Regarding the usefulness of such benchmarks? I don't think so, although I must point out that we don't have information on the degree to which some of those characteristics (noise and temperature) translate into reliability. Intel's Prescott from years back (the LGA-775 version, not the rather terrible Socket 478 flavor) was a good example of this. It indisputably drew more power--I could tell whether or not I had a Northwood or Prescott P4 running in a test system just by resting my hand on the power supply while the CPU was crunching. It ran hotter, ambient temps were higher, etc. That said, I've never seen evidence that Prescott processors failed for thermal reasons more often than Northwood's did when proper ventilation was maintained. Still, if you're doing a lot of AV work or running disk arrays, it's completely understandable why you'd care about noise and thermals for their own sake.
If you dig around, the Caviar Green wins good marks for being quiet and low power. I can't claim to have evaluated it independently but I know it's considered to at least stack up decently against equivalent drives from Ye Olde Manufacturere of Ye're Choice.
As an aside, you're right about the quality and scope of a handful of sites that typically focus on drive performance. Drives, in my opinion, are one of the hardest components to test partly because the vast majority of benchmark programs focus single aspects of performance or are poorly designed.
I don't think there's anything to worry about where Advanced Format is concerned. The idea of moving to 4K sectors has been in various stages of planning for something like 12 years. WD has rolled the tech out very quietly, there's no major marketing push behind this, and the company's primary concern has been with explaining the need for utilities like WD Align. Of course it never hurts to wait and see, either.;)
UBfusion, as the author of the piece in question, I'd like to note the following:
#1. WD does not claim that AF currently offers any reliability, life expectancy, or MTBF benefits. The information you're looking for is extremely granular--drive seek algorithms and the like are considered 'secret sauce' by the various manufacturers. These are not characteristics I'm even sure a reviewer can objectively independently measure.
#2. WD claims no energy efficiency improvements and the new WD Green drives are listed as drawing exactly the same amount of power as the old ones. If total power consumption has changed at the 1TB level, I'd imagine it would be because the new 1TB drives use two 500GB platters while the original Caviar Green 1TB drives used 3x333GB. Either way, WD has not revised their guidance.
#3. No--at least not real ones. As I stated in the article, average read/write speeds have improved across the entire drive because some of the inner drive tracks that were used in the WD10EARS models aren't used in the WD10EARS. In both cases, average read/writes are up about 2%. This is not a real speed increase--it's a mathematical example of what happens when you lop off the lowest sequence of numbers in an average.
To answer your overarching point, as you've implied, there's no solution save proper backup strategies.
As the headline implies, I managed to both wash and dry my iPhone and I ran it through the dryer twice, all while it was turned on.
I only found it when someone happened to be calling as I walked down the hall and wondered why on earth the dryer was beeping faintly.
Wait. So voting for Bush is foolish. Voting for Obama is foolish. Voting for "their" party (or, by extension, "my" party) is foolish. So if you don't vote for Candidate A or Candidate B, and you claim that placing oneself as a member of a political community or identifying with a party is a sign of stupidity, then what do the smart people do? Not vote? Vote for the Easter Bunny?
If I use my genuine, personal hardware to do something illegal with a legal program, I am using the hardware in an illegal/abusive way. I'm not equating legality and use/abuse, but it's not hard to see how the freedom to use any given device legally often opens abusive or illegal options.
"A legitimate copy of Photoshop CS4 stopped functioning after we clobbered a nagging registration screen by replacing a DLL with a hacked version."
It's not a "nagging registration screen" if he's referring to the screen I'm pretty sure he is--it's *one* window that pops up only when you launch the program and asks you to choose between registration or using the program in trial mode. Since when is it news that replacing a legitimate DLL with a hacked version *may* cause issues, particularly in the beta version of an OS? Can we wait for the RC before we begin the wailings and gnashings of teeths?
" Does this mean 98% of votes is enough to figure out how the other 2% voted?"
A properly done statistical analysis points the opposite direction; a small sample, properly randomized, can figure out how the other 98 percent voted. And if the margin is, say, 70/30, I don't think we care how they voted anyway.
Now, in a 51/49 split, sure. Those don't happen very often.
I must be missing something here, because I don't understand the OP's concern. When you handed the clerk your debit card, a record was created of the transaction. That's part of how a store like BB protects itself from fraud. You may have chosen not to give the store any extra information for their personal records, but there's no reason to think BB wouldn't automatically log your information off the debit card.
At some point, Samsung asked Best Buy to send out an update.
Here's what I'm really not getting. It's been a generally known fact for decades that using a credit card is a sure-fire way to give federal law enforcement a paper trail to follow. If you want to disappear (or at least maximize your chances of disappearing), you pay cash. I'm assuming the OP is aware of this...are you upset because a corporation essentially did what federal/state/local authorities could also conceivably do?
In all seriousness, I thought the "Linux on the desktop" model was dead several years ago. I can see how Enderle's point applies to Apple, but it seems an enormous stretch to predict that consumers will generally examine the desktop market as it exists today and opt for Linux over Vista, XP, or OS X. I realize Linux has gained ground in the netbook market and done well when debuted on systems that used customized distros. What's the larger picture?
We say we want DRM-free games. Some folks wear the badge of "I don't buy DRM software" as a matter of pride. The majority of us, however, are lying out our collective butts. The creators of World of Goo went out of their way to release a product with absolutely no DRM, and the result was a piracy rate over 90% (Google for this, it was widely reported). The game, by all accounts, is great, so it's not simply a matter of claiming that the title wasn't worth its own production.
I actually went out and bought a copy of the game when I heard about the piracy rate, because I really *do* want studios that publish good games without DRM to be rewarded for it. I don't know what the piracy figures are for Sins of a Solar Empire (another great, DRM-free game), but general findings do not seem to report this theory that gamers buy more copies of a game if it lacks DRM. The only way to convince studios that DRM is an economically bad policy is for DRM-free games to sell more copies. Given how entrenched the DRM mentality is within the industry, we probably need to make our collective case across both blockbusters and small titles. This way, DRM-free comes to be seen as inherent positive, rather than a situational/occasional boost in some cases and a detriment in others.
If you're serious about wanting DRM to go away, buy the products. I'm not saying we should buy all of them, or buy the crappy ones, but if we don't invest in these companies, they'll be forced out of business or will feel they have no choice but to return to DRM.
I actually made the switch from Office to OpenOffice, and so far it's gone surprisingly well--I've been able to fix the handful of problems I've had. I wish I could say the same for GIMP vs. Photoshop--that attempted switch has been a tremendous headache.
Honestly, I think you're probably overestimating your chances of being stopped. As someone who's flown around (and out of) the US post-9/11, the truth is, the TSA folks aren't really any more interested in the contents of your stuff than they used to be. Yes, they do pull random people out of line, and yes, you will have to send the laptop through an X-ray scanner, take your shoes off, etc--but I've never had to do more than turn a laptop on to prove that yes, it was a laptop.
I know there are people out there who have had terrible experiences with the TSA, but the chances of this happening to you, or to any particular passenger, are absolutely tiny. In order to "qualify" for such an invasion of privacy, you'd have to be pulled aside for individual screening (I'll call that level 1 inspection), have your carry-on + laptop hand-inspected, including turning the laptop on, and then have your laptop not just turned on, but painstakingly examined (lvl 3). Frankly, if you're at lvl 3, you're probably about to get strip-searched, which means the TSA is about to see most anything that might be in the photos you want to protect.
More to the point, if you're at what I've defined as Lvl 3, refusing to work with the TSA (i.e., by refusing to decypt a TrueCrypt partition for inspection), is only going to get you in more serious trouble. At this point, you're in a room, in your skivvies, and the guy sitting across the desk does not feel overly inclined to give you a phone call or access to a lawyer. In such a situation, your absolute best bet is to smile, comply, and show the nice man whatever it is he's interested in seeing. Then get the heck out, and take what legal actions you feel are necessary *after* you're released.
In short, the reason I think you're being overly paranoid is because the likelihood of you being inspected to such a degree is extremely low--and if you *are* inspected to such a degree, it's in your own absolute best interest to comply. If flying makes you nervous, if you have a habit of joking at improper times about improper topics when nervous, or if you simply feel there's something about your appearance, dress, or manner that makes you more likely to be selected for inspection, I respectfully suggest you spend time working on these behaviors, instead of encrypting your hard drive's contents.
Risen,
I'm not the one who needs to get over it, and you're rather facetiously comparing the process of typing in the English language (which a number of people haven't mastered) to actually understanding command-line syntax. In essence, you're saying that any child that can read a first grade primer should also be capable of reading Shakespeare, because the two are both written down. You may understand interfaces to the point where they are analogous for you, but your skillset and viewpoint aren't shared by the other 90% or so of the computing world that actually makes up the market for these products.
In an age of GUIs and simple install wizards, any mass market product should try to keep users out of a CLI--including Linux.
Dave,
I agree with you that the information should not have been present. The legal question here, I think (IANAL in full effect) is whether or not the exclusionary principle (thou shalt not use evidence obtained via an illegal warrant against the accused) applies. Did the police have probable cause? I think we can agree that they did, based on what they knew. The cops, as far as I can tell, did not act inappropriately and operated in good faith that the information in the database was accurate, as we can hopefully agree it should be.
So we clear the cops of willfully acting in bad faith. The doctrine of probable cause suggests that what the cops found is admissible evidence--they had reason to search, they searched, they found Bad Things. The exclusionary principle, however, suggests the opposite. Even though the cops themselves are clear of wrongdoing, in this case, since they acted on the information they had, the information they gathered was still gathered incorrectly.
One potential resolution to this is if the DA chooses to argue that the evidence would have been uncovered anyway. The exclusionary principle doesn't cover the exclusion of what is deemed to be notable while performing another activity. If the man's car would've been searched regardless, than the exclusionary principle may not apply. If, on the other hand, the search was particularly thorough or conducted entirely because of his record and outstanding warrant, than it might.
I agree with your overall characterization of this situation as serious, and that the lack of accountability (as brilliantly defined by most of the Bush Administration) is a very real problem.
Actually, it does. Probable cause is defined as a "more than 50 percent likelihood." Of course there's no empirical way to set "50%" and that perception will vary from person-to-person, but the courts have actually set a figure.;)
Probable cause, by definition, is based on thought. Wikipedia lists two accepted definitions, the first being: a reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime. The second states: a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent and cautious person's belief that certain facts are probably true. Look at the qualifiers involved, in both cases. "Reasonable" belief. "suspicion, supported by circumstances..." facts which are "probably true." I don't see any way to split this that doesn't come down to belief, or thought.
Our government--our lives--function on the belief that the information contained within various databases and repositories is correct. Sometimes this isn't true, and can lead to awful consequences (people who've been mistakenly declared dead have sometimes had an awful time proving that they are, in fact, alive), but the accuracy of these systems is still trusted, not just by individuals, but by companies, government organizations, and law enforcement. If the cops run a check on someone, and see a warrant listed, that's probable cause. Based on what they've found--a warrant--the police have reason to believe that the person in question has committed a previous, unpunished crime.
If there was a way for the cops to immediately and infallibly check the accuracy of a warrant while sitting behind someone on a stop, I'd be all in favor of it--such a system "costs" nothing, while adding an additional layer of veracity to the entire process. Practically speaking, however, such a system is never going to exist--at least, not without a far better inter-departmental communication database that's capable of reaching up through the various federal and state branches of law enforcement and returning results within an acceptable (let's say, 5-10 minutes) amount of time, even when outside of normal business hours.
Given this, the police have to have the authority to investigate situations, and people, based on probable cause, and in this case, the officers had every reason to believe probable cause was firmly established. Some of the responses have discussed the impact of being wrong, i.e., arresting an innocent man, but the implications of being *right* and releasing a guilty person could be significantly worse. There's no evidence to suggest that the police in question treated the man improperly, or that he would still be in jail today had additional contraband not been found in his vehicle.
For the record, the above was *not* a troll. Just because you disagree with a point doesn't mean the person at the other end is trying to incite an argument. I *was* using computers in the earlier era, and have no desire to go back to the days when having an Apple at home and a PC at work meant owning two computers that couldn't talk to each other simply and effectively. The idea that "coping" with this is some sort of solution, or that we didn't all wish the problem would go away, simply isn't true--in my opinion.
Haleth,
People coped, but people hated it. You're looking at the past with rose-colored glasses so bright the glare is blinding. I don't ever remember anyone cheering the fact that you had to remember 2-3 different sets of commands for different systems, or enjoying the fact that there was no simple way to ensure that a document saved on Computer A would open on Computer B. Even if you had two computers running MS-DOS (one at home, one at work), there was no guarantee they were functionally compatible--if your home computer used 5.25" floppies and your work computer had 3.5" floppies, you were just plain stuck--unless, of course, you could afford to shuck out some serious dough, and even then, compatibility could be dicey. In my case, the family computer ended up with a 1.44" floppy drive, but could only read a 720K floppy, due to BIOS/hardware limitations.
Coping and embracing are two fundamentally different concepts. People "coped" with computers back then, but that doesn't mean we'd ever want to step backwards to such a state.
That's not a solution, as it involves typing. The vast majority of users are no longer familiar with typing as a means of entering commands, if, indeed, they ever were. If Ubuntu is serious about making app finding/installation appealing to the true common user these netbooks are aimed at, they'll develop some sort of "wizard" interface. Typing may be fine for the vast majority of/. readers, but it's not something that resonates with the Windows-only crowd. For most people, a C:\ prompt (or Linux equivalent) conjures memories of obtuse interfaces, indecipherable language, and sky-high blood pressure.
I've got to agree that this seems a good-faith exception. Obviously law enforcement officials should make every effort to keep databases and such clear from factual error, but we have to accept the fact that human errors will inevitably occur. If the police had found nothing in his car, yet were still holding the man, I'd agree completely that the situation was bogus. In this case, however, police had probable cause to stop his vehicle and therefore grounds to enter anything they found within it as evidence against him.
There's no evidence that he'd still be in custody if he hadn't been observed to be in violation of the law, and as such, I support the police's right to stop and investigate him, even if the reasons for that investigation should have been cleared. There's no possible way for the police to know that when they stop a vehicle, and there's no time to confirm the accuracy of a warrant within that short span of time. Ultimately, the driver is completely responsible for the situation that led to his own arrest.
Where are you paying 16 cents for electricity? It would seem to be someplace outside (most) of the lower 48 states, as the average national rate in December, 2007, was 8.91c per kilowatt hour. Idaho was the lowest, at 5.2 cents, KY (where I live) was 5.76 cents, and Connecticut was the highest at 15.81 cents. Basically, if you live in New York or Connecticut, you're stuck with power that costs more than 15 cents per kilowatt hour, but the rest of us have a much better cost structure.
Considering I only pay 5.76 cents now, it seems unlikely that electricity 20 years ago was as low as 1.77 cents. It may have been, though--I don't claim to know for sure.
Oh, I agree with being secure, and I agree with taking the situation seriously. When I refer to security practices, I'm not talking about installing and updating Norton Antivirus as a be-all / end-all measure. The fact is, if his company *does* deal with this kind of data, it needs practices--regular, daily practices--that can secure such information.
I advise not being so paranoid. If you have proper security measures in place, and the other company does as well, the chance of either one of you being breached is absolutely minuscule. If you don't have such standards in place, you might investigate at least securing the PC the consultant will be using at his off-site location.
The immigrant in question wasn't murdered, though it might rise to the level of involuntary manslaughter, at the very most. It was unfortunate, regrettable, and yes, based on the footage in question, it appears the police acted improperly. The question, however, is whether or not the weapon or the improper actions of the officers' in question was the cause of the man's death. There have been cases--many cases--in which police offers responded to a situation with a level of force that, upon later review, was found to be extreme. It can be very difficult to make such calls in the split-second you have to make them, and while the emphasis should always be on responding appropriately, human fallibility doesn't always make this possible.
Has anyone considered the possibility that the vast majority of people who get tasered may actually deserve it? A police officer in a violent or imminently violent situation that does not require the use of a firearm is charged with an extremely difficult task. Disabling a person in close combat without significantly harming them is much more difficult than simply fighting them, particularly when the person in question is not operating under the same restriction. Given this, I'm inclined to grant considerable leeway to the officers in question.
The best way to avoid being tasered is not to do anything (or act in any way) that might give a cop cause to shoot you with a taser. As the article states, only a handful of tasered suspects have died, and only a handful of subjects within that group have died for reasons that might be attributable to the taser itself. How many times, in this even-smaller group, have police been accused of acting inappropriately? I am sure there have been a few, isolated cases of police officers firing these weapons when they weren't needed. If a person ever dies as a direct result of inappropriate and unjustifiable use of a taser, the officer(s) responsible absolutely deserve to be brought up on charges. Thus far, I've yet to see any evidence--including the immigrant in Vancouver--where any inappropriate actions took place.
If you don't want to get tasered, don't invite the possibility.
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Regarding the usefulness of such benchmarks? I don't think so, although I must point out that we don't have information on the degree to which some of those characteristics (noise and temperature) translate into reliability. Intel's Prescott from years back (the LGA-775 version, not the rather terrible Socket 478 flavor) was a good example of this. It indisputably drew more power--I could tell whether or not I had a Northwood or Prescott P4 running in a test system just by resting my hand on the power supply while the CPU was crunching. It ran hotter, ambient temps were higher, etc. That said, I've never seen evidence that Prescott processors failed for thermal reasons more often than Northwood's did when proper ventilation was maintained. Still, if you're doing a lot of AV work or running disk arrays, it's completely understandable why you'd care about noise and thermals for their own sake.
If you dig around, the Caviar Green wins good marks for being quiet and low power. I can't claim to have evaluated it independently but I know it's considered to at least stack up decently against equivalent drives from Ye Olde Manufacturere of Ye're Choice.
As an aside, you're right about the quality and scope of a handful of sites that typically focus on drive performance. Drives, in my opinion, are one of the hardest components to test partly because the vast majority of benchmark programs focus single aspects of performance or are poorly designed.
I don't think there's anything to worry about where Advanced Format is concerned. The idea of moving to 4K sectors has been in various stages of planning for something like 12 years. WD has rolled the tech out very quietly, there's no major marketing push behind this, and the company's primary concern has been with explaining the need for utilities like WD Align. Of course it never hurts to wait and see, either. ;)
UBfusion, as the author of the piece in question, I'd like to note the following:
#1. WD does not claim that AF currently offers any reliability, life expectancy, or MTBF benefits. The information you're looking for is extremely granular--drive seek algorithms and the like are considered 'secret sauce' by the various manufacturers. These are not characteristics I'm even sure a reviewer can objectively independently measure.
#2. WD claims no energy efficiency improvements and the new WD Green drives are listed as drawing exactly the same amount of power as the old ones. If total power consumption has changed at the 1TB level, I'd imagine it would be because the new 1TB drives use two 500GB platters while the original Caviar Green 1TB drives used 3x333GB. Either way, WD has not revised their guidance.
#3. No--at least not real ones. As I stated in the article, average read/write speeds have improved across the entire drive because some of the inner drive tracks that were used in the WD10EARS models aren't used in the WD10EARS. In both cases, average read/writes are up about 2%. This is not a real speed increase--it's a mathematical example of what happens when you lop off the lowest sequence of numbers in an average.
To answer your overarching point, as you've implied, there's no solution save proper backup strategies.
As the headline implies, I managed to both wash and dry my iPhone and I ran it through the dryer twice, all while it was turned on. I only found it when someone happened to be calling as I walked down the hall and wondered why on earth the dryer was beeping faintly.
Wait. So voting for Bush is foolish. Voting for Obama is foolish. Voting for "their" party (or, by extension, "my" party) is foolish. So if you don't vote for Candidate A or Candidate B, and you claim that placing oneself as a member of a political community or identifying with a party is a sign of stupidity, then what do the smart people do? Not vote? Vote for the Easter Bunny?
If I use my genuine, personal hardware to do something illegal with a legal program, I am using the hardware in an illegal/abusive way. I'm not equating legality and use/abuse, but it's not hard to see how the freedom to use any given device legally often opens abusive or illegal options.
It's not a "nagging registration screen" if he's referring to the screen I'm pretty sure he is--it's *one* window that pops up only when you launch the program and asks you to choose between registration or using the program in trial mode. Since when is it news that replacing a legitimate DLL with a hacked version *may* cause issues, particularly in the beta version of an OS? Can we wait for the RC before we begin the wailings and gnashings of teeths?
" Does this mean 98% of votes is enough to figure out how the other 2% voted?" A properly done statistical analysis points the opposite direction; a small sample, properly randomized, can figure out how the other 98 percent voted. And if the margin is, say, 70/30, I don't think we care how they voted anyway. Now, in a 51/49 split, sure. Those don't happen very often.
I must be missing something here, because I don't understand the OP's concern. When you handed the clerk your debit card, a record was created of the transaction. That's part of how a store like BB protects itself from fraud. You may have chosen not to give the store any extra information for their personal records, but there's no reason to think BB wouldn't automatically log your information off the debit card. At some point, Samsung asked Best Buy to send out an update. Here's what I'm really not getting. It's been a generally known fact for decades that using a credit card is a sure-fire way to give federal law enforcement a paper trail to follow. If you want to disappear (or at least maximize your chances of disappearing), you pay cash. I'm assuming the OP is aware of this...are you upset because a corporation essentially did what federal/state/local authorities could also conceivably do?
In all seriousness, I thought the "Linux on the desktop" model was dead several years ago. I can see how Enderle's point applies to Apple, but it seems an enormous stretch to predict that consumers will generally examine the desktop market as it exists today and opt for Linux over Vista, XP, or OS X. I realize Linux has gained ground in the netbook market and done well when debuted on systems that used customized distros. What's the larger picture?
We say we want DRM-free games. Some folks wear the badge of "I don't buy DRM software" as a matter of pride. The majority of us, however, are lying out our collective butts. The creators of World of Goo went out of their way to release a product with absolutely no DRM, and the result was a piracy rate over 90% (Google for this, it was widely reported). The game, by all accounts, is great, so it's not simply a matter of claiming that the title wasn't worth its own production.
I actually went out and bought a copy of the game when I heard about the piracy rate, because I really *do* want studios that publish good games without DRM to be rewarded for it. I don't know what the piracy figures are for Sins of a Solar Empire (another great, DRM-free game), but general findings do not seem to report this theory that gamers buy more copies of a game if it lacks DRM. The only way to convince studios that DRM is an economically bad policy is for DRM-free games to sell more copies. Given how entrenched the DRM mentality is within the industry, we probably need to make our collective case across both blockbusters and small titles. This way, DRM-free comes to be seen as inherent positive, rather than a situational/occasional boost in some cases and a detriment in others. If you're serious about wanting DRM to go away, buy the products. I'm not saying we should buy all of them, or buy the crappy ones, but if we don't invest in these companies, they'll be forced out of business or will feel they have no choice but to return to DRM.
I actually made the switch from Office to OpenOffice, and so far it's gone surprisingly well--I've been able to fix the handful of problems I've had. I wish I could say the same for GIMP vs. Photoshop--that attempted switch has been a tremendous headache.
I know there are people out there who have had terrible experiences with the TSA, but the chances of this happening to you, or to any particular passenger, are absolutely tiny. In order to "qualify" for such an invasion of privacy, you'd have to be pulled aside for individual screening (I'll call that level 1 inspection), have your carry-on + laptop hand-inspected, including turning the laptop on, and then have your laptop not just turned on, but painstakingly examined (lvl 3). Frankly, if you're at lvl 3, you're probably about to get strip-searched, which means the TSA is about to see most anything that might be in the photos you want to protect.
More to the point, if you're at what I've defined as Lvl 3, refusing to work with the TSA (i.e., by refusing to decypt a TrueCrypt partition for inspection), is only going to get you in more serious trouble. At this point, you're in a room, in your skivvies, and the guy sitting across the desk does not feel overly inclined to give you a phone call or access to a lawyer. In such a situation, your absolute best bet is to smile, comply, and show the nice man whatever it is he's interested in seeing. Then get the heck out, and take what legal actions you feel are necessary *after* you're released.
In short, the reason I think you're being overly paranoid is because the likelihood of you being inspected to such a degree is extremely low--and if you *are* inspected to such a degree, it's in your own absolute best interest to comply. If flying makes you nervous, if you have a habit of joking at improper times about improper topics when nervous, or if you simply feel there's something about your appearance, dress, or manner that makes you more likely to be selected for inspection, I respectfully suggest you spend time working on these behaviors, instead of encrypting your hard drive's contents.
Risen, I'm not the one who needs to get over it, and you're rather facetiously comparing the process of typing in the English language (which a number of people haven't mastered) to actually understanding command-line syntax. In essence, you're saying that any child that can read a first grade primer should also be capable of reading Shakespeare, because the two are both written down. You may understand interfaces to the point where they are analogous for you, but your skillset and viewpoint aren't shared by the other 90% or so of the computing world that actually makes up the market for these products. In an age of GUIs and simple install wizards, any mass market product should try to keep users out of a CLI--including Linux.
Dave, I agree with you that the information should not have been present. The legal question here, I think (IANAL in full effect) is whether or not the exclusionary principle (thou shalt not use evidence obtained via an illegal warrant against the accused) applies. Did the police have probable cause? I think we can agree that they did, based on what they knew. The cops, as far as I can tell, did not act inappropriately and operated in good faith that the information in the database was accurate, as we can hopefully agree it should be. So we clear the cops of willfully acting in bad faith. The doctrine of probable cause suggests that what the cops found is admissible evidence--they had reason to search, they searched, they found Bad Things. The exclusionary principle, however, suggests the opposite. Even though the cops themselves are clear of wrongdoing, in this case, since they acted on the information they had, the information they gathered was still gathered incorrectly. One potential resolution to this is if the DA chooses to argue that the evidence would have been uncovered anyway. The exclusionary principle doesn't cover the exclusion of what is deemed to be notable while performing another activity. If the man's car would've been searched regardless, than the exclusionary principle may not apply. If, on the other hand, the search was particularly thorough or conducted entirely because of his record and outstanding warrant, than it might. I agree with your overall characterization of this situation as serious, and that the lack of accountability (as brilliantly defined by most of the Bush Administration) is a very real problem.
Actually, it does. Probable cause is defined as a "more than 50 percent likelihood." Of course there's no empirical way to set "50%" and that perception will vary from person-to-person, but the courts have actually set a figure. ;)
Probable cause, by definition, is based on thought. Wikipedia lists two accepted definitions, the first being: a reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime. The second states: a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent and cautious person's belief that certain facts are probably true. Look at the qualifiers involved, in both cases. "Reasonable" belief. "suspicion, supported by circumstances..." facts which are "probably true." I don't see any way to split this that doesn't come down to belief, or thought.
Our government--our lives--function on the belief that the information contained within various databases and repositories is correct. Sometimes this isn't true, and can lead to awful consequences (people who've been mistakenly declared dead have sometimes had an awful time proving that they are, in fact, alive), but the accuracy of these systems is still trusted, not just by individuals, but by companies, government organizations, and law enforcement. If the cops run a check on someone, and see a warrant listed, that's probable cause. Based on what they've found--a warrant--the police have reason to believe that the person in question has committed a previous, unpunished crime.
If there was a way for the cops to immediately and infallibly check the accuracy of a warrant while sitting behind someone on a stop, I'd be all in favor of it--such a system "costs" nothing, while adding an additional layer of veracity to the entire process. Practically speaking, however, such a system is never going to exist--at least, not without a far better inter-departmental communication database that's capable of reaching up through the various federal and state branches of law enforcement and returning results within an acceptable (let's say, 5-10 minutes) amount of time, even when outside of normal business hours.
Given this, the police have to have the authority to investigate situations, and people, based on probable cause, and in this case, the officers had every reason to believe probable cause was firmly established. Some of the responses have discussed the impact of being wrong, i.e., arresting an innocent man, but the implications of being *right* and releasing a guilty person could be significantly worse. There's no evidence to suggest that the police in question treated the man improperly, or that he would still be in jail today had additional contraband not been found in his vehicle.
For the record, the above was *not* a troll. Just because you disagree with a point doesn't mean the person at the other end is trying to incite an argument. I *was* using computers in the earlier era, and have no desire to go back to the days when having an Apple at home and a PC at work meant owning two computers that couldn't talk to each other simply and effectively. The idea that "coping" with this is some sort of solution, or that we didn't all wish the problem would go away, simply isn't true--in my opinion.
Haleth, People coped, but people hated it. You're looking at the past with rose-colored glasses so bright the glare is blinding. I don't ever remember anyone cheering the fact that you had to remember 2-3 different sets of commands for different systems, or enjoying the fact that there was no simple way to ensure that a document saved on Computer A would open on Computer B. Even if you had two computers running MS-DOS (one at home, one at work), there was no guarantee they were functionally compatible--if your home computer used 5.25" floppies and your work computer had 3.5" floppies, you were just plain stuck--unless, of course, you could afford to shuck out some serious dough, and even then, compatibility could be dicey. In my case, the family computer ended up with a 1.44" floppy drive, but could only read a 720K floppy, due to BIOS/hardware limitations. Coping and embracing are two fundamentally different concepts. People "coped" with computers back then, but that doesn't mean we'd ever want to step backwards to such a state.
That's not a solution, as it involves typing. The vast majority of users are no longer familiar with typing as a means of entering commands, if, indeed, they ever were. If Ubuntu is serious about making app finding/installation appealing to the true common user these netbooks are aimed at, they'll develop some sort of "wizard" interface. Typing may be fine for the vast majority of /. readers, but it's not something that resonates with the Windows-only crowd. For most people, a C:\ prompt (or Linux equivalent) conjures memories of obtuse interfaces, indecipherable language, and sky-high blood pressure.
I've got to agree that this seems a good-faith exception. Obviously law enforcement officials should make every effort to keep databases and such clear from factual error, but we have to accept the fact that human errors will inevitably occur. If the police had found nothing in his car, yet were still holding the man, I'd agree completely that the situation was bogus. In this case, however, police had probable cause to stop his vehicle and therefore grounds to enter anything they found within it as evidence against him. There's no evidence that he'd still be in custody if he hadn't been observed to be in violation of the law, and as such, I support the police's right to stop and investigate him, even if the reasons for that investigation should have been cleared. There's no possible way for the police to know that when they stop a vehicle, and there's no time to confirm the accuracy of a warrant within that short span of time. Ultimately, the driver is completely responsible for the situation that led to his own arrest.
Where are you paying 16 cents for electricity? It would seem to be someplace outside (most) of the lower 48 states, as the average national rate in December, 2007, was 8.91c per kilowatt hour. Idaho was the lowest, at 5.2 cents, KY (where I live) was 5.76 cents, and Connecticut was the highest at 15.81 cents. Basically, if you live in New York or Connecticut, you're stuck with power that costs more than 15 cents per kilowatt hour, but the rest of us have a much better cost structure. Considering I only pay 5.76 cents now, it seems unlikely that electricity 20 years ago was as low as 1.77 cents. It may have been, though--I don't claim to know for sure.
Oh, I agree with being secure, and I agree with taking the situation seriously. When I refer to security practices, I'm not talking about installing and updating Norton Antivirus as a be-all / end-all measure. The fact is, if his company *does* deal with this kind of data, it needs practices--regular, daily practices--that can secure such information.
I advise not being so paranoid. If you have proper security measures in place, and the other company does as well, the chance of either one of you being breached is absolutely minuscule. If you don't have such standards in place, you might investigate at least securing the PC the consultant will be using at his off-site location.
The immigrant in question wasn't murdered, though it might rise to the level of involuntary manslaughter, at the very most. It was unfortunate, regrettable, and yes, based on the footage in question, it appears the police acted improperly. The question, however, is whether or not the weapon or the improper actions of the officers' in question was the cause of the man's death. There have been cases--many cases--in which police offers responded to a situation with a level of force that, upon later review, was found to be extreme. It can be very difficult to make such calls in the split-second you have to make them, and while the emphasis should always be on responding appropriately, human fallibility doesn't always make this possible.
The best way to avoid being tasered is not to do anything (or act in any way) that might give a cop cause to shoot you with a taser. As the article states, only a handful of tasered suspects have died, and only a handful of subjects within that group have died for reasons that might be attributable to the taser itself. How many times, in this even-smaller group, have police been accused of acting inappropriately? I am sure there have been a few, isolated cases of police officers firing these weapons when they weren't needed. If a person ever dies as a direct result of inappropriate and unjustifiable use of a taser, the officer(s) responsible absolutely deserve to be brought up on charges. Thus far, I've yet to see any evidence--including the immigrant in Vancouver--where any inappropriate actions took place.
If you don't want to get tasered, don't invite the possibility.