Basically, your analogy is flawed - debt isn't itself necessarily a problem. It is what you do with that debt that decides if you go broke or profit.
Yup - the key thing is the productivity of the lean. Borrowing money to build bridges is usually smart. Borrowing money to build bombs - less so unless you're so weak that the consequences of not having that bomb are worse.
I'd really like to see more stimulus money going into infrastructure of all kinds. Go ahead and run fiber to every home and pay off the equipment so people can get 1Gbps internet for $5/month for the rest of their life. That would be a lot cheaper than bailing out some banks, and it creates far more opportunities for the average person. Run public transit out into the suburbs, and so on. All that stuff creates job opportunities and it creates an inherent advantage for companies hiring locally.
The irony of it is that I don't think you'd even need to bother putting the coin under guard. What's the worst that can happen if somebody steals it? Go shopping at the mall and ask for change?
Do you want to know what the biggest entitlement program in America is? Try being born to rich parents... Nobody has less incentive to work than somebody who is just handed millions of dollars.
Well, compare it to anything that came before... I'm under no illusions that the democrats aren't about as corrupt as the Republicans are. The interests of their special interests just tend to align with a bit more of the population, at least at the moment.
True, but the capital requirements for a CA are pretty darn low. So, if things go badly just declare bankruptcy, sell a copy of your procedures to a "new" company (with the same employees), and apply for WebTrust/etc. Sure it will set you back a few months, but it isn't like you have to buy factories and all that nonsense to start over.
Yup, everybody wants to ditch the lump of metal ASAP. The problem is that the lump of metal works so darn well that nobody has been able to come up something better.
Slashdotters would appreciate that the IT industry has actually done a lot to get us close. Due to the demands of fabrication we're able to manufacture silicon to extremely high purity. Most of the best candidates for replacing the lump of metal involve fabricating pure lumps of silicon with precisely known dimensions (thus relating the kilogram to the meter). The problem is that they still haven't gotten the purity high enough.
Well, I think the Obama administration at least has done a bit more than most in setting up the website and having some kind of dialog. But yes, people do overblow the petitions.
I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten from crazies I know who go on and on about how the apocalypse is upon us because half the states in the US just voted to secede.
Depends. If you're just doing back of the envelope work the figures he tossed out are fine.
If not, then there are a bunch of factors that matter, including composition of the water (chemical and isotopic purity), air pressure (altitude actually doesn't matter, except insofar as it influences air pressure), and so on.
There is a reason that we still depend on that lump of irridium to define the kilogram. The meter is defined based on physical constants - if we could actually reliably relate the meter to the kilogram then we wouldn't need that lump of metal.
You don't need a lot of personnel or resources to run a CA. You mainly just need to be meticulous. The problem is that they get greedy and automate the living daylights out of everything, leading to situations like this.
Certificates sell for on the order of $100, so you can easily just pay for background checks, etc. You could have an employee spend an hour on every single certificate/renewal and easily come out ahead. The problem is that these companies instead try to spend about a minute of human effort on each one so that they can pocket more money (auto-renewals, automated checks, etc).
Agreed. The problem is that CAs are generally for-profit companies and they're optimized for making money. That usually means issuing the largest number of certificates in the least amount of time for the least amount of effort. They also have no inherent interest in privacy, so don't expect them to stand up to any kind of pressure to sign certificates for anybody who has influence over them (governments mostly, but that could also include insiders and partners).
It isn't that hard to make a very strong CA. The problem is that doing a good job takes a fair bit of manual effort. For the prices they're charging the CAs can easily afford to expend this effort, but why bother when they can just have some software churn out certificates on demand and make even more money?
The irony is that plain text never pops up a security warning, but SSL does if the certificate isn't trusted. There is no attack that can be mounted on an untrusted SSL certificate that can't be mounted on plain text, and the latter is susceptible to additional attacks.
The whole system is in massive need of replacement.
I wouldn't mind MTP if they fixed a few flaws with it (or with its implementations):
1. It needs to cache, somehow. Using tab-completion with an mtp-mounted device is PAINFUL. I can use tab completion with network shares, so why not with MTP - both have the same concurrency issues.
2. It needs to be dumber, or at least make that configurable. If I copy a file into a directory, I want the file to go into THAT directory. I don't care if I'm putting music in a pictures directory. I don't care if the driver doesn't understand the video codec. JUST COPY THE FILE!
I'm tempted to move to a FUSE implementation of adb at the rate things are going. I end up using adb most of the time now because MTP is just that painful. It usually works, but after copying stuff all over the place I don't want to find out an hour later after I've driven off that some file didn't quite make it, or have to hunt for a file while driving.
MTP is a pain. I just want to be able to access the files on the device, as if it were a network share or something.
MTP tries to add intelligence - it doesn't just copy files, but it tries to interpret what it is copying.
So, if I'm running mtpfs on linux and copy a video file and try to put it in a folder the device (or maybe the driver) doesn't like, it just puts it someplace else. Oh, and if it doesn't recognize the file it might not copy it at all.
MTP also doesn't play well with caching, so it is REALLY slow (the downside of concurrency - you can't just assume that the directory contents are the same as the last time you looked at it if you're not the only one with it mounted). That makes tab-completion a real joy.
I don't really care if the protocol is USB mass storage or not. It just needs to be better than MTP. I wouldn't even care if it was MTP if all the software involved wasn't conspiring to outsmart me.
I'm not watching a Youtube video. Application-specific solutions are the whole problem here - the OS basically throws its hands up and says "let's let the app writers have full-screen access" and then everybody washes their hands of the resulting mess.
The OS should control stuff like this, not individual apps. You don't always get a choice when it comes to apps.
The fact that things like this and LBE Privacy Guard (well, assuming that still worked) exist is of course the upside of Android. I just wish that sensible features like these were built-in.
Well, how about my thermostat control software, which also runs full screen, and therefore makes using lastpass a similar pain? Should I throw away my thermostat as well?
That is my issue with Android (and iOS certainly isn't any better) - it gives way too much control to app developers while witholding it from the user. And when that becomes a problem the usual response is what you just gave - don't use that app. The problem is that sometimes you don't really have that much of a choice, and there is no reason the OS can't just give you a choice.
And yes, I routinely root my android phones and mess with the API to get around stuff like this when practical (such as hacking the permissions system so that I can run any app and yet block access to contacts without it force-closing). However, it isn't exactly convenient, and there is no reason these sorts of things should be. The problem is that everybody seems to be in bed with everybody else - even the mainstream mods like CM do things like not let you edit app permissions except in ways that crash the app (seemingly to punish their users for daring to ask for the feature).
This level of detail is missing from Football, in part simply because too many bodies are in motion at once making it hard and tedious to map them, evaluate them, describe them, measure them, etc.
Yup, although the same issue applies to basketball. Baseball is fairly unique in that any given play usually is only influenced by 3-4 people. The pitcher is in every play, the batter is in every play, and then there might be a fielder where the ball goes, and maybe one or two where the ball is tossed, in particular first base). Whether the batter makes it to first is probably 95% of the entire game, thus the concept of batting average.
With football you can only advance the ball if just about everybody does their job right. Even receivers who won't get the ball need to run their routes to draw off coverage, and the lack of a good running back ensures that you'll see safeties all over the place. The whole game is just much more integrated. With baseball a lousy 3rd baseman is only going to impact the few plays that involve the ball going that direction, or a running heading for that base - it isn't like the batters are going to say "hey, let's run to 3rd instead of 1st because that guy is weaker!"
Yeah, that was a big battle at work, but we eventually got through it for the most part. Once you can set a precedent it gets a lot easier. It really is just conservatism.
I remember somebody even trying to block the use of FAXed signature pages (this is in the last 10 years). I pointed out that if our company continued to operate so inefficiently we'd end up being bought out, and the agreement of sale would no doubt involve a FAXed signature. FAX signature pages have been used for all kinds of legal documents for eons...
Brightness was just a single example - there are countless other things you can't get at because of the missing notification bar.
But, I agree with you. Why should my non-full-screen-app be forced to show the notification bar if I don't want it? Why not just make the full-screen setting be something that is defaulted based on an app developer setting, but then be configurable in the application list (right next to the options to move it to SD storage, or clear cache, etc). Authors could give their apps reasonable defaults, and users could change them. Everybody wins.
They don't have to, if you're careful. All files should be tagged with retention dates and purged when no longer required. Backups should also be discarded after a retention period - you shouldn't be running incremental backup sets back to the dawn of time.
If anything you're far more likely to effectively dispose of documents if they're electronic. Who knows what you have lying around in some filing cabinet...
Actually, legally-required documents are one of the biggest reasons to go paperless.
Take a document that needs to be signed off by 3 approvers in 3 different locations, and produced on demand for 15 years. Now imagine that in the course of just a single project you produce 100 of these annually.
With a document management system that supports electronic signatures you can handle review/revise/approval cycles with fairly little latency, and your documents are all classified away before they're signed off, which means you can find them in a decade.
With paper documents you need to keep track of who has what document, last-minute revisions kill days with the latency, and if you use multiple signature pages to cut down on latency then you end up with a massive re-assembly project. I've seen several original signature pages get lost despite a rather high level of care to prevent this (often FAXes/scans are available). You end up with documents that are amalgamations of originals, scans with annotations (which are therefore also originals), and pure scans (which usually can get tossed once you find the associated original). Then you have to file it all away so that it isn't lost, and have electronic scans made in case of disaster. Of course, the approvals are already done, so the project has moved on, and hopefully somebody bothers to file it away properly.
When you have a legal reason to produce a document that is usually all it takes to justify going electronic. The costs involved in handling paper PROPERLY are huge. When you go all-electronic choreographing a project internationally is no harder than doing one locally.
How about this one - I want to use lastpass to enter passwords in an app, using its notification bar options. Again I have to switch back and forth between apps just to get to them if the app I want to input a password in is full-screen.
I'm sure there are a million other reasons why you might want the notification bar to be present when running an otherwise full-screen app.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, your analogy is flawed - debt isn't itself necessarily a problem. It is what you do with that debt that decides if you go broke or profit.
Yup - the key thing is the productivity of the lean. Borrowing money to build bridges is usually smart. Borrowing money to build bombs - less so unless you're so weak that the consequences of not having that bomb are worse.
I'd really like to see more stimulus money going into infrastructure of all kinds. Go ahead and run fiber to every home and pay off the equipment so people can get 1Gbps internet for $5/month for the rest of their life. That would be a lot cheaper than bailing out some banks, and it creates far more opportunities for the average person. Run public transit out into the suburbs, and so on. All that stuff creates job opportunities and it creates an inherent advantage for companies hiring locally.
The irony of it is that I don't think you'd even need to bother putting the coin under guard. What's the worst that can happen if somebody steals it? Go shopping at the mall and ask for change?
Do you want to know what the biggest entitlement program in America is? Try being born to rich parents... Nobody has less incentive to work than somebody who is just handed millions of dollars.
Well, compare it to anything that came before... I'm under no illusions that the democrats aren't about as corrupt as the Republicans are. The interests of their special interests just tend to align with a bit more of the population, at least at the moment.
True, but the capital requirements for a CA are pretty darn low. So, if things go badly just declare bankruptcy, sell a copy of your procedures to a "new" company (with the same employees), and apply for WebTrust/etc. Sure it will set you back a few months, but it isn't like you have to buy factories and all that nonsense to start over.
Oh sure, I'm all for the metric system. It drives me nuts having to convert recipes - I really think I should have been born in Germany or something.
Yup, everybody wants to ditch the lump of metal ASAP. The problem is that the lump of metal works so darn well that nobody has been able to come up something better.
Slashdotters would appreciate that the IT industry has actually done a lot to get us close. Due to the demands of fabrication we're able to manufacture silicon to extremely high purity. Most of the best candidates for replacing the lump of metal involve fabricating pure lumps of silicon with precisely known dimensions (thus relating the kilogram to the meter). The problem is that they still haven't gotten the purity high enough.
Well, I think the Obama administration at least has done a bit more than most in setting up the website and having some kind of dialog. But yes, people do overblow the petitions.
I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten from crazies I know who go on and on about how the apocalypse is upon us because half the states in the US just voted to secede.
Depends. If you're just doing back of the envelope work the figures he tossed out are fine.
If not, then there are a bunch of factors that matter, including composition of the water (chemical and isotopic purity), air pressure (altitude actually doesn't matter, except insofar as it influences air pressure), and so on.
There is a reason that we still depend on that lump of irridium to define the kilogram. The meter is defined based on physical constants - if we could actually reliably relate the meter to the kilogram then we wouldn't need that lump of metal.
You don't need a lot of personnel or resources to run a CA. You mainly just need to be meticulous. The problem is that they get greedy and automate the living daylights out of everything, leading to situations like this.
Certificates sell for on the order of $100, so you can easily just pay for background checks, etc. You could have an employee spend an hour on every single certificate/renewal and easily come out ahead. The problem is that these companies instead try to spend about a minute of human effort on each one so that they can pocket more money (auto-renewals, automated checks, etc).
Agreed. The problem is that CAs are generally for-profit companies and they're optimized for making money. That usually means issuing the largest number of certificates in the least amount of time for the least amount of effort. They also have no inherent interest in privacy, so don't expect them to stand up to any kind of pressure to sign certificates for anybody who has influence over them (governments mostly, but that could also include insiders and partners).
It isn't that hard to make a very strong CA. The problem is that doing a good job takes a fair bit of manual effort. For the prices they're charging the CAs can easily afford to expend this effort, but why bother when they can just have some software churn out certificates on demand and make even more money?
The irony is that plain text never pops up a security warning, but SSL does if the certificate isn't trusted. There is no attack that can be mounted on an untrusted SSL certificate that can't be mounted on plain text, and the latter is susceptible to additional attacks.
The whole system is in massive need of replacement.
I wouldn't mind MTP if they fixed a few flaws with it (or with its implementations):
1. It needs to cache, somehow. Using tab-completion with an mtp-mounted device is PAINFUL. I can use tab completion with network shares, so why not with MTP - both have the same concurrency issues.
2. It needs to be dumber, or at least make that configurable. If I copy a file into a directory, I want the file to go into THAT directory. I don't care if I'm putting music in a pictures directory. I don't care if the driver doesn't understand the video codec. JUST COPY THE FILE!
I'm tempted to move to a FUSE implementation of adb at the rate things are going. I end up using adb most of the time now because MTP is just that painful. It usually works, but after copying stuff all over the place I don't want to find out an hour later after I've driven off that some file didn't quite make it, or have to hunt for a file while driving.
MTP is a pain. I just want to be able to access the files on the device, as if it were a network share or something.
MTP tries to add intelligence - it doesn't just copy files, but it tries to interpret what it is copying.
So, if I'm running mtpfs on linux and copy a video file and try to put it in a folder the device (or maybe the driver) doesn't like, it just puts it someplace else. Oh, and if it doesn't recognize the file it might not copy it at all.
MTP also doesn't play well with caching, so it is REALLY slow (the downside of concurrency - you can't just assume that the directory contents are the same as the last time you looked at it if you're not the only one with it mounted). That makes tab-completion a real joy.
I don't really care if the protocol is USB mass storage or not. It just needs to be better than MTP. I wouldn't even care if it was MTP if all the software involved wasn't conspiring to outsmart me.
See the other posts in the thread - brightness is not the only concern, nor is getting to settings. That said, it sounds like a nice player.
Somebody else pointed out an app that lets you recall the notification bar with a gesture in a full screen app. That seems useful.
I'm not watching a Youtube video. Application-specific solutions are the whole problem here - the OS basically throws its hands up and says "let's let the app writers have full-screen access" and then everybody washes their hands of the resulting mess.
The OS should control stuff like this, not individual apps. You don't always get a choice when it comes to apps.
That actually worked great, thanks!
The fact that things like this and LBE Privacy Guard (well, assuming that still worked) exist is of course the upside of Android. I just wish that sensible features like these were built-in.
KDE actually isn't that bad, at least as long as you don't install nepomuk. Another nice feature of Gentoo. :)
Well, how about my thermostat control software, which also runs full screen, and therefore makes using lastpass a similar pain? Should I throw away my thermostat as well?
That is my issue with Android (and iOS certainly isn't any better) - it gives way too much control to app developers while witholding it from the user. And when that becomes a problem the usual response is what you just gave - don't use that app. The problem is that sometimes you don't really have that much of a choice, and there is no reason the OS can't just give you a choice.
And yes, I routinely root my android phones and mess with the API to get around stuff like this when practical (such as hacking the permissions system so that I can run any app and yet block access to contacts without it force-closing). However, it isn't exactly convenient, and there is no reason these sorts of things should be. The problem is that everybody seems to be in bed with everybody else - even the mainstream mods like CM do things like not let you edit app permissions except in ways that crash the app (seemingly to punish their users for daring to ask for the feature).
This level of detail is missing from Football, in part simply because too many bodies are in motion at once making it hard and tedious to map them, evaluate them, describe them, measure them, etc.
Yup, although the same issue applies to basketball. Baseball is fairly unique in that any given play usually is only influenced by 3-4 people. The pitcher is in every play, the batter is in every play, and then there might be a fielder where the ball goes, and maybe one or two where the ball is tossed, in particular first base). Whether the batter makes it to first is probably 95% of the entire game, thus the concept of batting average.
With football you can only advance the ball if just about everybody does their job right. Even receivers who won't get the ball need to run their routes to draw off coverage, and the lack of a good running back ensures that you'll see safeties all over the place. The whole game is just much more integrated. With baseball a lousy 3rd baseman is only going to impact the few plays that involve the ball going that direction, or a running heading for that base - it isn't like the batters are going to say "hey, let's run to 3rd instead of 1st because that guy is weaker!"
Yeah, that was a big battle at work, but we eventually got through it for the most part. Once you can set a precedent it gets a lot easier. It really is just conservatism.
I remember somebody even trying to block the use of FAXed signature pages (this is in the last 10 years). I pointed out that if our company continued to operate so inefficiently we'd end up being bought out, and the agreement of sale would no doubt involve a FAXed signature. FAX signature pages have been used for all kinds of legal documents for eons...
Brightness was just a single example - there are countless other things you can't get at because of the missing notification bar.
But, I agree with you. Why should my non-full-screen-app be forced to show the notification bar if I don't want it? Why not just make the full-screen setting be something that is defaulted based on an app developer setting, but then be configurable in the application list (right next to the options to move it to SD storage, or clear cache, etc). Authors could give their apps reasonable defaults, and users could change them. Everybody wins.
They don't have to, if you're careful. All files should be tagged with retention dates and purged when no longer required. Backups should also be discarded after a retention period - you shouldn't be running incremental backup sets back to the dawn of time.
If anything you're far more likely to effectively dispose of documents if they're electronic. Who knows what you have lying around in some filing cabinet...
Actually, legally-required documents are one of the biggest reasons to go paperless.
Take a document that needs to be signed off by 3 approvers in 3 different locations, and produced on demand for 15 years. Now imagine that in the course of just a single project you produce 100 of these annually.
With a document management system that supports electronic signatures you can handle review/revise/approval cycles with fairly little latency, and your documents are all classified away before they're signed off, which means you can find them in a decade.
With paper documents you need to keep track of who has what document, last-minute revisions kill days with the latency, and if you use multiple signature pages to cut down on latency then you end up with a massive re-assembly project. I've seen several original signature pages get lost despite a rather high level of care to prevent this (often FAXes/scans are available). You end up with documents that are amalgamations of originals, scans with annotations (which are therefore also originals), and pure scans (which usually can get tossed once you find the associated original). Then you have to file it all away so that it isn't lost, and have electronic scans made in case of disaster. Of course, the approvals are already done, so the project has moved on, and hopefully somebody bothers to file it away properly.
When you have a legal reason to produce a document that is usually all it takes to justify going electronic. The costs involved in handling paper PROPERLY are huge. When you go all-electronic choreographing a project internationally is no harder than doing one locally.
Great, a hack for one use case.
How about this one - I want to use lastpass to enter passwords in an app, using its notification bar options. Again I have to switch back and forth between apps just to get to them if the app I want to input a password in is full-screen.
I'm sure there are a million other reasons why you might want the notification bar to be present when running an otherwise full-screen app.