I assume that "east district of texas" has somewhere around 10x the usual judges and a very large, busy courthouse and is somehow or other making a great deal of money off all this litigation.
It's a bit like red-light-cameras. Nobody likes them. They aren't serving their publicly declared purpose. But the local government won't give up their cash cow easily. So ya, they're fine with it I'd imagine. Don't expect Texas to do anything about it. But problem is, federal laws regarding jurisdiction allow them to keep doing this. There's federal laws that need to be changed to stope this abuse. There's no point in giving Texas the evil eye, they're just playing the system by the rules and are very happy to see it continue.
Very few of MS's products are "distinctive". The zune was one of them. Unfortunately, when you arrive very late to a market that's already occupied by several popular products, all of which carry several similar niche-defining traits, "distinctive" is not a good way to nudge into the market. Once people come to expect certain things from a product, even if you have some good, revolutionary features, they won't easily be embraced.
Zune's squirt and subscription service were both good ideas, but they weren't features people were expecting or looking for because they were already used to how MP3 players like the iPod worked and expected at least that base functionality to be taken seriously. Replacing some of the expected features with your "distinctive" features doesn't usually go over well.
In summary, if you want to be successful at "distinctive", you need to be innovative too. You need to be one of the first big players in a new market. Then, distinctive rocks. The iPod enjoyed this advantage. If it had come to market a year after the Zune, the tables would have been turned. Unfortunately, MS is not known for being innovative. They tend to look at what people are buying, and then try to develop an improved competing product, and use the power of their brand name to get over the hump of unfamiliarity. And over the years that's been less and less of a successful strategy. I'd say xbox was their last real success with that strategy. Windows7 phone wasn't the disaster that the zune was, but that should have been a warning. Anyone that tries to introduce anything that looks like a tablet in 2012 better have a tablet that at LEAST works like the public expects it to, or they're in very a very rough release, regardless of the product's merit.
Anyone that knows encryption knows, nothing will "stop" a determined attacker with unlimited time and resources. And the available resources of an attacker are assumed to double along with the advances in technology every few years.
Encryption only serves to make a successful attack impractical at the time of implementation to a point in the future where protection is no longer necessary.
AES256 has no "rainbow table" available and has enough bits to make an attack substantially difficult for probably the next 3-5 years. If someone in power is willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer resources on you today, or is willing to sit on your data for several years for it to become practical to attack, you're probably screwed anyway.
Just put a single DMG in your dropbox, an encrypted disk image. Then they can look at your DMG file all they want unless they feel like dealing with AES256.
But is the aluminum even a source of energy in this reaction, or is it acting more like a catalyst? (consumed or otherwise)
Isn't the sodium hydroxide the chief provider of energy? I'm not certain on this, I'm not chemist, but I know it takes a lot of energy to manufacture aluminum (in the form of electricity) but does this reaction recover any of that energy?
No, it's not like in the movies, they don't "blow up". They can fry the magnetron or the support electronics, or make a little lightning inside the food compartment. Might smoke a bit, or at best make a nice sparky energetic POP.
And close on the grid but not quite, I was going to mention this in my last post but forgot, newer microwaves all have a vaned fan blade looking affair in them that is in the line of fire in the box. It's often doing double duty as a cooling fan for the food or the magnetron. Its blades are moving, and cause the RF energy to reflect around in a non fixed pattern inside the box (which IS lined with a metal grid), this allows the microwave to heat the food more evenly.
It's like tossing a handball in a handball court, how the ball bounces around depends on where you're standing and what direction you throw. If you throw the same way each time, the ball will travel through the room in the same routes every throw, and there will be places in the room that the ball never gets near. Now imagine I place an exposed fan in the room and you're throwing at the fan every time. Depending on the position of the blade that ball could go almost anywhere. Same thing applies with microwaves. The handball represents the RF energy the magnetron is throwing out.
It's not an intuitive thing, don't worry you're not alone in not immediately seeing the problem.
A magnetron is a kind of RF (radio frequency) transmitter. It converts electrical energy into radio energy. This energy leaves the magnetron and bounces around inside the microwave. The frequency used makes it tend to interact with water molecules, and heats them up, changing radio energy into heat energy. And that's what heats the food. (note that foods with significant water content heat best)
The microwave is tuned just like an antenna is tuned, to maximize the use of energy. Energy the magnetron takes from electricity has to go somewhere. Energy sent into the box that isn't absorbed and converted to heat is reflected back to the transmitter. This is aka a "standing wave". The "Standing Wave Ratio" tells how efficient the energy transfer is.
A high SWR means a large percentage of the input energy is being reflected, and back to the transmitter where it must be used and so is converted into heat. Transmitters expect some of this because the conversion isn't perfect to begin with, but they're not designed to handle a LOT of additional energy to dump, and will overheat. Very high frequencies like magnetrons use are especially inefficient to start with, and so they're usually designed to cool heavily, with fans and fins. The heat you feel coming out the back of the microwave is NOT heat from the food, it's the waste heat off the magnetron. Adding too much to that waste heat can overheat and damage the magnetron, sometimes very quickly.
So, if you put a substantial chunk of metal into a tuned cavity like a microwave oven, it will interfere with the transfer of energy and cause a higher SWR, which can damage the magnetron. Running a microwave without anything in it is not recommended for the above reason, but adding metal into the mix makes matters worse. Placing nothing in the cavity besides a substantial piece of metal is about as destructive as you can be. The denser the metal, the bigger the effect.
actually the foil is VERY quickly shattered, it's quite spectacular and is a good deal safer on the magnetron than the other article today where someone was suggesting microwaving a hard drive
when they run out of ideas on how to take a character/franchise forward, the only two options are a reboot or to take it backward. So this really comes as no surprise. Yes, they've ran out of material.
oh don't say that. this rolling wreck of a hard drive brand will tank samsung like every other brand in their wake, and all we're going to be left with is toshiba and WD.
It's really all a shame. I remember when seagate was a good brand, and so was quantum. WD and toshiba were both crap. Amazing how things revolve. Back then I had a very tight budget and would buy seagates for their warranty and quality because I couldn't afford backup drives. Now the only thing seagate has going for them is their longer warranty, and by god you're probably going to get to use it, more than once.
I have backups now, but that's not an excuse to buy crappy drives, I don't need that kind of headache. I have enough drives around here now to have to RMA/replace a drive every now and then as it is.
(A) you can buy your own hardware and take it to work and use it, but (B) it's their network and they can demand access to it to insure it's secure.
But really, if they didn't need root access, it's going to make security checking approximately impossible to do confidently, so they're already demonstrating some ineptitude. Beware. It's quite possible the IT person you are working with is a "knows just enough to be dangerous" and they outsource the heavy lifting and he's just the eyes and hands on site for simple stuff. In which case stick a sucker in his mouth and be thankful you don't have to deal with hassle.
I've been known to take my own stuff to work - heck, I've always had my own laptop, and so far nobody's challenged me to get their hands on it. But then I generally know at least as much as they do, or more, so they leave me alone. Once they told me they needed to replace my computer with a "company machine" and asked for a written quote for replacement of everything in my laptop bag. I assume they got severe sticker shock, (I don't pack light) as they haven't brought it up since. First place I took my laptop to it was the only machine in the building that could work on the server's scsi drives, and the PHB didn't want me to bring it in until the day I had to and then he left me alone. (and refused to pay for one of their own)
If they were pushing me on the issue, and only wanted a shell on my machine and not root, I'd call that a fair compromise actually. (at least I'd be fairly confident they wouldn't do any danage) No way I would give them root. If they want root they can supply their own machine. But I do accept that my denying them root it would be totally fair to result in them to deny me a mapped port. Or just plain forbid me from connecting to the LAN period. I've seen companies and schools that are that way, the switches only routing traffic from apprived MACs. Flash drives too. Had a manager in the past the forbid personal flash drives on premises. But he was an ex bank manager so that wasn't too surprising.
Really you've already opened a can of worms by not just bringing in your own machine, but turning it into a server, a business-reliant machine. If I take my laptop home, stuff doesn't stop working. I'd say you've gone too far and should make a presentation to the PHBs to replace your kit with some of their own. Tell them you brought it in to demonstrate NEED and that the test is done and the results are in, and you are now going to take your gear home and they need to decide whether or not to buy their own stuff. If they can't see the improvement by the numbers now, take your box home and that will make the numbers fall again. If they still don't see a justification, either it's not worth it (is it? be serious and answer that) If it's worth it and they don't see that, time to move.
There was one quote from the judge that basically said the judge felt the plaintiffs proceeded with litigation while knowing that neither the facts nor the law were on their side. THAT will land you squarely in "frivolous lawsuit land" and piss off the judge real quick.
Basically, cavalierly wasting the court and judge's time is a very bad legal strategy.
It's probably a matter of where he is going to be living and where the new company is based (or if they have a presence in the usa) If he intends to stay living in the usa, and this place has a corp office there (if he's going to stay in the usa we'll assume they do) then they do have jurisdiction in this specific case.
I don't know if it would hold if he moved out of the usa before he was hired, if they have a corp presence in the usa.
While I'll agree that the definition of "porn" varies from place to place, and in some cases is extreme, the concept remains the same, sexual stimulation. There are very few web sites that actually operate somewhere in the in-between, because they generally have problems getting customers that are interested in more hard core. ("soft porn" is a relatively small industry) So it's not like there's going to be a huge number of "borderline" sites that have to be more carefully considered.
Look at the movie industry. They have a very clear and concise way to define what makes a film rated R.
I suppose this is related to IE being tied into the operating system. That was initially used in a lame attempt to make an excuse why MS had to force IE on their windows users. But now it's becoming a problem. Their current, most secure browser won't run even ONE version of OS behind? wow.
Not that any serious person really wants to continue using vista if they have any choice in the matter. Besides getting another OS upgrade sale under their belt I'm sure this was one of the driving factors.
to try to force the porn peddlers into using an.xxx domain name. Yes, they'll get blocked by a huge percentage of the web. But that's for the most part in places they're already not supposed to be like business and school networks. So while they may lose 90% of their coverage area, it won't disconnect them from more than 2% of their customers, the majority of which are hunkered down on their computers at home.
Normally I'm not a "think of the children!" type, but in this particular case, I see it as a net-positive thing. Maybe my opinion would be different if I were in the porn business. But if things come around this way, it will make a LOT of network admins jobs a little bit easier, and will give the people paying the internet bills the service change they want. The vast majority of the public will be either indifferent or will benefit from it, the only losers will be the porn industry, and they actually won't lose that much. The only market they're going to lose is the market that they weren't supposed to be in, that they weren't making very much on anyway. If you want to talk about "market" you have to compare the seller and the buyer, (the porn site and the school for example) and can't be considering the actual audience. (the kids at school, or the worker on lunch break) They're not the customer, they're not the market. This step will help stop the porn industry from making a small amount of additional money off a market that doesn't want to be their customer.
you can see something to click on but youâ(TM)ve got nowhere else to go.
I assume by "nowhere else to go" they mean you are going to just go to another web page. So, what else would they suggest?
I would disagree with even that assessment, some clickables trigger downloads, or open a new window that contains only an image, or a video. Some clickable downloads trigger on download complete to launch an application, start an installation, etc. But for the most part, clicking on a link in content takes you to other content, with more clickable links. Seems like a good thing to me?
How is Ted suggesting it should really work? Clicking a link causes your car to start? Or a pizza to land on your desk? (ok we can kinda already do that)
Slashdot Mirror
between the cops' ability to subpoena cell phone tower records and this? just a bit more precision? they've been keeping track of this for decades
I was just thinking something like that, there must be a leak in the tubes somewhere, letting out all that CO2....
I assume that "east district of texas" has somewhere around 10x the usual judges and a very large, busy courthouse and is somehow or other making a great deal of money off all this litigation.
It's a bit like red-light-cameras. Nobody likes them. They aren't serving their publicly declared purpose. But the local government won't give up their cash cow easily. So ya, they're fine with it I'd imagine. Don't expect Texas to do anything about it. But problem is, federal laws regarding jurisdiction allow them to keep doing this. There's federal laws that need to be changed to stope this abuse. There's no point in giving Texas the evil eye, they're just playing the system by the rules and are very happy to see it continue.
But they're doing 45 billion in business a year... 1 billion of that is under 3% markup. I don't think I'd call that "overpriced"?
And I wonder how wearing said cape to your job interview goes...?
Very few of MS's products are "distinctive". The zune was one of them. Unfortunately, when you arrive very late to a market that's already occupied by several popular products, all of which carry several similar niche-defining traits, "distinctive" is not a good way to nudge into the market. Once people come to expect certain things from a product, even if you have some good, revolutionary features, they won't easily be embraced.
Zune's squirt and subscription service were both good ideas, but they weren't features people were expecting or looking for because they were already used to how MP3 players like the iPod worked and expected at least that base functionality to be taken seriously. Replacing some of the expected features with your "distinctive" features doesn't usually go over well.
In summary, if you want to be successful at "distinctive", you need to be innovative too. You need to be one of the first big players in a new market. Then, distinctive rocks. The iPod enjoyed this advantage. If it had come to market a year after the Zune, the tables would have been turned. Unfortunately, MS is not known for being innovative. They tend to look at what people are buying, and then try to develop an improved competing product, and use the power of their brand name to get over the hump of unfamiliarity. And over the years that's been less and less of a successful strategy. I'd say xbox was their last real success with that strategy. Windows7 phone wasn't the disaster that the zune was, but that should have been a warning. Anyone that tries to introduce anything that looks like a tablet in 2012 better have a tablet that at LEAST works like the public expects it to, or they're in very a very rough release, regardless of the product's merit.
Anyone that knows encryption knows, nothing will "stop" a determined attacker with unlimited time and resources. And the available resources of an attacker are assumed to double along with the advances in technology every few years.
Encryption only serves to make a successful attack impractical at the time of implementation to a point in the future where protection is no longer necessary.
AES256 has no "rainbow table" available and has enough bits to make an attack substantially difficult for probably the next 3-5 years. If someone in power is willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer resources on you today, or is willing to sit on your data for several years for it to become practical to attack, you're probably screwed anyway.
Just put a single DMG in your dropbox, an encrypted disk image. Then they can look at your DMG file all they want unless they feel like dealing with AES256.
But is the aluminum even a source of energy in this reaction, or is it acting more like a catalyst? (consumed or otherwise)
Isn't the sodium hydroxide the chief provider of energy? I'm not certain on this, I'm not chemist, but I know it takes a lot of energy to manufacture aluminum (in the form of electricity) but does this reaction recover any of that energy?
No, it's not like in the movies, they don't "blow up". They can fry the magnetron or the support electronics, or make a little lightning inside the food compartment. Might smoke a bit, or at best make a nice sparky energetic POP.
And close on the grid but not quite, I was going to mention this in my last post but forgot, newer microwaves all have a vaned fan blade looking affair in them that is in the line of fire in the box. It's often doing double duty as a cooling fan for the food or the magnetron. Its blades are moving, and cause the RF energy to reflect around in a non fixed pattern inside the box (which IS lined with a metal grid), this allows the microwave to heat the food more evenly.
It's like tossing a handball in a handball court, how the ball bounces around depends on where you're standing and what direction you throw. If you throw the same way each time, the ball will travel through the room in the same routes every throw, and there will be places in the room that the ball never gets near. Now imagine I place an exposed fan in the room and you're throwing at the fan every time. Depending on the position of the blade that ball could go almost anywhere. Same thing applies with microwaves. The handball represents the RF energy the magnetron is throwing out.
It's not an intuitive thing, don't worry you're not alone in not immediately seeing the problem.
A magnetron is a kind of RF (radio frequency) transmitter. It converts electrical energy into radio energy. This energy leaves the magnetron and bounces around inside the microwave. The frequency used makes it tend to interact with water molecules, and heats them up, changing radio energy into heat energy. And that's what heats the food. (note that foods with significant water content heat best)
The microwave is tuned just like an antenna is tuned, to maximize the use of energy. Energy the magnetron takes from electricity has to go somewhere. Energy sent into the box that isn't absorbed and converted to heat is reflected back to the transmitter. This is aka a "standing wave". The "Standing Wave Ratio" tells how efficient the energy transfer is.
A high SWR means a large percentage of the input energy is being reflected, and back to the transmitter where it must be used and so is converted into heat. Transmitters expect some of this because the conversion isn't perfect to begin with, but they're not designed to handle a LOT of additional energy to dump, and will overheat. Very high frequencies like magnetrons use are especially inefficient to start with, and so they're usually designed to cool heavily, with fans and fins. The heat you feel coming out the back of the microwave is NOT heat from the food, it's the waste heat off the magnetron. Adding too much to that waste heat can overheat and damage the magnetron, sometimes very quickly.
So, if you put a substantial chunk of metal into a tuned cavity like a microwave oven, it will interfere with the transfer of energy and cause a higher SWR, which can damage the magnetron. Running a microwave without anything in it is not recommended for the above reason, but adding metal into the mix makes matters worse. Placing nothing in the cavity besides a substantial piece of metal is about as destructive as you can be. The denser the metal, the bigger the effect.
actually the foil is VERY quickly shattered, it's quite spectacular and is a good deal safer on the magnetron than the other article today where someone was suggesting microwaving a hard drive
i's bad enough waiting for a dvd to burn. Bluray? can you say "bloddy ages"? They're at what now, 4x for burn?
when they run out of ideas on how to take a character/franchise forward, the only two options are a reboot or to take it backward. So this really comes as no surprise. Yes, they've ran out of material.
That substantial of a chunk of metal would make quick work of the magnetron in a microwave. There's a reason you don't put silverware in a microwave.
You'd have to take them out of the hard drive at least, since the hard drive's enclosure is basically a faraday cage around them.
May as well whack them with a hammer a few times at that point.
oh don't say that. this rolling wreck of a hard drive brand will tank samsung like every other brand in their wake, and all we're going to be left with is toshiba and WD.
It's really all a shame. I remember when seagate was a good brand, and so was quantum. WD and toshiba were both crap. Amazing how things revolve. Back then I had a very tight budget and would buy seagates for their warranty and quality because I couldn't afford backup drives. Now the only thing seagate has going for them is their longer warranty, and by god you're probably going to get to use it, more than once.
I have backups now, but that's not an excuse to buy crappy drives, I don't need that kind of headache. I have enough drives around here now to have to RMA/replace a drive every now and then as it is.
(A) you can buy your own hardware and take it to work and use it, but (B) it's their network and they can demand access to it to insure it's secure.
But really, if they didn't need root access, it's going to make security checking approximately impossible to do confidently, so they're already demonstrating some ineptitude. Beware. It's quite possible the IT person you are working with is a "knows just enough to be dangerous" and they outsource the heavy lifting and he's just the eyes and hands on site for simple stuff. In which case stick a sucker in his mouth and be thankful you don't have to deal with hassle.
I've been known to take my own stuff to work - heck, I've always had my own laptop, and so far nobody's challenged me to get their hands on it. But then I generally know at least as much as they do, or more, so they leave me alone. Once they told me they needed to replace my computer with a "company machine" and asked for a written quote for replacement of everything in my laptop bag. I assume they got severe sticker shock, (I don't pack light) as they haven't brought it up since. First place I took my laptop to it was the only machine in the building that could work on the server's scsi drives, and the PHB didn't want me to bring it in until the day I had to and then he left me alone. (and refused to pay for one of their own)
If they were pushing me on the issue, and only wanted a shell on my machine and not root, I'd call that a fair compromise actually. (at least I'd be fairly confident they wouldn't do any danage) No way I would give them root. If they want root they can supply their own machine. But I do accept that my denying them root it would be totally fair to result in them to deny me a mapped port. Or just plain forbid me from connecting to the LAN period. I've seen companies and schools that are that way, the switches only routing traffic from apprived MACs. Flash drives too. Had a manager in the past the forbid personal flash drives on premises. But he was an ex bank manager so that wasn't too surprising.
Really you've already opened a can of worms by not just bringing in your own machine, but turning it into a server, a business-reliant machine. If I take my laptop home, stuff doesn't stop working. I'd say you've gone too far and should make a presentation to the PHBs to replace your kit with some of their own. Tell them you brought it in to demonstrate NEED and that the test is done and the results are in, and you are now going to take your gear home and they need to decide whether or not to buy their own stuff. If they can't see the improvement by the numbers now, take your box home and that will make the numbers fall again. If they still don't see a justification, either it's not worth it (is it? be serious and answer that) If it's worth it and they don't see that, time to move.
There was one quote from the judge that basically said the judge felt the plaintiffs proceeded with litigation while knowing that neither the facts nor the law were on their side. THAT will land you squarely in "frivolous lawsuit land" and piss off the judge real quick.
Basically, cavalierly wasting the court and judge's time is a very bad legal strategy.
It's probably a matter of where he is going to be living and where the new company is based (or if they have a presence in the usa) If he intends to stay living in the usa, and this place has a corp office there (if he's going to stay in the usa we'll assume they do) then they do have jurisdiction in this specific case.
I don't know if it would hold if he moved out of the usa before he was hired, if they have a corp presence in the usa.
While I'll agree that the definition of "porn" varies from place to place, and in some cases is extreme, the concept remains the same, sexual stimulation. There are very few web sites that actually operate somewhere in the in-between, because they generally have problems getting customers that are interested in more hard core. ("soft porn" is a relatively small industry) So it's not like there's going to be a huge number of "borderline" sites that have to be more carefully considered.
Look at the movie industry. They have a very clear and concise way to define what makes a film rated R.
I suppose this is related to IE being tied into the operating system. That was initially used in a lame attempt to make an excuse why MS had to force IE on their windows users. But now it's becoming a problem. Their current, most secure browser won't run even ONE version of OS behind? wow.
Not that any serious person really wants to continue using vista if they have any choice in the matter. Besides getting another OS upgrade sale under their belt I'm sure this was one of the driving factors.
to try to force the porn peddlers into using an .xxx domain name. Yes, they'll get blocked by a huge percentage of the web. But that's for the most part in places they're already not supposed to be like business and school networks. So while they may lose 90% of their coverage area, it won't disconnect them from more than 2% of their customers, the majority of which are hunkered down on their computers at home.
Normally I'm not a "think of the children!" type, but in this particular case, I see it as a net-positive thing. Maybe my opinion would be different if I were in the porn business. But if things come around this way, it will make a LOT of network admins jobs a little bit easier, and will give the people paying the internet bills the service change they want. The vast majority of the public will be either indifferent or will benefit from it, the only losers will be the porn industry, and they actually won't lose that much. The only market they're going to lose is the market that they weren't supposed to be in, that they weren't making very much on anyway. If you want to talk about "market" you have to compare the seller and the buyer, (the porn site and the school for example) and can't be considering the actual audience. (the kids at school, or the worker on lunch break) They're not the customer, they're not the market. This step will help stop the porn industry from making a small amount of additional money off a market that doesn't want to be their customer.
So I don't see this as a bad thing at all.
I assume by "nowhere else to go" they mean you are going to just go to another web page. So, what else would they suggest?
I would disagree with even that assessment, some clickables trigger downloads, or open a new window that contains only an image, or a video. Some clickable downloads trigger on download complete to launch an application, start an installation, etc. But for the most part, clicking on a link in content takes you to other content, with more clickable links. Seems like a good thing to me?
How is Ted suggesting it should really work? Clicking a link causes your car to start? Or a pizza to land on your desk? (ok we can kinda already do that)
NOT goatse
Well obviously quarks