If your product still runs adequately with : - less RAM (cheaper!) - a slower processor (cheaper!)
Then you go ahead and make the change to: - increase profit margins - keep up with your competitors so they don't price you out of the market.
Pretty clear-cut business case. In their case, they went out of their way to provide the original model again, pretty much just for hackers. They could've just dropped the old version, y'know.
Now I have no problem organize a list of people, to whom I grant the power of grey skull to be given my mobile phone's location. Quite frankly, I think that's a great idea in general. But it won't be my government. It'll be my parents, my children, my wife, a few crazy-close friends, my business partners, and perhaps a really good neighbour. Oh, and my doctor and my lawyer. In other words, people who already have a key to my home, a code to my alarm, power of attorney, or some equivalent level of trust that far over-shadow my location as a point of privacy.
I know! Lets ask some commonly-trusted community representative to act on behalf of all these people that could be concerned about your whereabouts. Some group that has a reasonable idea of law and procedure for these kind of things, and could be held accountable to some degree if they try and abuse said trust...... then anyone - anyone, not just those on your list - genuinely concerned for your whereabouts, could contact these representatives for help and make their case for further assistance. The telcos - having dealt with said representatives semi-regularly - would already have a relatively trusting arrangement with them, knowing already that they wouldn't generally ask if it wasn't generally necessary, with the overall setup saving time and hassles when someone has a legitimate concern for your safety.
Note then that this setup doesn't require any action or upkeep from you, in case you forget to keep your list of friends/doctors/lawyers/neighbors/good samaritians in sync with the telcos list.
Oh, I don't know, you'd probably be able to get away by the fact you were directly provoked and you provided an immediate response.
As a copper said to me once when discussing this area of the law in Australia :
"If someone comes up to you and says deliberate,provoking,fighting words to you about your missus, then he can't come crying to us when he gets beaten up. But if you let it slide, then get steamed up about it 10 minutes later go back and punch him out, then you've got a problem."
So, if a person in the next car seriously provokes you with a laser pointer - being unable to see while driving is a pretty serious provocation - then immediately getting out and causing some mayhem to the provoking person is something the law will overlook. There are limits, of course - if you shot him, or put them into a coma, well, you're likely to be asked to explain your actions. But if you give the little shit a black eye and they complain to the law about it, well they've an uphill battle to make anything stick.
If somebody can check email or write a TPS report or take a nap seated in a train instead of at a desk in a building, what time is being wasted?
Er, the time you spent away from work, doing non-work-related things?
Perhaps the GP was trying to imply that work isn't (or shouldn't be) everything. If a big hunk of your daily waking life is working, or getting ready for work, or travelling to and from work..... perhaps it's time to stop and smell the roses. If you've got some specific goal that means you work like a maniac for a few years, fine, but don't let work consume your life. It has a habit of slowly expanding to fill all your time - even more so these days with instant comms wherever you go.
Hey, look at me, I'm turning into a preachy hippy as I get older!:-p
Hmmm, I would have thought that space is cold enough - what with the background temp a few degrees above absolute zero - that a suitably large enough heatsink shaded from the sun and exposed to space would make a nice cold plate for the back of a well-insulated freezer. Yes, yes, the heat transfer out to space due to radiative effects is low, but add a reasonable amount of thermal mass to the heatsink and you'd have a respectable buffer for cooling warm things down when they're first put in.
Of course, the numbers for "suitably large heatsink" and "reasonable amount of thermal mass" might make it impractical though....
I have to wonder if simply putting dirty clothes outside for a few hours would do the trick.
Vacuum of space to boil off any volatile (read: stinky) chemicals, a dose of UV to break some of the more resilient compounds down....surely it'd help.
The US should have gone with DVB-T(and S/C variants), with its international and widely-supported set of associated standards (and yes, well known and recognised patents in various countries).
But no, they had to be Different and Special. Cooking up their own, home grown standard to use, incompatible with just about all of the rest of the world, leaving themselves wide open to crap like this.
"Alzheimer's" is the generally correct usage, given that it's a common enough malady to be able to leave out its companion word "disease" - the part which requires the posessive apostrophe to be used. That is, it's a disease first noticed as a separate malady by a Dr. Alzheimer and thus its "his" disease.
Ditto for "car's key" - although an odd phrase to my ears, it is grammatically correct. A car typically only requires one key, so the phrase "my car's key" works, just like "my cat's collar" does.
How long do you think the life of an average cargo ship is?
$725,000 / $1600 per day gives about 450 days before break-even.
Ships have a useful life of 20 to 30 years, so in the end, you wind up about 12 or 13 million ahead, even factoring in a total replacement at mid-life. And this rough calculation is just at (presumably) todays oil prices - when oil is double the price, you're now saving $3200/day and so on.
Plenty of scope for some serious cost savings.
Re:Free Fall? No Problem!
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Look around for a proportionate personal vehicle--some large, flat, aerodynamically suitable piece of wreckage.
Unfortunately at this point, all those bits are still wayyyy above you, flapping about as they tumble gently to earth. You, however, having been in the "dead spider" position for a few minutes, are wayyyy below them. Bummer.
But still, keep your hopes up and your mind clear, and you'll be able to take some nice shots with your cameraphone, smiling and waving cheekily as you plumment to earth. Try and get into one of those legs-crossed hindu levitation positions for the last ones - they'll look a treat.
The NSA is a lot more competent than you think. Go google "NSA DES" sometime.
"The NSA was embroiled in controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher used by the US government. During development by IBM in the 1970s, the NSA recommended changes to the algorithm. There was suspicion the agency had deliberately weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable it to eavesdrop if required. The suspicions were that a critical component -- the so-called S-boxes -- had been altered to insert a "backdoor"; and that the key length had been reduced, making it easier for the NSA to discover the key using massive computing power, although it has since been observed that the changes in fact strengthened the algorithm against differential cryptanalysis, which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s."
So they made some small changes to DES... then a *decade* later, the rest of the crypto world says, "Huh. We've just done the sums and that actually made it better."
Not to say that in this case they're just screwing with the algorithm though:-P
I've lived in several places where a police report that you failed a 40 degree Nystagmus test can put you in prison. No blood test, breathalyzer, etc. needed.
Which kind of sucks for you, I suppose.
Another Australian here. It's pretty clear cut in our legal system. There's a 0.05% blood alcohol limit. Under that, you're fine. Over that, your license is suspended for 24 hours and you're going to court in a few weeks. It's a 30-second test, get waved over to the side of the road, get the spiel :
And if you're below 0.05, you're off again. If you're over 0.05, a blood test is taken for "proper" evidence. If you've just put your beer between your knees before pulling over:-P, tell them and they'll let you sit there for 15 minutes to get the residual alcohol out of your mouth before blowing, so it doesn't skew the detector and you don't have to draw blood for no good reason.
I dunno about sobriety tests, I've never seen them in actual use - what do they involve?
For me , it'd probably be when the personal financial loss involved gets over $1000 or so, then the trust in what is essentially a black box starts to go down.
I worked for a time in a lab reporting on coal samples. Penalties for incorrect spec coal can easily end up being half a million bucks for one shipment. My spreadsheets were a small step in the chain of reporting and they took a lot of tedious calculations out of the loop, but I made damn sure they were correct - with test cases of previous data - before letting them loose.
.....if implemented according to the standard, may cause loss of life, property, and capital..
Pffft....as if this has ever been much concern to software manufacturers before.
Every EULA has boilerplate text denying all responsibility , and you'd be mad to trust any results from software implicitly. Double check it yourself , even if it's just a few corner cases.
and now we keep them in a state of artificially constructed abject poverty.
Boo fucking hoo. Get a job like the rest of us had to. So your great-great-grandfather got a bum deal. You're still here, aren't you? Adapt! Make something of yourself. You're not *forced* to live in abject poverty. You want to talk about bum deals? Talk to the Aztecs. Oh wait, you can't - the Spanish erased them from history. A lot less complaints from Aztec descendants that way it seems.
If you want to go all Borg-like (and this *is* slashdot, so I guess it's obligatory) :
Join our culture or perish. Your distinctiveness will be added to our whole. Resistance is futile.
It did end already. Didn't you know? All years end at the end of May now.
Perhaps *your* news sources censored the fact - *my* sources have been all over this since the decision to shorten years was made just before Y2K. So much easier to work around the whole Y2K issue if you have shortened years, you know. Of course, it's all going to bite us in the ass in May 2019, but I'm sure we'll have it sorted by then.
Draw a sinewave on the surface a balloon. It has a set wavelength, right? Now inflate the balloon to double it's previous size. The wavelength's longer now.
Same thing with the universe, except it's in 3D and in a trillion-year timeframe.
Slashdot Mirror
It was hardly done just to spite the hackers.
If your product still runs adequately with :
- less RAM (cheaper!)
- a slower processor (cheaper!)
Then you go ahead and make the change to:
- increase profit margins
- keep up with your competitors so they don't price you out of the market.
Pretty clear-cut business case. In their case, they went out of their way to provide the original model again, pretty much just for hackers. They could've just dropped the old version, y'know.
Now I have no problem organize a list of people, to whom I grant the power of grey skull to be given my mobile phone's location. Quite frankly, I think that's a great idea in general. But it won't be my government. It'll be my parents, my children, my wife, a few crazy-close friends, my business partners, and perhaps a really good neighbour. Oh, and my doctor and my lawyer. In other words, people who already have a key to my home, a code to my alarm, power of attorney, or some equivalent level of trust that far over-shadow my location as a point of privacy.
I know! Lets ask some commonly-trusted community representative to act on behalf of all these people that could be concerned about your whereabouts. Some group that has a reasonable idea of law and procedure for these kind of things, and could be held accountable to some degree if they try and abuse said trust...... then anyone - anyone, not just those on your list - genuinely concerned for your whereabouts, could contact these representatives for help and make their case for further assistance. The telcos - having dealt with said representatives semi-regularly - would already have a relatively trusting arrangement with them, knowing already that they wouldn't generally ask if it wasn't generally necessary, with the overall setup saving time and hassles when someone has a legitimate concern for your safety.
Note then that this setup doesn't require any action or upkeep from you, in case you forget to keep your list of friends/doctors/lawyers/neighbors/good samaritians in sync with the telcos list.
Oh, I don't know, you'd probably be able to get away by the fact you were directly provoked and you provided an immediate response.
As a copper said to me once when discussing this area of the law in Australia :
"If someone comes up to you and says deliberate,provoking,fighting words to you about your missus, then he can't come crying to us when he gets beaten up. But if you let it slide, then get steamed up about it 10 minutes later go back and punch him out, then you've got a problem."
So, if a person in the next car seriously provokes you with a laser pointer - being unable to see while driving is a pretty serious provocation - then immediately getting out and causing some mayhem to the provoking person is something the law will overlook. There are limits, of course - if you shot him, or put them into a coma, well, you're likely to be asked to explain your actions. But if you give the little shit a black eye and they complain to the law about it, well they've an uphill battle to make anything stick.
Only point it up.
I believe that's the problem they're trying to address.
If somebody can check email or write a TPS report or take a nap seated in a train instead of at a desk in a building, what time is being wasted?
:-p
Er, the time you spent away from work, doing non-work-related things?
Perhaps the GP was trying to imply that work isn't (or shouldn't be) everything. If a big hunk of your daily waking life is working, or getting ready for work, or travelling to and from work..... perhaps it's time to stop and smell the roses. If you've got some specific goal that means you work like a maniac for a few years, fine, but don't let work consume your life. It has a habit of slowly expanding to fill all your time - even more so these days with instant comms wherever you go.
Hey, look at me, I'm turning into a preachy hippy as I get older!
Hmmm, I would have thought that space is cold enough - what with the background temp a few degrees above absolute zero - that a suitably large enough heatsink shaded from the sun and exposed to space would make a nice cold plate for the back of a well-insulated freezer. Yes, yes, the heat transfer out to space due to radiative effects is low, but add a reasonable amount of thermal mass to the heatsink and you'd have a respectable buffer for cooling warm things down when they're first put in.
Of course, the numbers for "suitably large heatsink" and "reasonable amount of thermal mass" might make it impractical though....
I have to wonder if simply putting dirty clothes outside for a few hours would do the trick.
Vacuum of space to boil off any volatile (read: stinky) chemicals, a dose of UV to break some of the more resilient compounds down....surely it'd help.
Ha!
The US should have gone with DVB-T(and S/C variants), with its international and widely-supported set of associated standards (and yes, well known and recognised patents in various countries).
But no, they had to be Different and Special. Cooking up their own, home grown standard to use, incompatible with just about all of the rest of the world, leaving themselves wide open to crap like this.
Are you sure about that?
"Alzheimer's" is the generally correct usage, given that it's a common enough malady to be able to leave out its companion word "disease" - the part which requires the posessive apostrophe to be used. That is, it's a disease first noticed as a separate malady by a Dr. Alzheimer and thus its "his" disease.
Ditto for "car's key" - although an odd phrase to my ears, it is grammatically correct. A car typically only requires one key, so the phrase "my car's key" works, just like "my cat's collar" does.
How long do you think the life of an average cargo ship is?
$725,000 / $1600 per day gives about 450 days before break-even.
Ships have a useful life of 20 to 30 years, so in the end, you wind up about 12 or 13 million ahead, even factoring in a total replacement at mid-life. And this rough calculation is just at (presumably) todays oil prices - when oil is double the price, you're now saving $3200/day and so on.
Plenty of scope for some serious cost savings.
Look around for a proportionate personal vehicle--some large, flat, aerodynamically suitable piece of wreckage.
Unfortunately at this point, all those bits are still wayyyy above you, flapping about as they tumble gently to earth. You, however, having been in the "dead spider" position for a few minutes, are wayyyy below them. Bummer.
But still, keep your hopes up and your mind clear, and you'll be able to take some nice shots with your cameraphone, smiling and waving cheekily as you plumment to earth. Try and get into one of those legs-crossed hindu levitation positions for the last ones - they'll look a treat.
Adding 20 new, unobserved, unproven particles makes for an "exceptionally simple" theory? Wonder what Occam would say about that.
I dunno, but the guy(s) who worked out the periodic table would likely approve:
(Dmitri taps his newly formed periodic table)
"Hmmm. Looks like some element should fit here."
(20 years later)
"Hey look! We've just discovered germanium, and it fits *right there*"
The NSA is a lot more competent than you think.
:-P
Go google "NSA DES" sometime.
"The NSA was embroiled in controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher used by the US government. During development by IBM in the 1970s, the NSA recommended changes to the algorithm. There was suspicion the agency had deliberately weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable it to eavesdrop if required. The suspicions were that a critical component -- the so-called S-boxes -- had been altered to insert a "backdoor"; and that the key length had been reduced, making it easier for the NSA to discover the key using massive computing power, although it has since been observed that the changes in fact strengthened the algorithm against differential cryptanalysis, which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s."
So they made some small changes to DES... then a *decade* later, the rest of the crypto world says, "Huh. We've just done the sums and that actually made it better."
Not to say that in this case they're just screwing with the algorithm though
"Suborbital" to me defines a particular mode of flight - powered launch, ballistic trajectory of some sort, landing.
Toodling about a few miles up for a half-day doesn't really seem to fit it.
Bitchin.
That's all I have to say.
Ah, history.
You're not a true geek unless you've visited at least ten of those sites in your normal web browsing.
I've lived in several places where a police report that you failed a 40 degree Nystagmus test can put you in prison. No blood test, breathalyzer, etc. needed.
o u-had-any-drinks-recently-please-blow-into-the-mac hine."
:-P, tell them and they'll let you sit there for 15 minutes to get the residual alcohol out of your mouth before blowing, so it doesn't skew the detector and you don't have to draw blood for no good reason.
Which kind of sucks for you, I suppose.
Another Australian here. It's pretty clear cut in our legal system. There's a 0.05% blood alcohol limit. Under that, you're fine. Over that, your license is suspended for 24 hours and you're going to court in a few weeks. It's a 30-second test, get waved over to the side of the road, get the spiel :
"This-is-a-random-breath-test-my-name-is-X-have-y
And if you're below 0.05, you're off again. If you're over 0.05, a blood test is taken for "proper" evidence. If you've just put your beer between your knees before pulling over
I dunno about sobriety tests, I've never seen them in actual use - what do they involve?
then not only that but there is still trialware on the disks which is bs, you shouldnt get garbageware on a disk you rightfully paid for EVER.
Man, you're right. All those SimTel CDROM's should've come to me with only 1/20th of the software on them!
(wait, am I showing my age?)
All your trust examples are good... to a point.
For me , it'd probably be when the personal financial loss involved gets over $1000 or so, then the trust in what is essentially a black box starts to go down.
I worked for a time in a lab reporting on coal samples. Penalties for incorrect spec coal can easily end up being half a million bucks for one shipment. My spreadsheets were a small step in the chain of reporting and they took a lot of tedious calculations out of the loop, but I made damn sure they were correct - with test cases of previous data - before letting them loose.
Pffft....as if this has ever been much concern to software manufacturers before.
Every EULA has boilerplate text denying all responsibility , and you'd be mad to trust any results from software implicitly. Double check it yourself , even if it's just a few corner cases.
9. wasn't that MIR?
Could have been skylab.
and now we keep them in a state of artificially constructed abject poverty.
Boo fucking hoo. Get a job like the rest of us had to. So your great-great-grandfather got a bum deal. You're still here, aren't you? Adapt! Make something of yourself. You're not *forced* to live in abject poverty. You want to talk about bum deals? Talk to the Aztecs. Oh wait, you can't - the Spanish erased them from history. A lot less complaints from Aztec descendants that way it seems.
If you want to go all Borg-like (and this *is* slashdot, so I guess it's obligatory) :
Join our culture or perish. Your distinctiveness will be added to our whole. Resistance is futile.
"He's like some time-traveling MacGyver," I think to myself
Blasphemer!
Dr. Who is not like some time-travelling MacGyver, MacGyver is like some temporally-impaired Dr. Who.
There's a hell of a difference.
It did end already. Didn't you know? All years end at the end of May now.
Perhaps *your* news sources censored the fact - *my* sources have been all over this since the decision to shorten years was made just before Y2K. So much easier to work around the whole Y2K issue if you have shortened years, you know. Of course, it's all going to bite us in the ass in May 2019, but I'm sure we'll have it sorted by then.
From what I understand of it:
Draw a sinewave on the surface a balloon. It has a set wavelength, right?
Now inflate the balloon to double it's previous size. The wavelength's longer now.
Same thing with the universe, except it's in 3D and in a trillion-year timeframe.