Judge Aiken's opinion said in finding violations of the Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure. "A shift to a nation based on extraconstitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill advised."
I'll bet W is wondering where in the constitution it says "Extraconsitutional Authority is prohibited"
This comment is powered by the energy generated by dynamos attached to the spinning graves of J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthey, Richard Nixon...
It was announced that the problem will be resolved by submitting a new standard to the ISO committee for fast track:
2.15.3.6 multiplyLikeExcel2007 (Emulate Excel 2007 multiplication product output.) The * operation, previously known as "multiply" has been overloaded^H^H^H^H replaced with a new operation which will be known as multiply. A description of this function shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Excel 2007) when determining the function output of values near 65535, the resulting output (also known as "product" shall behave identically to Excell 2007.
[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors (random, psychotic or otherwise) and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications (perhaps using a table or random number generator.) It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]
Web developers are going to have to get used to it. They've had years of being able to lazily code, develop and test for a single platform and ignore everyone else.
Now iPhone, along with Nokia's E and N series phones, firefox and the growing popularity of OSX, Linux and other alternatives are finally forcing Web developers to do what they should have been doing all along, coding and testing for actual w3c standards instead of Microsoft's ad-hoc proprietary "standards". (Yes I am aware that w3c standards need to be tightened a bit)
The correct phrase is "GNU is Not Unix" and more importantly, GLNJL, "GNU/Linux is Not Just Linux" and GUBK, "GNU can be Used on Better Kernels." But I digress...
There are obviously areas of Solaris that are few years behind Linux but 10-15 years behind? No a chance. I started on Slackware 96, I spent several years supporting SuSE and I still use Ubuntu. Ubuntu is ahead of most Linux distributions on packaging and drivers and is also slightly ahead of OpenSolaris in this area. The sheer number of hobbyists and businesses using GNU/Linux means it is a year or two ahead on consumer driven software. The problem with both Solaris and Linux fanatics is they believe that because their O.S. works well for them on their hardware, it should be used everywhere by everyone. That being said, Linux is used in many places (enterprise servers, mainframes) where Solaris would be a much better solution. For the moment, Solaris isn't the ideal OS for Nokia's N series phones.
Sun made its biggest mistake(s) near the peak of its stock price, when Sun dropped Solaris X86 for a few months. Whoever made that decision should have been fired a dozen times over but that's water under the bridge now and Sun is back as a viable solution for IBM's customers. The only real question is why don't HP and DELL support Solaris for customer problems where Linux or Windows are square pegs in round holes?
Whoever marked this offtopic either doesn't understand the problem or didn't read the comment. For small devices (USB memory sticks) I'd go with the least common denominator filesystem which truly has cross-platform read and write (e.g. FAT32) and live with the fact that it sucks. For anything more than 100G, I'd use a modern scalable filesystem which runs on a stable kernel, guarantees data writes, supports RAID, snapshots and clones. I would export it via NFS or SMB and send hourly snapshots somewhere. Unless I'm mistaken, ZFS is the only filesystem which fits this bill right now. Ext3/Reiser/HFS+ are somewhere in between but they are also compromises, they aren't necessarily a better fit to this problem.
Lemme see, "evil wavelengths" can be blocked by dichroic or peril-sensitive sunglasses...
And any disorientation and nausea caused by the flash pattern can be stopped with These Amiga X-Specs You'd just need to synchronize the LCD blanking with the "evil" patten of flashes.
Or... you could just get the bad guys to wear the X-Specs and then attack them with a nauseating 200 inch LCD projection TV image of frogger '87 or maybe the 3D version of Michael Jackson's super-bowl 27 half-time show
The good news if the DOD is again looking for creative ways of wasting money, this obviously means they are nearly finished with the cleanup from two wars. Couple hundred billion here, couple hundred billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money!
I wondered about this since I have the European Nokia E61 which works with any Wifi (Unlike the U.S. Cingular/AT&T E61 with
no Wifi!) If Apple locks their product into an monopoly in the U.S., that's fine. Locked in monopolies are apparently what we seem to expect here in the land of the free. But if Apple ever plans to sell the iPhones in Europe or Asia, they're going to have to create a version of it which is free to roam to other internet providers, including my own broadband router. It's what they expect.
So long Mercury, you evil toxic metal. Welcome Cadmium, Cerium, Yttrium and Arsenic. Thank goodness the cradle to grave process of creating LEDs doesn't involve dangerous and toxic elements...
Ah the joy of fiat money! Wasn't it only a few years ago when nearly 100% of the copper in pennies was replaced with cheaper zinc so its face value wouldn't drop below its scrap value? Now zinc is worth 12% more than the penny. Is anyone here old enough to remember when dimes were nearly pure silver (1964) and Nickels had Nickel as a primary ingredient? What will be next? Will the value of ink and paper in paper money exceed the face value? I know, let's mint money out of that nuclear waste everyone has been trying to figure out how to get rid of. That way, those economy-wrecking money savers will have every incentive to spend it, and spend it now!
Uncle Ben Benranke, fire up those currency printing presses! Wouldn't you like to have a Beowulf cluster of those?
Preventing them from making decisions based on the information is an area frought with grey areas that it runs the risk of being highly ineffective because in spite of the fact that there are many criteria by which insurers are prohibited to descriminate, they manage to skirt the matter by descriminating based on "similar" and statistically related information... you know, like zip codes instead of ethnicity?
For example, this story about the tricks insurance companies used when trying to avoid anti-gay discrimination claims.
Some insurance restrictions aimed at AIDS cases have violated laws or the industry's ethical standards, legal experts say. One company was found to be rejecting all applicants from San Francisco, which has one of the nation's largest AIDS caseloads. Civil rights lawyers say coverage has also been denied to men who are not married or who have jobs that are stereotypically associated with gay and bisexual men, like hairdressing.
Insurance companies have done well over the past century. Look at the largest buildings in any city in America, if it isn't a bank, it's an insurance company. Here is how it works:
1) Convince people they need insurance to cover the cost X of Service S. 2) Insured people can now afford to pay more so provider charges X+Y for service S. 3) Rising cost of (X+Y) means people can no longer afford service S so they must buy more insurance. 4) ??? Profit 5) goto step 1
Insurance companies don't need the ??? step and they don't need all of the advantages they've been able to buy from congressional and state representatives including:
1) Require that everyone buys insurance (I'd love to see a law requiring everyone to buy my company's products.)
2) Require that everyone buys extra insurance to cover those who break law 1.
3) Don't sell insurance to those who are likely to collect. (e.g. Don't sell earthquake insurance in earthquake zones or flood insurance in flood zones) Instead, let the federal government create a "federal flood insurance" or go ahead and sell disaster insurance in if a disaster occurs, file chapter 11 bankruptcy and leave town fast!
4) Don't provide medical insurance for those with medical conditions. (e.g. if there is ANY gap in insurance coverage due to a job loss or inability to pay COBRA, you will be considered a new customer by all insurance companies and your condition (diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure) will be considered a prexisting condition. If you can get coverage at all, you'll be paying upwards of $2000/month.
Example, someone I know has a child with diabetes. A false workplace claim by a compulsive lier cost him his almost decade long career and corporate health insurance coverage. Every health insurance companies he has spoken told him that they could cover his family except for the child with diabetes.
Does anyone remember the sci-fi story based on the idea that one of the gas giant planet's moons (Titan?) consisted of an enormous diamond? It might have been one of Sagan's stories. Space is really big, somewhere out there I'll bet there are crystals the size of small planets. I don't remember if diamond crystals can present a hexagonal cross section, but with the pressure of saturn's atmosphere, you might get crystals of a hydrocarbon. Who would have thought that black carbon subjected to enormous pressure would become a beautiful transparent crystal diamond?
Tapes are still widely used in the industry. It scares me how many companies may be choosing the convenience of DVD over the stability of tape. I've seen digital 8mm digital (exabyte) tapes survive unharmed 10 years in an attic where temperatures ranged from 15F-150F and yet I've seen CDs and DVDs without a scratch on them mysteriously stop working after less than 2 years. As for hard drives, they can be made part of a viable storage technology, but the drives themselves are notoriously unreliable. I'd use RAID5/RAID6/Z with some sort of parity checking filesystem (e.g. ZFS on BSD or OpenSolaris).
'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies.
No, it's not. RAW = Canon's "raw" image format. "Raw" image formats are produced by many higher-end digital cameras. I'm sorry you don't understand the distinction between RAW and raw, but it does make it painfully obvious this isn't your area of expertise. It is mine: I've shot RAW images on my Canon dSLR for fun and profit for several years now. I shoot exclusively in RAW format because of the extra bit depth which makes adjustments much more 'transparent' (a level adjustment won't cause as much problems wit 10-12 bit data as it will with 8 bit, and you also have no compression artifacts.) I archive everything in the original Canon RAW format.
Allowing H1B temporary immigrants to work below local market rates really isn't free market capitalism because:
H1B was a 6 year visa. If you knew that you could work in a country where you'd make 3 times your home salary but where cost of living was 3 times your home cost of living, you might be able to plug away for a few years, living as cheaply as possible in the low-rent district then take the money and run. U.S. born citizens really don't have this option.
If labor had the mobility of jobs, you would rea;;u have a free world market. People would seek places where the demand for their skills gives an optimal salary*quality of life/cost of living ratio. I can tell you right now that silicon valley would not be the place.
-- tnargime B1H na
FAA (after several extremely expensive false starts) finally deployed a flight control system to replace the Sperry-Univac 8300s. You'd think they would have learned something from these mistakes, but there are several things that scare me about this:
1) The fact that Windows Vista (an unproven not yet released OS) is being considered for mission critical systems.
2) The fact that Government might tie a crucial part of national infrastructure to any single company (Microsoft or a high-flying dot com)
3) The fact that Linux was considered but not BSD, OpenSolaris, OSX and any number of other OSs suggests that the FAA still doesn't understand their problem, instead they focus on a sole-source vendor who can claims to be able to solve it, whatever it is.
Once you have determined that a device can be replaced, use the zpool replace command to replace the device. If you are replacing the damaged device with another different device, use the following command:
# zpool replace tank c1t0d0 c2t0d0 # zpool status tank
pool: tank
state: DEGRADED reason: One or more devices is being resilvered. action: Wait for the resilvering process to complete.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-XXXX-08
scrub: none requested config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
tank DEGRADED 0 0 0
mirror DEGRADED 0 0 0
replacing DEGRADED 0 0 0 52% resilvered
c1t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c2t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
Judging from ssec and noaa info, it looks like a high north, a low to the south are almost straddling the bay. Some sea fog and/or low clouds extends well past the farallons. I would've expected a W-NW wind gradually clocking around to N NE but depending on day/night temperatures, near shore sea or land breeze might counter this and extend out 5 miles or so. Can any sailors in the area give local conditions for the past 48 hours? People have already speculated on things that can go wrong but quite a few failures can put you out of touch but still be surviable:
Cell phones really can't be expected to work 26 miles offshore, my old analog toshiba didn't even make it 1/3 across lake Michigan.
If as this NOAA bouy indicates, the wind has been moderate NW-westerly, we can hope that he'll be found in a raft or disabled boat along the shore. It might even be worth slashdotting highway 1 from Pt. Reyes to Monteray and look for him. I once called in a dismasted catameran I found with a telescope I'd just picked up at a FL rummage sale. It was dusk and the crew were on the horizon paddling furiously against an offshore wind.
If the wind/currents were moving offshore, he could be well over 100 miles offshore, trying to get back. VHF radio is basically line of site, you might get 50 miles on a good day from a high coast guard tower, if his radio were working well. But more typically I only get 5 miles boat-boat.
If something went wrong with the boat, fire, dismasting, rudder break... he might be busy heaving to and doing whatever he can to keep from running aground. The bushing which attaches the rudder to the tiller on my 24' C&C eventually went bad. We replaced it, but offshore failure wouldn't have been fun. A larger sailboat sank near scotland when its wheel steering cable broke and the rudder slammed hard enough to crack its housing.
But it wouldn't take a sinking to be lost, if the wind took him out of VHF range, it wouldn't matter if he knew exactly where he was, no one else would unless he had a working activated EPIRB.
There is a small chance that his navigation equipment went wrong and he doesn't know where he is. The california coast is very unforgiving. I think I heard that Francis Drake sailed right past SF bay because from offshore it looks just like another pices of rocky unforgiving shoreline.
There is still hope. My prayers go out to his family and friends. Any computer expert interested in sailing and astronomy must be a good guy, even if he works for Microsoft.
The comment about Scott and GPL is nonsense. But it's true that Scott et. al made some enormous mistakes during the peak of the last bubble. When Sun was golden, they started selling Ultra workstations with inadequate memory, a PCI bus and IDE drives. These low end machines introduced many a college student to Solaris and helped promote the "Slowaris" meme. Sun delayed X86 Solaris at precisely the right time to insure that GNU/Linux could take advantage of a steep part of the X86 moore curve and decades of opensource software development, some of which came from Sun. Sun made their development environment an expensive option, which surely turned away many talented but frugal developers.
Now that Sun is doing (most) everything right, opensourcing Java (GPL), opensourcing Solaris and contributing real innovations to Unix (Dtrace, ZFS...), their biggest problem is that they don't have the marketing budget of IBM (Linux's biggest corporate backer) or Microsoft and they Schwartz doesn't yet have yet have the reality distortion aura of Steve Jobs. Solaris 10 and more recent releases of Opensolaris are already freely available, as is Sun Studio. How much extra who it cost to put S10 on some DVDs and ship it to those who show enough interest? It's a no-brainer and miles away from a "cry of desparation."
I don't know if it qualifies as worst, but Porto Portugal's Andante RFID rail pass system is an example of a theoretically good system with poor implementation. I'd much rather go to the trouble of pulling a card from my wallet and having the system stamp (a paper trail) a validation so that I am not automatically assumed to be a criminal if (WHEN!) the system failed. When the system started, it was reported that 3% of passengers were incurring fines of 50 Euro or moree. Portugal's rail police and rail administrator seem to believe that that many people are trying to scam the system. The day after I had to choose between paying the Porto fine to avoid jail for me, my wife and my 3 year old daughter, the RFID for my workplace also failed. RFID is cool, but most implementations are nowhere near 6-sigma quality. Those who promote this technology should consider the possibility of a backlash when people see how failure prone such systems are and hear that it is going to be used for everything from inventory control to border control to medical tagging.
Let's hope Portugal doesn't experiment with RFID voting
Depending on the shape and sensitivity of the "security" light's dusk/dawn sensor, a well-aimed laser pointer can be your friend. Not that I would know about such things, but I've been told;-)
P.S. If your town has a light pollution/light trespass ordinance, make sure the laser direction and wattage are such that you aren't breaking these laws. A typical pen laser outputs less than 1/50,000th the wattage of a typical insecurity light.
Indeed, Ireland changes its immigration laws (in fact all of its laws) almost as often as it rains here. The current mood is isolationism, even though immigration, tax amnesty lured multinationals and international trade created the celtic tiger in the first place.
Despite what the Irish believe, Ireland is a beautiful, prosperous place where people enjoy life without as much government interference as you'd have in the U.S., France or ex Soviet states. Here are some pluses and minuses:
The amount of vacation is the least in the E.U., but is still several times what you'd have in the U.S.
The personal tax rate averages about 8% more than the U.S.
Driving is expensive, intense, and dangerous similar to what you'd see in New York City, Rome, Paris, and yet other aspects of life are more relaxed than in the U.S.
Do your own research before buying property, Ireland is propsperous but methinks not prosperous enough to maintain this bubble. Prices are higher than most of the major cities of the world and nearly all of the United States.
IT isn't growing as fast as it was, it may be decreasing, the construction boom (associated with the property boom/bubble) is taking up the slack... for the time being.
The people are generally very friendly, but I see a growing level of racism and anti immigrant sentiment.
Considering the prosperity, high tax rate and extremely high take by the government, the infrastructure is terrible. Roads are narrow and dangerous, public transportation service in much of the developing world is better. The public health care system has disimproved since Ireland was the one of the poorest countries in the E.U.
Law enforcement is weak.
There isn't a clean separation between church and state. When you are choosing a school, a prime consideration is whether you are protestant or Catholic, with the implication that others needn't apply.
Speech isn't quite as free as in the U.S. A political figure or wealthy famous person can sue you for libel or slander quite easily.
The cost of living is extremely high compared to wages.
And yet, I choose to live here because you don't have to drive a car everywhere, villages are self-sufficient, people are generally very well educated and have good intentions, jobs are available.
Slashdot Mirror
Judge Aiken's opinion said in finding violations of the Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure. "A shift to a nation based on extraconstitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill advised."
I'll bet W is wondering where in the constitution it says "Extraconsitutional Authority is prohibited"
This comment is powered by the energy generated by dynamos attached to the spinning graves of J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthey, Richard Nixon...
It was announced that the problem will be resolved by submitting a new standard to the ISO committee for fast track:
2.15.3.6 multiplyLikeExcel2007 (Emulate Excel 2007 multiplication product output.)
The * operation, previously known as "multiply" has been overloaded^H^H^H^H replaced with a new operation which will be known as multiply. A description of this function shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Excel 2007) when determining the function output of values near 65535, the resulting output (also known as "product" shall behave identically to Excell 2007. [Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors (random, psychotic or otherwise) and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications (perhaps using a table or random number generator.) It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]
Web developers are going to have to get used to it. They've had years of being able to lazily code, develop and test for a single platform and ignore everyone else.
Now iPhone, along with Nokia's E and N series phones, firefox and the growing popularity of OSX, Linux and other alternatives are finally forcing Web developers to do what they should have been doing all along, coding and testing for actual w3c standards instead of Microsoft's ad-hoc proprietary "standards". (Yes I am aware that w3c standards need to be tightened a bit)
The correct phrase is "GNU is Not Unix" and more importantly, GLNJL, "GNU/Linux is Not Just Linux" and GUBK, "GNU can be Used on Better Kernels." But I digress...
There are obviously areas of Solaris that are few years behind Linux but 10-15 years behind? No a chance. I started on Slackware 96, I spent several years supporting SuSE and I still use Ubuntu. Ubuntu is ahead of most Linux distributions on packaging and drivers and is also slightly ahead of OpenSolaris in this area. The sheer number of hobbyists and businesses using GNU/Linux means it is a year or two ahead on consumer driven software. The problem with both Solaris and Linux fanatics is they believe that because their O.S. works well for them on their hardware, it should be used everywhere by everyone. That being said, Linux is used in many places (enterprise servers, mainframes) where Solaris would be a much better solution. For the moment, Solaris isn't the ideal OS for Nokia's N series phones.
Sun made its biggest mistake(s) near the peak of its stock price, when Sun dropped Solaris X86 for a few months. Whoever made that decision should have been fired a dozen times over but that's water under the bridge now and Sun is back as a viable solution for IBM's customers. The only real question is why don't HP and DELL support Solaris for customer problems where Linux or Windows are square pegs in round holes?
Whoever marked this offtopic either doesn't understand the problem or didn't read the comment. For small devices (USB memory sticks) I'd go with the least common denominator filesystem which truly has cross-platform read and write (e.g. FAT32) and live with the fact that it sucks. For anything more than 100G, I'd use a modern scalable filesystem which runs on a stable kernel, guarantees data writes, supports RAID, snapshots and clones. I would export it via NFS or SMB and send hourly snapshots somewhere. Unless I'm mistaken, ZFS is the only filesystem which fits this bill right now. Ext3/Reiser/HFS+ are somewhere in between but they are also compromises, they aren't necessarily a better fit to this problem.
Lemme see, "evil wavelengths" can be blocked by dichroic or peril-sensitive sunglasses...
And any disorientation and nausea caused by the flash pattern can be stopped with These Amiga X-Specs You'd just need to synchronize the LCD blanking with the "evil" patten of flashes.
Or... you could just get the bad guys to wear the X-Specs and then attack them with a nauseating 200 inch LCD projection TV image of frogger '87 or maybe the 3D version of Michael Jackson's super-bowl 27 half-time show
"There's one wavelength that gets everybody," Lieberman said, according to the newsletter. "Vlad calls it the evil color."
And if the psychophysical effects are limited to a single or range of wavelengths, these effects are easily blocked with Dichroic Filter Sunglasses. Or better yet, Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.
The good news if the DOD is again looking for creative ways of wasting money, this obviously means they are nearly finished with the cleanup from two wars. Couple hundred billion here, couple hundred billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money!
Filtering pr0n out of the internet should be easy, just put a filter around the series of tubes.
So long Mercury, you evil toxic metal. Welcome Cadmium, Cerium, Yttrium and Arsenic. Thank goodness the cradle to grave process of creating LEDs doesn't involve dangerous and toxic elements...
Or you could just ask for change for that paper dollar and ship it to India where it can be meilted down for more than 10% profit. Of course the government made that illegal back in December: From Mish Shedlock's globaleconomicanalysis blog: People who melt pennies or nickels to profit from the jump in metals prices could face jail time and pay thousands of dollars in fines, according to new rules out Thursday. Soaring metals prices mean that the value of the metal in pennies and nickels exceeds the face value of the coins. Based on current metals prices, the value of the metal in a nickel is now 6.99 cents, while the penny's metal is worth 1.12 cents, according to the U.S. Mint. "The nation needs its coinage for commerce," U.S. Mint director Ed Moy said in a statement. "We don't want to see our pennies and nickels melted down so a few individuals can take advantage of the American taxpayer. Replacing these coins would be an enormous cost to taxpayers." Under the new rules, it is illegal to melt pennies and nickels. It is also illegal to export the coins for melting. Travelers may legally carry up to $5 in 1- and 5-cent coins out of the USA or ship $100 of the coins abroad "for legitimate coinage and numismatic purposes."
Ah the joy of fiat money! Wasn't it only a few years ago when nearly 100% of the copper in pennies was replaced with cheaper zinc so its face value wouldn't drop below its scrap value? Now zinc is worth 12% more than the penny. Is anyone here old enough to remember when dimes were nearly pure silver (1964) and Nickels had Nickel as a primary ingredient? What will be next? Will the value of ink and paper in paper money exceed the face value? I know, let's mint money out of that nuclear waste everyone has been trying to figure out how to get rid of. That way, those economy-wrecking money savers will have every incentive to spend it, and spend it now!
Uncle Ben Benranke, fire up those currency printing presses! Wouldn't you like to have a Beowulf cluster of those?
Preventing them from making decisions based on the information is an area frought with grey areas that it runs the risk of being highly ineffective because in spite of the fact that there are many criteria by which insurers are prohibited to descriminate, they manage to skirt the matter by descriminating based on "similar" and statistically related information... you know, like zip codes instead of ethnicity? For example, this story about the tricks insurance companies used when trying to avoid anti-gay discrimination claims.
Some insurance restrictions aimed at AIDS cases have violated laws or the industry's ethical standards, legal experts say. One company was found to be rejecting all applicants from San Francisco, which has one of the nation's largest AIDS caseloads. Civil rights lawyers say coverage has also been denied to men who are not married or who have jobs that are stereotypically associated with gay and bisexual men, like hairdressing.
Insurance companies have done well over the past century. Look at the largest buildings in any city in America, if it isn't a bank, it's an insurance company. Here is how it works:
1) Convince people they need insurance to cover the cost X of Service S.
2) Insured people can now afford to pay more so provider charges X+Y for service S.
3) Rising cost of (X+Y) means people can no longer afford service S so they must buy more insurance.
4) ??? Profit
5) goto step 1
Insurance companies don't need the ??? step and they don't need all of the advantages they've been able to buy from congressional and state representatives including:
1) Require that everyone buys insurance (I'd love to see a law requiring everyone to buy my company's products.)
2) Require that everyone buys extra insurance to cover those who break law 1.
3) Don't sell insurance to those who are likely to collect. (e.g. Don't sell earthquake insurance in earthquake zones or flood insurance in flood zones) Instead, let the federal government create a "federal flood insurance" or go ahead and sell disaster insurance in if a disaster occurs, file chapter 11 bankruptcy and leave town fast!
4) Don't provide medical insurance for those with medical conditions. (e.g. if there is ANY gap in insurance coverage due to a job loss or inability to pay COBRA, you will be considered a new customer by all insurance companies and your condition (diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure) will be considered a prexisting condition. If you can get coverage at all, you'll be paying upwards of $2000/month.
Example, someone I know has a child with diabetes. A false workplace claim by a compulsive lier cost him his almost decade long career and corporate health insurance coverage. Every health insurance companies he has spoken told him that they could cover his family except for the child with diabetes.
Does anyone remember the sci-fi story based on the idea that one of the gas giant planet's moons (Titan?) consisted of an enormous diamond? It might have been one of Sagan's stories. Space is really big, somewhere out there I'll bet there are crystals the size of small planets. I don't remember if diamond crystals can present a hexagonal cross section, but with the pressure of saturn's atmosphere, you might get crystals of a hydrocarbon. Who would have thought that black carbon subjected to enormous pressure would become a beautiful transparent crystal diamond?
Tapes are still widely used in the industry. It scares me how many companies may be choosing the convenience of DVD over the stability of tape. I've seen digital 8mm digital (exabyte) tapes survive unharmed 10 years in an attic where temperatures ranged from 15F-150F and yet I've seen CDs and DVDs without a scratch on them mysteriously stop working after less than 2 years. As for hard drives, they can be made part of a viable storage technology, but the drives themselves are notoriously unreliable. I'd use RAID5/RAID6/Z with some sort of parity checking filesystem (e.g. ZFS on BSD or OpenSolaris).
'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies.
No, it's not. RAW = Canon's "raw" image format. "Raw" image formats are produced by many higher-end digital cameras. I'm sorry you don't understand the distinction between RAW and raw, but it does make it painfully obvious this isn't your area of expertise. It is mine: I've shot RAW images on my Canon dSLR for fun and profit for several years now. I shoot exclusively in RAW format because of the extra bit depth which makes adjustments much more 'transparent' (a level adjustment won't cause as much problems wit 10-12 bit data as it will with 8 bit, and you also have no compression artifacts.) I archive everything in the original Canon RAW format.
Since you claim expertise in this area and make some arguments that are, on the surface, convincing I feel it is important to point out mistakes in your arguments. Mistakes that even a relatively raw beginner such as myself are aware of. It appears that you have a very high level understanding of RAW, but to extend this into an understanding of the internals is a dangerous thing to do on Slashdot. First of all, since you speak of Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax 'raw', I think you do understand that each of these formats are unique. The original poster is correct that some manufacturers (e.g. Sony) actually encrypt some of the data in their RAW format so that (for instance) the white balance can only be extracted using proprietary software. It may not be "a Sh!7l0ad of smaller manufacturers" from your point of view, but since I've seen relatively inexpensive Sony, Canon, Pentax and (the dearly departed) Minolta cameras spit out what their marketing material claims is "raw". The bottom line is that RAW is like tiff, only worse in that the data, data representation (byte order...), encoder and container may change from manufacturer to manufacturer. The only thing Canon RAW and Sony RAW are certain to have in common is that their marketing material, instruction book and camera's menu uses the three letters 'R', 'A', and 'W' to represent the name of the format (or in some cases 'r', 'a', 'w'. For a close look at the internals of many raw formats, I suggest you look at the source code to Dcraw. A few other mistakes, even really cheap webcams don't encode to gif (I don't know where that comment came from but they don't, the closed driver software takes the "raw" CMOS/CCD data and encodes it to GIF without letting the user see the raw data. If you're into astrophotography or have used a webcam on an opensource operating system, you'll understand more. Also, the raw file may be the closest consumers can come to the CCD's internal format, but by no means does is it identical to the RAW CCD data as it comes out of the CCD's analog light buckets (or CMOS gates) into the A/D.
Allowing H1B temporary immigrants to work below local market rates really isn't free market capitalism because: H1B was a 6 year visa. If you knew that you could work in a country where you'd make 3 times your home salary but where cost of living was 3 times your home cost of living, you might be able to plug away for a few years, living as cheaply as possible in the low-rent district then take the money and run. U.S. born citizens really don't have this option. If labor had the mobility of jobs, you would rea;;u have a free world market. People would seek places where the demand for their skills gives an optimal salary*quality of life/cost of living ratio. I can tell you right now that silicon valley would not be the place. -- tnargime B1H na
FAA (after several extremely expensive false starts) finally deployed a flight control system to replace the Sperry-Univac 8300s. You'd think they would have learned something from these mistakes, but there are several things that scare me about this:
1) The fact that Windows Vista (an unproven not yet released OS) is being considered for mission critical systems.
2) The fact that Government might tie a crucial part of national infrastructure to any single company (Microsoft or a high-flying dot com)
3) The fact that Linux was considered but not BSD, OpenSolaris, OSX and any number of other OSs suggests that the FAA still doesn't understand their problem, instead they focus on a sole-source vendor who can claims to be able to solve it, whatever it is.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/6n7ht6q
For example:
Do regional phone carriers have information regarding his last whereabouts based on the last successful ping (or call) from his cell phone?
Judging from ssec and noaa info, it looks like a high north, a low to the south are almost straddling the bay. Some sea fog and/or low clouds extends well past the farallons. I would've expected a W-NW wind gradually clocking around to N NE but depending on day/night temperatures, near shore sea or land breeze might counter this and extend out 5 miles or so. Can any sailors in the area give local conditions for the past 48 hours? People have already speculated on things that can go wrong but quite a few failures can put you out of touch but still be surviable:
Cell phones really can't be expected to work 26 miles offshore, my old analog toshiba didn't even make it 1/3 across lake Michigan.
If as this NOAA bouy indicates, the wind has been moderate NW-westerly, we can hope that he'll be found in a raft or disabled boat along the shore. It might even be worth slashdotting highway 1 from Pt. Reyes to Monteray and look for him. I once called in a dismasted catameran I found with a telescope I'd just picked up at a FL rummage sale. It was dusk and the crew were on the horizon paddling furiously against an offshore wind.
If the wind/currents were moving offshore, he could be well over 100 miles offshore, trying to get back. VHF radio is basically line of site, you might get 50 miles on a good day from a high coast guard tower, if his radio were working well. But more typically I only get 5 miles boat-boat.
If something went wrong with the boat, fire, dismasting, rudder break... he might be busy heaving to and doing whatever he can to keep from running aground. The bushing which attaches the rudder to the tiller on my 24' C&C eventually went bad. We replaced it, but offshore failure wouldn't have been fun. A larger sailboat sank near scotland when its wheel steering cable broke and the rudder slammed hard enough to crack its housing.
But it wouldn't take a sinking to be lost, if the wind took him out of VHF range, it wouldn't matter if he knew exactly where he was, no one else would unless he had a working activated EPIRB.
There is a small chance that his navigation equipment went wrong and he doesn't know where he is. The california coast is very unforgiving. I think I heard that Francis Drake sailed right past SF bay because from offshore it looks just like another pices of rocky unforgiving shoreline.
There is still hope. My prayers go out to his family and friends. Any computer expert interested in sailing and astronomy must be a good guy, even if he works for Microsoft.
The comment about Scott and GPL is nonsense. But it's true that Scott et. al made some enormous mistakes during the peak of the last bubble. When Sun was golden, they started selling Ultra workstations with inadequate memory, a PCI bus and IDE drives. These low end machines introduced many a college student to Solaris and helped promote the "Slowaris" meme. Sun delayed X86 Solaris at precisely the right time to insure that GNU/Linux could take advantage of a steep part of the X86 moore curve and decades of opensource software development, some of which came from Sun. Sun made their development environment an expensive option, which surely turned away many talented but frugal developers.
Now that Sun is doing (most) everything right, opensourcing Java (GPL), opensourcing Solaris and contributing real innovations to Unix (Dtrace, ZFS...), their biggest problem is that they don't have the marketing budget of IBM (Linux's biggest corporate backer) or Microsoft and they Schwartz doesn't yet have yet have the reality distortion aura of Steve Jobs. Solaris 10 and more recent releases of Opensolaris are already freely available, as is Sun Studio. How much extra who it cost to put S10 on some DVDs and ship it to those who show enough interest? It's a no-brainer and miles away from a "cry of desparation."
I don't know if it qualifies as worst, but Porto Portugal's Andante RFID rail pass system is an example of a theoretically good system with poor implementation. I'd much rather go to the trouble of pulling a card from my wallet and having the system stamp (a paper trail) a validation so that I am not automatically assumed to be a criminal if (WHEN!) the system failed. When the system started, it was reported that 3% of passengers were incurring fines of 50 Euro or moree. Portugal's rail police and rail administrator seem to believe that that many people are trying to scam the system. The day after I had to choose between paying the Porto fine to avoid jail for me, my wife and my 3 year old daughter, the RFID for my workplace also failed. RFID is cool, but most implementations are nowhere near 6-sigma quality. Those who promote this technology should consider the possibility of a backlash when people see how failure prone such systems are and hear that it is going to be used for everything from inventory control to border control to medical tagging. Let's hope Portugal doesn't experiment with RFID voting
Depending on the shape and sensitivity of the "security" light's dusk/dawn sensor, a well-aimed laser pointer can be your friend. Not that I would know about such things, but I've been told ;-)
P.S. If your town has a light pollution/light trespass ordinance, make sure the laser direction and wattage are such that you aren't breaking these laws. A typical pen laser outputs less than 1/50,000th the wattage of a typical insecurity light.
Indeed, Ireland changes its immigration laws (in fact all of its laws) almost as often as it rains here. The current mood is isolationism, even though immigration, tax amnesty lured multinationals and international trade created the celtic tiger in the first place.
Despite what the Irish believe, Ireland is a beautiful, prosperous place where people enjoy life without as much government interference as you'd have in the U.S., France or ex Soviet states. Here are some pluses and minuses:
The amount of vacation is the least in the E.U., but is still several times what you'd have in the U.S.
The personal tax rate averages about 8% more than the U.S.
Driving is expensive, intense, and dangerous similar to what you'd see in New York City, Rome, Paris, and yet other aspects of life are more relaxed than in the U.S.
Do your own research before buying property, Ireland is propsperous but methinks not prosperous enough to maintain this bubble. Prices are higher than most of the major cities of the world and nearly all of the United States.
IT isn't growing as fast as it was, it may be decreasing, the construction boom (associated with the property boom/bubble) is taking up the slack... for the time being.
The people are generally very friendly, but I see a growing level of racism and anti immigrant sentiment.
Considering the prosperity, high tax rate and extremely high take by the government, the infrastructure is terrible. Roads are narrow and dangerous, public transportation service in much of the developing world is better. The public health care system has disimproved since Ireland was the one of the poorest countries in the E.U.
Law enforcement is weak.
There isn't a clean separation between church and state. When you are choosing a school, a prime consideration is whether you are protestant or Catholic, with the implication that others needn't apply.
Speech isn't quite as free as in the U.S. A political figure or wealthy famous person can sue you for libel or slander quite easily.
The cost of living is extremely high compared to wages.
And yet, I choose to live here because you don't have to drive a car everywhere, villages are self-sufficient, people are generally very well educated and have good intentions, jobs are available.