The problem is that DMCA doesn't effectively provide penalties for filing bogus notifications.
It does require the complainant to make a statement under penalty of perjury. In theory false takedowns could be pursued in court.
The real problem here is automated takedowns. How can you have a computer system make a statement on your behalf under penalty of perjury? It would be like sending a computer to testify on your behalf in court.
If GoDaddy filed an effectively-bogus DMCA, why weren't they punished?
"[..] statement by you UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf."
Simple - a prosecutor didn't go after them for it. People commit perjury on DMCA takedown requests all the time. The problem is that perjury is a criminal matter, which means a prosecutor has to pursue the matter. I don't see the Attorney General's office all that busy going after false DMCA claims - they're too busy going after the alleged copyright infringers.
Agree 100%. I recall buying software licenses and doing the dog an pony show about a decade ago. We had four vendors come in. Most sent a team with one sales guy and one technical guy. One vendor had the sales guy get sick at the last minute and they just sent a technical rep. We ended up selecting that vendor, and even our local management commented vocally during the meeting that they appreciated that we were digging into the meat of the discussions and not spending two hours talking about how great their company was.
I also know somebody else who was doing technical sales support in a completely different industry, but again involving the sales of fairly technical equipment primarily to engineers. They basically clinched a sale but then their VP found out and got involved, and then they nearly lost the sale.
The average person isn't going to be setting up rsync and a cron job. I personally use duplicity to cloud storage for the most important stuff (measured in GB), and rsnapshot to normally-unmounted storage for the less-important stuff (measured in TB). It requires near-zero oversight, but it isn't the sort of thing that just anybody could/would set up. For family I'd probably recommend something like Carbonite - it isn't any better than what you and I are doing but it is at least targeted at the consumer.
Just letting viruses loose on your system is not wise. Besides the risk of data loss, you could have compromise of financial and other personal information. And, anybody can come along and write another cryptolocker/etc.
My point though was just running something like Linux out-of-the-box doesn't really solve your antivirus problems. I'd rather start from that than a retail Windows DVD, but we could do a lot better.
In my experience there are a bunch of skills needed to get the job, and individuals vary in how much of any of these skills they have. On average you find different skills in business analysts vs managers vs engineers. When you look at individuals I have no doubt you find people any any role who could do any other role, or people in a role who really aren't competent to do any of them.
The division of labor sometimes makes sense simply so that all the bases are covered and the job takes more than one person. Sometimes a lack of roles results in neglect, which hurts down the road.
I'm a business analyst by job title, but the last thing I'd want any software engineer to do is not talk to the customer. Likewise, I view engineers AS one of my customers, so I'm always interested in feedback about how my work is useful to them - I'm not big on producing deliverables for their own sake. I don't think I can do my job without being fairly knowledgeable about how the technology works, though I will confess that I don't have the standard class libraries of every language at a moment's grasp. I like to think that I add value.
But, I fully get what you're saying. The thing is, most people are average. I've had really good managers and I've had lousy ones. I have nothing but respect for the really good ones and I can appreciate the things that they do that make my life a lot easier, and I don't think I could fill their shoes. On the other hand, I have had poor ones that honestly I don't think I'd have trouble replacing. The same goes for "engineers" - I've had to deal with some where frankly I'd have been better off doing the work myself if I had the time to do it on top of the job I was supposed to be doing.
A really good team has a diversity of skills, they understand each other, and they work together so that they're producing far more than what you'd get if you took one member of the team and cloned them a half-dozen times. They know when to trust each other, and when to step in. And nobody really gets a pass on having at least a sense of how to do everybody else's job.
This is actually a good illustration of the fact that people making decisions for a corporation rarely put the shareholder's interests first.
If you're hiring and the interviewee looks like they are homeless, but for whatever reason they demonstrate that they are the most competent candidate for the job, then your choice is to either toss them for their appearance and hire a less competent candidate, or hire them. Now, if they absolutely reek of body odor perhaps you'll have to have them work from home or sequester them into an office with self-contained ventillation or else half the rest of the department will quit. All of those concerns are legitimate business concerns if your sole preoccupation is with making your shareholders as much money as possible.
However, a lot of other factors weigh into the decision like what people will think of you as a manager if you hire a "bum" and those tend to take priority over making your shareholders money.
This is just one example, and dress code isn't a particularly strong one. Managers don't make decisions to make companies money - they are motivated primarily by self-interest, and to some extent corporate policies help to align that self-interest with making the company money.
This is part of why start-ups tend to put little emphasis on things like dress code, tend to be much less rigid, etc. The owner knows everybody, and for a company where the decisions are made by the owner, self-interest and making money for the shareholders are almost perfectly aligned. Even if there is a layer of management or two involved, the shareholders aren't some disconnected and abstract force - they're people just down the hall who check in frequently and know everybody's name.
I once had to buy dry ice and bought it from a small business which clearly wasn't retail-oriented. I walked into the office door and asked if they would sell to private individuals. They responded that as long as the money was green that they would take it. I work for a company that employes 50k people. If somebody walked up to the security gate and offered $10M cash for 1 pound of dry ice (which could be obtained from a building 100 yards away easily) nobody would give them the time of day or have any idea how to make that work even if they were inclined to do so. Most likely they would be turned away, or if they had a desperate need they might just be given it free of charge. The idea of actually selling something for outrageous profit is so abstracted away there just isn't any process for doing it. The company certainly sells product, but completing a single sale probably involves 100 people doing 1/100th of the task each across two continents with ERP systems and financial systems and the works. If you walked into a software start-up and told them that you're desperately in need of a laptop so if they could just hand them one (wiped/new/etc) they'd pay $200k cash for it, they'd figure out how to make it work.
I'd considered this, but these days it isn't just juvenile prank software that ends up running. If you just accept viruses on your network you get issues like: 1. You're part of the spam problem. I prefer not to be a leach on society. 2. They're stealing your personal info, including stuff like banking credentials. I like having money, and would prefer to hang onto it. 3. Somebody could use your PC to attack something else, perhaps something important. I don't like guys kicking down my doors in the middle of the night. 4. Somebody could use your PC to host warez/music/etc. I don't like getting sued and having to prove my innocence, and heaven forbid any of my PCs actually contain warez/music/etc in the first place when this happens.
I could see regular wipes as an inconvenient ADDITIONAL layer of security on top of keeping garbage out. I just don't see it as a substitute.
That and have a backup, or at least filesystem snapshots.
That is his whole point though. The OS security isn't really adding any effective value. If you're going to not run malware in the first place, then it doesn't matter if you're running everything as root. If you're going to have good backups, then losing all your files won't matter much.
The unix security model makes sense from the standpoint that when damage gets in it is contained to a single user account, and doesn't affect the other 500 users on the system. The problem is that this isn't how desktop systems actually work. When there is only a single user account on the system, limiting the damage to only that account means that you've basically lost the war entirely.
Something like SELinux takes the security model a step further by not treating all programs with the same uid equally. The problem is that it is painful enough to use that most distros don't bother with it.
And good backups aren't as easy as you suggest. Maybe if all you do is word processing you can either store your stuff in the cloud or use an online backup service and you'll be OK. Once your data volumes go up, doing good backups is both expensive and inconvenient. If you want only one copy of your data, then you double your storage costs right off the bat. If you want multiple copies going back in time, then your costs go up more. The average user considers a backup a USB hard drive they leave plugged in 24x7, and thus it is subject to loss just like the main system - it really only provides protection against drive failure, not malware. Some people leave the backup drive powered off except when doing backups, which reduces the risk of malware, but probably means their backup is old unless they are religious about doing backups.
Sure, you or I could jot down a robust backup procedure in 5 minutes. The problem is that this works much better for a datacenter where you pay 5 guys to man the floor 24x7 to monitor 500 computers than for a situation where you have one person who is responsible for one computer and they'd prefer not to have to think about it.
Yeah, I can't complain about the EOD bots. Actually, I'd think those would also be ideal for some kinds of wacko-with-a-gun situations. If the wacko is alone you can send in the robot to talk to him, and the guy could surrender the gun to the robot. That lets you disarm the wacko while reducing the risk of a situation where a cop would have to shoot the wacko in self-defense. Sure, it won't be able to subdue him on its own, but that isn't the point - you want to talk to them, calm them down, and get them to put the gun on the floor and walk away from it. This lets you do it without putting a person in harms way, which means you can be more patient and not fire as soon as the guy twitches.
In some countries, the penalty for drug offenses is not prison, it's execution.
Yup. We really need to crack down. If we keep up this laxity before we know it people will feel like it is OK to change religions, marry somebody of a different religion, or teach a girl how to read.
Well, knowledge of the local environment perhaps not (anymore... after all there was no GPS when the law was made).
However special driving license, yes!
Special driving license, maybe...
If we were talking about busses I'd definitely buy in. They're larger than normal cars, and there are issues with evacuation, and situations that just don't come up with cars.
However, driving a taxi safely is no harder than driving a car safely. Maybe just a special endorsement after taking a quiz would make sense. If somebody can't drive a few passengers safely, they can't drive a family safely, or even themselves safely without putting others at risk.
Well, I usualy have trips that are not longer than 15 minutes, and I appreciate it if the driver does not need 2 mins to set up the navigation first, especially if the spelling of the target is odd.
Is this REALLY something that needs to be regulated by law? I can understand the need for insurance, basic safety, etc. However, if it takes you a few minutes longer to get to the destination to save $5, shouldn't that be a choice you can legally choose to make.
I mean, I'd hope that the UPS driver wouldn't get lost finding my house and delay the shipment for a month, but if UPS did that routinely they'd be out of business, so it isn't necessary to regulate it.
These guys seem to be copping a whole lot of shit just for trying to make transport easier for users.
No, these guys are copping a whole lot of shit for trying to offer no-standards transport in nations that have minimum standards for their public transport services.
Well, no doubt they have standards, but they are their own standards.
I'm all for basic requirements around liability insurance and such as long as they aren't over the top (you shouldn't need a million dollar policy to carry a few passengers).
The thing is, it is in Uber's interest to ensure a decent level of quality everywhere. If somebody gets mugged by an Uber driver in Italy, they will lose customers EVERYWHERE. If somebody gets mugged by an Italian taxi driver, it won't affect the revenues of the London taxi drivers all that much. It is really a different model to quality - it isn't necessarily worse, just different. I think it needs to be regulated differently, but I don't suggest that we should accept unsafe conditions.
Have you actually been to Thailand or you are just spouting prejudice? Official taxis there (especially in Bangkok) are great - clean, working AC, _very_ cheap (on meter with official rate).
I think the point is that Uber is a global brand. Thialand Taxi Company or whatever they call it isn't. I have no idea if their Taxis are good or not, but I know what Uber is. Maybe Thailand Taxi is better, but it is an unknown quantity for somebody new to the country.
If I go to Uzbekistan and need to mail a package back to the US, maybe the Uzbekistan post office is decent. But, if I see an office labeled "UPS" I have some kind of expectation about what kind of service it will provide, and if UPS wants to remain competitive as a global provider they're going to strive to meet that level of service everywhere. Global companies stay in business by offering their customers a uniform experience that they can't get without being experts in every country on earth.
The concept is like a film camera. You capture the data first, and deal with it later. No CPU is involved in the actual collection of each frame, and they capture a VERY limited number of frames as a result.
When they did bullet time in the first matrix movie they just lined up a whole bunch of cameras and triggered them at very short intervals. Each camera only recorded a single frame. You can collect/process the data later - the critical part was capturing the data. Most high-speed data collection works the same way - extremely fast sampling times, but capture is done into a small buffer and then offloaded later.
Well, they don't transport anything anywhere with their solution. But, if you had a technology that could actually offload the data to bulk storage and thus operate "indefinitely" the speed of light would not create any problems whatsoever.
Just send the data down a wire or fiber optic cable. Sure, the first byte will only travel a few mm before you have to send the second, but there is no law saying that you can only have one packet of data in the cable at a time. Speed of light impacts latency, not bandwidth. If you want to be able to retransmit lost packets/etc then that latency will have a HUGE impact on your buffering requirements at both ends. We're talking transmitting trillions of data points before getting the first ack.
The reality is that it will be a long time before this technology could be operated for more than a handful of frames at a time. We don't have any technologies with the necessary bandwidth to transfer this kind of data volume quickly. Even if a frame only required a kilobyte of space to store, you're talking about petabytes per second here. Still, the speed of light is not a fundamental limitation on bandwidth.
TAXES are regressive, all of them. Until the left realizes this, we're stuck being turned into serfs unto our government masters.
How do you propose paying for wealth-transfer programs without taxes? It is impossible to use programs like basic income and so on without taxation - the entire premise behind these programs is that it is impossible for some people to earn enough money to survive, and thus somebody else has to earn money on their behalf and then care for them.
The fact that in the US only a small percentage of taxpayers pay such a large share of the total tax base demonstrates that taxes aren't inherently regressive, especially considering that the higher tax brackets used to be taxed much more heavily in the past.
They said that it was delivered within 3 hours, which presumably means by courier. Dispatching a courier isn't cheap - certainly it is far more expensive than just mailing a letter.
The safest approach is to not fscking do this kind of insanity in the first place.
Certainly. If the research is likely to have a public health benefit (likely, not tenuous connection), and there is NO other way to obtain the benefit, then I could see room for debate and careful consideration.
Short of that, this is just playing with fire. It seems like we have more controls over using primates in experiments than creating civilization-destroying viruses...
They can potentially be useful if you want some kind of independent survey of a boring topic that isn't of primary interest to you, but which you have to deal with.
Every company has its areas of expertise. If you're learning anything from Gartner in these areas you're probably doing something wrong.
On the other hand, maybe your company wants to deploy proximity ID badges in 14 offices in 10 countries, and you want to know who makes systems that are compatible/compliant/etc across all of them. Unless you make/sell badge readers as your primary business, you probably don't know much about them. If you were securing one office with one door, maybe you wouldn't care and would just pick a random vendor with a cheap price. However, even a high-level overview of the field could save you a lot of money, and trying to figure out what info online is good/bad would probably be tough.
Just a random example. Just look at any of the 4700 things a company has to do to stay in business which aren't cool enough to get coverage in newspapers or other free semi-unbiased sources of info, but which can cost a company money if they don't pick at least a reasonable solution for.
At my workplace (a private company) it feels like we're still stuck in a 1970s IT mindset. Everything is waterfall with a veneer of Agile. Then there is all the finger-pointing when it turns out that there was a mistake in the requirements, and if all goes well we deploy a solution to the problems of two years before.
When you look at successful technologies these days, almost none of them follow a classical requirements methodology. Sure, they involve requirements, but they rarely involve huge documents of specifications that encompass a year's worth of project that the vendors live (or more likely die) by, which are meticulously curated over time so as to always represent an as-built documentation set.
Combine this with a more-with-less mentality, and it feels like success is impossible...
But, even still - I see little reason for an operating system to be there, except for convenient/cheap/fast development.
Don't discount those. Which would you rather own shares in? The mid-sized company with significant revenues but with a core product that has design issues requiring a significant overhaul? Or, the failed start-up that had a great design but which didn't get to market before the money ran out or the aforementioned mid-sized company gobbled up 99% market share?
To be honest I'm not sure about the mass of a Dyson sphere. However, I'd assume that estimates of the amount of baryonic matter already take into account the non-steller mass associated with a typical solar system, so if the estimate is that we need N stars to account for it, we'd need N Dyson spheres since those spheres could only be constructed from the matter around the star. That is, unless they disassemble a few stars to provide matter to produce a sphere around a different star.
In any case, they would still radiate IR. Also, is it any less astonishing to claim that for any 2-3 stars we see anywhere in the universe (including in other galaxies) there is a dyson sphere in the same galaxy, with all of them being distributed fairly uniformly? If they can deconstruct entire stars and move the matter around, why would they scatter the stars they do occupy all over the place?
And I say "your" because you at least appear to be shilling for someone and not actually individuals. I fully admit that is a speculation, but a fair one given that not a single person who defended the GP has been willing to debate my points.
Or they just can't be bothered to.:)
I have exactly one Slashdot account, and I've been using it for 10 years. Heck, I use the same username on half of the Internet so you could probably figure out who I am if you tried hard enough...
So now you claim that the only way to have any knowledge is by working for a specific company, almost as good as your previous point.
Uh, what previous point would that be? This is my first post in this thread.
And yes, the only way to have any knowledge about the results of a measure taken by Google is to work about Google, unless they publish the data. You can certainly say that we tried the same thing and it didn't work elsewhere, but you can't purport to know whether it worked for Google. Maybe the folks at your company were just incompetent? Or maybe the guy is just lying about Google. I have no idea, and neither do you.
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The problem is that DMCA doesn't effectively provide penalties for filing bogus notifications.
It does require the complainant to make a statement under penalty of perjury. In theory false takedowns could be pursued in court.
The real problem here is automated takedowns. How can you have a computer system make a statement on your behalf under penalty of perjury? It would be like sending a computer to testify on your behalf in court.
If GoDaddy filed an effectively-bogus DMCA, why weren't they punished?
"[..] statement by you UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf."
Simple - a prosecutor didn't go after them for it. People commit perjury on DMCA takedown requests all the time. The problem is that perjury is a criminal matter, which means a prosecutor has to pursue the matter. I don't see the Attorney General's office all that busy going after false DMCA claims - they're too busy going after the alleged copyright infringers.
Agree 100%. I recall buying software licenses and doing the dog an pony show about a decade ago. We had four vendors come in. Most sent a team with one sales guy and one technical guy. One vendor had the sales guy get sick at the last minute and they just sent a technical rep. We ended up selecting that vendor, and even our local management commented vocally during the meeting that they appreciated that we were digging into the meat of the discussions and not spending two hours talking about how great their company was.
I also know somebody else who was doing technical sales support in a completely different industry, but again involving the sales of fairly technical equipment primarily to engineers. They basically clinched a sale but then their VP found out and got involved, and then they nearly lost the sale.
The average person isn't going to be setting up rsync and a cron job. I personally use duplicity to cloud storage for the most important stuff (measured in GB), and rsnapshot to normally-unmounted storage for the less-important stuff (measured in TB). It requires near-zero oversight, but it isn't the sort of thing that just anybody could/would set up. For family I'd probably recommend something like Carbonite - it isn't any better than what you and I are doing but it is at least targeted at the consumer.
Just letting viruses loose on your system is not wise. Besides the risk of data loss, you could have compromise of financial and other personal information. And, anybody can come along and write another cryptolocker/etc.
My point though was just running something like Linux out-of-the-box doesn't really solve your antivirus problems. I'd rather start from that than a retail Windows DVD, but we could do a lot better.
In my experience there are a bunch of skills needed to get the job, and individuals vary in how much of any of these skills they have. On average you find different skills in business analysts vs managers vs engineers. When you look at individuals I have no doubt you find people any any role who could do any other role, or people in a role who really aren't competent to do any of them.
The division of labor sometimes makes sense simply so that all the bases are covered and the job takes more than one person. Sometimes a lack of roles results in neglect, which hurts down the road.
I'm a business analyst by job title, but the last thing I'd want any software engineer to do is not talk to the customer. Likewise, I view engineers AS one of my customers, so I'm always interested in feedback about how my work is useful to them - I'm not big on producing deliverables for their own sake. I don't think I can do my job without being fairly knowledgeable about how the technology works, though I will confess that I don't have the standard class libraries of every language at a moment's grasp. I like to think that I add value.
But, I fully get what you're saying. The thing is, most people are average. I've had really good managers and I've had lousy ones. I have nothing but respect for the really good ones and I can appreciate the things that they do that make my life a lot easier, and I don't think I could fill their shoes. On the other hand, I have had poor ones that honestly I don't think I'd have trouble replacing. The same goes for "engineers" - I've had to deal with some where frankly I'd have been better off doing the work myself if I had the time to do it on top of the job I was supposed to be doing.
A really good team has a diversity of skills, they understand each other, and they work together so that they're producing far more than what you'd get if you took one member of the team and cloned them a half-dozen times. They know when to trust each other, and when to step in. And nobody really gets a pass on having at least a sense of how to do everybody else's job.
This is actually a good illustration of the fact that people making decisions for a corporation rarely put the shareholder's interests first.
If you're hiring and the interviewee looks like they are homeless, but for whatever reason they demonstrate that they are the most competent candidate for the job, then your choice is to either toss them for their appearance and hire a less competent candidate, or hire them. Now, if they absolutely reek of body odor perhaps you'll have to have them work from home or sequester them into an office with self-contained ventillation or else half the rest of the department will quit. All of those concerns are legitimate business concerns if your sole preoccupation is with making your shareholders as much money as possible.
However, a lot of other factors weigh into the decision like what people will think of you as a manager if you hire a "bum" and those tend to take priority over making your shareholders money.
This is just one example, and dress code isn't a particularly strong one. Managers don't make decisions to make companies money - they are motivated primarily by self-interest, and to some extent corporate policies help to align that self-interest with making the company money.
This is part of why start-ups tend to put little emphasis on things like dress code, tend to be much less rigid, etc. The owner knows everybody, and for a company where the decisions are made by the owner, self-interest and making money for the shareholders are almost perfectly aligned. Even if there is a layer of management or two involved, the shareholders aren't some disconnected and abstract force - they're people just down the hall who check in frequently and know everybody's name.
I once had to buy dry ice and bought it from a small business which clearly wasn't retail-oriented. I walked into the office door and asked if they would sell to private individuals. They responded that as long as the money was green that they would take it. I work for a company that employes 50k people. If somebody walked up to the security gate and offered $10M cash for 1 pound of dry ice (which could be obtained from a building 100 yards away easily) nobody would give them the time of day or have any idea how to make that work even if they were inclined to do so. Most likely they would be turned away, or if they had a desperate need they might just be given it free of charge. The idea of actually selling something for outrageous profit is so abstracted away there just isn't any process for doing it. The company certainly sells product, but completing a single sale probably involves 100 people doing 1/100th of the task each across two continents with ERP systems and financial systems and the works. If you walked into a software start-up and told them that you're desperately in need of a laptop so if they could just hand them one (wiped/new/etc) they'd pay $200k cash for it, they'd figure out how to make it work.
I'd considered this, but these days it isn't just juvenile prank software that ends up running. If you just accept viruses on your network you get issues like:
1. You're part of the spam problem. I prefer not to be a leach on society.
2. They're stealing your personal info, including stuff like banking credentials. I like having money, and would prefer to hang onto it.
3. Somebody could use your PC to attack something else, perhaps something important. I don't like guys kicking down my doors in the middle of the night.
4. Somebody could use your PC to host warez/music/etc. I don't like getting sued and having to prove my innocence, and heaven forbid any of my PCs actually contain warez/music/etc in the first place when this happens.
I could see regular wipes as an inconvenient ADDITIONAL layer of security on top of keeping garbage out. I just don't see it as a substitute.
You probably shouldn't run a trojan then.
That and have a backup, or at least filesystem snapshots.
That is his whole point though. The OS security isn't really adding any effective value. If you're going to not run malware in the first place, then it doesn't matter if you're running everything as root. If you're going to have good backups, then losing all your files won't matter much.
The unix security model makes sense from the standpoint that when damage gets in it is contained to a single user account, and doesn't affect the other 500 users on the system. The problem is that this isn't how desktop systems actually work. When there is only a single user account on the system, limiting the damage to only that account means that you've basically lost the war entirely.
Something like SELinux takes the security model a step further by not treating all programs with the same uid equally. The problem is that it is painful enough to use that most distros don't bother with it.
And good backups aren't as easy as you suggest. Maybe if all you do is word processing you can either store your stuff in the cloud or use an online backup service and you'll be OK. Once your data volumes go up, doing good backups is both expensive and inconvenient. If you want only one copy of your data, then you double your storage costs right off the bat. If you want multiple copies going back in time, then your costs go up more. The average user considers a backup a USB hard drive they leave plugged in 24x7, and thus it is subject to loss just like the main system - it really only provides protection against drive failure, not malware. Some people leave the backup drive powered off except when doing backups, which reduces the risk of malware, but probably means their backup is old unless they are religious about doing backups.
Sure, you or I could jot down a robust backup procedure in 5 minutes. The problem is that this works much better for a datacenter where you pay 5 guys to man the floor 24x7 to monitor 500 computers than for a situation where you have one person who is responsible for one computer and they'd prefer not to have to think about it.
Yeah, I can't complain about the EOD bots. Actually, I'd think those would also be ideal for some kinds of wacko-with-a-gun situations. If the wacko is alone you can send in the robot to talk to him, and the guy could surrender the gun to the robot. That lets you disarm the wacko while reducing the risk of a situation where a cop would have to shoot the wacko in self-defense. Sure, it won't be able to subdue him on its own, but that isn't the point - you want to talk to them, calm them down, and get them to put the gun on the floor and walk away from it. This lets you do it without putting a person in harms way, which means you can be more patient and not fire as soon as the guy twitches.
In some countries, the penalty for drug offenses is not prison, it's execution.
Yup. We really need to crack down. If we keep up this laxity before we know it people will feel like it is OK to change religions, marry somebody of a different religion, or teach a girl how to read.
Well, knowledge of the local environment perhaps not (anymore ... after all there was no GPS when the law was made).
However special driving license, yes!
Special driving license, maybe...
If we were talking about busses I'd definitely buy in. They're larger than normal cars, and there are issues with evacuation, and situations that just don't come up with cars.
However, driving a taxi safely is no harder than driving a car safely. Maybe just a special endorsement after taking a quiz would make sense. If somebody can't drive a few passengers safely, they can't drive a family safely, or even themselves safely without putting others at risk.
Well, I usualy have trips that are not longer than 15 minutes, and I appreciate it if the driver does not need 2 mins to set up the navigation first, especially if the spelling of the target is odd.
Is this REALLY something that needs to be regulated by law? I can understand the need for insurance, basic safety, etc. However, if it takes you a few minutes longer to get to the destination to save $5, shouldn't that be a choice you can legally choose to make.
I mean, I'd hope that the UPS driver wouldn't get lost finding my house and delay the shipment for a month, but if UPS did that routinely they'd be out of business, so it isn't necessary to regulate it.
No, these guys are copping a whole lot of shit for trying to offer no-standards transport in nations that have minimum standards for their public transport services.
Well, no doubt they have standards, but they are their own standards.
I'm all for basic requirements around liability insurance and such as long as they aren't over the top (you shouldn't need a million dollar policy to carry a few passengers).
The thing is, it is in Uber's interest to ensure a decent level of quality everywhere. If somebody gets mugged by an Uber driver in Italy, they will lose customers EVERYWHERE. If somebody gets mugged by an Italian taxi driver, it won't affect the revenues of the London taxi drivers all that much. It is really a different model to quality - it isn't necessarily worse, just different. I think it needs to be regulated differently, but I don't suggest that we should accept unsafe conditions.
Have you actually been to Thailand or you are just spouting prejudice? Official taxis there (especially in Bangkok) are great - clean, working AC, _very_ cheap (on meter with official rate).
I think the point is that Uber is a global brand. Thialand Taxi Company or whatever they call it isn't. I have no idea if their Taxis are good or not, but I know what Uber is. Maybe Thailand Taxi is better, but it is an unknown quantity for somebody new to the country.
If I go to Uzbekistan and need to mail a package back to the US, maybe the Uzbekistan post office is decent. But, if I see an office labeled "UPS" I have some kind of expectation about what kind of service it will provide, and if UPS wants to remain competitive as a global provider they're going to strive to meet that level of service everywhere. Global companies stay in business by offering their customers a uniform experience that they can't get without being experts in every country on earth.
The concept is like a film camera. You capture the data first, and deal with it later. No CPU is involved in the actual collection of each frame, and they capture a VERY limited number of frames as a result.
When they did bullet time in the first matrix movie they just lined up a whole bunch of cameras and triggered them at very short intervals. Each camera only recorded a single frame. You can collect/process the data later - the critical part was capturing the data. Most high-speed data collection works the same way - extremely fast sampling times, but capture is done into a small buffer and then offloaded later.
Well, they don't transport anything anywhere with their solution. But, if you had a technology that could actually offload the data to bulk storage and thus operate "indefinitely" the speed of light would not create any problems whatsoever.
Just send the data down a wire or fiber optic cable. Sure, the first byte will only travel a few mm before you have to send the second, but there is no law saying that you can only have one packet of data in the cable at a time. Speed of light impacts latency, not bandwidth. If you want to be able to retransmit lost packets/etc then that latency will have a HUGE impact on your buffering requirements at both ends. We're talking transmitting trillions of data points before getting the first ack.
The reality is that it will be a long time before this technology could be operated for more than a handful of frames at a time. We don't have any technologies with the necessary bandwidth to transfer this kind of data volume quickly. Even if a frame only required a kilobyte of space to store, you're talking about petabytes per second here. Still, the speed of light is not a fundamental limitation on bandwidth.
TAXES are regressive, all of them. Until the left realizes this, we're stuck being turned into serfs unto our government masters.
How do you propose paying for wealth-transfer programs without taxes? It is impossible to use programs like basic income and so on without taxation - the entire premise behind these programs is that it is impossible for some people to earn enough money to survive, and thus somebody else has to earn money on their behalf and then care for them.
The fact that in the US only a small percentage of taxpayers pay such a large share of the total tax base demonstrates that taxes aren't inherently regressive, especially considering that the higher tax brackets used to be taxed much more heavily in the past.
They said that it was delivered within 3 hours, which presumably means by courier. Dispatching a courier isn't cheap - certainly it is far more expensive than just mailing a letter.
The safest approach is to not fscking do this kind of insanity in the first place.
Certainly. If the research is likely to have a public health benefit (likely, not tenuous connection), and there is NO other way to obtain the benefit, then I could see room for debate and careful consideration.
Short of that, this is just playing with fire. It seems like we have more controls over using primates in experiments than creating civilization-destroying viruses...
They can potentially be useful if you want some kind of independent survey of a boring topic that isn't of primary interest to you, but which you have to deal with.
Every company has its areas of expertise. If you're learning anything from Gartner in these areas you're probably doing something wrong.
On the other hand, maybe your company wants to deploy proximity ID badges in 14 offices in 10 countries, and you want to know who makes systems that are compatible/compliant/etc across all of them. Unless you make/sell badge readers as your primary business, you probably don't know much about them. If you were securing one office with one door, maybe you wouldn't care and would just pick a random vendor with a cheap price. However, even a high-level overview of the field could save you a lot of money, and trying to figure out what info online is good/bad would probably be tough.
Just a random example. Just look at any of the 4700 things a company has to do to stay in business which aren't cool enough to get coverage in newspapers or other free semi-unbiased sources of info, but which can cost a company money if they don't pick at least a reasonable solution for.
At my workplace (a private company) it feels like we're still stuck in a 1970s IT mindset. Everything is waterfall with a veneer of Agile. Then there is all the finger-pointing when it turns out that there was a mistake in the requirements, and if all goes well we deploy a solution to the problems of two years before.
When you look at successful technologies these days, almost none of them follow a classical requirements methodology. Sure, they involve requirements, but they rarely involve huge documents of specifications that encompass a year's worth of project that the vendors live (or more likely die) by, which are meticulously curated over time so as to always represent an as-built documentation set.
Combine this with a more-with-less mentality, and it feels like success is impossible...
But, even still - I see little reason for an operating system to be there, except for convenient/cheap/fast development.
Don't discount those. Which would you rather own shares in? The mid-sized company with significant revenues but with a core product that has design issues requiring a significant overhaul? Or, the failed start-up that had a great design but which didn't get to market before the money ran out or the aforementioned mid-sized company gobbled up 99% market share?
To be honest I'm not sure about the mass of a Dyson sphere. However, I'd assume that estimates of the amount of baryonic matter already take into account the non-steller mass associated with a typical solar system, so if the estimate is that we need N stars to account for it, we'd need N Dyson spheres since those spheres could only be constructed from the matter around the star. That is, unless they disassemble a few stars to provide matter to produce a sphere around a different star.
In any case, they would still radiate IR. Also, is it any less astonishing to claim that for any 2-3 stars we see anywhere in the universe (including in other galaxies) there is a dyson sphere in the same galaxy, with all of them being distributed fairly uniformly? If they can deconstruct entire stars and move the matter around, why would they scatter the stars they do occupy all over the place?
And I say "your" because you at least appear to be shilling for someone and not actually individuals. I fully admit that is a speculation, but a fair one given that not a single person who defended the GP has been willing to debate my points.
Or they just can't be bothered to. :)
I have exactly one Slashdot account, and I've been using it for 10 years. Heck, I use the same username on half of the Internet so you could probably figure out who I am if you tried hard enough...
So now you claim that the only way to have any knowledge is by working for a specific company, almost as good as your previous point.
Uh, what previous point would that be? This is my first post in this thread.
And yes, the only way to have any knowledge about the results of a measure taken by Google is to work about Google, unless they publish the data. You can certainly say that we tried the same thing and it didn't work elsewhere, but you can't purport to know whether it worked for Google. Maybe the folks at your company were just incompetent? Or maybe the guy is just lying about Google. I have no idea, and neither do you.