Ah, but that's only after two years. If you don't upgrade, the subsidized phone plan ends up being way worse after 3 or even 4 years. That's the big reason the phone companies want you to go for the subsidized plan - they get to ream you after the 2 years.
With the ability to triangulate your location based on your cell signal, this is pretty scary. It used to be the government would show up at political rallies to photograph people and license plates to figure out who the "subversives" were. Now they'll just check the cell tower logs to see whose phones are there.
It sounds like someone should start working on "Free Mesh" to allow wifi enabled phones to self organize into a communication network at political rallies.
Here in the US it has been a little harder for the government to set up all encompassing surveillance and databases, but they get around it by mandating certain information be kept by business, and then showing up with a national security letter to force secret access to the data. This also has the nice side effect of pushing the cost onto business so government doesn't have to spend their hard earned tax money.
Sigh. As the saying goes, you have three boxes that help you maintain your freedom: soap box, ballot box, ammo box. Use in that order. Too bad the UK has already been disarmed.
I would not just say it's the far right. There are plenty of centrists such as myself who happen to own firearms and hunt would are very wary of Soros. He gives a lot of money to gun control organizations and would strip us of our current rights.
I wouldn't want to live in a country Soros was running.
If you paid a marginal fee. Then you are a paying customer, and your problem gets priority.
It's not actually that absolute. What is your priority relative to all the other customers who are competing with you for finite rexources? The reality is that more profitable customers may move through the customer support phone queue faster than you, and their issues may be addressed before yours.
Also, it's not uncommon, particularly after a company acquisition, for customers to be reassessed and prioritized according to profitability. Companies decide to cede whole markets to their competitors if they're not sufficiently profitable or they decide to go in a different market direction.
The customer is often not told they are no longer a priority, they just find their rates go up, the quality of their support goes down, their packets are routed through over subscribed network fabric, etc.
The company won't actually tell the customer to go away; they'll continue to accept money until the customer figures it out and goes away on their own.
I disagree with "5. It is morally wrong to kill a human person". War, self defence, and for some people capital punishment, suicide, and euthanasia are all counterexamples to this.
A more accurate statement would be "It is morally wrong to kill a human person in a situation other than those where we've decided it's okay", and that's part of the issue here. It is reasonable to take the position that the embryo is a human at conception, yet still believe the mother's right to control her own body takes priority until the foetus has developed to the point it can live outside the body. And that point will change over time with medical advances.
Perhaps one day we'll have the medical ability to treat it like a transplant, removing the embryo/foetus from one woman and implanting into another.
Bullshit. It's about belief, not provable fact. By your definition, everyone would have to be an agnostic since neither the believers nor the non-believers can provide proof of existence or non-existence of god.
So I'm curious. If you don't believe in intellectual property, then I guess you don't believe in the GPL either?
If music and software producers have no right to prevent large scale copying of their work, then it would seem it's also okay to say that when an individual produces some software and gives it away for free that it's okay for a corporation to incorporate it into a for sale product and neither compensate you for writing the software in the first place nor make the source code available.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. If you preloaded the electronic version with anything other than counts of 0, the randomly chosen machines for the audit would have their electronic and paper versions disagree. I'm assuming somebody verifies that the box for the paper versions is empty when the polls open, just like they do for paper ballots today..
The idea is to actually have a verifiable paper ballot, but you don't need to count and verify all of the paper ballots due to the enough random sampling to convince people the electronic versions are correct.
This is just like how you verify the quality of the goods coming out of a factory where sampling is a destructive action. By checking a small but sufficient random sample, you have a reasonable estimate of failure rates in the products you ship to customers.
I'd like to see a system where the computer accepts your input, verifies the integrity of your ballot (e.g. you haven't selected more than one person in the same race, etc.) and prints out the ballot you'll be casting for you to see. Having approved it, but without being allowed to touch it, the ballot is dropped into the box and also added to a matching electronic tally.
When the polls close, the two totals should match. Just to be sure, we select a small percentage of the devices at random and verify the two totals do indeed match by manually counting the paper ballots. Devices that have statistically different results from their adjacent devices would also be automatically hand verified. Finally, we give each party a set number of devices that they can choose to have included in the manual recount.
Given this statistical sampling, we'd have timely and verifiable results while only needing to count on the order of 1% of the actual ballots.
The admins of Wikipedia are quite within their rights to decide for themselves what the do and don't consider inappropriate. Showing images of Muhammad would suggest they're not overly Islam centric, but that's okay. They don't have to be.
Disallowing profanity while allowing images of Muhammad doesn't make them hypocrites. Similarly, choosing which religions you're going to avoid offending doesn't make you a hypocrite. There will always be someone who's is offending by something (medical marijuana anyone?), and I'd much rather live in a world where that's okay than in a world where anything that offends someone must be suppressed.
It's part of living in a free society. Get over it.
I've always found it interesting that the whole point of not having pictures of Muhammad was to avoid idolizing him, and yet the vehemence with which pictures are suppressed would seem to raise him up to the same idolization they're supposed to be avoiding.
Yes, you can definitely stop when you're too tired to continue.
It comes down to how you define "tired". When I took the course, they were pretty clear that it means really, really, really tired (at least in their eyes). Their concern was that one person would start doing CPR, someone else would not bother to stop since the situation was being handled, and then the first person would give up too soon. They really wanted you to be prepared to give CPR for quite a while if you were going to start it. It's also wise to establish if there's a second person who's CPR certified so you can trade off periodically.
They also noted that if you're doing a good job of CPR when the EMTs arrive, they may very well have you just continue while they tend to the things you're not qualified for.
Ultimately, in the unlikely event that it ended up in court, you'd need to defend that you didn't make a half assed attempt that possibly dissuaded someone else from stepping in.
All that said, it's been a few years since I took the course and I should probably take a refresher. They change their minds (and the course materials) periodically.
People are close on good samaritan laws, but not exact (at least going by what they've told me every time I've taken a first aid course here in California). There are two legal issues to consider.
Once you begin providing aid, you must continue to provide aid until you can hand off to someone who is at least as qualified as you. This is why doctors don't like to get involved, because they are unable to hand off to any sort of EMT or medic, only to another doctor who is at least as qualified as them.
You can't be sued as long as you stick to your level of training. If you've only taken a first aid course and decide to give someone a tracheotomy, you can (and probably will) be sued.
I've used Borland's Together in the past and found it really helpful for C++/Java code. It can be really helpful for coming up to speed a code base's class hierarchy. Unfortunately, when I tried it on a large C++ code base where I'm currently working, after loading the code base in it seemed to go into some sort of a analysis phase and then eventually crashed.
I'm not sure what the problem was. A sales droid called to check in on my download, passed the crash info on to a techie, and said I'd get a call back. About a month later another sales droid called, said essentially the same thing, and I never heard back.:-(
Slightly off topic, but at a previous company we ran Together inside a VNC session as a virtual whiteboard during design sessions with a distributed team. That made it really easy for everyone to visualize the designs we were discussing, and produced code for us as well.
It's a great tool, but apparently has its limitations.
I would think the telecoms have stated company policies to the effect that snooping on people's private communications is not allowed. Given that, they should be able to limit their exposure by terminating the people involved.
I'm not a lawyer, but this seems similar to what they cover in the "sensitivity training" that's designed to limit company exposure. As long as employees are made to understand what is not allowed, and if the company takes action when you do something you're not supposed to, the company is not liable.
So in the absence of immunity, I'd expect the companies to quickly limit their exposure by firing the people involved. It's important to make it clear that people personally will be held accountable, not the company.
Linux software RAID does not update a parity stripe in a transactional way Could you be specific about what you mean by "transactional way" please?
Sure. Suppose you're doing 4+1 RAID and you need to write one of the disk blocks. RAID requires that you read all 5 blocks first (even the one you're about to overwrite since you have to check the parity on read). You then recalculate the new parity based on the one you're writing, and finally you write all 5 back to disk again.
If you only get some of those blocks written to disk before the system goes down, you're left with a mix of the old and new blocks, and a subsequent parity test will fail. The system will then treat the 4+1 blocks as a read error since it doesn't know which blocks are good and which are bad.
What needs to happen is to write the new data someplace else on the disk, say a transaction log, and then back copy to where it needs to be. If the system goes down half way through the back copy, you can redo that operation when the system comes back up.
Linux software RAID does not update a parity stripe in a transactional way, which means a power failure or crash can result in an entire stripe being corrupted. Linux software RAID is not enterprise grade.
Someone correct me if this has changed in the last year or so, but every time I've looked into it I've reached the same conclusion.
Plus, in the event of a sudden power off or crash, software raid can corrupt your disk if you're running with a parity disk. If all N tracks aren't consistent, the entire stripe will fail parity.
If you have more than one box, they knock $6 off the monthly fee for the additional boxes bringing it down to $6.95 per month. It's not $3, but still not bad. When you consider the rental charge on the cable company's box, the difference for a Tivo is really just the up front $300. That's not so bad, in my view, considering you end up with a much better experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, lots of businesses are already doing this.
Agreed, if it's an option. It doesn't seem to be an option with many (most?) carriers though. They like it that way.
Ah, but that's only after two years. If you don't upgrade, the subsidized phone plan ends up being way worse after 3 or even 4 years. That's the big reason the phone companies want you to go for the subsidized plan - they get to ream you after the 2 years.
A good discussion of scale that puts things in perspective was published on CNN not long ago...
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/05/13/mackay.energy/index.html?iref=newssearch
They do.
With the ability to triangulate your location based on your cell signal, this is pretty scary. It used to be the government would show up at political rallies to photograph people and license plates to figure out who the "subversives" were. Now they'll just check the cell tower logs to see whose phones are there.
It sounds like someone should start working on "Free Mesh" to allow wifi enabled phones to self organize into a communication network at political rallies.
Here in the US it has been a little harder for the government to set up all encompassing surveillance and databases, but they get around it by mandating certain information be kept by business, and then showing up with a national security letter to force secret access to the data. This also has the nice side effect of pushing the cost onto business so government doesn't have to spend their hard earned tax money.
Sigh. As the saying goes, you have three boxes that help you maintain your freedom: soap box, ballot box, ammo box. Use in that order. Too bad the UK has already been disarmed.
I would not just say it's the far right. There are plenty of centrists such as myself who happen to own firearms and hunt would are very wary of Soros. He gives a lot of money to gun control organizations and would strip us of our current rights.
I wouldn't want to live in a country Soros was running.
If you paid a marginal fee. Then you are a paying customer, and your problem gets priority.
It's not actually that absolute. What is your priority relative to all the other customers who are competing with you for finite rexources? The reality is that more profitable customers may move through the customer support phone queue faster than you, and their issues may be addressed before yours.
Also, it's not uncommon, particularly after a company acquisition, for customers to be reassessed and prioritized according to profitability. Companies decide to cede whole markets to their competitors if they're not sufficiently profitable or they decide to go in a different market direction.
The customer is often not told they are no longer a priority, they just find their rates go up, the quality of their support goes down, their packets are routed through over subscribed network fabric, etc.
The company won't actually tell the customer to go away; they'll continue to accept money until the customer figures it out and goes away on their own.
I disagree with "5. It is morally wrong to kill a human person". War, self defence, and for some people capital punishment, suicide, and euthanasia are all counterexamples to this.
A more accurate statement would be "It is morally wrong to kill a human person in a situation other than those where we've decided it's okay", and that's part of the issue here. It is reasonable to take the position that the embryo is a human at conception, yet still believe the mother's right to control her own body takes priority until the foetus has developed to the point it can live outside the body. And that point will change over time with medical advances.
Perhaps one day we'll have the medical ability to treat it like a transplant, removing the embryo/foetus from one woman and implanting into another.
Bullshit. It's about belief, not provable fact. By your definition, everyone would have to be an agnostic since neither the believers nor the non-believers can provide proof of existence or non-existence of god.
So I'm curious. If you don't believe in intellectual property, then I guess you don't believe in the GPL either?
If music and software producers have no right to prevent large scale copying of their work, then it would seem it's also okay to say that when an individual produces some software and gives it away for free that it's okay for a corporation to incorporate it into a for sale product and neither compensate you for writing the software in the first place nor make the source code available.
Do I have that correct?
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. If you preloaded the electronic version with anything other than counts of 0, the randomly chosen machines for the audit would have their electronic and paper versions disagree. I'm assuming somebody verifies that the box for the paper versions is empty when the polls open, just like they do for paper ballots today..
The idea is to actually have a verifiable paper ballot, but you don't need to count and verify all of the paper ballots due to the enough random sampling to convince people the electronic versions are correct.
This is just like how you verify the quality of the goods coming out of a factory where sampling is a destructive action. By checking a small but sufficient random sample, you have a reasonable estimate of failure rates in the products you ship to customers.
I'd like to see a system where the computer accepts your input, verifies the integrity of your ballot (e.g. you haven't selected more than one person in the same race, etc.) and prints out the ballot you'll be casting for you to see. Having approved it, but without being allowed to touch it, the ballot is dropped into the box and also added to a matching electronic tally.
When the polls close, the two totals should match. Just to be sure, we select a small percentage of the devices at random and verify the two totals do indeed match by manually counting the paper ballots. Devices that have statistically different results from their adjacent devices would also be automatically hand verified. Finally, we give each party a set number of devices that they can choose to have included in the manual recount.
Given this statistical sampling, we'd have timely and verifiable results while only needing to count on the order of 1% of the actual ballots.
Fair point. So I guess it's neutral on stuff that's outside their own definitions of what's acceptable.
The admins of Wikipedia are quite within their rights to decide for themselves what the do and don't consider inappropriate. Showing images of Muhammad would suggest they're not overly Islam centric, but that's okay. They don't have to be.
Disallowing profanity while allowing images of Muhammad doesn't make them hypocrites. Similarly, choosing which religions you're going to avoid offending doesn't make you a hypocrite. There will always be someone who's is offending by something (medical marijuana anyone?), and I'd much rather live in a world where that's okay than in a world where anything that offends someone must be suppressed.
It's part of living in a free society. Get over it.
I've always found it interesting that the whole point of not having pictures of Muhammad was to avoid idolizing him, and yet the vehemence with which pictures are suppressed would seem to raise him up to the same idolization they're supposed to be avoiding.
Yes, you can definitely stop when you're too tired to continue.
It comes down to how you define "tired". When I took the course, they were pretty clear that it means really, really, really tired (at least in their eyes). Their concern was that one person would start doing CPR, someone else would not bother to stop since the situation was being handled, and then the first person would give up too soon. They really wanted you to be prepared to give CPR for quite a while if you were going to start it. It's also wise to establish if there's a second person who's CPR certified so you can trade off periodically.
They also noted that if you're doing a good job of CPR when the EMTs arrive, they may very well have you just continue while they tend to the things you're not qualified for.
Ultimately, in the unlikely event that it ended up in court, you'd need to defend that you didn't make a half assed attempt that possibly dissuaded someone else from stepping in.
All that said, it's been a few years since I took the course and I should probably take a refresher. They change their minds (and the course materials) periodically.
People are close on good samaritan laws, but not exact (at least going by what they've told me every time I've taken a first aid course here in California). There are two legal issues to consider.
I've used Borland's Together in the past and found it really helpful for C++/Java code. It can be really helpful for coming up to speed a code base's class hierarchy. Unfortunately, when I tried it on a large C++ code base where I'm currently working, after loading the code base in it seemed to go into some sort of a analysis phase and then eventually crashed.
I'm not sure what the problem was. A sales droid called to check in on my download, passed the crash info on to a techie, and said I'd get a call back. About a month later another sales droid called, said essentially the same thing, and I never heard back. :-(
Slightly off topic, but at a previous company we ran Together inside a VNC session as a virtual whiteboard during design sessions with a distributed team. That made it really easy for everyone to visualize the designs we were discussing, and produced code for us as well.
It's a great tool, but apparently has its limitations.
I would think the telecoms have stated company policies to the effect that snooping on people's private communications is not allowed. Given that, they should be able to limit their exposure by terminating the people involved.
I'm not a lawyer, but this seems similar to what they cover in the "sensitivity training" that's designed to limit company exposure. As long as employees are made to understand what is not allowed, and if the company takes action when you do something you're not supposed to, the company is not liable.
So in the absence of immunity, I'd expect the companies to quickly limit their exposure by firing the people involved. It's important to make it clear that people personally will be held accountable, not the company.
Sure. Suppose you're doing 4+1 RAID and you need to write one of the disk blocks. RAID requires that you read all 5 blocks first (even the one you're about to overwrite since you have to check the parity on read). You then recalculate the new parity based on the one you're writing, and finally you write all 5 back to disk again.
If you only get some of those blocks written to disk before the system goes down, you're left with a mix of the old and new blocks, and a subsequent parity test will fail. The system will then treat the 4+1 blocks as a read error since it doesn't know which blocks are good and which are bad.
What needs to happen is to write the new data someplace else on the disk, say a transaction log, and then back copy to where it needs to be. If the system goes down half way through the back copy, you can redo that operation when the system comes back up.
Very cool. Solaris only?
Linux software RAID does not update a parity stripe in a transactional way, which means a power failure or crash can result in an entire stripe being corrupted. Linux software RAID is not enterprise grade.
Someone correct me if this has changed in the last year or so, but every time I've looked into it I've reached the same conclusion.
Plus, in the event of a sudden power off or crash, software raid can corrupt your disk if you're running with a parity disk. If all N tracks aren't consistent, the entire stripe will fail parity.
If you have more than one box, they knock $6 off the monthly fee for the additional boxes bringing it down to $6.95 per month. It's not $3, but still not bad. When you consider the rental charge on the cable company's box, the difference for a Tivo is really just the up front $300. That's not so bad, in my view, considering you end up with a much better experience.