Anyone with a solid Computer Science background, extensive programming experience, and access to google can make something that is secure enough that it cannot be cracked in resonable time. It may be sluggish, it may be extremely inefficient, it will require a secure exchange of data at some point (before it is secure itself) and will draw a lot of attention when used. But it is perfectly possible. I certainly could do it.
Oh, of course, I would be infringing on a bunch of patents, but I bet it would be the last of my problems, once my encrypted communications attract the attention of 'the proper authorities'.
I personally don't believe that the NSA can't crack strong encryption.
I'm not quite sure what you are saying. It sounds to me as if you think that there is no encryption strong enough that the NSA cannot crack it. This is completely false.
A simple example is using one time pad encryption. Without the pad, you you cannot even theoretically crack it. Try every possible pad, and you will get every possible message of the proper length - some of them will make perfect sense, so you will not be able to find the right one.
Taking it a bit further, there are encryptions that would take too long to crack, if they are properly executed, and the NSA does not have a backdoor. And by too long, I mean that there is not enough time before the heat death of the Universe.
Hell, I am perfectly sure that I could establish communication with some of my friends from college that could not be cracked, even theoretically. I would have to exchange some information with them in a secure manner before hand, of course. But I would never take the risk of doing something like this. It would attract the wrong kind of attention.
I cannot decide whether you lack comprehension of your own native language, or whether you are deliberately obtuse. Or maybe you believe that North America's civilization, which I do not dispute, means that your property is magically safe because the people around you are a different breed from the ones populating the rest of the world.
Let me recap.
You said: I don't see how that is different from what happens on earth (aside from the space fairy dust). Whoever digs the hole generally owns the minerals extracted.
This is completely incorrect everywhere I have been, and that certainly includes the United States, where I currently work. (BTW, the countries you call 'tiny' include six of the eight largest economies in the world)
In general, oil, gas and minerals in the US belong not to whoever digs the hole, but to whoever owns the land directly above them. That is different from most other countries in the world, where they belong to the State, period. Even in the US, the resource rights can be separated from surface ownership by an explicit deed, and there are provisions according to which land owners can be forced to sell their rights, even if they are already exploiting the resources, or even if the extraction of the resources will detrimentally affect their use of their property.
Familiarize yourself with the laws of your own country! They vary from state to state, but they have a few things in common. The most important thing, of which you are clearly unaware, is that you own fuck all. The deeds, titles, etc. which allow you to use land or resources are granted by the State, and the State can unilaterally break the contract if it deems it necessary. People living on lands needed for malls, people farming above oil deposits, people raising livestock on 'frackable' terrain... those have all learned exactly how much their deeds and titles are worth. Because the US is civilized, they will be reimbursed by their losses... exactly as much as those who matter think that they should be paid.
I explicitly said: the one holding a contract with the entity able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else. Who the hell do you think I was referring to? Who do you think has its monopoly on using violence enshrined in law?
Space will be no different. Resources will belong to whoever has come to an agreement with the entity that can enforce its will (project force, has monopoly on violence, blah blah blah) Right now, there is no entity that can do this in space, which means that if you could extract the resources, you could pretend you own them as long as you stay away from Earth. Once you enter the sphere of influence of various States, things will be different.
I don't see how that is different from what happens on earth (aside from the space fairy dust). Whoever digs the hole generally owns the minerals extracted.
Where are you from? Because I have lived in a dozen countries, on three continents, and the minerals have either belonged to the one being able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else who wants them, or to the one holding a contract an the entity able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else. (Also know as the State. The contract often has a name like deed, title, etc...)
There is no property, and I doubt there has ever been property, without the means to protect it. In the past, and in some shitty places in the present, that means the owner being able to protect it himself. But we, as a society, have decided that it is more efficient (for those who matter) to actually have a mechanism that allows property to be protected by a larger group than the owner.
I doubt space will be any different. When it is in the interest of those who matter, they will get together and come up with a mechanism that will allow people who matter to exploit space resources. By definition, if a group can keep other groups out, that's the only group that matters.
Now, everyone has his own opinion on who matters... I will not bother arguing about that.
Even if everything was the same economically, culturally between the two, you'd expect about six times more police shootings overall.
Yes, you'd expect six times fewer total shootings, if you expect the same shootings per capita. Instead, they have more that 500 times fewer shootings (over the last 18 years) or about 100 times fewer per capita.
I recognize that doesn't make up for the balance, but there are other factors involved.
Yes, there are, and yes, many of the ones you listed are very relevant. But my point was that the examples I was replying to weren't damning at all. The British do a good job at policing, and if they have an easier job of it, isn't it at least possible that it is due to them doing something else also right?
1. The original poster praises the British police, and compares it favorably to ours.
2. The next poster lists four examples of the British police killing people, arguably due to the incompetence of the policemen.
3. I point out that his examples are relevant, but spread over the span of eight years, that the British police has shot exactly zero people to death in 2012 and 2013, and that their police killings are a lot less frequent than ours, per capita.
4. You bring up a friend of a friend who was stabbed to death, and speculate about his afterlife!?
I admit I am having trouble following your chain of thought, but I will attempt to answer you. Lets see...
You are wrong because the crocodile is longer than it's green, being long in both directions but only green on top.
Those are very relevant examples of the British police incompetence resulting in dead citizens. The thing is... there are four of them, and they occurred in a period of twice as many years. Even if you add up all of the fatal British police shootings since 2000, including ones that were 100% justified, in self-defense, and recorded by the ubiquitous cameras, you will still come to about one tenth of the lowest estimate of police shootings in the US for one year.
The Brits can go years without any fatal police shootings, and the total times service weapons are discharged is usually in the dozens per year. For comparison, last year, there were four fatal police shootings in the US county (no 'r') in which I work. Two in the one where I live, plus a possible bloodbath, in the town were I live, which was avoided because some brave policemen decided to disregard procedure, by rushing and disarming a suspect instead of opening fire on him and his friends.
If anything, I have been amazed at the videos in which British cops subdue maniacs who are waving various weapons around. Make a Google search. You will find videos of literally dozens of cops spending a good portions of an hour in ultimately successful attempts not to kill people who in the US would be getting a bellyful of lead within seconds.
I'm not even going to argue whether it's a good thing that these policemen and policewomen are risking their lives to capture those people. I'm not going to say that I would want the cops in my town to act like British cops. But it is a fact that British style policing results in a lot fewer lethal shootings that ours, per capita.
Thanks for answering! I guess we pretty much do the same thing, except that we draw the line between programming skills and CS fundamentals in a slightly different place:-)
OTOH, I've interviewed quite a few people with degrees but only very shallow coding skills (no real understanding of pointers or debugging), and who still didn't have strong fundamentals in computer science.
It's not that I doubt you, but how do you catch that? I am actually asking, not being facetious.
By the time I invite someone for an interview, I have looked at their resume, and I have had them answer a few questions that are supposed to tell me of their CS grounding OR of their command of google and their ability to wade through bullshit.
At the interview, I mostly talk about their projects and give them short task that tell me about their programming tasks. I certainly expect to notice if an applicant isn't comfortable with pointer arithmetics, or has never wondered about character set representation, for example.
But their understanding of CS fundamentals? Sure, I try to see whether they come up with the test answers on their own, or looked them up, but for the rest... Unless you are counting basic algorithms and complexity, you need time to see how well grounded they are. And if they lack the programming skills, I will let someone else investigate their CS credentials.
Of course, a CS graduate who does not know how to program is a worse candidate for a programming job than someone with a few projects under his belt.
But I have to say, I have very little experience with CS graduates who do not know how to program. Every single Course VI (EE&CS) person whom I knew in college had serious programming chops.
No, I never took a programming class (I TA'd two) but it was because I felt I was a hot-shot programmer going in. Every summer I would take a project that would pay in the 15-30K range, and mostly, it would be finished before the first day of classes. Most of my friends had internships, and those were programming jobs. I very much doubt they were learning the basics on the job, either.
Many of my classes (computer vision, distributed computing, etc...) assumed that we had working knowledge of C (maybe C++) They all had final projects that could not be approached, let alone completed without serious programming skills.
As for those who felt that they needed to learn a language, they were classes for that, as well. I am not saying that there aren't people who graduate with a CS degree without having even basic programming skills, but they seem to be the exception to me, not the rule. Hell, every category has its fuckups. But in my experience, it isn't CS graduate without programming experience vs high school graduates with programming experience. It's programmers with or without a college degree. And frankly, for programming jobs, I tend to hire both. I also happen to spend hours explaining some basics to the ones without a CS degree. In the long run, they may become just as good as the ones with a degree, but they sure do not command the same salary. And it is fair: in general, they take more training.
Actually, in August, I had to recommend a book to one of my guys, and answer his questions about it. He had tried to implement a commit/roll back mechanism without any theoretical background, and had made a mess out of it. No big deal. He was smart enough to learn.
I do not know about actors, but as far back as a dozen of years ago, one of my friends from college was composing music for her robot musicians. Look up Christine Southworth, one of the co-founders of Ensemble Robot...... or just google it: https://www.google.com/search?q=emsemble+robot+christine+southworth
Yeah, it's a plug, but it's not for myself, and anyway, it's another nail of that persistent meme that MIT girls are ugly.
This is exactly what's going on. The company I work for had this problem, at one of our warehouses (not AT&T, different provider, probably subletting from someone).
The warehouse manager threatened his local rep with a law suit, they laughed at him. The company lawyer mentioned a class action law suit, they fixed our billing the same month.
When we had to renew, the new contract spelled out that they will bill us for the 'resulting' traffic. It got signed without anyone from my department getting asked, but the funny thing is, months later, they are still billing us the old way i.e. without the overhead.
As for the original poster - check your contract. If you have not agreed to pay for their internal overhead, you will get amazing results if you remind them that they are overcharging thousands of customers, and that they can be on the hook for millions, when a lawyer agrees to take the case for a percentage. If you have agreed to pay for the overhead... I doubt there is much you can do.
By the way, I am an IT director,not a lawyer, so don't go blindly follow my advice, either.
Headline ending with a question mark? Check. Big image that insists on occupying the whole screen! Check. Self-promoting claim of being the first, when there was evidence of something not being quite right with the Standard Model as early as the 90s? (I'm no physicist, but I read it on Slashdot) And finally, there is no new data. They are setting up an experiment, which will not bear fruit for years.
Did viable Space Plankton drift from outer space to the ISS as it was orbiting Earth, and just happened to be DNA-identical to the one that has been living (and maybe evolving) in Earth's seas?
Or was Sea Plankton carried by the wind to the hold of the vehicle carrying these components up from cape Canaveral?
Your idea sound great on first glance, but less so on second.
" If there is no safe escape route, it should not be moving"
This would not work, for the simple reason that there is no way to safely move on most roads, if you assume that everyone else is a malevolent actor, waiting to slam into you as soon as you place yourself in a position from which you cannot avoid him.
We all try not to get into situations where someone else's mistake will doom us. But we assume that most people are sane and will try to avoid accidents. Sometimes, we see that a particular car behaves dangerously, and we start planning our moves with the assumption that this particular actor may create problems. You cannot do that for everyone, or you will be paralyzed.
An automated car will assume that the car driving in the opposite direction on that two lane road will NOT swerve at the precise wrong moment when collision will be unavoidable. And most times, it will be a good assumptions, especially if the other car is also automated, and in good working order.
But some times, the other car will blow a left tire, or the other driver will have a heart attack and lean on the wheel. And an accident will be about to happen.
At this point, the automated car will have to do something. It will have very little time to react - more than a human, maybe, but it will have a lot less information.
I know that the huge object at the corner of my exit is an inflatable truck advertising for the Ford dealership, and that it is sitting on flimsy tubing frame covered with a plastic shroud. My automated car would not know that, and for it, it will be just an immobile object that it has to avoid.
With an automated car, all objects would be of three types - immobile objects, moving objects controlled by an known automated driver, all other moving objects. (It would be nice to have a category "Safe to hit", but there would be one in the foreseeable future, unless it is mandated by law that things get labeled that way)
When a collision is imminent, the car should try to avoid hitting anything. If it cannot, it will have a fail mode, which I bet dollars to donuts will be "Maintain heading and reduce speed". Why? Because that is the safest setting in many situations, because it is what you want everyone else to do, and because it is easy to mandate it by law. Car manufacturers and insurance companies will both want it, and guess what? They are the one who will be able to afford politicians, not the navel gazing ignoramuses like the author of the damn article.
First of all, your arms mobility is already quite restricted, even by a simple breastplate. Vertical ridges and bulges in the middle of your chest or belly do not additionally hinder your mobility all that much.
Second, all armor is a compromise between protection and mobility, so some loss of mobility is acceptable. Bulges in the right places can deflect blows away from vital areas. Ridges make the armor stronger, and better able to distribute impact. This is the theory, and practice seems to confirm it.
And third, try google. You will see tons of pictures of historical armor, and you will notice that vertical ridges from neck to groin are common in all periods, and that a bulge over the plackart is often seen in late period armor. And before you claim that it's for the wearer's beer gut, remember, the plackart goes over another armor layer, one that does not have the bulge. It is for deflection.
The few comics I read are mostly Humanoid/Vertigo, so I'm not familiar with the original armor... But if it is any less practical than the armor displayed on that screen, it must consist of a funnel channeling all blows to the heart of the wearer.
Lets see.
Openings between the helmet and the shoulder pads, to divert blows to the neck. That gorgeous hair must flow!
Pauldrons coming short of protecting the shoulders. Can't hide too much skin!
Armpits completely exposed. Those curves must be seen!
Boob mounds channeling blows towards the center of the chest. What's the point of having a female character if you're not going to draw boobs?!
The stomach is completely exposed. Even the cloth has a belly window, to make sure that no attacker has any doubts about the entrails being vulnerable.
Frankly, it is sickening that anyone would call this travesty practical... Female armor should looks like male armor, with slightly different proportions, to account for different shoulder/hip/chest ratios. Once the padding is on, most of the differences are smoothed over.
Expensive and late period armor that can afford the added weigh would have a single bulge on the chest - to divert the blows, not two to channel them where they would do the most harm.
This is not the first time the United States does something similar, i.e. has the authorities in country A apprehend someone who is not accused of anything there, expel him from A without notifying the country of origin, and 'somehow' have US officials waiting to arrest the 'expelled' individual on 'international' ground.
US lawyers have consistently explained that this is somehow very different from illegal extradition/kidnapping which is explicitly condemned by the UN. It only looks the same. And I very much doubt the States are the only ones doing it. The Brits and Russians have done the same.
Is it a travesty of justice? Meh, I'm not a lawyer. Is it an example of the strong getting what they want? Hell, yeah!
The only thing that makes this interesting is that the Russians will raise a more stench than usual, because the arrested individual is more than just a 'paysan'.
I am not buying the universal solvent theory, because even accounting for the salts in the water, it would take hundreds of years for most plastics to dissolve.
The bacteria theory is more likely, because I remember reading something about bacteria living in trash dumps, and supposedly breaking down plastic. I do not remember a followup, but it's still more likely than the above. The problem is, this does not necessarily result in harmless components being the end result.
Here's another theory that I consider more likely: algae and barnacles attach themselves to plastic objects, and eventually sink them out of sight. Not as perfectly conductive to happily singing "La-la-la" and dismissing all worries, but hey, if you wish, you can just come up with more comforting theories, like "Magical pink narwhals are spearing the floating plastic, and melting it in underwater volcanoes to build underwater cooling systems to fight global warming".
My salary is below 150K. We're an aftermarket automotive manufacturer, and times have been better.
Last year, I declared 170K from programing projects.
I billed anywhere from $110 to $350 per hour for side projects, and I prefer negotiating for payment upon completion rather than having to give an estimate, and charging per the hour. Many customers prefer it this way, are ready to just pay 5-10K to get something done, and do not really care how long it takes me, as long as I'm done before they need the results This is especially true for companies who are forced to migrate from one application to another, and who do not want to pay a new service provider to transfer old data to the new system, but still want to be able to access it.
It takes a fraction of a weekend to write a program to pull the data from a ADP payroll database, a Kronos timekeeper system, a Business Works Accounts Payable module, a Solomon Ledger, etc... transfer it to MariaDB and throw together a few reports that can answer 99% of the client questions about their past history.
Service providers easily charge 50k+ for stuff like this. Big companies pay without a second thought, but privately owned shops balk. And people in the same industrial parks talk to each other... to the point that I simply do not have the time to take all the lucrative projects that come my way. (Or the inclination, really. Computer vision and game AI is what really gets my attention nowadays.)
I got excited about computers when I saw a computer with BASIC in a chain store in the early 80's. Must have been a Vic20.
I took an 'Informatics' High School curriculum, got an M.Eng. in Computer Science, and started as 'The Computer guy' in a small, privately owned manufacturing company. Now the company has four plants, 50 warehouses, 600 PCs, and my card says CTO. I still do some programming on the job, but it's probably less than 5 hours per week.
But in my spare time, I take on real programming projects. My last three were a IDE interface for company that uses hardware that is WAY too old, a computer vision search tool, and a video game AI module. I earn more outside of my day job, and have to refuse projects... but of course the day job comes with security and health insurance.
But, yeah, mileage varies. There is nothing I would rather do to earn money than write code for applications where a small memory footprint and execution speed are the first priority. This has not changed since 1988, except that since then I've decided that maybe I can afford to use C as opposed to assembly. And, yeah, I have written AI routines for two games released in 2013 in plain old C, because pointy headed bastards think that AI does not deserve ANY resources...
No, because I drive a 1990 Toyota Supra, and a 2004 Volvo S60-R, and the electronics on both are quite fine, thank you very much. I sold my previous 1990 Supra in 2010, because a cop read ended me while I was fully stopped, and twisted the frame like a pretzel, but before the crash, the electronics were just fine.
Crap has always been crap, and quality cars have always been quality cars. Take your own advice, and do pop a panel. The quality is very different between a Volvo S60-R and my neighbor's Ford Mustang (I helped her change a brake light) I can vouch for that, even though they were both made in the mid-2000s.
I own a Volvo S60-R made in Sweden, in 2004. Before we got married, my wife bought a Volvo S40-1.9T which was made in the US, in 2001.
Apart from regular maintenance, and consumables like tires and oil, the S60 has needed its turn signal stick replaced and its CD player repaired. True, I have replaced the original clutch, turbo and downpipe, and I have added a second intercooler, but this was done to increase performance in 2005-2006. Since then, the car has been rock solid.
The S40 had the shocks, the engine mounts, the catalytic converter and more replaced since 2009. A headlight fell off, the exhaust burned through. At some point, my wife got a new car, so I stopped throwing money at the damn thing. We still keep it, because she does not drive stick, and likes to have a car when the Audi is in the shop. The AC has its own mind, the stereo is busted, the transmission computer is on the blink, and it leaks a bit of oil. Its MPG is comparable to that of the 460hp S60.
I am not saying that this is anything more than anecdotal evidence, and that all Sweden made Volvos stack as well against all US made ones. But I would not be even a little bit surprised if the China made ones differ from the Swedish ones just as much.
You'd think so, but I remember that in the early 90s, the Bulgarian Air Force School in Dolna Mitropolia was still flying them.
Considering how great the country has been doing since, I doubt they have been replaced... and considering how long they have already lasted, I doubt they are no longer being maintained.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone with a solid Computer Science background, extensive programming experience, and access to google can make something that is secure enough that it cannot be cracked in resonable time. It may be sluggish, it may be extremely inefficient, it will require a secure exchange of data at some point (before it is secure itself) and will draw a lot of attention when used. But it is perfectly possible. I certainly could do it.
Oh, of course, I would be infringing on a bunch of patents, but I bet it would be the last of my problems, once my encrypted communications attract the attention of 'the proper authorities'.
I personally don't believe that the NSA can't crack strong encryption.
I'm not quite sure what you are saying. It sounds to me as if you think that there is no encryption strong enough that the NSA cannot crack it. This is completely false.
A simple example is using one time pad encryption. Without the pad, you you cannot even theoretically crack it. Try every possible pad, and you will get every possible message of the proper length - some of them will make perfect sense, so you will not be able to find the right one.
Taking it a bit further, there are encryptions that would take too long to crack, if they are properly executed, and the NSA does not have a backdoor. And by too long, I mean that there is not enough time before the heat death of the Universe.
Hell, I am perfectly sure that I could establish communication with some of my friends from college that could not be cracked, even theoretically. I would have to exchange some information with them in a secure manner before hand, of course. But I would never take the risk of doing something like this. It would attract the wrong kind of attention.
I cannot decide whether you lack comprehension of your own native language, or whether you are deliberately obtuse. Or maybe you believe that North America's civilization, which I do not dispute, means that your property is magically safe because the people around you are a different breed from the ones populating the rest of the world.
Let me recap.
You said: I don't see how that is different from what happens on earth (aside from the space fairy dust). Whoever digs the hole generally owns the minerals extracted.
This is completely incorrect everywhere I have been, and that certainly includes the United States, where I currently work. (BTW, the countries you call 'tiny' include six of the eight largest economies in the world)
In general, oil, gas and minerals in the US belong not to whoever digs the hole, but to whoever owns the land directly above them. That is different from most other countries in the world, where they belong to the State, period. Even in the US, the resource rights can be separated from surface ownership by an explicit deed, and there are provisions according to which land owners can be forced to sell their rights, even if they are already exploiting the resources, or even if the extraction of the resources will detrimentally affect their use of their property.
Familiarize yourself with the laws of your own country! They vary from state to state, but they have a few things in common. The most important thing, of which you are clearly unaware, is that you own fuck all. The deeds, titles, etc. which allow you to use land or resources are granted by the State, and the State can unilaterally break the contract if it deems it necessary. People living on lands needed for malls, people farming above oil deposits, people raising livestock on 'frackable' terrain... those have all learned exactly how much their deeds and titles are worth. Because the US is civilized, they will be reimbursed by their losses... exactly as much as those who matter think that they should be paid.
I explicitly said: the one holding a contract with the entity able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else. Who the hell do you think I was referring to? Who do you think has its monopoly on using violence enshrined in law?
Space will be no different. Resources will belong to whoever has come to an agreement with the entity that can enforce its will (project force, has monopoly on violence, blah blah blah) Right now, there is no entity that can do this in space, which means that if you could extract the resources, you could pretend you own them as long as you stay away from Earth. Once you enter the sphere of influence of various States, things will be different.
I don't see how that is different from what happens on earth (aside from the space fairy dust). Whoever digs the hole generally owns the minerals extracted.
Where are you from? Because I have lived in a dozen countries, on three continents, and the minerals have either belonged to the one being able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else who wants them, or to the one holding a contract an the entity able to use violence to overwhelm anyone else. (Also know as the State. The contract often has a name like deed, title, etc...)
There is no property, and I doubt there has ever been property, without the means to protect it. In the past, and in some shitty places in the present, that means the owner being able to protect it himself. But we, as a society, have decided that it is more efficient (for those who matter) to actually have a mechanism that allows property to be protected by a larger group than the owner.
I doubt space will be any different. When it is in the interest of those who matter, they will get together and come up with a mechanism that will allow people who matter to exploit space resources. By definition, if a group can keep other groups out, that's the only group that matters.
Now, everyone has his own opinion on who matters... I will not bother arguing about that.
Even if everything was the same economically, culturally between the two, you'd expect about six times more police shootings overall.
Yes, you'd expect six times fewer total shootings, if you expect the same shootings per capita. Instead, they have more that 500 times fewer shootings (over the last 18 years) or about 100 times fewer per capita.
I recognize that doesn't make up for the balance, but there are other factors involved.
Yes, there are, and yes, many of the ones you listed are very relevant. But my point was that the examples I was replying to weren't damning at all. The British do a good job at policing, and if they have an easier job of it, isn't it at least possible that it is due to them doing something else also right?
I must be missing something.
1. The original poster praises the British police, and compares it favorably to ours.
2. The next poster lists four examples of the British police killing people, arguably due to the incompetence of the policemen.
3. I point out that his examples are relevant, but spread over the span of eight years, that the British police has shot exactly zero people to death in 2012 and 2013, and that their police killings are a lot less frequent than ours, per capita.
4. You bring up a friend of a friend who was stabbed to death, and speculate about his afterlife!?
I admit I am having trouble following your chain of thought, but I will attempt to answer you. Lets see...
You are wrong because the crocodile is longer than it's green, being long in both directions but only green on top.
Those are very relevant examples of the British police incompetence resulting in dead citizens. The thing is... there are four of them, and they occurred in a period of twice as many years. Even if you add up all of the fatal British police shootings since 2000, including ones that were 100% justified, in self-defense, and recorded by the ubiquitous cameras, you will still come to about one tenth of the lowest estimate of police shootings in the US for one year.
The Brits can go years without any fatal police shootings, and the total times service weapons are discharged is usually in the dozens per year. For comparison, last year, there were four fatal police shootings in the US county (no 'r') in which I work. Two in the one where I live, plus a possible bloodbath, in the town were I live, which was avoided because some brave policemen decided to disregard procedure, by rushing and disarming a suspect instead of opening fire on him and his friends.
If anything, I have been amazed at the videos in which British cops subdue maniacs who are waving various weapons around. Make a Google search. You will find videos of literally dozens of cops spending a good portions of an hour in ultimately successful attempts not to kill people who in the US would be getting a bellyful of lead within seconds.
I'm not even going to argue whether it's a good thing that these policemen and policewomen are risking their lives to capture those people. I'm not going to say that I would want the cops in my town to act like British cops. But it is a fact that British style policing results in a lot fewer lethal shootings that ours, per capita.
Thanks for answering! I guess we pretty much do the same thing, except that we draw the line between programming skills and CS fundamentals in a slightly different place :-)
OTOH, I've interviewed quite a few people with degrees but only very shallow coding skills (no real understanding of pointers or debugging), and who still didn't have strong fundamentals in computer science.
It's not that I doubt you, but how do you catch that? I am actually asking, not being facetious.
By the time I invite someone for an interview, I have looked at their resume, and I have had them answer a few questions that are supposed to tell me of their CS grounding OR of their command of google and their ability to wade through bullshit.
At the interview, I mostly talk about their projects and give them short task that tell me about their programming tasks. I certainly expect to notice if an applicant isn't comfortable with pointer arithmetics, or has never wondered about character set representation, for example.
But their understanding of CS fundamentals? Sure, I try to see whether they come up with the test answers on their own, or looked them up, but for the rest... Unless you are counting basic algorithms and complexity, you need time to see how well grounded they are. And if they lack the programming skills, I will let someone else investigate their CS credentials.
Of course, a CS graduate who does not know how to program is a worse candidate for a programming job than someone with a few projects under his belt.
But I have to say, I have very little experience with CS graduates who do not know how to program. Every single Course VI (EE&CS) person whom I knew in college had serious programming chops.
No, I never took a programming class (I TA'd two) but it was because I felt I was a hot-shot programmer going in. Every summer I would take a project that would pay in the 15-30K range, and mostly, it would be finished before the first day of classes. Most of my friends had internships, and those were programming jobs. I very much doubt they were learning the basics on the job, either.
Many of my classes (computer vision, distributed computing, etc...) assumed that we had working knowledge of C (maybe C++) They all had final projects that could not be approached, let alone completed without serious programming skills.
As for those who felt that they needed to learn a language, they were classes for that, as well. I am not saying that there aren't people who graduate with a CS degree without having even basic programming skills, but they seem to be the exception to me, not the rule. Hell, every category has its fuckups. But in my experience, it isn't CS graduate without programming experience vs high school graduates with programming experience. It's programmers with or without a college degree. And frankly, for programming jobs, I tend to hire both. I also happen to spend hours explaining some basics to the ones without a CS degree. In the long run, they may become just as good as the ones with a degree, but they sure do not command the same salary. And it is fair: in general, they take more training.
Actually, in August, I had to recommend a book to one of my guys, and answer his questions about it. He had tried to implement a commit/roll back mechanism without any theoretical background, and had made a mess out of it. No big deal. He was smart enough to learn.
I do not know about actors, but as far back as a dozen of years ago, one of my friends from college was composing music for her robot musicians. Look up Christine Southworth, one of the co-founders of Ensemble Robot... ... or just google it: https://www.google.com/search?q=emsemble+robot+christine+southworth
Yeah, it's a plug, but it's not for myself, and anyway, it's another nail of that persistent meme that MIT girls are ugly.
This is exactly what's going on. The company I work for had this problem, at one of our warehouses (not AT&T, different provider, probably subletting from someone).
The warehouse manager threatened his local rep with a law suit, they laughed at him. The company lawyer mentioned a class action law suit, they fixed our billing the same month.
When we had to renew, the new contract spelled out that they will bill us for the 'resulting' traffic. It got signed without anyone from my department getting asked, but the funny thing is, months later, they are still billing us the old way i.e. without the overhead.
As for the original poster - check your contract. If you have not agreed to pay for their internal overhead, you will get amazing results if you remind them that they are overcharging thousands of customers, and that they can be on the hook for millions, when a lawyer agrees to take the case for a percentage. If you have agreed to pay for the overhead... I doubt there is much you can do.
By the way, I am an IT director ,not a lawyer, so don't go blindly follow my advice, either.
You are kidding, I hope.
Unless you are running an e-mail server on your own home network, of course it counts against your data cap.
The file is encoded, transmitted to an e-mail server somewhere else, and stored there until your e-mail client retrieves it.
A 10M file can easily count as 60M against your cap, depending on the encoding your client uses. x3 for the encoding, and x2 for the transmission.
I certainly hate this post.
Headline ending with a question mark? Check.
Big image that insists on occupying the whole screen! Check.
Self-promoting claim of being the first, when there was evidence of something not being quite right with the Standard Model as early as the 90s? (I'm no physicist, but I read it on Slashdot)
And finally, there is no new data. They are setting up an experiment, which will not bear fruit for years.
Let see.
Did viable Space Plankton drift from outer space to the ISS as it was orbiting Earth, and just happened to be DNA-identical to the one that has been living (and maybe evolving) in Earth's seas?
Or was Sea Plankton carried by the wind to the hold of the vehicle carrying these components up from cape Canaveral?
Oh, my... so hard to decide which is more likely.
Your idea sound great on first glance, but less so on second.
" If there is no safe escape route, it should not be moving"
This would not work, for the simple reason that there is no way to safely move on most roads, if you assume that everyone else is a malevolent actor, waiting to slam into you as soon as you place yourself in a position from which you cannot avoid him.
We all try not to get into situations where someone else's mistake will doom us. But we assume that most people are sane and will try to avoid accidents. Sometimes, we see that a particular car behaves dangerously, and we start planning our moves with the assumption that this particular actor may create problems. You cannot do that for everyone, or you will be paralyzed.
An automated car will assume that the car driving in the opposite direction on that two lane road will NOT swerve at the precise wrong moment when collision will be unavoidable. And most times, it will be a good assumptions, especially if the other car is also automated, and in good working order.
But some times, the other car will blow a left tire, or the other driver will have a heart attack and lean on the wheel. And an accident will be about to happen.
At this point, the automated car will have to do something. It will have very little time to react - more than a human, maybe, but it will have a lot less information.
I know that the huge object at the corner of my exit is an inflatable truck advertising for the Ford dealership, and that it is sitting on flimsy tubing frame covered with a plastic shroud. My automated car would not know that, and for it, it will be just an immobile object that it has to avoid.
With an automated car, all objects would be of three types - immobile objects, moving objects controlled by an known automated driver, all other moving objects. (It would be nice to have a category "Safe to hit", but there would be one in the foreseeable future, unless it is mandated by law that things get labeled that way)
When a collision is imminent, the car should try to avoid hitting anything. If it cannot, it will have a fail mode, which I bet dollars to donuts will be "Maintain heading and reduce speed". Why? Because that is the safest setting in many situations, because it is what you want everyone else to do, and because it is easy to mandate it by law. Car manufacturers and insurance companies will both want it, and guess what? They are the one who will be able to afford politicians, not the navel gazing ignoramuses like the author of the damn article.
Not quite true.
First of all, your arms mobility is already quite restricted, even by a simple breastplate. Vertical ridges and bulges in the middle of your chest or belly do not additionally hinder your mobility all that much.
Second, all armor is a compromise between protection and mobility, so some loss of mobility is acceptable. Bulges in the right places can deflect blows away from vital areas. Ridges make the armor stronger, and better able to distribute impact. This is the theory, and practice seems to confirm it.
And third, try google. You will see tons of pictures of historical armor, and you will notice that vertical ridges from neck to groin are common in all periods, and that a bulge over the plackart is often seen in late period armor. And before you claim that it's for the wearer's beer gut, remember, the plackart goes over another armor layer, one that does not have the bulge. It is for deflection.
The few comics I read are mostly Humanoid/Vertigo, so I'm not familiar with the original armor... But if it is any less practical than the armor displayed on that screen, it must consist of a funnel channeling all blows to the heart of the wearer.
Lets see.
Openings between the helmet and the shoulder pads, to divert blows to the neck. That gorgeous hair must flow!
Pauldrons coming short of protecting the shoulders. Can't hide too much skin!
Armpits completely exposed. Those curves must be seen!
Boob mounds channeling blows towards the center of the chest. What's the point of having a female character if you're not going to draw boobs?!
The stomach is completely exposed. Even the cloth has a belly window, to make sure that no attacker has any doubts about the entrails being vulnerable.
Frankly, it is sickening that anyone would call this travesty practical... Female armor should looks like male armor, with slightly different proportions, to account for different shoulder/hip/chest ratios. Once the padding is on, most of the differences are smoothed over.
Expensive and late period armor that can afford the added weigh would have a single bulge on the chest - to divert the blows, not two to channel them where they would do the most harm.
This is not the first time the United States does something similar, i.e. has the authorities in country A apprehend someone who is not accused of anything there, expel him from A without notifying the country of origin, and 'somehow' have US officials waiting to arrest the 'expelled' individual on 'international' ground.
US lawyers have consistently explained that this is somehow very different from illegal extradition/kidnapping which is explicitly condemned by the UN. It only looks the same. And I very much doubt the States are the only ones doing it. The Brits and Russians have done the same.
Is it a travesty of justice? Meh, I'm not a lawyer. Is it an example of the strong getting what they want? Hell, yeah!
The only thing that makes this interesting is that the Russians will raise a more stench than usual, because the arrested individual is more than just a 'paysan'.
I am not buying the universal solvent theory, because even accounting for the salts in the water, it would take hundreds of years for most plastics to dissolve.
The bacteria theory is more likely, because I remember reading something about bacteria living in trash dumps, and supposedly breaking down plastic. I do not remember a followup, but it's still more likely than the above. The problem is, this does not necessarily result in harmless components being the end result.
Here's another theory that I consider more likely: algae and barnacles attach themselves to plastic objects, and eventually sink them out of sight. Not as perfectly conductive to happily singing "La-la-la" and dismissing all worries, but hey, if you wish, you can just come up with more comforting theories, like "Magical pink narwhals are spearing the floating plastic, and melting it in underwater volcanoes to build underwater cooling systems to fight global warming".
My salary is below 150K. We're an aftermarket automotive manufacturer, and times have been better.
Last year, I declared 170K from programing projects.
I billed anywhere from $110 to $350 per hour for side projects, and I prefer negotiating for payment upon completion rather than having to give an estimate, and charging per the hour. Many customers prefer it this way, are ready to just pay 5-10K to get something done, and do not really care how long it takes me, as long as I'm done before they need the results This is especially true for companies who are forced to migrate from one application to another, and who do not want to pay a new service provider to transfer old data to the new system, but still want to be able to access it.
It takes a fraction of a weekend to write a program to pull the data from a ADP payroll database, a Kronos timekeeper system, a Business Works Accounts Payable module, a Solomon Ledger, etc... transfer it to MariaDB and throw together a few reports that can answer 99% of the client questions about their past history.
Service providers easily charge 50k+ for stuff like this. Big companies pay without a second thought, but privately owned shops balk. And people in the same industrial parks talk to each other... to the point that I simply do not have the time to take all the lucrative projects that come my way. (Or the inclination, really. Computer vision and game AI is what really gets my attention nowadays.)
I got excited about computers when I saw a computer with BASIC in a chain store in the early 80's. Must have been a Vic20.
I took an 'Informatics' High School curriculum, got an M.Eng. in Computer Science, and started as 'The Computer guy' in a small, privately owned manufacturing company. Now the company has four plants, 50 warehouses, 600 PCs, and my card says CTO. I still do some programming on the job, but it's probably less than 5 hours per week.
But in my spare time, I take on real programming projects. My last three were a IDE interface for company that uses hardware that is WAY too old, a computer vision search tool, and a video game AI module. I earn more outside of my day job, and have to refuse projects... but of course the day job comes with security and health insurance.
But, yeah, mileage varies. There is nothing I would rather do to earn money than write code for applications where a small memory footprint and execution speed are the first priority. This has not changed since 1988, except that since then I've decided that maybe I can afford to use C as opposed to assembly. And, yeah, I have written AI routines for two games released in 2013 in plain old C, because pointy headed bastards think that AI does not deserve ANY resources...
No, because I drive a 1990 Toyota Supra, and a 2004 Volvo S60-R, and the electronics on both are quite fine, thank you very much. I sold my previous 1990 Supra in 2010, because a cop read ended me while I was fully stopped, and twisted the frame like a pretzel, but before the crash, the electronics were just fine.
Crap has always been crap, and quality cars have always been quality cars. Take your own advice, and do pop a panel. The quality is very different between a Volvo S60-R and my neighbor's Ford Mustang (I helped her change a brake light) I can vouch for that, even though they were both made in the mid-2000s.
I own a Volvo S60-R made in Sweden, in 2004. Before we got married, my wife bought a Volvo S40-1.9T which was made in the US, in 2001.
Apart from regular maintenance, and consumables like tires and oil, the S60 has needed its turn signal stick replaced and its CD player repaired. True, I have replaced the original clutch, turbo and downpipe, and I have added a second intercooler, but this was done to increase performance in 2005-2006. Since then, the car has been rock solid.
The S40 had the shocks, the engine mounts, the catalytic converter and more replaced since 2009. A headlight fell off, the exhaust burned through. At some point, my wife got a new car, so I stopped throwing money at the damn thing. We still keep it, because she does not drive stick, and likes to have a car when the Audi is in the shop. The AC has its own mind, the stereo is busted, the transmission computer is on the blink, and it leaks a bit of oil. Its MPG is comparable to that of the 460hp S60.
I am not saying that this is anything more than anecdotal evidence, and that all Sweden made Volvos stack as well against all US made ones. But I would not be even a little bit surprised if the China made ones differ from the Swedish ones just as much.
You'd think so, but I remember that in the early 90s, the Bulgarian Air Force School in Dolna Mitropolia was still flying them.
Considering how great the country has been doing since, I doubt they have been replaced... and considering how long they have already lasted, I doubt they are no longer being maintained.