Since all the other users are fed from your town hall, why feed them comcast cable? Receive comcast at the townhall, and then transmit analog cable down the lines to all your other locations?
Most hotels do this, they have a single feed into the building and then handle their own feeds into all the sets via various methods (some hotels use iptv for instance).
Most smokers i encounter don't think like that, they try very hard to justify that it's not really very damaging or deny that its harmful at all... They also try to claim that people around them won't be affected by the fumes, for instance i know someone who stands by a window to smoke to give the impression that hes thinking about the other non smokers around him, yet he completely refuses to accept that a large amount of that smoke actually gets blown back inside.
Ingest yes, but smoking is an extremely inefficient method of ingesting anything...
The majority of it goes up in the air, where it is inhaled by people nearby wether they want to or not. Shouldn't people also be free to choose *not* to ingest something?
In countries with nationalized healthcare, does the tax revenue from smoking (and separately from alcohol for that matter) cover the cost of the healthcare required to deal with the results? Not to mention the cost of cleaning up the mess smokers leave (the streets are covered in the filters, most smokers simply toss them aside once finished) and all the instances of fire being caused by smoking.
Turkey are also an islamic nation, and their national team tends to be quite good... They made it to the last 4 in 2002 for instance.
Because of the way qualifying is done in regional groups, you usually get some low ranking teams qualifying... If qualifying was entirely based on ability you'd typically only see european and south american teams at the finals.
North Korea did surprisingly well, they held their own against Brazil who have traditionally been one of if not the best team.. People were amazed when it got to half time and it was still 0:0, and even more amazed when north korea actually scored in the second half. Sure they lost, but this was a team ranked 105 (and weren't they ranked lower at the time?) playing against the team ranked 1. North Korea were also the first asian team to reach the quarter finals in 1966, it took until 2002 for another asian team to better their record.
But consider that england is where football was started, and england operates the most widely watched club football league in the world... Many chinese like to gamble on the outcome of football rather than actually play it themselves, and a lot of those would rather watch the english premier league than local chinese leagues.
China actually failed to qualify for the world cup finals this year, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and i believe Australia also qualify in the asian region now...
A lot of commercial vendors treat independent researchers with contempt (how dare they find holes in our products) or as slaves (they should do the work our quality control dept should, for free)... White hat researchers are doing these vendors a favor and often get treated extremely badly in return. If you scare off the white hat researchers, then there will be more vulnerabilities for the black hat ones to find and exploit, and they won't publicise it they will just sell it to the highest bidder.
Personally i would leave commercial software to the black hats, and concentrate on finding (and fixing) security bugs in open source... With open source it's a give and take, you might be helping them by finding bugs but they're helping you by providing the software to you for free in the first place. And the commercial vendors would prefer this, since the black hats don't generate as much bad publicity for them (its in their interests to keep out of the mass media).
If a vulnerability exists but it's not being exploited en masse (ie only being exploited by a small number of blackhats on a small scale) commercial vendors often won't fix it because to release a fix would admit a problem exist... Sometimes they will silently release a patch bundled with another update so they don't have to admit to all the bugs.
But how soon can i buy these laptops? It's all well and good talking about it and showing prototypes, but i want to buy one of these ARM based laptops... The only ARM based laptops i see for sale right now are older models, usually running windows ce with very little memory or storage and pitiful battery life (usually because of a tiny battery rather than inefficient design)...
I have an EEE901 right now, 2gb ram, solid state 20gb drive, 9" screen... something with similar power to this, but significantly better battery life and perhaps a little thinner/lighter would suit me just fine.
Not only do i have a lot of stupid power bricks, but when i go somewhere for work i have to carry 2 laptops and 2 different power bricks... When i arrive, the client will undoubtedly have their own laptops but most likely they wont have compatible power to mine.
If i could walk around with no power bricks and be sure that any laptop supply would be compatible things would be much easier. Even just carrying one brick instead of 2 would be a huge improvement.
Considering that the internal components of laptops are largely standardised, its pretty alarming that manufacturers still use all kinds of different connectors and voltages...
On the other hand, the Apple magsafe connectors are pretty neat (and has saved me a few times) and noone else seems to have copied them yet...
Even on desktops you quite often get non standard power supplies on pre-assembled machines, they tend to be the lowest quality units too so you can't just buy a normal ATX replacement once the proprietary one dies.
Blame Microsoft... There are plenty of open royalty free filesystems out there, but MS refuse to implement them and want you to pay royalties to use their own filesystems instead, so people use fat32 because its the least patented of the few filesystems MS do bother to support.
Mounting the stick readonly is to protect yourself against liability more than anything else (what if your kiosk corrupts the customers filesystem or deletes their files?) On the other hand, you could use a hardware reader which is designed to be read only so the software cannot write to it regardless... If the customer inserts a CDROM there is no chance of it being written to if the kiosk doesn't have a writer device.
Preventing anything malicious from executing in the first place is another matter entirely, and also needs fixing.
Why run windows on these kiosks? An embedded OS would be more suitable and cheaper...
Why execute anything thats stored on the usb sticks? That's just colossally stupid, i could understand if some malware was getting onto the devices by exploiting a bug in the jpeg parser or similar, but executing any code on an inserted device is just ridiculous. Why is the inserted media not mounted read only? These kiosks only need to print photos, they don't need to write to the media. Why is the system drive writable? Why is the kiosk software running as a privileged user?
The idea of installing antivirus on them is a stupid one, it will increase the cost, require the kiosks to be updated somehow (either necessitating frequent engineer visits or require a network connection), and no antivirus detects everything (i often do incident response when a customer system has been compromised, in every single case there has been some kind of av product installed and it failed to detect the compromise even tho in most cases the malware installed is well known to other av products).
Also an av product may detect a false positive on a customer's media device and delete their data which could open the kiosk vendor up to potential liability.
Instead, run an embedded linux on these systems... the frontend software is custom written anyway so could just be written for linux instead without too much difficulty.. less to go wrong since such an os could be stripped to its bare minimum less cost - there would be no per unit licensing costs.. mount any customer supplied media readonly and noexec. boot the os from readonly flash so the os cannot be tampered with and any problems a reboot will restore it to default/clean settings use ram for temporary storage (or a small disk which is reformatted at boot if more storage is required) so after a power cycle, anything left on there is gone if any persistent storage is required (eg for logs) use a remote syslog server, a receipt printer, or a small disk mounted noexec use something like an internal readonly compact flash card for the os, when an engineer has to upgrade all he needs to is swap the card out.
You also find that windows users try to use macos (or linux) as if it was windows, and don't take advantage of features like multiple workspaces, and try to run every app maximized on the screen and use alt+tab to switch between apps. Sure this works, but you're really not getting the most from the system if you use it this way, i find multiple workspaces absolutely essential and couldn't live without them.
But i agree with the grandparent's point, people are more comfortable with what they're used to, and it takes them quite some time to get used to anything different regardless of which is technically superior.
If you can get all those libs compiled under rh9 sure... It's possible to build a whole userland from libc up within your own homedir without root, the only requirement is that the version of libc be compiled for your kernel version or earlier (which generally means you cant just tar up the libs from a newer distro).
While nonstandard addons are a problem, nonstandard addons which aren't documented for other people to implement are much worse. Many of the nonstandard css properties are in-development implementations of new standard features which don't properly comply to the standards yet... Having the beta features under their own properties until they're working correctly is arguably a lot better than having straight broken implementations.
The point is that competition benefits the majority, so the government - which supposedly acts on behalf of the majority, should ensure that free competition is able to take place. This is the whole purpose of a government.
Without a government, you theoretically have a completely free society.. What happens in reality is that you get war until one faction is powerful enough to take control and once in control, will use every underhanded method available to them in order to retain control.
A completely unregulated market works exactly the same way, one player will claw their way to the top and then do whatever they can to stay there.
But this is exactly what the government does, there are government mandated standards for virtually everything, and industry seems to get along just fine by competing within the framework of those standards.
You consider "innovation" to be "stifling competition" ?
I never said you can't invent a new mechanism to do anything, just that if you come up with a new mechanism to store or transmit data it must be a clear improvement on what already exists, and you must disclose the details of how it works so third parties can interoperate.
Take ODF vs OOXML... MS could have done the decent thing, like everyone else in the industry and cooperated with the development of ODF... However, because by doing that they would not have had total control, only an equal say relative to everyone else, they created their own format which has been pointed out to suffer from a large number of design flaws.
Many companies simply do not innovate at all, their sole aim is to lock people in to their own product which is equivalent or inferior... If you're going to make something that's no better than what exists and yet is demonstrably worse (ie its proprietary and locks you in) then this shouldn't be allowed.
What numbers are technically "authorised" is actually very hard to determine.. It might be relatively simple in a case like this where the destination number and voicemail system belong to the same telco, but consider for a moment.
Roaming - your number which belongs to one telco, now exists at a roaming partner in a different country.
Interconnects - if i use one telco and call a customer of a completely different telco, how is that call routed? it might be through third parties, how do you keep track of who owns what number?
Companies with multiple lines - at work we have lines from 3 different providers for resiliency, however when making an outbound call we always present our main switchboard number as the cli - the switchboard number only belongs to one of the 3 suppliers but we can announce it through all 3.
When i make calls from home via my voip phone (because its cheaper) i always present the cli of my mobile, so that people know who's calling and can call back even if i'm not at home.
You can do end to end encryption with an iphone too... It has a VPN client, and all of the other protocols it supports (imap, smtp, caldav, activesync etc) work over SSL.
Infact i would argue it's better, because it uses known protocols, talks to a server you control (ie you can choose your implementation of the above protocols), and is direct from your telcos network to your network without any third party involvement.
You'd be surprised just how long grossly incompetent staff can keep bungling along... You'll only go out of business if you're massively worse than the competition, but they also hire bungling incompetents. Anyone who hires decent staff may offer a far better service, but their costs will now be higher.
Distribution of physical media is so cheap anyway, how much do you think it costs to press cd/dvd media in bulk?
The cost of distribution has been getting cheaper and cheaper for years, while the cost of prerecorded media has steadily gone up... Downloads are simply the next step to further gouge the customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Since all the other users are fed from your town hall, why feed them comcast cable?
Receive comcast at the townhall, and then transmit analog cable down the lines to all your other locations?
Most hotels do this, they have a single feed into the building and then handle their own feeds into all the sets via various methods (some hotels use iptv for instance).
Most smokers i encounter don't think like that, they try very hard to justify that it's not really very damaging or deny that its harmful at all...
They also try to claim that people around them won't be affected by the fumes, for instance i know someone who stands by a window to smoke to give the impression that hes thinking about the other non smokers around him, yet he completely refuses to accept that a large amount of that smoke actually gets blown back inside.
Ingest yes, but smoking is an extremely inefficient method of ingesting anything...
The majority of it goes up in the air, where it is inhaled by people nearby wether they want to or not. Shouldn't people also be free to choose *not* to ingest something?
In countries with nationalized healthcare, does the tax revenue from smoking (and separately from alcohol for that matter) cover the cost of the healthcare required to deal with the results? Not to mention the cost of cleaning up the mess smokers leave (the streets are covered in the filters, most smokers simply toss them aside once finished) and all the instances of fire being caused by smoking.
Turkey are also an islamic nation, and their national team tends to be quite good... They made it to the last 4 in 2002 for instance.
Because of the way qualifying is done in regional groups, you usually get some low ranking teams qualifying... If qualifying was entirely based on ability you'd typically only see european and south american teams at the finals.
North Korea did surprisingly well, they held their own against Brazil who have traditionally been one of if not the best team.. People were amazed when it got to half time and it was still 0:0, and even more amazed when north korea actually scored in the second half. Sure they lost, but this was a team ranked 105 (and weren't they ranked lower at the time?) playing against the team ranked 1. North Korea were also the first asian team to reach the quarter finals in 1966, it took until 2002 for another asian team to better their record.
But consider that england is where football was started, and england operates the most widely watched club football league in the world...
Many chinese like to gamble on the outcome of football rather than actually play it themselves, and a lot of those would rather watch the english premier league than local chinese leagues.
China actually failed to qualify for the world cup finals this year, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and i believe Australia also qualify in the asian region now...
A lot of commercial vendors treat independent researchers with contempt (how dare they find holes in our products) or as slaves (they should do the work our quality control dept should, for free)...
White hat researchers are doing these vendors a favor and often get treated extremely badly in return. If you scare off the white hat researchers, then there will be more vulnerabilities for the black hat ones to find and exploit, and they won't publicise it they will just sell it to the highest bidder.
Personally i would leave commercial software to the black hats, and concentrate on finding (and fixing) security bugs in open source... With open source it's a give and take, you might be helping them by finding bugs but they're helping you by providing the software to you for free in the first place. And the commercial vendors would prefer this, since the black hats don't generate as much bad publicity for them (its in their interests to keep out of the mass media).
If a vulnerability exists but it's not being exploited en masse (ie only being exploited by a small number of blackhats on a small scale) commercial vendors often won't fix it because to release a fix would admit a problem exist... Sometimes they will silently release a patch bundled with another update so they don't have to admit to all the bugs.
But how soon can i buy these laptops?
It's all well and good talking about it and showing prototypes, but i want to buy one of these ARM based laptops... The only ARM based laptops i see for sale right now are older models, usually running windows ce with very little memory or storage and pitiful battery life (usually because of a tiny battery rather than inefficient design)...
I have an EEE901 right now, 2gb ram, solid state 20gb drive, 9" screen... something with similar power to this, but significantly better battery life and perhaps a little thinner/lighter would suit me just fine.
The connection between the cable and MagSafe was fragile, but the newer versions are a lot more sturdy...
Not only do i have a lot of stupid power bricks, but when i go somewhere for work i have to carry 2 laptops and 2 different power bricks...
When i arrive, the client will undoubtedly have their own laptops but most likely they wont have compatible power to mine.
If i could walk around with no power bricks and be sure that any laptop supply would be compatible things would be much easier. Even just carrying one brick instead of 2 would be a huge improvement.
Considering that the internal components of laptops are largely standardised, its pretty alarming that manufacturers still use all kinds of different connectors and voltages...
On the other hand, the Apple magsafe connectors are pretty neat (and has saved me a few times) and noone else seems to have copied them yet...
Even on desktops you quite often get non standard power supplies on pre-assembled machines, they tend to be the lowest quality units too so you can't just buy a normal ATX replacement once the proprietary one dies.
Blame Microsoft...
There are plenty of open royalty free filesystems out there, but MS refuse to implement them and want you to pay royalties to use their own filesystems instead, so people use fat32 because its the least patented of the few filesystems MS do bother to support.
Mounting the stick readonly is to protect yourself against liability more than anything else (what if your kiosk corrupts the customers filesystem or deletes their files?)
On the other hand, you could use a hardware reader which is designed to be read only so the software cannot write to it regardless... If the customer inserts a CDROM there is no chance of it being written to if the kiosk doesn't have a writer device.
Preventing anything malicious from executing in the first place is another matter entirely, and also needs fixing.
Why run windows on these kiosks? An embedded OS would be more suitable and cheaper...
Why execute anything thats stored on the usb sticks? That's just colossally stupid, i could understand if some malware was getting onto the devices by exploiting a bug in the jpeg parser or similar, but executing any code on an inserted device is just ridiculous.
Why is the inserted media not mounted read only? These kiosks only need to print photos, they don't need to write to the media.
Why is the system drive writable?
Why is the kiosk software running as a privileged user?
The idea of installing antivirus on them is a stupid one, it will increase the cost, require the kiosks to be updated somehow (either necessitating frequent engineer visits or require a network connection), and no antivirus detects everything (i often do incident response when a customer system has been compromised, in every single case there has been some kind of av product installed and it failed to detect the compromise even tho in most cases the malware installed is well known to other av products).
Also an av product may detect a false positive on a customer's media device and delete their data which could open the kiosk vendor up to potential liability.
Instead, run an embedded linux on these systems...
the frontend software is custom written anyway so could just be written for linux instead without too much difficulty..
less to go wrong since such an os could be stripped to its bare minimum
less cost - there would be no per unit licensing costs..
mount any customer supplied media readonly and noexec.
boot the os from readonly flash so the os cannot be tampered with and any problems a reboot will restore it to default/clean settings
use ram for temporary storage (or a small disk which is reformatted at boot if more storage is required) so after a power cycle, anything left on there is gone
if any persistent storage is required (eg for logs) use a remote syslog server, a receipt printer, or a small disk mounted noexec
use something like an internal readonly compact flash card for the os, when an engineer has to upgrade all he needs to is swap the card out.
Don't they have to be trying to arrest you already in order for you to resist, and thus need grounds to justify the initial arrest attempt?
You also find that windows users try to use macos (or linux) as if it was windows, and don't take advantage of features like multiple workspaces, and try to run every app maximized on the screen and use alt+tab to switch between apps. Sure this works, but you're really not getting the most from the system if you use it this way, i find multiple workspaces absolutely essential and couldn't live without them.
But i agree with the grandparent's point, people are more comfortable with what they're used to, and it takes them quite some time to get used to anything different regardless of which is technically superior.
If you can get all those libs compiled under rh9 sure...
It's possible to build a whole userland from libc up within your own homedir without root, the only requirement is that the version of libc be compiled for your kernel version or earlier (which generally means you cant just tar up the libs from a newer distro).
While nonstandard addons are a problem, nonstandard addons which aren't documented for other people to implement are much worse.
Many of the nonstandard css properties are in-development implementations of new standard features which don't properly comply to the standards yet... Having the beta features under their own properties until they're working correctly is arguably a lot better than having straight broken implementations.
The point is that competition benefits the majority, so the government - which supposedly acts on behalf of the majority, should ensure that free competition is able to take place. This is the whole purpose of a government.
Without a government, you theoretically have a completely free society.. What happens in reality is that you get war until one faction is powerful enough to take control and once in control, will use every underhanded method available to them in order to retain control.
A completely unregulated market works exactly the same way, one player will claw their way to the top and then do whatever they can to stay there.
But this is exactly what the government does, there are government mandated standards for virtually everything, and industry seems to get along just fine by competing within the framework of those standards.
You consider "innovation" to be "stifling competition" ?
I never said you can't invent a new mechanism to do anything, just that if you come up with a new mechanism to store or transmit data it must be a clear improvement on what already exists, and you must disclose the details of how it works so third parties can interoperate.
Take ODF vs OOXML... MS could have done the decent thing, like everyone else in the industry and cooperated with the development of ODF... However, because by doing that they would not have had total control, only an equal say relative to everyone else, they created their own format which has been pointed out to suffer from a large number of design flaws.
Many companies simply do not innovate at all, their sole aim is to lock people in to their own product which is equivalent or inferior... If you're going to make something that's no better than what exists and yet is demonstrably worse (ie its proprietary and locks you in) then this shouldn't be allowed.
What numbers are technically "authorised" is actually very hard to determine.. It might be relatively simple in a case like this where the destination number and voicemail system belong to the same telco, but consider for a moment.
Roaming - your number which belongs to one telco, now exists at a roaming partner in a different country.
Interconnects - if i use one telco and call a customer of a completely different telco, how is that call routed? it might be through third parties, how do you keep track of who owns what number?
Companies with multiple lines - at work we have lines from 3 different providers for resiliency, however when making an outbound call we always present our main switchboard number as the cli - the switchboard number only belongs to one of the 3 suppliers but we can announce it through all 3.
When i make calls from home via my voip phone (because its cheaper) i always present the cli of my mobile, so that people know who's calling and can call back even if i'm not at home.
You can do end to end encryption with an iphone too...
It has a VPN client, and all of the other protocols it supports (imap, smtp, caldav, activesync etc) work over SSL.
Infact i would argue it's better, because it uses known protocols, talks to a server you control (ie you can choose your implementation of the above protocols), and is direct from your telcos network to your network without any third party involvement.
Those kids who die are poor kids with no money for buying political favors, the government couldn't care less about them.
You'd be surprised just how long grossly incompetent staff can keep bungling along...
You'll only go out of business if you're massively worse than the competition, but they also hire bungling incompetents. Anyone who hires decent staff may offer a far better service, but their costs will now be higher.
Distribution of physical media is so cheap anyway, how much do you think it costs to press cd/dvd media in bulk?
The cost of distribution has been getting cheaper and cheaper for years, while the cost of prerecorded media has steadily gone up... Downloads are simply the next step to further gouge the customers.