Why does anyone think the "illegitimate" spammers don't do exactly the same thing? Especially when, at $5/hr (about what US min wage is, I think) 5 seconds of effort (an overestimate, most likely, after you've been doing it for an hour) works out to about 2/3rds of a CENT...and that has the potential to reach hundreds of people before someone flags it? ONE worker could do 720 an hour...
There's always some way around it.
The goal is not to stop every last bit of spam, that's impossible.
Sure you might be only adding one cent per email but how many orders of magnitude higher is that than what it cost before?
If the have to drop two of three zeros off the number of spams they send out, that's a pretty impressive result.
You might not understand this, but in general when someone says "maybe this thing, or maybe this other thing" they are engaged in a process known as "speculation."
So for YOU it's "speculation", but for other people it's crazy consiracy theories. Perhaps it's not that I don't understand you, but that you own thought process is fucked.
If it wasn't, you'd understand that I made that statement to point out you ridiculously lopsided rhetoric.
They have admittedly made mistakes in the past, but do you really expect agencies whose heritage includes the Magic and Ultra programs to not grasp this idea?
That's the frickin understatement of the year: Vietnam, Hussein, WMDs, other coutries nuclear capabilities, the list is a mile long.
They seem to be much better at doing what the handful of people in charge want, than persuing actual intelligence.
But hey let's forget the whole "eternal vigilence" thing and just stick our head in the sand because we're oh-so-scared.
After all, the article doesn't actually tell you exactly who's doing what to who and why, but already you have no problem with it (whatever "it" ACTUALLY is) because there's vauge mention of the war on terror.
Way to take a stand on "something"!
You're don't know what you're actually supporting, but it's gotta be a good idea because they mentioned terrorists.
Maybe this has already been done, and its intelligence gathering value is now outweighed by its usefulness to the bad guys. Or maybe the nature of the resource makes tracking the people who are talking problematic at best.
Or maybe none of what you just said is true at all. You're ranting about conspiriacy theorists, and here you are, making shit up. I highly doubt you have a single shred of evidence to back any of that up.
I'm guessing you didn't RTFA.
Actually, I did. The article doesn't ACTUALLY tell you who's doing what to who. It makes vague implications of yet another victory in the war on terror, but in reality, there's no proof of any such thing. Maybe you feel informed, but I assure you, there was very little ACTUAL information in that article.
So there I was responding to a post the says "Hurray! We're shutting down their communcations links." And you're calling ME the consiracy theorist!
ABOUT WHAT!
My whole point is this doesn't look like a real victory at all. It's probably bad because we're loosing sources of information, and we might be shutting down sites that we shouldn't be.
The analogy to 'park benches' doesn't hold, because this action is just an attempt to smash the well-known park benches. Without 'common knowledge' park benches to meet at, communication breaks down.
Actually, the way you put is hilarious! Yes, let's smash all the "well-known" park benches. The terrorists will never regroup.
I can't believe you're serious!
Your last sentence rather tips your hand. Who cares about reason and accountability? SOMEONE IS CLAIMING TO FIGHT TERRORISM! ATTACK and RIDICULE them!
It doesn't bother you at all that sites are being shut down with basically ZERO accountability and no meaningful description as to what's getting them shut down?
Do you live in Iran or something? Are dense?
The article doesn't ACTUALLY tell us who is shutting down what websites or why. How can you possibly support that?
And isn't it also interesting how you totally avoided my point about giving yourself away before you've arrested anyone.
If there are actual terrorists going to a website, and we know this, we should be getting the proper authorizations and trying to hunt down the ACTUAL PEOPLE.
Notice for example, that Israeli intelligence is being used as a "source" here. They noticed these sites disappearing. It couldn't possibly be that they were watching these sites and getting useful information, could it?
These guys should be after two things:
PEOPLE
MONEY
You could destroy every single line of communication tommorow. The people and the money will still be out there, they will set up new links, and next time it will be harder to find them.
In the end, you've only made the REAL job harder.
Of course, maybe we're not actually interested in the real job...
Communication is a military neccessity--removing your enemy's ability to talk amongst themselves makes your job easier, and theirs alot harder.
So where's the proof? Somehow, it think if we actually had PROOF, we wouldn't be shutting down sites at all, but monitoring them in order to track down ACTUAL PEOPLE.
All this amounts to is an incredibly silly "fake" victory. How freakin hard is it to set up a website?
This is like smashing a park bench where spies had sat on one day and conversed. Who gives a crap! There are plently of other park benches.
The sensisble thing is to keep your information secret until you can actually arrest somebody. Unless, of course, you don't actually HAVE any information to back up your claims.
So yeah, let's all have a big hurrah for this PR bullshit. These "terrorists" will never be able to set up ANOTHER WEBSITE.....
Who cares about reason and accountability, when someone is claiming to fight terrorism!
Knowledge is everything in the web world, we learn a lot from our employers, I'm okay with them telling me to avoid their line of work for a period after I finish my employment. Just because your knowledge may be with regards to Searching for example, and you are banned from working from a search centric company (ie google) doesn't mean your skills are useless.
That's what patents are for.
If your ideas are really novel, patent them, otherwise, don't interfere with somebody's ability to put food on the table for their family because you're afraid of competing in a free market.
Non-competes should be flat-out illegal, or at a minimum the company should be forced to pay this guy to NOT work.
If your employees are that important to you, treat them that way.
And it's not like the guy in question is an idiot, he knew what he was doing when he signed his contract with Microsoft.
That's not a very good argument. People have gotta eat. They can't sit around for years until various things go into and out of style in the market place.
Contracts like this are predatory. And non-competes are bad for the market. Tons of new and innovative companies are started by people who picked up their experience at other places and realized they could do it better. This is a GOOD thing because it forces business to compete.
It's the whole frickin point of capitalism.
Just as well. Slippery slope is a logical fallacy anyway.
It may be a common argument, but the concept that things will generally continue to exhibit the same behavior is a pretty reasonable line of thought.
It's easy to *call* something a fallacy, but think about the implications here. Calling the "slippery slope" argument a fallacy is like calling all of statistics a fallacy.
I think the "slippery slope" "fallacy" is basically a way to allow one person to control the debate about a subject to their advantage. Actions have implications, and those actions in turn have implications.
And, as someone pointed out already, there is no security concern to be worried about. Even if someone copied their thumbprint database, I mean, what could you do with that? Nada...
Perhaps, but information encrypted with quantum cryptography is un-interceptable.
This isn't true.
There's nothing about QC that says you can't intercept the photons, only that you will be detected if you do.
Even this is going to limited by your inability to produce a single photon on command with perfect repeatability. Sometimes you're going to get two, sometimes you're going to get none. This would mean an attacker is going to have to intercept enough photons to noticiably throw off the PDF of your expected result.
Somehow I never see this caveat mentioned anywhere, but it seems to me that if you've built a device that can produce EXACTLY one photon each and every time (probability = 1) then you just flipped various important physical theories the bird, and are probably going to get a Nobel prize for that alone.
I totally agree with you about privilege levels. I was all about running as a non-privileged user. That was until realism and idealism clashed. Some programs literally won't work right without for example administrator rights on Windows.
That's not realism vs idealism, that's broken software.
What you're doing is saying that it's not practical to lock the doors on a house because your particular door locks are jammed. You're not illustrating the idea as unworkable so much as your unwillingness to fix things that are broken.
A fixed-wing aircraft that is maintaining constant altitude must be traveling at a relatively high velocity to maintain lift, right?
right
So once an aircraft achieves cruise velocity, the downward force of gravity is basically nullified, correct?
It is "nullified" by lift created by the wings, which is created by using fuel to push that plane forwards. You are constantly spending some of your thrust to create this force.
Doesnt driving uphill qualify gravity as a force acting upon a car?
This is a non-interesting part of the problem as both aircraft and cars are equally subject to U=mgh.
I'm comparing real land vehicles with real aircraft. You're the one who wants to create artificial comparisons by requiring that both vehicles weigh the same and have the same drag coefficient.
That's simple common sense!
All you're doing in deliberately skewing the results by demanding that one vehicle be operated inefficiently while the other is not.
It's ridiculous to compare a bus with one passenger to a Cessna with one passenger, or a 747 with 4 people to a Honda Civic with four people. It's a bullshit comparison and you know it.
Fundamentally, flying is less energy efficient. It's the basic physics of the problem. All else being equal, energy must be expended to suppurt the full weight of the airplane, while a car must overcome only a small fraction of it's weight in rolling resitance.
Sorry, aircraft are subject to drag, but gravity is not a loss the way you state. As far as physics is concerned it only takes work to move a force through a distance, so an aircraft at constant altitude has no losses due to gravity
Sorry this is simply not how it works. Everything on earth is pulled downwards by the earth's gravity with a force w which is called it's WEIGHT. In order to stay at the same height there needs to be a force equal and opposite to gravity.
For most of us, this is provided by whatever we're standing on a the moment. For an airplane, it is provided by the wings. Airplane wings ARE NOY MAGICAL, OVER-UNITY devices, and so therefore you have to maintain at least w worth of thrust devoted simply towards keeping the airplane in the air. If this was not the case, you could build a couple electric fans, point them at each other and have your very own perpetual motion machine.
A hot air baloon stays in the air via a completely different principle than a airplane. In this case the equal and opposite force is generated by simple fuild statics.
Your statement about work, also doesn't make any sense. Try this: hold your monitor above your head for ten minutes. Are your arms tired? That's because you've been expending energy to both hold the TV up and keep it balanced. Although you may not have applied a force through a distance, you have applied a constant force over a period of time. Anyways, you're neglecting the "work" being done to the air molecules around to plane, pushing them downwards in order to allow the plane to stay at a constant height.
As an extreme example, consider what kind of gas mileage a glider gets, even counting whatever gas is used to tow (or propel, for a motor-glider) it to altitude. Compare that to an SUV with under-inflated tires.
It's fundamentally silly to DIRECTLY compare the milage of two vehicles whose cargo capacities vary by more than a factor of ten. Let alone requiring only one of them to be self-propelled, AND requiring that same vehicle to be broken.
Your compaision is ridiculous.
Fundamentally, in any sort of SANE comparison a rolling vehicle is ALWAYS going to win. If you make both vehicle weight the same amount and have the same drag coefficient the car is easily going to win.
Loss no 2 is proportional to mass in BOTH CASES, so everything else being equal, varying the mass is NOT getting you anywhere.
In addition, since your coefficient of rolling friction is ALWAYS less than one, you are ALWAYS going to loose more energy from #2 when you're flying than driving.
What you're doing is taking a really light, aerodynamic airplane and compare it to a huge, unaerodynamic truck, but that's not a fair comparison. For instance, How much cargo can a 20 MPG truck move compared to a 20MPG airplane?
A fair compaison is not to compare the MPG of two arbitray vehicles of vastly different capacities, but to compare MPG per pound of cargo. Once you do this, you'll see that your point doesn't hold water at all, as evidenced by the rates of all major shipping companies (UPS, Fedex, etc).
ctually this is one thing you don't want.. a police officers job is to enforce the laws created by the elected representives. It is actually unethical for the cops to go picking and choosing the laws they agree with. If ou dont like the traffic laws then take it yup with the local goverment
The problem with this argument is that it ignores reality. Reality: Cops do choose which laws they're going to enforce each and ever day.
If a cop's on foot doing a drug sting, he isn't going to catch any speeders. If a cop spends all day on the west side of town, he's not going to stop any random crimes on the east side of town.
The reality is that cops choose to actively enforce certain laws. Even if a cop isn't actively looking for violators of a certain specfic type, just the simple circumstances of where he is and what equipment he has with him are going to predispose him in a certain direction.
The ethical thing to do is to actively persue law violations that actually matter, while enforcing all the "nusiance laws" on an "If someone calls us or we happen to see it" basis.
For example:
If wearing a blue shirt on tuesday inside your own house is illegal, should cops sit around trying to peer into everyone's windows, or is there perhaps something better they could be doing with their time?
Or, perhaps, it's because so many of the citizens dogs are getting run over by outsiders rocketing through town, and parents of five year olds are becoming worried.
...and thus we illustrate the classic "straw man" fallacy. I didn't claim that ALL small town speed limits were too low, I said that some of them are. Are you actually trying to claim that there isn't a single 20 or 30 mph zone in the entire country that was set that way specfically to make money for the town?
The reality is that a lot of towns deliberately set their speed limits too low so they have a nearly endless supply of speeders to make money from. Especially in my state, which doesn't have laws to deal with this problem.
And why would a cop pay attention to someone's signaling, when they could be looking at other things that actually *cause* problems like their head/tail lights (at night) along with speeding?
Not signaling IS a major cause of accidents. I would bet much more so than having one light bulb out (cars pretty much have two of everything in case you didn't notice... except for turn signals, which you don't seem to think matter anyways).
It's a LOT easier to catch speeders than illegal lane changes and cutting people off.
Which is exactly what I was saying. Cops are more concerned with easy money than actually helping.
That's unfortunate that it bothers you, but you have to pay attention to the road. Many drivers are ignorant, stupid, inconsiderate, etc. Cops cannot watch every lane change to make sure they properly use their signal. The best way to avoid bad drivers is not to drive at all.
This is crazy. Cops can't catch every single speeded either, but that not the point. Right now cops basically DON'T EVEN TRY to catch people doing the things that actually cause accidents.
I'm not bitching that's I have to pay attention to the road, I'm bitching because traffic enforcement in this country is retarded. I've seen people change lanes without signaling in front of a cop on many occasions and nothing ever happens. They aren't even doing anything about the people they DO catch as a matter of circumstance, let alone actually trying to actively do something about it.
Do you have any idea how many fewer rush hour accidents we'd have if people weren't cutting each other off all the time?
Fact is, fewer of those offenses are ticketed because people take great pains not to commit them in front of police. You would not believe the difference in driver behavior, simply by comparing what you observe while driving your POV to what you observe while driving a marked cruiser.
The fact is, I have NEVER seen anyone get pulled over for say, not signaling... and I have seen it done in front of cops many times.
At least in my area, they just don't care.
Driving down the road a 65 on a nice day when you have two freakin miles of visibility will land you a ticket, but changing lanes or cutting someone off almost NEVER does. I really don't care too much how fast someone's going, so long as they keep it under insane speeds, what's actually dangerous is when they do something unexpected, like turn left in fron if you without signaling.
with the exception of the highway patrol guys, most municipal/county cops HATE doing traffic.
Of course rather than standing up for their principles, they do it anyways. And then of course there are those little towns that deliberatlely set their speed limits WAY too freaking low. It's basically a conspiracy by the local gov't to pull in money. and the police STILL enforce them. At what point are you being a scumbag for giving someone a ticket, when the speed limit is 10mph below what it should be? 20? 30? If police want to be looked on better by the general population, they should start displaying some ethics. Rather than ticketing people for things that shouldn't be illegal in the first place, they could go try to catch people commiting crimes that actually have victims.
Besides, the individual cops don't get a cut of those tickets.
Except that they have a quota and they are expected to meet it. This is considered in their evaluations.
Somehow there's always this amazing spike in "traffic enforcement" towards the beginning and end of each month. Whether the quota is official of not, it's pretty obvious they do exist.
BTW, the assured-clear-distance tickets, reckless operation citations, etc are finable offenses, so the "no revenue" accusation doesn't wash.
But it does because police actually have to DO WORK to catch people commiting those offenses. Right now traffic enforcement seems totally geared towards "How many people can I bust per hour." instead of "How can in improve that saftey of our nation's roadways."
It's pretty obvious since even you are complaining about how hard it is to catch people committing offenses that are dangerous. Why not actually put some effort into giving tickets that make sense, rather than highway robbery?
Oh yeah, you might actually have to work hard, and you might not get promoted since you wouldn't meet quota.
What if it was I caught an employee stealing our customers credit card numbers and SSNs to USB flash drives.
Then we would ask you why the hell they had access to that data in the first place.
Data like that should be accessible to as absolutely few people as possible. I'm talking about a number that you can count on one hand, ESPECIALLY if we're talking about the raw database. Call center employees, for example, only really need access to a system that will give them ONE CC# after they've input ONE SSN/Customer ID#/Name/etc.
A lot of people have a rabid response to those two letters: I.P.
Maybe that's because the term itself is tries to lump three very different types of law into one and claim that they all constitute "property", which is legally not true. It's a deliberately misleading term like "full speed" USB vs "high speed" USB. Even if you agreed with all current patent, copyright and trademark laws, you still might find the term IP, offensive all by itself. Just using the term "intellectual property", slants the debate by suggesting something that really isn't true.
Even though our architects were very excited to work there, and had a policy of "no personal use" of the sysytems, I still had to fish out one of their own Zip disks from the empty drive bays every few days. You know, right behind where they'd peeled off or slit through where I'd "only" put clear packing tape and a sign reading "NO ZIP DRIVE, NO FLOPPY DRIVE." *snort*
Maybe that's because your policy is ridiculous.
If you come up with a ridiclous security policy that interferes with other legitimate actions, people will deliberately circumvent it.
What you're doing is like putting 12 deadbolts on a crappy door. People realize that it's silly and they're just going to leave it propped open.
Did you ever consider, for example, only giving people access to the files they NEED access to rather than crippling their machines?
Were we storm troopers for doing this? By no means: our archivist was happy to share our old stuff (going back 125+ years) but ongoing projects were just that, ongoing. And probably the real reason is that the software tools -- CAD programs, home-grown project management databases, etc. -- we had at work were very expensive and pretty mature: anyone in their field would *love* to have free use of them.
It sounds to me like you aren't even really sure why you did this. It's always great when people who aren't even sure about what they're doing start interfering with other people's ability to get actual work done.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does anyone think the "illegitimate" spammers don't do exactly the same thing? Especially when, at $5/hr (about what US min wage is, I think) 5 seconds of effort (an overestimate, most likely, after you've been doing it for an hour) works out to about 2/3rds of a CENT...and that has the potential to reach hundreds of people before someone flags it? ONE worker could do 720 an hour...
There's always some way around it.
The goal is not to stop every last bit of spam, that's impossible.
Sure you might be only adding one cent per email but how many orders of magnitude higher is that than what it cost before?
If the have to drop two of three zeros off the number of spams they send out, that's a pretty impressive result.
I've been playing online for some time now and I haven't noticed anyone cheating.
And how would you know?
Are you running a long-term statistical analysis?
You might not understand this, but in general when someone says "maybe this thing, or maybe this other thing" they are engaged in a process known as "speculation."
So for YOU it's "speculation", but for other people it's crazy consiracy theories. Perhaps it's not that I don't understand you, but that you own thought process is fucked.
If it wasn't, you'd understand that I made that statement to point out you ridiculously lopsided rhetoric.
They have admittedly made mistakes in the past, but do you really expect agencies whose heritage includes the Magic and Ultra programs to not grasp this idea?
That's the frickin understatement of the year: Vietnam, Hussein, WMDs, other coutries nuclear capabilities, the list is a mile long.
They seem to be much better at doing what the handful of people in charge want, than persuing actual intelligence.
But hey let's forget the whole "eternal vigilence" thing and just stick our head in the sand because we're oh-so-scared.
After all, the article doesn't actually tell you exactly who's doing what to who and why, but already you have no problem with it (whatever "it" ACTUALLY is) because there's vauge mention of the war on terror.
Way to take a stand on "something"!
You're don't know what you're actually supporting, but it's gotta be a good idea because they mentioned terrorists.
Maybe this has already been done, and its intelligence gathering value is now outweighed by its usefulness to the bad guys. Or maybe the nature of the resource makes tracking the people who are talking problematic at best.
Or maybe none of what you just said is true at all. You're ranting about conspiriacy theorists, and here you are, making shit up. I highly doubt you have a single shred of evidence to back any of that up.
I'm guessing you didn't RTFA.
Actually, I did. The article doesn't ACTUALLY tell you who's doing what to who. It makes vague implications of yet another victory in the war on terror, but in reality, there's no proof of any such thing. Maybe you feel informed, but I assure you, there was very little ACTUAL information in that article.
So there I was responding to a post the says "Hurray! We're shutting down their communcations links." And you're calling ME the consiracy theorist!
ABOUT WHAT!
My whole point is this doesn't look like a real victory at all. It's probably bad because we're loosing sources of information, and we might be shutting down sites that we shouldn't be.
The analogy to 'park benches' doesn't hold, because this action is just an attempt to smash the well-known park benches. Without 'common knowledge' park benches to meet at, communication breaks down.
Actually, the way you put is hilarious! Yes, let's smash all the "well-known" park benches. The terrorists will never regroup.
I can't believe you're serious!
Your last sentence rather tips your hand. Who cares about reason and accountability? SOMEONE IS CLAIMING TO FIGHT TERRORISM! ATTACK and RIDICULE them!
It doesn't bother you at all that sites are being shut down with basically ZERO accountability and no meaningful description as to what's getting them shut down?
Do you live in Iran or something? Are dense?
The article doesn't ACTUALLY tell us who is shutting down what websites or why. How can you possibly support that?
And isn't it also interesting how you totally avoided my point about giving yourself away before you've arrested anyone.
If there are actual terrorists going to a website, and we know this, we should be getting the proper authorizations and trying to hunt down the ACTUAL PEOPLE.
Notice for example, that Israeli intelligence is being used as a "source" here. They noticed these sites disappearing. It couldn't possibly be that they were watching these sites and getting useful information, could it?
These guys should be after two things:
PEOPLE
MONEY
You could destroy every single line of communication tommorow. The people and the money will still be out there, they will set up new links, and next time it will be harder to find them.
In the end, you've only made the REAL job harder.
Of course, maybe we're not actually interested in the real job...
Communication is a military neccessity--removing your enemy's ability to talk amongst themselves makes your job easier, and theirs alot harder.
So where's the proof?
Somehow, it think if we actually had PROOF, we wouldn't be shutting down sites at all, but monitoring them in order to track down ACTUAL PEOPLE.
All this amounts to is an incredibly silly "fake" victory. How freakin hard is it to set up a website?
This is like smashing a park bench where spies had sat on one day and conversed. Who gives a crap! There are plently of other park benches.
The sensisble thing is to keep your information secret until you can actually arrest somebody. Unless, of course, you don't actually HAVE any information to back up your claims.
So yeah, let's all have a big hurrah for this PR bullshit. These "terrorists" will never be able to set up ANOTHER WEBSITE.....
Who cares about reason and accountability, when someone is claiming to fight terrorism!
Knowledge is everything in the web world, we learn a lot from our employers, I'm okay with them telling me to avoid their line of work for a period after I finish my employment. Just because your knowledge may be with regards to Searching for example, and you are banned from working from a search centric company (ie google) doesn't mean your skills are useless.
That's what patents are for.
If your ideas are really novel, patent them, otherwise, don't interfere with somebody's ability to put food on the table for their family because you're afraid of competing in a free market.
Non-competes should be flat-out illegal, or at a minimum the company should be forced to pay this guy to NOT work.
If your employees are that important to you, treat them that way.
And it's not like the guy in question is an idiot, he knew what he was doing when he signed his contract with Microsoft.
That's not a very good argument. People have gotta eat. They can't sit around for years until various things go into and out of style in the market place.
Contracts like this are predatory. And non-competes are bad for the market. Tons of new and innovative companies are started by people who picked up their experience at other places and realized they could do it better. This is a GOOD thing because it forces business to compete.
It's the whole frickin point of capitalism.
Just as well. Slippery slope is a logical fallacy anyway.
It may be a common argument, but the concept that things will generally continue to exhibit the same behavior is a pretty reasonable line of thought.
It's easy to *call* something a fallacy, but think about the implications here. Calling the "slippery slope" argument a fallacy is like calling all of statistics a fallacy.
I think the "slippery slope" "fallacy" is basically a way to allow one person to control the debate about a subject to their advantage. Actions have implications, and those actions in turn have implications.
And, as someone pointed out already, there is no security concern to be worried about. Even if someone copied their thumbprint database, I mean, what could you do with that? Nada...
Other than framing you for a crime...
Perhaps, but information encrypted with quantum cryptography is un-interceptable.
This isn't true.
There's nothing about QC that says you can't intercept the photons, only that you will be detected if you do.
Even this is going to limited by your inability to produce a single photon on command with perfect repeatability. Sometimes you're going to get two, sometimes you're going to get none. This would mean an attacker is going to have to intercept enough photons to noticiably throw off the PDF of your expected result.
Somehow I never see this caveat mentioned anywhere, but it seems to me that if you've built a device that can produce EXACTLY one photon each and every time (probability = 1) then you just flipped various important physical theories the bird, and are probably going to get a Nobel prize for that alone.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Yeah, but where's that part about being assasinated?
FYI, I believe this is exactly where the term "engineer" started.
Not true.
According to this source the term engineer has been in use since the 1700 and originally referred to military engineers.
Unfortunately, just about anyone calls themselves an engineer these days.
Actually, when you get into a touchscreen based environment, operating systems that expect 2 button (or more) mouses are a liability.
:)
As are fingerprints
I totally agree with you about privilege levels. I was all about running as a non-privileged user. That was until realism and idealism clashed. Some programs literally won't work right without for example administrator rights on Windows.
That's not realism vs idealism, that's broken software.
What you're doing is saying that it's not practical to lock the doors on a house because your particular door locks are jammed. You're not illustrating the idea as unworkable so much as your unwillingness to fix things that are broken.
A fixed-wing aircraft that is maintaining constant altitude must be traveling at a relatively high velocity to maintain lift, right?
right
So once an aircraft achieves cruise velocity, the downward force of gravity is basically nullified, correct?
It is "nullified" by lift created by the wings, which is created by using fuel to push that plane forwards. You are constantly spending some of your thrust to create this force.
Doesnt driving uphill qualify gravity as a force acting upon a car?
This is a non-interesting part of the problem as both aircraft and cars are equally subject to U=mgh.
I'm comparing real land vehicles with real aircraft. You're the one who wants to create artificial comparisons by requiring that both vehicles weigh the same and have the same drag coefficient.
That's simple common sense!
All you're doing in deliberately skewing the results by demanding that one vehicle be operated inefficiently while the other is not.
It's ridiculous to compare a bus with one passenger to a Cessna with one passenger, or a 747 with 4 people to a Honda Civic with four people. It's a bullshit comparison and you know it.
Fundamentally, flying is less energy efficient. It's the basic physics of the problem. All else being equal, energy must be expended to suppurt the full weight of the airplane, while a car must overcome only a small fraction of it's weight in rolling resitance.
Sorry, aircraft are subject to drag, but gravity is not a loss the way you state. As far as physics is concerned it only takes work to move a force through a distance, so an aircraft at constant altitude has no losses due to gravity
Sorry this is simply not how it works.
Everything on earth is pulled downwards by the earth's gravity with a force w which is called it's WEIGHT. In order to stay at the same height there needs to be a force equal and opposite to gravity.
For most of us, this is provided by whatever we're standing on a the moment. For an airplane, it is provided by the wings. Airplane wings ARE NOY MAGICAL, OVER-UNITY devices, and so therefore you have to maintain at least w worth of thrust devoted simply towards keeping the airplane in the air. If this was not the case, you could build a couple electric fans, point them at each other and have your very own perpetual motion machine.
A hot air baloon stays in the air via a completely different principle than a airplane. In this case the equal and opposite force is generated by simple fuild statics.
Your statement about work, also doesn't make any sense. Try this: hold your monitor above your head for ten minutes. Are your arms tired? That's because you've been expending energy to both hold the TV up and keep it balanced. Although you may not have applied a force through a distance, you have applied a constant force over a period of time. Anyways, you're neglecting the "work" being done to the air molecules around to plane, pushing them downwards in order to allow the plane to stay at a constant height.
As an extreme example, consider what kind of gas mileage a glider gets, even counting whatever gas is used to tow (or propel, for a motor-glider) it to altitude. Compare that to an SUV with under-inflated tires.
It's fundamentally silly to DIRECTLY compare the milage of two vehicles whose cargo capacities vary by more than a factor of ten. Let alone requiring only one of them to be self-propelled, AND requiring that same vehicle to be broken.
Your compaision is ridiculous.
Fundamentally, in any sort of SANE comparison a rolling vehicle is ALWAYS going to win. If you make both vehicle weight the same amount and have the same drag coefficient the car is easily going to win.
No that would be true for ANY mass.
Cars are subject to two major losses: (by the nature of the vehicle)
Airtcraft are subject to two major losses:
Loss no 2 is proportional to mass in BOTH CASES, so everything else being equal, varying the mass is NOT getting you anywhere.
In addition, since your coefficient of rolling friction is ALWAYS less than one, you are ALWAYS going to loose more energy from #2 when you're flying than driving.
What you're doing is taking a really light, aerodynamic airplane and compare it to a huge, unaerodynamic truck, but that's not a fair comparison. For instance, How much cargo can a 20 MPG truck move compared to a 20MPG airplane?
A fair compaison is not to compare the MPG of two arbitray vehicles of vastly different capacities, but to compare MPG per pound of cargo. Once you do this, you'll see that your point doesn't hold water at all, as evidenced by the rates of all major shipping companies (UPS, Fedex, etc).
ctually this is one thing you don't want.. a police officers job is to enforce the laws created by the elected representives. It is actually unethical for the cops to go picking and choosing the laws they agree with. If ou dont like the traffic laws then take it yup with the local goverment
The problem with this argument is that it ignores reality. Reality: Cops do choose which laws they're going to enforce each and ever day.
If a cop's on foot doing a drug sting, he isn't going to catch any speeders. If a cop spends all day on the west side of town, he's not going to stop any random crimes on the east side of town.
The reality is that cops choose to actively enforce certain laws. Even if a cop isn't actively looking for violators of a certain specfic type, just the simple circumstances of where he is and what equipment he has with him are going to predispose him in a certain direction.
The ethical thing to do is to actively persue law violations that actually matter, while enforcing all the "nusiance laws" on an "If someone calls us or we happen to see it" basis.
For example: If wearing a blue shirt on tuesday inside your own house is illegal, should cops sit around trying to peer into everyone's windows, or is there perhaps something better they could be doing with their time?
Or, perhaps, it's because so many of the citizens dogs are getting run over by outsiders rocketing through town, and parents of five year olds are becoming worried.
...and thus we illustrate the classic "straw man" fallacy. I didn't claim that ALL small town speed limits were too low, I said that some of them are. Are you actually trying to claim that there isn't a single 20 or 30 mph zone in the entire country that was set that way specfically to make money for the town?
If that's so then why do so many states have laws passed to deal with this problem?
The reality is that a lot of towns deliberately set their speed limits too low so they have a nearly endless supply of speeders to make money from. Especially in my state, which doesn't have laws to deal with this problem.
And why would a cop pay attention to someone's signaling, when they could be looking at other things that actually *cause* problems like their head/tail lights (at night) along with speeding?
Not signaling IS a major cause of accidents. I would bet much more so than having one light bulb out (cars pretty much have two of everything in case you didn't notice... except for turn signals, which you don't seem to think matter anyways).
It's a LOT easier to catch speeders than illegal lane changes and cutting people off.
Which is exactly what I was saying. Cops are more concerned with easy money than actually helping.
That's unfortunate that it bothers you, but you have to pay attention to the road. Many drivers are ignorant, stupid, inconsiderate, etc. Cops cannot watch every lane change to make sure they properly use their signal. The best way to avoid bad drivers is not to drive at all.
This is crazy. Cops can't catch every single speeded either, but that not the point. Right now cops basically DON'T EVEN TRY to catch people doing the things that actually cause accidents.
I'm not bitching that's I have to pay attention to the road, I'm bitching because traffic enforcement in this country is retarded. I've seen people change lanes without signaling in front of a cop on many occasions and nothing ever happens. They aren't even doing anything about the people they DO catch as a matter of circumstance, let alone actually trying to actively do something about it.
Do you have any idea how many fewer rush hour accidents we'd have if people weren't cutting each other off all the time?
Fact is, fewer of those offenses are ticketed because people take great pains not to commit them in front of police. You would not believe the difference in driver behavior, simply by comparing what you observe while driving your POV to what you observe while driving a marked cruiser.
The fact is, I have NEVER seen anyone get pulled over for say, not signaling... and I have seen it done in front of cops many times.
At least in my area, they just don't care.
Driving down the road a 65 on a nice day when you have two freakin miles of visibility will land you a ticket, but changing lanes or cutting someone off almost NEVER does. I really don't care too much how fast someone's going, so long as they keep it under insane speeds, what's actually dangerous is when they do something unexpected, like turn left in fron if you without signaling.
with the exception of the highway patrol guys, most municipal/county cops HATE doing traffic.
Of course rather than standing up for their principles, they do it anyways. And then of course there are those little towns that deliberatlely set their speed limits WAY too freaking low. It's basically a conspiracy by the local gov't to pull in money. and the police STILL enforce them. At what point are you being a scumbag for giving someone a ticket, when the speed limit is 10mph below what it should be? 20? 30?
If police want to be looked on better by the general population, they should start displaying some ethics. Rather than ticketing people for things that shouldn't be illegal in the first place, they could go try to catch people commiting crimes that actually have victims.
Besides, the individual cops don't get a cut of those tickets.
Except that they have a quota and they are expected to meet it. This is considered in their evaluations.
Somehow there's always this amazing spike in "traffic enforcement" towards the beginning and end of each month. Whether the quota is official of not, it's pretty obvious they do exist.
BTW, the assured-clear-distance tickets, reckless operation citations, etc are finable offenses, so the "no revenue" accusation doesn't wash.
But it does because police actually have to DO WORK to catch people commiting those offenses. Right now traffic enforcement seems totally geared towards "How many people can I bust per hour." instead of "How can in improve that saftey of our nation's roadways."
It's pretty obvious since even you are complaining about how hard it is to catch people committing offenses that are dangerous.
Why not actually put some effort into giving tickets that make sense, rather than highway robbery?
Oh yeah, you might actually have to work hard, and you might not get promoted since you wouldn't meet quota.
What if it was I caught an employee stealing our customers credit card numbers and SSNs to USB flash drives.
Then we would ask you why the hell they had access to that data in the first place.
Data like that should be accessible to as absolutely few people as possible. I'm talking about a number that you can count on one hand, ESPECIALLY if we're talking about the raw database. Call center employees, for example, only really need access to a system that will give them ONE CC# after they've input ONE SSN/Customer ID#/Name/etc.
A lot of people have a rabid response to those two letters: I.P.
Maybe that's because the term itself is tries to lump three very different types of law into one and claim that they all constitute "property", which is legally not true. It's a deliberately misleading term like "full speed" USB vs "high speed" USB. Even if you agreed with all current patent, copyright and trademark laws, you still might find the term IP, offensive all by itself.
Just using the term "intellectual property", slants the debate by suggesting something that really isn't true.
Even though our architects were very excited to work there, and had a policy of "no personal use" of the sysytems, I still had to fish out one of their own Zip disks from the empty drive bays every few days. You know, right behind where they'd peeled off or slit through where I'd "only" put clear packing tape and a sign reading "NO ZIP DRIVE, NO FLOPPY DRIVE." *snort*
Maybe that's because your policy is ridiculous.
If you come up with a ridiclous security policy that interferes with other legitimate actions, people will deliberately circumvent it.
What you're doing is like putting 12 deadbolts on a crappy door. People realize that it's silly and they're just going to leave it propped open.
Did you ever consider, for example, only giving people access to the files they NEED access to rather than crippling their machines?
Were we storm troopers for doing this? By no means: our archivist was happy to share our old stuff (going back 125+ years) but ongoing projects were just that, ongoing. And probably the real reason is that the software tools -- CAD programs, home-grown project management databases, etc. -- we had at work were very expensive and pretty mature: anyone in their field would *love* to have free use of them.
It sounds to me like you aren't even really sure why you did this. It's always great when people who aren't even sure about what they're doing start interfering with other people's ability to get actual work done.