When I worked on defense stuff, cell phones and cameras were forbidden (most people left theirs in the car). Private laptops and any other device with storage on it were outlawed as well. And the penalty for bringing it in was to have the equipment (or at least the disk) crushed; as happened to a contractor who was not aware of the rules and brought in his laptop.
Phones didn't work anyway as we worked in TEMPEST rooms. We had internet but it was heavily controlled as well. Even so... smuggling out a teensy thumb drive wouldn't have been too hard.
I've worked for a bit on my girlfriends W126 (a 500 SEL, it was her dad's car, bought in '82). It's a nice mechanic's car and easy to work on even for novices like myself; if you want a "project car" that offers plenty of comfort, and if you don't mind the crappy milage, then I would recommend the Benz. Just check for rust in the usual spots.
You can charge that cost (in whatever form it comes) to spammers only; if you apply it to everyone equally, you'll run into another phenomenon called "market failure". And identifying spam and spammers is something that many researchers and developers have tried solving already. That's the real problem: it is hard to distinguish spam sources, usage patterns and content from legitimate emailers, especially bulk emailers. How do you propose to "track an undesired effect" in email?
So FB does have a use: as a honeypot. Thanks Mark!
Spam has been moving towards web based services for a while now. Almost all message boards have antispam measures now; every now and then you may run into an orphaned board without such measures, and it'll be wall to wall spam. The ratio of spam and legitimate posts on my Wordpress site used to be over 10/1 until I added some (premium) spam control, but a few spams still make it through. I see the same on a Drupal site I administer. Those spammers are really making the effort in getting through.
And most often the compression is in the master, not added by the streaming server, though I have no idea if that is the case with Young's music. By the way, that in most cases is the difference between "warm" vinyl and "cold" CDs: they are mastered differently. Record an LP using quality equipment and store it in a 320kbps MP3, and no one will be able to tell the difference.
The Netherlands. The rule was introduced a few years ago because "terrorists". And to make it easier to identify people getting stopped or arrested (but before the new rule, the police already had that power: no ID=get taken to the station, if they doubted you are who you say you are). The rule hasn't generated any additional security or even convenience for the police, but of course they'll never consider repealing that rule.
Maybe... the real question is: will rides be anywhere near affordable?
Suppose they make this thing a little less luxurious, cram in 30-40 small-ish business class style seats, and operate this thing at around the same per-seat price as business/first class on a regular aircraft. They would still sell tickets at 3-4x the price, because there will always be a few people who are willing to pay a lot extra for the prestige and reduced flight time. Concorde proved that. So even if it's economically viable, it'll not be for you and me.
Interesting: they pick you up on a silly charge and let you go, but they can still do you for being upset about that? Depends a bit on how upset the guy was of course, but still... Oh well, it seems to work like that in most places in the world. Over here they'll invariably ask you for your ID, which you are obliged to carry but many people don't, so they get to slap on an extra fine.
In any case he is lucky he wasn't asked to "help the police with their inquiries", i.e. locked in a room and beaten with a rubber hose. Gotta love British euphemisms.
Public opinion is one thing, regulation and oversight are another matter entirely. Shit happened, it got cleaned up more or less, and the company responsible for the mess paid for it and them some. But you'd think that regulators would at least ask a few questions, llike "what happened" and "what can we do to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again".
If anything, medical students, and indeed everyone, should approach these controversial topics with a scientific "lens". Keep an open mind, certainly, but keep it open to alternative avenues of scientific exploration, and apply the same rigour as you would to your regular research.
Depends. If you are a manager responsible for a service that relies on the TF1 project, there are two scenarios.
Close source TF1 goes bust: "Unfortunately this happens sometimes, but at least we get to sue the company for damages"
Open source RF1 goes bust: "You used FOSS for this project? How could you have been so irresponsible?!"
To be fair, that was 5 years ago, and my last few clients (large corporations) are wising up to this particular risk. When they buy software, they do assess the risk of the vendor going out of business and weigh that against the impact of losing the software. When they use open source, they implement a strategy to mitigate that risk, by identifying alternatives, or by assessing the feasibility to provide continued support of the software with in-house resources or external consultants.
I'd pay for that in a heartbeat, but I've never seen that option on other airlines (KLMs "Comfort Class" is a few extra inches of leg room and nothing else) I've been tempted a few times to buy the middle seat by getting 3 tickets when travelling with my girlfriend, it could be a relatively cheap way to buy a lot of extra comfort. However I think the airline would somehow still screw it up: "I am sorry, we've had to reshuffle some crying infants around to spread te noise evenly across the cabin, and now your empty spare seat is somewhere 2 rows behind you", or "I am sorry but we are overbooked and we are commandeering your empty seat. Enjoy your massively overweight smelly neighbour".
Sure there are: the legs of the passenger facing the other way.
No kidding though, that seems to be the point of this configuration. Not to decrease seat pitch (distance between rows), but to decrease even further the width of the already narrow economy seats, to go 3-3-3 instead of 2-3-2 perhaps. And the only way to do it without having to rub shoulders with your neighbour (already an issue on certain flights with certain passengers) is to have the middle person sit the other way, and have no armrests. If they'd add those, they would get in the way of the legs of your neighbour.
Screw this. I've always said that I would happily pay 50-75% extra for a 50-75% increase in space (both width and pitch), but someone told me once that the airlines are afraid to make "comfort class" so comfortable as to have business class travellers choose that instead of flying business class, where the real money is made.
Mass surveillance is when they listen in on everyone, including you, me and Amnesty. If they just tap into Amnesty, it's targeted surveillance. It might still be wrong, but it's not the same. I'm not against targeted surveillance, provided that there are clear rules in place that get independently verified and rigorously enforced (which of course is never the case).
Uh, why? Comcast wasn't harassing the people of the state, it was harassing this specific individual.
Correct, and in this case you might say the fine is for actual damages (being troubled by unsollicited phone calls). If I read it right, the fine is $500 per call, and it got tripled because the company kept it up even after the lady filed suit. Again 150x the crime = 150x the fine. All payable to the lady. That's not excessive, that's just how it works (you don't get volume discounts on fines apparently), even though personally I would gladly put up with 150 robocalls for that amount.
So you want the fine to be utterly meaningless as a deterrent to future action by Comcast? Let me guess: you also don't like class action lawsuit
I am not saying the amount should be lower. I think $500 - $1500 per call is ok, and as I said, it's also ok for it to go to the victim. What I am against is huge punitive damages, meant to financially hurt a company, to go to the victim. If a company through wilful omission causes you to be in the hospital for a year, you're certainly entitled to all medical bills paid, recompense for lost wages during and after the year, and a goodly sum for mental anguish (losing a year, basically). But not millions of $ on top of that. If the company deserves a fine, why should you get that money, if you have already been adequately compensated?. Recompense the victim generously, but let punitive fines go to the state, so that people aren't encouraged to make a grab for the company coffers every time a little mishap befalls them. That is what our law states: compensation and fines are strictly separate things.
By the way, I haven't said anything about class action cases. Laws in our country don't really cater for them but that is changing, and I think it's a good thing. The problem is that in many such cases, it seems that the claimants come away with a pittance; the real winners are generally the lawyers.
In all but a few cases, the victim would call a consumer rights organisation, a state oversight committee, or even simply the police. From that point the organisation or state would take over.
The chance to win large sums in punitive damages, or even in settlement, combined with ambulance chasers and lack of a "loser pays" system leads to a system where people are encouraged (and do) file large claims for the most ridiculous things, in hopes of winning the jackpot.
I'm not a big fan of punitive damages payable to the victim. (In my country there's no such thing; there are fines payable to the state, and actual damages payable to the victim, with very small amounts being paid for unquantifiable stuff like "mental anguish"). I'm also not a big fan of people landing a huge payday because of a small "jackpot" mishap or being slighted in some small way by a large, rich company.
However, I am in favour of strict anti spam laws and rules against robocalls. $1500 per unlawful unsolicited call does not sound excessive to me, either as a fine paid by the company or as a sum received by the victim. I wish we had a similar law. But yes... if you are going to call someone 150 times, even after the person points out that you have the wrong person, then you are going to pay the fine 150x. Simple math.
Agreed, it would have been nice if they would have just developed an "education shield" for the Pi or the Arduino. For classrooms, an Arduino might have been better as they are very easy to program even for complete beginners: an Arduino and an IDE or CodeBender come close to the pgrogramming ease of the old computers with a BASIC command line. And for advanced students, there's already a whole range of other projects, sensors and shields out there they can sink their teeth into.
GP is right: the old machines were usually programmed in BASIC, with a simple command line interface. It really all starts with "Hello world", and the ease with which one can create that program is a decent measure of how friendly the language is for absolute beginners. On a modern computer, you'll have to find and install the right tools first: a simple interpreter or an IDE. On a phone, you'll probably have to learn about compiling and using libraries, a huge learning curve for beginners. Back then, the computer came with a book designed to teach a bit of rudimentary programming. Today, you can find all you need online... if you know what to look for.
Kids who are interested will make the leap, but kids who might be interested probably won't. They need a little push to convince them "I can actually do this!", and that push is unlikely to come from the Internet. In that sense, I daresay that the old BBC micro met its goals.
Exactly. Or, upon your return, ask the enraged Siemens rep: "Letter? What letter? We didn't read our morning mail before taking off today". What are they going to to, go to the press or even the courts after a successful flight?
This is the first time it's done in a more or less commercially viable electric aircraft (not solar); apparently they are planning to sell these planes to the public. That makes it quite a different achievement.
It depends on the company: in companies where there is a culture of working from home at least some of the time, ranking, perception, and opposition from management are much less of an issue. And if you prefer to work from home most of the time, an employer who is used to remote working may still appreciate someone from a similar culture who can be called in for the occasional face to face meeting over someone cheaper at the other end of the earth.
So, if this is important to you, the right time to ask is not a few months in, but during the job interview. If you are interviewed by several people, ask all of them: the manager can tell you what the company policy is, and a peer will tell you how that works out in practise.
There are some companies in the UK that employ staff working 5 days a week from home (I've had one as a client), but I'm not sure about software developers.
Slashdot Mirror
From now on we'll call them Carbon Deniers or some such.
When I worked on defense stuff, cell phones and cameras were forbidden (most people left theirs in the car). Private laptops and any other device with storage on it were outlawed as well. And the penalty for bringing it in was to have the equipment (or at least the disk) crushed; as happened to a contractor who was not aware of the rules and brought in his laptop.
Phones didn't work anyway as we worked in TEMPEST rooms. We had internet but it was heavily controlled as well. Even so... smuggling out a teensy thumb drive wouldn't have been too hard.
I've worked for a bit on my girlfriends W126 (a 500 SEL, it was her dad's car, bought in '82). It's a nice mechanic's car and easy to work on even for novices like myself; if you want a "project car" that offers plenty of comfort, and if you don't mind the crappy milage, then I would recommend the Benz. Just check for rust in the usual spots.
You can charge that cost (in whatever form it comes) to spammers only; if you apply it to everyone equally, you'll run into another phenomenon called "market failure". And identifying spam and spammers is something that many researchers and developers have tried solving already. That's the real problem: it is hard to distinguish spam sources, usage patterns and content from legitimate emailers, especially bulk emailers. How do you propose to "track an undesired effect" in email?
So FB does have a use: as a honeypot. Thanks Mark!
Spam has been moving towards web based services for a while now. Almost all message boards have antispam measures now; every now and then you may run into an orphaned board without such measures, and it'll be wall to wall spam. The ratio of spam and legitimate posts on my Wordpress site used to be over 10/1 until I added some (premium) spam control, but a few spams still make it through. I see the same on a Drupal site I administer. Those spammers are really making the effort in getting through.
And most often the compression is in the master, not added by the streaming server, though I have no idea if that is the case with Young's music. By the way, that in most cases is the difference between "warm" vinyl and "cold" CDs: they are mastered differently. Record an LP using quality equipment and store it in a 320kbps MP3, and no one will be able to tell the difference.
The Netherlands. The rule was introduced a few years ago because "terrorists". And to make it easier to identify people getting stopped or arrested (but before the new rule, the police already had that power: no ID=get taken to the station, if they doubted you are who you say you are). The rule hasn't generated any additional security or even convenience for the police, but of course they'll never consider repealing that rule.
Maybe... the real question is: will rides be anywhere near affordable?
Suppose they make this thing a little less luxurious, cram in 30-40 small-ish business class style seats, and operate this thing at around the same per-seat price as business/first class on a regular aircraft. They would still sell tickets at 3-4x the price, because there will always be a few people who are willing to pay a lot extra for the prestige and reduced flight time. Concorde proved that. So even if it's economically viable, it'll not be for you and me.
In any case he is lucky he wasn't asked to "help the police with their inquiries", i.e. locked in a room and beaten with a rubber hose. Gotta love British euphemisms.
simply releasing him without charge
You're going straight to hell for that one... ;)
Public opinion is one thing, regulation and oversight are another matter entirely. Shit happened, it got cleaned up more or less, and the company responsible for the mess paid for it and them some. But you'd think that regulators would at least ask a few questions, llike "what happened" and "what can we do to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again".
If anything, medical students, and indeed everyone, should approach these controversial topics with a scientific "lens". Keep an open mind, certainly, but keep it open to alternative avenues of scientific exploration, and apply the same rigour as you would to your regular research.
Depends. If you are a manager responsible for a service that relies on the TF1 project, there are two scenarios.
Close source TF1 goes bust: "Unfortunately this happens sometimes, but at least we get to sue the company for damages"
Open source RF1 goes bust: "You used FOSS for this project? How could you have been so irresponsible?!"
To be fair, that was 5 years ago, and my last few clients (large corporations) are wising up to this particular risk. When they buy software, they do assess the risk of the vendor going out of business and weigh that against the impact of losing the software. When they use open source, they implement a strategy to mitigate that risk, by identifying alternatives, or by assessing the feasibility to provide continued support of the software with in-house resources or external consultants.
I'd pay for that in a heartbeat, but I've never seen that option on other airlines (KLMs "Comfort Class" is a few extra inches of leg room and nothing else) I've been tempted a few times to buy the middle seat by getting 3 tickets when travelling with my girlfriend, it could be a relatively cheap way to buy a lot of extra comfort. However I think the airline would somehow still screw it up: "I am sorry, we've had to reshuffle some crying infants around to spread te noise evenly across the cabin, and now your empty spare seat is somewhere 2 rows behind you", or "I am sorry but we are overbooked and we are commandeering your empty seat. Enjoy your massively overweight smelly neighbour".
Sure there are: the legs of the passenger facing the other way.
No kidding though, that seems to be the point of this configuration. Not to decrease seat pitch (distance between rows), but to decrease even further the width of the already narrow economy seats, to go 3-3-3 instead of 2-3-2 perhaps. And the only way to do it without having to rub shoulders with your neighbour (already an issue on certain flights with certain passengers) is to have the middle person sit the other way, and have no armrests. If they'd add those, they would get in the way of the legs of your neighbour.
Screw this. I've always said that I would happily pay 50-75% extra for a 50-75% increase in space (both width and pitch), but someone told me once that the airlines are afraid to make "comfort class" so comfortable as to have business class travellers choose that instead of flying business class, where the real money is made.
Mass surveillance is when they listen in on everyone, including you, me and Amnesty. If they just tap into Amnesty, it's targeted surveillance. It might still be wrong, but it's not the same. I'm not against targeted surveillance, provided that there are clear rules in place that get independently verified and rigorously enforced (which of course is never the case).
So they're both space stations? Some trap...
Uh, why? Comcast wasn't harassing the people of the state, it was harassing this specific individual.
Correct, and in this case you might say the fine is for actual damages (being troubled by unsollicited phone calls). If I read it right, the fine is $500 per call, and it got tripled because the company kept it up even after the lady filed suit. Again 150x the crime = 150x the fine. All payable to the lady. That's not excessive, that's just how it works (you don't get volume discounts on fines apparently), even though personally I would gladly put up with 150 robocalls for that amount.
So you want the fine to be utterly meaningless as a deterrent to future action by Comcast? Let me guess: you also don't like class action lawsuit
I am not saying the amount should be lower. I think $500 - $1500 per call is ok, and as I said, it's also ok for it to go to the victim. What I am against is huge punitive damages, meant to financially hurt a company, to go to the victim. If a company through wilful omission causes you to be in the hospital for a year, you're certainly entitled to all medical bills paid, recompense for lost wages during and after the year, and a goodly sum for mental anguish (losing a year, basically). But not millions of $ on top of that. If the company deserves a fine, why should you get that money, if you have already been adequately compensated?. Recompense the victim generously, but let punitive fines go to the state, so that people aren't encouraged to make a grab for the company coffers every time a little mishap befalls them. That is what our law states: compensation and fines are strictly separate things.
By the way, I haven't said anything about class action cases. Laws in our country don't really cater for them but that is changing, and I think it's a good thing. The problem is that in many such cases, it seems that the claimants come away with a pittance; the real winners are generally the lawyers.
In all but a few cases, the victim would call a consumer rights organisation, a state oversight committee, or even simply the police. From that point the organisation or state would take over.
The chance to win large sums in punitive damages, or even in settlement, combined with ambulance chasers and lack of a "loser pays" system leads to a system where people are encouraged (and do) file large claims for the most ridiculous things, in hopes of winning the jackpot.
I'm not a big fan of punitive damages payable to the victim. (In my country there's no such thing; there are fines payable to the state, and actual damages payable to the victim, with very small amounts being paid for unquantifiable stuff like "mental anguish"). I'm also not a big fan of people landing a huge payday because of a small "jackpot" mishap or being slighted in some small way by a large, rich company.
However, I am in favour of strict anti spam laws and rules against robocalls. $1500 per unlawful unsolicited call does not sound excessive to me, either as a fine paid by the company or as a sum received by the victim. I wish we had a similar law. But yes... if you are going to call someone 150 times, even after the person points out that you have the wrong person, then you are going to pay the fine 150x. Simple math.
Yes. Give the kids an Arduino and shield, or come up with their own design but make it compatible with the Arduino.
Agreed, it would have been nice if they would have just developed an "education shield" for the Pi or the Arduino. For classrooms, an Arduino might have been better as they are very easy to program even for complete beginners: an Arduino and an IDE or CodeBender come close to the pgrogramming ease of the old computers with a BASIC command line. And for advanced students, there's already a whole range of other projects, sensors and shields out there they can sink their teeth into.
GP is right: the old machines were usually programmed in BASIC, with a simple command line interface. It really all starts with "Hello world", and the ease with which one can create that program is a decent measure of how friendly the language is for absolute beginners. On a modern computer, you'll have to find and install the right tools first: a simple interpreter or an IDE. On a phone, you'll probably have to learn about compiling and using libraries, a huge learning curve for beginners. Back then, the computer came with a book designed to teach a bit of rudimentary programming. Today, you can find all you need online... if you know what to look for.
Kids who are interested will make the leap, but kids who might be interested probably won't. They need a little push to convince them "I can actually do this!", and that push is unlikely to come from the Internet. In that sense, I daresay that the old BBC micro met its goals.
Exactly. Or, upon your return, ask the enraged Siemens rep: "Letter? What letter? We didn't read our morning mail before taking off today". What are they going to to, go to the press or even the courts after a successful flight?
This is the first time it's done in a more or less commercially viable electric aircraft (not solar); apparently they are planning to sell these planes to the public. That makes it quite a different achievement.
It depends on the company: in companies where there is a culture of working from home at least some of the time, ranking, perception, and opposition from management are much less of an issue. And if you prefer to work from home most of the time, an employer who is used to remote working may still appreciate someone from a similar culture who can be called in for the occasional face to face meeting over someone cheaper at the other end of the earth.
So, if this is important to you, the right time to ask is not a few months in, but during the job interview. If you are interviewed by several people, ask all of them: the manager can tell you what the company policy is, and a peer will tell you how that works out in practise.
There are some companies in the UK that employ staff working 5 days a week from home (I've had one as a client), but I'm not sure about software developers.