There's a big difference between a "justified war" and a "Just War" (where I'm using the capital 'J' not for emphasis, but to refer to the modern or postmodern didactic theory).
A war can be "justified" in that a large number of the people involved in the conflict, on one or both sides, believe that it is worth the cost; this is completely unrelated to whether the conflict fits the (rather arbitrary) "Just War" criteria.
To say that a war which is "justified" is also "Just," is to assume that the people that the war is being justified to are all believers in the theory of Just War. This is hardly true in practice -- many people will feel a conflict justified, for one reason or another, even if it isn't Just according to some theory or another.
The whole concept of 'Just War Criteria' is a pretty one, but ultimately, in my opinion, naive: the standard it tries to set is higher than is required in most cases to convince a group of people to attack another one, and does not take into consideration that under a democratic form of government, this is really the only thing that matters. The reasons why countries go to war against each other are complex, and dividing conflicts into "just" and "unjust" based on a set of arbitrary criteria is at best an academic exercise. At worst, it gives us an un-earned feeling of superiority for having partially "understood" war, without delving into the much more subtle motivators that might drive it.
The human mind, both singly as an individual, but also as part of a larger group, is capable of incredible rationalizations; the ability of people to justify an action ex post facto is virtually unlimited. In the same way that a person might kick a dog out of rage and self-loathing, and then later explain that the dog deserved it, one country might be more predisposed to go to war out of feelings of powerlessness as a group, and then justify it later. In the same way that examining the dog's prior misbehavior will give you little insight on why the person kicked it, listening to the "Just War" rationalizations and justifications shed little light on the actual motivations behind armed conflict.
It comes to this: pacifists have this entirely unrealistic and silly idea that war and violence are not the default value for humanity. Despite the fact that there's probably never been a time in the hsitory of the human race where there hasn't been armed conflict somewhere, we still think that the default is peace. This is silly result of people growing up in 1st world nations where they are not in danger for most of their lives. They think that because life as they know it is generally safe and comfortable that the world is by default a save and comfortable place. Violence, especially to most Americans, is a rare intrusion into an otherwise complacent life. So we see violence as unnatural. As though peace just happens, but violence needs a motivating cause. This is wrong.
Holy crap; a Slashdot comment that actually makes sense.
Who are you, and what did you do with the real Slashdot?
But, as it stands, nobody has a case if he tries to sue the manufacturer because he cut off his finger. But put an auto-brake on the saw, and every time it fails the manufacturer and insurance company have a dismemberment case to settle.
An well-said, although unfortunate, point.
It's seemed to me for a while that we need -- if we can't actually accomplish all-over tort reform -- some sort of a "good samaritan" law for corporations as well as individuals.
There shouldn't be any liability reasons for not putting a safety device like this on your equipment. But the system as it stands doesn't encourage it, for exactly the reasons you mention. Without a safety device, and as long as they're not "expected," when someone takes their finger off, it's just their own damn fault. But with the safety device, they'll be a massive lawsuit whenever it doesn't work perfectly -- even though it might work very well most of the time.
This reminds me of the situation in many states prior to the introduction of "good samaritan" liability laws. You'd have doctors and off-duty paramedics driving past the scene of an accident and not stopping, because nobody wanted to risk getting sued. It was only after some pretty ridiculous and unfortunate situations, where it became clear that as a society, we shouldn't be encouraging people to leave their fellows bleeding to death in a ditch because of fear of being sued later, that many states have changed the law.
A company which makes it's products safer than the norm shouldn't be liable for suits when the safety mechanism fails, if the result of the failure is that the product is only as dangerous as the device would normally be expected to be (assuming the manufacturer has not advertised it as being much safer, or that less precautions are necessary).
Any time you have the law encouraging the creation of more-dangerous products for perceived liability reasons, you have a problem. The goal of the law should be to encourage and reward productive behavior, not discourage and punish it.
the zip archive tool scans the whole code, it finds repeats in the code (1001010), abbreviates them and then indexes them in a seperate file within the archived file, then when the other computer begins to extract, it takes on the work of plonking back the repeated code, making the archive tiny.
Huh? What do you think the compression software is doing right now? It searches through the file for blocks of similar information, and then replaces those blocks with pointers to an index, where it stores the block itself. The more repetition you have in the data, the more compression you can get out of it. Good algorithms use (I believe) variable block sizes, and reset the indices as they work their way through the file based on what is probably optimal.
Putting an extra layer of compression on top of that, by replacing frequently used blocks of code, or replacing English words with abbreviations and re-inflating them at the opposite end (as someone else in this thread suggested), would only make the data being fed into the "real" compression utility a little harder to compress. It's unlikely that you could do a better job than any reasonable compression program does already with the same data.
Well, the Xerox Star (aka 8010) isn't a personal computer by any stretch of the imagination, and it made the list. In fact, Wikipedia claims that a small workgroup (2 or 3 machines, file server, printer) outfitted with Xerox Star-era hardware would have costed 50 to 100 thousand dollars. The Star seems to be pretty much the grandaddy of all "workstations."
I don't really know how to work it into the procedure that this article uses, but with PithHelmet (for Apple Safari on OS X) you can set up rules for various URLs/domains that includes blocking cookies, resetting them after quit, etc. The best part is that you can base the rules on regexps, and you can set different rules for domains and subdomains. So you could allow a persistent cookie from mail.google.com/mail (or whatever) and have all the other Google cookies reset on quit.
It's possible Google could still track your searching using the GMail cookie, I suppose... ultimately it comes down to how paranoid you want to be. If you want to have privacy, you have to give up a certain level of convenience.
I think the reason the law works out this way, is that it would be obviously unjust for a woman to have to continue with a pregnancy that she doesn't want, because of somebody else's (the father's) wishes.
Frankly, I think the way it should work is something like this: if both parents want the child, everything's hunky-dory. If the father doesn't want it, then he has to cover the cost of the termination, but after that has no further liabilities. If the mother wants to continue with it at that point, it's on her. If the mother wants to terminate, and the father doesn't, then it isn't fair to require her to continue with the pregnancy: at best, she could be required to have the pregnancy terminated in such a way that the frozen embryo could be turned over to the father, and he could find/pay someone to act as a surrogate mother, if he was so inclined. Either way, either partner could leave but leave the other partner the possibility of continuing on without them, if they really wanted to.
I think the key is that we need to make it clear that nobody who is uninterested in becoming a parent should ever become one. It's too damned important a job to take on if you have any reservations at all about your ability or desire to do it. There are enough people in the world: I'd rather have more abortions than have kids born to parents who didn't want to be parents.
The corporation would politely turn you down, because the risk of loss incurred by killing someone is worth a lot more than $100. Now, if the question is whether some corporation would kill your neighbor for $100, if there wasn't a risk that they'd have their assets seized and actually have employees end up in jail -- if that killing was for some reason legal -- of course they would do it. They'd compete for the business.
Corporations only appear to act morally, because the laws encourage them to do so by making it less profitable to act otherwise. When the profit of some other path exceeds the possible risk of being caught, then they'll do something that seems immoral. Either way, it's silly to call the conduct "moral" or "immoral." At best, it can be "ethical" or "unethical." (If we take the common definition that 'morals' are something you feel, 'ethics' are something generally held by society or a group of people, and 'laws' are the codified versions of same, backed up by the threats of sanctions.) Since corporations have no innate 'self,' they have no sense of morality themselves.
The actual MPEG-2 encoder isn't part of iMovie, it's part of iDVD.
iMovie just outputs an edited DV file and chapter information; the heavy lifting is done in iDVD.
I haven't really followed the progress of iDVD very closely over the past few years. Once upon a time, the compressor that it used was pretty miserable: it was a CBR thing at a very high bitrate, which was great if you just wanted to put 60 minutes of DV footage onto a disc, but useless for anything else. If they've improved that at all, it might be an option.
The only Apple product that really fits the bill here is Compressor, which is part of Final Cut Studio. It's their "professional grade" MPEG encoder; has lots of options, including VBR, multipass, distributed encoding, etc. I can't really compare it to any other very high end tools, but I've been told its output is very good. It gives you enough options that you can tweak the output to your liking, and balance output size against quality for whatever suits your project.
It's really designed to work as part of a FC-based workflow, in the same way that iDVD is made to accept stuff from iMovie, but I'm pretty sure that if you just had a DV file, you could use it to do the compression. Ultimately, what Apple wants you to do is use FCP for editing, then Compressor for encoding, and then DVD Studio Pro to build the disc master image. Coming in halfway through the workflow may not be the easiest thing in the world, but it shouldn't be impossible.
I second TOAD, having used it on a daily basis with an absolutely massive (hundreds of tables, many millions of lines) Oracle-based system, and it's been the best way I've found of making sense of things. The "Schema Browser" function I find particularly helpful when I know vaguely what column I'm looking for, but not what table it's in. It's replaced a lot of the old "cheat sheets" I used to have pinned to every flat vertical surface in my cube.
I've heard it's a fairly expensive piece of software, but thankfully I don't pay for it. It might be tough to get your PHB to spring for it, if that's actually the case...but I've yet to use or even hear of a better way to work with really complex DB systems.
I'm sure that if you start hitting these companies with $10,000 fines per violation that they would pay attention to the list. And if they stole it, it's all the more fines.
The problem isn't the companies that you can sue. The problem is that the registry will get out to all the fly-by-night operations, using botnetted Windows boxes, or open relays in China, selling "V14GrA" from websites that are linked to front companies in countries with lax banking laws.
The companies that you can actually sue are only a very small part of the problem. No entity currently has the resources and the motivation to track down (by following the money trail) the majority of criminal spammers; until that changes, it doesn't make sense to try to legislate spam away. At best, you're doing nothing but creating feel-good legislation.
The only way I could see something like this working, is if at the same time you created the laws with the huge penalties, you also set up an office which investigated spam, and was funded through the fines it generated. (After being jump-started with sufficient capital.) Or you could put out some sort of a cash bounty on reporting spammers -- 20% of the fines collected, perhaps -- and let private industry do it, like bounty hunters do with bail-jumpers today. But there's not a whole lot of point in creating a "do not email" list that you can't possibly enforce: you'll just have created a target list at that point.
How about not require expensive blanks that are going to include, built into their price, a surcharge for using them with your purchased, downloaded movie? That's all this is -- there's no reason why you can't use a regular DVD-R blank (that's what they were designed for, after all); the only purpose this whole scheme they're cooking up with the special blanks serves is to chisel a few extra bucks out of you. You want a downloaded movie? Fine, that's $9. You want to burn it? Fine, but you have to buy one of these expensive blanks.
Actually, today it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a "Slow Down" button, to drop the clockspeed to a lower level. I guess this is effectively done in software anyway (how the chip turns parts of itself into low-power mode when it's not being fully used), but there are definitely times when I don't need my computer running at full speed. A simple switch that turned the clock down for a more power-friendly mode wouldn't be bad.
Or something that briefly over-clocked the processor, maybe running the fans at a speed that you wouldn't want to keep them at indefinitely, but would be safe occasionally... that could come in handy as well. Lots of computers get used for games on occasion, but most of the time don't need the majority of their power.
I figured as much; obviously if the economies of scale weren't there, then the airlines wouldn't invest in such huge jets.
What my suggestion assumes is that the airlines would have to be forced to abandon those cost savings, and switch to smaller jets, and try to recoup the losses through higher rates and by hopefully making more efficient planes in the future.
The cost per passenger-mile would certainly increase; however, with more flights, you might be able to reduce the number of miles flown. Right now to get between many destinations, you have to go to a major hub and back. With smaller planes you can have more direct flights, and with more airports and less security-for-the-sake-of-appearances, you have shorter wait times. In combination, you might be able to make flying on the newer, smaller aircraft as attractive to the passenger as it is now, on the longer ones.
But you're right, it's not something that's just going to happen without pressure from an entity above the airlines; if the companies had their way, we'd all by flying around stacked like cordwood in the bellies of super-jumbos, from one huge regional airport to another. But the airlines don't put any value on the lives of their passengers, besides the bad PR that seems to follow killing a bunch of them, and the loss of income secondary to that. Sometimes it takes government action in order to force a change that's not economically preferable, but is desired because of the value that people place on their lives. (Although I'm small-government, I think it's within the scope of the proper role of government to do things like this from time to time, because corporations can't be expected to do anything except whatever's maximally profitable; thus we rely on government to set up the landscape in such a way that pursuing profit leads us to the outcomes we want to have happen.)
This is of course quite true; however, people seem willing to trade security against dying accidentally, for security against dying at the hands of terrorists. For whatever reason, we seem to care more about getting killed by someone else intentionally than we do about dying in a perceived accident. My suggestion more or less took this as a premise: that the increased risk inherent in having more planes in the air would be a good tradeoff for having smaller targets for terror.
Given the political destabilization that can occur as a result of terrorism, this might actually not be a bad thing: look at the chain of events that we can extrapolate out from 9/11, and from the responses to it, and to the responses to them. If an equivalent number of people had died accidentally, many of those secondary and tertiary deaths would not have occurred, the government would probably be less powerful, in general the world would probably be a better place, etc.
While it may seem stupid to say that we should increase our risk of dying in one way to prevent dying in another, when looked at as a society, it may be preferable to have more people dying in airplane crashes than to have a system that is susceptible to terrorism, because of the destabilization that occurs as a result of it.
Indirectly, we do this already: as we make it more and more of a pain to fly, we encourage people to use other, more dangerous methods of transportation. Although I've never seen anyone actually investigate the number of highway accidents as a function of the wait times and security screenings at airports, common sense dictates that when people don't fly, they either don't travel or they use some other method of transportation, and driving is undoubtedly popular. Given that we know driving to be a dangerous way of moving oneself around, we are in effect raising a person's risk by causing them to use the roads instead of the airlines, by making the latter less attractive.
I agree on the Starlight cases. I don't own one personally, but I have a friend who swears by them for transporting firearms and camera equipment, and they're built solidly. (Actually this is the first time I have heard anyone other than him mention them.) Except that I have no real need, I'd love to order several for all my photo gear.
Not that Pelican cases aren't tough, but if you look at an equivalent Pelican case and Starlight next to each other, it seems to me that the Pelican cases are a little more "consumer-ised" than the Starlight ones. (Some of the Pelican ones, anyway.) Plus it seems like Starlight can be a little less expensive or at least comparable, if you can work with one of their sizes.
The problem with Starlight is that they don't have nearly the range of available options that Pelican does. For a laptop, you're pretty much looking at either the model 061016, which is 6"x10"x16" (anyone not appreciating their model numbers, please leave Slashdot now) for $100, or the 071414, for $150, or the 091220 for $180. None of those are really great sizes for a single-laptop case. For camera equipment or guns the extra depth is great, but it's overkill for something that's only two inches thick. At those sizes, they're comparably priced or cheaper than Pelican. (The 10x16 case would be fine for a small laptop or two, but my Thinkpad is 10" long, so it might get a big tight on larger ones. Particularly since I'm not sure whether the claimed 10" is inside or outside dimensions.)
Pelican has a wider range of sizes including ones that are designed specifically for laptops, so that you can probably get away with a smaller case, and thus a less-expensive one. And perhaps more importantly, it's a lot less weight and just physically smaller.
I've never ordered from Starlight, but I wonder how many you need to order, or how much extra they charge, to make a case other than the ones they list on their site. It seems like they must have cases in sizes other than those, so if there's an un-advertised 4x12x16, that might be pretty close to the ideal laptop container.
It's a common misconception that cargo holds are not pressurized or climatized.
You know, the fact that they transport LIVE ANIMALS down there probably should have been a clue... what do people think they do, give Fido an oxygen tank and a blanket for the duration of the trip?
Yeah but unfortunately, unlike Jack Bauer, us normal folks can't go and hunt down and execute the asshat who steals our stuff while in transit, because it looked like something that would be chock full of either expensive electronics, Columbian cocaine, or bundles of fresh $20s.
Don't put expensive stuff in something that looks like it's designed to transport expensive stuff. You'd be better off putting it in a cardboard box padded with Styrofoam. (That being how they ship laptops to you in the first place, it follows that the machine can take a beating in that configuration.)
I think the unspoken commentary regarding the finish they put on Zero-Halliburton cases is: if you're rich enough to afford it in the first place, then you're rich enough to replace the damn thing every time it gets scratched.
That's actually the biggest reason why I would avoid it, or any other kind of obviously high-end, high-tech luggage. You don't want the bag that has your expensive stuff in it, to look like it has expensive stuff in it.
If I had a Z-H, the first thing I'd do before I checked it in at the airline, would be to put it in a nondescript duffel bag. Maybe something tremendously ugly and/or distinctive (a giveaway bag from the "Swan Lake Camp for Retarded Youngsters" would work well). Particularly since the maximum claimable value for luggage is limited by law to something fairly low, and downright worthless on international flights, you really don't want to have a few thousand dollars worth of stuff stolen. When that nice shiny piece of brushed aluminum or stainless steel fails to come around the luggage-recovery belt, you're going to be out thousands of dollars worth of luggage and gear.
I think the airlines' liability for checked luggage is limited to something around $9.07 per pound with a maximum of $400 per passenger; disguising your bag so that it doesn't grow legs and walk off seems to me, to be a whole lot more important than looking sharp when you're carrying it around.
I'd get a Pelican case, or other kind of hard transport case, and then always check it inside of some other crappy bag. Not only will it protect the "real" case, but it'll make it a little less obvious that whatever's inside the bag is valuable enough to warrant such a container.
It just makes me wonder what the producers of that film would have thought about the Internet... if you think "news-stand perversions" are bad, just wait until you see Fleshbot.com.
Any time I watch something like that, and I'm filled with a certain smugness ("nice job, suckers...now you can get porn everywhere!"), I wonder what sort of stuff that's on TV or the Internet today, people will be watching and laughing at in 40 or 50 years. Will it be the MPAA's "Copying DVDs is Stealing" PSAs? Or the "When You Smoke Weed, You're Helping The Terrorists" ones? Obviously it's impossible to say, but it's an interesting question nonetheless.
True; however I'd like to insert a word of caution. This terror plot wasn't foiled nearly as much by the intelligence of any agency or program, but due to the idiocy of the terrorists involved. If they hadn't started a fire in the room where they were making their bombs, just like any trailer-park meth lab in the worst white-trash ghetto of America, they wouldn't have gotten caught. This wasn't like catching Bin Laden, these people were idiots.
It's lucky for us that quite a few terrorists do seem to be uniquely stupid: there was that guy after the first WTC bombing that tried to recover the deposit from his rental truck that he blew up, for instance. But it's not really smart to assume that they'll stay that stupid forever.
...two Middle Eastern men had checked into the hotel, which offered low-cost, long-term accomodations. It was about 200 yards (182 meters) down the street from the residence of the Vatican envoy - where Pope John Paul II was to stay while attending the World Youth Day festivities the following month.
One of the men registered as Naji Haddad and listed his nationality as Moroccan. Police later determined that Haddad was Ramzi Yousef. His companion was Abdul-Hakim Murad, a Pakistani who grew up in Kuwait.
The new tenants immediately attracted suspicion. Hotel staff noticed a series of Middle Eastern-looking men shuttling in and out of the apartment, often bringing boxes and metal pipes. Manila had been rocked by a series of small explosions in recent weeks, and the local press was full of warnings about extremists within the country's Muslim minority.
Oh wait -- isn't this the "racial profiling" we're always being told is wrong? Maybe they were just a bunch of dark-skinned plumbing aficionados. Naturally, the police are helpless:
The neighborhood watch association reported the suspicious activity to the police, who advised they had no legal grounds to search the room.
Guess they'd be feeling pretty stupid right now, if the terrorists hadn't been quite so incompetent.
On the night of Jan. 6... a security guard reported smoke billowing from Suite 603.
Firemen were summoned and the room filled with acrid fumes. Yousef had disappeared in the confusion but Murad explained they were just fireworks for a delayed New Years' Eve celebration.
You can tell this guy's a real winner already.
Police staked out the apartment and were waiting when Murad returned about 2 a.m.
In retrospect, going back to the bomb-factory...probably not such a good idea. Let's all take a moment to thank your diety of choice that this guy lost one of his two functioning brain cells in the explosion, and decided to do something so dumb.
Under intensive interrogration over time, Murad gave up a plot - to kill the pope and blow up American planes. Corraborating evidence was found on a laptop and diskettes found in Suite 603.
Humm..."intensive interrogation over time." You know, that sounds almost like a euphemism for something unpleasant, doesn't it? I wonder what kind of 'interrogation' you get in Indonesia after you are caught trying to blow up the Pope? I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that they probably don't just ask you the same question each morning until you get bored and decide to open up. Apparently, it was the kind where you spill your guts about every other terror plot you know of. In the U.S., he'd probably be smirking at a Federal judge when the planes finally blew up.
What foiled this plot? Sounds to me like it was a combination of racial profiling, general incompetence and stupidity on the part of the terrorists, and a healthy dose of things the CIA claims it doesn't endorse anymore.
I agree with your position -- I fly on business all the time, and I want (hell, I expect) my government, if it doesn't do anything else for me that day, to at least make traveling reasonably safe.
On the other hand, the security that they do implement seems like a total waste of time. People have already pointed out the problems with the "no liquids" rule: what about liquid medications? Do you not let people with liquid medications on? If you don't, you might kill them or make it much harder for them to travel; if you don't, the whole "no liquids" exercise was pointless, since all you need to do is get an Rx medicine bottle, fill it up with your liquid explosive, and take it on board. (It's even better than putting it in a water bottle, because nobody can reasonably demand that you take a big swig to prove it's not poison -- many medications are poison, or close to it.)
Plus, all the additional restrictions apply only to hand luggage. If you're not putting the same level of scrutiny on every single checked bag (which they don't, because they don't have the resources to do so; it improved slightly after 9/11 but they still do more to hand luggage -- because that's where people will see the security, so that's where it gets put -- than to checked stuff) then someone could put the liquid-bomb there, and remote detonate it from the cabin with a transmitter like every other person in this country already carries on their keychain.
Planes are big, fragile machines; it doesn't take very much to knock one out of the sky. Eventually, I think a few things are going to happen, because the current way we're approaching security just isn't working, and isn't going to work. It's designed to create the appearance of security, not security itself. Probably the biggest step we're going to have to take is to eliminate jumbo and super-jumbo jets: when you have people hell-bent on blowing themselves up, it's not practical to assume that you're going to catch all of them. Thus you can't put so many "eggs" in one basket, either in terms of just the lives lost if one of them is crashed, or by giving the attackers such a large weapon (both literally and in terms of public relations). Smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient jets, going to more localized airports (further removing some of the terrible centralization our system suffers from now), are probably the best way of limiting the consequences of an attack.
There is just no way to prevent someone who is so absorbed with the task of killing others that they're willing to destroy themselves, from accomplishing their task. Any screening procedure will have holes. Any background check will have places where information can be injected, manipulated, omitted, or forged.
The problem we have, and which our government (and the airline industry generally) isn't willing to tackle, is not something that's going to be solved by issuing a few new procedures to the TSA screeners. It's something that can only be mitigated, and even then will require a huge systemic overhaul of our transportation infrastructure, removing the centralized points of failure that we've built up as ready targets for terrorism, and replacing them with a more robust, fault-tolerant, and survivable one.
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There's a big difference between a "justified war" and a "Just War" (where I'm using the capital 'J' not for emphasis, but to refer to the modern or postmodern didactic theory).
A war can be "justified" in that a large number of the people involved in the conflict, on one or both sides, believe that it is worth the cost; this is completely unrelated to whether the conflict fits the (rather arbitrary) "Just War" criteria.
To say that a war which is "justified" is also "Just," is to assume that the people that the war is being justified to are all believers in the theory of Just War. This is hardly true in practice -- many people will feel a conflict justified, for one reason or another, even if it isn't Just according to some theory or another.
The whole concept of 'Just War Criteria' is a pretty one, but ultimately, in my opinion, naive: the standard it tries to set is higher than is required in most cases to convince a group of people to attack another one, and does not take into consideration that under a democratic form of government, this is really the only thing that matters. The reasons why countries go to war against each other are complex, and dividing conflicts into "just" and "unjust" based on a set of arbitrary criteria is at best an academic exercise. At worst, it gives us an un-earned feeling of superiority for having partially "understood" war, without delving into the much more subtle motivators that might drive it.
The human mind, both singly as an individual, but also as part of a larger group, is capable of incredible rationalizations; the ability of people to justify an action ex post facto is virtually unlimited. In the same way that a person might kick a dog out of rage and self-loathing, and then later explain that the dog deserved it, one country might be more predisposed to go to war out of feelings of powerlessness as a group, and then justify it later. In the same way that examining the dog's prior misbehavior will give you little insight on why the person kicked it, listening to the "Just War" rationalizations and justifications shed little light on the actual motivations behind armed conflict.
It comes to this: pacifists have this entirely unrealistic and silly idea that war and violence are not the default value for humanity. Despite the fact that there's probably never been a time in the hsitory of the human race where there hasn't been armed conflict somewhere, we still think that the default is peace. This is silly result of people growing up in 1st world nations where they are not in danger for most of their lives. They think that because life as they know it is generally safe and comfortable that the world is by default a save and comfortable place. Violence, especially to most Americans, is a rare intrusion into an otherwise complacent life. So we see violence as unnatural. As though peace just happens, but violence needs a motivating cause. This is wrong.
Holy crap; a Slashdot comment that actually makes sense.
Who are you, and what did you do with the real Slashdot?
But, as it stands, nobody has a case if he tries to sue the manufacturer because he cut off his finger. But put an auto-brake on the saw, and every time it fails the manufacturer and insurance company have a dismemberment case to settle.
An well-said, although unfortunate, point.
It's seemed to me for a while that we need -- if we can't actually accomplish all-over tort reform -- some sort of a "good samaritan" law for corporations as well as individuals.
There shouldn't be any liability reasons for not putting a safety device like this on your equipment. But the system as it stands doesn't encourage it, for exactly the reasons you mention. Without a safety device, and as long as they're not "expected," when someone takes their finger off, it's just their own damn fault. But with the safety device, they'll be a massive lawsuit whenever it doesn't work perfectly -- even though it might work very well most of the time.
This reminds me of the situation in many states prior to the introduction of "good samaritan" liability laws. You'd have doctors and off-duty paramedics driving past the scene of an accident and not stopping, because nobody wanted to risk getting sued. It was only after some pretty ridiculous and unfortunate situations, where it became clear that as a society, we shouldn't be encouraging people to leave their fellows bleeding to death in a ditch because of fear of being sued later, that many states have changed the law.
A company which makes it's products safer than the norm shouldn't be liable for suits when the safety mechanism fails, if the result of the failure is that the product is only as dangerous as the device would normally be expected to be (assuming the manufacturer has not advertised it as being much safer, or that less precautions are necessary).
Any time you have the law encouraging the creation of more-dangerous products for perceived liability reasons, you have a problem. The goal of the law should be to encourage and reward productive behavior, not discourage and punish it.
the zip archive tool scans the whole code, it finds repeats in the code (1001010), abbreviates them and then indexes them in a seperate file within the archived file, then when the other computer begins to extract, it takes on the work of plonking back the repeated code, making the archive tiny.
Huh? What do you think the compression software is doing right now? It searches through the file for blocks of similar information, and then replaces those blocks with pointers to an index, where it stores the block itself. The more repetition you have in the data, the more compression you can get out of it. Good algorithms use (I believe) variable block sizes, and reset the indices as they work their way through the file based on what is probably optimal.
Putting an extra layer of compression on top of that, by replacing frequently used blocks of code, or replacing English words with abbreviations and re-inflating them at the opposite end (as someone else in this thread suggested), would only make the data being fed into the "real" compression utility a little harder to compress. It's unlikely that you could do a better job than any reasonable compression program does already with the same data.
Well, the Xerox Star (aka 8010) isn't a personal computer by any stretch of the imagination, and it made the list. In fact, Wikipedia claims that a small workgroup (2 or 3 machines, file server, printer) outfitted with Xerox Star-era hardware would have costed 50 to 100 thousand dollars. The Star seems to be pretty much the grandaddy of all "workstations."
I don't really know how to work it into the procedure that this article uses, but with PithHelmet (for Apple Safari on OS X) you can set up rules for various URLs/domains that includes blocking cookies, resetting them after quit, etc. The best part is that you can base the rules on regexps, and you can set different rules for domains and subdomains. So you could allow a persistent cookie from mail.google.com/mail (or whatever) and have all the other Google cookies reset on quit.
... ultimately it comes down to how paranoid you want to be. If you want to have privacy, you have to give up a certain level of convenience.
It's possible Google could still track your searching using the GMail cookie, I suppose
I think the reason the law works out this way, is that it would be obviously unjust for a woman to have to continue with a pregnancy that she doesn't want, because of somebody else's (the father's) wishes.
Frankly, I think the way it should work is something like this: if both parents want the child, everything's hunky-dory. If the father doesn't want it, then he has to cover the cost of the termination, but after that has no further liabilities. If the mother wants to continue with it at that point, it's on her. If the mother wants to terminate, and the father doesn't, then it isn't fair to require her to continue with the pregnancy: at best, she could be required to have the pregnancy terminated in such a way that the frozen embryo could be turned over to the father, and he could find/pay someone to act as a surrogate mother, if he was so inclined. Either way, either partner could leave but leave the other partner the possibility of continuing on without them, if they really wanted to.
I think the key is that we need to make it clear that nobody who is uninterested in becoming a parent should ever become one. It's too damned important a job to take on if you have any reservations at all about your ability or desire to do it. There are enough people in the world: I'd rather have more abortions than have kids born to parents who didn't want to be parents.
Someone please think of the children and their virgin ears!!
This is Slashdot. If we worried about virgin ears, we wouldn't be able to say much of anything at all...
The corporation would politely turn you down, because the risk of loss incurred by killing someone is worth a lot more than $100. Now, if the question is whether some corporation would kill your neighbor for $100, if there wasn't a risk that they'd have their assets seized and actually have employees end up in jail -- if that killing was for some reason legal -- of course they would do it. They'd compete for the business.
Corporations only appear to act morally, because the laws encourage them to do so by making it less profitable to act otherwise. When the profit of some other path exceeds the possible risk of being caught, then they'll do something that seems immoral. Either way, it's silly to call the conduct "moral" or "immoral." At best, it can be "ethical" or "unethical." (If we take the common definition that 'morals' are something you feel, 'ethics' are something generally held by society or a group of people, and 'laws' are the codified versions of same, backed up by the threats of sanctions.) Since corporations have no innate 'self,' they have no sense of morality themselves.
The actual MPEG-2 encoder isn't part of iMovie, it's part of iDVD.
iMovie just outputs an edited DV file and chapter information; the heavy lifting is done in iDVD.
I haven't really followed the progress of iDVD very closely over the past few years. Once upon a time, the compressor that it used was pretty miserable: it was a CBR thing at a very high bitrate, which was great if you just wanted to put 60 minutes of DV footage onto a disc, but useless for anything else. If they've improved that at all, it might be an option.
The only Apple product that really fits the bill here is Compressor, which is part of Final Cut Studio. It's their "professional grade" MPEG encoder; has lots of options, including VBR, multipass, distributed encoding, etc. I can't really compare it to any other very high end tools, but I've been told its output is very good. It gives you enough options that you can tweak the output to your liking, and balance output size against quality for whatever suits your project.
It's really designed to work as part of a FC-based workflow, in the same way that iDVD is made to accept stuff from iMovie, but I'm pretty sure that if you just had a DV file, you could use it to do the compression. Ultimately, what Apple wants you to do is use FCP for editing, then Compressor for encoding, and then DVD Studio Pro to build the disc master image. Coming in halfway through the workflow may not be the easiest thing in the world, but it shouldn't be impossible.
I second TOAD, having used it on a daily basis with an absolutely massive (hundreds of tables, many millions of lines) Oracle-based system, and it's been the best way I've found of making sense of things. The "Schema Browser" function I find particularly helpful when I know vaguely what column I'm looking for, but not what table it's in. It's replaced a lot of the old "cheat sheets" I used to have pinned to every flat vertical surface in my cube.
I've heard it's a fairly expensive piece of software, but thankfully I don't pay for it. It might be tough to get your PHB to spring for it, if that's actually the case...but I've yet to use or even hear of a better way to work with really complex DB systems.
I'm sure that if you start hitting these companies with $10,000 fines per violation that they would pay attention to the list. And if they stole it, it's all the more fines.
The problem isn't the companies that you can sue. The problem is that the registry will get out to all the fly-by-night operations, using botnetted Windows boxes, or open relays in China, selling "V14GrA" from websites that are linked to front companies in countries with lax banking laws.
The companies that you can actually sue are only a very small part of the problem. No entity currently has the resources and the motivation to track down (by following the money trail) the majority of criminal spammers; until that changes, it doesn't make sense to try to legislate spam away. At best, you're doing nothing but creating feel-good legislation.
The only way I could see something like this working, is if at the same time you created the laws with the huge penalties, you also set up an office which investigated spam, and was funded through the fines it generated. (After being jump-started with sufficient capital.) Or you could put out some sort of a cash bounty on reporting spammers -- 20% of the fines collected, perhaps -- and let private industry do it, like bounty hunters do with bail-jumpers today. But there's not a whole lot of point in creating a "do not email" list that you can't possibly enforce: you'll just have created a target list at that point.
a potential bomber would have to be really sure that the flight would leave on time. ;)
In other news, Chicago-O'Hare International has just been awarded the title of "Safest Airport in the World."
BTW, what is this "Slashdot position" you speak of?
It's kind of like the Missionary Position, but without the other person.
How about not require expensive blanks that are going to include, built into their price, a surcharge for using them with your purchased, downloaded movie? That's all this is -- there's no reason why you can't use a regular DVD-R blank (that's what they were designed for, after all); the only purpose this whole scheme they're cooking up with the special blanks serves is to chisel a few extra bucks out of you. You want a downloaded movie? Fine, that's $9. You want to burn it? Fine, but you have to buy one of these expensive blanks.
Either way, you're paying them twice.
Actually, today it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a "Slow Down" button, to drop the clockspeed to a lower level. I guess this is effectively done in software anyway (how the chip turns parts of itself into low-power mode when it's not being fully used), but there are definitely times when I don't need my computer running at full speed. A simple switch that turned the clock down for a more power-friendly mode wouldn't be bad.
... that could come in handy as well. Lots of computers get used for games on occasion, but most of the time don't need the majority of their power.
Or something that briefly over-clocked the processor, maybe running the fans at a speed that you wouldn't want to keep them at indefinitely, but would be safe occasionally
I figured as much; obviously if the economies of scale weren't there, then the airlines wouldn't invest in such huge jets.
What my suggestion assumes is that the airlines would have to be forced to abandon those cost savings, and switch to smaller jets, and try to recoup the losses through higher rates and by hopefully making more efficient planes in the future.
The cost per passenger-mile would certainly increase; however, with more flights, you might be able to reduce the number of miles flown. Right now to get between many destinations, you have to go to a major hub and back. With smaller planes you can have more direct flights, and with more airports and less security-for-the-sake-of-appearances, you have shorter wait times. In combination, you might be able to make flying on the newer, smaller aircraft as attractive to the passenger as it is now, on the longer ones.
But you're right, it's not something that's just going to happen without pressure from an entity above the airlines; if the companies had their way, we'd all by flying around stacked like cordwood in the bellies of super-jumbos, from one huge regional airport to another. But the airlines don't put any value on the lives of their passengers, besides the bad PR that seems to follow killing a bunch of them, and the loss of income secondary to that. Sometimes it takes government action in order to force a change that's not economically preferable, but is desired because of the value that people place on their lives. (Although I'm small-government, I think it's within the scope of the proper role of government to do things like this from time to time, because corporations can't be expected to do anything except whatever's maximally profitable; thus we rely on government to set up the landscape in such a way that pursuing profit leads us to the outcomes we want to have happen.)
This is of course quite true; however, people seem willing to trade security against dying accidentally, for security against dying at the hands of terrorists. For whatever reason, we seem to care more about getting killed by someone else intentionally than we do about dying in a perceived accident. My suggestion more or less took this as a premise: that the increased risk inherent in having more planes in the air would be a good tradeoff for having smaller targets for terror.
Given the political destabilization that can occur as a result of terrorism, this might actually not be a bad thing: look at the chain of events that we can extrapolate out from 9/11, and from the responses to it, and to the responses to them. If an equivalent number of people had died accidentally, many of those secondary and tertiary deaths would not have occurred, the government would probably be less powerful, in general the world would probably be a better place, etc.
While it may seem stupid to say that we should increase our risk of dying in one way to prevent dying in another, when looked at as a society, it may be preferable to have more people dying in airplane crashes than to have a system that is susceptible to terrorism, because of the destabilization that occurs as a result of it.
Indirectly, we do this already: as we make it more and more of a pain to fly, we encourage people to use other, more dangerous methods of transportation. Although I've never seen anyone actually investigate the number of highway accidents as a function of the wait times and security screenings at airports, common sense dictates that when people don't fly, they either don't travel or they use some other method of transportation, and driving is undoubtedly popular. Given that we know driving to be a dangerous way of moving oneself around, we are in effect raising a person's risk by causing them to use the roads instead of the airlines, by making the latter less attractive.
I agree on the Starlight cases. I don't own one personally, but I have a friend who swears by them for transporting firearms and camera equipment, and they're built solidly. (Actually this is the first time I have heard anyone other than him mention them.) Except that I have no real need, I'd love to order several for all my photo gear.
Not that Pelican cases aren't tough, but if you look at an equivalent Pelican case and Starlight next to each other, it seems to me that the Pelican cases are a little more "consumer-ised" than the Starlight ones. (Some of the Pelican ones, anyway.) Plus it seems like Starlight can be a little less expensive or at least comparable, if you can work with one of their sizes.
The problem with Starlight is that they don't have nearly the range of available options that Pelican does. For a laptop, you're pretty much looking at either the model 061016, which is 6"x10"x16" (anyone not appreciating their model numbers, please leave Slashdot now) for $100, or the 071414, for $150, or the 091220 for $180. None of those are really great sizes for a single-laptop case. For camera equipment or guns the extra depth is great, but it's overkill for something that's only two inches thick. At those sizes, they're comparably priced or cheaper than Pelican. (The 10x16 case would be fine for a small laptop or two, but my Thinkpad is 10" long, so it might get a big tight on larger ones. Particularly since I'm not sure whether the claimed 10" is inside or outside dimensions.)
Pelican has a wider range of sizes including ones that are designed specifically for laptops, so that you can probably get away with a smaller case, and thus a less-expensive one. And perhaps more importantly, it's a lot less weight and just physically smaller.
I've never ordered from Starlight, but I wonder how many you need to order, or how much extra they charge, to make a case other than the ones they list on their site. It seems like they must have cases in sizes other than those, so if there's an un-advertised 4x12x16, that might be pretty close to the ideal laptop container.
It's a common misconception that cargo holds are not pressurized or climatized.
... what do people think they do, give Fido an oxygen tank and a blanket for the duration of the trip?
You know, the fact that they transport LIVE ANIMALS down there probably should have been a clue
Yeah but unfortunately, unlike Jack Bauer, us normal folks can't go and hunt down and execute the asshat who steals our stuff while in transit, because it looked like something that would be chock full of either expensive electronics, Columbian cocaine, or bundles of fresh $20s.
Don't put expensive stuff in something that looks like it's designed to transport expensive stuff. You'd be better off putting it in a cardboard box padded with Styrofoam. (That being how they ship laptops to you in the first place, it follows that the machine can take a beating in that configuration.)
I think the unspoken commentary regarding the finish they put on Zero-Halliburton cases is: if you're rich enough to afford it in the first place, then you're rich enough to replace the damn thing every time it gets scratched.
That's actually the biggest reason why I would avoid it, or any other kind of obviously high-end, high-tech luggage. You don't want the bag that has your expensive stuff in it, to look like it has expensive stuff in it.
If I had a Z-H, the first thing I'd do before I checked it in at the airline, would be to put it in a nondescript duffel bag. Maybe something tremendously ugly and/or distinctive (a giveaway bag from the "Swan Lake Camp for Retarded Youngsters" would work well). Particularly since the maximum claimable value for luggage is limited by law to something fairly low, and downright worthless on international flights, you really don't want to have a few thousand dollars worth of stuff stolen. When that nice shiny piece of brushed aluminum or stainless steel fails to come around the luggage-recovery belt, you're going to be out thousands of dollars worth of luggage and gear.
I think the airlines' liability for checked luggage is limited to something around $9.07 per pound with a maximum of $400 per passenger; disguising your bag so that it doesn't grow legs and walk off seems to me, to be a whole lot more important than looking sharp when you're carrying it around.
I'd get a Pelican case, or other kind of hard transport case, and then always check it inside of some other crappy bag. Not only will it protect the "real" case, but it'll make it a little less obvious that whatever's inside the bag is valuable enough to warrant such a container.
That video is priceless. Thanks.
... if you think "news-stand perversions" are bad, just wait until you see Fleshbot.com.
It just makes me wonder what the producers of that film would have thought about the Internet
Any time I watch something like that, and I'm filled with a certain smugness ("nice job, suckers...now you can get porn everywhere!"), I wonder what sort of stuff that's on TV or the Internet today, people will be watching and laughing at in 40 or 50 years. Will it be the MPAA's "Copying DVDs is Stealing" PSAs? Or the "When You Smoke Weed, You're Helping The Terrorists" ones? Obviously it's impossible to say, but it's an interesting question nonetheless.
It's lucky for us that quite a few terrorists do seem to be uniquely stupid: there was that guy after the first WTC bombing that tried to recover the deposit from his rental truck that he blew up, for instance. But it's not really smart to assume that they'll stay that stupid forever.
Let's review the facts here: (from this article)
Oh wait -- isn't this the "racial profiling" we're always being told is wrong? Maybe they were just a bunch of dark-skinned plumbing aficionados. Naturally, the police are helpless:Guess they'd be feeling pretty stupid right now, if the terrorists hadn't been quite so incompetent.You can tell this guy's a real winner already.In retrospect, going back to the bomb-factory...probably not such a good idea. Let's all take a moment to thank your diety of choice that this guy lost one of his two functioning brain cells in the explosion, and decided to do something so dumb.Humm..."intensive interrogation over time." You know, that sounds almost like a euphemism for something unpleasant, doesn't it? I wonder what kind of 'interrogation' you get in Indonesia after you are caught trying to blow up the Pope? I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that they probably don't just ask you the same question each morning until you get bored and decide to open up. Apparently, it was the kind where you spill your guts about every other terror plot you know of. In the U.S., he'd probably be smirking at a Federal judge when the planes finally blew up.
What foiled this plot? Sounds to me like it was a combination of racial profiling, general incompetence and stupidity on the part of the terrorists, and a healthy dose of things the CIA claims it doesn't endorse anymore.
I feel so much better already.
I agree with your position -- I fly on business all the time, and I want (hell, I expect) my government, if it doesn't do anything else for me that day, to at least make traveling reasonably safe.
On the other hand, the security that they do implement seems like a total waste of time. People have already pointed out the problems with the "no liquids" rule: what about liquid medications? Do you not let people with liquid medications on? If you don't, you might kill them or make it much harder for them to travel; if you don't, the whole "no liquids" exercise was pointless, since all you need to do is get an Rx medicine bottle, fill it up with your liquid explosive, and take it on board. (It's even better than putting it in a water bottle, because nobody can reasonably demand that you take a big swig to prove it's not poison -- many medications are poison, or close to it.)
Plus, all the additional restrictions apply only to hand luggage. If you're not putting the same level of scrutiny on every single checked bag (which they don't, because they don't have the resources to do so; it improved slightly after 9/11 but they still do more to hand luggage -- because that's where people will see the security, so that's where it gets put -- than to checked stuff) then someone could put the liquid-bomb there, and remote detonate it from the cabin with a transmitter like every other person in this country already carries on their keychain.
Planes are big, fragile machines; it doesn't take very much to knock one out of the sky. Eventually, I think a few things are going to happen, because the current way we're approaching security just isn't working, and isn't going to work. It's designed to create the appearance of security, not security itself. Probably the biggest step we're going to have to take is to eliminate jumbo and super-jumbo jets: when you have people hell-bent on blowing themselves up, it's not practical to assume that you're going to catch all of them. Thus you can't put so many "eggs" in one basket, either in terms of just the lives lost if one of them is crashed, or by giving the attackers such a large weapon (both literally and in terms of public relations). Smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient jets, going to more localized airports (further removing some of the terrible centralization our system suffers from now), are probably the best way of limiting the consequences of an attack.
There is just no way to prevent someone who is so absorbed with the task of killing others that they're willing to destroy themselves, from accomplishing their task. Any screening procedure will have holes. Any background check will have places where information can be injected, manipulated, omitted, or forged.
The problem we have, and which our government (and the airline industry generally) isn't willing to tackle, is not something that's going to be solved by issuing a few new procedures to the TSA screeners. It's something that can only be mitigated, and even then will require a huge systemic overhaul of our transportation infrastructure, removing the centralized points of failure that we've built up as ready targets for terrorism, and replacing them with a more robust, fault-tolerant, and survivable one.