My own opinions on your blinkeredness shall remain unsaid. I'm sure you can guess them.
First, I'm not American. I have visited but these incidents literally remove the country from the list of viable or "safe" foreign countries I could travel to.
"I carry corporate source, designs and some customer data on my laptop. Yes, it would be a problem if it were made public. I encrypt it, but do not hide it. I see no reason that a border guard, a TSA guard or even the (whisper) NSA would choose to give it to a competitor if they had it."
-Several thousand dollars. - Industrial espionage. Even in the UK, some staff at airports have been caught selling on items stolen from baggage, there's nothing to stop a corrupt official doing so. By giving them to ability and "legitimate" reason to search ANY laptop for ANY reason, it's inviting problems.
- A letter from Microsoft offering a reward for non-licensed or pirate software. - Anything that could accidentally tag you as a terrorist. Customs officer browsing through my web history: You read wikileaks lately? We'll have that as evidence of, in your own words, being an anarchist. - THIS POST. Say I took a laptop with a copy of my posting history to slashdot to the US... they could EASILY use this very post against me. Evidence of "wanting to avoid customs" or some such rubbish.
"What's the problem here? Is this a matter of principle or is there something to hide?"
Neither. It's my data. You have no right to go through it without reasonable suspicion FIRST. And then in a certified, supervised way to ensure you keep within your stated use of the data. No other civilised country in the world currently does this and the UK has been dealing with terrorism for FAR, FAR longer than the US has (a UK airport security expert was told that he was "being paranoid" before 9/11 when he visited a US airport and complained about their lax security - within days he was on BBC News recounting the tale because 9/11 happened).
My workplace cannot even throw a hard drive out with having it professionally destroyed, whether it's been exposed to confidential data or not. What makes you think I can let a customs officer copy it without MASSIVE assurances of everywhere the data could end up? The chances are I'd be in a questioning room while all the copying was going on.
"Consider how important your data is to a customs official. News flash: I'd bet a lot that they don't give a rat's ass what you've got, as long as it's not illegal. If it's illegal, then the problem is totally different and you have no right to complain about it."
Define illegal. I think you'll find it depends on jurisdiction, for a start, and includes such things as data protection laws. This is the problem.
As a business, I would be required to NOT TAKE SOME DATA into the US because of this - UK and EU data protection laws means that I *can't* let anyone see it, whether or not it's "secret". If your salesman is going to have to break British law to make a sale in the US, then he's not going to GO to the US. Or he'll have to take the steps mentioned in this article.
Say my office gave me a laptop with copy of Windows that was installed from a pirate key... that's "illegal". I could get detained *without reasonable suspicion* and possibly convicted because of that. Say I *don't know* the password to an "encrypted-looking" file on the laptop (like, I don't know, say a database contained within a business program accessed only by Word macros or company-created utilities - I have seen many such systems loaded on laptops for employee use). I'm detained until I release it.
It's not that I have anything illegal under US law - the US is not the world, though. Things that the US does are considered illegal in other countries. Let's not go too far down that avenue because it's just too easy to get into country-bashing.
It's that the US customs have no reason to demand inspections without reasonable suspicion. They certainly s
Are you seriously telling me you've never seen the word treble used in that context?
treble (trb'l) adj. meaning Triple
Perfectly valid English in every English dialect and has been for hundreds of years (Answers.com actually pointed me at a George Eliot quote as an example of its use). Treble sounds better in a sentence such as that one (it matches better with "double" than triple would and feels more natural for most native English-speakers) and there are certain places where we British prefer treble to triple (triple is usually an action, "he tripled the number" whereas treble is usually a statement "awarded treble damages") although they are very mix-and-match. You can even have trebled, trebling, trebles (nothing to do with Star Trek).
Because even at 8km/h you can do serious damage. Any lander has to be extremely light for takeoff from Earth and the transit to Mars, contain extremely fragile equipment, and end up there in one piece. "Bouncing" off Mars is not an option. That requires heavy, expensive materials, or some sort of complicated landed shield arrangement (e.g. giant inflatable bubble) that all add years of work and millions to the cost of the project. You could literally double or treble the cost of the entire project by "beefing up" the lander.
Plus, it has to land under autonomous control, so you really have no idea how fast it actually landed or exactly where until several minutes after it has landed - so coming in a little too fast isn't a good option, neither is a stray patch of rock (there are few "soft spots" on Mars, by the way - it's mostly rock). Much better to land as gently as you can manage and do your braking manoevures in the "air" as you come down. You've got plenty of time, the physics are easier to calculate, and there's less to go wrong.
The first few hours of a new lander's life on another planet are basically checking that everything still works, even with all the gentle landings in the world, things get broken that cost MILLIONS to put them up there. 50% of the things still never make it to the planet operational, even with all the good will in the world behind it. You want to spend MULTIPLES of the cost of the entire project on making the landings more difficult, more violent and less reliable when we can't even get half of what we send onto the planet successfully?
I don't have a DVR but I think I can explain this quite simply. I don't buy a TV to watch ads. Myself, being an old fart, just wants to watch the highlighted programs that I know I will like. I no longer want to "try" watching much unless it really grabs my interest. By flooding me with ads, the TV companies have made it almost impossible to get me interested in any new series that I might want to watch. I'm more likely to read about it in a paper/online or pick up on it via word of mouth once it's been established for about two or three series. Thus, I have a tendency to totally skip all ads for anything.
If I was a kid today, I wouldn't see the point in TV at all. It's all just ads. When I was younger, there were a handful of ads that, even back then, I used as a convenient break in my programs to use the bathroom, make a drink etc. But now there's nothing of interest to them, and if they manually skipped them all they'd never get anything done. They are actually doing what the TV companies would fear most - they are learning to completely ignore ads in all media because they are saturated with them from an early age in all media. That's a good skill for them to have, I say. Thus, they can leave them playing and it makes little difference.
Myself and my wife gave up on broadcast TV about five years ago. By that I mean that the TV is now just a display device - we watch DVD's (and even still videos) and we play games on it all the time. But that's pretty much it. We have a satellite subscription on the lowest paid rate because then we get the "old programs" channels and things like Discovery but we're even considering giving that up because it's no longer of much value to us. We watch a "new" program about once a year, if that. But if I stumble across a favourite, I'll watch it if I'm in the mood.
The chances are that we only watch maybe one or two half-hour programs a night now and only about three or four nights a week unless we are working hard. That's WAY down on our previous rates. Most of the programs we do watch are re-runs that we know we are going to enjoy (although they are being slowly ruined by being edited for broadcasting during the day and then repeated with those same edits during the evening - so we "jar" on the gaps because we know the programs well enough to know something "naughty" was cut out, even though it's way past most people's bedtime). We have the remote on hand to mute all the adverts (because of the "let's raise advert volume levels" stupidity) and wait for the channel banner until we turn it back on. In the gap, we read, make phonecalls or prepare food. A lot of the time we just switch the thing off or, if our interest was peaked by a favourite program being on but it being yet another repeat of that episode we've watched a thousand times, what we will do is dig out our "complete set" DVD and choose a better episode of the same series.
Broadcast TV is slowly dying under the weight of the ads, for which the good programming has given way - it has been for years. They are poor quality (especially the ones that seem US-based when broadcast to a UK audience - the Cillit Bang man really needs a volume-reduction operation and the "US advert with dubbed fake UK voices" is just too grating when it's every other advert), uninteresting, not well targetted, over-used, over-frequent, and too forced. And the programs that they are replacing are becoming more like adverts every day. Even the bloody movies are adverts now (the bit in "I Robot" about the trainers really annoyed me in an otherwise very enjoyable film).
I can remember a time when I was younger, when a Saturday night was a non-stop run of fantastic programs, some old, some new and some which even then were 20-year-old repeats but it didn't show that badly - that made you stay in front of the TV all evening. The example that my wife likes to use is Tony Hancock (although we're both far too young to remember it the first time around, that's our sort of humour and type of era/program
You have no recourse unless you have PAID to have one, like with almost everything else in the world. The GPL specifically states that it's not a warranty or guarantee that things will work.
However, if you were using it in a business, I would hope that you either a) hired your own programmers to work with the code or b) bought a support package/liability clause from someone like Red Hat. In which case it would be down to your programmers or Red Hat respectively. But we're not talking about Red Hat. Or any of the other big-name, support-contract-and-some-sort-of-indemnity-clause-included distros. They don't have this problem, presumably because they are not that stupid.
We're talking about Debian. Got a support contract / liability agreement with Debian? No? Bad luck. It's a bit like asking Microsoft to accept responsibility for your pirate copy of Windows, then, isn't it?
So the EU were planning on pissing off the US? It wouldn't surprise me, actually, but I don't think they are considering declaring war on the US just yet.
Simple military tactics - make sure your weapons and systems are under your control. Make sure they are redundant enough to survive a war. Make sure your enemies can't interfere even via the intervention of other nations. Make sure that political decisions don't get your only source of GPS information turned off.
I don't think that scaremongering over a GPS system that is identical in function and capability to other existing systems is justified. China does a lot worse things every day that are more deserving of concern. An independent GPS system isn't anything that doesn't already exist, isn't something that the US couldn't remove or cripple if war was declared, has several million legitimate uses and provides extra levels of redundancy that entire continents have been striving for for years.
No, if we were talking about actual weapons (e.g. a gps-guided nuclear bomb), then you would have a point and a lot of the above isn't relevant. But in that case, it's the bomb that's the problem, not the GPS.
Like the US system. And the EU system. Both of which have provision for encrypted signals that only those with the key (i.e. the military) can decrypt, while providing less accurate data "unencrypted". Except that the US turned their encryption off a few years back, but neither the EU or the US have said that they wouldn't turn encryption on "in troubled times". The EU initially considered doing without this but it ended up getting included too in a roundabout way.
Not so much "bad" as a waste of time. The unencrypted accuracy is still very useful for most purposes, and there are historical records of the US system being scuppered so that over certain parts of the globe at certain times, even the unencrypted signal was deliberately highly inaccurate but the military knew how to "compensate" for the bad data using a key. However, if China are doing this to stop the effects of a US/EU turnoff from affecting them, this is pretty much vital, I would say. The rest of the world's GPS has exactly the same features, so I don't see how China are doing anything "bad" by this. That's not to say that their overall motives are good, but no worse than the EU/US.
Most telesales is not well paid. At all. It's mostly students and hard-up people manning the phones, unless it's an extremely large, famous company (most places are not). These places rarely, if ever, care about their employees and threats of lawsuits are 99.9% useless, because most people who work there can't ever afford to sue and usually the "supervisors" change every month anyway (if not more) so they don't care if the company gets sued either. The employee turnover is so fast, you wouldn't believe.
And getting sacked for whatever reason, no matter how stupid, is not an option for most of the people who do the job because they are there to make some quick money to pay the rent. Not only would such actions guarantee you were sacked (as in physically out of the building within a minute) but any threats of lawsuits would be impotent - it would be amazingly difficult to track down employers, witnesses etc. These places really don't care, anyway, or they wouldn't be doing the work they are doing. You are stuck for 8 hours (if you're lucky) in a tiny cubicle with a phone and if you don't fulfill your quota, you're out. If you do but you make next-to-no money for yourself that month, tough. Employee issues? Grow up. Health and Safety? Don't be a wuss. Discrimination? Aw, shut up and man the phone before I sack you. You get sacked? Don't expect your pay packet to ever arrive. No matter what the law says.
Not everywhere operates under the law and these sorts of places tend to take advantage of people who need money and have hit bottom and can't fight back. A lot of people don't last more than a week in such places because they do exactly as you've described (I would be one of them too). I place the blame at the foot of the *employers*. They set, implement, control and enforce the policies, without shame. They sack the employees who don't follow suit. They are the ones breaking most employment regulations. They are the ones paying a pittance. They are the ones who care about nothing but a little figure beside your name at the end of the month, no matter what you've done to get it.
Just for clarity about the types of places, I can name you a handful of large double-glazing firms in the UK where all of the above is true. Someone I know works exclusively in them, changing firms/areas every single month because of stupid problems. Break the rules, phone anyone, promise anything, just get your quota of appointments and you get paid that month. Otherwise, forget it.
Supposedly. I just wish I hadn't been so pre-occupied when I opened the door (or known he was coming back). Trading standards springs to mind but I doubt they could do anything without some sort of name anyway and I didn't bother to inspect his ID too closely as he wasn't coming into the house.
I have seen a lot of EDF reps around the town, though, all dressed in orange-flourescent workmen's jackets, I assume to make them look official. If I see the guy again, I may have to worry him just out of entertainment by asking for his name, a copy of his ID, etc.
Pre-pay meters are still rare, even in the UK, but they avoid such fraud by simple measures such as "the meter is inside the house". At least in my case. My neighbour even has a glass block in the wall of his porch so that the meter is inside but can be read from outside. I, however, have to let the electricity company come in if they so demand but they NEVER do because - well, it's pre-pay and they have control of it remotely anyway.
To those people asking why you would want to call a "Do Not Call" list anyway...
I know a few people who work in telesales and it's usually the stupid and draconian rules put on the employees by the company, despite there being no actual proof that they would improve sales. In fact, in some places where they listen to the employees, changes can be made to INCREASE sales by cutting out known-bad calls as soon as possible.
E.g. (these are ACTUAL examples of PRESENT policies among some UK tele-sales offices)
"You can not hang up on the customer. They must hang up."
One of my friends had a three-hour ordeal with a woman whose husband had died and had to persist trying to sell to her because she could only plead for THEM to hang up, she was so upset. Yes, the woman should have just hung up rather than upsetting herself but she was hardly thinking straight.
"You must try to make an appointment for a salesman to call, even if you know it will mean no sale."
So tele-sales were booking appointments with people who were so annoyed at the telesales that they were threatening violent action. They were talking these people into BOOKING AN APPOINTMENT with a real, physical representative of the company who then turns up their house only to be pulverised.
On a similar tack, I just had a sleazy salesman knock at my door the other day. His opening words, while flashing an EDF Energy ID card, were "Hi, we're from EDF Energy and we're here to give you a new prepayment electricity key". Okay, I'm listening. I have a pre-pay meter. But I know there's something not quite right. The following conversation then ensued.
"Okay... erm... but I don't think I'm with EDF." (I'm actually with E-On but I was sufficiently confused between the two to take a second. Note that in this second he would not have been allowed access to the property or even the meter cupboard anyway. I'm not THAT stupid).
"Oh. Well. Would you mind telling us who you *are* with then?"
"Erm. You know? I'm not telling you."
"Why not?"
"I believe you're a salesman. Goodbye."
"Thank you sir."
Two hours later, he was back and I opened the door again (the wife had been suitably alerted by this time anyway so she would have slammed the door in his face too). He only said "Oh, it's you. We've spoken to you."
What got me was the unbelievably casual fraud (they implied, even if the actual words didn't say, that they were my current electricity supplier when in fact they were planning to sign me up to a new electricity supplier by inserting the key into my meter). And the fact that they went up the road and obviously carried on with the same line for the rest of the afternoon before turning back and trying the houses that they'd missed.
If I hadn't been in the middle of laying a new floor at the time, I would have shouted down the street and knocked on everybody's doors to warn them myself, or call the police and make them explain themselves. They may have been doing nothing "wrong" but I'm sure that a police officer wouldn't take kindly to their sales pitch and it would cause them enough trouble to try another street.
Guess what happens next time I'm choosing an electricity supplier? The ones who commit fraud on my doorstep don't get included.
If you're in Europe, Velleman sell something similar: the k8055. It's a USB board with Linux drivers available that has a handful of digital outputs/inputs as well as a analog/PWM output/input. You can have four boards on the same USB bus and address them individually and they also have onboard indicators/test switches so you can see how it works and run some demo programs before you plug anything into it.
In the UK, you can pick them up pre-assembled for £25 each from Maplin Electronics, or you can build them yourself for a little cheaper. Velleman are Belgian, so they distribute to most of Europe.
I use a CCTV-computer system running Linux, it's based on "motion", which I'm sure you can Google yourself. It does just want you want - I personally email the files (video/photo) to a Gmail account so that I can retrieve it with just a simple web browser (i.e. at the most basic of police stations). I use PCI WinTV cards and cheap cameras (I could use very expensive cameras without any problems, but listen to why in a second) - it costs me about £30 ($50) for each camera setup and a basic computer can handle four or more cameras easily (up to 16 if you have a fast machine and a Linux-compatible 4-input CCTV card.
The bit I like about it is that someone can nick the cameras, the machine itself, etc. and STILL the images will be sitting in the Gmail account, ready for pickup. This is how one (incredibly dumb) British burglar got caught, and with the exact same software (motion). There was a story on BBC News about it.
You have several problems, though.
"To me, the object isn't just deterrence if someone tries to break into my house or my car (parked on the street in front of my house), I'd like to provide a high-quality image of the perpetrator to the police."
I wear a hoodie, probably in a dark colour, like most of the "kids" who do stuff like this. I just beat your high-quality image. You'll stand more chance with more rubbishy cameras getting such people from all angles, or a burglar alarm. Or have your system text you / ring your phone when it detects motion somewhere it shouldn't.
Deterence - A burglar alarm box that doesn't look fake. A camera box that doesn't look fake. That's deterence. It does an awful lot, and it's very cheap to "deter". It's a lot harder to "catch". Large cameras get stones aimed at them, even if the kids aren't trying to break in (I know, the little gits have broken my security floodlight several times "for a laugh"). Much better to have very cheap, replaceable and (except for one or two) concealable cameras if you want to record evidence of criminal activity. If you want to CATCH the person responsible, that is much harder than just having a high-resolution image.
"Inexpensive video surveillance systems, with their atrocious image quality, are nearly useless."
As are expensive ones when they are defeated by extremely simple measures such as putting on a hood. Seriously. Get a bunch of friends, get them to pick a random member of their party (unknown to you), get that person to put on a hoodie and walk past every camera you own. You'll be hard-pressed to identify them.
The things that most people (including myself) look for are, in order of importance:
- Whether they can relate to you (nobody employs people who are obnoxious, although a lot of people turn that way after employment!) - Proof of competency (can you DO the job, even if you've never done it before and have no qualifications? This applies to both the specific job, "can you code?", and generally "can you learn how to do stuff I need you to do?") - Can you learn quickly, competently, use that knowledge, bring in knowledge from elsewhere, study, etc. - Length of relevant experience (have you just walked out of university or are you experienced?) - Breadth of relevant experience (have you done ten jobs like this but in similar, yet different, areas?) - Personal passion for the job/industry (are you an open-source programmer as well, do you know every company I use, do you do amazing stuff in the same area during your spare time?) - Revelant references and their opinions (do they think you can do the job you're applying for?) and who your references are from (Your brother will always give you a good reference, your last employer is more important) - Official qualifications in the area of expertise (some jobs prioritise this more, e.g. government work etc.) - Particularities of your education (where you went to school, etc.) - Your list of hobbies/pastimes on your CV (it's amazing how many people include this).
I've worked with people who have had entire categories from the above missing (qualifications, experience, even education!) and the only thing that matters is that there are enough of the higher ones (i.e. can you do the job, or learn to do it quickly?). Myself, when I first got a job after university, I didn't have experience, official IT qualifications (just a CS degree), or references that could attest to my work ethic. But I was competent, able to learn quickly, had a passion for the job and could relate well to people. Now, six years later, I have enough to write a page about how I have actually demonstrated proof of every single category there, except possibly official qualifications for which I still only have a CS degree (I have refused to be trained several times because everybody wants me to do baby-IT courses until I protest and then the "big" qualifications are very expensive, quickly irrelevant and quite useless at actually improving my work in a job).
I've never been asked for my personal school history, nor did it ever affect any interviews. Nobody cares, so long as you have the tick under "yes, he can study", if that. The CS degree did that for me and I got it from a university that specialised in Astronomy and Medicine.
NVIDIA vs ATI drivers - I don't really care. "It worked for me" - I don't really care. Statistics on the cause of crashes - I don't really care. Anybody running unsigned drivers and experiencing crashes - I don't really care
Hang on. Let me explain.
The fact that you can STILL crash a Windows machine with a dodgy driver - that I care about. I thought everything was supposed to be userspace. I thought the error-handling was supposed to be better. I thought that Windows was supposed to be more stable and secure. I thought people who were using signed drivers were supposed to be "approved" and relatively crash-free.
Unsigned drivers? You can't support that no matter who you are, unless you're confident they are PURE userspace - they could be doing anything (like the 3DFX drivers that used to open access to all sorts of things it shouldn't in order for a primitive user-space part to actual drive the hardware). That's why you have to click that "CONTINUE Anyway" button with the dire warning. That's the Windows equivalent of kernel tainting. Once you've done that, nobody cares. The fact that most XP drivers are still using uncertified drivers is a bit of a problem but I can understand the reasons why. But you can't blame MS for crashes in uncertified drivers under XP. I thought Vista was supposed to be different, though.
If a certified driver is crashing that often, then you have an entirely different matter. The certification effectively becomes worthless. Nobody trusts it. Therefore every driver manufacturer ignores certification and just tells users to click "Continue". Then you will have nothing BUT uncertified drivers. Catch-22.
Blue screens should not happen. They certainly shouldn't happen often enough that people have coined the term "blue-screen" or BSOD to mean a crash. When they DO happen, when the driver goes absolutely nuts and starts stomping memory, aren't things like DEP and the user-space driver model supposed to STOP that happening and recover in some half-decent fashion? Or shouldn't the machine at least what the cause was and provide the user with some hint of what went wrong (i.e. "You installed an uncertified driver. Tough.").
Let's compare for a second - Linux kernels crash too. They crash much more often if third-party drivers are installed and nobody really cares about that except the third-party and their users. When they do crash, there's not much you can do but most of the time you'll get all sorts of debugging information and usually you can carry on. You might lose X, which may or may not load up again - I have a laptop that likes to crash X if I run more than one copy of Xine at a time but the worst that happens is X dies and restarts and then carries on working for hours/days/weeks as if nothing had happened (and yes, I need to update the kernel/X on that machine!) but things keep on working as best they can. You can do pretty much what you like in terms of software but the worst that'll happen if you're not actually loading a kernel module or patching a kernel or playing with kernel-level features is a software crash and be chucked back to the command-line. Sometimes you might even end up taking out X, like my example above.
You can rip out the harddrive and *make* the kernel crash but most of the time things will carry on, just without the component you ripped out (i.e. the IDE layer may die, but it'll still keep running as best it can without it). Even when Linux comes to a complete halt and freezes, you have debugging information and logs with which to narrow down the cause yourself, without needing to consult Linus himself.
When Windows crashes (even with certified drivers and clean installs), there's bugger all to go on. Half the time the event log doesn't show anything at all. The second you see a blue screen, the computer is down and there's little arguing. There's zero information to go on. You have no idea what caused the crash at all because usually all you get is a generic STOP error and a
And the important point that you've all missed... who said that the disks are illegal? They are personal copies of disks that I have, which I have made to ensure my original (which I still have) doesn't get damaged. If necessary, I can provide proof that I own the original and that the copies are purely for personal use, which is completely legal in my own and most other countries. How many ipod's do customs let through? Do you think that they could ever or do ever check the authenticity of the files on them? No. It's not a customs issue.
Secondly, nobody has EVER questioned it. Not even a nod or a hint. Nothing. Nobody checks the disks, nobody looks at them, nobody asks what's on them and a lot of the time when flying they are in the luggage anyway, and still I've never had my luggage opened (I would know, because of the way I secure the luggage). Nobody cares, because it's almost impossible to prove that it's not completely legitimate and for personal use. Especially if it's a handful of DVD or CD-R's compared to a few thousand. People expect to find CD-R's with laptops, it's not at all unusual.
But then, I don't live in or travel to countries that insist that it's a security issue for them to browse through my personal files on my laptop while travelling, or load up CD's to check their contents. Because it's not and I'd contest anyone who thought that it was. And even after all that, it's virtually impossible to be convicted of anything because what I am doing is completely legitimate and not worth the court time.
The nearest incident I have ever even *heard* of is my father-in-law who tried to order a science video for his school in Kuwait. Unfortunately, it was seized on the border by the post office and it's content "checked". They were concerned it might contain "unreligious" material. But then, I would never travel to such places anyway.
Okay, picking up on an old post because I just got my moderation results back but...
This is exactly what I'm talking about. I assume you are dumbing down but even so - what you have done is *decided* what penalties, when, where and why. The program hasn't "learned" anything, it's doing the only thing that lets it make any progress in the universe that you've put it into - you're shoehorning programs into the only way that they are allowed to make progress by the above rules and then pretending it intelligently chose to do that. It didn't. This is rule-following and strictly-controlled evolution, not intelligence.
And abstract programs running around a virtual maze are really not AI. Sure, they help make a primitive computer opponent for Doom but that's just playing.
My point was that: "you can't "write" an AI. It's silly to try unless you have very limited targets in mind." If you have targets, you are controlling the progress of the program, shoehorning it into a particular result, which it will obviously "evolve" into something given enough time and suitable pruning. Sure, you can get something resembling AI from that but the concept is just too rigorous. True AI is about intelligence and (quite a lot of) pattern-recognition, not the ability to perform a certain task. The AI isn't recognising a pattern, it's following rules. There's a difference.
I get lost in mazes all the time, despite knowing the left-hand-rule and having two years of Graph Theory behind me, but it doesn't mean that there isn't intelligence in me somewhere. You'll know you've hit true AI when the program runs around the maze, gets lost, tries to peep through the computer's memory to find the exit, then gets bored, roams around for a week and then kills itself.:-)
I don't think of intelligence as some magical spark that comes along out of nowhere (we are all physics-based beings), but I still say that the first "real" AI is going to be something made completely accidentally, outside the control of the person who thought they were making it, after just letting things run their own way and do their own thing in a sufficiently complex universe without arbitrary rules or targets. It'll be something that you can give a task (find your way out of the maze) and then give it a completely new, never-seen-before task (find out if a random string pulls into a knot or not) and it'll still work just as well without you having to change its rules or universe. And more often that not it'll ignore you and want to do what *IT* wants because it's found a loophole somewhere that lets it get "rewarded" for something else that it finds easier.
The only way I can see that working is by complete accident and/or a combination of millions of generations of evolution in a suitably complex universe. I don't see it years off. I very much doubt it's decades, unless it's quite a few. Centuries, possibly, given the complexity of the task. Longer than that I find doubtful.
AI people are honestly trying to design an artificial version of something that they can hardly define. There's a problem there, right away. AI and genetic algorithms should be going hand-in-hand all the way and they aren't - there's a facade that they are but AI people, I have found, tend to want a purely mathematical solution to a problem - the document linked to has more lambda's and Monte Carlo methods than my maths degree did. They simplify everything as much as possible, enforce rigorous rules and then are pleasantly surprised when the only available avenue is taken. I find that completely unsurprising, uninteresting (I have sat through Calculus I, II and III, so I know uninteresting when I see it!;-) ) and a little pointless.
I think that personally, if I were doing it, I'd be going for one huge, massive, general-purpose intelligence for everything and try to train it on different things at random times for years on end, throwing in something completely "new" to it every now and then and seei
I think you're wrong about people legally backing up. I know of people that can't navigate a start menu who have backed up their kids DVD's, give the copies to the kids and put the actual DVD's out of reach. I know of people who back up music CD's and only play the backups in cars because they have a tendency to get scratched, lost, trodden on, or left out in the sun.
Only last week, I bought a book that came with a video DVD. It cost me about £30 and the DVD will only play in my DVD player because it's cheaply-produced. It would cost me more in petrol to take it back to the shop than it would to just copy it and I had two DVD-RW drives that could read it, slowly, but they could. So I made a copy and I have that copy tucked inside the book alongside the original.
When we go abroad on holiday, we often go with family and watch DVD's some nights. We'll take copies wherever possible because you don't know what people's machine will do, what the luggage has to go through etc. And it's not unusual for us to leave something in the DVD player. When we travel in our own country, I'll bung hundreds of mp3's and a few movies or a TV series onto a laptop or DVD-R so that we have our own entertainment for travel and/or if our destination doesn't have something to play music on.
I've trained my wife to use backup CD's wherever practical - she ruined the original copy of a CD of the first song I ever bought her and she was devastated, so from then on she's copied every CD that she thinks is worth the effort. The same for a few DVD's but with the CSS and menuing hassles, it was harder to get her into that. With Blu-Ray (or any future technology), if I can't copy them easily, I won't buy them. Even if it comes down to just being able to transcode them to DVD and burning a DVD-R, that's what I'll do. And I have absolutely no doubts that whatever the most common format for purchasing movies/music, there will be a way to copy them sooner or later. At that point and not before, I will buy into the technology, if I feel the need.
I do this all the time... I actually am quite surprised at the number of everyday things that have such simple flaws.
In the hospital waiting for my wife the other day, I watched a mailwoman with a big trolley full of mail, sorted into departments, insert several people's medical records into the trolley and then walk off out of sight through locked doors (which were opened by her tapping the glass and standing to one side) leaving the mail unattended. It wouldn't take much to a) gain access to the baby ward that is supposed to be secure by posing as a mail woman or b) stealing someone medical records just by knowing they were in hospital that day and one department that they would have to visit.
The other, from working in schools, comes from the Tesco Computers For Schools voucher scheme. For every £10 spent in a supermarket, customers get a flimsy paper voucher that they can give to the schools (only schools) who, when they have a few thousand, can trade them in for a free computer or computer hardware. Most people just throw them away, and I actually collect hundreds from the floor outside shops on my way home.
First, the vouchers are simply printed pieces of paper - there isn't any security on them at all. The only "barcode" is always "1234567890X" and every piece of paper is identical - it's also just cheap, bog-standard paper. Secondly, the schools can collect amazing numbers of vouchers just by running campaigns or by collecting harder, so there are schools that collect 5 vouchers one year and 50,000 the next. Thirdly, the vouchers are *not counted* at the other end. They are weighed approximately (if at all - I don't believe that Tesco's actually weight millions of vouchers each year and worry about the accuracy). I always wonder how much it would cost to print, say, 10,000 identical vouchers of your own to the same standard compared to the cost of a video-editing PC and lots of educational software supplied with it. Or to try your luck by declaring false numbers of vouchers and thereby learn the accuracy that they measure to (yes, you TELL Tesco how many you have, you can even do that online, and then send them off later to be "verified").
That, and working in IT in a school means I'm always looking for ways into the building, past staff, into the computer systems, etc. Some schools are amazingly lax while others are like Fort Knox.
This isn't news, and especially isn't news for nerds... Windows, Linux, MacOS, it doesn't matter...
Don't run programs of which you don't know the origin (commercial games from big store - yes, hacked games from random illegal Internet site, no) Don't let programs run automatically ever (autorun, activex in browser without prompts, email attachments etc.) Don't run programs just because something in an email, on a webpage, on a game, tells you to - double check first. Use only trusted, well known mediums to obtain the things you want, whether that's a game magazine or a download site.
You DO NOT NEED something running 24/7 and taking up CPU all the time, intercepting every disk access to stop you getting a virus. You just need to follow some simple rules. My girlfriend manages them with little to no training - never had a virus. If in doubt, you ask someone in the know. They will tell you if something is safe and should be able to do so over the phone or IM it's that easy. They don't even need to SEE the file itself or its contents, they can tell from your description of where it came from.
You only need antivirus if you run a network where the users deliberately "forget" their training. Unfortunately, that's most corporate networks. Therefore most corporations do "need" it. That's their own problem for running systems that allow execution of arbitrary programs for normal users. It shouldn't be required EVER in a corporate environment unless they are on the development team. Bring back the good old days of "Press 1 for receipts, 2 for stock control, 3 for staff databases"... by restricting the interface, you restrict the possibilities.
Number of viruses I've had - zero. Number of viruses witnessed first-hand - hundreds of thousands. Number of machines cleaned for other people - hundreds. Number of antivirus programs installed on those computers - hundreds. Number of effective antivirus programs when used on novice user's computers? Zero. Number of antivirus programs installed on any OS on my own personal machines - zero.
What do I do when I need to check someone's computer? Free virus checkers RUN FROM KNOWN-GOOD, CHECKSUM-VERIFIED executables stored on READ-ONLY media of my own. See. The rules apply even then. Amazing, isn't it?
I have seriously removed more antivirus programs than the number of computers I've fixed. They are an absolute waste of time as they are only "after-the-event" - they hardly detect any "real" viruses, if they do detect them, they can't clean them or remove them effectively. And, besides, it's too late by the time an antivirus program spots something - it's already running. Most AV are easy for viruses to disable or fool anyway, so they are just false psychological reinforcement for novice users. Once users are SHOWN that the AV did absolutely nothing to stop the virus they just got, I ask them if they want to renew it next year (so that they remember come the time). I have dozens of people who ask me to remove it there and then and put something "that works" on. I tell them it doesn't work like that, but I can install a free antivirus and at least save them some money, if not save them completely from viruses.
It's amazing the amount of people I've dealt with who are shocked that:
1) The expensive antivirus that they've been paying every year for has never really worked properly and they've had viruses all along. Or hasn't updated in five years. Or says it's updating and isn't. Or says it's running and isn't.
2) The same expensive antivirus is useless at detecting some stuff and useless at removing anything (the amount of times I've run "clean" only to have the same message pop up again on another file, repeated ad inifitum). Cleaning from within an infected operating system is very difficult (I've done it successfully many times but never with an automated antivirus tool) and is only really any good if you absolutely CANNOT get the virus off any other way without losing data.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like you're wrong. I couldn't get anything at all from that link
Someone punch him.
(mods: this whole thread is a Red Dwarf in-joke)
My own opinions on your blinkeredness shall remain unsaid. I'm sure you can guess them.
First, I'm not American. I have visited but these incidents literally remove the country from the list of viable or "safe" foreign countries I could travel to.
"I carry corporate source, designs and some customer data on my laptop. Yes, it would be a problem if it were made public. I encrypt it, but do not hide it. I see no reason that a border guard, a TSA guard or even the (whisper) NSA would choose to give it to a competitor if they had it."
-Several thousand dollars.
- Industrial espionage.
Even in the UK, some staff at airports have been caught selling on items stolen from baggage, there's nothing to stop a corrupt official doing so. By giving them to ability and "legitimate" reason to search ANY laptop for ANY reason, it's inviting problems.
- A letter from Microsoft offering a reward for non-licensed or pirate software.
- Anything that could accidentally tag you as a terrorist.
Customs officer browsing through my web history: You read wikileaks lately? We'll have that as evidence of, in your own words, being an anarchist.
- THIS POST. Say I took a laptop with a copy of my posting history to slashdot to the US... they could EASILY use this very post against me. Evidence of "wanting to avoid customs" or some such rubbish.
"What's the problem here? Is this a matter of principle or is there something to hide?"
Neither. It's my data. You have no right to go through it without reasonable suspicion FIRST. And then in a certified, supervised way to ensure you keep within your stated use of the data. No other civilised country in the world currently does this and the UK has been dealing with terrorism for FAR, FAR longer than the US has (a UK airport security expert was told that he was "being paranoid" before 9/11 when he visited a US airport and complained about their lax security - within days he was on BBC News recounting the tale because 9/11 happened).
My workplace cannot even throw a hard drive out with having it professionally destroyed, whether it's been exposed to confidential data or not. What makes you think I can let a customs officer copy it without MASSIVE assurances of everywhere the data could end up? The chances are I'd be in a questioning room while all the copying was going on.
"Consider how important your data is to a customs official. News flash: I'd bet a lot that they don't give a rat's ass what you've got, as long as it's not illegal. If it's illegal, then the problem is totally different and you have no right to complain about it."
Define illegal. I think you'll find it depends on jurisdiction, for a start, and includes such things as data protection laws. This is the problem.
As a business, I would be required to NOT TAKE SOME DATA into the US because of this - UK and EU data protection laws means that I *can't* let anyone see it, whether or not it's "secret". If your salesman is going to have to break British law to make a sale in the US, then he's not going to GO to the US. Or he'll have to take the steps mentioned in this article.
Say my office gave me a laptop with copy of Windows that was installed from a pirate key... that's "illegal". I could get detained *without reasonable suspicion* and possibly convicted because of that. Say I *don't know* the password to an "encrypted-looking" file on the laptop (like, I don't know, say a database contained within a business program accessed only by Word macros or company-created utilities - I have seen many such systems loaded on laptops for employee use). I'm detained until I release it.
It's not that I have anything illegal under US law - the US is not the world, though. Things that the US does are considered illegal in other countries. Let's not go too far down that avenue because it's just too easy to get into country-bashing.
It's that the US customs have no reason to demand inspections without reasonable suspicion. They certainly s
Are you seriously telling me you've never seen the word treble used in that context?
treble (trb'l) adj. meaning Triple
Perfectly valid English in every English dialect and has been for hundreds of years (Answers.com actually pointed me at a George Eliot quote as an example of its use). Treble sounds better in a sentence such as that one (it matches better with "double" than triple would and feels more natural for most native English-speakers) and there are certain places where we British prefer treble to triple (triple is usually an action, "he tripled the number" whereas treble is usually a statement "awarded treble damages") although they are very mix-and-match. You can even have trebled, trebling, trebles (nothing to do with Star Trek).
Because even at 8km/h you can do serious damage. Any lander has to be extremely light for takeoff from Earth and the transit to Mars, contain extremely fragile equipment, and end up there in one piece. "Bouncing" off Mars is not an option. That requires heavy, expensive materials, or some sort of complicated landed shield arrangement (e.g. giant inflatable bubble) that all add years of work and millions to the cost of the project. You could literally double or treble the cost of the entire project by "beefing up" the lander.
Plus, it has to land under autonomous control, so you really have no idea how fast it actually landed or exactly where until several minutes after it has landed - so coming in a little too fast isn't a good option, neither is a stray patch of rock (there are few "soft spots" on Mars, by the way - it's mostly rock). Much better to land as gently as you can manage and do your braking manoevures in the "air" as you come down. You've got plenty of time, the physics are easier to calculate, and there's less to go wrong.
The first few hours of a new lander's life on another planet are basically checking that everything still works, even with all the gentle landings in the world, things get broken that cost MILLIONS to put them up there. 50% of the things still never make it to the planet operational, even with all the good will in the world behind it. You want to spend MULTIPLES of the cost of the entire project on making the landings more difficult, more violent and less reliable when we can't even get half of what we send onto the planet successfully?
I don't have a DVR but I think I can explain this quite simply. I don't buy a TV to watch ads. Myself, being an old fart, just wants to watch the highlighted programs that I know I will like. I no longer want to "try" watching much unless it really grabs my interest. By flooding me with ads, the TV companies have made it almost impossible to get me interested in any new series that I might want to watch. I'm more likely to read about it in a paper/online or pick up on it via word of mouth once it's been established for about two or three series. Thus, I have a tendency to totally skip all ads for anything.
If I was a kid today, I wouldn't see the point in TV at all. It's all just ads. When I was younger, there were a handful of ads that, even back then, I used as a convenient break in my programs to use the bathroom, make a drink etc. But now there's nothing of interest to them, and if they manually skipped them all they'd never get anything done. They are actually doing what the TV companies would fear most - they are learning to completely ignore ads in all media because they are saturated with them from an early age in all media. That's a good skill for them to have, I say. Thus, they can leave them playing and it makes little difference.
Myself and my wife gave up on broadcast TV about five years ago. By that I mean that the TV is now just a display device - we watch DVD's (and even still videos) and we play games on it all the time. But that's pretty much it. We have a satellite subscription on the lowest paid rate because then we get the "old programs" channels and things like Discovery but we're even considering giving that up because it's no longer of much value to us. We watch a "new" program about once a year, if that. But if I stumble across a favourite, I'll watch it if I'm in the mood.
The chances are that we only watch maybe one or two half-hour programs a night now and only about three or four nights a week unless we are working hard. That's WAY down on our previous rates. Most of the programs we do watch are re-runs that we know we are going to enjoy (although they are being slowly ruined by being edited for broadcasting during the day and then repeated with those same edits during the evening - so we "jar" on the gaps because we know the programs well enough to know something "naughty" was cut out, even though it's way past most people's bedtime). We have the remote on hand to mute all the adverts (because of the "let's raise advert volume levels" stupidity) and wait for the channel banner until we turn it back on. In the gap, we read, make phonecalls or prepare food. A lot of the time we just switch the thing off or, if our interest was peaked by a favourite program being on but it being yet another repeat of that episode we've watched a thousand times, what we will do is dig out our "complete set" DVD and choose a better episode of the same series.
Broadcast TV is slowly dying under the weight of the ads, for which the good programming has given way - it has been for years. They are poor quality (especially the ones that seem US-based when broadcast to a UK audience - the Cillit Bang man really needs a volume-reduction operation and the "US advert with dubbed fake UK voices" is just too grating when it's every other advert), uninteresting, not well targetted, over-used, over-frequent, and too forced. And the programs that they are replacing are becoming more like adverts every day. Even the bloody movies are adverts now (the bit in "I Robot" about the trainers really annoyed me in an otherwise very enjoyable film).
I can remember a time when I was younger, when a Saturday night was a non-stop run of fantastic programs, some old, some new and some which even then were 20-year-old repeats but it didn't show that badly - that made you stay in front of the TV all evening. The example that my wife likes to use is Tony Hancock (although we're both far too young to remember it the first time around, that's our sort of humour and type of era/program
Hello troll,
You have no recourse unless you have PAID to have one, like with almost everything else in the world. The GPL specifically states that it's not a warranty or guarantee that things will work.
However, if you were using it in a business, I would hope that you either a) hired your own programmers to work with the code or b) bought a support package/liability clause from someone like Red Hat. In which case it would be down to your programmers or Red Hat respectively. But we're not talking about Red Hat. Or any of the other big-name, support-contract-and-some-sort-of-indemnity-clause-included distros. They don't have this problem, presumably because they are not that stupid.
We're talking about Debian. Got a support contract / liability agreement with Debian? No? Bad luck. It's a bit like asking Microsoft to accept responsibility for your pirate copy of Windows, then, isn't it?
So the EU were planning on pissing off the US? It wouldn't surprise me, actually, but I don't think they are considering declaring war on the US just yet.
Simple military tactics - make sure your weapons and systems are under your control. Make sure they are redundant enough to survive a war. Make sure your enemies can't interfere even via the intervention of other nations. Make sure that political decisions don't get your only source of GPS information turned off.
I don't think that scaremongering over a GPS system that is identical in function and capability to other existing systems is justified. China does a lot worse things every day that are more deserving of concern. An independent GPS system isn't anything that doesn't already exist, isn't something that the US couldn't remove or cripple if war was declared, has several million legitimate uses and provides extra levels of redundancy that entire continents have been striving for for years.
No, if we were talking about actual weapons (e.g. a gps-guided nuclear bomb), then you would have a point and a lot of the above isn't relevant. But in that case, it's the bomb that's the problem, not the GPS.
Like the US system. And the EU system. Both of which have provision for encrypted signals that only those with the key (i.e. the military) can decrypt, while providing less accurate data "unencrypted". Except that the US turned their encryption off a few years back, but neither the EU or the US have said that they wouldn't turn encryption on "in troubled times". The EU initially considered doing without this but it ended up getting included too in a roundabout way.
Not so much "bad" as a waste of time. The unencrypted accuracy is still very useful for most purposes, and there are historical records of the US system being scuppered so that over certain parts of the globe at certain times, even the unencrypted signal was deliberately highly inaccurate but the military knew how to "compensate" for the bad data using a key. However, if China are doing this to stop the effects of a US/EU turnoff from affecting them, this is pretty much vital, I would say. The rest of the world's GPS has exactly the same features, so I don't see how China are doing anything "bad" by this. That's not to say that their overall motives are good, but no worse than the EU/US.
Most telesales is not well paid. At all. It's mostly students and hard-up people manning the phones, unless it's an extremely large, famous company (most places are not). These places rarely, if ever, care about their employees and threats of lawsuits are 99.9% useless, because most people who work there can't ever afford to sue and usually the "supervisors" change every month anyway (if not more) so they don't care if the company gets sued either. The employee turnover is so fast, you wouldn't believe.
And getting sacked for whatever reason, no matter how stupid, is not an option for most of the people who do the job because they are there to make some quick money to pay the rent. Not only would such actions guarantee you were sacked (as in physically out of the building within a minute) but any threats of lawsuits would be impotent - it would be amazingly difficult to track down employers, witnesses etc. These places really don't care, anyway, or they wouldn't be doing the work they are doing. You are stuck for 8 hours (if you're lucky) in a tiny cubicle with a phone and if you don't fulfill your quota, you're out. If you do but you make next-to-no money for yourself that month, tough. Employee issues? Grow up. Health and Safety? Don't be a wuss. Discrimination? Aw, shut up and man the phone before I sack you. You get sacked? Don't expect your pay packet to ever arrive. No matter what the law says.
Not everywhere operates under the law and these sorts of places tend to take advantage of people who need money and have hit bottom and can't fight back. A lot of people don't last more than a week in such places because they do exactly as you've described (I would be one of them too). I place the blame at the foot of the *employers*. They set, implement, control and enforce the policies, without shame. They sack the employees who don't follow suit. They are the ones breaking most employment regulations. They are the ones paying a pittance. They are the ones who care about nothing but a little figure beside your name at the end of the month, no matter what you've done to get it.
Just for clarity about the types of places, I can name you a handful of large double-glazing firms in the UK where all of the above is true. Someone I know works exclusively in them, changing firms/areas every single month because of stupid problems. Break the rules, phone anyone, promise anything, just get your quota of appointments and you get paid that month. Otherwise, forget it.
Supposedly. I just wish I hadn't been so pre-occupied when I opened the door (or known he was coming back). Trading standards springs to mind but I doubt they could do anything without some sort of name anyway and I didn't bother to inspect his ID too closely as he wasn't coming into the house.
I have seen a lot of EDF reps around the town, though, all dressed in orange-flourescent workmen's jackets, I assume to make them look official. If I see the guy again, I may have to worry him just out of entertainment by asking for his name, a copy of his ID, etc.
Pre-pay meters are still rare, even in the UK, but they avoid such fraud by simple measures such as "the meter is inside the house". At least in my case. My neighbour even has a glass block in the wall of his porch so that the meter is inside but can be read from outside. I, however, have to let the electricity company come in if they so demand but they NEVER do because - well, it's pre-pay and they have control of it remotely anyway.
To those people asking why you would want to call a "Do Not Call" list anyway...
I know a few people who work in telesales and it's usually the stupid and draconian rules put on the employees by the company, despite there being no actual proof that they would improve sales. In fact, in some places where they listen to the employees, changes can be made to INCREASE sales by cutting out known-bad calls as soon as possible.
E.g. (these are ACTUAL examples of PRESENT policies among some UK tele-sales offices)
"You can not hang up on the customer. They must hang up."
One of my friends had a three-hour ordeal with a woman whose husband had died and had to persist trying to sell to her because she could only plead for THEM to hang up, she was so upset. Yes, the woman should have just hung up rather than upsetting herself but she was hardly thinking straight.
"You must try to make an appointment for a salesman to call, even if you know it will mean no sale."
So tele-sales were booking appointments with people who were so annoyed at the telesales that they were threatening violent action. They were talking these people into BOOKING AN APPOINTMENT with a real, physical representative of the company who then turns up their house only to be pulverised.
On a similar tack, I just had a sleazy salesman knock at my door the other day. His opening words, while flashing an EDF Energy ID card, were "Hi, we're from EDF Energy and we're here to give you a new prepayment electricity key". Okay, I'm listening. I have a pre-pay meter. But I know there's something not quite right. The following conversation then ensued.
"Okay... erm... but I don't think I'm with EDF." (I'm actually with E-On but I was sufficiently confused between the two to take a second. Note that in this second he would not have been allowed access to the property or even the meter cupboard anyway. I'm not THAT stupid).
"Oh. Well. Would you mind telling us who you *are* with then?"
"Erm. You know? I'm not telling you."
"Why not?"
"I believe you're a salesman. Goodbye."
"Thank you sir."
Two hours later, he was back and I opened the door again (the wife had been suitably alerted by this time anyway so she would have slammed the door in his face too). He only said "Oh, it's you. We've spoken to you."
What got me was the unbelievably casual fraud (they implied, even if the actual words didn't say, that they were my current electricity supplier when in fact they were planning to sign me up to a new electricity supplier by inserting the key into my meter). And the fact that they went up the road and obviously carried on with the same line for the rest of the afternoon before turning back and trying the houses that they'd missed.
If I hadn't been in the middle of laying a new floor at the time, I would have shouted down the street and knocked on everybody's doors to warn them myself, or call the police and make them explain themselves. They may have been doing nothing "wrong" but I'm sure that a police officer wouldn't take kindly to their sales pitch and it would cause them enough trouble to try another street.
Guess what happens next time I'm choosing an electricity supplier? The ones who commit fraud on my doorstep don't get included.
If you're in Europe, Velleman sell something similar: the k8055. It's a USB board with Linux drivers available that has a handful of digital outputs/inputs as well as a analog/PWM output/input. You can have four boards on the same USB bus and address them individually and they also have onboard indicators/test switches so you can see how it works and run some demo programs before you plug anything into it.
In the UK, you can pick them up pre-assembled for £25 each from Maplin Electronics, or you can build them yourself for a little cheaper. Velleman are Belgian, so they distribute to most of Europe.
I use a CCTV-computer system running Linux, it's based on "motion", which I'm sure you can Google yourself. It does just want you want - I personally email the files (video/photo) to a Gmail account so that I can retrieve it with just a simple web browser (i.e. at the most basic of police stations). I use PCI WinTV cards and cheap cameras (I could use very expensive cameras without any problems, but listen to why in a second) - it costs me about £30 ($50) for each camera setup and a basic computer can handle four or more cameras easily (up to 16 if you have a fast machine and a Linux-compatible 4-input CCTV card.
The bit I like about it is that someone can nick the cameras, the machine itself, etc. and STILL the images will be sitting in the Gmail account, ready for pickup. This is how one (incredibly dumb) British burglar got caught, and with the exact same software (motion). There was a story on BBC News about it.
You have several problems, though.
"To me, the object isn't just deterrence if someone tries to break into my house or my car (parked on the street in front of my house), I'd like to provide a high-quality image of the perpetrator to the police."
I wear a hoodie, probably in a dark colour, like most of the "kids" who do stuff like this. I just beat your high-quality image. You'll stand more chance with more rubbishy cameras getting such people from all angles, or a burglar alarm. Or have your system text you / ring your phone when it detects motion somewhere it shouldn't.
Deterence - A burglar alarm box that doesn't look fake. A camera box that doesn't look fake. That's deterence. It does an awful lot, and it's very cheap to "deter". It's a lot harder to "catch". Large cameras get stones aimed at them, even if the kids aren't trying to break in (I know, the little gits have broken my security floodlight several times "for a laugh"). Much better to have very cheap, replaceable and (except for one or two) concealable cameras if you want to record evidence of criminal activity. If you want to CATCH the person responsible, that is much harder than just having a high-resolution image.
"Inexpensive video surveillance systems, with their atrocious image quality, are nearly useless."
As are expensive ones when they are defeated by extremely simple measures such as putting on a hood. Seriously. Get a bunch of friends, get them to pick a random member of their party (unknown to you), get that person to put on a hoodie and walk past every camera you own. You'll be hard-pressed to identify them.
You've forgotten at least two of the universal solutions:
Superglue
Blu-Tak
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The recently-deceased Arthur C. Clarke.
The things that most people (including myself) look for are, in order of importance:
- Whether they can relate to you (nobody employs people who are obnoxious, although a lot of people turn that way after employment!)
- Proof of competency (can you DO the job, even if you've never done it before and have no qualifications? This applies to both the specific job, "can you code?", and generally "can you learn how to do stuff I need you to do?")
- Can you learn quickly, competently, use that knowledge, bring in knowledge from elsewhere, study, etc.
- Length of relevant experience (have you just walked out of university or are you experienced?)
- Breadth of relevant experience (have you done ten jobs like this but in similar, yet different, areas?)
- Personal passion for the job/industry (are you an open-source programmer as well, do you know every company I use, do you do amazing stuff in the same area during your spare time?)
- Revelant references and their opinions (do they think you can do the job you're applying for?) and who your references are from (Your brother will always give you a good reference, your last employer is more important)
- Official qualifications in the area of expertise (some jobs prioritise this more, e.g. government work etc.)
- Particularities of your education (where you went to school, etc.)
- Your list of hobbies/pastimes on your CV (it's amazing how many people include this).
I've worked with people who have had entire categories from the above missing (qualifications, experience, even education!) and the only thing that matters is that there are enough of the higher ones (i.e. can you do the job, or learn to do it quickly?). Myself, when I first got a job after university, I didn't have experience, official IT qualifications (just a CS degree), or references that could attest to my work ethic. But I was competent, able to learn quickly, had a passion for the job and could relate well to people. Now, six years later, I have enough to write a page about how I have actually demonstrated proof of every single category there, except possibly official qualifications for which I still only have a CS degree (I have refused to be trained several times because everybody wants me to do baby-IT courses until I protest and then the "big" qualifications are very expensive, quickly irrelevant and quite useless at actually improving my work in a job).
I've never been asked for my personal school history, nor did it ever affect any interviews. Nobody cares, so long as you have the tick under "yes, he can study", if that. The CS degree did that for me and I got it from a university that specialised in Astronomy and Medicine.
Obligatory Red Dwarf quote:
A white hole?
But what is it?
NVIDIA vs ATI drivers - I don't really care.
"It worked for me" - I don't really care.
Statistics on the cause of crashes - I don't really care.
Anybody running unsigned drivers and experiencing crashes - I don't really care
Hang on. Let me explain.
The fact that you can STILL crash a Windows machine with a dodgy driver - that I care about. I thought everything was supposed to be userspace. I thought the error-handling was supposed to be better. I thought that Windows was supposed to be more stable and secure. I thought people who were using signed drivers were supposed to be "approved" and relatively crash-free.
Unsigned drivers? You can't support that no matter who you are, unless you're confident they are PURE userspace - they could be doing anything (like the 3DFX drivers that used to open access to all sorts of things it shouldn't in order for a primitive user-space part to actual drive the hardware). That's why you have to click that "CONTINUE Anyway" button with the dire warning. That's the Windows equivalent of kernel tainting. Once you've done that, nobody cares. The fact that most XP drivers are still using uncertified drivers is a bit of a problem but I can understand the reasons why. But you can't blame MS for crashes in uncertified drivers under XP. I thought Vista was supposed to be different, though.
If a certified driver is crashing that often, then you have an entirely different matter. The certification effectively becomes worthless. Nobody trusts it. Therefore every driver manufacturer ignores certification and just tells users to click "Continue". Then you will have nothing BUT uncertified drivers. Catch-22.
Blue screens should not happen. They certainly shouldn't happen often enough that people have coined the term "blue-screen" or BSOD to mean a crash. When they DO happen, when the driver goes absolutely nuts and starts stomping memory, aren't things like DEP and the user-space driver model supposed to STOP that happening and recover in some half-decent fashion? Or shouldn't the machine at least what the cause was and provide the user with some hint of what went wrong (i.e. "You installed an uncertified driver. Tough.").
Let's compare for a second - Linux kernels crash too. They crash much more often if third-party drivers are installed and nobody really cares about that except the third-party and their users. When they do crash, there's not much you can do but most of the time you'll get all sorts of debugging information and usually you can carry on. You might lose X, which may or may not load up again - I have a laptop that likes to crash X if I run more than one copy of Xine at a time but the worst that happens is X dies and restarts and then carries on working for hours/days/weeks as if nothing had happened (and yes, I need to update the kernel/X on that machine!) but things keep on working as best they can. You can do pretty much what you like in terms of software but the worst that'll happen if you're not actually loading a kernel module or patching a kernel or playing with kernel-level features is a software crash and be chucked back to the command-line. Sometimes you might even end up taking out X, like my example above.
You can rip out the harddrive and *make* the kernel crash but most of the time things will carry on, just without the component you ripped out (i.e. the IDE layer may die, but it'll still keep running as best it can without it). Even when Linux comes to a complete halt and freezes, you have debugging information and logs with which to narrow down the cause yourself, without needing to consult Linus himself.
When Windows crashes (even with certified drivers and clean installs), there's bugger all to go on. Half the time the event log doesn't show anything at all. The second you see a blue screen, the computer is down and there's little arguing. There's zero information to go on. You have no idea what caused the crash at all because usually all you get is a generic STOP error and a
And the important point that you've all missed... who said that the disks are illegal? They are personal copies of disks that I have, which I have made to ensure my original (which I still have) doesn't get damaged. If necessary, I can provide proof that I own the original and that the copies are purely for personal use, which is completely legal in my own and most other countries. How many ipod's do customs let through? Do you think that they could ever or do ever check the authenticity of the files on them? No. It's not a customs issue.
Secondly, nobody has EVER questioned it. Not even a nod or a hint. Nothing. Nobody checks the disks, nobody looks at them, nobody asks what's on them and a lot of the time when flying they are in the luggage anyway, and still I've never had my luggage opened (I would know, because of the way I secure the luggage). Nobody cares, because it's almost impossible to prove that it's not completely legitimate and for personal use. Especially if it's a handful of DVD or CD-R's compared to a few thousand. People expect to find CD-R's with laptops, it's not at all unusual.
But then, I don't live in or travel to countries that insist that it's a security issue for them to browse through my personal files on my laptop while travelling, or load up CD's to check their contents. Because it's not and I'd contest anyone who thought that it was. And even after all that, it's virtually impossible to be convicted of anything because what I am doing is completely legitimate and not worth the court time.
The nearest incident I have ever even *heard* of is my father-in-law who tried to order a science video for his school in Kuwait. Unfortunately, it was seized on the border by the post office and it's content "checked". They were concerned it might contain "unreligious" material. But then, I would never travel to such places anyway.
Okay, picking up on an old post because I just got my moderation results back but...
:-)
;-) ) and a little pointless.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. I assume you are dumbing down but even so - what you have done is *decided* what penalties, when, where and why. The program hasn't "learned" anything, it's doing the only thing that lets it make any progress in the universe that you've put it into - you're shoehorning programs into the only way that they are allowed to make progress by the above rules and then pretending it intelligently chose to do that. It didn't. This is rule-following and strictly-controlled evolution, not intelligence.
And abstract programs running around a virtual maze are really not AI. Sure, they help make a primitive computer opponent for Doom but that's just playing.
My point was that: "you can't "write" an AI. It's silly to try unless you have very limited targets in mind." If you have targets, you are controlling the progress of the program, shoehorning it into a particular result, which it will obviously "evolve" into something given enough time and suitable pruning. Sure, you can get something resembling AI from that but the concept is just too rigorous. True AI is about intelligence and (quite a lot of) pattern-recognition, not the ability to perform a certain task. The AI isn't recognising a pattern, it's following rules. There's a difference.
I get lost in mazes all the time, despite knowing the left-hand-rule and having two years of Graph Theory behind me, but it doesn't mean that there isn't intelligence in me somewhere. You'll know you've hit true AI when the program runs around the maze, gets lost, tries to peep through the computer's memory to find the exit, then gets bored, roams around for a week and then kills itself.
I don't think of intelligence as some magical spark that comes along out of nowhere (we are all physics-based beings), but I still say that the first "real" AI is going to be something made completely accidentally, outside the control of the person who thought they were making it, after just letting things run their own way and do their own thing in a sufficiently complex universe without arbitrary rules or targets. It'll be something that you can give a task (find your way out of the maze) and then give it a completely new, never-seen-before task (find out if a random string pulls into a knot or not) and it'll still work just as well without you having to change its rules or universe. And more often that not it'll ignore you and want to do what *IT* wants because it's found a loophole somewhere that lets it get "rewarded" for something else that it finds easier.
The only way I can see that working is by complete accident and/or a combination of millions of generations of evolution in a suitably complex universe. I don't see it years off. I very much doubt it's decades, unless it's quite a few. Centuries, possibly, given the complexity of the task. Longer than that I find doubtful.
AI people are honestly trying to design an artificial version of something that they can hardly define. There's a problem there, right away. AI and genetic algorithms should be going hand-in-hand all the way and they aren't - there's a facade that they are but AI people, I have found, tend to want a purely mathematical solution to a problem - the document linked to has more lambda's and Monte Carlo methods than my maths degree did. They simplify everything as much as possible, enforce rigorous rules and then are pleasantly surprised when the only available avenue is taken. I find that completely unsurprising, uninteresting (I have sat through Calculus I, II and III, so I know uninteresting when I see it!
I think that personally, if I were doing it, I'd be going for one huge, massive, general-purpose intelligence for everything and try to train it on different things at random times for years on end, throwing in something completely "new" to it every now and then and seei
I think you're wrong about people legally backing up. I know of people that can't navigate a start menu who have backed up their kids DVD's, give the copies to the kids and put the actual DVD's out of reach. I know of people who back up music CD's and only play the backups in cars because they have a tendency to get scratched, lost, trodden on, or left out in the sun.
Only last week, I bought a book that came with a video DVD. It cost me about £30 and the DVD will only play in my DVD player because it's cheaply-produced. It would cost me more in petrol to take it back to the shop than it would to just copy it and I had two DVD-RW drives that could read it, slowly, but they could. So I made a copy and I have that copy tucked inside the book alongside the original.
When we go abroad on holiday, we often go with family and watch DVD's some nights. We'll take copies wherever possible because you don't know what people's machine will do, what the luggage has to go through etc. And it's not unusual for us to leave something in the DVD player. When we travel in our own country, I'll bung hundreds of mp3's and a few movies or a TV series onto a laptop or DVD-R so that we have our own entertainment for travel and/or if our destination doesn't have something to play music on.
I've trained my wife to use backup CD's wherever practical - she ruined the original copy of a CD of the first song I ever bought her and she was devastated, so from then on she's copied every CD that she thinks is worth the effort. The same for a few DVD's but with the CSS and menuing hassles, it was harder to get her into that. With Blu-Ray (or any future technology), if I can't copy them easily, I won't buy them. Even if it comes down to just being able to transcode them to DVD and burning a DVD-R, that's what I'll do. And I have absolutely no doubts that whatever the most common format for purchasing movies/music, there will be a way to copy them sooner or later. At that point and not before, I will buy into the technology, if I feel the need.
I do this all the time... I actually am quite surprised at the number of everyday things that have such simple flaws.
In the hospital waiting for my wife the other day, I watched a mailwoman with a big trolley full of mail, sorted into departments, insert several people's medical records into the trolley and then walk off out of sight through locked doors (which were opened by her tapping the glass and standing to one side) leaving the mail unattended. It wouldn't take much to a) gain access to the baby ward that is supposed to be secure by posing as a mail woman or b) stealing someone medical records just by knowing they were in hospital that day and one department that they would have to visit.
The other, from working in schools, comes from the Tesco Computers For Schools voucher scheme. For every £10 spent in a supermarket, customers get a flimsy paper voucher that they can give to the schools (only schools) who, when they have a few thousand, can trade them in for a free computer or computer hardware. Most people just throw them away, and I actually collect hundreds from the floor outside shops on my way home.
First, the vouchers are simply printed pieces of paper - there isn't any security on them at all. The only "barcode" is always "1234567890X" and every piece of paper is identical - it's also just cheap, bog-standard paper. Secondly, the schools can collect amazing numbers of vouchers just by running campaigns or by collecting harder, so there are schools that collect 5 vouchers one year and 50,000 the next. Thirdly, the vouchers are *not counted* at the other end. They are weighed approximately (if at all - I don't believe that Tesco's actually weight millions of vouchers each year and worry about the accuracy). I always wonder how much it would cost to print, say, 10,000 identical vouchers of your own to the same standard compared to the cost of a video-editing PC and lots of educational software supplied with it. Or to try your luck by declaring false numbers of vouchers and thereby learn the accuracy that they measure to (yes, you TELL Tesco how many you have, you can even do that online, and then send them off later to be "verified").
That, and working in IT in a school means I'm always looking for ways into the building, past staff, into the computer systems, etc. Some schools are amazingly lax while others are like Fort Knox.
This isn't news, and especially isn't news for nerds... Windows, Linux, MacOS, it doesn't matter...
Don't run programs of which you don't know the origin (commercial games from big store - yes, hacked games from random illegal Internet site, no)
Don't let programs run automatically ever (autorun, activex in browser without prompts, email attachments etc.)
Don't run programs just because something in an email, on a webpage, on a game, tells you to - double check first.
Use only trusted, well known mediums to obtain the things you want, whether that's a game magazine or a download site.
You DO NOT NEED something running 24/7 and taking up CPU all the time, intercepting every disk access to stop you getting a virus. You just need to follow some simple rules. My girlfriend manages them with little to no training - never had a virus. If in doubt, you ask someone in the know. They will tell you if something is safe and should be able to do so over the phone or IM it's that easy. They don't even need to SEE the file itself or its contents, they can tell from your description of where it came from.
You only need antivirus if you run a network where the users deliberately "forget" their training. Unfortunately, that's most corporate networks. Therefore most corporations do "need" it. That's their own problem for running systems that allow execution of arbitrary programs for normal users. It shouldn't be required EVER in a corporate environment unless they are on the development team. Bring back the good old days of "Press 1 for receipts, 2 for stock control, 3 for staff databases"... by restricting the interface, you restrict the possibilities.
Number of viruses I've had - zero. Number of viruses witnessed first-hand - hundreds of thousands. Number of machines cleaned for other people - hundreds. Number of antivirus programs installed on those computers - hundreds. Number of effective antivirus programs when used on novice user's computers? Zero. Number of antivirus programs installed on any OS on my own personal machines - zero.
What do I do when I need to check someone's computer? Free virus checkers RUN FROM KNOWN-GOOD, CHECKSUM-VERIFIED executables stored on READ-ONLY media of my own. See. The rules apply even then. Amazing, isn't it?
I have seriously removed more antivirus programs than the number of computers I've fixed. They are an absolute waste of time as they are only "after-the-event" - they hardly detect any "real" viruses, if they do detect them, they can't clean them or remove them effectively. And, besides, it's too late by the time an antivirus program spots something - it's already running. Most AV are easy for viruses to disable or fool anyway, so they are just false psychological reinforcement for novice users. Once users are SHOWN that the AV did absolutely nothing to stop the virus they just got, I ask them if they want to renew it next year (so that they remember come the time). I have dozens of people who ask me to remove it there and then and put something "that works" on. I tell them it doesn't work like that, but I can install a free antivirus and at least save them some money, if not save them completely from viruses.
It's amazing the amount of people I've dealt with who are shocked that:
1) The expensive antivirus that they've been paying every year for has never really worked properly and they've had viruses all along. Or hasn't updated in five years. Or says it's updating and isn't. Or says it's running and isn't.
2) The same expensive antivirus is useless at detecting some stuff and useless at removing anything (the amount of times I've run "clean" only to have the same message pop up again on another file, repeated ad inifitum). Cleaning from within an infected operating system is very difficult (I've done it successfully many times but never with an automated antivirus tool) and is only really any good if you absolutely CANNOT get the virus off any other way without losing data.
3) The same