We aren't talking about a casual visitor, we're talking about somebody who is in the city 5 days/week, 52 weeks per year, for his job. If you do the math he's spending substantially more days in New York than not.
So yeah, I think there's a good case that commuting workers should pay taxes. The state and city have to provide services according to the number of people present - resident and commuters - not just the number of permanent residents. If they're commuting into town 260 days/year relocation is hardly an unreasonable suggestion.
The same argument, in reverse, is why telecommuting workers should _not_ be taxed in the same manner as residents and commuters.
That's not taxation without representation since he is free to move to New York.
I disagree with this decision... but only because it's telecommuting. If he physically commuted into the state then he's getting substantial services from the state (or city) without compensating them. Police and fire protection, roads, etc. Paying double taxes and not having a voice in who runs the government sucks but, again, he could always choose to live and work in the same state.
In contrast somebody who is telecommuting does not get any services from the state or city. No police or fire protection, no road use, nada. If he makes occasional trips to the offices, he's paying for these services in hotel room and car rental taxes. If this is taxable, then you could make an argument that he owes taxes for every state his network connection goes through.
Public domain has a very specific legal meaning. Open source is definitely not in the public domain. It is protected by copyright and all of the "open" licenses are precisely that - licenses to use that code (or documentation, images, etc.) in specific ways.
Of course some companies make the mistake you made... and when they're caught they're usually act surprised to learn that 1) somebody cares and 2) that somebody has enforceable legal rights.
As for the second comment, that's all anyone serious about security needs to know. Get back to us after at least five years of serious review by experienced cryptographers - until then you're pissing in the rain and trying to sell umbrellas.
(P.S., are you familiar with the saying that any fool can invent an encryption algorithm that they can't crack... and only a fool would believe that that proves nobody else can either?)
Instant DDOS attack. All a spammer needs to do is send out a message containing "Nigeria v!agra load http://www.spam-fighter.com teen" and that site gets clobbered even though it had nothing to do with the message.
It means that, in the near future, the corporate IT department will plan to deploy linux systems and windows proponents will have to work hard to overcome the assumption that their product isn't up to snuff, not the other way around.
It means that the low-end systems you find in the store will have a variant of Linux and Open Office, not a low-end version of Windows (e.g., XP Home) and "works."
Surely you jest. That may be true of junior programmers, but not anyone with real experience.
Force me to use emacs and my productivity plummets because I have to focus on how to write the code, not what to write. It's even worse with a "friendly" GUI-based editor. You don't see an impact when all editors are unfamiliar, but use the same editor for 20 years and it's as natural as walking.
As for OS, it's even worse. I'm familiar with many dozens of standard Unix (C and Java) libraries and probably thousands of functions/classes/methods. I usually know exactly what library to use (including obscure ones) and rarely need to refer to the manual pages or sample code. I know where system files are kept, what format they're in, and standard tools to access them. Even more importantly I know what NOT to do. That lets me produce quality code in little time.
Put me Windows and none of that experience applies. Even maintaining existing code is difficult because of all of the nonstandard crap the MS C compiler requires. The standard library is still there, but I don't even know what library holds the GUI -- and am sure it's nothing like X/Motif. I'm sure it has the equivalence of regex.so and bzip.so, but I have no idea what they are or how to use them. What about Unix sockets for IPC?
I don't know the details, but apparently if I want to create a commercial mix disc (think "That's Music!" and the like) the copyright owners must grant a license for no more than a fee stipulated by law.
The motivation is exactly what we're seeing with online markets (trying to kill the competition through predatory licensing fees), and the obvious solution is the same thing. E.g., anyone can obtain a redistribution license for no more than 10c/song/copy. The licensee can then set their own resale price.
Oops - forget about that last point. I was thinking about an unrelated algorithm. This is why I always code from CLR, complete with assertions and page references in the comments. It doesn't matter if the algorithm is fast if it's also wrong.
Oh yeah, the details of the bidirectional form....
1) obviously, you go both directions.
2) on the i-th pass, you only need to go to the N - i-th position (or the corresponding positions when headed the other way). Most people forget this nuance of the algorithm.
3) if you're doing a bidirectional sort you can start at the last exchange. You still have to go to the N - i-th position.
The algorithm is still O(n^2), but these simple changes will make the implementation maybe 4x faster.
Grrr, you named the algorithm that must not be named! Cursed be the name of the fool who thought it would be a good algorithm for introductory students - I've lost count of the number of people convinced that this satan-spawned algorithm is faster than an insertion sort (it's not) and that there's no reason for them to learn to use the qsort() function. N.B., not to implement a quick sort, but to simply call a standard library routine.
The most frustrating thing is that, if you must use the algorithm that must not be named, the bidirectional form of the algorithm is much faster (in practice) than the unidirectional form yet really no more complex to code than the latter if you have any potential as a software developer.
That's odd, I much prefer my Debian machines to my Windows machine because almost none of my hardware works under Windows.
I'm serious.
The "problem" is that I use old hardware which runs old versions of windows (98, ME) because 1) I don't care to spend hundreds of dollars for a new version of Windows and 2) the hardware couldn't run it anyway. The existing hardware works fine for my needs, and I can think of hundreds of better uses for the cost of a new entry-level machine.
But every so often I would like to use some of my other hardware with this box, and it simply doesn't work. My parallel port ZIP drive - doesn't work. My USB thumb drive - unrecognized.
Drivers are either missing or inaccessible. You might argue that I should have filed away the disks that came with the hardware, but they're totally useless to me since they don't contain Linux device drivers or configuration tools. Many companies, inexplicitly, don't provide downloadable drivers - if the manufacturer still exists.
My favorite has to be the thumbdrive that contained the driver. On the thumbdrive. So the driver is only accessible if its unnecessary. (I tried copying it via my Linux system, but apparently they decided against supporting 98.)
My point is that your argument is not just bogus because a sample size of one is meaningless, it's bogus because the "windows always has drivers" argument is false. If I need a new driver under Linux I can usually install a new kernel without too much else changing, and the package manager should take care of the few dependencies. But if my Windows kernel doesn't support a driver I have to install a whole new OS and probably kill several of my applications in the process.
Nothing escapes the event horizon. Not even "invisible" radiation, whatever that is.
Black holes shine (at extremely high energies) because of the matter falling into the accretion disk. That traffic jam of matter that's fallen deep into a gravity well heats it up to phenomenal temperatures. The disks are part of what you might call a black hole system, but they are no more part of the black hole than the earth is part of the sun.
If you're using a single file as an archive, you want a TOC, checksums, per-file compression and encryption. Applications still need to be archive aware, but the cost can be very low. E.g., it's common to have something like
struct stat * astat(const char *url, struct stat *);
where the former loads the archive file into the specified buffer and the latter provides Unix style metadata. The URL can be something like zip://zipfile/full/path/to/file. Hardcore developers can even use kernel- or user-space based virtual filesystems and the archive looks like another partition.
Once you have this infrastructure life is _so_ much easier since everything is bundled. It can be taken to self-defeating extremes, but anyone who has had to deal with somebody putting an "equivalent" file into an application's resources can see the benefit in this.
(N.B., configuration information should not be bundled. I'm referring to things like the PHP or Perl scripts for an application, things that the average user won't need to modify.)
TAR is a weird critter. It is a streaming block-oriented protocol since it was designed to work with tape drives, but it sucks on disk because the archive must be searched sequentially to find individual files. Compression was retrofitted and it's easy to transparently handle via standard libraries, but compression blows out blocking. Compression also prevents applications from creating their own meaningful TOC since the archive is unseekable. (Archive creation tools can reset the compression stream for each file, but I think my own implementation is the only one that does so. This makes the archive semi-seekable.) The format is adequate for transport archives, but that's about it.
ZIP is nice but the standard headers don't include all Unix metadata. (There are well-documented extensions that handle this information - and it's a moot point if it's bundled application data.) The format can be streamed for both input and output (which is why the TOC is at the end of the archive), but it's not properly blocked for tape either.
> I would bet that the speed limits could be raised if people actually followed them, because they probably take into account that the average person will drive X over the limit.
The Colorado Dept. of Transportation goes the other way - they'll adjust the speed limit to match the speed people are driving, when legally permitted. (Federally funded roads often have strings.) They have the attitude that thousands of drivers will make a better informed decision than somebody using a traffic handbook.
It's also well known that "friction" caused by drivers going at different speeds is *far* more dangerous than everyone going at the same higher speed. Drivers can be ticketed for driving significantly slower than the traffic flow, and I seem to recall a local story where a driver was ticketed for going "too slow" even as he was exceeding the speed limit!
BTW, the speed limit is never the final word. Weather and road conditions may make it unsafe to travel at those speeds and people do get ticketed for excess speed even when they're well under the posted limit. I would gladly exchange 1000 tickets for people going 65 instead of 55 on a limited access road for one ticket for somebody going 30 instead of 15 in heavy fog or snow.
I'm not referring to tailgating on surface streets where you might get bent steel and possibly whiplash, I'm referring to tailgating on urban interstates where one blown tire or a patch of ice can trigger a high-speed pileup with fatalities.
Do some idiots blow through red lights at very high speed? Of course, and like you I have a close encounter every few years. But photo red light will have absolutely no effect on their behavior since they'll simply behave at those few intersections.
BTW, I'm not opposed to _all_ photo radar and photo red-light units. That highway offramp you mentioned should have both, due to the high accident rate and the severity of those accidents. I don't mind time-keyed photo radar near schools.
But a cop sitting on the side of a limited access road and ticketing vehicles going 55 instead of the posted 45? Give me a break.
I have a more general problem with red-light radar (and most red-light radar) - it's "teaching to the test." Or in this case, "enforcing laws that are easily mechanized, not laws that are most critical to public safety."
The biggest problem I face on the road are tailgaters and the guys who cut me off at interstate speeds and the morons who barrel out of parking lots at 20 mph without checking for traffic and the idiots who think "right turn on red" has right of way over people already on the road. Hell, even the superjock riding his bike far too fast for me to see him approaching as I cross the bike path... and he wrongly believes that he, not I, have right of way. (Pedestrians do, but in this state mounted bikes are "vehicles" and bike paths are "secondary roads.") As if it will matter when he hits my car (or vice versa), other than me suing his estate to repair my car's paint job.
People who run red lights or are speeding between lights on limited access roads? Not A Problem. Maybe once every few years I'll nearly get clobbered by some moron who goes through an intersection at high speed long after the light changed, but that's reckless driving, not merely running a red light. The latter should remain illegal, but a low enforcement priority unless it's an ongoing serious problem at a specific location.
So why do we see more and more red-light X systems? Because they're cheap revenue sources. To actually make driving safer you have to hire more cops and put them in more unmarked cars and get them out on the street where they can nail the guys who really are hazards to other drivers. Not guys going 45 in a 35 zone because that's what the heavy traffic is doing and it would be far more dangerous to obey the law than to break it. Or the guy who's behind a truck and doesn't know the light has turned red until he's already in the intersection.
How long until the laws themselves are written on the basis of what's easily enforceable, not on the basis of what harms others?
And the guy in Denver who put a photo-radar system on the interstate onramp where traffic is always at least 15 mph over the posted speed limit? The cop who lectured my HS class wants to talk to you - he assured tens of thousands of us that no cop would ever, under any circumstances, ticket us for going over the speed limit in order to merge with traffic. (We were supposed to gradually slow down once merged.) Ticket or being flattened by a semi? Hmm, which will it be? Ticket or being flattened by a semi. Gee, that's such a hard decision. Not.
MS's *positive* cash flow comes from the operating system and office tools. Cut those off and the company is in serious problems.
Office matured almost a decade ago. The tremendous bloat since then is to satisfy increasingly niche markets, 95% of most people can do 95% of their work on the core... and they'll prefer a fast, stable and easy to use application over one that's bloated, routinely eats their work, and hard to use because the menus have become so overloaded that it's a "feature" that most of the options are now hidden by default.
As for the OS, who needs a PC with a legacy OS? The future is hidden computers in your video game console, your tivo, your car, whatever. Linux is free, MS is pushing Windows-CE (iirc) but even a modest cost is going to make a competive difference when the product costs under the $200 sweep point. Toss in perceived reliability issues and WinCE is even less attractive unless you've picked up some bargain-rate windows coders.
Heck, I'm a serious coder/admin and I could do almost all of my work with a <$100 mini xterm box that supports xterm/ssh, a browser, and a mail client. My 'development' box is a colocated server on the other side of a broadband connection. Windows developers need their own boxes, but they're only a tiny fraction of the current user base.
This is why MS has been pushing so hard into new markets (video games, dvrs, etc.), but they're still losing serious money on every unit sold.
You do realize, do you not, that the earth's magnetic fields has flipped countless times in the past? In fact some people think we may be starting to see the start of a new reversal - the strength of the earth's magnetic field has dropped dramatically in the last century.
Are we going to have to redo all of our maps with Australia at the top?
What annoys me the most about these stories is that there's no way for the customer to take proactive measures to disable problematic services. Maybe the default is to enable online banking, but I should have the right to tell them to disable that service and not honor any request through it unless and until I show up at a branch office with appropriate identification.
The worst example of this was a former bank (emphasis on "former") that unilaterally disabled all existing ATM cards without warning. But not to worry - our spanking new debit cards should have already arrived, together with the new PIN number in a separate mailing.
As if that's not bad enough, this was back before debit cards had fraud protection. If somebody cleared out your checking account that was it - that money was gone.
I immediately cancelled my account. The drone assured me that my funds were safe, I could request (REQUEST) a new ATM card, etc. I told him there was no way I was keeping my money there - they violated my trust and they weren't getting a second chance.
I heard, unoffically, that a full third of the bank's customers dropped their accounts because of this braindead move. But the bank's new overlords and masters in Minnesota refused to accept responsibility for a collosial FU - they said the problem was that we were all to provincial to understand the brave new world of banking, not that we were well-informed and refused to do business with assholes who could have left us traveling without access to our funds and without warning. (When I travel I usually pulled spending money out of an ATM so it's in the local currency, but now I'll probably use a "gift card.")
Say the magic words and *poof* it's the law
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What makes you think you'll have a choice?
If this technology works, how long until there's a law passed that, "due to the threat of terrorism," all digital cameras sold or imported into the US must have this "feature." All "sensitive" sites will be equiped with jammers. As will all law enforcement officers, to prevent them from being targeted by terrorists.
Needless to say it will be illegal for the hoi poi to have or use this technology. With suitable exceptions for major contributors to the republican party - I mean officers of major, "critical" public companies.
The way this paints a big bullseye on every potential target ("Hey, Sven, let's drive around town and take pictures of everything and see what's blurry!") will be completely ignored. 'Cause, you know, those foreigners are too stupid to think of it.
While it has its flaws, I would say Stargate is one of the hardest science fiction shows in history.
The reason why is because it's progressive. If you exclude the introductory and wrap-up episodes common in more recent series, you could swap the first and last episode of ST:TNG. ST:TOS. Quantum Leap (other than Sam regaining his memory). Seven Days. And on and on and on. It's all fantasy - the actors have a magic box or two and roam the universe or timeline without really changing anything.
Stargate is one of the few shows that shows progression. The Tori'i were clueless in the first few episodes (after Teal'c joined them). But their hard work introduced them to the Toik'ra, gave them naquida generators, introduced us to the Asgard, bootstrapped the development of our own fighters, allowed us to run the Prometheus, got us advanced engines from a grateful Asgard, and on and on and on.
Have they had missteps? Sure. Are they on the verge of having so many goodies that they run the risk of having the rabid viewer ask "why didn't they use the gozmotron from the 3rd season?" In fact they've turned that to their advantage - after a few seasons those goodies are reintroduced in a natural manner. The "safe" bullets are used for training. The virtual reality pods are used for training and planning.
Sometimes the science is hokey, but you have a very real sense that they're trying to figure things out and often get it wrong. But they keep at it until they succeed.
Why do you think only "corporate" (which seem to be big iron since you contrast it to "personal computers") have sensitive data?
What about doctors? Lawyers? Accountants? Schools? Bookstores? etc.
If you've been paying attention to the news you'll know that every so often somebody buys a used computer disk and finds the results of STD tests (including AIDS) for tens of thousands of people. Or the name, address and credit card information for thousands of customers.
The loss of this information may not cause the DJIA to drop 10%, but it can be devastating to the people involved. But security is often lax since it's "only" a PC and it never occurs to these people that their computers may be stolen precisely because of the confidential information on the disk.
Even home users can face a difficult situation if they take their work home. They have a duty to protect that information... then they work on those files on virus-ridden systems. Today's viruses seem to focus on spam and stealing credit card numbers, but it's not hard to imagine more sophisticated attackers looking for other information.
That's.88% of 30 million users, or over a quarter million people.
If the analysts are remotely competent they'll use standard statistical methods for eliminating noise. E.g., take seven daily snapshots instead of a week of data. Either find the median value or compute the mean of the daily values. The latter approach also gives you a tighter confidence bound than the same value computed as a single weeklong block.
Why do you think they're going to use HTTPS? How many people actually look for the lock symbol?
No HTTPS, no prompt whether to accept a new certificate.
If you want to be even nastier I think you can set up Apache so it will use a "null" cipher. I'm not sure whether certificates are even needed in that case, but to anyone who doesn't drill through the "security" dialogs it will look like a genuine site.
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We aren't talking about a casual visitor, we're talking about somebody who is in the city 5 days/week, 52 weeks per year, for his job. If you do the math he's spending substantially more days in New York than not.
So yeah, I think there's a good case that commuting workers should pay taxes. The state and city have to provide services according to the number of people present - resident and commuters - not just the number of permanent residents. If they're commuting into town 260 days/year relocation is hardly an unreasonable suggestion.
The same argument, in reverse, is why telecommuting workers should _not_ be taxed in the same manner as residents and commuters.
That's not taxation without representation since he is free to move to New York.
I disagree with this decision... but only because it's telecommuting. If he physically commuted into the state then he's getting substantial services from the state (or city) without compensating them. Police and fire protection, roads, etc. Paying double taxes and not having a voice in who runs the government sucks but, again, he could always choose to live and work in the same state.
In contrast somebody who is telecommuting does not get any services from the state or city. No police or fire protection, no road use, nada. If he makes occasional trips to the offices, he's paying for these services in hotel room and car rental taxes. If this is taxable, then you could make an argument that he owes taxes for every state his network connection goes through.
Public domain has a very specific legal meaning. Open source is definitely not in the public domain. It is protected by copyright and all of the "open" licenses are precisely that - licenses to use that code (or documentation, images, etc.) in specific ways.
Of course some companies make the mistake you made... and when they're caught they're usually act surprised to learn that 1) somebody cares and 2) that somebody has enforceable legal rights.
As for the second comment, that's all anyone serious about security needs to know. Get back to us after at least five years of serious review by experienced cryptographers - until then you're pissing in the rain and trying to sell umbrellas.
(P.S., are you familiar with the saying that any fool can invent an encryption algorithm that they can't crack... and only a fool would believe that that proves nobody else can either?)
Instant DDOS attack. All a spammer needs to do is send out a message containing "Nigeria v!agra load http://www.spam-fighter.com teen" and that site gets clobbered even though it had nothing to do with the message.
I doubt it. What average user is going to understand the problem, much less the solution?
It means that, in the near future, the corporate IT department will plan to deploy linux systems and windows proponents will have to work hard to overcome the assumption that their product isn't up to snuff, not the other way around.
It means that the low-end systems you find in the store will have a variant of Linux and Open Office, not a low-end version of Windows (e.g., XP Home) and "works."
Surely you jest. That may be true of junior programmers, but not anyone with real experience.
Force me to use emacs and my productivity plummets because I have to focus on how to write the code, not what to write. It's even worse with a "friendly" GUI-based editor. You don't see an impact when all editors are unfamiliar, but use the same editor for 20 years and it's as natural as walking.
As for OS, it's even worse. I'm familiar with many dozens of standard Unix (C and Java) libraries and probably thousands of functions/classes/methods. I usually know exactly what library to use (including obscure ones) and rarely need to refer to the manual pages or sample code. I know where system files are kept, what format they're in, and standard tools to access them. Even more importantly I know what NOT to do. That lets me produce quality code in little time.
Put me Windows and none of that experience applies. Even maintaining existing code is difficult because of all of the nonstandard crap the MS C compiler requires. The standard library is still there, but I don't even know what library holds the GUI -- and am sure it's nothing like X/Motif. I'm sure it has the equivalence of regex.so and bzip.so, but I have no idea what they are or how to use them. What about Unix sockets for IPC?
I don't know the details, but apparently if I want to create a commercial mix disc (think "That's Music!" and the like) the copyright owners must grant a license for no more than a fee stipulated by law.
The motivation is exactly what we're seeing with online markets (trying to kill the competition through predatory licensing fees), and the obvious solution is the same thing. E.g., anyone can obtain a redistribution license for no more than 10c/song/copy. The licensee can then set their own resale price.
Oops - forget about that last point. I was thinking about an unrelated algorithm. This is why I always code from CLR, complete with assertions and page references in the comments. It doesn't matter if the algorithm is fast if it's also wrong.
Oh yeah, the details of the bidirectional form....
1) obviously, you go both directions.
2) on the i-th pass, you only need to go to the N - i-th position (or the corresponding positions when headed the other way). Most people forget this nuance of the algorithm.
3) if you're doing a bidirectional sort you can start at the last exchange. You still have to go to the N - i-th position.
The algorithm is still O(n^2), but these simple changes will make the implementation maybe 4x faster.
Grrr, you named the algorithm that must not be named! Cursed be the name of the fool who thought it would be a good algorithm for introductory students - I've lost count of the number of people convinced that this satan-spawned algorithm is faster than an insertion sort (it's not) and that there's no reason for them to learn to use the qsort() function. N.B., not to implement a quick sort, but to simply call a standard library routine.
The most frustrating thing is that, if you must use the algorithm that must not be named, the bidirectional form of the algorithm is much faster (in practice) than the unidirectional form yet really no more complex to code than the latter if you have any potential as a software developer.
That's odd, I much prefer my Debian machines to my Windows machine because almost none of my hardware works under Windows.
I'm serious.
The "problem" is that I use old hardware which runs old versions of windows (98, ME) because 1) I don't care to spend hundreds of dollars for a new version of Windows and 2) the hardware couldn't run it anyway. The existing hardware works fine for my needs, and I can think of hundreds of better uses for the cost of a new entry-level machine.
But every so often I would like to use some of my other hardware with this box, and it simply doesn't work. My parallel port ZIP drive - doesn't work. My USB thumb drive - unrecognized.
Drivers are either missing or inaccessible. You might argue that I should have filed away the disks that came with the hardware, but they're totally useless to me since they don't contain Linux device drivers or configuration tools. Many companies, inexplicitly, don't provide downloadable drivers - if the manufacturer still exists.
My favorite has to be the thumbdrive that contained the driver. On the thumbdrive. So the driver is only accessible if its unnecessary. (I tried copying it via my Linux system, but apparently they decided against supporting 98.)
My point is that your argument is not just bogus because a sample size of one is meaningless, it's bogus because the "windows always has drivers" argument is false. If I need a new driver under Linux I can usually install a new kernel without too much else changing, and the package manager should take care of the few dependencies. But if my Windows kernel doesn't support a driver I have to install a whole new OS and probably kill several of my applications in the process.
Nothing escapes the event horizon. Not even "invisible" radiation, whatever that is.
Black holes shine (at extremely high energies) because of the matter falling into the accretion disk. That traffic jam of matter that's fallen deep into a gravity well heats it up to phenomenal temperatures. The disks are part of what you might call a black hole system, but they are no more part of the black hole than the earth is part of the sun.
If you're using a single file as an archive, you want a TOC, checksums, per-file compression and encryption. Applications still need to be archive aware, but the cost can be very low. E.g., it's common to have something like
ssize_t readArchive(char *buffer, size_t len, const char *url);
struct stat * astat(const char *url, struct stat *);
where the former loads the archive file into the specified buffer and the latter provides Unix style metadata. The URL can be something like zip://zipfile/full/path/to/file. Hardcore developers can even use kernel- or user-space based virtual filesystems and the archive looks like another partition.
Once you have this infrastructure life is _so_ much easier since everything is bundled. It can be taken to self-defeating extremes, but anyone who has had to deal with somebody putting an "equivalent" file into an application's resources can see the benefit in this.
(N.B., configuration information should not be bundled. I'm referring to things like the PHP or Perl scripts for an application, things that the average user won't need to modify.)
TAR is a weird critter. It is a streaming block-oriented protocol since it was designed to work with tape drives, but it sucks on disk because the archive must be searched sequentially to find individual files. Compression was retrofitted and it's easy to transparently handle via standard libraries, but compression blows out blocking. Compression also prevents applications from creating their own meaningful TOC since the archive is unseekable. (Archive creation tools can reset the compression stream for each file, but I think my own implementation is the only one that does so. This makes the archive semi-seekable.) The format is adequate for transport archives, but that's about it.
ZIP is nice but the standard headers don't include all Unix metadata. (There are well-documented extensions that handle this information - and it's a moot point if it's bundled application data.) The format can be streamed for both input and output (which is why the TOC is at the end of the archive), but it's not properly blocked for tape either.
> I would bet that the speed limits could be raised if people actually followed them, because they probably take into account that the average person will drive X over the limit.
The Colorado Dept. of Transportation goes the other way - they'll adjust the speed limit to match the speed people are driving, when legally permitted. (Federally funded roads often have strings.) They have the attitude that thousands of drivers will make a better informed decision than somebody using a traffic handbook.
It's also well known that "friction" caused by drivers going at different speeds is *far* more dangerous than everyone going at the same higher speed. Drivers can be ticketed for driving significantly slower than the traffic flow, and I seem to recall a local story where a driver was ticketed for going "too slow" even as he was exceeding the speed limit!
BTW, the speed limit is never the final word. Weather and road conditions may make it unsafe to travel at those speeds and people do get ticketed for excess speed even when they're well under the posted limit. I would gladly exchange 1000 tickets for people going 65 instead of 55 on a limited access road for one ticket for somebody going 30 instead of 15 in heavy fog or snow.
I'm not referring to tailgating on surface streets where you might get bent steel and possibly whiplash, I'm referring to tailgating on urban interstates where one blown tire or a patch of ice can trigger a high-speed pileup with fatalities.
Do some idiots blow through red lights at very high speed? Of course, and like you I have a close encounter every few years. But photo red light will have absolutely no effect on their behavior since they'll simply behave at those few intersections.
BTW, I'm not opposed to _all_ photo radar and photo red-light units. That highway offramp you mentioned should have both, due to the high accident rate and the severity of those accidents. I don't mind time-keyed photo radar near schools.
But a cop sitting on the side of a limited access road and ticketing vehicles going 55 instead of the posted 45? Give me a break.
I have a more general problem with red-light radar (and most red-light radar) - it's "teaching to the test." Or in this case, "enforcing laws that are easily mechanized, not laws that are most critical to public safety."
The biggest problem I face on the road are tailgaters and the guys who cut me off at interstate speeds and the morons who barrel out of parking lots at 20 mph without checking for traffic and the idiots who think "right turn on red" has right of way over people already on the road. Hell, even the superjock riding his bike far too fast for me to see him approaching as I cross the bike path... and he wrongly believes that he, not I, have right of way. (Pedestrians do, but in this state mounted bikes are "vehicles" and bike paths are "secondary roads.") As if it will matter when he hits my car (or vice versa), other than me suing his estate to repair my car's paint job.
People who run red lights or are speeding between lights on limited access roads? Not A Problem. Maybe once every few years I'll nearly get clobbered by some moron who goes through an intersection at high speed long after the light changed, but that's reckless driving, not merely running a red light. The latter should remain illegal, but a low enforcement priority unless it's an ongoing serious problem at a specific location.
So why do we see more and more red-light X systems? Because they're cheap revenue sources. To actually make driving safer you have to hire more cops and put them in more unmarked cars and get them out on the street where they can nail the guys who really are hazards to other drivers. Not guys going 45 in a 35 zone because that's what the heavy traffic is doing and it would be far more dangerous to obey the law than to break it. Or the guy who's behind a truck and doesn't know the light has turned red until he's already in the intersection.
How long until the laws themselves are written on the basis of what's easily enforceable, not on the basis of what harms others?
And the guy in Denver who put a photo-radar system on the interstate onramp where traffic is always at least 15 mph over the posted speed limit? The cop who lectured my HS class wants to talk to you - he assured tens of thousands of us that no cop would ever, under any circumstances, ticket us for going over the speed limit in order to merge with traffic. (We were supposed to gradually slow down once merged.) Ticket or being flattened by a semi? Hmm, which will it be? Ticket or being flattened by a semi. Gee, that's such a hard decision. Not.
MS's *positive* cash flow comes from the operating system and office tools. Cut those off and the company is in serious problems.
Office matured almost a decade ago. The tremendous bloat since then is to satisfy increasingly niche markets, 95% of most people can do 95% of their work on the core... and they'll prefer a fast, stable and easy to use application over one that's bloated, routinely eats their work, and hard to use because the menus have become so overloaded that it's a "feature" that most of the options are now hidden by default.
As for the OS, who needs a PC with a legacy OS? The future is hidden computers in your video game console, your tivo, your car, whatever. Linux is free, MS is pushing Windows-CE (iirc) but even a modest cost is going to make a competive difference when the product costs under the $200 sweep point. Toss in perceived reliability issues and WinCE is even less attractive unless you've picked up some bargain-rate windows coders.
Heck, I'm a serious coder/admin and I could do almost all of my work with a <$100 mini xterm box that supports xterm/ssh, a browser, and a mail client. My 'development' box is a colocated server on the other side of a broadband connection. Windows developers need their own boxes, but they're only a tiny fraction of the current user base.
This is why MS has been pushing so hard into new markets (video games, dvrs, etc.), but they're still losing serious money on every unit sold.
My head hurts.
You do realize, do you not, that the earth's magnetic fields has flipped countless times in the past? In fact some people think we may be starting to see the start of a new reversal - the strength of the earth's magnetic field has dropped dramatically in the last century.
Are we going to have to redo all of our maps with Australia at the top?
What annoys me the most about these stories is that there's no way for the customer to take proactive measures to disable problematic services. Maybe the default is to enable online banking, but I should have the right to tell them to disable that service and not honor any request through it unless and until I show up at a branch office with appropriate identification.
The worst example of this was a former bank (emphasis on "former") that unilaterally disabled all existing ATM cards without warning. But not to worry - our spanking new debit cards should have already arrived, together with the new PIN number in a separate mailing.
As if that's not bad enough, this was back before debit cards had fraud protection. If somebody cleared out your checking account that was it - that money was gone.
I immediately cancelled my account. The drone assured me that my funds were safe, I could request (REQUEST) a new ATM card, etc. I told him there was no way I was keeping my money there - they violated my trust and they weren't getting a second chance.
I heard, unoffically, that a full third of the bank's customers dropped their accounts because of this braindead move. But the bank's new overlords and masters in Minnesota refused to accept responsibility for a collosial FU - they said the problem was that we were all to provincial to understand the brave new world of banking, not that we were well-informed and refused to do business with assholes who could have left us traveling without access to our funds and without warning. (When I travel I usually pulled spending money out of an ATM so it's in the local currency, but now I'll probably use a "gift card.")
What makes you think you'll have a choice?
If this technology works, how long until there's a law passed that, "due to the threat of terrorism," all digital cameras sold or imported into the US must have this "feature." All "sensitive" sites will be equiped with jammers. As will all law enforcement officers, to prevent them from being targeted by terrorists.
Needless to say it will be illegal for the hoi poi to have or use this technology. With suitable exceptions for major contributors to the republican party - I mean officers of major, "critical" public companies.
The way this paints a big bullseye on every potential target ("Hey, Sven, let's drive around town and take pictures of everything and see what's blurry!") will be completely ignored. 'Cause, you know, those foreigners are too stupid to think of it.
While it has its flaws, I would say Stargate is one of the hardest science fiction shows in history.
The reason why is because it's progressive. If you exclude the introductory and wrap-up episodes common in more recent series, you could swap the first and last episode of ST:TNG. ST:TOS. Quantum Leap (other than Sam regaining his memory). Seven Days. And on and on and on. It's all fantasy - the actors have a magic box or two and roam the universe or timeline without really changing anything.
Stargate is one of the few shows that shows progression. The Tori'i were clueless in the first few episodes (after Teal'c joined them). But their hard work introduced them to the Toik'ra, gave them naquida generators, introduced us to the Asgard, bootstrapped the development of our own fighters, allowed us to run the Prometheus, got us advanced engines from a grateful Asgard, and on and on and on.
Have they had missteps? Sure. Are they on the verge of having so many goodies that they run the risk of having the rabid viewer ask "why didn't they use the gozmotron from the 3rd season?" In fact they've turned that to their advantage - after a few seasons those goodies are reintroduced in a natural manner. The "safe" bullets are used for training. The virtual reality pods are used for training and planning.
Sometimes the science is hokey, but you have a very real sense that they're trying to figure things out and often get it wrong. But they keep at it until they succeed.
Why do you think only "corporate" (which seem to be big iron since you contrast it to "personal computers") have sensitive data?
What about doctors? Lawyers? Accountants? Schools? Bookstores? etc.
If you've been paying attention to the news you'll know that every so often somebody buys a used computer disk and finds the results of STD tests (including AIDS) for tens of thousands of people. Or the name, address and credit card information for thousands of customers.
The loss of this information may not cause the DJIA to drop 10%, but it can be devastating to the people involved. But security is often lax since it's "only" a PC and it never occurs to these people that their computers may be stolen precisely because of the confidential information on the disk.
Even home users can face a difficult situation if they take their work home. They have a duty to protect that information... then they work on those files on virus-ridden systems. Today's viruses seem to focus on spam and stealing credit card numbers, but it's not hard to imagine more sophisticated attackers looking for other information.
That's .88% of 30 million users, or over a quarter million people.
If the analysts are remotely competent they'll use standard statistical methods for eliminating noise. E.g., take seven daily snapshots instead of a week of data. Either find the median value or compute the mean of the daily values. The latter approach also gives you a tighter confidence bound than the same value computed as a single weeklong block.
Why do you think they're going to use HTTPS? How many people actually look for the lock symbol?
No HTTPS, no prompt whether to accept a new certificate.
If you want to be even nastier I think you can set up Apache so it will use a "null" cipher. I'm not sure whether certificates are even needed in that case, but to anyone who doesn't drill through the "security" dialogs it will look like a genuine site.