Unfortunatly, that is not likely to change. Juryies have no advocates in the system, whereas Lawyers and Judges do. That's why the jury selection process is so messed up. IMHO, there should be a first pass to weed out people with mental handicaps and excessive pre-concieved notions (IE, knows about the case ahead of time or is just a racist or something), but after that force the Lawyers to work with whatever Jury they get. In fact the Lawyers shouldn't be allowed in the Jury selection process IMHO, selection should rest entirely on the judge. If a lawyer sees something he think the Judge missed (oversight) he should be allowed to bring the issue up, but actual dismissals from these petitions should be rare.
Stacked juries are one of those things that really annoy me about our current legal system, especially since it is often used against minorities who can't afford the same caliber of legal protection as the other party.
How about keeping the deer population in check? While you can hunt with Bows, it is far less efficient than using a gun (requires more skill, time, and training for the same results). Because we have decimated the natural predator population, it is our duty to keep them in check.
Say What? I've had my Series 2 running over 802.11 since the day I bought it (over two years ago now). I've been using a Microsoft MN-510 (IIRC). The TiVo software even has sections for setting up your WEP keys, monitor signal strength, and everything.
How did Copyright Law force them to add anything? It seems more likey to me that certain cartels forced them to put it in under threat of legal action using Copyright Law, but the law didn't force them to do anything.
Yeah, I didn't belive the "noise" argument either. A lot of people reported this and many of them were in the same area. I think either the Fox guys were over protective, or they had some oddball equipment installed that accidentally tripped the flag.
Seems to me that if they actually worked like a lightning rod, then you wouldn't have to worry. The electrical charge would never get a chance to build up near them as the elevator grounds out everything around it. Lightning Rods don't work the way you think they work.
Although the Slashdot guys have blocked it again, there was a short time this morning where the validator could get through. It showed the main page as validating Ok for the most part, but some of the sidebars (especially the Freshmeat sidebar) as failing miserably. Just looking at the source doesn't give me a headache anymore though, which is a massive improvement.
That is great and all, but I have a feeling you're looking for cost savings on a part that is already extremely cheap to run. I suspect the screen and perhaps the AEM7 are the big items in the power budget, and making the buttons more expensive will have no noticable effect on the battery life of the device.
There was an article on Slashdot a few weeks ago that said exactly that. You end up burning something like 1.2 gallons of diesal for every gallon of biodiesal you make with our current practices.
In other words, current biodiesal is just another subsidy for farmers. One of the biggest problems is that most places use corn, which isn't as efficent as other crops, but popular with Congress (who funds the subsidies) because there is a corn lobby. Also, farmers are already have equipment designed for corn, so they are happy to grow it.
The original parent's post was talking about using plants to remove carbon from the atmosphere though, but then went on to talk about biodiesal and other stuff, which is why I made my comment. Plants CAN remove carbon from the atmosphere, but you then have to bury them somewhere and make sure the carbon released from their decomposition doesn't make it back into the atmosphere.
Note however that if you grow vast stretches of soybeans in an effort to cut down on the carbon in the atmosphere, but then turn around and make biodiesel out of those soybeans, you've accomplished nothing.
OTOH, if you're goal is to reduce the amount of extra carbon in the atmosphere (that was previously trapped in the earths crust), then you have a win (assuming you can make biodiesel without burning regular oil/coal -- which is something we havn't done yet.
The fact of the matter is that it's pretty hard to cut down on the CO2 already in the atmosphere, especially since every car driving person puts _tons_ of extra CO2 out each year. Multiply that by the number of cars on the road and you get an idea of the scale of the problem here.
Really? I've never been in a hotel where they could do that without invalidating all of the other keys. I'd assumed it was part of the technology and done that way for security purposes.
In theory the basic system is very simple. Each door has a reader with a cryptographic key that is hashed together with a counter. The programmer at the front desk has all of the cryptographic keys in it as well, along with a set of counters that keep it in sync with the doors. Whenever a key is inserted, the door just has to check if it matches the current key (someone returning to their room) or the next key (someone entering the room for the first time). If it's the next key, the internal counter is updated. Theoretically, there is no reason the card programmer couldn't make an extra key (just don't update the internal count) but they either don't work that way or the front desk staff never read the manual.
Ugh, I know what you mean about those commercial breaks. One of the local stations here got bought out by Clear Channel and after a couple of months it changed into what I consider an all-ad format. Seriously, it takes me 30 minutes to drive to work, and during that time it can easily be nothing but ads interspersed with some lame DJ banter and a traffic update or two.
That's why I switched to NPR. NPR runs ads too, but only occaisionally and they make them short. Their ads are just a shout-out to whatever big company gave them a donation, like ADM: Supermarket to the World (much better than their current slogan).
Don't get me wrong though, if there were a music version of NPR I'd be all over it. News on the radio gets repetative on long trips, but I just can't stand getting 3 songs followed by 15 minutes of ads. Thankfully I have CDs I can play as well, but CDs are no good at introducing you to new music.
Yeah, but look at the modern farmer compared to the ancient farmer. He works just as long (or even twice as long, just for argument) and produces 100 times as much food. Theoretically, if he wanted to, he could work a tiny percentage of his land and have enormous amounts of free time (in practice maybe not, but in theory it works). As another poster pointed out though, we want to improve society, and that takes work, so even though we are more productive, more of that work goes into improving society instead of just feeding/sheltering ourselves and our family.
More importantly, Snopes tends to be conservative with assumptions (whereas email warnings are not), so Snopes and an email might differ like so: Email Warning: Your credit card numbers are being solen every time you check into a hotel! Thieves read the discarded cards and them load them up into global international databases that people buy so they can buy stuff with your card! Always burn hotel cards and eat the ashes! Snopes: While technically possible, there are no reported instances of this happening, also all of the hotels and security companies we contacted said that they do not store any information like that on their cards.
THe Snopes article is a real let-down after you get all fired up about the email warning, but is usually a lot closer to the truth.
Actually, I've had to get extra keys at hotels several times (usually when guests arrive late), and if they can say the name and room number of the guy who checked in originally they can almost always get another key without hassle. In fact, they SHOULD hassle the other guy more because when he uses his key it invalidates all of the other keys, forcing him to distribute the new keys to everyone else in the room or (more often) make us all go down to the front desk and get a whole new set of keys.
Frankly, I'm shocked that the keys had that much information on them (assuming this story is true), the only thing they need is the encrypted key and perhaps a sequence number that the lock compares against its internal key. I suppose a check-out time is a good idea as well so people can't mooch off of presumably vacant hotel rooms--although that will be a hassle if someone tries to extend their say. One of the other posters mentioned that it can be used to check for room service as well, but it seems to me that a check in the kitchen would be better than one that you won't spot until the food is at the door. How do you read it? By sticking a special card in the door and checking the lights? It might be tempting to put the room number on the door so the wait staff can return lost keys, but the keys are so cheap (and may be out of date by the time the wait staff finds it) that I can't imagine this being worth the danger.
Basically, technology makes us more efficient, which is an assertion that few on slashdot are going to dispute. This means we can either do more with our time, or have more leisure time and look "lazier" to someone without proper context.
During the dawn of agriculture, humans had to work their butts off every day tending to fields or getting ready for the winter or they would die. These days you can work a mere 8 hours a day in a cushy office job and have all of the food and shelter you need. Modern man looks a lot lazer--he only works half as much time wise--but due to technology he's actually contributing more to society than his primitive ancestor.
I don't know, if I were trying to subvert the system I think I'd have the machine work completely properly for the first thousand votes or so, then every so often count an one candidate as the other. Maybe 1% of the time or so. That's all you need to swing votes one way or the other. I know those election workers are supposed to test it, but given how motivated they are when I get there, I have trouble believing that they put more than a couple dozen votes in. Also, maybe this goes without saying, but someone DOES record those little counters at the end of the day and compare them to the numbers uploaded from the machine right?
That said, I don't really trust the Diebold machines either, but thus far nobody has given me any solid evidence of wrongdoing.
Eh, unless your memory, power supply, or memory controller are marginal flipped bits are pretty damn rare. They do exist, I used to work for a place that had 50+ SGI Challenge XLs loaded to the gills with memory. We had to write special filters in the log watcher to filter out "Single bit parity error" messages, because there would be several of them per day. However, this was over thousands of memory sticks. On the one or two sticks you have in your PC, it's almost unheard of. You're far more likely to lose data due to an OS glitch. It's just extra money spent that probably won't correct a single bit in it's entire lifetime.
Anecdotal evidence: I have an old PII-400 at home with ECC memory. Thus far it has yet to correct a single bit error, despite being on 24/7 since January of 1998.
In other words, are you going to allow for a tiny amount of uncertainty (which may just be noise compared to the uncertainty you get from other parts of the system), for extra performance and cost savings? That's what you need to ask yourself. OTOH, parity checks are an easy way to spot a failing memory module, which can make debugging a hardware problem so much simpler.
"Freedom of Travel" sounds nice on paper, but Air Traffic Control exists for a reason. In Africa you could get away with it for awhile because not many people would be able to afford air travel, but it wouldn't take long for the problem to get out of hand. Imagine if you will if nearly every traffic accident were fatal. Think of how many accients (even "fender benders") we have each year and you can see how quickly that would turn into a nightmare. The FAA isn't conservative because it's run by old guys who don't know how to do new things, they're conservative because if they try something new and it doesn't work, people die.
I prefer Grave of the Fireflies personally. Not only is it a powerful film, but it is also obviously not aimed at children (although strangely it was shown as a double feature with My Neighbor Totoro!) and won't make people think that all foreign animation is porn.
On the other hand it's hard to get people to sit through an entire showing of Grave of the Fireflies, it's just so relentlessly depressing.
Back when Be was still making BeBoxes (best name ever) they were already doomed. My roommate had a Be system and I got to play around with it a bit. It was extremely nice, especially with the way it handled media (you could play multi channel audio back when even getting full duplex working on OSS was a major pain in the butt).
The problem was that it was somewhat difficult to port applications to the box. The networking in particular seemed to cause lots of problems. This ment that in 1996 (I think) there were still no decent webbrowsers for Beos. That sort of problem was endemic with Beos too. Unless you were willing to port the applications yourself, about the only thing you could do with the OS was give people impressive multimedia demos and explain how cool the filesystem is. Granted, there was a community around porting applications to Be, but they weren't well organized from what I saw.
It's possible Be has changed in the time since I saw it last, and now has a compatability layer that lets it compile stuff written for Linux right out of the box (does it support X apps yet?), but even with that it's hard to see why I would want to use it.
That would be fine except that sometimes a 250 GB drive is actually 249.7 GB. Drive manufacturers round up just as often as they round down. The best practice I've found is just to cut off the last 0.5% of the drive or so, but it's still annoying.
Fantasia isn't a childrens movie! Heck, I've yet to meet a kid that doesn't find it boring. Unfortunatly, just because it was animated people assume it is aimed at kids.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunatly, that is not likely to change. Juryies have no advocates in the system, whereas Lawyers and Judges do. That's why the jury selection process is so messed up. IMHO, there should be a first pass to weed out people with mental handicaps and excessive pre-concieved notions (IE, knows about the case ahead of time or is just a racist or something), but after that force the Lawyers to work with whatever Jury they get. In fact the Lawyers shouldn't be allowed in the Jury selection process IMHO, selection should rest entirely on the judge. If a lawyer sees something he think the Judge missed (oversight) he should be allowed to bring the issue up, but actual dismissals from these petitions should be rare.
Stacked juries are one of those things that really annoy me about our current legal system, especially since it is often used against minorities who can't afford the same caliber of legal protection as the other party.
How about keeping the deer population in check? While you can hunt with Bows, it is far less efficient than using a gun (requires more skill, time, and training for the same results). Because we have decimated the natural predator population, it is our duty to keep them in check.
I have no idea why that would matter in the least. It's not like they integrate their faith into their language or anything.
Say What? I've had my Series 2 running over 802.11 since the day I bought it (over two years ago now). I've been using a Microsoft MN-510 (IIRC). The TiVo software even has sections for setting up your WEP keys, monitor signal strength, and everything.
How did Copyright Law force them to add anything? It seems more likey to me that certain cartels forced them to put it in under threat of legal action using Copyright Law, but the law didn't force them to do anything.
Yeah, I didn't belive the "noise" argument either. A lot of people reported this and many of them were in the same area. I think either the Fox guys were over protective, or they had some oddball equipment installed that accidentally tripped the flag.
Seems to me that if they actually worked like a lightning rod, then you wouldn't have to worry. The electrical charge would never get a chance to build up near them as the elevator grounds out everything around it. Lightning Rods don't work the way you think they work.
Although the Slashdot guys have blocked it again, there was a short time this morning where the validator could get through. It showed the main page as validating Ok for the most part, but some of the sidebars (especially the Freshmeat sidebar) as failing miserably. Just looking at the source doesn't give me a headache anymore though, which is a massive improvement.
That is great and all, but I have a feeling you're looking for cost savings on a part that is already extremely cheap to run. I suspect the screen and perhaps the AEM7 are the big items in the power budget, and making the buttons more expensive will have no noticable effect on the battery life of the device.
There was an article on Slashdot a few weeks ago that said exactly that. You end up burning something like 1.2 gallons of diesal for every gallon of biodiesal you make with our current practices.
In other words, current biodiesal is just another subsidy for farmers. One of the biggest problems is that most places use corn, which isn't as efficent as other crops, but popular with Congress (who funds the subsidies) because there is a corn lobby. Also, farmers are already have equipment designed for corn, so they are happy to grow it.
The original parent's post was talking about using plants to remove carbon from the atmosphere though, but then went on to talk about biodiesal and other stuff, which is why I made my comment. Plants CAN remove carbon from the atmosphere, but you then have to bury them somewhere and make sure the carbon released from their decomposition doesn't make it back into the atmosphere.
Note however that if you grow vast stretches of soybeans in an effort to cut down on the carbon in the atmosphere, but then turn around and make biodiesel out of those soybeans, you've accomplished nothing.
OTOH, if you're goal is to reduce the amount of extra carbon in the atmosphere (that was previously trapped in the earths crust), then you have a win (assuming you can make biodiesel without burning regular oil/coal -- which is something we havn't done yet.
The fact of the matter is that it's pretty hard to cut down on the CO2 already in the atmosphere, especially since every car driving person puts _tons_ of extra CO2 out each year. Multiply that by the number of cars on the road and you get an idea of the scale of the problem here.
Really? I've never been in a hotel where they could do that without invalidating all of the other keys. I'd assumed it was part of the technology and done that way for security purposes.
In theory the basic system is very simple. Each door has a reader with a cryptographic key that is hashed together with a counter. The programmer at the front desk has all of the cryptographic keys in it as well, along with a set of counters that keep it in sync with the doors. Whenever a key is inserted, the door just has to check if it matches the current key (someone returning to their room) or the next key (someone entering the room for the first time). If it's the next key, the internal counter is updated. Theoretically, there is no reason the card programmer couldn't make an extra key (just don't update the internal count) but they either don't work that way or the front desk staff never read the manual.
Ugh, I know what you mean about those commercial breaks. One of the local stations here got bought out by Clear Channel and after a couple of months it changed into what I consider an all-ad format. Seriously, it takes me 30 minutes to drive to work, and during that time it can easily be nothing but ads interspersed with some lame DJ banter and a traffic update or two.
That's why I switched to NPR. NPR runs ads too, but only occaisionally and they make them short. Their ads are just a shout-out to whatever big company gave them a donation, like ADM: Supermarket to the World (much better than their current slogan).
Don't get me wrong though, if there were a music version of NPR I'd be all over it. News on the radio gets repetative on long trips, but I just can't stand getting 3 songs followed by 15 minutes of ads. Thankfully I have CDs I can play as well, but CDs are no good at introducing you to new music.
Yeah, but look at the modern farmer compared to the ancient farmer. He works just as long (or even twice as long, just for argument) and produces 100 times as much food. Theoretically, if he wanted to, he could work a tiny percentage of his land and have enormous amounts of free time (in practice maybe not, but in theory it works). As another poster pointed out though, we want to improve society, and that takes work, so even though we are more productive, more of that work goes into improving society instead of just feeding/sheltering ourselves and our family.
More importantly, Snopes tends to be conservative with assumptions (whereas email warnings are not), so Snopes and an email might differ like so:
Email Warning: Your credit card numbers are being solen every time you check into a hotel! Thieves read the discarded cards and them load them up into global international databases that people buy so they can buy stuff with your card! Always burn hotel cards and eat the ashes!
Snopes: While technically possible, there are no reported instances of this happening, also all of the hotels and security companies we contacted said that they do not store any information like that on their cards.
THe Snopes article is a real let-down after you get all fired up about the email warning, but is usually a lot closer to the truth.
Actually, I've had to get extra keys at hotels several times (usually when guests arrive late), and if they can say the name and room number of the guy who checked in originally they can almost always get another key without hassle. In fact, they SHOULD hassle the other guy more because when he uses his key it invalidates all of the other keys, forcing him to distribute the new keys to everyone else in the room or (more often) make us all go down to the front desk and get a whole new set of keys.
Frankly, I'm shocked that the keys had that much information on them (assuming this story is true), the only thing they need is the encrypted key and perhaps a sequence number that the lock compares against its internal key. I suppose a check-out time is a good idea as well so people can't mooch off of presumably vacant hotel rooms--although that will be a hassle if someone tries to extend their say. One of the other posters mentioned that it can be used to check for room service as well, but it seems to me that a check in the kitchen would be better than one that you won't spot until the food is at the door. How do you read it? By sticking a special card in the door and checking the lights? It might be tempting to put the room number on the door so the wait staff can return lost keys, but the keys are so cheap (and may be out of date by the time the wait staff finds it) that I can't imagine this being worth the danger.
Basically, technology makes us more efficient, which is an assertion that few on slashdot are going to dispute. This means we can either do more with our time, or have more leisure time and look "lazier" to someone without proper context.
During the dawn of agriculture, humans had to work their butts off every day tending to fields or getting ready for the winter or they would die. These days you can work a mere 8 hours a day in a cushy office job and have all of the food and shelter you need. Modern man looks a lot lazer--he only works half as much time wise--but due to technology he's actually contributing more to society than his primitive ancestor.
I don't know, if I were trying to subvert the system I think I'd have the machine work completely properly for the first thousand votes or so, then every so often count an one candidate as the other. Maybe 1% of the time or so. That's all you need to swing votes one way or the other. I know those election workers are supposed to test it, but given how motivated they are when I get there, I have trouble believing that they put more than a couple dozen votes in. Also, maybe this goes without saying, but someone DOES record those little counters at the end of the day and compare them to the numbers uploaded from the machine right?
That said, I don't really trust the Diebold machines either, but thus far nobody has given me any solid evidence of wrongdoing.
Eh, unless your memory, power supply, or memory controller are marginal flipped bits are pretty damn rare. They do exist, I used to work for a place that had 50+ SGI Challenge XLs loaded to the gills with memory. We had to write special filters in the log watcher to filter out "Single bit parity error" messages, because there would be several of them per day. However, this was over thousands of memory sticks. On the one or two sticks you have in your PC, it's almost unheard of. You're far more likely to lose data due to an OS glitch. It's just extra money spent that probably won't correct a single bit in it's entire lifetime.
Anecdotal evidence: I have an old PII-400 at home with ECC memory. Thus far it has yet to correct a single bit error, despite being on 24/7 since January of 1998.
In other words, are you going to allow for a tiny amount of uncertainty (which may just be noise compared to the uncertainty you get from other parts of the system), for extra performance and cost savings? That's what you need to ask yourself. OTOH, parity checks are an easy way to spot a failing memory module, which can make debugging a hardware problem so much simpler.
I guess this is a good time to test the old saying:
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the core.
Still, you have to be pretty desperate to say "sure, give me some random dead person's face, mine sucks".
"Freedom of Travel" sounds nice on paper, but Air Traffic Control exists for a reason. In Africa you could get away with it for awhile because not many people would be able to afford air travel, but it wouldn't take long for the problem to get out of hand. Imagine if you will if nearly every traffic accident were fatal. Think of how many accients (even "fender benders") we have each year and you can see how quickly that would turn into a nightmare. The FAA isn't conservative because it's run by old guys who don't know how to do new things, they're conservative because if they try something new and it doesn't work, people die.
I prefer Grave of the Fireflies personally. Not only is it a powerful film, but it is also obviously not aimed at children (although strangely it was shown as a double feature with My Neighbor Totoro!) and won't make people think that all foreign animation is porn.
On the other hand it's hard to get people to sit through an entire showing of Grave of the Fireflies, it's just so relentlessly depressing.
Back when Be was still making BeBoxes (best name ever) they were already doomed. My roommate had a Be system and I got to play around with it a bit. It was extremely nice, especially with the way it handled media (you could play multi channel audio back when even getting full duplex working on OSS was a major pain in the butt).
The problem was that it was somewhat difficult to port applications to the box. The networking in particular seemed to cause lots of problems. This ment that in 1996 (I think) there were still no decent webbrowsers for Beos. That sort of problem was endemic with Beos too. Unless you were willing to port the applications yourself, about the only thing you could do with the OS was give people impressive multimedia demos and explain how cool the filesystem is. Granted, there was a community around porting applications to Be, but they weren't well organized from what I saw.
It's possible Be has changed in the time since I saw it last, and now has a compatability layer that lets it compile stuff written for Linux right out of the box (does it support X apps yet?), but even with that it's hard to see why I would want to use it.
That would be fine except that sometimes a 250 GB drive is actually 249.7 GB. Drive manufacturers round up just as often as they round down. The best practice I've found is just to cut off the last 0.5% of the drive or so, but it's still annoying.
Fantasia isn't a childrens movie! Heck, I've yet to meet a kid that doesn't find it boring. Unfortunatly, just because it was animated people assume it is aimed at kids.