I couldn't agree more. The debate was over whether it was sufficient just to release a keygen to pirate a product, or if it was necessary to patch the software. My argument was that keygens only work if the software vendor is sloppy. Obviously a code patch is going to work just about all of the time (although TCPA could change that).
While it seems like most activation schemes have been defeated, in theory it is possible to devise one that is unbreakable without espionage.
Create a VERY secure server. Stick it in a vault with just a power cord and a serial cable running out to another server. Have this secure server generate a keypair, and upload the public key across the serial port to the general network. Embed this public key in your software.
When activating your software the program generates a request for activation, and sends it to the vendor. The vendor screens it appropriately, and if it meets the criteria for approval uploads it over the serial line to the secure server, which signs it and returns the signed registration key. The secure server software simply listens on the tty, examines the input for a valid signature request, signs it, and returns it via the tty. The software is carefully audited so as to be completely secure.
Such a system would be immune to a keygen. You would have to patch the software itself to remove the authentication check (which of course is completely possible, at least until TCPA comes along).
A keygen can only be created if symmetric crypto is used, if the key is short enough to crack, or if there is a leak at the vendor. Now, usually one of these conditions is met, but there is nothing that says this has to be the case...
Deciding on a career based on how much money you expect make is just wrong.
Deciding on what car to buy based on the price tag is just wrong. If you like the BMW right out of college you should go ahead and spend $70k on it. It is all about what you like driving - not what it costs.
Deciding on what computer to buy based on the price tag is just wrong. If your personality shouts "Alienware!" then you should go ahead and spend $5000 on your system. It is all about the image - not whether it is better or costs more.
Welcome to real life. Money matters. Sure, on its own it doesn't buy happiness, but there is some correlation. If you find a field that you love in which employers pay little and treat employees like trash, you won't be happy even if it is what you would do as your hobby. Instead, find a compromise job where you can be reasonably happy at work, but make a good wage and have money to spend on your hobbies in your spare time.
Besides, if we all only did things for the love of the job, do you think that anybody would be driving out to your house to pick up your garbage?
However, my guess is that a substantial number of apache users aren't rolling their own nonfree versions. And how would anybody know if they were?
Clearly RMS was referring to people who are distributing proprietary derivatives of apache. Users modifying their own versions is the very essence of freedom! It is developers modifying software and releasing it non-free which RMS objects to.
That is my big dilema. My Tivo is on its last legs. However, I won't settle for less than two tuners, and I'm eerie about re-encoded video quality. To use myth I'd need to get two sat receivers and attach them to a myth box. $570 is a LOT to pay for a DVR, when you can get the R10 for free or the R15 for a yet-to-be-determined sum. I keep thinking about myth - every time my tivo acts up I just think of the benefits of having something I can just dig into and fix on my own. However, even if I had to replace my Tivo every year I'd probably still not break even.
Obviously this is largely the result of below-cost marketing. However, I guarantee that DirecTV is not paying $570 per unit. Myth really needs somebody to come up with a cheap hardware solution to make it work...
You need to see how well Earl fared in mythbusters. Suffice it to say the cop is better off making a suicide dash towards the nearest building than just firing from behind his car...
Can you give me the reference to the line in the constituation that states that the bill of rights is subject to the whim of those in charge?
Martial law amounts to might makes right. Obviously if I have a pistol and there are 25 guys outside my house with M16s and a few APCs, they're going to have things their way. Likewise when you're walking down the street minding your own business and a gang war erupts around you and you're dodging bullets you're not going to come out on top. In neither case does might in and of itself make right. Citizens should hold the people involved accountable in both cases...
Uh, why would the writers of the constitution write an ammendment to guarantee the right of the armed forces to be armed? Why would the governemnt ever disarm the armed forces in the first place?
The reason you write an ammendment is to keep the government from doing something that otherwise it might have an inclination to do. While most governments would not be inclined to disarm themselves, they certainly would be likely to want to disarm the general citizenry. Hence the ammendment...
One problem - how many people does it take to build a spaceship? Most likely more than would fit inside the ship. So, you need a few generations of growth just to begin construction. And why would people with a perfectly good planet with a Texas-per-person of open space want to get back on a ship for a few hundred years to find another planet which is most likely no better than the one they're already on?
If people multiplied like rats I could see the colony time being every 1000 years or so, but most likely they wouldn't multiply like rats. 1st world societies are barely at the replacement level - if a planet were colonized with modern Americans or Europeans, it would NEVER grow. Most likely future colonists would be migratory - depete a planet of resources and move on. However, it would not be depleted quickly, since modern societies don't grow all that fast.
Just a few random thoughts. Who knows how things will really turn out. If we knew we had another planet we could reach in 500 years and had the technology to go there, why would more than the odd explorer bother to make the trip (at least until the early-adopters develop things a bit)? Colonization is a slow process. Early American colonists tended to be driven by persecution from Europe (religious or political) - modern society doesn't tend to have as much of this. Obviously a major famine or something like that would become a big driver.
They probably say that email is not to be used for non-work related purposes (Every place Ive worked at has had that one) but as a law firm, I'd imagine they'd need a strict policy about internal correspondance leaving the firms internal network.
Even such a clause can be hard to enforce legally if the defence can show that it is not enforced uniformly. That is the danger of broad contract clause. If the defence can show that EVERYBODY violates the contract, then the courts will question the wisdom of enforcing it in any particular case.
For example, if the windows EULA contained a restriction that said that if you mow your own lawn you agree to give Bill Gates the title to your home, that is technically an agreement to avoid a particular activity. If MS then slectively went after windows copyright violators using this clause it would be likely to be found unenforceable, since it is being used selectively.
The fact is that most companies do in fact tolerate personal use of email despite wording to the contrary in the AUP. If the defence can show that many others send personal emails, and that their managers are aware of this activity, then the court may be likely to question why they are being singled out. Otherwise a company who wants to get rid of all its over-40 employees could just do an audit and fire just these employees for sending personal emails.
Many companies as a result have AUPs that specifically allow personal use of email within certain bounds. A court is more likely to uphold such an AUP if the bounds sound reasonable and has in fact been violated (such as running a personal business on company time, or sending bulk mail or many large emails, or excessive use of company time). Additionally, if an employee is excessively using time at work for personal business it is likely that their performance will suffer and that is clearly cause for termination.
Government has a bad habit of exempting itself from the rules that they make everybody else play by. I figure that low-lying land that's uneconomical to build on because of insurance costs would be attractive for an eminent domain grab, to put civic services, like, say, public housing on. Whoops, we're back where we started.
You couldn't be more correct. Of course, my intention was to house them where the cost is lowest in terms of TCO. However, as you point out government is traditionally short-sighted in this regard and we'll be housing these people in flood plains most likely.
Sometimes I wonder if things would be better if we just evenly dispersed people on welfare across the countryside at an even density - so some would end up in cities, but most would end up in rural areas. You wouldn't have collections of people on public assistance in the same neighborhoods. This would help people on welfare to form social networks with productive members of society, who would then be able to positively influence them and also help them find gainful employment. They would also find it boring to just sit at home 9-5 when everybody else is out working. Sometimes I wonder if the ghetto isn't half of our problem. If nothing else their kids are more likely to turn out well if they're in a non-ghetto setting.
Of course, this will cost more upfront as housing is MUCH more expensive in these areas. However, it will probably pay for itself if in 10 years we have 1/10th the number of people on public assistance...
So... you're saying that the Free Market could have ensured that this disaster could have been much less worse?;-)
Sure. Who would issue a mortgage on a home in an area prone to flooding if they knew the Feds wouldn't pay them off if there was a flood? Who would build a business there?
The disaster wasn't the flood - there have been floods there for the past several million years. It is only a disaster when you have a million people living in a spot that has severe flooding every 50 years or so.
You can try to move the water, or you can just move the people. Or, you can point out that anybody who builds their home there will have to rebuild it every few decades and then when the flood comes just stand and say "I told you so."
Human life is valuable. I'd support free bussing to get people out of danger even if they were idiots for being there in the first place. However, their homes are less valuable. If they're dependant on government assistance for having someplace to live, the government should at least find someplace cheaper to put them...
Sure, just look up cryptoloop or something like that.
Everything on disk is encrypted. However, the decryption key is cached in memory and used to encrypt and decrypt data as it is read/written. This way you don't accidentally forget to re-encrypt stuff, and you don't have decrypted data temporarily on disk.
Simply using kgpg requires manual effort. If you encrypt individual files/folders you're contantly re-decrypting them. If you're encrypting half your drive in one file, then you have to sit around for 15 minutes decrypting it each time you boot, and 15 minutes of encryption every time you shut down.
Encryption will only be widespread if it is transparent.
I'm waiting for plausible deniability encryption schemes to become a bit more mainstream for linux. Phonebook is a good example, but it doesn't have mainstream distro support.
That might not be such a bad thing (loss of orbital momentum).
1. Deploy tether. 2. Generate electromagnetic field. 3. Gather space junk with said field. 4. Eventually orbit decays and craft deorbits, carrying gathered junk.
Of course, this would be useless for non-ferromagnetic material. Maybe an dispersed ionizing radiation source or something like that could be used to ionize non-metallic objects to draw them into the field.
That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I have no doubts that what you've reported is true, but something like this should just be a slap on the wrist ($20 fine maybe) to discourage people from hiking without the proper radio / satphone / whatever.
I'm sure the FCC/FBI/whatever has better things to be investigating than people making desperate calls for help in the least intrusive manner possible. I'm sure the guy wasn't just sitting there all day long jamming the police frequencies - he probably just radioed his location and got off the air...
Your entire line of questions regarding backup falls into this category. Backing up a RDBMS is hardly a new thing.
Actually, backups are an interesting issue that I hadn't thought about with the whole file-as-DB debate.
Backing up a DB is straightforward. In fact, with journals and all that it can be made possible to do atomic backups (ie a backup that captures the state of the filesystem in an instant of time).
However, the issue here is partial backups. Doing a backup of a 400GB drive onto 800 CDs or 80 DVDs or a tape or two with a $2000 drive is simple enough already. However, when I do a backup I don't want all records that changed since the last backup. I want all important records that changed (usually my home dir). Probably the easiest way to do that is via a backup field on the database, with an easy way to control its default setting (off for OS/Software, on for data, inherit from parent metadata).
One issue with big databases is that they are only useful if your relationships are good (ie your keywords/projects/etc). Users in my experience do a lousy job picking these on their own, and often resent the work of having to choose them. In many database apps they are set silently in the background based on the context of a user's operations, but while this works in an application program that automates a particular business process, it will be harder to extend this to general practice.
I think the jury is out on this whole debate. I think nobody will really know what is easier until people start trying it and learn to love it or hate it.
I love databases in general. However, the features that make them very powerful have always been the hardest things to explain to ordinary users...
My guess is that the only thing stopping them now is the availability of nukes or the logistics of getting them into the US. I doubt the will to use them is a problem right now.
In any case, nukes obviously shouldn't be used wontonly on the battlefield in what would otherwise be a conventional war. However, I have no delusions that this policy is in any way making it less likely that nukes will be used on the US anyway. When nutcases get bombs and a clear path to their target, they blow things up. For the most part terrorism is as simple as this. Sure, foreign policy probably does tend to exhasperate the situation a little, and it may also influence whether terrorist groups get sponsored by national governments. However, the big problem is that as technology increases it become easier for a small group to do a large amount of damange, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Suggesting that US policy dictates the liklihood of somebody smuggling a nuke into the US is like suggesting that welfare policy dictates the liklihood of some idiot opening fire in a mall with a machine gun. The world is full of idiots and it is just becoming harder to limit there actions...
The employment agreement probably said that if you sue IBM over your retirment package, you forfeit it automatically. Probably not enforcable in the courts, but IBM would still be able to stop mailing him checks until the court explictly ruled so. The way courts work, they might not even owe penalties under the premise that they were just following the letter of the contract.
The fact is that when it is you against IBM, and they owe you $500k over the next 30 years, you're the one over a barrel - not them. They might have to pay you in the end, but they can make your life so miserable that it isn't worth fighting them.
What can I say, the law isn't meant to be fair. I'd be the first in line to change it, but first I need to be elected, and in order to that I need the backing of the lawyers and megacorps...
Vioxx is a pain releiver that causes heart attacks when there are a lot of pain relievers that actually HELP your heart (eg aspirin).
Actually, by "a lot" you probably mean "just one" - aspirin.
I don't believe that any other pain medication has a cardioprotective benefit. The only one which seems up for debate was Naproxen, which was a theory advocated in fact by Merck. Early studies showed that Vioxx caused as many heart attacks as placebo, and more heart attacks than Naproxen. The question was whether Vioxx was killing people, or Naproxen was saving people.
It eventually turned out that Vioxx was in fact causing heart attacks, although most likely Naproxen was also saving people.
The real problem for Merck was that heart attacks were an undisclosed side effect. If the risks had been known in advance there probably would be no grounds for a lawsuit - after all, the doctors knew what they were prescribing. The big item debated in the Vioxx cases is whether Merck should have concluded that Vioxx caused heart attacks based on the data they had years ago, or whether as Merck maintains there wasn't any solid evidence prior to late 2004.
Of course, once you allow non-automated cars on the road you give up a number of advantages of automation:
1. Safety (those non-automated cars can cause accidents).
2. Congestion management (that non-automated driver may wait forever at a stop sign to make a left turn, may drive 10 under the speed limit, will fail to immediately step on the gas the instant a light turns green, etc).
3. Removed need for local parking (why have lots in front of every store at a strip mall - why not have one huge parking garage a mile down the road shared by all the stores in the vicinity). If you have manual drivers you still need parking lots.
Really, it makes sense just to ditch the manual driving entirely and then everybody can take full advantage of computer-based controls. Imagine an internet which had to allow for manual source routing, or manual encryption of SSL sessions - ISPs wouldn't be able to take advantage of all their bandwidth since people wouldn't be bothered to source-route through their least-loaded lines, and web servers would have to leave connections open all day while grandma does eliptic curves on her calculator since she doesn't trust the new-fangled computer. Sounds silly when you talk about computers, so why shouldn't it sound silly when you talk about cars?
Put it this way, if you were designing a system in a warehouse for shutting materials around the building that you knew would be HEAVILY used, would you design it to use vehicles driven by people along personally-chosen routes at times of their own choosing and without central control of any kind? Roads are as heavily utilized as the most automated of warehouses, and businesses have learned that at those scales it makes sense to automate.
Put it this way, which is cheaper:
1. Making every car more efficient to make up for gas wasted on the commute to work, while paying to have courts entertain squabbles about who caused what accident, while paying to imprison drunk drivers while demolishing houses to make way for new bypasses, while fining everybody in sight for daring to drive too fast on big highways.
or
2. Making everybody's trip to work 15 minutes shorter by adopting a standard for automatic vehicle control, while eliminating the need for medium-length flights since you can just sleep in your car on the way, while cutting down on pollution, while all but eliminating accidents, while letting cars go service themselves while you're at work, while eliminating the home delivery business as your cars can just pull into a depot and get loaded up while you're at work, and so on...
Err - you're right. You can tell I don't play much myself... The probability is in favor of AKs and above against 9 players. However, with anything lower than this (such as AQs or JJ) the normally-winning strategy of scaring off the other players with a big bet is less likely to pay off against colluders. Especially if one or more of them has an A, K, or Q. In theory colluders can bet wisely against even AA if they know their hands have more strength than would be apparent without knowledge of the other cards in play.
I think the EU already has a patent on this concept. Or at least they will once the commission finishes overriding the democratic will of their electorate and legalizes business-method patents. They make a good case-study in why government-by-bureaucracy doesn't work.
I believe wholeheartedly in federal government (national government - national concerns, local government - local concerns), but the representatives should ALL be popularly elected. Otherwise the folks at the top are more beholden to parties than constituents...
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I couldn't agree more. The debate was over whether it was sufficient just to release a keygen to pirate a product, or if it was necessary to patch the software. My argument was that keygens only work if the software vendor is sloppy. Obviously a code patch is going to work just about all of the time (although TCPA could change that).
While it seems like most activation schemes have been defeated, in theory it is possible to devise one that is unbreakable without espionage.
Create a VERY secure server. Stick it in a vault with just a power cord and a serial cable running out to another server. Have this secure server generate a keypair, and upload the public key across the serial port to the general network. Embed this public key in your software.
When activating your software the program generates a request for activation, and sends it to the vendor. The vendor screens it appropriately, and if it meets the criteria for approval uploads it over the serial line to the secure server, which signs it and returns the signed registration key. The secure server software simply listens on the tty, examines the input for a valid signature request, signs it, and returns it via the tty. The software is carefully audited so as to be completely secure.
Such a system would be immune to a keygen. You would have to patch the software itself to remove the authentication check (which of course is completely possible, at least until TCPA comes along).
A keygen can only be created if symmetric crypto is used, if the key is short enough to crack, or if there is a leak at the vendor. Now, usually one of these conditions is met, but there is nothing that says this has to be the case...
Deciding on a career based on how much money you expect make is just wrong.
Deciding on what car to buy based on the price tag is just wrong. If you like the BMW right out of college you should go ahead and spend $70k on it. It is all about what you like driving - not what it costs.
Deciding on what computer to buy based on the price tag is just wrong. If your personality shouts "Alienware!" then you should go ahead and spend $5000 on your system. It is all about the image - not whether it is better or costs more.
Welcome to real life. Money matters. Sure, on its own it doesn't buy happiness, but there is some correlation. If you find a field that you love in which employers pay little and treat employees like trash, you won't be happy even if it is what you would do as your hobby. Instead, find a compromise job where you can be reasonably happy at work, but make a good wage and have money to spend on your hobbies in your spare time.
Besides, if we all only did things for the love of the job, do you think that anybody would be driving out to your house to pick up your garbage?
However, my guess is that a substantial number of apache users aren't rolling their own nonfree versions. And how would anybody know if they were?
Clearly RMS was referring to people who are distributing proprietary derivatives of apache. Users modifying their own versions is the very essence of freedom! It is developers modifying software and releasing it non-free which RMS objects to.
Or, you can have a DirecTivo for free.
That is my big dilema. My Tivo is on its last legs. However, I won't settle for less than two tuners, and I'm eerie about re-encoded video quality. To use myth I'd need to get two sat receivers and attach them to a myth box. $570 is a LOT to pay for a DVR, when you can get the R10 for free or the R15 for a yet-to-be-determined sum. I keep thinking about myth - every time my tivo acts up I just think of the benefits of having something I can just dig into and fix on my own. However, even if I had to replace my Tivo every year I'd probably still not break even.
Obviously this is largely the result of below-cost marketing. However, I guarantee that DirecTV is not paying $570 per unit. Myth really needs somebody to come up with a cheap hardware solution to make it work...
Well, sure, but you have to admit that they are fun to watch!
You need to see how well Earl fared in mythbusters. Suffice it to say the cop is better off making a suicide dash towards the nearest building than just firing from behind his car...
Can you give me the reference to the line in the constituation that states that the bill of rights is subject to the whim of those in charge?
Martial law amounts to might makes right. Obviously if I have a pistol and there are 25 guys outside my house with M16s and a few APCs, they're going to have things their way. Likewise when you're walking down the street minding your own business and a gang war erupts around you and you're dodging bullets you're not going to come out on top. In neither case does might in and of itself make right. Citizens should hold the people involved accountable in both cases...
Uh, why would the writers of the constitution write an ammendment to guarantee the right of the armed forces to be armed? Why would the governemnt ever disarm the armed forces in the first place?
The reason you write an ammendment is to keep the government from doing something that otherwise it might have an inclination to do. While most governments would not be inclined to disarm themselves, they certainly would be likely to want to disarm the general citizenry. Hence the ammendment...
One problem - how many people does it take to build a spaceship? Most likely more than would fit inside the ship. So, you need a few generations of growth just to begin construction. And why would people with a perfectly good planet with a Texas-per-person of open space want to get back on a ship for a few hundred years to find another planet which is most likely no better than the one they're already on?
If people multiplied like rats I could see the colony time being every 1000 years or so, but most likely they wouldn't multiply like rats. 1st world societies are barely at the replacement level - if a planet were colonized with modern Americans or Europeans, it would NEVER grow. Most likely future colonists would be migratory - depete a planet of resources and move on. However, it would not be depleted quickly, since modern societies don't grow all that fast.
Just a few random thoughts. Who knows how things will really turn out. If we knew we had another planet we could reach in 500 years and had the technology to go there, why would more than the odd explorer bother to make the trip (at least until the early-adopters develop things a bit)? Colonization is a slow process. Early American colonists tended to be driven by persecution from Europe (religious or political) - modern society doesn't tend to have as much of this. Obviously a major famine or something like that would become a big driver.
Interesting concepts...
They probably say that email is not to be used for non-work related purposes (Every place Ive worked at has had that one) but as a law firm, I'd imagine they'd need a strict policy about internal correspondance leaving the firms internal network.
Even such a clause can be hard to enforce legally if the defence can show that it is not enforced uniformly. That is the danger of broad contract clause. If the defence can show that EVERYBODY violates the contract, then the courts will question the wisdom of enforcing it in any particular case.
For example, if the windows EULA contained a restriction that said that if you mow your own lawn you agree to give Bill Gates the title to your home, that is technically an agreement to avoid a particular activity. If MS then slectively went after windows copyright violators using this clause it would be likely to be found unenforceable, since it is being used selectively.
The fact is that most companies do in fact tolerate personal use of email despite wording to the contrary in the AUP. If the defence can show that many others send personal emails, and that their managers are aware of this activity, then the court may be likely to question why they are being singled out. Otherwise a company who wants to get rid of all its over-40 employees could just do an audit and fire just these employees for sending personal emails.
Many companies as a result have AUPs that specifically allow personal use of email within certain bounds. A court is more likely to uphold such an AUP if the bounds sound reasonable and has in fact been violated (such as running a personal business on company time, or sending bulk mail or many large emails, or excessive use of company time). Additionally, if an employee is excessively using time at work for personal business it is likely that their performance will suffer and that is clearly cause for termination.
Government has a bad habit of exempting itself from the rules that they make everybody else play by. I figure that low-lying land that's uneconomical to build on because of insurance costs would be attractive for an eminent domain grab, to put civic services, like, say, public housing on. Whoops, we're back where we started.
You couldn't be more correct. Of course, my intention was to house them where the cost is lowest in terms of TCO. However, as you point out government is traditionally short-sighted in this regard and we'll be housing these people in flood plains most likely.
Sometimes I wonder if things would be better if we just evenly dispersed people on welfare across the countryside at an even density - so some would end up in cities, but most would end up in rural areas. You wouldn't have collections of people on public assistance in the same neighborhoods. This would help people on welfare to form social networks with productive members of society, who would then be able to positively influence them and also help them find gainful employment. They would also find it boring to just sit at home 9-5 when everybody else is out working. Sometimes I wonder if the ghetto isn't half of our problem. If nothing else their kids are more likely to turn out well if they're in a non-ghetto setting.
Of course, this will cost more upfront as housing is MUCH more expensive in these areas. However, it will probably pay for itself if in 10 years we have 1/10th the number of people on public assistance...
So... you're saying that the Free Market could have ensured that this disaster could have been much less worse? ;-)
Sure. Who would issue a mortgage on a home in an area prone to flooding if they knew the Feds wouldn't pay them off if there was a flood? Who would build a business there?
The disaster wasn't the flood - there have been floods there for the past several million years. It is only a disaster when you have a million people living in a spot that has severe flooding every 50 years or so.
You can try to move the water, or you can just move the people. Or, you can point out that anybody who builds their home there will have to rebuild it every few decades and then when the flood comes just stand and say "I told you so."
Human life is valuable. I'd support free bussing to get people out of danger even if they were idiots for being there in the first place. However, their homes are less valuable. If they're dependant on government assistance for having someplace to live, the government should at least find someplace cheaper to put them...
Sure, just look up cryptoloop or something like that.
Everything on disk is encrypted. However, the decryption key is cached in memory and used to encrypt and decrypt data as it is read/written. This way you don't accidentally forget to re-encrypt stuff, and you don't have decrypted data temporarily on disk.
Simply using kgpg requires manual effort. If you encrypt individual files/folders you're contantly re-decrypting them. If you're encrypting half your drive in one file, then you have to sit around for 15 minutes decrypting it each time you boot, and 15 minutes of encryption every time you shut down.
Encryption will only be widespread if it is transparent.
I'm waiting for plausible deniability encryption schemes to become a bit more mainstream for linux. Phonebook is a good example, but it doesn't have mainstream distro support.
That might not be such a bad thing (loss of orbital momentum).
1. Deploy tether.
2. Generate electromagnetic field.
3. Gather space junk with said field.
4. Eventually orbit decays and craft deorbits, carrying gathered junk.
Of course, this would be useless for non-ferromagnetic material. Maybe an dispersed ionizing radiation source or something like that could be used to ionize non-metallic objects to draw them into the field.
That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I have no doubts that what you've reported is true, but something like this should just be a slap on the wrist ($20 fine maybe) to discourage people from hiking without the proper radio / satphone / whatever.
I'm sure the FCC/FBI/whatever has better things to be investigating than people making desperate calls for help in the least intrusive manner possible. I'm sure the guy wasn't just sitting there all day long jamming the police frequencies - he probably just radioed his location and got off the air...
Your entire line of questions regarding backup falls into this category. Backing up a RDBMS is hardly a new thing.
Actually, backups are an interesting issue that I hadn't thought about with the whole file-as-DB debate.
Backing up a DB is straightforward. In fact, with journals and all that it can be made possible to do atomic backups (ie a backup that captures the state of the filesystem in an instant of time).
However, the issue here is partial backups. Doing a backup of a 400GB drive onto 800 CDs or 80 DVDs or a tape or two with a $2000 drive is simple enough already. However, when I do a backup I don't want all records that changed since the last backup. I want all important records that changed (usually my home dir). Probably the easiest way to do that is via a backup field on the database, with an easy way to control its default setting (off for OS/Software, on for data, inherit from parent metadata).
One issue with big databases is that they are only useful if your relationships are good (ie your keywords/projects/etc). Users in my experience do a lousy job picking these on their own, and often resent the work of having to choose them. In many database apps they are set silently in the background based on the context of a user's operations, but while this works in an application program that automates a particular business process, it will be harder to extend this to general practice.
I think the jury is out on this whole debate. I think nobody will really know what is easier until people start trying it and learn to love it or hate it.
I love databases in general. However, the features that make them very powerful have always been the hardest things to explain to ordinary users...
My guess is that the only thing stopping them now is the availability of nukes or the logistics of getting them into the US. I doubt the will to use them is a problem right now.
In any case, nukes obviously shouldn't be used wontonly on the battlefield in what would otherwise be a conventional war. However, I have no delusions that this policy is in any way making it less likely that nukes will be used on the US anyway. When nutcases get bombs and a clear path to their target, they blow things up. For the most part terrorism is as simple as this. Sure, foreign policy probably does tend to exhasperate the situation a little, and it may also influence whether terrorist groups get sponsored by national governments. However, the big problem is that as technology increases it become easier for a small group to do a large amount of damange, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Suggesting that US policy dictates the liklihood of somebody smuggling a nuke into the US is like suggesting that welfare policy dictates the liklihood of some idiot opening fire in a mall with a machine gun. The world is full of idiots and it is just becoming harder to limit there actions...
Simple.
The employment agreement probably said that if you sue IBM over your retirment package, you forfeit it automatically. Probably not enforcable in the courts, but IBM would still be able to stop mailing him checks until the court explictly ruled so. The way courts work, they might not even owe penalties under the premise that they were just following the letter of the contract.
The fact is that when it is you against IBM, and they owe you $500k over the next 30 years, you're the one over a barrel - not them. They might have to pay you in the end, but they can make your life so miserable that it isn't worth fighting them.
What can I say, the law isn't meant to be fair. I'd be the first in line to change it, but first I need to be elected, and in order to that I need the backing of the lawyers and megacorps...
Vioxx is a pain releiver that causes heart attacks when there are a lot of pain relievers that actually HELP your heart (eg aspirin).
Actually, by "a lot" you probably mean "just one" - aspirin.
I don't believe that any other pain medication has a cardioprotective benefit. The only one which seems up for debate was Naproxen, which was a theory advocated in fact by Merck. Early studies showed that Vioxx caused as many heart attacks as placebo, and more heart attacks than Naproxen. The question was whether Vioxx was killing people, or Naproxen was saving people.
It eventually turned out that Vioxx was in fact causing heart attacks, although most likely Naproxen was also saving people.
The real problem for Merck was that heart attacks were an undisclosed side effect. If the risks had been known in advance there probably would be no grounds for a lawsuit - after all, the doctors knew what they were prescribing. The big item debated in the Vioxx cases is whether Merck should have concluded that Vioxx caused heart attacks based on the data they had years ago, or whether as Merck maintains there wasn't any solid evidence prior to late 2004.
Agreed. My whole point was that passengers/mach was a useless metric.
/. is that you simply can't be subtle...)
Passengers*mach would be much more useful.
And indeed, the last time I checked 5 / 0.1 was in fact = 50... As far as my conversion to mach goes - google 65 mph in mach...
(Alas, the trouble with
That's nothing - my Toyota Camry with 5 passengers going 65mph gets 58 passengers/mach! The bus down the street gets about 500 passengers/mach.
Of course, once you allow non-automated cars on the road you give up a number of advantages of automation:
1. Safety (those non-automated cars can cause accidents).
2. Congestion management (that non-automated driver may wait forever at a stop sign to make a left turn, may drive 10 under the speed limit, will fail to immediately step on the gas the instant a light turns green, etc).
3. Removed need for local parking (why have lots in front of every store at a strip mall - why not have one huge parking garage a mile down the road shared by all the stores in the vicinity). If you have manual drivers you still need parking lots.
Really, it makes sense just to ditch the manual driving entirely and then everybody can take full advantage of computer-based controls. Imagine an internet which had to allow for manual source routing, or manual encryption of SSL sessions - ISPs wouldn't be able to take advantage of all their bandwidth since people wouldn't be bothered to source-route through their least-loaded lines, and web servers would have to leave connections open all day while grandma does eliptic curves on her calculator since she doesn't trust the new-fangled computer. Sounds silly when you talk about computers, so why shouldn't it sound silly when you talk about cars?
Put it this way, if you were designing a system in a warehouse for shutting materials around the building that you knew would be HEAVILY used, would you design it to use vehicles driven by people along personally-chosen routes at times of their own choosing and without central control of any kind? Roads are as heavily utilized as the most automated of warehouses, and businesses have learned that at those scales it makes sense to automate.
Put it this way, which is cheaper:
1. Making every car more efficient to make up for gas wasted on the commute to work, while paying to have courts entertain squabbles about who caused what accident, while paying to imprison drunk drivers while demolishing houses to make way for new bypasses, while fining everybody in sight for daring to drive too fast on big highways.
or
2. Making everybody's trip to work 15 minutes shorter by adopting a standard for automatic vehicle control, while eliminating the need for medium-length flights since you can just sleep in your car on the way, while cutting down on pollution, while all but eliminating accidents, while letting cars go service themselves while you're at work, while eliminating the home delivery business as your cars can just pull into a depot and get loaded up while you're at work, and so on...
Err - you're right. You can tell I don't play much myself... The probability is in favor of AKs and above against 9 players. However, with anything lower than this (such as AQs or JJ) the normally-winning strategy of scaring off the other players with a big bet is less likely to pay off against colluders. Especially if one or more of them has an A, K, or Q. In theory colluders can bet wisely against even AA if they know their hands have more strength than would be apparent without knowledge of the other cards in play.
I think the EU already has a patent on this concept. Or at least they will once the commission finishes overriding the democratic will of their electorate and legalizes business-method patents. They make a good case-study in why government-by-bureaucracy doesn't work.
I believe wholeheartedly in federal government (national government - national concerns, local government - local concerns), but the representatives should ALL be popularly elected. Otherwise the folks at the top are more beholden to parties than constituents...