They have made themselves one of the explicit exceptions to the automated dialing laws they passed. "Here's a law that stops our voters from being harassed over the phone by everyone, except us of course."
There are a few additional exceptions, but not many. There ought to be a law that bans electoral bodies from passing laws with provisions to make the voting body an exception to the law being passed. Just one of those "I can't believe they had the balls to do that" stunts by our country's legislature. Really, if they can get away with that, they can get away with about anything.
Most business people, like investors in general, dislike surprises, and prefer to know their risks in advance. The trick is to present the situation in non-threatening terms, so that the boss feels like you're trying to make more money for him.
How true. They'd much rather hear how your change is going to make them money than prevent the loss of money. Fortunately, it's usually possible to spin words (honestly) between the two forms.
I had to push for a 10bt 24 port ethernet switch in 1996, back when switches were mad expensive. ($1500) Instead of explaining how we were losing productivity every day due to the bottlenecks and slow network, I explained the benefits of faster boot time and end-of-day processing. Same message, different words. And the morning after, he had a line outside his office with people wanting to know "what the hell did you do to the server last night??!" That was fun, savor the victories. Fortunately, from that point forward they had a lot more trust in my recommendations when money needed to be spent.
Yep. Hop into the waders and get to work. It can be a very rewarding experience turning a steaming pile back into a smooth running good looking machine.
To add to the above, document everything. Though it sounds like you're already doing that. Make sure it's documentation that works for anyone not just you. Don't take anything for granted. Automate whatever you can, including problem detection and notification. (save yourself from having to check things daily or weekly, have it shoot you an email or something if a common issue crops up again)
Make sure your employer fully understands the situation you and they are in, so they don't expect you to be doing improvements and striking things off their sore to-do-list that they were probably hoping you'd tackle the day you started. Get them a timeline as soon as you get something of a grip on the situation, tell them where you're going to be spending your time to start with, and the reasons why it's essential and going to delay their getting their bells and whistles and visible bang-for-the-buck of hiring you. Otherwise they may think you're just sitting on your butt because they're seeing no tangible benefits.
If you've got a LOT of things that need to be fixed, things that can be done by closer to trained-monkey level, consider getting a temp assistant to help you dig out. Someone to run around and reimage machines, fix networks, repair stations, do RMAs, etc while you pull up your sleeves and unhack the servers. But if they're not in that big of a hurry this may not be appropriate.
Good luck with it, sounds like fun actually, a challenge at the least.
as long as competitors' smartphones and tablets bear no resemblance to smartphones and tablets
That's not how to avoid infringement, that's how to avoid litigation. And in this game, that's not the way business is done. There's "what's illegal" and there's "what you'll get called on". Somewhere in between there lies "what I can get away with". And that's generally what many shoot for. Staying in your comfort zone will just get you buried in the harsh world of business.
So really, getting a suit brought for infringement at this level really isn't big news. Losing said fight is bad, for whoever loses. It either gives someone a free pass to continue without (as much) further harassment, or tosses a large bucket of water in your foundry. It's a gamble for both sides.
Apple has a pisspile of ("good" and "bad") patents and prior art on tablet design and touch interfaces, and if you try to compete in their market with something they think they can shove you out with, you can absolutely bet on them trying. It's just good business. And in this case Apple has a strong upper hand because of their early successes in these markets. Don't blame Apple. Whoever made it to the top of the hill first is naturally going to work hard to push the others off as they approach, that's just how the game is played. Doesn't matter if it was Samsung, Google, Nokia, Microsoft, whoever. They'd be doing exactly the same thing if they were in Apple's position right now, fighting to stay on top.
hopefully you have a battery of unit tests and functional regression tests
Or just plain boobytrap the code all over the place with sanity checks and known gotcha conditions, spiked with good comments and explanations.
I ran across that just last week when developing an importer for iTunes music library - reusing an xml class I wrote 3 yrs ago, it blew out on me with a "you're being STUPID" sort of error message just under a dozen times during development. Opening up said code block revealed comments I made when I wrote the sanity check, describing WHY it had coughed up the message, and more importantly, what was causing the problem.
I of course had little to no memory of ever writing them, but there they were, providing me an instant catch-me-up in the why's of my code, and saved me from having to relearn all the internals and subtleties that went into writing that bug-free, beautiful, and time-saving class of code.
That's one of the great things about having a poor long-term memory - it forces you to comment (and liberally sanity check) your own code well, not because someone else will need it, but because you are going to need it. You get to be the direct beneficiary of your own good practices.
Doesn't have to. Every piece of airborne tech like that is rigged in two fundamental ways:
1. software and firmware is encrypted, and the decryption keys are uploaded to the device when it is being armed - these keys are never stored and exist only in volatile ram. A series of serially-connected failsafes provide power to the memory storing the key. If any of them is triggered or damaged, the key is erased and the software and firmware on the device are bricked as a result. While the gear left onboard without software may be useful, it's greatly devaluated when you're going to have to try to develop software to run it, assuming you can even figure out HOW to run it. This system is both passive and reliable. A single piece of flak hitting a UAV is very likely to turn the UAV into a dead stick that will fall out of the sky as a result of software loss.
2. small explosive charges are placed on critical components and will be detonated if possible. This active system isn't guaranteed - a lucky hit could disable the primary and backup power (or triggering intelligence) for these explosives and they aren't to be relied as heavily upon. Hard drives for example on flight recorders have a small pack of explosives inside the hard drive to spray metal fragments all around the spinning platters to insure a fast, thorough erasure if needed.
Considering the sensitivity given by (1), and the slow moving predictable flight characteristics of these UAVs, it's not the least bit surprising that they get downed from time to time. Heck, a birdstrike could take one down. There won't be much of use when it hits the ground, and that's by design. Better safe than sorry. They'd much rather lose a unit from time to time due to oversensitive protections than to have an intact unit fall into enemy hands.
Except that the walled garden DOESN'T reduce tech support nightmares.
What flavor of kool-aid have you been drining?
I'm certain that at least 95% of the techs out there among us would agree, all the people around us that require tech support - family, friends, coworkers, friends of family, friends of friends, we see it all. Face reality, some people need walled gardens. My mom needs a walled garden. She'll click on a link that looks like something I might have sent her, she's done it already. Education only helps so much. If you're the IT support for a company and someone offers you a walled garden you can put your users into, where they lose zero productivity and at the same time cut your support headaches in half, you can benefit from the walled garden. You'd be negligent to not at least explore the option.
Walled gardens are like your local police. In "your perfect world", the police aren't necessary. Everyone has a gun and knows how to use it and can defend and take care of themselves. But that doesn't work in the real world. And you can't just say the best solution is to make sure everyone has a gun and training on using it. That's just not practical. In a community of people with widely varying levels of expertise you need a central defense system of some sort to protect those that can't protect themselves.
Now it's certain, walled gardens provide companies with a lot of leverage and control. You certainly wouldn't want your local police department in the pocket of any company. It's ripe for abuse, and companies always take advantage of it to some degree. Companies have three main reasons to create walled gardens. The first two are your favorite straw men: for lock-in and to lower competition. The third is the creation of a safe, reliable, "it just works" environment to provide their customers with a better experience that they will value above the other available offerings. But that's the price you as the customer are paying for the huge benefits you are receiving for being within the safety of the walled garden. If you don't like that, you're free to step outside and polish up your gun and fend for yourself. You can move out to some ranch in arizona and do whatever you like, with a lot more freedom.
I have no grounds to argue against your right to step out on your own and take on the world or to force you to live within the walls. And for that same reason you have no business trying to drag us out of our garden. The polls have been open for quite awhile now, and the public has voted with their wallets and bought scads of ipads, ipods, iphones, etc. And you will be unable to find more than 5% of them that don't like the walled garden they've chosen to live in. You are in the super-minority here. I can see why you're unhappy with it, but lets face it, how you want to live your life isn't the same as how most of the rest of us do. You either want the rest of the world to voluntarily change how they do things and make their lives more complicated and less pleasant as a result, or you want to tell others how they're supposed to live their lives. And I'm very thankful you can't do either.
The walled garden I've chosen to live in has walls that aren't so tall as to prevent me from climbing out from time to time when I want to, and yet they keep out 99.9% of the riff-raff. And I'm quite happy with it like it is. And so are most of the rest of us in here. Enjoy your stay outside the wall, and I'm not saying it's impossible for you to enjoy it, but where you've chosen to live is not the optimal place for the grand majority of us. For sure there are a few of us inside here that don't like the wall, but they're still here - because they value some of the benefits of being in the garden more than they dislike the wall. Leave us and the garden alone - don't ruin it for everyone.
I never understood this. Of all the electronic things in the world, why is there such a scare on this? It's almost always possible to make electronics RF-proof, just by adding a little shielding or filter components. I know, I'm a ham operator and when you're pumping out up to 1500 watts of RF, (10,000x and up of what a remote meter transmits) you learn how to control your gear and how to retrofit your neighbors' crappy electronics when you start talking over their cheap bathroom TV or computer speakers.
I just don't see why it's even become a suspect issue with medical equipment. That stuff, of all things, should be sealed up RF-tight and properly filtered by default. When I go into a hospital and see signs saying to turn off cell phones and don't use computer wifi, all I can think of is why, when you are making absurdly expensive medical gear (I doubt anything electronic in that building can be had for under a grand, and a lot of it is over 50) why on earth you don't put sufficient R&D into it to make it immune to weak sources of common interference? This shouldn't be a credible issue, in any hospital circumstances.
IMHO the mention of medical equipment (ooooh!) is just a lame stab at some headline sensationalism.
it doesn't surprise me at all that scientists are finding all sorts of neat uses for graphene. (curious, that's NOT in my dictionary here...) The main novelty here is they're dealing with a building material on an atomic scale. Since things behave very differently at those scales, it's only natural to find new uses for it. And this is only one element they're working with. Imagine what all awaits discovery at the nano scale?
It's like all these years you've been somehow managing to fix fine swiss watches using a baseball bat and tire iron for tools, getting at best mediocre results and only modest improvements from time to time. Now someone hands you a tweezers. Hey, this works better! really? They need to explore other nano materials instead of concentrating all their time on this one new one.
this isn't even slightly surprising. the carrier is the #1 obstacle between Apple and their iPhone. It's the one aspect they have very little control over, (or that even has a bit of control over them) and I'm sure anyone at Apple would love to see an independent network to run their iPhones on.
Right now what does someone do if they get a lot of dropped calls? blame Apple. Sometimes it's Apple's fault like with the antennas, but Apple fixed that, because they could. What now? still getting dropped calls? AT&T sucks? There's really nothing Apple can do about that. Apple is completely dependent on the carriers to make their product work well, or work at all for that matter. Any business that has one of their flagship products held by the balls by a company they have little to no control over is naturally going to be looking for alternatives. It's not good when your company is at another company's mercy.
He created the Twitter account as part of his job, so it does belong the company.
If he created and maintained it on company time, then there's probably a good argument for that. But if it was done entirely on his own time, and he wasn't being compensated for it, then good luck, you'd better be able to prove it was a gift.
Just because you're doing something that someone else feels they are benefiting from doesn't mean they own it. They have to ask for it, and they have to give you something in return for it, OR you have to explicitly state you're giving it away. "real property" is the same way, no receipt and no proof of gift, and no, you can't have it, it's still mine.
If I bring a screwdriver to work and use it, for a few months, and then go somewhere else, you can't have my screwdriver. His employer will need to prove to the court that they asked him to spend company time on making and maintaining the page (or paid him something else extra or offered some other compensation for doing it) to win this case.
It can't be easy to determine where the cuts are going to be made if you've decided to not just do an even across-the-board cut. Most divisions within any sizable company could have good arguments made for not selecting them for cuts.
Unless your company has a "wing" ripe for picking anyway. Something that can be cut out all at once like a tumor without much effect to the rest of the company. You just have to hope you have quality bean-counters working closely with the company directors/visionaries to determine the best places to trim the fat. Mistakes get made when one or the other of those two groups has too much say in the decision. One way you shoot yourself in the foot, and the other way you just slow the trip down the drain.
hmmm, I last recall reading that magnitude numbers are log10, and that an 8.0 is ten times as powerful as a 7.0? or maybe that referred to the apparent effect at ground level, not to the actual energy, which I'll admit I have no idea if they are very different orders.
First off I can't believe that drilling causes earthquakes. Earthquakes are caused by slippage during the course of tectonic plate movements. So saying that drilling "causes" earthquakes is silly.
What I can believe is that it causes quakes to come earlier and smaller, by slightly lowering the stiction between the plates. Looked at this way, it would seem to be a benefit rather than an evil disaster-maker? I think most places would much prefer to have a handful of 4.0's instead of the occasional 6.5.
Afaik, the only manmade earthquakes involve using very large explosives (h bombs) or conventional explosives on bedrock. (there are numerous examples of explosives being set off near bedrock and breaking windows for miles as a result of transmission of the blast through the bedrock - neither is a true earthquake but with somewhat similar effect)
so it's (A) a kernel bug with a kernel API, and (B) an application bug that passes the exploit on to the kernel? So it's not one bug, but two, one in the kernel and one in the app?
Most run off style voting systems don't require a second poll if one candidate gets a majority of the vote in the initial run.
Agreed, the basic idea here is to be able to say that the elected official "has the support of over half the voting population". If you got 40% of the vote and the other 5 candidates got 5,5,10,10,30%, you do a runoff and that forces the ones that voted in the 5 and 10% camps to pick a side that has stronger support of the people.
It's still possible of course for that 30% candidate to win the runoff though depending on how the votes were divided. The reason its normally the cutoff is that even if all the people that didn't vote for you got behind one candidate you would still win. But voters are fickle, it's quite possible a few percent of people that voted for you did so because they didn't expect their first pick to have a chance, and the runoff changed their mind.
So I'd like to see a runoff on any election where the top taker doesn't get at least 60% of the vote and the next in line got at least 35%, let those top two run off.
Lets say there was a result of 11 / 37 / 52, I'd like to see that ran-off. Even if it doesn't produce a different outcome, at least there's a good chance that a hunk of that 11% will peel off to the 52 camp, and will increase public support for the elected official. It's hard to perform confidently and with public support in your position when the press keeps talking about your "just barely enough to scrape by" victory at the polls. Or maybe you get 49 / 51 at the polls - but at least you know where you stand. If you end it with 11 / 37 / 52, you really don't know how much support you really have once you're in office.
To clear it up, the reason I think 11 / 37 / 52 may produce a different result in a runoff is that in theory all 11% will vote with the 37, leading to a 48 / 52, BUT also some of the 52 may have voted for C because they really didn't expect B to win and didn't want any chance of A getting into office, so now they switch to B now because B has a better chance of winning and A is no longer a danger. (possibly leading to a 51 / 49 outcome?) I know it's not terribly likely, but likely enough I think.
In theory, for large elections, I'd like to see presidential and gubernatorial elections fall into some second election if the turnout is very close (48 / 52 etc) and force some sort of public debate to see if issues can be clarified and widen the gap, but there's no chance of that happening.
When I read this I was wondering how many were on the ballot. if there were 10 on the ballot, this guy could easily have gotten triple the number of votes of his next contender.
That's why runoff elections are good in cases like that, take say the top two or three from the first vote and then shake that out with one more vote.
do you have a kernel security bug in a word processor?
Normally I'd be exaggerating with a statement like this, but not this time I think: "only with Microsoft..." Every time I see something like this I can't help but think they can't possibly pull off something stupider. And yet somehow they just keep doing it.
when they stopped messing with the FBI and defense contractors and moved up to Mexican drug cartels.
And here I thought those two would be about on even ground in terms of power, ruthlessness, and lawlessness. But clearly the Zetas have the FBI beat on overall intimidation. Guess that's the difference between getting dumped in prison vs hung from an overpass?
As I understand it, the government now shreds anything important (paper, hard drive, etc) down to less than 1mm on a side, so it's not such an easy problem these days - veyr many disctint pieces, and not much distinctness along the edges.
Depends on how much they value their privacy. Subs cross cut, then run it through another machine that somehow grinds that into what can best be described as "coarse paper dust", and then they flush the dust out into the water, while they're at depth. (i.e. not only a tough dumpster-dive, but there is no dumpster)
It appears to be a widely held viewpoint3 that thereâ(TM)s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers donâ(TM)t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If thatâ(TM)s really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isnâ(TM)t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone.
I think if you want to compare iphones with other smartphones you need to focus on this differing philosophy. Neither Apple nor anyone else makes much money on their phone OS, they make money selling hardware. Apple will charge you a small amount ($5 iirc) to upgrade your phone to their later OS when released, but that amount is trivial and is probably more tied to making it a purchase and making their TOS more binding than anything. (remember the laptop 802-11N updater they also sold for $5 so long ago?)
They all use their OS to increase value in the product they sell, the phone hardware. Thing is, Apple and everyone else want you to buy a new phone from them every few years. They're not too interested in selling (or giving) you updates to their OS on your existing phone. They probably would prefer your old phone to rot at version 1.0 of whatever it shipped with, to encourage you to buy a new phone from them. From that viewpoint, Apple is the one acting strangely, not Nokia and Sony etc. But they're very successful, just by viewing the results they're getting you have to assume they know what they are doing and it's a good strategy. I think right now Apple would prefer to take a small cut in their sales of their new phone in exchange for boosting public impression of their products, both old and new.
Apple already has a bit of a cult following and a "ooo new shiney, must have it!" customer base, so they're probably a lot less worried about the negative sales impact of keeping their old phones' OS up to date. And I think that's pretty much the final word on it.
Re:Any chance of breaking the Indus valley script?
on
Copiale Cipher Decoded
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· Score: 1
Even a short glance at the article shows frequency analysis isn't going to work well. Most letters had more than one symbol that could map to them - common letters like vowels had numerous variations, "E" had 7 symbols that mapped to it. So even a short word could be written several different ways. A long word could easily be unique in a passage of this size even if it occurred statistically frequently. That's a really good idea when you think about it, and is probably the reason why this has gone undecoded for so long.
Also the roman characters weren't "junk", they were word separations. (instead of using spaces) Word separation certainly isn't junk in a cipher.
I don't blame the voters.. not really a choice in front of them:
K from MIB 1:
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
This is directly applicable to voters. A voter is smart. Voters are greedy, short-sighted, selfish animals and you know it.
Unfortunately, any democracy, given enough time, will fall into the trap that this creates, because companies tend to be smart both alone and in groups, and through slow, continuous effort will eventually get the system rigged in their favor. The USA has been this way for almost a century. (and many would argue longer)
This all boils down to the simple truth that any successful company is run by a group of intelligent people, who do an above-average job of working the system to their advantage. People on the other hand, are a random lot that sometimes are smart and sometimes are dumb. (and moreoften than not are dumb on any large scale) And eventually, smart all the time wins over smart some of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
They have made themselves one of the explicit exceptions to the automated dialing laws they passed. "Here's a law that stops our voters from being harassed over the phone by everyone, except us of course."
There are a few additional exceptions, but not many. There ought to be a law that bans electoral bodies from passing laws with provisions to make the voting body an exception to the law being passed. Just one of those "I can't believe they had the balls to do that" stunts by our country's legislature. Really, if they can get away with that, they can get away with about anything.
How true. They'd much rather hear how your change is going to make them money than prevent the loss of money. Fortunately, it's usually possible to spin words (honestly) between the two forms.
I had to push for a 10bt 24 port ethernet switch in 1996, back when switches were mad expensive. ($1500) Instead of explaining how we were losing productivity every day due to the bottlenecks and slow network, I explained the benefits of faster boot time and end-of-day processing. Same message, different words. And the morning after, he had a line outside his office with people wanting to know "what the hell did you do to the server last night??!" That was fun, savor the victories. Fortunately, from that point forward they had a lot more trust in my recommendations when money needed to be spent.
Yep. Hop into the waders and get to work. It can be a very rewarding experience turning a steaming pile back into a smooth running good looking machine.
To add to the above, document everything. Though it sounds like you're already doing that. Make sure it's documentation that works for anyone not just you. Don't take anything for granted. Automate whatever you can, including problem detection and notification. (save yourself from having to check things daily or weekly, have it shoot you an email or something if a common issue crops up again)
Make sure your employer fully understands the situation you and they are in, so they don't expect you to be doing improvements and striking things off their sore to-do-list that they were probably hoping you'd tackle the day you started. Get them a timeline as soon as you get something of a grip on the situation, tell them where you're going to be spending your time to start with, and the reasons why it's essential and going to delay their getting their bells and whistles and visible bang-for-the-buck of hiring you. Otherwise they may think you're just sitting on your butt because they're seeing no tangible benefits.
If you've got a LOT of things that need to be fixed, things that can be done by closer to trained-monkey level, consider getting a temp assistant to help you dig out. Someone to run around and reimage machines, fix networks, repair stations, do RMAs, etc while you pull up your sleeves and unhack the servers. But if they're not in that big of a hurry this may not be appropriate.
Good luck with it, sounds like fun actually, a challenge at the least.
That's not how to avoid infringement, that's how to avoid litigation. And in this game, that's not the way business is done. There's "what's illegal" and there's "what you'll get called on". Somewhere in between there lies "what I can get away with". And that's generally what many shoot for. Staying in your comfort zone will just get you buried in the harsh world of business.
So really, getting a suit brought for infringement at this level really isn't big news. Losing said fight is bad, for whoever loses. It either gives someone a free pass to continue without (as much) further harassment, or tosses a large bucket of water in your foundry. It's a gamble for both sides.
Apple has a pisspile of ("good" and "bad") patents and prior art on tablet design and touch interfaces, and if you try to compete in their market with something they think they can shove you out with, you can absolutely bet on them trying. It's just good business. And in this case Apple has a strong upper hand because of their early successes in these markets. Don't blame Apple. Whoever made it to the top of the hill first is naturally going to work hard to push the others off as they approach, that's just how the game is played. Doesn't matter if it was Samsung, Google, Nokia, Microsoft, whoever. They'd be doing exactly the same thing if they were in Apple's position right now, fighting to stay on top.
Or just plain boobytrap the code all over the place with sanity checks and known gotcha conditions, spiked with good comments and explanations.
I ran across that just last week when developing an importer for iTunes music library - reusing an xml class I wrote 3 yrs ago, it blew out on me with a "you're being STUPID" sort of error message just under a dozen times during development. Opening up said code block revealed comments I made when I wrote the sanity check, describing WHY it had coughed up the message, and more importantly, what was causing the problem.
I of course had little to no memory of ever writing them, but there they were, providing me an instant catch-me-up in the why's of my code, and saved me from having to relearn all the internals and subtleties that went into writing that bug-free, beautiful, and time-saving class of code.
That's one of the great things about having a poor long-term memory - it forces you to comment (and liberally sanity check) your own code well, not because someone else will need it, but because you are going to need it. You get to be the direct beneficiary of your own good practices.
Doesn't have to. Every piece of airborne tech like that is rigged in two fundamental ways:
1. software and firmware is encrypted, and the decryption keys are uploaded to the device when it is being armed - these keys are never stored and exist only in volatile ram. A series of serially-connected failsafes provide power to the memory storing the key. If any of them is triggered or damaged, the key is erased and the software and firmware on the device are bricked as a result. While the gear left onboard without software may be useful, it's greatly devaluated when you're going to have to try to develop software to run it, assuming you can even figure out HOW to run it. This system is both passive and reliable. A single piece of flak hitting a UAV is very likely to turn the UAV into a dead stick that will fall out of the sky as a result of software loss.
2. small explosive charges are placed on critical components and will be detonated if possible. This active system isn't guaranteed - a lucky hit could disable the primary and backup power (or triggering intelligence) for these explosives and they aren't to be relied as heavily upon. Hard drives for example on flight recorders have a small pack of explosives inside the hard drive to spray metal fragments all around the spinning platters to insure a fast, thorough erasure if needed.
Considering the sensitivity given by (1), and the slow moving predictable flight characteristics of these UAVs, it's not the least bit surprising that they get downed from time to time. Heck, a birdstrike could take one down. There won't be much of use when it hits the ground, and that's by design. Better safe than sorry. They'd much rather lose a unit from time to time due to oversensitive protections than to have an intact unit fall into enemy hands.
What flavor of kool-aid have you been drining?
I'm certain that at least 95% of the techs out there among us would agree, all the people around us that require tech support - family, friends, coworkers, friends of family, friends of friends, we see it all. Face reality, some people need walled gardens. My mom needs a walled garden. She'll click on a link that looks like something I might have sent her, she's done it already. Education only helps so much. If you're the IT support for a company and someone offers you a walled garden you can put your users into, where they lose zero productivity and at the same time cut your support headaches in half, you can benefit from the walled garden. You'd be negligent to not at least explore the option.
Walled gardens are like your local police. In "your perfect world", the police aren't necessary. Everyone has a gun and knows how to use it and can defend and take care of themselves. But that doesn't work in the real world. And you can't just say the best solution is to make sure everyone has a gun and training on using it. That's just not practical. In a community of people with widely varying levels of expertise you need a central defense system of some sort to protect those that can't protect themselves.
Now it's certain, walled gardens provide companies with a lot of leverage and control. You certainly wouldn't want your local police department in the pocket of any company. It's ripe for abuse, and companies always take advantage of it to some degree. Companies have three main reasons to create walled gardens. The first two are your favorite straw men: for lock-in and to lower competition. The third is the creation of a safe, reliable, "it just works" environment to provide their customers with a better experience that they will value above the other available offerings. But that's the price you as the customer are paying for the huge benefits you are receiving for being within the safety of the walled garden. If you don't like that, you're free to step outside and polish up your gun and fend for yourself. You can move out to some ranch in arizona and do whatever you like, with a lot more freedom.
I have no grounds to argue against your right to step out on your own and take on the world or to force you to live within the walls. And for that same reason you have no business trying to drag us out of our garden. The polls have been open for quite awhile now, and the public has voted with their wallets and bought scads of ipads, ipods, iphones, etc. And you will be unable to find more than 5% of them that don't like the walled garden they've chosen to live in. You are in the super-minority here. I can see why you're unhappy with it, but lets face it, how you want to live your life isn't the same as how most of the rest of us do. You either want the rest of the world to voluntarily change how they do things and make their lives more complicated and less pleasant as a result, or you want to tell others how they're supposed to live their lives. And I'm very thankful you can't do either.
The walled garden I've chosen to live in has walls that aren't so tall as to prevent me from climbing out from time to time when I want to, and yet they keep out 99.9% of the riff-raff. And I'm quite happy with it like it is. And so are most of the rest of us in here. Enjoy your stay outside the wall, and I'm not saying it's impossible for you to enjoy it, but where you've chosen to live is not the optimal place for the grand majority of us. For sure there are a few of us inside here that don't like the wall, but they're still here - because they value some of the benefits of being in the garden more than they dislike the wall. Leave us and the garden alone - don't ruin it for everyone.
well yes, ambulance chasers will tend to be in higher concentrations in hospitals I suppose...
I never understood this. Of all the electronic things in the world, why is there such a scare on this? It's almost always possible to make electronics RF-proof, just by adding a little shielding or filter components. I know, I'm a ham operator and when you're pumping out up to 1500 watts of RF, (10,000x and up of what a remote meter transmits) you learn how to control your gear and how to retrofit your neighbors' crappy electronics when you start talking over their cheap bathroom TV or computer speakers.
I just don't see why it's even become a suspect issue with medical equipment. That stuff, of all things, should be sealed up RF-tight and properly filtered by default. When I go into a hospital and see signs saying to turn off cell phones and don't use computer wifi, all I can think of is why, when you are making absurdly expensive medical gear (I doubt anything electronic in that building can be had for under a grand, and a lot of it is over 50) why on earth you don't put sufficient R&D into it to make it immune to weak sources of common interference? This shouldn't be a credible issue, in any hospital circumstances.
IMHO the mention of medical equipment (ooooh!) is just a lame stab at some headline sensationalism.
it doesn't surprise me at all that scientists are finding all sorts of neat uses for graphene. (curious, that's NOT in my dictionary here...) The main novelty here is they're dealing with a building material on an atomic scale. Since things behave very differently at those scales, it's only natural to find new uses for it. And this is only one element they're working with. Imagine what all awaits discovery at the nano scale?
It's like all these years you've been somehow managing to fix fine swiss watches using a baseball bat and tire iron for tools, getting at best mediocre results and only modest improvements from time to time. Now someone hands you a tweezers. Hey, this works better! really? They need to explore other nano materials instead of concentrating all their time on this one new one.
this isn't even slightly surprising. the carrier is the #1 obstacle between Apple and their iPhone. It's the one aspect they have very little control over, (or that even has a bit of control over them) and I'm sure anyone at Apple would love to see an independent network to run their iPhones on.
Right now what does someone do if they get a lot of dropped calls? blame Apple. Sometimes it's Apple's fault like with the antennas, but Apple fixed that, because they could. What now? still getting dropped calls? AT&T sucks? There's really nothing Apple can do about that. Apple is completely dependent on the carriers to make their product work well, or work at all for that matter. Any business that has one of their flagship products held by the balls by a company they have little to no control over is naturally going to be looking for alternatives. It's not good when your company is at another company's mercy.
If he created and maintained it on company time, then there's probably a good argument for that. But if it was done entirely on his own time, and he wasn't being compensated for it, then good luck, you'd better be able to prove it was a gift.
Just because you're doing something that someone else feels they are benefiting from doesn't mean they own it. They have to ask for it, and they have to give you something in return for it, OR you have to explicitly state you're giving it away. "real property" is the same way, no receipt and no proof of gift, and no, you can't have it, it's still mine.
If I bring a screwdriver to work and use it, for a few months, and then go somewhere else, you can't have my screwdriver. His employer will need to prove to the court that they asked him to spend company time on making and maintaining the page (or paid him something else extra or offered some other compensation for doing it) to win this case.
It can't be easy to determine where the cuts are going to be made if you've decided to not just do an even across-the-board cut. Most divisions within any sizable company could have good arguments made for not selecting them for cuts.
Unless your company has a "wing" ripe for picking anyway. Something that can be cut out all at once like a tumor without much effect to the rest of the company. You just have to hope you have quality bean-counters working closely with the company directors/visionaries to determine the best places to trim the fat. Mistakes get made when one or the other of those two groups has too much say in the decision. One way you shoot yourself in the foot, and the other way you just slow the trip down the drain.
hmmm, I last recall reading that magnitude numbers are log10, and that an 8.0 is ten times as powerful as a 7.0? or maybe that referred to the apparent effect at ground level, not to the actual energy, which I'll admit I have no idea if they are very different orders.
First off I can't believe that drilling causes earthquakes. Earthquakes are caused by slippage during the course of tectonic plate movements. So saying that drilling "causes" earthquakes is silly.
What I can believe is that it causes quakes to come earlier and smaller, by slightly lowering the stiction between the plates. Looked at this way, it would seem to be a benefit rather than an evil disaster-maker? I think most places would much prefer to have a handful of 4.0's instead of the occasional 6.5.
Afaik, the only manmade earthquakes involve using very large explosives (h bombs) or conventional explosives on bedrock. (there are numerous examples of explosives being set off near bedrock and breaking windows for miles as a result of transmission of the blast through the bedrock - neither is a true earthquake but with somewhat similar effect)
Just like all those SQL-using web apps. that's been such an effective solution there, leaving security in the hands of the application developers.
so it's (A) a kernel bug with a kernel API, and (B) an application bug that passes the exploit on to the kernel? So it's not one bug, but two, one in the kernel and one in the app?
Agreed, the basic idea here is to be able to say that the elected official "has the support of over half the voting population". If you got 40% of the vote and the other 5 candidates got 5,5,10,10,30%, you do a runoff and that forces the ones that voted in the 5 and 10% camps to pick a side that has stronger support of the people.
It's still possible of course for that 30% candidate to win the runoff though depending on how the votes were divided. The reason its normally the cutoff is that even if all the people that didn't vote for you got behind one candidate you would still win. But voters are fickle, it's quite possible a few percent of people that voted for you did so because they didn't expect their first pick to have a chance, and the runoff changed their mind.
So I'd like to see a runoff on any election where the top taker doesn't get at least 60% of the vote and the next in line got at least 35%, let those top two run off.
Lets say there was a result of 11 / 37 / 52, I'd like to see that ran-off. Even if it doesn't produce a different outcome, at least there's a good chance that a hunk of that 11% will peel off to the 52 camp, and will increase public support for the elected official. It's hard to perform confidently and with public support in your position when the press keeps talking about your "just barely enough to scrape by" victory at the polls. Or maybe you get 49 / 51 at the polls - but at least you know where you stand. If you end it with 11 / 37 / 52, you really don't know how much support you really have once you're in office.
To clear it up, the reason I think 11 / 37 / 52 may produce a different result in a runoff is that in theory all 11% will vote with the 37, leading to a 48 / 52, BUT also some of the 52 may have voted for C because they really didn't expect B to win and didn't want any chance of A getting into office, so now they switch to B now because B has a better chance of winning and A is no longer a danger. (possibly leading to a 51 / 49 outcome?) I know it's not terribly likely, but likely enough I think.
In theory, for large elections, I'd like to see presidential and gubernatorial elections fall into some second election if the turnout is very close (48 / 52 etc) and force some sort of public debate to see if issues can be clarified and widen the gap, but there's no chance of that happening.
When I read this I was wondering how many were on the ballot. if there were 10 on the ballot, this guy could easily have gotten triple the number of votes of his next contender.
That's why runoff elections are good in cases like that, take say the top two or three from the first vote and then shake that out with one more vote.
do you have a kernel security bug in a word processor?
Normally I'd be exaggerating with a statement like this, but not this time I think: "only with Microsoft..." Every time I see something like this I can't help but think they can't possibly pull off something stupider. And yet somehow they just keep doing it.
And here I thought those two would be about on even ground in terms of power, ruthlessness, and lawlessness. But clearly the Zetas have the FBI beat on overall intimidation. Guess that's the difference between getting dumped in prison vs hung from an overpass?
Depends on how much they value their privacy. Subs cross cut, then run it through another machine that somehow grinds that into what can best be described as "coarse paper dust", and then they flush the dust out into the water, while they're at depth. (i.e. not only a tough dumpster-dive, but there is no dumpster)
from the article,
I think if you want to compare iphones with other smartphones you need to focus on this differing philosophy. Neither Apple nor anyone else makes much money on their phone OS, they make money selling hardware. Apple will charge you a small amount ($5 iirc) to upgrade your phone to their later OS when released, but that amount is trivial and is probably more tied to making it a purchase and making their TOS more binding than anything. (remember the laptop 802-11N updater they also sold for $5 so long ago?)
They all use their OS to increase value in the product they sell, the phone hardware. Thing is, Apple and everyone else want you to buy a new phone from them every few years. They're not too interested in selling (or giving) you updates to their OS on your existing phone. They probably would prefer your old phone to rot at version 1.0 of whatever it shipped with, to encourage you to buy a new phone from them. From that viewpoint, Apple is the one acting strangely, not Nokia and Sony etc. But they're very successful, just by viewing the results they're getting you have to assume they know what they are doing and it's a good strategy. I think right now Apple would prefer to take a small cut in their sales of their new phone in exchange for boosting public impression of their products, both old and new.
Apple already has a bit of a cult following and a "ooo new shiney, must have it!" customer base, so they're probably a lot less worried about the negative sales impact of keeping their old phones' OS up to date. And I think that's pretty much the final word on it.
Even a short glance at the article shows frequency analysis isn't going to work well. Most letters had more than one symbol that could map to them - common letters like vowels had numerous variations, "E" had 7 symbols that mapped to it. So even a short word could be written several different ways. A long word could easily be unique in a passage of this size even if it occurred statistically frequently. That's a really good idea when you think about it, and is probably the reason why this has gone undecoded for so long.
Also the roman characters weren't "junk", they were word separations. (instead of using spaces) Word separation certainly isn't junk in a cipher.
K from MIB 1:
This is directly applicable to voters. A voter is smart. Voters are greedy, short-sighted, selfish animals and you know it.
Unfortunately, any democracy, given enough time, will fall into the trap that this creates, because companies tend to be smart both alone and in groups, and through slow, continuous effort will eventually get the system rigged in their favor. The USA has been this way for almost a century. (and many would argue longer)
This all boils down to the simple truth that any successful company is run by a group of intelligent people, who do an above-average job of working the system to their advantage. People on the other hand, are a random lot that sometimes are smart and sometimes are dumb. (and moreoften than not are dumb on any large scale) And eventually, smart all the time wins over smart some of the time.