Now there is an illness that needs a custom disease to wipe out those who take them...
It's called being run over by a car.
The problem isn't selfies per se, it's people who are disconnected from the environment they're in and so pose an obstacle or even threat to people they're sharing that space with. Who the hell cares if someone shares a selfie or a Facebook status update. It's wandering around with no awareness of what's going around you that creates problems for other people.
I have no problem with selfie-sticks per se, but there are plenty of situations where confined spaces and heavy foot traffic make just using your smartphone a nuisance. Just in the last year or so I've noticed a trend of people in the supermarket walking their carts into other people as they text and they don't even notice. I was visiting Manhattan last weekend and I dodged so many young women texting as they walked that I had a flare-up of an old college knee injury that hadn't bothered me in years. If someone wants to take a selfie in Central Park that's one thing, but if just 1-2% of the patrons in a crowded museum corridor try it that's going to be utter chaos.
Here's the thing. The more wealth you have, the less purely financial reason you have not to foul your own nest. Because you can always buy another nest. An oil company doesn't worry that an oil well will run dry in 20 years if it at any point in time before that it'll have made its investment back plus a normal profit. Likewise a developer doesn't worry about turning paradise into a garbage pit in twenty years if he's made a similar return. Capital will simply flow to the next relatively unspoiled place, because capital is efficient -- on its own terms.
That doesn't mean that rich people are necessarily environmental exploiters any more than middle-class people are environmental saints -- which they clearly aren't. But it does mean that long-term impacts aren't a priority for a government which serves business interests more or less exclusively.
To play devil's advocate, it *is* really advantageous for technology developers to have easy physical access and low linguistic barriers with early adopters. So it would unquestionably help the early development of the drone industry if drones were completely unregulated. That doesn't mean they should be unregulated. It just means that regulation has, along with its intended consequences, some undesirable ones as well.
But that's always true. The US food supply is highly regulated when compared to some place like China, which is notorious for food adulteration. It would no doubt be a great benefit to the US food industry if food safety regulations were removed. People will have to eat even if they can't be sure that their food isn't tainted, so if government's sole responsibility is fostering US industry, then Congress should repeal all food safety laws.
So it's quite possible that regulating drones might harm the US drone industry, but that doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't regulate it. We almost certainly should. What doesn't help anyone in the US is taking longer than strictly necessary to come up with a reasonable set of regulations.
We ban so many things these days. Try discussing the idea that racial differences go beyond the cosmetic and see how long you last at your job.
Yeah, and perpetual motion too. See what your perpetual motion invention does for your standing in the physics faculty or your chances of getting an engineering job. It's discrimination -- against crackpots.
Here's the problem with demanding that scientists take your humbug seriously: there's an endless supply of humbug in the world. It's effortless to manufacture bullshit out of thin air, and when that is disposed of it's effortless to make more. But science takes work, and turning scientists into professional humbug debunkers would force them to spend all their time trying to pick sense out of nonsense.
Race had its chance as a scientific concept, but now that we can actually look at people's DNA it's obvious that race is humbug. When you look at the DNA in geographic populations, you see that they are highly genetically permeable. Certain simple traits like dark skin or fair hair may predominate in certain regions, but if you choose other traits like blood clotting proteins you'd get a very different "racial map". It's not so much that you *can't* create some set of three or four "races" by some clusters of randomly selected features, but that any scheme you come up with is just one of any number of equally justifiable divisions.
And here's the kicker: the vast majority of human genetic diversity is found in Africa, so it certainly makes no sense at all to talk about an "African race". It turns out that we're all African; populations outside of Africa are just twigs on a bushy African tree.
I strongly suggest that anyone who is proud of his racial heritage have his DNA analyzed by an independent lab, which costs $99 now. He may find he has a lot more things to be proud of than he imagined. One of my sisters turned out to be part Polynesian, which was a surprise. She's clearly our sister, but she was the only one of us who got dealt that gene when our parents' genomes were shuffled.
If this a 10 year battery with a 5 year precautionary change then who gives a flying rats....
I think that attitude leads to abuse of engineering recommendations.
Physical reality is more complicated than "this battery will work for ten years and then stop". Some batteries lose 50% of their capacity in about three years, but they'll continue to work and be perfectly adequate for some users after five or six years when they've lost 75% of their capacity. Other users might find them unacceptable after two years, even though the manufacturer calls it a "three year battery".
When a battery is marketed as a "ten year battery" what that means is that the vendor thinks that most users will still be satisfied with the degraded performance of the battery after ten years. But the application engineer's judgment trumps the component designer's, because the application engineer knows exactly what he is demanding of the battery. If he says a ten year battery should be changed after five years, that battery is really a five year battery in that specific application.
But suppose the application engineer says, "this battery *should* be good for ten years, but we'd better change it at five," he's making a judgment call based on the likelihood that some people involved with this system might not have done what they are supposed to. Which is why everyone ought to do what they're supposed to. When you say "the maintenance schedule calls for swap-out at five years, but I'll stretch it to seven and it'll be good," you're making the implicit assumption you're the only lazy, greedy, irresponsible person involved in this business, which might not be true.
When everybody does what they're supposed to then the system performs *better* than it has to. That actually turns out to be a valuable property because sometimes you need a system to perform better than you'd anticipated. Like when you can't locate a lost plane's location more precisely than "somewhere in the South China Sea, or possibly in the Andaman Sea".
So not replacing a "ten year battery" at five years when a designer calls for it *is* a big deal. That's overriding the engineer's carefully considered judgment with the seat of your pants and hoping for the best.
Personally, I don't see that any of these things as compelling practical advantages, given that the kids already have dual Swedish and Belgian (and therefore EU) citizenship. If they were Moldovan and South Sudanese, that'd be a different story. Or if they were citizens of a country from which getting a visa to enter the US might be difficult in the future.
But most importantly I think this is one of those decisions that you just don't make primarily on a cost-benefit basis. It's not like deciding to join Costco or subscribe to Hulu. Citizenship entails responsibilities. If you want your kids to shoulder those responsibilities and feel allegiance to the US then it makes sense to get them that citizenship come hell or high water. But given that they already have two perfectly good citizenships from two advanced western democracies with generally positive international relations worldwide, I don't see much practical advantage in adding a third.
Still, I wouldn't presume to give advice, other than this. The poster needs to examine, very carefully, that feeling he has that maybe his kids should be Americans. The way he expresses it, "sentimental reasons", makes those feelings seem pretty trivial, in which case it hardly matters if they don't become Americans. After all, most other Belgians seem to get along perfectly well without being Americans too. But if this is at all something he suspects he might seriously regret not doing, or if it nags him in ways he can't quite put his finger on, he needs to get to the bottom of that in a way random people on the Internet can't help him with.
The ending '-eous' or '-ious' is added to a noun to produce an adjective that means producing whatever that noun is. Something that is 'advantageous' produces advantage for example. Something which is ignominious produce ignominy (shame, embarrassment). Something that is piteous arouses pity in the onlooker.
I think you see where I'm going with this. The word the headline writer should have used is 'nauseated', although making users nauseous in the pedantic sense would certainly be a concern for the developers of any product.
There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.
"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"
"Well," he'd begin.
"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."
You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.
How it was initially deployed is known only to its makers, but Stuxnet was designed to enter an isolated facility on a USB drive. Once on the LAN it would propagate to other computers, and potentially to other networks via an infected laptop, which is how it ended upon the Internet.
You can use your imagination as to how they got the USB into the target facility. It might have been as simple as dropping the USB stick in the parking lot of a vendor, but given the resources needed to create the worm itself you can't rule out some kind of black bag job or human asset.
I really don't see that as a the most vulnerable point. Not by a long shot. Tapping a digital fiber link wouldn't be like US submarines tapping Soviet analog telephone cables. The data on the link can be encrypted and authenticated at either end such that it's not really practical to modify or impersonate without the kind of assets in the organization that would make an inside job a lot simpler.
The real problem is human factors. Air-gapping sensitive systems is a sound idea in principle but in practice it often fails because it's too cumbersome for users who then undermine the system. And Stuxnet showed that it's possible for a sufficiently advanced opponent to target systems of the far side of an air gap.
So the problem is with the notion that separate parallel systems separated from the outside world are a "simple" solution. They're a potential solution, but if you want to have confidence in that solution there's a lot of work analyzing and policing the behavior of the people who use, maintain, and produce the equipment.
Hmmm. While your explanation is unquestionably true, I don't think you quite understood what the poster was asking. His question is, I think, about the sharp shadows behind ridges on the surface, not the shadow of the vehicle itself.
I think his problem is an implicit assumption that if you drew a line from the center of the sun through the spacecraft, it would intersect the surface at a right angle. In that case you wouldn't expect cracks on the surface to display in such relief. However I believe that assumption is faulty, and that the rays of the sun intersect the surface at a considerable angle.
This is not unlike seeing the shadow of a plane you are riding in on the surface of the Earth. Unless you are in the tropics, that shadow won't be directly beneath you. It will be off to one side. It will also be distorted as it is spread out across the non-perpendicular surface, but you won't necessarily notice that because of foreshortening.
I once took over 30,000 lines of code that had been written by a subcontractor and trimmed it to around 4000 LOC. And you better believe it ran faster! Not because refactoring is magic, but because once all the mind-numbing almost-repetition was mucked out you could actually see what the code was doing and notice that a lot of it wasn't really necessary. Ever since then I have always maintained that coders should never ever copy and paste code. I've had people disagree, saying that a little bit of copying and pasting won't hurt, but I say if it's really such a little bit then you shouldn't mind re-typing it. Of course if you do that very soon you start putting more effort into devising ways to stop repeating yourself, which is exactly the point. Repeating yourself should be painful.
That's I think a reliable litmus test for whether you should refactor a piece of software. If it's an area of code that's been receiving a lot of maintenance, and you think you can reduce the size significantly (say by 1/3 or more) without loss of features or generality you should do it. If it's an area of code that's not taking up any maintenance time, or if you're adding speculative features nobody is asked for and the code will get larger or remain the same size, then you should leave it alone. It's almost common sense.
I don't see why anyone would think that refactoring for its own sake would necessarily improve anything. If an automotive engineer on a lark decided to redesign a transmission you wouldn't expect it to get magically better just because he fiddled with it. But if he had a specific and reasonable objective in the redesign that's a different situation. If you have a specific and sensible objective for reorganizing a piece of code, then it's reasonable to consider doing it.
Well, this is the thing about civil disobedience. The classic formula is to keep up awareness of your issue by forcing the government to go through the embarrassing and drawn-out process of prosecuting and punishing you. I'll bet they had to drag Thoreau kicking and screaming out of that Concord jail cell when some joker finally came along and paid his poll tax for him. Holding court for his admirers in the town pokey no doubt suited his purposes nicely.
In that spirit, this announcement is very effective. When was the last headline you read about Edward Snowden? If he comes back for a long and drawn out trial that'll show he's pretty hard core about this civil disobedience thing -- if leaving a cushy, high paying job in Hawaii with his pole-dancing girlfriend to go to fricken' Russia wasn't enough.
It occurs to me, though, that this situation is a lot like what I always say about data management systems: the good ones are easier to replace than the bad ones. Likewise the better governments, the ones with at least some commitment to things like due process, are much easier to face down with civil disobedience than ones where being a political threat gets you a bullet in the head, like Ninoy Aquino or Boris Nemtzov. If Snowden *does* come back, and if he ends up "detained" in limbo somewhere, then it'll be time for everyone to go into the streets and bring the government down.
Everyone likes getting paid. And all things being equal, everyone likes getting paid *more*.
But one thing I've noticed is that the people who are most dissatisfied with their current pay also happen to be the most dissatisfied with their working conditions overall, particularly how they feel treated. The feeling seems to be that if they ought to get more pay to put up with this shit.
Now I wouldn't suggest to any employer, particularly in tech, to economize by offering low salaries. You want to attract and retain the best people you can. But this suggests to me that many employers would do themselves a favor by paying a little more attention to worker happiness. If you're paying people approaching (or even more than) $100,000, there's bound to be a lot more cost effective ways to goose worker morale than handing out raises they'll perceive as significant.
But oddly many employers seem to think paying someone's salary is a license for handing out indignities. This doesn't even qualify as penny wise pound foolish.
What is gasoline if not a liquid? And what is liquid but a fluid? Therefore I should be able to run my car on hot air. So not all fair use is parody, nor is everything an author has to put up with fair use.
Fan fiction falls into that last category. Some authors encourage it, which is gracious; others are paranoid about it, which is understandable. But ultimately no matter how they feel about fan fiction they're going to have to put up with it. A successful work of fiction fires peoples' imaginations, and in the Internet era that means they're going to share their imaginings with like-minded people. Trying to police fan-fiction in a world where anyone can set up a blog or social media account to share it is like spitting into a hurricane force wind.
But even though a successful author pretty much has to put up with fan fiction whether he likes it or not, it's ridiculous to think that any author is somehow obligated to promote it. That just a fan-fiction author's fantasy. Authors have lives too, and there is not enough hours in the day for an author to police the stuff, much less to negotiate business deals for the people who write it. It's considered bad manners to even ask an author for the name of his literary agent, because an agent is supposed to work for an author, which he won't be able to do if he's swamped with requests from wannabes.
Well, it's an open question of who's living in a fantasy world. I'm actually old enough to remember these people. Show me a Republican today who'd be as aggressive as Nixon on regulation. Who would sign the Clean Water Act, or the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or appoint someone like Elliot Richardson the head of HEW. Nixon also took the single most intrusive act of economic intervention ever by an American president (including FDR): the wage-price freeze. It's fair to say that there's nobody in national politics anywhere on the spectrum that would undertake a step like that. For one thing it was hopeless; there is no way to stop incipient runaway inflation without restricting the money supply and reducing government deficit spending so as to induce a temporary contraction of the economy.
That may surprise people here. The Republicans have done a good job painting her as the quintessential ultra-liberal Democrat, but really she is no such thing. She is, in fact, from the right wing of the party and could have been an establishment Republican a generation ago. She is widely reviled by the left over her vote on the Iraq War Authorization of Military Force (although to be fair, Joe Biden voted for it too and he's seen as generally reliable on liberal issues, as long as he doesn't open his mouth).
On the other hand she's the first really plausible female presidential candidate for a major party, and I think a lot of people who want to see that milestone project a great deal of their hopes on her. But what makes her plausible in the first place is her acceptability to the establishment.
And what makes her acceptable to the establishment is her competence and personal accomplishments; being married to Bill helps. But the Ivy League education, experience in high profile NGOs and partnership in a major law firm mean she's seen as serious by "serious people". But in this case that should be held against her here. She's not like old Uncle Joe (Biden), whose heart is in the right place but who the hell can tell where his mind might go a-wandering; Hillary is someone you expect to have her head in the game. She knew damn well that conducting official business on non-government servers is exactly what people do when they're breaking the law.
I'm neither a Hillary partisan nor a Hillary hater. On the political spectrum I tend to fall a little to the right of the most vocal Democratic base and to the left of the establishment "DLC" wing that dominates the party at the national level. When the Secretary of State does something this fishy, that's a big deal. I think there should be something like a special prosecutor appointed, even though when the words "Clinton" and "special prosecutor" are uttered in the sentence the word "circus" can't be far behind. But then if the special prosecutor finds no indictable offense I'd be happy with that result.
Not really. The really one remaining significant difference between the parties is that public shaming is still a career-ender in the Democratic party. There's no post-scandal career phase as an evangelical preacher, Fox news commentator, or both waiting for guys like Anthony Wiener or William J. Jefferson (the freezer cash guy).
Straw man. The poster's point doesn't relate to whether the interference is "significant" by whatever standard law enforcement uses to make that determination. It relates to whether that interference is legal.
The device was approved by the FCC. However the approval process is not in this case transparent. We don't know whether the FCC took into account whether the device's capacity to create interference, or whether they may have played favorites.
One thing we can be certain about is that the FCC didn't worry about Constitutional or laws that protect citizen privacy, and certainly not the use of the devices without a warrant. That's not their bailiwick.
So to summarize the FCC approved this device but we don't know if they did their job. We can be certain they didn't do *more* than their job.
Well... maybe there's some kind of model in which you would actually look forward to seeing your colleagues in person.
Personally, I've done in both ways. When my partner and I sold our business to a company that was on the other side of the country, I no longer had a two hour a day commute, which was awesome. I also didn't have a team I saw in person every day, which I very quickly grew to miss. And I'm not the most sociable person in the world. I'm more than glad to spend a few days or even weeks working by myself. But as weeks stretched into months, with only emails, teleconferencing, and the occasional cross-country flight, I grew to hate telecommuting. It's great to be able to do it even a couple of days a week, but if I had the choice of woking in bathrobe in the spare bedroom ALL the time or spending two hours in the car EVERY day, I'd go with the commute.
If I were starting another company, I think one of my priorities would be to make being there fun, stimulating, and personally rewarding. I'd make it possible to telecommute, but if people began to see it as their primary mode of working I'd consider that a red flag.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there is an illness that needs a custom disease to wipe out those who take them...
It's called being run over by a car.
The problem isn't selfies per se, it's people who are disconnected from the environment they're in and so pose an obstacle or even threat to people they're sharing that space with. Who the hell cares if someone shares a selfie or a Facebook status update. It's wandering around with no awareness of what's going around you that creates problems for other people.
I have no problem with selfie-sticks per se, but there are plenty of situations where confined spaces and heavy foot traffic make just using your smartphone a nuisance. Just in the last year or so I've noticed a trend of people in the supermarket walking their carts into other people as they text and they don't even notice. I was visiting Manhattan last weekend and I dodged so many young women texting as they walked that I had a flare-up of an old college knee injury that hadn't bothered me in years. If someone wants to take a selfie in Central Park that's one thing, but if just 1-2% of the patrons in a crowded museum corridor try it that's going to be utter chaos.
Here's the thing. The more wealth you have, the less purely financial reason you have not to foul your own nest. Because you can always buy another nest. An oil company doesn't worry that an oil well will run dry in 20 years if it at any point in time before that it'll have made its investment back plus a normal profit. Likewise a developer doesn't worry about turning paradise into a garbage pit in twenty years if he's made a similar return. Capital will simply flow to the next relatively unspoiled place, because capital is efficient -- on its own terms.
That doesn't mean that rich people are necessarily environmental exploiters any more than middle-class people are environmental saints -- which they clearly aren't. But it does mean that long-term impacts aren't a priority for a government which serves business interests more or less exclusively.
To play devil's advocate, it *is* really advantageous for technology developers to have easy physical access and low linguistic barriers with early adopters. So it would unquestionably help the early development of the drone industry if drones were completely unregulated. That doesn't mean they should be unregulated. It just means that regulation has, along with its intended consequences, some undesirable ones as well.
But that's always true. The US food supply is highly regulated when compared to some place like China, which is notorious for food adulteration. It would no doubt be a great benefit to the US food industry if food safety regulations were removed. People will have to eat even if they can't be sure that their food isn't tainted, so if government's sole responsibility is fostering US industry, then Congress should repeal all food safety laws.
So it's quite possible that regulating drones might harm the US drone industry, but that doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't regulate it. We almost certainly should. What doesn't help anyone in the US is taking longer than strictly necessary to come up with a reasonable set of regulations.
We ban so many things these days. Try discussing the idea that racial differences go beyond the cosmetic and see how long you last at your job.
Yeah, and perpetual motion too. See what your perpetual motion invention does for your standing in the physics faculty or your chances of getting an engineering job. It's discrimination -- against crackpots.
Here's the problem with demanding that scientists take your humbug seriously: there's an endless supply of humbug in the world. It's effortless to manufacture bullshit out of thin air, and when that is disposed of it's effortless to make more. But science takes work, and turning scientists into professional humbug debunkers would force them to spend all their time trying to pick sense out of nonsense.
Race had its chance as a scientific concept, but now that we can actually look at people's DNA it's obvious that race is humbug. When you look at the DNA in geographic populations, you see that they are highly genetically permeable. Certain simple traits like dark skin or fair hair may predominate in certain regions, but if you choose other traits like blood clotting proteins you'd get a very different "racial map". It's not so much that you *can't* create some set of three or four "races" by some clusters of randomly selected features, but that any scheme you come up with is just one of any number of equally justifiable divisions.
And here's the kicker: the vast majority of human genetic diversity is found in Africa, so it certainly makes no sense at all to talk about an "African race". It turns out that we're all African; populations outside of Africa are just twigs on a bushy African tree.
I strongly suggest that anyone who is proud of his racial heritage have his DNA analyzed by an independent lab, which costs $99 now. He may find he has a lot more things to be proud of than he imagined. One of my sisters turned out to be part Polynesian, which was a surprise. She's clearly our sister, but she was the only one of us who got dealt that gene when our parents' genomes were shuffled.
If this a 10 year battery with a 5 year precautionary change then who gives a flying rats....
I think that attitude leads to abuse of engineering recommendations.
Physical reality is more complicated than "this battery will work for ten years and then stop". Some batteries lose 50% of their capacity in about three years, but they'll continue to work and be perfectly adequate for some users after five or six years when they've lost 75% of their capacity. Other users might find them unacceptable after two years, even though the manufacturer calls it a "three year battery".
When a battery is marketed as a "ten year battery" what that means is that the vendor thinks that most users will still be satisfied with the degraded performance of the battery after ten years. But the application engineer's judgment trumps the component designer's, because the application engineer knows exactly what he is demanding of the battery. If he says a ten year battery should be changed after five years, that battery is really a five year battery in that specific application.
But suppose the application engineer says, "this battery *should* be good for ten years, but we'd better change it at five," he's making a judgment call based on the likelihood that some people involved with this system might not have done what they are supposed to. Which is why everyone ought to do what they're supposed to. When you say "the maintenance schedule calls for swap-out at five years, but I'll stretch it to seven and it'll be good," you're making the implicit assumption you're the only lazy, greedy, irresponsible person involved in this business, which might not be true.
When everybody does what they're supposed to then the system performs *better* than it has to. That actually turns out to be a valuable property because sometimes you need a system to perform better than you'd anticipated. Like when you can't locate a lost plane's location more precisely than "somewhere in the South China Sea, or possibly in the Andaman Sea".
So not replacing a "ten year battery" at five years when a designer calls for it *is* a big deal. That's overriding the engineer's carefully considered judgment with the seat of your pants and hoping for the best.
Personally, I don't see that any of these things as compelling practical advantages, given that the kids already have dual Swedish and Belgian (and therefore EU) citizenship. If they were Moldovan and South Sudanese, that'd be a different story. Or if they were citizens of a country from which getting a visa to enter the US might be difficult in the future.
But most importantly I think this is one of those decisions that you just don't make primarily on a cost-benefit basis. It's not like deciding to join Costco or subscribe to Hulu. Citizenship entails responsibilities. If you want your kids to shoulder those responsibilities and feel allegiance to the US then it makes sense to get them that citizenship come hell or high water. But given that they already have two perfectly good citizenships from two advanced western democracies with generally positive international relations worldwide, I don't see much practical advantage in adding a third.
Still, I wouldn't presume to give advice, other than this. The poster needs to examine, very carefully, that feeling he has that maybe his kids should be Americans. The way he expresses it, "sentimental reasons", makes those feelings seem pretty trivial, in which case it hardly matters if they don't become Americans. After all, most other Belgians seem to get along perfectly well without being Americans too. But if this is at all something he suspects he might seriously regret not doing, or if it nags him in ways he can't quite put his finger on, he needs to get to the bottom of that in a way random people on the Internet can't help him with.
Exactly. My being sanctimonious would make you hypocritically self-righteous.
... with some food for thought.
The ending '-eous' or '-ious' is added to a noun to produce an adjective that means producing whatever that noun is. Something that is 'advantageous' produces advantage for example. Something which is ignominious produce ignominy (shame, embarrassment). Something that is piteous arouses pity in the onlooker.
I think you see where I'm going with this. The word the headline writer should have used is 'nauseated', although making users nauseous in the pedantic sense would certainly be a concern for the developers of any product.
There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.
"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"
"Well," he'd begin.
"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."
You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.
His family has requested that donations be made in his memory to one of the following charities
Everychild Foundation http://everychildfoundation.or...
P.O. Box 1808
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Foundation http://www.copdfoundation.org/
20 F Street NW, Suite 200-A
Washington, D.C. 20001
Beit T’Shuvah Treatment Center http://www.beittshuvah.org/tre...
8831 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Bay-Nimoy Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel of Hollywood http://www.tiohnurseryschool.o...
7300 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046
Source: http://www.startrek.com/articl...
How it was initially deployed is known only to its makers, but Stuxnet was designed to enter an isolated facility on a USB drive. Once on the LAN it would propagate to other computers, and potentially to other networks via an infected laptop, which is how it ended upon the Internet.
You can use your imagination as to how they got the USB into the target facility. It might have been as simple as dropping the USB stick in the parking lot of a vendor, but given the resources needed to create the worm itself you can't rule out some kind of black bag job or human asset.
I really don't see that as a the most vulnerable point. Not by a long shot. Tapping a digital fiber link wouldn't be like US submarines tapping Soviet analog telephone cables. The data on the link can be encrypted and authenticated at either end such that it's not really practical to modify or impersonate without the kind of assets in the organization that would make an inside job a lot simpler.
The real problem is human factors. Air-gapping sensitive systems is a sound idea in principle but in practice it often fails because it's too cumbersome for users who then undermine the system. And Stuxnet showed that it's possible for a sufficiently advanced opponent to target systems of the far side of an air gap.
So the problem is with the notion that separate parallel systems separated from the outside world are a "simple" solution. They're a potential solution, but if you want to have confidence in that solution there's a lot of work analyzing and policing the behavior of the people who use, maintain, and produce the equipment.
Hmmm. While your explanation is unquestionably true, I don't think you quite understood what the poster was asking. His question is, I think, about the sharp shadows behind ridges on the surface, not the shadow of the vehicle itself.
I think his problem is an implicit assumption that if you drew a line from the center of the sun through the spacecraft, it would intersect the surface at a right angle. In that case you wouldn't expect cracks on the surface to display in such relief. However I believe that assumption is faulty, and that the rays of the sun intersect the surface at a considerable angle.
This is not unlike seeing the shadow of a plane you are riding in on the surface of the Earth. Unless you are in the tropics, that shadow won't be directly beneath you. It will be off to one side. It will also be distorted as it is spread out across the non-perpendicular surface, but you won't necessarily notice that because of foreshortening.
I once took over 30,000 lines of code that had been written by a subcontractor and trimmed it to around 4000 LOC. And you better believe it ran faster! Not because refactoring is magic, but because once all the mind-numbing almost-repetition was mucked out you could actually see what the code was doing and notice that a lot of it wasn't really necessary. Ever since then I have always maintained that coders should never ever copy and paste code. I've had people disagree, saying that a little bit of copying and pasting won't hurt, but I say if it's really such a little bit then you shouldn't mind re-typing it. Of course if you do that very soon you start putting more effort into devising ways to stop repeating yourself, which is exactly the point. Repeating yourself should be painful.
That's I think a reliable litmus test for whether you should refactor a piece of software. If it's an area of code that's been receiving a lot of maintenance, and you think you can reduce the size significantly (say by 1/3 or more) without loss of features or generality you should do it. If it's an area of code that's not taking up any maintenance time, or if you're adding speculative features nobody is asked for and the code will get larger or remain the same size, then you should leave it alone. It's almost common sense.
I don't see why anyone would think that refactoring for its own sake would necessarily improve anything. If an automotive engineer on a lark decided to redesign a transmission you wouldn't expect it to get magically better just because he fiddled with it. But if he had a specific and reasonable objective in the redesign that's a different situation. If you have a specific and sensible objective for reorganizing a piece of code, then it's reasonable to consider doing it.
I misread the the article's title as "Douche Telecom Call for Google and Facebook to be Regulated like Tacos." I'd misplaced my computer glasses.
Well, this is the thing about civil disobedience. The classic formula is to keep up awareness of your issue by forcing the government to go through the embarrassing and drawn-out process of prosecuting and punishing you. I'll bet they had to drag Thoreau kicking and screaming out of that Concord jail cell when some joker finally came along and paid his poll tax for him. Holding court for his admirers in the town pokey no doubt suited his purposes nicely.
In that spirit, this announcement is very effective. When was the last headline you read about Edward Snowden? If he comes back for a long and drawn out trial that'll show he's pretty hard core about this civil disobedience thing -- if leaving a cushy, high paying job in Hawaii with his pole-dancing girlfriend to go to fricken' Russia wasn't enough.
It occurs to me, though, that this situation is a lot like what I always say about data management systems: the good ones are easier to replace than the bad ones. Likewise the better governments, the ones with at least some commitment to things like due process, are much easier to face down with civil disobedience than ones where being a political threat gets you a bullet in the head, like Ninoy Aquino or Boris Nemtzov. If Snowden *does* come back, and if he ends up "detained" in limbo somewhere, then it'll be time for everyone to go into the streets and bring the government down.
Everyone likes getting paid. And all things being equal, everyone likes getting paid *more*.
But one thing I've noticed is that the people who are most dissatisfied with their current pay also happen to be the most dissatisfied with their working conditions overall, particularly how they feel treated. The feeling seems to be that if they ought to get more pay to put up with this shit.
Now I wouldn't suggest to any employer, particularly in tech, to economize by offering low salaries. You want to attract and retain the best people you can. But this suggests to me that many employers would do themselves a favor by paying a little more attention to worker happiness. If you're paying people approaching (or even more than) $100,000, there's bound to be a lot more cost effective ways to goose worker morale than handing out raises they'll perceive as significant.
But oddly many employers seem to think paying someone's salary is a license for handing out indignities. This doesn't even qualify as penny wise pound foolish.
What is gasoline if not a liquid? And what is liquid but a fluid? Therefore I should be able to run my car on hot air. So not all fair use is parody, nor is everything an author has to put up with fair use.
Fan fiction falls into that last category. Some authors encourage it, which is gracious; others are paranoid about it, which is understandable. But ultimately no matter how they feel about fan fiction they're going to have to put up with it. A successful work of fiction fires peoples' imaginations, and in the Internet era that means they're going to share their imaginings with like-minded people. Trying to police fan-fiction in a world where anyone can set up a blog or social media account to share it is like spitting into a hurricane force wind.
But even though a successful author pretty much has to put up with fan fiction whether he likes it or not, it's ridiculous to think that any author is somehow obligated to promote it. That just a fan-fiction author's fantasy. Authors have lives too, and there is not enough hours in the day for an author to police the stuff, much less to negotiate business deals for the people who write it. It's considered bad manners to even ask an author for the name of his literary agent, because an agent is supposed to work for an author, which he won't be able to do if he's swamped with requests from wannabes.
Well, it's an open question of who's living in a fantasy world. I'm actually old enough to remember these people. Show me a Republican today who'd be as aggressive as Nixon on regulation. Who would sign the Clean Water Act, or the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or appoint someone like Elliot Richardson the head of HEW. Nixon also took the single most intrusive act of economic intervention ever by an American president (including FDR): the wage-price freeze. It's fair to say that there's nobody in national politics anywhere on the spectrum that would undertake a step like that. For one thing it was hopeless; there is no way to stop incipient runaway inflation without restricting the money supply and reducing government deficit spending so as to induce a temporary contraction of the economy.
A generation ago, Hillary was on the left fringe of the Democratic Party. She has not moved right, the Party has moved left.
A generation ago, Paul Wolfowitz was on the left fringe of the Democratic party. People change.
Nelson Rockefeller was to the left of Hillary. So was Richard Nixon.
That may surprise people here. The Republicans have done a good job painting her as the quintessential ultra-liberal Democrat, but really she is no such thing. She is, in fact, from the right wing of the party and could have been an establishment Republican a generation ago. She is widely reviled by the left over her vote on the Iraq War Authorization of Military Force (although to be fair, Joe Biden voted for it too and he's seen as generally reliable on liberal issues, as long as he doesn't open his mouth).
On the other hand she's the first really plausible female presidential candidate for a major party, and I think a lot of people who want to see that milestone project a great deal of their hopes on her. But what makes her plausible in the first place is her acceptability to the establishment.
And what makes her acceptable to the establishment is her competence and personal accomplishments; being married to Bill helps. But the Ivy League education, experience in high profile NGOs and partnership in a major law firm mean she's seen as serious by "serious people". But in this case that should be held against her here. She's not like old Uncle Joe (Biden), whose heart is in the right place but who the hell can tell where his mind might go a-wandering; Hillary is someone you expect to have her head in the game. She knew damn well that conducting official business on non-government servers is exactly what people do when they're breaking the law.
I'm neither a Hillary partisan nor a Hillary hater. On the political spectrum I tend to fall a little to the right of the most vocal Democratic base and to the left of the establishment "DLC" wing that dominates the party at the national level. When the Secretary of State does something this fishy, that's a big deal. I think there should be something like a special prosecutor appointed, even though when the words "Clinton" and "special prosecutor" are uttered in the sentence the word "circus" can't be far behind. But then if the special prosecutor finds no indictable offense I'd be happy with that result.
Not really. The really one remaining significant difference between the parties is that public shaming is still a career-ender in the Democratic party. There's no post-scandal career phase as an evangelical preacher, Fox news commentator, or both waiting for guys like Anthony Wiener or William J. Jefferson (the freezer cash guy).
Straw man. The poster's point doesn't relate to whether the interference is "significant" by whatever standard law enforcement uses to make that determination. It relates to whether that interference is legal.
The device was approved by the FCC. However the approval process is not in this case transparent. We don't know whether the FCC took into account whether the device's capacity to create interference, or whether they may have played favorites.
One thing we can be certain about is that the FCC didn't worry about Constitutional or laws that protect citizen privacy, and certainly not the use of the devices without a warrant. That's not their bailiwick.
So to summarize the FCC approved this device but we don't know if they did their job. We can be certain they didn't do *more* than their job.
Well... maybe there's some kind of model in which you would actually look forward to seeing your colleagues in person.
Personally, I've done in both ways. When my partner and I sold our business to a company that was on the other side of the country, I no longer had a two hour a day commute, which was awesome. I also didn't have a team I saw in person every day, which I very quickly grew to miss. And I'm not the most sociable person in the world. I'm more than glad to spend a few days or even weeks working by myself. But as weeks stretched into months, with only emails, teleconferencing, and the occasional cross-country flight, I grew to hate telecommuting. It's great to be able to do it even a couple of days a week, but if I had the choice of woking in bathrobe in the spare bedroom ALL the time or spending two hours in the car EVERY day, I'd go with the commute.
If I were starting another company, I think one of my priorities would be to make being there fun, stimulating, and personally rewarding. I'd make it possible to telecommute, but if people began to see it as their primary mode of working I'd consider that a red flag.