surely there has to be cheaper and less invasive methods of doing so
So one might have thought. But nobody has come up with one that works. Publishing the crime statistics, for example, doesn't work, because people don't believe them.
Try explaining all that to a "little old lady" who's just be beaten up
I've never had to - like I said, this doesn't actually happen very often. Most of the violent crime round here is drunken young men hitting each other, and they're perfectly happy to do it under the cameras, being too drunk to care about being caught.
Most cameras are located in city centres, not on council estates where they are really needed!!
Some are on council estates. And some are mobile, and can be put wherever there's a problem.
As a councillor who participates in decisions about deploying these cameras...
The deterrent effect is debated. However there are some effects which are for real and not open to debate:
(1) When a perp is caught on camera they are more likely to plead guilty and save lots of time and money in the court system. (This is why the court system puts up some of the cost of the cameras.)
(2) People who have been suspected of an offence have been proved not to be guilty by camera footage, thus eliminating the possibility of a miscarriage of justice.
(3) The people like the cameras and keep asking for more of them.
And the main benefit:
(4) Fear of crime is reduced.
It's not the level of actual crime that makes little old ladies to frightened to leave their houses in the evening to go to the bingo, it's fear of crime. Sticking up cameras does not reduce the number of little old ladies who are mugged on their way to bingo (because this crime is pretty well non-existent to start with) but it does make the old ladies feel confident to go out, which is a significant improvement in their quality of life.
All Microsoft is about money-grubbing ...
on
Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 1
Some of you slashweenies are so out of touch with the real world it's not true, and one wonders how you manage to drive the system well enough to eat.
In many jurisdictions it is the legal duty of a board of directors to maximise shareholder value - that's what a company is, that's what it does, and if it did anything different the shareholders would sue.
So, criticising a company for trying to make money is completely stupid.
I prefer the Brit[t]ish (which I guess that term isn't right if you are from Northern Ireland?)
Well, there's:
England England and Wales Great Britain The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
which are reasonably easily identifiable differnt geographical and legal entities, most bits of most of which are in the EU quite a lot of the time, but it becomes more complicated if you want to try to define what
Britain
means, or to work out which of the above do or don't include
The Isle of Man The Channel Islands.
Yes, there are places you can travel to and from, starting from the English mainland, where you don't need a passport, find the same money (Sterling) at the other end, but do pass through customs.
Once you get into the adjectives (like British) it starts getting complicated, though, given the various different descriptions of nationality you can find on UK passports.
Not quite... one lady wrote such a long detailed list of her hobbies that we wondered how on earth she could ever find any time to do any work... so we didn't interview her. So, that section of her CV was useful to us.
I always found it funny that, in the UK, you can get married and have sex at the age of 16; yet you can't look at porno until you are 18.
Uh?? You need parental consent to marry at 16, and your parent can get an X rated video from the rental shop for you. What's the difference? (Apart from being able to watch porn online and on telly without parental consent of course.)
Er, wot, you mean, like the little plastic bit that's all you need to repair your 15 year old washing machine, for example, rather than having to throw it away and buy a new one?
Most spammers are from overseas in non-cooperative countries (with the US). This is a US law. What do they care?
The vast majority of spam I get is US-based. Sure, it's been passed through a Chinese server or a hacked Italian ADSL box on the way, but the request to send US dollars to a US postal address is sometimes a bit of a give-away.
Apart from the Nigerian stuff, most of which seems come from Amsterdam these days, spam is very largely a US product.
Does this new law make it illegal for US citizens to spam foreigners (whether or not using an offshore relay)? Thought not. Business as usual.
every single piece of their equipment will be in the Middle East for the next century or so
It's not all in the middle east, unless you include the Balkans and Cyprus as "middle east", and even then you probably don't count Belize and the Falklands as "middle east", and from time to time there are British troops on other continents too.
When I was programming, I only processed email 2-3 times a day (morning, right before lunch, and towards the end of the day) and this worked very well.
Don't work too well if some of the email comes from the change control system and says, in effect, "drop what you're doing and fix this bug now because there are five people waiting for it".
... won't accept emailed instructions to do anything, not even a Word document with an embedded picture which is my scanned signature.
But they will accept a fax as an instruction do to something... even if the fax is a Word document with an embedded picture which is my scanned signature.
(Actually this is quite useful. If something needs to be done with my wife's bank account whilst she's in the US on a jolly, I've got her signature on disk and can just send a fax to her bank. (I usually remember to email or text her to tell her I've done this.))
In many jursidictions companies have a legal obligation to maximise shareholder value, so can't take the money from shareholders.
If they put their prices up the customers will go elsewhere, so they can't take the money from customers.
Which leaves employees. "Hi guys and gals, you won't mind a 10% pay cut to fund our contribution to the open source community, will you?". Yeah, right.
But MacOS X also doesn't have things like RPC and Windows Messenger Service enabled by default.
Macs also don't seem to have DHCP client enabled by default... we plugged one into our network to see what we could get it to do, and gave up after a couple of hours of failing to find out how to turn on the DHCP client. Not going to waste time on one of those ever again.
I buy a packaged consumer product and install it on my computer.
Why should I be expected to know there is such a thing as a firewall and that I should install it?
To put it simply, that's unrealistic. Sure, geeks should know better, but the general public shouldn't have to.
I buy a packaged consumer product and install it on my computer.
Whenever I try to do anything it spouts gibberish at me, like "access denied", "consult your systems adminstrator", "you don't have permission to do that", "consider enabling UDP port 1234 outbound on interface zzzz", "you need to urgle the flombat", "system error 5".
Why should I be epxected to understand all this gibberish? It's my computer, I bought it, I paid for it, it's mine, it has no business telling me I'm not allowed to do things. I want to install it and just have it work without my having to learn whether any of this technobabble actually means anything.
To put it simply, that's unrealistic. Sure, geeks can cope with all this stuff, but the general public shouldn't have to.
There are times where it is possible to compute stuff in, say, WHERE clauses using standard SQL, but it's an enormous pain and being able to write a little function in a "real" programming language makes things vastly easier.
MS Access programmers have been doing this for a very long time, with little VBA (or Access Basic if you're old enough) functions saving vast screeds of incomprehensible and possibly rather slow SQL arithmetic and/or substring manipulation.
With Java (or C or anything else) functions running on the server in MySQL you get all those wins plus the win of not having to pull the data to the client to look at it.
(Recent example: I had to write some MySQL SQL code to convert a field representing a latitude/longitude value from a numeric GSM encoding to a string in the format "dd:mm:ss.sss". Possible, but dozens of lines of SQL and utterly utterly horrible. One trivial Java function on the server would have been lots less tedious.)
Anyone know how to make a Mac work as a DHCP client in the first place??
We plugged one into our network, just wanting to use the web browser, and spent several hours wandering round all the network configuration dialogs we could find. We could find nothing at all that would persuade the Mac to actually go and ask the DHCP server for an IP address. (So we junked it and carried on just using real computers.)
You can represent tree structured data dead easily in.INI files (as long as your API for parsing them can enumerate sections and keys, not just ask for ones by names you already know).
Actually there's nothing forcing you to stop at trees; you could represent arbitrary directed graphs in.INI files without any trouble, other than that of remembering that your application needs to avoid running round loops forever.
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surely there has to be cheaper and less invasive methods of doing so
So one might have thought. But nobody has come up with one that works. Publishing the crime statistics, for example, doesn't work, because people don't believe them.
Politicians don't do logic much, we prefer statistics.
Little old ladies getting mugged before = 0
Little old ladies getting mugged after = 0
Increase = 0%
Try explaining all that to a "little old lady" who's just be beaten up
I've never had to - like I said, this doesn't actually happen very often. Most of the violent crime round here is drunken young men hitting each other, and they're perfectly happy to do it under the cameras, being too drunk to care about being caught.
Most cameras are located in city centres, not on council estates where they are really needed!!
Some are on council estates. And some are mobile, and can be put wherever there's a problem.
As a councillor who participates in decisions about deploying these cameras ...
The deterrent effect is debated. However there are some effects which are for real and not open to debate:
(1) When a perp is caught on camera they are more likely to plead guilty and save lots of time and money in the court system. (This is why the court system puts up some of the cost of the cameras.)
(2) People who have been suspected of an offence have been proved not to be guilty by camera footage, thus eliminating the possibility of a miscarriage of justice.
(3) The people like the cameras and keep asking for more of them.
And the main benefit:
(4) Fear of crime is reduced.
It's not the level of actual crime that makes little old ladies to frightened to leave their houses in the evening to go to the bingo, it's fear of crime. Sticking up cameras does not reduce the number of little old ladies who are mugged on their way to bingo (because this crime is pretty well non-existent to start with) but it does make the old ladies feel confident to go out, which is a significant improvement in their quality of life.
Some of you slashweenies are so out of touch with the real world it's not true, and one wonders how you manage to drive the system well enough to eat.
In many jurisdictions it is the legal duty of a board of directors to maximise shareholder value - that's what a company is, that's what it does, and if it did anything different the shareholders would sue.
So, criticising a company for trying to make money is completely stupid.
I prefer the Brit[t]ish (which I guess that term isn't right if you are from Northern Ireland?)
Well, there's:
England
England and Wales
Great Britain
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
which are reasonably easily identifiable differnt geographical and legal entities, most bits of most of which are in the EU quite a lot of the time, but it becomes more complicated if you want to try to define what
Britain
means, or to work out which of the above do or don't include
The Isle of Man
The Channel Islands.
Yes, there are places you can travel to and from, starting from the English mainland, where you don't need a passport, find the same money (Sterling) at the other end, but do pass through customs.
Once you get into the adjectives (like British) it starts getting complicated, though, given the various different descriptions of nationality you can find on UK passports.
What's with this "Funny" moderation then -- it was all absolutely true!!!!!
Nobody gives a crap about your hobbies
... one lady wrote such a long detailed list of her hobbies that we wondered how on earth she could ever find any time to do any work ... so we didn't interview her. So, that section of her CV was useful to us.
Not quite
I always found it funny that, in the UK, you can get married and have sex at the age of 16; yet you can't look at porno until you are 18.
Uh?? You need parental consent to marry at 16, and your parent can get an X rated video from the rental shop for you. What's the difference? (Apart from being able to watch porn online and on telly without parental consent of course.)
Er, wot, you mean, like the little plastic bit that's all you need to repair your 15 year old washing machine, for example, rather than having to throw it away and buy a new one?
Nah, it'll never catch on, daft idea.
Most spammers are from overseas in non-cooperative countries (with the US). This is a US law. What do they care?
The vast majority of spam I get is US-based. Sure, it's been passed through a Chinese server or a hacked Italian ADSL box on the way, but the request to send US dollars to a US postal address is sometimes a bit of a give-away.
Apart from the Nigerian stuff, most of which seems come from Amsterdam these days, spam is very largely a US product.
Does this new law make it illegal for US citizens to spam foreigners (whether or not using an offshore relay)? Thought not. Business as usual.
Like, don't fly one of these things on four hundred feet of string inside an ATZ?
Please?
I really wouldn't want to fly into one.
every single piece of their equipment will be in the Middle East for the next century or so
It's not all in the middle east, unless you include the Balkans and Cyprus as "middle east", and even then you probably don't count Belize and the Falklands as "middle east", and from time to time there are British troops on other continents too.
When I was programming, I only processed email 2-3 times a day (morning, right before lunch, and towards the end of the day) and this worked very well.
Don't work too well if some of the email comes from the change control system and says, in effect, "drop what you're doing and fix this bug now because there are five people waiting for it".
Daft bank ... anyone could be sending them a fax with a scan of my signature.
... won't accept emailed instructions to do anything, not even a Word document with an embedded picture which is my scanned signature.
... even if the fax is a Word document with an embedded picture which is my scanned signature.
But they will accept a fax as an instruction do to something
(Actually this is quite useful. If something needs to be done with my wife's bank account whilst she's in the US on a jolly, I've got her signature on disk and can just send a fax to her bank. (I usually remember to email or text her to tell her I've done this.))
Who's going to pay to put something back?
In many jursidictions companies have a legal obligation to maximise shareholder value, so can't take the money from shareholders.
If they put their prices up the customers will go elsewhere, so they can't take the money from customers.
Which leaves employees. "Hi guys and gals, you won't mind a 10% pay cut to fund our contribution to the open source community, will you?". Yeah, right.
Wasn't a troll, was a genuine problem. We couldn't find anything as obvious as you're suggesting.
But MacOS X also doesn't have things like RPC and Windows Messenger Service enabled by default.
... we plugged one into our network to see what we could get it to do, and gave up after a couple of hours of failing to find out how to turn on the DHCP client. Not going to waste time on one of those ever again.
Macs also don't seem to have DHCP client enabled by default
I buy a packaged consumer product and install it on my computer.
Why should I be expected to know there is such a thing as a firewall and that I should install it?
To put it simply, that's unrealistic. Sure, geeks should know better, but the general public shouldn't have to.
I buy a packaged consumer product and install it on my computer.
Whenever I try to do anything it spouts gibberish at me, like "access denied", "consult your systems adminstrator", "you don't have permission to do that", "consider enabling UDP port 1234 outbound on interface zzzz", "you need to urgle the flombat", "system error 5".
Why should I be epxected to understand all this gibberish? It's my computer, I bought it, I paid for it, it's mine, it has no business telling me I'm not allowed to do things. I want to install it and just have it work without my having to learn whether any of this technobabble actually means anything.
To put it simply, that's unrealistic. Sure, geeks can cope with all this stuff, but the general public shouldn't have to.
They just don't get it, do they?
There are times where it is possible to compute stuff in, say, WHERE clauses using standard SQL, but it's an enormous pain and being able to write a little function in a "real" programming language makes things vastly easier.
MS Access programmers have been doing this for a very long time, with little VBA (or Access Basic if you're old enough) functions saving vast screeds of incomprehensible and possibly rather slow SQL arithmetic and/or substring manipulation.
With Java (or C or anything else) functions running on the server in MySQL you get all those wins plus the win of not having to pull the data to the client to look at it.
(Recent example: I had to write some MySQL SQL code to convert a field representing a latitude/longitude value from a numeric GSM encoding to a string in the format "dd:mm:ss.sss". Possible, but dozens of lines of SQL and utterly utterly horrible. One trivial Java function on the server would have been lots less tedious.)
Over here if you did that at 1400 feet you'd be in serious trouble. (Rule 5: 1500 feet over congested areas.)
Anyone know how to make a Mac work as a DHCP client in the first place??
We plugged one into our network, just wanting to use the web browser, and spent several hours wandering round all the network configuration dialogs we could find. We could find nothing at all that would persuade the Mac to actually go and ask the DHCP server for an IP address. (So we junked it and carried on just using real computers.)
You can represent tree structured data dead easily in .INI files (as long as your API for parsing them can enumerate sections and keys, not just ask for ones by names you already know).
.INI files without any trouble, other than that of remembering that your application needs to avoid running round loops forever.
Actually there's nothing forcing you to stop at trees; you could represent arbitrary directed graphs in