A "steep learning curve" is one where you go up, and get to the top, quickly, ie the thing is easy to learn quickly.
A "gentle learning curve" is one that you climb up slowly over a long time, ie the thing is a right pain to learn and takes ages.
So why do people who appear to know English get these the wrong way round? Is it perhaps that they're not illiterate, they're just innumerate and haven't a clue what a graph is?
Within hours of the news story appearing, our council leader had asked the council's legal officer to find out if there was any way that the council could refuse to accept these powers.
(It was so obvious that we didn't want these powers that the council leader issued these instructions before consulting his fellow councillors, as it seemed inconceivable that any of us would take a different view.)
None of us is in control of the technology we use.
I've long since given up reading the hardware specs for the processors I'm using and expecting to understand every wire on the circuit board and every byte of code in the PROM. (Yes, I used to do this.) It's just all too complicated, and one does wish to have some time left to use the stuff.
It all got too much for me when processors started caching stuff internally, so you could no longer see what they were doing by watching the data fetches with a logic analyser; it was at this point that you could no longer calculate how long a processor would take to do something, because the same instruction might take a different number of cycles depending on cache history; you had to just run the code several times and measure it.
So the fact that I don't have a copy of several million lines of source code that I have no desire at all to spend time reading doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Cost to me would be £0 - I need the MSDN Universal anyway, so it doesn't cost me anything extra to use more bits of it.
I'm sure a whole bunch of slashweenies will now accuse me of voluntarily paying a Microsoft tax, but I can assure you that I've made lots more money out of Microsoft than I've ever paid them, and I get a jolly good ROI on the subscription.
Put all the data on Exchange Server. Access it via VPN (unless or cable or ADSL supplier blocks incoming VPN, of course). If you need to access it from a box which doesn't have a suitable client use the web interface. You get moderately clever syncing with the message base on the lap top, which you can then use off line, and all the shared calendar stuff as well.
Basically, there isn't any, which means that a data user under EU legislation must make sure the data they hold doesn't leak to the US (or any other country without a comparable data protection regime).
This can be rather a pain. Suppose I am registered under UK data protection legislation to hold certain kinds of personal data for certain purposes (which I am[1]) and I want to send it to my mate who is also registered to hold the same data for the same purposes.
Am I allowed to send him this data via email, given that I can't prove that the email won't be routed via a US server which isn't subject to any laws protecting personal data?
The simple answer is that we don't know. Different people give different advice and AFAIK there hasn't been a test case.
[1] Under four separate registrations, so far, and I'm being told I need a fifth. Personally I think this is getting to be rather over the top.
I just don't trust the authorities enough to only put them where they're needed
I can assure you that like most other things local authorities do there is nowhere near enough money available to put cameras everywhere they are needed, and anyone who wasted precious resources putting a camera where it wasn't needed would be in trouble. With such a long backlog of requests for cameras where they are needed it is inconceivable that we'd put one somewhere it wasn't needed.
Surely putting more policemen on the street (diverting them from the motorways, maybe) would be a better solution?
I'm too lazy to look up the figures just right now, but it'll be something like a choice between one policeman, who can only be in one place at a time, for only eight hours a day, with no automatic recording for evidence of what his eyes see, or about eight cameras for the same money being monitored 24/7 and recording 24/7.
Just out of interest, what party are you a member of?
Lib Dem, but that doesn't make any difference to CCTV policy which is supported locally by all parties.
serious restrictions on where the police can put them
The police don't put them anywhere.
Not here, in Cambridge, anyway - it's run by the local council under democratic control, which means me and 41 other councillors. I can assure you that we get endless requests for extensions to the system and have not had a single complaint except where the system has failed to catch a criminal.
Sure, the council-employed operators cooperate with the police, but the police don't get to see anything that the council employees don't think they're entitled to according to the rules. For example, there needs to be a reasonable certainty that there is something serious in progress right now before the privacy screening can be turned off.
This is not a new idea - it was suggested years ago in an article in Wired.
Actually nobody in the UK (apart from the criminals) does anything but enthusiastically support the CCTV systems, particularly when a child goes missing.
As a district councillor I have been invited several times to visit our council's control room, but haven't bothered to find time yet because, whilst it would be an interesting visit, it's not a bit deal as I have precisely 0 constituents worried about CCTV who need to be reassured. (I think that in fact anyone who asks to visit the control room will get a tour. So in fact I think we already have public access to the CCTV pictures.)
The only complaints we get are that CCTV sometimes fails to catch criminals; and that there aren't enough CCTV cameras, which is a complaint we get every time there is a crime not covered by the camera system.
[Of course, in a country where everyone is entitled to own guns and they have more shootings than we have burglaries they might simply be used to being victims of crime as a way of life, and "privacy" nutters might, with the backing of the NRA, make more noise than they do here?]
He said that you could (theoretically) be outside the room quite some distance away as long as you had a half-way reasonable telescope. Of course you get a trade-off with distance, ambient lighting level (S/N ratio is the big problem) etc.
But he reckoned that if I sat at this computer right here with all the lights off and the curtains open the reflection of the monitor on the wall behind me should be readable from the bottom of the garden. (The monitor isn't facing the window so you can't read it directly with a telescope.)
Probably safe, though, because I only have all the lights off if I'm playing games - if I'm doing real work there's usually a light on.
... their lightplane industry before inventing any new product liability laws.
It got so that anyone who flew whilst drunk and crashed a plane that he hadn't maintained for years could sue the manufacturer for many millions with a fair chance of winning. And even if the manufacturer won their legal costs would wipe out the profit on many aircraft. So basically the US lightplane industry closed down. (It has since started up again, as a shadow of its former self, following some law changes.)
OK, that didn't affect all that many people. Closing down the software industry would be a different game altogether.
The brief version is that he had to buy a new scanner, new CD-burner software, upgrade to Office XP, upgrade to PAgemaker 7.0, buy new versions of kiddie games. And it all took a LOT of suffering on his part!
Well, there's no accounting for idiots, at the end of the day. When I upgrade an OS I do first check whether it has a hope in hell of supporting my hardware. Far too many hardware manufacturers can't be arsed to produce drivers for new operating systems to drive their obsolete hardware... for a very good reason, actually, which is it that it costs them money for no return - indeed, negative return, because if they don't bother to make the drivers they get to sell you a new piece of hardware.
It was ever thus. Anyone who tries to put a new OS on an old machine without being aware of this aspect of life has things to learn.
And the software? There's a lot of crap software out there. If you run commercial shrinkwrap software with appropriate debug tools you can spot all the bugs that the developers couldn't be arsed to detect and fix. It's reasonable that a new version of an OS will respond differently to broken API calls.
I'm slightly surprised that he "had" to upgrade to Office XP, though. What was he upgrading from, and what didn't work in the old version that meant he "had" to upgrade?
And all that playing around took how long before he could actually use the thing? After spending how long praticing (he does clearly say you need to know what you're doing)?
At my charge out rate I wonder how many copies of Windows I could buy for the same time...
Yes dear, I have written code in PostScript, both hand-coded programs (to generate forms etc) and machine generated (ie I've written PostScript printer drivers). In the mid 1980s IIRC.
But it's still not an appropriate language to distribute documents that you want anyone other than Unix users to read. This is a historical accident. For anyone who is too young to remember, this came about because the first decent laser printer happened to be a PostScript machine, and Unix didn't develope a printer driver model - instead everyone just emulated, one way or another, the LaserWriter. (I don't know if this has changed, I haven't found it profitable to do much work on Unix graphical apps the last few years.)
PDF is vastly more sensible as a general distribution format.
I usually take the distribution of a document in PostScript format as a message that I'm not part of the intended audience, and I don't read it. If I'm really not part of the intended audience then that's fine, of course, and everybody's happy; but if I was intended to use it then they got the format wrong.
Somewhat to my astonishment when I clicked on the link up popped a box asking me to confirm Postscript Renderer options! I had no idea that I had anything on this box that could read Postscript.
Some minutes of 100% CPU later up pops a PSP window, with the document rendered in a font about five pixels square. Fair enough, I suppose, for what's basically a photograph editing application.
But really, how bizarre, posting something in a low level printer file format. We'll have people posting documents in PCL5 next.
They've been doing similar in the UK for many years. You don't need the GPS rubbish either, you just arrange that the car doors lock the moment someone shuts them, and don't provide any means to open the doors or windows from inside.
I went to a talk by Roger Needham (a few years ago now, I don't know if this is still his view) on secure protocols. Lots of interesting stuff on strategies for designing secure protocols and algorithms, and theoretical attacks and so on.
But just passing mention of DOS attacks - these are boring to academics because they are easy to do and impossible to counter so there's no research to do and no papers to write.
(I paraphrase slightly, and I probably remember the details wrong anyway, so any flaming should be directed at me, not Roger.)
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Why oh why can't people get this right??
A "steep learning curve" is one where you go up, and get to the top, quickly, ie the thing is easy to learn quickly.
A "gentle learning curve" is one that you climb up slowly over a long time, ie the thing is a right pain to learn and takes ages.
So why do people who appear to know English get these the wrong way round? Is it perhaps that they're not illiterate, they're just innumerate and haven't a clue what a graph is?
Within hours of the news story appearing, our council leader had asked the council's legal officer to find out if there was any way that the council could refuse to accept these powers.
(It was so obvious that we didn't want these powers that the council leader issued these instructions before consulting his fellow councillors, as it seemed inconceivable that any of us would take a different view.)
None of us is in control of the technology we use.
I've long since given up reading the hardware specs for the processors I'm using and expecting to understand every wire on the circuit board and every byte of code in the PROM. (Yes, I used to do this.) It's just all too complicated, and one does wish to have some time left to use the stuff.
It all got too much for me when processors started caching stuff internally, so you could no longer see what they were doing by watching the data fetches with a logic analyser; it was at this point that you could no longer calculate how long a processor would take to do something, because the same instruction might take a different number of cycles depending on cache history; you had to just run the code several times and measure it.
So the fact that I don't have a copy of several million lines of source code that I have no desire at all to spend time reading doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Cost to me would be £0 - I need the MSDN Universal anyway, so it doesn't cost me anything extra to use more bits of it.
I'm sure a whole bunch of slashweenies will now accuse me of voluntarily paying a Microsoft tax, but I can assure you that I've made lots more money out of Microsoft than I've ever paid them, and I get a jolly good ROI on the subscription.
Put all the data on Exchange Server. Access it via VPN (unless or cable or ADSL supplier blocks incoming VPN, of course). If you need to access it from a box which doesn't have a suitable client use the web interface. You get moderately clever syncing with the message base on the lap top, which you can then use off line, and all the shared calendar stuff as well.
Basically, there isn't any, which means that a data user under EU legislation must make sure the data they hold doesn't leak to the US (or any other country without a comparable data protection regime).
This can be rather a pain. Suppose I am registered under UK data protection legislation to hold certain kinds of personal data for certain purposes (which I am[1]) and I want to send it to my mate who is also registered to hold the same data for the same purposes.
Am I allowed to send him this data via email, given that I can't prove that the email won't be routed via a US server which isn't subject to any laws protecting personal data?
The simple answer is that we don't know. Different people give different advice and AFAIK there hasn't been a test case.
[1] Under four separate registrations, so far, and I'm being told I need a fifth. Personally I think this is getting to be rather over the top.
I just don't trust the authorities enough to only put them where they're needed
I can assure you that like most other things local authorities do there is nowhere near enough money available to put cameras everywhere they are needed, and anyone who wasted precious resources putting a camera where it wasn't needed would be in trouble. With such a long backlog of requests for cameras where they are needed it is inconceivable that we'd put one somewhere it wasn't needed.
Surely putting more policemen on the street (diverting them from the motorways, maybe) would be a better solution?
I'm too lazy to look up the figures just right now, but it'll be something like a choice between one policeman, who can only be in one place at a time, for only eight hours a day, with no automatic recording for evidence of what his eyes see, or about eight cameras for the same money being monitored 24/7 and recording 24/7.
Just out of interest, what party are you a member of?
Lib Dem, but that doesn't make any difference to CCTV policy which is supported locally by all parties.
serious restrictions on where the police can put them
The police don't put them anywhere.
Not here, in Cambridge, anyway - it's run by the local council under democratic control, which means me and 41 other councillors. I can assure you that we get endless requests for extensions to the system and have not had a single complaint except where the system has failed to catch a criminal.
Sure, the council-employed operators cooperate with the police, but the police don't get to see anything that the council employees don't think they're entitled to according to the rules. For example, there needs to be a reasonable certainty that there is something serious in progress right now before the privacy screening can be turned off.
The Green Bike scheme was a totally mad idea by a previous adminstration.
The people currently running Cambridge City Council, including me, are not very likely to do anything quite as daft as that.
This is not a new idea - it was suggested years ago in an article in Wired.
Actually nobody in the UK (apart from the criminals) does anything but enthusiastically support the CCTV systems, particularly when a child goes missing.
As a district councillor I have been invited several times to visit our council's control room, but haven't bothered to find time yet because, whilst it would be an interesting visit, it's not a bit deal as I have precisely 0 constituents worried about CCTV who need to be reassured. (I think that in fact anyone who asks to visit the control room will get a tour. So in fact I think we already have public access to the CCTV pictures.)
The only complaints we get are that CCTV sometimes fails to catch criminals; and that there aren't enough CCTV cameras, which is a complaint we get every time there is a crime not covered by the camera system.
[Of course, in a country where everyone is entitled to own guns and they have more shootings than we have burglaries they might simply be used to being victims of crime as a way of life, and "privacy" nutters might, with the backing of the NRA, make more noise than they do here?]
Sorry, but I really don't understand this.
By taking time off work to see a film during working time you save how many dollars exactly on the price of the cinema ticket?
And the half day's income you lose is how much exactly?
Round here you'd lose even if you were unemployed, because the car parking charges during the day are so much more than during the evening.
but these are queued behnd each other, usually at least 2-3 minutes apart
No, dear, not at Heathrow, it's 90 seconds max usually. Just sit there with a watch and count them. Or listen in on the radio.
If there's a 3 minute gap it's because they've lost one.
He said that you could (theoretically) be outside the room quite some distance away as long as you had a half-way reasonable telescope. Of course you get a trade-off with distance, ambient lighting level (S/N ratio is the big problem) etc.
But he reckoned that if I sat at this computer right here with all the lights off and the curtains open the reflection of the monitor on the wall behind me should be readable from the bottom of the garden. (The monitor isn't facing the window so you can't read it directly with a telescope.)
Probably safe, though, because I only have all the lights off if I'm playing games - if I'm doing real work there's usually a light on.
... their lightplane industry before inventing any new product liability laws.
It got so that anyone who flew whilst drunk and crashed a plane that he hadn't maintained for years could sue the manufacturer for many millions with a fair chance of winning. And even if the manufacturer won their legal costs would wipe out the profit on many aircraft. So basically the US lightplane industry closed down. (It has since started up again, as a shadow of its former self, following some law changes.)
OK, that didn't affect all that many people. Closing down the software industry would be a different game altogether.
Doesn't this make it harder for RR "customers" to send out Usenet spam with totally forged headers and remain undetected?
Isn't this a Good Thing for everyone?
In particular it's a Good Thing for all RR customers who don't spam, as it means that other ISPs won't be denying connectivity to RR because of spam.
What have I misunderstood here?
Yes, that may well be accounting for idiots - I use Quicken myself, which was vastly better when I started using it.
The brief version is that he had to buy a new scanner, new CD-burner software, upgrade to Office XP, upgrade to PAgemaker 7.0, buy new versions of kiddie games. And it all took a LOT of suffering on his part!
... for a very good reason, actually, which is it that it costs them money for no return - indeed, negative return, because if they don't bother to make the drivers they get to sell you a new piece of hardware.
Well, there's no accounting for idiots, at the end of the day. When I upgrade an OS I do first check whether it has a hope in hell of supporting my hardware. Far too many hardware manufacturers can't be arsed to produce drivers for new operating systems to drive their obsolete hardware
It was ever thus. Anyone who tries to put a new OS on an old machine without being aware of this aspect of life has things to learn.
And the software? There's a lot of crap software out there. If you run commercial shrinkwrap software with appropriate debug tools you can spot all the bugs that the developers couldn't be arsed to detect and fix. It's reasonable that a new version of an OS will respond differently to broken API calls.
I'm slightly surprised that he "had" to upgrade to Office XP, though. What was he upgrading from, and what didn't work in the old version that meant he "had" to upgrade?
And all that playing around took how long before he could actually use the thing? After spending how long praticing (he does clearly say you need to know what you're doing)?
...
At my charge out rate I wonder how many copies of Windows I could buy for the same time
... was, and still is, collecting subscriptions in the USA.
Yes dear, I have written code in PostScript, both hand-coded programs (to generate forms etc) and machine generated (ie I've written PostScript printer drivers). In the mid 1980s IIRC.
But it's still not an appropriate language to distribute documents that you want anyone other than Unix users to read. This is a historical accident. For anyone who is too young to remember, this came about because the first decent laser printer happened to be a PostScript machine, and Unix didn't develope a printer driver model - instead everyone just emulated, one way or another, the LaserWriter. (I don't know if this has changed, I haven't found it profitable to do much work on Unix graphical apps the last few years.)
PDF is vastly more sensible as a general distribution format.
I usually take the distribution of a document in PostScript format as a message that I'm not part of the intended audience, and I don't read it. If I'm really not part of the intended audience then that's fine, of course, and everybody's happy; but if I was intended to use it then they got the format wrong.
Somewhat to my astonishment when I clicked on the link up popped a box asking me to confirm Postscript Renderer options! I had no idea that I had anything on this box that could read Postscript.
Some minutes of 100% CPU later up pops a PSP window, with the document rendered in a font about five pixels square. Fair enough, I suppose, for what's basically a photograph editing application.
But really, how bizarre, posting something in a low level printer file format. We'll have people posting documents in PCL5 next.
They've been doing similar in the UK for many years. You don't need the GPS rubbish either, you just arrange that the car doors lock the moment someone shuts them, and don't provide any means to open the doors or windows from inside.
They pissed me off with lousy customer service years ago so I junked the account.
You must live in the wrong house then :-)
I went to a talk by Roger Needham (a few years ago now, I don't know if this is still his view) on secure protocols. Lots of interesting stuff on strategies for designing secure protocols and algorithms, and theoretical attacks and so on.
But just passing mention of DOS attacks - these are boring to academics because they are easy to do and impossible to counter so there's no research to do and no papers to write.
(I paraphrase slightly, and I probably remember the details wrong anyway, so any flaming should be directed at me, not Roger.)