If you honestly think anyone with a brain or in any position of repute has ever claimed those three things, then you're a bigger idiot than posting that on Slashdot makes you appear.
Aiming a botnet (paid-for or otherwise) at a company can be a single-click affair if you go to the right places on the Internet.
Stealing code from a virus that's managed - accidentally - to get into Sony is not hard either.
However, making a targeted attack, into the secure areas, not getting caught? That's difficult even in the most lax of scenarios, precisely because more attention is paid to it.
A pilot earning a small fortune, whose entire professional life is based on trust in him to save lives, whose entire career can be blighted by a single "what I saw wasn't there" incident, who's sitting next to co-pilots, lying in order to get an aircraft that he probably plays with at home himself banned?
Yeah. Right. It's all a conspiracy. Or some dickhead tested out his kids Christmas present and didn't know the laws surrounding drones because "it's just a toy", or wanted to get a cool shot of a plane taking off.
Heathrow is restricted airspace. NOTHING should be in that area, it's the world's busiest airport. You report ANYTHING out of the ordinary as a matter of course, as a pilot. And radar won't see a drone any more than it will see a house, or a car, or a cloud, or a big bird on it's own, or a lost birthday balloon. It's looking for aircraft. And all aircraft carry transponders blurting out their name and position by law anyway, which is the basis for air traffic control. Radar isn't there to find these kinds of things.
Occam's Razor. Either it's a conspiracy by the airports, the pilots, the governments and the CAA to ban drones that they themselves are using. Or it's some idiot with a Christmas toy. And they are already having enough problems with laser pointers, etc. by such idiots. I'm going with the later.
How strange, given that anybody with a license to the original ROMs (yes, there were Interface II ROMs - I have a Jetpac one!) or tapes would be the people legally allowed to use them (and that only under a grey-area of the law) and they wouldn't have to worry about them being bundled.
£20 for a RPi. £10 for an SD card. £10 for a pretty casing. £10 per hour of faffing about getting it to work and installing 1000 games for it.
And you have spent as much in time/money as it costs, for an unlicensed, homebrew, sort-it-out-yourself solution, without electrical certifications, etc. as it costs for an off-the-shelf "just works" official Spectrum-y looking cool gadget.
The price is not a problem. The licensing may well be, but that's another matter.
As far as I know, Amstrad may only have the license to make their own Spectrum models (kinda like ARM's licensing - you can make an ARM chip, and call it ARM, but you don't own the ARM name and have no control over others making their licensed ARM chips).
Given that Sir Clive was a multi-millionaire, and creator of the thing, chances are he had the lawyers present to do things properly.
Amstrad may own just the licence to make their OWN Spectrum (+2, +2A, +3, etc.), use the name, etc. not to block anybody who created the originals from going it alone.
After 15 years in IT, including self-employment and employment, state and private, and I haven't worked an hour of overtime unnecessarily. If something blows up, yeah, I'll hang around to get it working for the next morning - but I'll make sure I'm paid for it or get it off in lieu. Apart from that, I'm not a clock-watcher but will certainly work as my contract states.
And the line "other reasonable duties" is a joint interpretation. If I don't think it's reasonable, I won't be doing it. Never had a problem, never had to argue or even discuss it with an employer.
Overtime is OVER time. It's a voluntary, temporary extension of your contract which is paid extra to compensate for the short-notice and unusual nature of the change. If you're doing that to win favour, you're an idiot. Find a better place to work, where they would be horrified at you trying to work overtime and tell you to go home unless there was a REAL need for you to do so.
Most employers that I've worked for, my boss will sneak out of the door 15-30 minutes before he should and, as he passes, tells you to go home yourself. Especially if it's a Friday.
Is this an American thing? Quite who do you think you're benefitting by working uncompensated as a matter of course?
It's closer to 100:1 almost everywhere I've worked.
Sorry, but if it's not 100:1, I think you're doing something VERY wrong, probably including not training your staff (IT or otherwise) at all.
And, to be honest, Mac support isn't in the same class. Macs are individual machines that, to centrally manage, is more difficult than it needs to be. Enforcing security policy on any serious basis requires an awful lot more work.
But let's not get into Mac vs Windows, as they are pretty similar if you use them en-masse. Let's focus that you think you need one guy to manage a small room of 10 users, and the same next door, and the same next door, and the same next door.
Fuck that. I've seen schools with 1000's of users with IT teams of anywhere from 2 to 7.
No worse than the children already do - shoulder-surfing passwords, jumping on their friends machine, etc.
All things that can see their account suspended. All things that we deal with already. We're not talking high-end security for children's accounts here. It's not uncommon for early years to have an account with a password like "cat" or "dog". Giving them an RFID tag is nothing more than more convenient than waiting for a class of 4-year-olds to type "cat".
I'd be interested in any cheap, Windows-logon compatible system that I can supply my own RFID reader hardware for.
RFID readers are stupid-cheap. Nobody's going to go to the effort of copying an RFID tag just to get on a system as a child user. And I can buy tags for about 10p each.
Every logon system I see is stupendously priced (either per reader, per card, or per seat software licence) or doesn't work on Windows logon. Those are useless to me.
I've been looking since the XP GINA days, still haven't found anything vaguely suitable and in a school's price-range.
(Note: School in the UK refers to education up to age 18, in my particular case education up to age 13).
Maybe if you had no recourse but for Microsoft to fix their stuff, maybe they'd have to... you know... fix it?
I don't buy the "it's better / quicker from the illegal sites" argument in terms of software, movies, etc. The problem is not the speed or ease of access as much as the ease of licensing. When you can't buy a movie in a certain country, or on a certain date, or by a certain vendor, it's almost always a licensing problem. Fix the licensing and the problem solves itself.
Justifying illegal copies floating round PirateBay by the fact that you might use them if your legit copy is unavailable (Sorry, a "key piece of infrastructure" and you don't have the original install disks or a system backup? I judge you and your backup procedures, not Microsoft) is like justifying counterfeit notes as being an acceptable substitute if your local ATM isn't working.
No, it's not. Shout at Microsoft, that company you're presumably paying for the service, otherwise it will never get fixed. And I've had the occasional glitch with MS VLSC... once they had hand-typed in my administrator@domain.com email address as the primary logon and managed to spell administrator wrong (the only things I submitted were electronic, so they must have hand-typed somewhere along the road). You shout at them until they resolve it.
But, then, all my workplaces had every original server, windows and office CD of any volume licensed content anyway. Usually several versions slipstreamed to quicken installation but increasingly now just a plain PXE-deployable image of a clean version of whatever is relevant. Beyond that, I have a Zalman storage device that you can put every ISO on and it "emulates" a bootable USB CD drive with the ISO contents.
But "MS wasn't working" (and I'm guessing it's the security on their VL accounts, which I've also run into but - again - not enough to worry about the waiting time while they send me new logins etc.) isn't an excuse. Especially in business.
Did you check hashes at least? You have no damn clue what you've just installed on your "key piece of infrastructure".
Yeah, that kind of attitude goes down really well.
Hence why Microsoft kowtowed to the EU requests and paid millions of dollars in fines, etc.
Pulling out of one of the top two world markets (depends what you look at exactly, but Europe and the US are either 1st or 2nd in almost any product/industry), especially over a sales tax, is corporate insanity and will see stockholder lawsuits within seconds.
And, to be honest, there are countries that survive just fine without Google. Google is only really the top search engine in English-speaking countries. And Google Maps? What about it? I can name ten different companies producing maps accurate enough for almost any purpose. You think ONLY Google get the mapping and aerial photography data of a country? Maybe StreetView (because they're the only ones really doing it seriously), but maps? No.
If kept at ultra-low temperatures in a room full of equipment to help do that.
MRI's are one of the largest users of liquid helium in the world, and it's considered to be one of the bigger supply-chain problems to come in the future (i.e. we won't have enough).
If something has been abandoned for 90+ years with no significant advances in the area, it's probably for a reason.
The upper limit on what such gearing could do is quite low. You're comparing a steel-pushing-steel scenario with one of trying to turn one magnetic wheel by pushing another near it. It's a loser except in ultra-specialist applications with exotic materials (Space? Fine. Your car? Unlikely).
Battery powered cars have been around forever. UK milk floats were entirely battery powered for decades, delivering hundreds of pints of milk to every house in the local town - they just used lead acid batteries and charged overnight. If you ever got stuck behind one, you quickly (!) found out the limitations of the technology of the time. We've moved on from there now, but only very, very recently.
Some huge trucks still have things based on variable transmission technology, so the entire gearbox doesn't have gears but just slides into the most convenient gearing automatically. They've been around for decades. And they work by using a strong belt that can slide up and down a conical shaft. I kid you not. Every few years, they are re-invented under another brand / patent / material and actually do quite a good job. But they are still considered specialist parts because we can't overcome their weaknesses.
Wankel engines were still in mass production until very recently (I believe Mazda don't have newer models that still use them?). Again, they do everything you would want and were constantly reinventing themselves for decades.
The problem is not that it's been done before. It's that it's been done an awful lot and not much more can be done that way. As such, although we have stronger room-temperature magnets, they aren't THAT much stronger. Superconducting magnets might be considered "new" but we can't make them practical yet - except in the absolute zero and vacuum of outer space.
There's nothing wrong with going back to the old, but you have to add something new (e.g. the clockwork radio was hailed as genius because it took the old and made it do something "new").
I have many reasons why I do / don't contribute, but mostly it's time. You don't realise what an investment of personal time means to the person giving it. When I was young and a student, I could code for hours into the early hours and not have to worry and could churn out twice as much code in languages that I had been unfamiliar with the week before. As I get older, giving up my time produces less results but also costs more. To do so for a small software project, or a game even, is something to be applauded - time is precious.
However, when I have time, I don't have the time to argue with people. I won't get into a discussion about whether or not X should exist if it's what *I* want, and I could start coding in the time it takes to argue it. Open source is an inherently selfish (and selfless!) prospect - I write a feature because I need it. If someone else benefits, great, but that's not the prime intention for me. Also, if someone else has coded a feature I need, whether or not it gets upstream, that's what I want and I'll use it. I might not even tell anyone about doing that.
The larger projects do attract an attitude of kinds. I used to contribute to a large open-source game but when all my feature-patches (actual working patches, with code, that I'd be playing the game with for months) were pushed, there were disparaged to oblivion. Why would anyone want that? Put full translations for every language for this string you have. Why would you use THAT piece of free MIT-licenced code to help you when you could have used this other, almost identical MIT-licenced code that has less correlation and a worse API?
So instead I put my patches on my website and let people pull them as required. Over time, all those same features made it into the game proper, but years later, and with much more complex code. I wasn't bitter because by that time I didn't care and had stopped coding for the project. I'm not easily put off, but it was more than my investment in time was not rewarded (rightly so if my code was crap, but I don't think it was) and thus the patches I was making for me were only ever going to seen by me, so why bother to push them?
Even as a teenager, I was cleaning up the English documentation for open-source emulators, pushing bug reports and trying to hunt down the lines of code that were the cause, and handling questions on the forums. That kind of time is what I still give to the projects I enjoy, want to see propagate, and that I see in need of help. My answering a question on the forum could (I like to think) save a programmer ten minutes of having to interpret a bug report written inexpertly by that user.
I also wrote a port of a game once after seeing that there wasn't one for the GP2X - a handheld open-source video games console. I questioned on a forum whether there was a port, and got told no. I was then encouraged by a handful of people to start porting it myself because they thought I was as good as they were and they'd ported games.
It was probably one of the larger things I've ended up doing and cost many months of time for me. And I got a lot of good feedback, and I know thousands of people used the end product. And I had great fun, and I feel quite proud of it, even though the actual code isn't great. People took it and ported my code because all the hard work was done and they could easily port what I'd written than the original project. But that was about it. You don't get recognition for what you do (and I wasn't expecting any - OS is selfish too, remember?) so you have to enjoy doing it.
I actually get more good feedback, and more enjoyment, out of putting up a couple of game servers out of my own wallet, being admin on them in my own time, and chatting with the regulars. That's a sad state of affairs, but I suppose in a large OS project you do get that kind of thing too - the game project above certainly ended up with a huge compile farm that one guy managed - no doubt they had fun on the IRC channels and felt appreciated.
If you're driving a ton of machinery at 70 mph within inches of other people you NEED to be sober. It's not optional.
The BAC limits cannot be adjusted to the individual, you have NO way of knowing what effect that BAC will have. As anyone knows, not having eaten, being dehydrated etc. will VASTLY affect the alcohol's effect on anyone. And you can't measure "hunger", and dehydration may not show up on a later (non-road-side) measurement.
Just don't be a fucking idiot.
And phones are dangerous, yes. And should be equally punished. Not letting off people whose BAC is PROVEN to show physical impairment, deterioration in depth perception and WORSE over-confidence in their own abilities, just because something else is more dangerous and more (for some fucking insane reason) socially acceptable.
Do not drink. I smell alcohol on your breath by the side of the road, I'm reporting you, whether it was a ding or a close miss, or whatever. I'm not a cop. I'm not anti-drink (my father has worked for breweries his entire life, I had beer at home available from a very young age). Just anti-stupidity. "I'm okay, it doesn't affect me", said by a moron, is the fucking death-knell of too many lives.
And the US is far from the strictest on this. Not even close.
I once had a carful of screaming Germans because I did a U-turn in the middle of an empty road where nothing said you couldn't do that.
They label their roads as "broken road" on street signs if there's a single pothole.
Flashing another driver (admittedly a UK thing, but we use it to say thank you and let people out, officially it's "making other drivers aware of your presence") is something that could see you pulled over - I kinda guessed this so never did it, but the UK does things differently.
Parking for a fraction of a second in a big town where you're not supposed to will get you a fine and they will chase you internationally.
If you break down on a motorway (freeway) because you run out of fuel, you get points on your licence.
German driving laws are tough. But they have some of the best roads and drivers in the world.
The German Autobahns are unrestricted. You can literally go as fast as you want on them (your insurance may blame you in an accident if you're the only one doing over 100mph, but it's not "illegal").
Strict lane control is the saviour. You can be arrested for dawdling in the inner lanes (the "fast" - actually "overtaking" - lanes) unnecessarily. It works well because the old grannies do get too scared to be in anything but the first lane, so they actually stick to it, rather than hog the middle lane as they do in my country (the UK).
I see no problem with a rise in speed limits (and would vastly prefer that to people campaigning to scrap speed cameras etc.), but basic driving etiquette must be enforced. In Germany, I believe it's actually written on the road signs and road markings - this lane below 55, these lane over 55 ONLY.
And thus the communication method that's most efficient should take priority.
I'd rather kids spent times learning how to use the words than how they are drawn. Especially if they are left-handed, clumsy, short-sighted, etc.
My mother stormed up to my school innumerable times to point out this very fact to them.
"He's handwriting is messy" "But is the answer right?" "Well, yes, but it's messy." "But you could read it, and the answer was right?" "Well, yes..."
At that point the schools tended to change tack, because they were realising the logical problem with their argument. Sure, neat handwriting in Art or Design, I get that. Handwriting neat enough for others to read (but, hell, I just print if that's necessary), I get. But maths teachers fucking about with getting me to join an "a" to another letter in THEIR preferred way rather than the myriad ways that it's possible? Get lost.
Handwriting is dead in the water. It's long-winded, hard-to-teach, a practical skill not an intellectual one, and in the end it matters SO LITTLE in the modern world that it's laughable. Teach how to write, by all means, but spending years perfecting cursive writing? Stuff that. Cut that shit out, and put an extra English, Maths or Science lesson in there instead.
As others point out, all forms say "Please print". You read a hundred times more text on a font than you do in cursive. Even the handwriting you do in school is printed out BY USING A TYPEFACE, teachers do not hand-write it! Even back in my day, photocopied sheets for practice were with typescript letters.
Pissing time away on a dead art is wasteful, especially so in education. I can't remember the last time I had to do more than jot a note on a Post-It by hand. And since the smartphone era, I just use Google Keep apps. Doctors have computerised systems now. Authors have been required to submit typewritten manuscripts for decades.
Sorry, but it was a waste in my day (and I was told off by my teachers for doing so much on computer instead of by hand, and I can't say it's hurt my career at all). It's a waste now. It's going to be a waste in 20 years time, which is where the country noted in this article is in education terms compared to the UK or US.
Communicate. By removing the shit associated with it such that communication is a pure art focusing on the words and their meaning, not how pretty they look.
An interesting article, given that the linked government statistics do not include any comparison of pricing whatsoever and I wasn't able to find any on the "open government" gov.uk either:
Slashdot Mirror
If you honestly think anyone with a brain or in any position of repute has ever claimed those three things, then you're a bigger idiot than posting that on Slashdot makes you appear.
It's an ordinary piece of malware.
It talks home to a hard-coded URL.
It has to have a secret "knock" before it will talk back to you (port-knocking has uses both ways, it seems!).
It contains easily-greppable strings.
Quite what distinguishes this from other malware, I'm not too sure. Just that nobody had seen it before?
The problem is that that stuff is actually hard.
Aiming a botnet (paid-for or otherwise) at a company can be a single-click affair if you go to the right places on the Internet.
Stealing code from a virus that's managed - accidentally - to get into Sony is not hard either.
However, making a targeted attack, into the secure areas, not getting caught? That's difficult even in the most lax of scenarios, precisely because more attention is paid to it.
A pilot earning a small fortune, whose entire professional life is based on trust in him to save lives, whose entire career can be blighted by a single "what I saw wasn't there" incident, who's sitting next to co-pilots, lying in order to get an aircraft that he probably plays with at home himself banned?
Yeah. Right. It's all a conspiracy. Or some dickhead tested out his kids Christmas present and didn't know the laws surrounding drones because "it's just a toy", or wanted to get a cool shot of a plane taking off.
Heathrow is restricted airspace. NOTHING should be in that area, it's the world's busiest airport. You report ANYTHING out of the ordinary as a matter of course, as a pilot. And radar won't see a drone any more than it will see a house, or a car, or a cloud, or a big bird on it's own, or a lost birthday balloon. It's looking for aircraft. And all aircraft carry transponders blurting out their name and position by law anyway, which is the basis for air traffic control. Radar isn't there to find these kinds of things.
Occam's Razor. Either it's a conspiracy by the airports, the pilots, the governments and the CAA to ban drones that they themselves are using. Or it's some idiot with a Christmas toy. And they are already having enough problems with laser pointers, etc. by such idiots. I'm going with the later.
How strange, given that anybody with a license to the original ROMs (yes, there were Interface II ROMs - I have a Jetpac one!) or tapes would be the people legally allowed to use them (and that only under a grey-area of the law) and they wouldn't have to worry about them being bundled.
[And it was "Underwurlde", I believe.]
£20 for a RPi.
£10 for an SD card.
£10 for a pretty casing.
£10 per hour of faffing about getting it to work and installing 1000 games for it.
And you have spent as much in time/money as it costs, for an unlicensed, homebrew, sort-it-out-yourself solution, without electrical certifications, etc. as it costs for an off-the-shelf "just works" official Spectrum-y looking cool gadget.
The price is not a problem. The licensing may well be, but that's another matter.
Depends on the wording.
As far as I know, Amstrad may only have the license to make their own Spectrum models (kinda like ARM's licensing - you can make an ARM chip, and call it ARM, but you don't own the ARM name and have no control over others making their licensed ARM chips).
Given that Sir Clive was a multi-millionaire, and creator of the thing, chances are he had the lawyers present to do things properly.
Amstrad may own just the licence to make their OWN Spectrum (+2, +2A, +3, etc.), use the name, etc. not to block anybody who created the originals from going it alone.
I wouldn't want your life.
After 15 years in IT, including self-employment and employment, state and private, and I haven't worked an hour of overtime unnecessarily. If something blows up, yeah, I'll hang around to get it working for the next morning - but I'll make sure I'm paid for it or get it off in lieu. Apart from that, I'm not a clock-watcher but will certainly work as my contract states.
And the line "other reasonable duties" is a joint interpretation. If I don't think it's reasonable, I won't be doing it. Never had a problem, never had to argue or even discuss it with an employer.
Overtime is OVER time. It's a voluntary, temporary extension of your contract which is paid extra to compensate for the short-notice and unusual nature of the change. If you're doing that to win favour, you're an idiot. Find a better place to work, where they would be horrified at you trying to work overtime and tell you to go home unless there was a REAL need for you to do so.
Most employers that I've worked for, my boss will sneak out of the door 15-30 minutes before he should and, as he passes, tells you to go home yourself. Especially if it's a Friday.
Is this an American thing? Quite who do you think you're benefitting by working uncompensated as a matter of course?
It's closer to 100:1 almost everywhere I've worked.
Sorry, but if it's not 100:1, I think you're doing something VERY wrong, probably including not training your staff (IT or otherwise) at all.
And, to be honest, Mac support isn't in the same class. Macs are individual machines that, to centrally manage, is more difficult than it needs to be. Enforcing security policy on any serious basis requires an awful lot more work.
But let's not get into Mac vs Windows, as they are pretty similar if you use them en-masse. Let's focus that you think you need one guy to manage a small room of 10 users, and the same next door, and the same next door, and the same next door.
Fuck that. I've seen schools with 1000's of users with IT teams of anywhere from 2 to 7.
No worse than the children already do - shoulder-surfing passwords, jumping on their friends machine, etc.
All things that can see their account suspended. All things that we deal with already. We're not talking high-end security for children's accounts here. It's not uncommon for early years to have an account with a password like "cat" or "dog". Giving them an RFID tag is nothing more than more convenient than waiting for a class of 4-year-olds to type "cat".
I work in schools.
I'd be interested in any cheap, Windows-logon compatible system that I can supply my own RFID reader hardware for.
RFID readers are stupid-cheap. Nobody's going to go to the effort of copying an RFID tag just to get on a system as a child user. And I can buy tags for about 10p each.
Every logon system I see is stupendously priced (either per reader, per card, or per seat software licence) or doesn't work on Windows logon. Those are useless to me.
I've been looking since the XP GINA days, still haven't found anything vaguely suitable and in a school's price-range.
(Note: School in the UK refers to education up to age 18, in my particular case education up to age 13).
It's not really much of an argument.
Maybe if you had no recourse but for Microsoft to fix their stuff, maybe they'd have to... you know... fix it?
I don't buy the "it's better / quicker from the illegal sites" argument in terms of software, movies, etc. The problem is not the speed or ease of access as much as the ease of licensing. When you can't buy a movie in a certain country, or on a certain date, or by a certain vendor, it's almost always a licensing problem. Fix the licensing and the problem solves itself.
Justifying illegal copies floating round PirateBay by the fact that you might use them if your legit copy is unavailable (Sorry, a "key piece of infrastructure" and you don't have the original install disks or a system backup? I judge you and your backup procedures, not Microsoft) is like justifying counterfeit notes as being an acceptable substitute if your local ATM isn't working.
No, it's not. Shout at Microsoft, that company you're presumably paying for the service, otherwise it will never get fixed. And I've had the occasional glitch with MS VLSC... once they had hand-typed in my administrator@domain.com email address as the primary logon and managed to spell administrator wrong (the only things I submitted were electronic, so they must have hand-typed somewhere along the road). You shout at them until they resolve it.
But, then, all my workplaces had every original server, windows and office CD of any volume licensed content anyway. Usually several versions slipstreamed to quicken installation but increasingly now just a plain PXE-deployable image of a clean version of whatever is relevant. Beyond that, I have a Zalman storage device that you can put every ISO on and it "emulates" a bootable USB CD drive with the ISO contents.
But "MS wasn't working" (and I'm guessing it's the security on their VL accounts, which I've also run into but - again - not enough to worry about the waiting time while they send me new logins etc.) isn't an excuse. Especially in business.
Did you check hashes at least? You have no damn clue what you've just installed on your "key piece of infrastructure".
"Want to watch your friends play instead of playing?"
NO.
Why on Earth would you do that? Either play with them, or do something else entirely.
Is this honestly what the youth of gaming are doing with their time nowadays?
Hence why this is a tax on sales, not a tax on profits.
Whatever you do with the money, it gets taxed. Even if you "pay yourself" via a roundabout method.
Yeah, that kind of attitude goes down really well.
Hence why Microsoft kowtowed to the EU requests and paid millions of dollars in fines, etc.
Pulling out of one of the top two world markets (depends what you look at exactly, but Europe and the US are either 1st or 2nd in almost any product/industry), especially over a sales tax, is corporate insanity and will see stockholder lawsuits within seconds.
And, to be honest, there are countries that survive just fine without Google. Google is only really the top search engine in English-speaking countries. And Google Maps? What about it? I can name ten different companies producing maps accurate enough for almost any purpose. You think ONLY Google get the mapping and aerial photography data of a country? Maybe StreetView (because they're the only ones really doing it seriously), but maps? No.
If kept at ultra-low temperatures in a room full of equipment to help do that.
MRI's are one of the largest users of liquid helium in the world, and it's considered to be one of the bigger supply-chain problems to come in the future (i.e. we won't have enough).
If something has been abandoned for 90+ years with no significant advances in the area, it's probably for a reason.
The upper limit on what such gearing could do is quite low. You're comparing a steel-pushing-steel scenario with one of trying to turn one magnetic wheel by pushing another near it. It's a loser except in ultra-specialist applications with exotic materials (Space? Fine. Your car? Unlikely).
Battery powered cars have been around forever. UK milk floats were entirely battery powered for decades, delivering hundreds of pints of milk to every house in the local town - they just used lead acid batteries and charged overnight. If you ever got stuck behind one, you quickly (!) found out the limitations of the technology of the time. We've moved on from there now, but only very, very recently.
Some huge trucks still have things based on variable transmission technology, so the entire gearbox doesn't have gears but just slides into the most convenient gearing automatically. They've been around for decades. And they work by using a strong belt that can slide up and down a conical shaft. I kid you not. Every few years, they are re-invented under another brand / patent / material and actually do quite a good job. But they are still considered specialist parts because we can't overcome their weaknesses.
Wankel engines were still in mass production until very recently (I believe Mazda don't have newer models that still use them?). Again, they do everything you would want and were constantly reinventing themselves for decades.
The problem is not that it's been done before. It's that it's been done an awful lot and not much more can be done that way. As such, although we have stronger room-temperature magnets, they aren't THAT much stronger. Superconducting magnets might be considered "new" but we can't make them practical yet - except in the absolute zero and vacuum of outer space.
There's nothing wrong with going back to the old, but you have to add something new (e.g. the clockwork radio was hailed as genius because it took the old and made it do something "new").
And I'm not sure this does that at all.
I have many reasons why I do / don't contribute, but mostly it's time. You don't realise what an investment of personal time means to the person giving it. When I was young and a student, I could code for hours into the early hours and not have to worry and could churn out twice as much code in languages that I had been unfamiliar with the week before. As I get older, giving up my time produces less results but also costs more. To do so for a small software project, or a game even, is something to be applauded - time is precious.
However, when I have time, I don't have the time to argue with people. I won't get into a discussion about whether or not X should exist if it's what *I* want, and I could start coding in the time it takes to argue it. Open source is an inherently selfish (and selfless!) prospect - I write a feature because I need it. If someone else benefits, great, but that's not the prime intention for me. Also, if someone else has coded a feature I need, whether or not it gets upstream, that's what I want and I'll use it. I might not even tell anyone about doing that.
The larger projects do attract an attitude of kinds. I used to contribute to a large open-source game but when all my feature-patches (actual working patches, with code, that I'd be playing the game with for months) were pushed, there were disparaged to oblivion. Why would anyone want that? Put full translations for every language for this string you have. Why would you use THAT piece of free MIT-licenced code to help you when you could have used this other, almost identical MIT-licenced code that has less correlation and a worse API?
So instead I put my patches on my website and let people pull them as required. Over time, all those same features made it into the game proper, but years later, and with much more complex code. I wasn't bitter because by that time I didn't care and had stopped coding for the project. I'm not easily put off, but it was more than my investment in time was not rewarded (rightly so if my code was crap, but I don't think it was) and thus the patches I was making for me were only ever going to seen by me, so why bother to push them?
Even as a teenager, I was cleaning up the English documentation for open-source emulators, pushing bug reports and trying to hunt down the lines of code that were the cause, and handling questions on the forums. That kind of time is what I still give to the projects I enjoy, want to see propagate, and that I see in need of help. My answering a question on the forum could (I like to think) save a programmer ten minutes of having to interpret a bug report written inexpertly by that user.
I also wrote a port of a game once after seeing that there wasn't one for the GP2X - a handheld open-source video games console. I questioned on a forum whether there was a port, and got told no. I was then encouraged by a handful of people to start porting it myself because they thought I was as good as they were and they'd ported games.
It was probably one of the larger things I've ended up doing and cost many months of time for me. And I got a lot of good feedback, and I know thousands of people used the end product. And I had great fun, and I feel quite proud of it, even though the actual code isn't great. People took it and ported my code because all the hard work was done and they could easily port what I'd written than the original project. But that was about it. You don't get recognition for what you do (and I wasn't expecting any - OS is selfish too, remember?) so you have to enjoy doing it.
I actually get more good feedback, and more enjoyment, out of putting up a couple of game servers out of my own wallet, being admin on them in my own time, and chatting with the regulars. That's a sad state of affairs, but I suppose in a large OS project you do get that kind of thing too - the game project above certainly ended up with a huge compile farm that one guy managed - no doubt they had fun on the IRC channels and felt appreciated.
Not the OP but... fuck off.
If you're driving a ton of machinery at 70 mph within inches of other people you NEED to be sober. It's not optional.
The BAC limits cannot be adjusted to the individual, you have NO way of knowing what effect that BAC will have. As anyone knows, not having eaten, being dehydrated etc. will VASTLY affect the alcohol's effect on anyone. And you can't measure "hunger", and dehydration may not show up on a later (non-road-side) measurement.
Just don't be a fucking idiot.
And phones are dangerous, yes. And should be equally punished. Not letting off people whose BAC is PROVEN to show physical impairment, deterioration in depth perception and WORSE over-confidence in their own abilities, just because something else is more dangerous and more (for some fucking insane reason) socially acceptable.
Do not drink. I smell alcohol on your breath by the side of the road, I'm reporting you, whether it was a ding or a close miss, or whatever. I'm not a cop. I'm not anti-drink (my father has worked for breweries his entire life, I had beer at home available from a very young age). Just anti-stupidity. "I'm okay, it doesn't affect me", said by a moron, is the fucking death-knell of too many lives.
And the US is far from the strictest on this. Not even close.
German driving laws are quite strict all over.
I once had a carful of screaming Germans because I did a U-turn in the middle of an empty road where nothing said you couldn't do that.
They label their roads as "broken road" on street signs if there's a single pothole.
Flashing another driver (admittedly a UK thing, but we use it to say thank you and let people out, officially it's "making other drivers aware of your presence") is something that could see you pulled over - I kinda guessed this so never did it, but the UK does things differently.
Parking for a fraction of a second in a big town where you're not supposed to will get you a fine and they will chase you internationally.
If you break down on a motorway (freeway) because you run out of fuel, you get points on your licence.
German driving laws are tough. But they have some of the best roads and drivers in the world.
The German Autobahns are unrestricted. You can literally go as fast as you want on them (your insurance may blame you in an accident if you're the only one doing over 100mph, but it's not "illegal").
Strict lane control is the saviour. You can be arrested for dawdling in the inner lanes (the "fast" - actually "overtaking" - lanes) unnecessarily. It works well because the old grannies do get too scared to be in anything but the first lane, so they actually stick to it, rather than hog the middle lane as they do in my country (the UK).
I see no problem with a rise in speed limits (and would vastly prefer that to people campaigning to scrap speed cameras etc.), but basic driving etiquette must be enforced. In Germany, I believe it's actually written on the road signs and road markings - this lane below 55, these lane over 55 ONLY.
Enforce that strictly, it becomes much safer.
And thus the communication method that's most efficient should take priority.
I'd rather kids spent times learning how to use the words than how they are drawn. Especially if they are left-handed, clumsy, short-sighted, etc.
My mother stormed up to my school innumerable times to point out this very fact to them.
"He's handwriting is messy"
"But is the answer right?"
"Well, yes, but it's messy."
"But you could read it, and the answer was right?"
"Well, yes..."
At that point the schools tended to change tack, because they were realising the logical problem with their argument. Sure, neat handwriting in Art or Design, I get that. Handwriting neat enough for others to read (but, hell, I just print if that's necessary), I get. But maths teachers fucking about with getting me to join an "a" to another letter in THEIR preferred way rather than the myriad ways that it's possible? Get lost.
Handwriting is dead in the water. It's long-winded, hard-to-teach, a practical skill not an intellectual one, and in the end it matters SO LITTLE in the modern world that it's laughable. Teach how to write, by all means, but spending years perfecting cursive writing? Stuff that. Cut that shit out, and put an extra English, Maths or Science lesson in there instead.
As others point out, all forms say "Please print". You read a hundred times more text on a font than you do in cursive. Even the handwriting you do in school is printed out BY USING A TYPEFACE, teachers do not hand-write it! Even back in my day, photocopied sheets for practice were with typescript letters.
Pissing time away on a dead art is wasteful, especially so in education. I can't remember the last time I had to do more than jot a note on a Post-It by hand. And since the smartphone era, I just use Google Keep apps. Doctors have computerised systems now. Authors have been required to submit typewritten manuscripts for decades.
Sorry, but it was a waste in my day (and I was told off by my teachers for doing so much on computer instead of by hand, and I can't say it's hurt my career at all). It's a waste now. It's going to be a waste in 20 years time, which is where the country noted in this article is in education terms compared to the UK or US.
Communicate. By removing the shit associated with it such that communication is a pure art focusing on the words and their meaning, not how pretty they look.
When your career depends on things working, an "exciting" startup manager (which is what I presume you meant) is the last thing you want.
In fact, you want things to be as un-exciting as possible.
Tell that to LibreOffice.
An interesting article, given that the linked government statistics do not include any comparison of pricing whatsoever and I wasn't able to find any on the "open government" gov.uk either:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...