand students on their campus without paying the difference it would cost.
In my experience, working in schools rather than universities, I wouldn't be surprised if traffic (and therefore costs) quadrupled the second they relax their policy, even if they DON'T announce that they've done so. And those sorts of places usually run HUGE dedicated lines that are the backbone of the Internet - X thousand students accessing junk sites is NOT more important than the chemistry lab pushing a few Gigabytes around the world to their research partner. I assure you.
You have a workaround in the form of your own Internet connection, use it. If you want the uni to provide it, they will charge you MORE for the same thing because they are NOT an end-user ISP.
Dunno, but I heard of one poor sod that was caught within the Hiroshima bombings and, after being exposed, evacuated to Nagasaki just in time for... And that was a genuine, documented case from what I remember.
Maybe people should watch "When The Wind Blows" more often and less Terminator. Nuke != instantaneous death. Really. It's a whole lot worse than that. In comparison to what happens to you after, it's probably better to go out in an instant flash of hot, burning death.
What are pre-school children doing using the Internet unsupervised?
What are pre-school children doing on a computer that lets them connect to the Internet at all (this is what NetNanny, software firewalls, etc. are FOR).
What are pre-school children doing clicking on anything that they see on the screen?
What are pre-school children doing using admin-level accounts that allow modification of any settings but their own?
What are parents doing to allow all of the above and then complain about what happens to their PC (or their child)?
It probably just got a crap signal and kept trying to update your location on the basis of that crap signal. Thus one minute there's a jump of 200km/h and the next there's nothing because it thought you hadn't moved.
And it would be even worse if that were a commercial road-based sat-nav device - those basically try to snap you to the nearest road, which can mean all sorts of funny business when you have a poor signal or aren't on an actual road.
GPS "spoofers" don't try to make nearby GPS devices more at 200km/h (which would instantly signal a warning on anything checking speed). They just block the signal (by talking over it) so the GPS has no idea where it is at all and can't even guess. A bit like going through a tunnel with a satnav.
I'd be extremely disappointed (but not at all surprised) to find that a car manufacturer *HASN'T* considered how to tow an electric vehicle. I suppose they just expect people to know this and book a tow truck that picks the car off the road (but then - how do you get it onto that truck without a crane?).
I'd be less surprised if your average vehicle recovery firm wouldn't know about whatever-method and tow it anyway.
I also would be 100% completely unsurprised if most electric car owners have no knowledge of this whatsoever, even if it was written in the manual.
The atmosphere itself weighs 5 quadrillion (5Ã--10^15) tonnes and extends 100km. I don't think it's going to be a balance problem to stick a cocktail stick into the side of an elephant.
That said, my reply to this article is: Okay then. Off you go. Call us when you're close and we'll take a look.
And when some idiot digging up a water main cuts through their broadband line, which takes a week to repair, they won't be renewing their support/licences.
Always-on is okay for most things but it's not a magic bullet. My workplace insists on nothing being Internet-reliable because, well, our connection isn't reliable despite having any amount of failovers and different mediums available and even 3G as an emergency backup. We've done everything reasonably practical to make it more reliable but in the end we just choose not to use thing that RELY on the Internet being up to work. We do have online-server backup - but it retries and retries and warns us if there's a problem and NEVER stops us trying from some other connection / IP if necessary. Losing access to it temporarily doesn't mean we can't use the program.
And when you have one piece of software, that's fine to talk out. When you have 50 pieces of software and 1000 users and they all want to constantly talk out, then you have a big problem in terms of bandwidth. If you're talking not-just-verification packets, that's even worse. And uncacheable, obviously, by design. And reliant on the remote provider even existing let alone still be up, processing and supporting your software.
You haven't seen a crack or keygen because there isn't one. But you'll almost certainly run into a customer who either has avoided you like the plague for your policy and/or tries you and costs you more in support and refunds than he was worth. You can be arrogant about it, but so can the customer. And some competitor, I assure you, will more than satisfy your customers using your DRM scheme as a reason against you.
And if you suggest updates to my software, which I can't turn off, I take your software off my network. My users don't need to deal with that and click through it, only I do, and only I know when to upgrade or not, and only I *can* upgrade or not. So bothering them about it is actually an insult to me.
There most certainly isn't "no issue here". You've just chosen to ignore them. It might work for you, it might not, but it's not a happy ending all round - you just don't know who *hasn't* bought your software because of that policy.
Hint: I refused a large piece of software recently that would have cost about £10,000. When you get into "always-on" and moving functionality onto remote servers, I might as well just VNC into a remote host at your company and run the program on that. And that's basically what this company wanted us to do, with a Silverlight interface on our end as "the program". We just found a competitor that did what we needed, even if the software migration will be a big project. We'd rather have something on-site, that only we can switch off and on, and own when your company goes bust than remote access to the application on your servers, to the point where we'll PAY for that.
If you miss that last point, your company is going to suffer for it. Maybe not go bust because of it, but certainly lose out where it didn't need to.
I'd even go so far as to say you could use any weapon that you *BUILT* from raw materials during your hunt, i.e. sticks, spears, bows, arrows, etc. If you want to "hunt", do it while being like a hunter. Not while trying to act like a special forces marine taking out an oil refinery.
Hunting is an excuse for people to fire guns. Even in the UK, where general gun ownership is illegal, we allowed them shotguns for an awful long time. They still run with the dogs and horses now (I think, I don't keep track) but the bottom's fallen completely out of it - and it's the dogs (in overwhelming numbers) that do the "hunting" even then. Wanna impress me? Chase down the fecking fox on foot yourself.
To paraphrase Rowan Atkinson in the comedy series The Thin Blue Line: I think that the person who WANTS a gun licence is exactly the sort of person that shouldn't be given one.
I'm not even close to being a greenie, vegetarian or anything else. You want to hunt the deer, do it. On its own terms. Hunter against hunted. And be a man about it. If you come back with meat, we'll celebrate your manliness. If you come back with scratches and broken ribs, you were just beaten that day - nothing that strips away your manliness.
Similarly, you want to mug someone, be a man, not a pussy. Beat me in a fair fist fight without your gang and your weapons and you can have my wallet. But if you can't, you have to ask yourself what gives you your status in the local food chain - your weapon, or your ability.
Whether it exists doesn't correlate to whether it's used.
My girlfriend had an argument with her doctor only the other week because he hand-filled out the prescription, gave it to his medical receptionist, who took it upon herself to post it to the local Tesco's (whose pharmacy staff really are a waste of space) without ever asking.
The Tesco's couldn't fulfil it so she had to fight to get the paper prescription back, take it to Boots herself (who could only fulfil half of it, and did so without asking first, and kept her paper prescription telling her she could collect the other half "next month" - when this was supposed to be an out-of-cycle prescription so she could take her medication on a long holiday that would mean she'd normally miss her prescription filling date).
Some places might have them, but for sure nowhere near all, or even most. And to be honest, there's an awful lot of problems with them that they can't cope with that even getting humans to cope with can be tricky (obstinate cows in your local GP's reception office aside).
Are we out in the middle of the sticks? No. Greater London, major town. Similar experiences with the same things in other parts of London and Essex, too. We're a long way from any automation. I know, I sat and read through my entire medical records a few years back because they're still in the same envelope (that I can recognise amongst all the others), still the same pieces of paper, and still have to be pushed by post/courier to every doctor I deal with (fortunately, I hardly deal with doctors at all in the last 10 years unless something is dropping off...).
Would someone please back up my claim that when I came back from Tenerife once, having decided to blow all my spending money, all that remained in my pocket was:
1 single coin - One half of one cent of one Euro.
Everyone I've spoken to who's familiar with the Euro says that it never existed. Wish I'd kept the damn thing now. It was so worthless but I kept it until I'd got back to the UK (because it was funny to say, when my parents asked, that I had come back with money - and show them the most pathetically small denomination of Euro coin I could ever have found) and eventually threw it away.
20,000 % is 200 times. That's not a lot when you're considering total data, and not just maximum theoretical speed. For a start, if I use something everyday now that, five years ago, I only used one a month, that's 30 times more data already.
But it would be a lot in speed capability. The mobile I had when I was a kid years ago could only handle GSM data (i.e. 9600 bps at best at the time). If that speed had increased 20,000%, I'd have a 230Gbytes/s phone today.
I'm sorry but it's just poor planning. You know exactly how many customers you have and are likely to have. You know exactly what the theoretical maximum of those phones are. You know exactly what the average person will do (slowly use it more as time passes and upgrades pass by). Yet you still sell an unlimited package.
It's just bad business, but they don't want to admit that, like the small businesses that let Groupon sell 20,000 coupons for a free cupcake, etc. You didn't plan. You didn't extrapolate. You didn't price your products properly. You didn't expand the capability of your network. You didn't do anything that I would expect a large business like AT&T to do.
Ramp your prices up. Then wait for your customers to see all those Japanese telco's that give everyone huge allowances at top data rates for manageable prices on both mobile and fixed-line broadband. I don't care about your bad business planning, all I look for is value-for-money. If you can't provide it, I won't buy from you. If I do buy from you, I expect to get what I bought without any wording-tricks and revisions of the contracts. How hard is this to understand?
Submitter blocked from ever appearing on my front page again.
One step closer to removing this site from daily bookmarks.
And I *paid* to get rid of advertisements once already. Sure, we could argue about definitions of that in court but it's easier to just never come back here.
You want money? Ask for it. Don't alienate your regulars. I consider this "article" an utter betrayal of your geek cred, to be honest. Do it again, and I won't come back.
The last year, I've found myself doing nothing but finding reasons NOT to return to this site, if I'm honest, and have had to use my filters whereas before I never used them once. If you were actually *doing* anything, like making in Unicode compatible, or providing new features, then some things could be excused. But you are just doing nothing more than Yes/No and a little editing on user submissions. How well is that going to go when all the users bugger off because of abuses like this?
One person I know only buys what Which Magazine recommends. Everything he owns is "top" of Which's ratings. And they all have some pretty killer problems or cost the earth, and he gets nothing more done than someone who buys the cheapest things out of Tesco.
And just how many of my friends know what an indexable skiplist is, or the correct invocation of a particularl Windows API function, or a system for library cataloguing that integrates with AD, or the name of that guy in the film with that other guy? Precisely zero. If you've stopped tapping things into Google and are instead tapping them into Twitter or Facebook then, let's be honest, they probably weren't really worth asking in the first place. And anyone that answers will use Google to find the thing they read about that topic last week, etc.
Not only do I not believe it, I think that it could only be a good thing to stop Google having to deal with "Who saw Eastenders the other night? Did Jack find his long-last father?" when it could be dealing with my queries which need a mite more data and research.
Actually, it's more akin to a rubber seal manufacturer being in a phone call with Ford and saying "You know that car you're about to release? We think that possibly one of our engineers may have identified a problem."
Then Ford saying: "Okay, is it something we should recall the car for or not produce it?"
And then replying: "No. Hold on. Whisper, whisper, whisper. No, it'll be fine. It's no problem at all. Sorry to have bothered you."
The guy that the article is about was the engineer. The company he worked for took it through several levels of management and hushed it up. NASA are hardly completely to blame - they queried it and were told it was fine by the people who engineered that component.
What that has to do with taking risks I have no idea - sure, it was "potentially" avoidable but do we know how many times things like that happen over the decades needed to plan a shuttle launch with some millions of components and thousands of outside company, which employ collectively millions of people? And how many times they were "right" and how many times they were just paranoid, or even how many times their paranoia led to problems itself? No.
Spaceflight is high-risk, even with every control in the world. There hasn't been a space traveller yet that hasn't been made aware of that, private, military or commercial.
When you push the boundaries of capability and science, there are bound to be accidents, oversights and, yes, casualties.
And just because this guy did spot the problem, it doesn't make NASA any less dangerous a place to be in even today, knowing about it. Thousands of cranks and scientists probably doubted every section of every component at one time or another. How many people *thought* there'd be a slight risk of an accident with the numerous things they were responsible for but there never was? It doesn't mean it was right, or he was any more wrong, but it's a HUGE project pushing every capability to the maximum so it's always a risk.
This is what gets me most about modern warfare. One soldier dies and it's front-page news. Do you have any notion of how many died just a generation or two ago in wars that involved much fewer countries?
It's a matter of perspective. For those 17, it was tragic. For their families, it was awful. For anyone who knew that it was incredibly sad. For everyone else - they were fecking military test pilots flying something completely outside the normal historical bounds of flight.
Just how many lives do you think have been claimed by things like land-speed records? Is that tragic? How many by Arctic expeditions just to say they set foot on the pole? How many by people trying to climb Everest for charity? All *completely* avoidable - so long as we don't want to try to do anything like that.
They still died, of course, and were still human. But, in context, that many people die EVERY WEEK just in ordinary car accidents. These people were on the cutting edge of science, propulsion, flight, control systems, and on one of the hugest amounts of flammable fuel every collected in order to blast off into the most inhospitable environment that humans have ever been in. It's not exactly a shocking amount of deaths, no matter what the circumstances (more people die every time a train derails because someone forgot to check it).
You can either take it into account and move on, or you can abandon spaceflight entirely because someone might die. One of those progresses science and one doesn't. One of those would shut down CERN, nuclear reactors, etc. overnight and one wouldn't.
They knew what they were risking, and that's part of *why* they signed up. They didn't *need* to die but the fact that they, or someone doing the same things, died is hardly shocking to even themselves - and shouldn't be to us. Remember them, but don't "blame" them by proxy for us never wanting to put another human on a rocket again.
So your next-door-neighbour rape-victim who wants to remain completely anonymous because of the intense psychology damage it would do her to have that information be public doesn't get a choice?
In my country, it's hardly ever been possible to listen in on police radio (encrypted analog radios for decades even, I believe). I'm not sure if it's even legal to listen in, to be honest. And probably for good reason. You have *no* more reason to have that information public than victims and "alleged" criminals have to keep it private. Do you not have a right to a private life for innocent people in your country?
And what an incredibly stupid idea: "We've had an accusation of a man living at address.... interfering with children at the local playground" - and before you know it, John Smith is dead in a ditch somewhere because his ex-wife wanted to cause him hell by falsely reporting him and some vigilante with a scanner took it upon himself to be judge, jury and executioner. Giving the media access to it and not others is even more hilarious a concept.
If you want transparency and access - get it how you get any information out of a public office. Go to court and obtain the legally-required recordings of everything that happened.
If you even think for a second that you have to monitor your police force personally, you're living in the wrong country or you're more paranoid than a meeting of the OCD society.
That's not to say there isn't corruption and abuse of the system but in my country, the UK, police still are put behind bars when they use their powers incorrectly, recordings are still released when appropriate, courts have total access to use as evidence against corrupt individuals, incidents like beating rioters who then collapse of a heart attack *can't* be covered up because everything recorded is subject to court order and absence of it is a failure of duty that's punished more seriously than anything else, and the people put their trust in the ONLY people who are required to come to your aid if someone threatens you with violence.
No wonder the US police I've met have such a disdain for the American public and a love of the tourist - we actually respect them, not accuse them by default.
Not everything is as blanket-simple as "Free Speech and Open Access". Anyone who trots out arguments like that is really just clinging to some principle they think exists in a form *THEY* want it to.
Say your daughter is abused by her teacher. Yeah, sure, you want to see him go to jail or worse. But do you really want *ANYONE* with a scanner in range of where it was reported (e.g. her schoolmates, their parents, the people who go to her clubs, her neighbours, etc.) to know exactly what was done to her and who she is? Or would you prefer that to be reported by the officers discreetly over a covert channel (not even necessarily by radio)? As soon as you put the police under surveillance, you put every victim under surveillance too.
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Cat's eyes work for the distance your headlights reach, for curves and junctions (the colour of them changes for different road features - red, and green for the two sides, yellow for junctions, etc.). Decent headlights reach further than your braking distance at your car's legal top speed in those conditions (further if you "undip" them).
Anything beyond that is basically invisible anyway. If your headlights can't pick up a cat's eye in the distance (whether around a bend or not), it's because it's just not visible (behind trees, buildings, etc.). The angle does not have to be spot-on, the cat's eye will illuminate enough to either side of your path too.
A compliant set of headlights will illuminate everything you need (including cat's eyes and truck-level signs) to drive at 50+ mph through that environment with adequate braking distance (whether that a sensible speed or not in total darkness that a deer could leap out of at any moment is another matter entirely) .
I drove a lot in Scotland, and through some rural areas near me, in pitch-black with only my car lights and cat's eyes to guide me (and having to dip my headlights constantly for oncoming traffic). Not once did I need the cat's eyes to do more than they did and there there's a very real chance of plummeting down a cliff or driving into a loch with even a metre of error either side.
If the signs in your country don't illuminate (literally punching out of the darkness like they have bulbs behind them) just by your headlights approaching them, you need to send your highways departments back to school.
The same place all the other excess energy goes into - methods to try and store it and use it at slightly less efficiency later in the day.
The usual example is to pump water back up a reservoir that's being used for electricity generation. So when it falls down again tomorrow, you can get useful energy from it again at the right time and only lose a percentage of the energy to keep pumping it back up there until you need it.
Still doesn't mean it's efficient but the thing about electricity planning is that they KNOW when things are going to ramp up or slow down (even down to the timing of the adverts in the middle of big football matches!) and if they know, they can do their best to compensate.
More likely, if the motorways are switched off on a regular basis, they will power down a more flexible station during those times because they know they won't have to supply as high a peak. You can't "turn off" nuclear easily, but the infrastructure isn't all nuclear. You could easily keep them going all the time to supply the "base" current and deal with peaks and spikes (like the motorway lights being on) with other means and get to shut down OTHER types of station that you wouldn't normally be able to because of the demand required.
"Glow in the dark paint on road sides."
Never heard of cat's eyes? Simpler, cheaper, non-polluting and basically last forever (the UK ones spring down when you run over them and "clean themselves" in the pool of water that collects in a chamber underneath them). That's why all UK motorways and major roads have them already.
If we wanted to save extreme amounts of power, we could turn off all streetlights quite easily. Motorways wouldn't suffer, nor would back streets and most rural roads are unlit anyway. That's what headlights were FOR.
The point is to balance safety with power. It's SAFER to have lights on on the motorway but, if necessary, you don't compromise safety by adjusting them in varying levels of traffic. Still the road that you pull off the motorway and do 30mph in might be unlit, but that's a much slower road so it's much less of a risk.
It would be incredibly dangerous to remove cat's eyes or make them power-reliant. That's why they are there. Even a city-wide power-cut wouldn't stop us using the roads and motorways. But if we can switch off the MEGAWATTS of power that hundreds of miles of motorway uses when there's one or two cars per minute (try using even the M25 in the very early hours of the morning), that's an acceptable trade-off.
No more than they can opt of out paying for a lecturer they don't get on with, or a worksheet they didn't want, or a projector they didn't want to use in the lecture hall, or a piece of grass on the university grounds, or the rubbish collectors hired by the uni or any one of a million and one costs.
You bought into the uni, they had clear policies on what was and was not provided. Your problem. Sure, a uni that had an "open" policy might be more popular, but probably more expensive - but that's the choice you made when you signed up to that university.
Asking a stupid question will get you stupid answers.
"How can I bypass my University's IT policy against their wishes" isn't a question that requires an answer. It's like asking "How do I deploy an open telnetd running as root on the Internet?" or "How do I bypass the fact that my ISP allow me to put my unauthenticated Windows fileshares online?"
When you're doing something stupid, don't expect people to help directly. You think that telling someone they're doing it wrong isn't helping. It is. It helps them learn that they shouldn't NEED the answer to their question.
If someone phones up a garage and asks how they can wire the metal door-handles directly to the battery, or how they can illuminate the petrol tank with an uncovered candle, you'd expect them to be similarly unhelpful. Because it's a stupid thing to do, and if you want to do that, you're on your own. Our "help" is to tell you not to try.
Unfortunately, 90% of the headache of running a network is the userbase. Even in a small secondary school it can be difficult to keep people from abusing the connection (hell, I know I abused my uni's connection when I was there, not to mention their storage, FTP, CPU time, etc.) without policies like this.
They are providing you the service for things related to your work. Those sites you mention are not related to your work. Even if they were, the abuse of people using for things NOT related to their work is a burden that the IT department will be able to statistically measure. Otherwise they wouldn't bother with the hassle from students, staff, and technical problems associated with limiting your access.
It's not a question of "experts vs students", it's a question of different priorities. Even if you escalated it to the Dean themselves with the aid of staff, you would all end up sitting in a room with the IT guys who would explain exactly how much traffic that system cuts out, how many lost hours, how fewer abuse complaints they receive, how many more PC's they'd need to cope with the extra demand because of people hogging the computers for personal use, etc. and all for something that - if a site is genuinely vital to your work - they would gladly adjust to make sure it didn't interfere with your studies.
And then either you or the Dean would end up basically agreeing that what's in place isn't actually that draconian after all, and standard practice for most places for SEVERAL, very good, measurable, verifiable reasons. And every year you'd have the students/staff make the same argument and every year since the 90's it's been less of an issue because - as you point out - if you want unfiltered Internet for personal use, you can get it for next to nothing. And hell, in any university town I've ever been in, every cafe has free Internet to draw students in.
You have paid the uni, indirectly, to support your studies. If they are not supporting your studies, you can complain. But you can't complain that they aren't other personal Internet services to all X thousand students on their campus without paying the difference it would cost.
In my experience, working in schools rather than universities, I wouldn't be surprised if traffic (and therefore costs) quadrupled the second they relax their policy, even if they DON'T announce that they've done so. And those sorts of places usually run HUGE dedicated lines that are the backbone of the Internet - X thousand students accessing junk sites is NOT more important than the chemistry lab pushing a few Gigabytes around the world to their research partner. I assure you.
You have a workaround in the form of your own Internet connection, use it. If you want the uni to provide it, they will charge you MORE for the same thing because they are NOT an end-user ISP.
Yeah. You don't see those neutrinos fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.
Dunno, but I heard of one poor sod that was caught within the Hiroshima bombings and, after being exposed, evacuated to Nagasaki just in time for...
And that was a genuine, documented case from what I remember.
Maybe people should watch "When The Wind Blows" more often and less Terminator. Nuke != instantaneous death. Really. It's a whole lot worse than that. In comparison to what happens to you after, it's probably better to go out in an instant flash of hot, burning death.
Tell that to the hard drive manufacturers.
What are pre-school children doing using the Internet unsupervised?
What are pre-school children doing on a computer that lets them connect to the Internet at all (this is what NetNanny, software firewalls, etc. are FOR).
What are pre-school children doing clicking on anything that they see on the screen?
What are pre-school children doing using admin-level accounts that allow modification of any settings but their own?
What are parents doing to allow all of the above and then complain about what happens to their PC (or their child)?
Almost certainly not.
It probably just got a crap signal and kept trying to update your location on the basis of that crap signal. Thus one minute there's a jump of 200km/h and the next there's nothing because it thought you hadn't moved.
And it would be even worse if that were a commercial road-based sat-nav device - those basically try to snap you to the nearest road, which can mean all sorts of funny business when you have a poor signal or aren't on an actual road.
GPS "spoofers" don't try to make nearby GPS devices more at 200km/h (which would instantly signal a warning on anything checking speed). They just block the signal (by talking over it) so the GPS has no idea where it is at all and can't even guess. A bit like going through a tunnel with a satnav.
http://www.autoobserver.com/2011/02/towing-raises-new-issues-when-evs-are-involved.html
I'd be extremely disappointed (but not at all surprised) to find that a car manufacturer *HASN'T* considered how to tow an electric vehicle. I suppose they just expect people to know this and book a tow truck that picks the car off the road (but then - how do you get it onto that truck without a crane?).
I'd be less surprised if your average vehicle recovery firm wouldn't know about whatever-method and tow it anyway.
I also would be 100% completely unsurprised if most electric car owners have no knowledge of this whatsoever, even if it was written in the manual.
The atmosphere itself weighs 5 quadrillion (5Ã--10^15) tonnes and extends 100km. I don't think it's going to be a balance problem to stick a cocktail stick into the side of an elephant.
That said, my reply to this article is: Okay then. Off you go. Call us when you're close and we'll take a look.
Until then, it's still just science-fiction.
And when some idiot digging up a water main cuts through their broadband line, which takes a week to repair, they won't be renewing their support/licences.
Always-on is okay for most things but it's not a magic bullet. My workplace insists on nothing being Internet-reliable because, well, our connection isn't reliable despite having any amount of failovers and different mediums available and even 3G as an emergency backup. We've done everything reasonably practical to make it more reliable but in the end we just choose not to use thing that RELY on the Internet being up to work. We do have online-server backup - but it retries and retries and warns us if there's a problem and NEVER stops us trying from some other connection / IP if necessary. Losing access to it temporarily doesn't mean we can't use the program.
And when you have one piece of software, that's fine to talk out. When you have 50 pieces of software and 1000 users and they all want to constantly talk out, then you have a big problem in terms of bandwidth. If you're talking not-just-verification packets, that's even worse. And uncacheable, obviously, by design. And reliant on the remote provider even existing let alone still be up, processing and supporting your software.
You haven't seen a crack or keygen because there isn't one. But you'll almost certainly run into a customer who either has avoided you like the plague for your policy and/or tries you and costs you more in support and refunds than he was worth. You can be arrogant about it, but so can the customer. And some competitor, I assure you, will more than satisfy your customers using your DRM scheme as a reason against you.
And if you suggest updates to my software, which I can't turn off, I take your software off my network. My users don't need to deal with that and click through it, only I do, and only I know when to upgrade or not, and only I *can* upgrade or not. So bothering them about it is actually an insult to me.
There most certainly isn't "no issue here". You've just chosen to ignore them. It might work for you, it might not, but it's not a happy ending all round - you just don't know who *hasn't* bought your software because of that policy.
Hint: I refused a large piece of software recently that would have cost about £10,000. When you get into "always-on" and moving functionality onto remote servers, I might as well just VNC into a remote host at your company and run the program on that. And that's basically what this company wanted us to do, with a Silverlight interface on our end as "the program". We just found a competitor that did what we needed, even if the software migration will be a big project. We'd rather have something on-site, that only we can switch off and on, and own when your company goes bust than remote access to the application on your servers, to the point where we'll PAY for that.
If you miss that last point, your company is going to suffer for it. Maybe not go bust because of it, but certainly lose out where it didn't need to.
I have to agree.
I'd even go so far as to say you could use any weapon that you *BUILT* from raw materials during your hunt, i.e. sticks, spears, bows, arrows, etc. If you want to "hunt", do it while being like a hunter. Not while trying to act like a special forces marine taking out an oil refinery.
Hunting is an excuse for people to fire guns. Even in the UK, where general gun ownership is illegal, we allowed them shotguns for an awful long time. They still run with the dogs and horses now (I think, I don't keep track) but the bottom's fallen completely out of it - and it's the dogs (in overwhelming numbers) that do the "hunting" even then. Wanna impress me? Chase down the fecking fox on foot yourself.
To paraphrase Rowan Atkinson in the comedy series The Thin Blue Line: I think that the person who WANTS a gun licence is exactly the sort of person that shouldn't be given one.
I'm not even close to being a greenie, vegetarian or anything else. You want to hunt the deer, do it. On its own terms. Hunter against hunted. And be a man about it. If you come back with meat, we'll celebrate your manliness. If you come back with scratches and broken ribs, you were just beaten that day - nothing that strips away your manliness.
Similarly, you want to mug someone, be a man, not a pussy. Beat me in a fair fist fight without your gang and your weapons and you can have my wallet. But if you can't, you have to ask yourself what gives you your status in the local food chain - your weapon, or your ability.
Whether it exists doesn't correlate to whether it's used.
My girlfriend had an argument with her doctor only the other week because he hand-filled out the prescription, gave it to his medical receptionist, who took it upon herself to post it to the local Tesco's (whose pharmacy staff really are a waste of space) without ever asking.
The Tesco's couldn't fulfil it so she had to fight to get the paper prescription back, take it to Boots herself (who could only fulfil half of it, and did so without asking first, and kept her paper prescription telling her she could collect the other half "next month" - when this was supposed to be an out-of-cycle prescription so she could take her medication on a long holiday that would mean she'd normally miss her prescription filling date).
Some places might have them, but for sure nowhere near all, or even most. And to be honest, there's an awful lot of problems with them that they can't cope with that even getting humans to cope with can be tricky (obstinate cows in your local GP's reception office aside).
Are we out in the middle of the sticks? No. Greater London, major town. Similar experiences with the same things in other parts of London and Essex, too. We're a long way from any automation. I know, I sat and read through my entire medical records a few years back because they're still in the same envelope (that I can recognise amongst all the others), still the same pieces of paper, and still have to be pushed by post/courier to every doctor I deal with (fortunately, I hardly deal with doctors at all in the last 10 years unless something is dropping off...).
Would someone please back up my claim that when I came back from Tenerife once, having decided to blow all my spending money, all that remained in my pocket was:
1 single coin - One half of one cent of one Euro.
Everyone I've spoken to who's familiar with the Euro says that it never existed. Wish I'd kept the damn thing now. It was so worthless but I kept it until I'd got back to the UK (because it was funny to say, when my parents asked, that I had come back with money - and show them the most pathetically small denomination of Euro coin I could ever have found) and eventually threw it away.
20,000 % is 200 times. That's not a lot when you're considering total data, and not just maximum theoretical speed. For a start, if I use something everyday now that, five years ago, I only used one a month, that's 30 times more data already.
But it would be a lot in speed capability. The mobile I had when I was a kid years ago could only handle GSM data (i.e. 9600 bps at best at the time). If that speed had increased 20,000%, I'd have a 230Gbytes/s phone today.
I'm sorry but it's just poor planning. You know exactly how many customers you have and are likely to have. You know exactly what the theoretical maximum of those phones are. You know exactly what the average person will do (slowly use it more as time passes and upgrades pass by). Yet you still sell an unlimited package.
It's just bad business, but they don't want to admit that, like the small businesses that let Groupon sell 20,000 coupons for a free cupcake, etc. You didn't plan. You didn't extrapolate. You didn't price your products properly. You didn't expand the capability of your network. You didn't do anything that I would expect a large business like AT&T to do.
Ramp your prices up. Then wait for your customers to see all those Japanese telco's that give everyone huge allowances at top data rates for manageable prices on both mobile and fixed-line broadband. I don't care about your bad business planning, all I look for is value-for-money. If you can't provide it, I won't buy from you. If I do buy from you, I expect to get what I bought without any wording-tricks and revisions of the contracts. How hard is this to understand?
So it's Windows CE then?
Thanks for the clarification but I'd suspected that all along. Windows is only "Windows" on your PC. No change at all, to anything, then.
Submitter blocked from ever appearing on my front page again.
One step closer to removing this site from daily bookmarks.
And I *paid* to get rid of advertisements once already. Sure, we could argue about definitions of that in court but it's easier to just never come back here.
You want money? Ask for it. Don't alienate your regulars. I consider this "article" an utter betrayal of your geek cred, to be honest. Do it again, and I won't come back.
The last year, I've found myself doing nothing but finding reasons NOT to return to this site, if I'm honest, and have had to use my filters whereas before I never used them once. If you were actually *doing* anything, like making in Unicode compatible, or providing new features, then some things could be excused. But you are just doing nothing more than Yes/No and a little editing on user submissions. How well is that going to go when all the users bugger off because of abuses like this?
Sort it out, Slashdot.
Social search? No thanks.
One person I know only buys what Which Magazine recommends. Everything he owns is "top" of Which's ratings. And they all have some pretty killer problems or cost the earth, and he gets nothing more done than someone who buys the cheapest things out of Tesco.
And just how many of my friends know what an indexable skiplist is, or the correct invocation of a particularl Windows API function, or a system for library cataloguing that integrates with AD, or the name of that guy in the film with that other guy? Precisely zero. If you've stopped tapping things into Google and are instead tapping them into Twitter or Facebook then, let's be honest, they probably weren't really worth asking in the first place. And anyone that answers will use Google to find the thing they read about that topic last week, etc.
Not only do I not believe it, I think that it could only be a good thing to stop Google having to deal with "Who saw Eastenders the other night? Did Jack find his long-last father?" when it could be dealing with my queries which need a mite more data and research.
Actually, it's more akin to a rubber seal manufacturer being in a phone call with Ford and saying "You know that car you're about to release? We think that possibly one of our engineers may have identified a problem."
Then Ford saying: "Okay, is it something we should recall the car for or not produce it?"
And then replying: "No. Hold on. Whisper, whisper, whisper. No, it'll be fine. It's no problem at all. Sorry to have bothered you."
The guy that the article is about was the engineer. The company he worked for took it through several levels of management and hushed it up. NASA are hardly completely to blame - they queried it and were told it was fine by the people who engineered that component.
What that has to do with taking risks I have no idea - sure, it was "potentially" avoidable but do we know how many times things like that happen over the decades needed to plan a shuttle launch with some millions of components and thousands of outside company, which employ collectively millions of people? And how many times they were "right" and how many times they were just paranoid, or even how many times their paranoia led to problems itself? No.
Spaceflight is high-risk, even with every control in the world. There hasn't been a space traveller yet that hasn't been made aware of that, private, military or commercial.
When you push the boundaries of capability and science, there are bound to be accidents, oversights and, yes, casualties.
And just because this guy did spot the problem, it doesn't make NASA any less dangerous a place to be in even today, knowing about it. Thousands of cranks and scientists probably doubted every section of every component at one time or another. How many people *thought* there'd be a slight risk of an accident with the numerous things they were responsible for but there never was? It doesn't mean it was right, or he was any more wrong, but it's a HUGE project pushing every capability to the maximum so it's always a risk.
This is what gets me most about modern warfare. One soldier dies and it's front-page news. Do you have any notion of how many died just a generation or two ago in wars that involved much fewer countries?
It's a matter of perspective. For those 17, it was tragic. For their families, it was awful. For anyone who knew that it was incredibly sad. For everyone else - they were fecking military test pilots flying something completely outside the normal historical bounds of flight.
Just how many lives do you think have been claimed by things like land-speed records? Is that tragic? How many by Arctic expeditions just to say they set foot on the pole? How many by people trying to climb Everest for charity? All *completely* avoidable - so long as we don't want to try to do anything like that.
They still died, of course, and were still human. But, in context, that many people die EVERY WEEK just in ordinary car accidents. These people were on the cutting edge of science, propulsion, flight, control systems, and on one of the hugest amounts of flammable fuel every collected in order to blast off into the most inhospitable environment that humans have ever been in. It's not exactly a shocking amount of deaths, no matter what the circumstances (more people die every time a train derails because someone forgot to check it).
You can either take it into account and move on, or you can abandon spaceflight entirely because someone might die. One of those progresses science and one doesn't. One of those would shut down CERN, nuclear reactors, etc. overnight and one wouldn't.
They knew what they were risking, and that's part of *why* they signed up. They didn't *need* to die but the fact that they, or someone doing the same things, died is hardly shocking to even themselves - and shouldn't be to us. Remember them, but don't "blame" them by proxy for us never wanting to put another human on a rocket again.
So your next-door-neighbour rape-victim who wants to remain completely anonymous because of the intense psychology damage it would do her to have that information be public doesn't get a choice?
In my country, it's hardly ever been possible to listen in on police radio (encrypted analog radios for decades even, I believe). I'm not sure if it's even legal to listen in, to be honest. And probably for good reason. You have *no* more reason to have that information public than victims and "alleged" criminals have to keep it private. Do you not have a right to a private life for innocent people in your country?
And what an incredibly stupid idea: "We've had an accusation of a man living at address .... interfering with children at the local playground" - and before you know it, John Smith is dead in a ditch somewhere because his ex-wife wanted to cause him hell by falsely reporting him and some vigilante with a scanner took it upon himself to be judge, jury and executioner. Giving the media access to it and not others is even more hilarious a concept.
If you want transparency and access - get it how you get any information out of a public office. Go to court and obtain the legally-required recordings of everything that happened.
If you even think for a second that you have to monitor your police force personally, you're living in the wrong country or you're more paranoid than a meeting of the OCD society.
That's not to say there isn't corruption and abuse of the system but in my country, the UK, police still are put behind bars when they use their powers incorrectly, recordings are still released when appropriate, courts have total access to use as evidence against corrupt individuals, incidents like beating rioters who then collapse of a heart attack *can't* be covered up because everything recorded is subject to court order and absence of it is a failure of duty that's punished more seriously than anything else, and the people put their trust in the ONLY people who are required to come to your aid if someone threatens you with violence.
No wonder the US police I've met have such a disdain for the American public and a love of the tourist - we actually respect them, not accuse them by default.
Not everything is as blanket-simple as "Free Speech and Open Access". Anyone who trots out arguments like that is really just clinging to some principle they think exists in a form *THEY* want it to.
Say your daughter is abused by her teacher. Yeah, sure, you want to see him go to jail or worse. But do you really want *ANYONE* with a scanner in range of where it was reported (e.g. her schoolmates, their parents, the people who go to her clubs, her neighbours, etc.) to know exactly what was done to her and who she is? Or would you prefer that to be reported by the officers discreetly over a covert channel (not even necessarily by radio)? As soon as you put the police under surveillance, you put every victim under surveillance too.