Increased uptake of treatment.[19]
Reduction in HIV diagnoses amongst drug users by 71%[20]
Reduction in drug related deaths. [21]
So, while there was more people taking drugs, they were being treated for their problems, and there was a reduction in HIV diagnosis and death. It's ok if people are taking drugs, as long as they are doing so in a controlled fashion. If overall there is less harm, I would have to say that decriminalization was a good thing.
Kind of funny, since they are only using a hash, why not just allow any length of password. The hash will always be the same length, regardless of the length of the password. You could even allow users to upload a file as their password, in order to allow for non-typeable byte values in order to increase entropy. If you stored the files for each website on a truecrypt partition that automatically dismounted after a timeout, it would probably be about as secure as using keepass, and the actually password would be very strong.
The operative word being "try". If you want to try out a language for the first time, those are probably good solutions, as they let you try out the language without installing anything, which can sometimes be more difficult than it should be. I have yet to see an online IDE that comes anywhere close to being as productive as working on your own actual machine. Although I'm sure upon mentioning this, that someone will point me towards something that is at least passably good.
You're lucky. In Canada Amazon recently switch to UPS from Canada Post. UPS just leaves the package on the door step without even ringing the bell, or knocking. Canada Post was great. We all use community mail boxes anyway, no door-to-door delivery for most new neighbourhoods. Instead you walk (or drive if you're really lazy) about a block away at most, and get your package there. They have an extra large mailbox for packages and they leave the key for that in your mailbox if you have a package. Then you drop the key back in the outgoing mail slot for the carrier to pick up the next day. If your package is too big, they will attempt delivery, and if you aren't home, the leave it as a local postal facility which is usually no more than 2-3 KM away, and located in a pharmacy most of the time, sometimes a corner store. Great system. UPS is terrible for home deliveries. Works great for businesses most of the time, but their residential service is terrible.
To be fair, way back when Active Desktop was touted, everyone (those who had internet at least) were still dialing into their internet connection. And almost all web pages were static pages, hand edited by people, and not applications. People back then didn't spend all their computing time on the web browser. They spent time playing games, in their word processor, email client, IM chat client, IRC, managing finances (quickbooks, excel, or quattro pro), and writing programs. Except for writing programs, I would have to say that just about all those tasks are now done solely in the web browser for a large majority of people, and the vast majority of people will never write a program. So while it may not be the right GUI for you, there's a lot of people that never leave their browser anyway, so anything that isn't their browser just ends up getting in the way.
In that world, online banking wouldn't even by on the WWW. There would be not website where you could do your banking, because the "best available" isn't http servers with SSL. We have much stronger encryption, and we have much less hackable networks. The problem is, is that they are way to inconvenient for the common user to connect to. I mean, ideally you'd create a VPN with the bank, using Private key encryption with a lot of bits. And now somebody is going to come along and tell me that indeed, this isn't enoung, and that we should be using one time pads delivered by trained assassins., with another group of ninjas watching the assassin to ensure there's not man in the middle attack. In everything, even banks, there has to be a compromise. You have to ask, what is good enough for your threat level, and for the users trying to access your system. SSL is secure enough for almost all environments, and is dumb simple for anyone to use. Anything beyond that, you are probably just kidding yourself anyway, because the weakest link is the end user.
I just have to say, "And nothing of importance was lost". Seriously most people don't care that much about having every single email they've ever sent or received archived for history. Do you record every telephone call? Every conversation? Do you keep IM chat logs? This is the equivalient of what most people use email for. I won't worry that much if all my email disappeared tomorrow. I mean, it's nice and all that the email is there to look at, and I don't actually delete any email, since gmail offers basically unlimited storage. However I don't think my life would be that worse if all my email went missing. I might be kind of disappointed in gmail. Might even switch email providers, but I don't think it would be anything to worry about.
Exactly. If you follow the information on the Panoptoclick site, then it tells you to disable a bunch of stuff, that only a very small number of people will do. Toss in that information with tracking your IP to a city, and you are probably very unique, yet panoptoclick says you aren't unique anymore. I think the methods for determining uniqueness are very flawed. I mean, if everybody followed the recommendations they put out, then the entire internet would look homogeneous, and everyone would be the same, and untrackable. However, this is entirely not the case, and following their directions makes you stick out in a crowd.
I've always wondered about this stuff. If you're one of the 6 people on the internet who care about this stuff, and therefore block all their fingerprint methods, doesn't that make you somewhat unique? Wouldn't it make more sense to return a random list of fonts, a random user agent, and randomize all the other information they are fingerprinting you with to make it seem like you're a different person every time, rather than being one of only 6 people who have a very simple UserAgent string, with no extra stuff tacked on the end?
I took a course in parallel programming. We worked with MPI in C if anyone is curious or interested. The hardest part was completely changing the way you thought about programming. It was like the first time you looked at prolog. Or the first time you tried a functional language like scheme. If you've only ever done procedural, it can be quite a big deal to switch. Also, it's quite a bit harder to debug multithreaded code, as the exact order of the instructions is different everytime you run it. Tracking down a deadlock and other problems that only exist in parallel programs can be quite difficult. Anybody who thinks thread syncronization is a solved problem has never written a complex multithreaded application, or is a programming genius. Most likely the former.
Actually, I've always thought that software was kind of weird in that respect. They get copyright on the code and binaries. They get patents (country dependant) on the software. They also get trademarks on various things used within the software. And on top of that they have trade secret protection, because they don't have to release the source code, even if they have something pantented. Which I think is kind of absurd. If you want to patent something, the code for your implementation should have to be submitted as part of the patent, so that others don't have to reimplement the patent based on some vague english prose definition of what your software does.
I've always cursed about non standard computer interfaces. What is it with newer keyboards messing around with the F (F1-F12) keys. On my laptop, the default setup is that you have to push fn+Fkey to get the actual function key, otherwise, you get the multimedia keys to control the volume screen brightness and such. Luckily that's configurable, but only through the BIOS. Also, a lot of keyboard manufacturers (HP) seem to thik it's alright to mess with the insert/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdown keys. The difference between hitting delete and insert can be quite annoying. Others seem to mess with the placement of the \ key, although that's more acceptable. Imagine if they started messing with the key placement on pianos, sorry, G is now next to E, or now the notes go high to low as you go left to right. Why people think they can improve on a standard interface that people have already gotten used to is beyond me. The keyboard and mouse (I prefer trackballs) is quite ubiquitous and understood by all. I don't think this whole gesture thing improves anything.
Maybe there should be a clause that unless the charges are actually terrorist/intelligence related, that any information obtained under the guise of "terror" should be inadmissible for any other offenses. So, if they searched your files without a warrant under the terror label, and found information about how you were selling drugs, then this information could not be used in court, as they got it without a warrant. If however, they found that you had plans to blow up a building, then they could use the information. However, there would be one loop hole in that they could mine everyone's data, or just people that were somewhat suspect to find out who was guilty, and then once they knew what you were doing, go through the proper channels to find other data that they could arrest you with. Once you know who's committing the crimes, it's pretty easy to find evidence against them.
Government funded healthcare goes a long way to cover medical expenses. Also, I'm a big fan of being responsible for your own mishaps. You can get (term) life insurance or injury insurance for yourself if you're really that worried about being hit by a car. Sure in the very rare event that somebody hits you with a car, while walking, it would be nice to get some money out of them, but you can't really bank on that, as a lot of the bad drivers out there have no insurance/license anyway, and probably not much of a job either. There's so many other ways you can get hurt/killed where the person reponsible wouldn't have insurance that would cover it, or there wouldn't be anybody responsible at all, that you should probably have insurance anyway. Unless you have no family and no debts, then you could probably forgo the insurance, but that doesn't describe most people.
Three simple words. No fault insurance. In the event of an accident, your insurance covers your car and your injuries. There are no legal battles, because everyone is responsible for insuring themselves. They do this where I live. If you decide not to drive with insurance, then you aren't covered, regardless of whether or not the accident is your fault.
I do this using password safe. Just back up the file to your phone and an USB key every so often. You sync your phone everyday anyway. If you don't sync your phone, pick another device you sync all the time,like your mp3 player, or what have you. Or just sync the file to drop box if you like and it syncs to all your comupters. It's encrypted anyway. Choose a single strong password and you've gone a long way to opening yourself up to all kinds of attack vectors.
For most people, $60 isn't a sweet spot, It's an overly expensive amount. Of all the entertainment options out there, games cost the most. More than movies, more than music, more than books. And don't tell me that games cost more to make, because movies cost much more than games, and are still able to keep the costs down for the end user. The problem is games is that the prices haven't come down since they were shipped on expensive cartridges that actually required the game cost a lot of money. Not games come on DVD, and most don't even have much of a manual. The barrage of people buying 99 cent games on their phone, and $5 to $15 games directly on their console shows that people really do want to pay less for games, but that for some reason the game development companies haven't started to bring prices down as much as they should.
According to wikipedia, the atmosphere extends 100 km up. This volcano has quite a way to go before it hits space. Although it may have made it up to the stratosphere.
That's a refurb. If there's one thing I've learned in shopping for computers for many years, it's, "NEVER BUY REFURBS". You could probably get that same machine for an extra $50. It's seriously not worth it to have a product that someone already else found defective. I've seen so many refurbs ship with problems right out of the box. People think they are saving money. But in the end they're just buying a headache. While I'm sure that somebody will chime in with their anecdote of how well their refurb has worked for them, I have worked in an office that tried to run all the systems from refurbs. The number of problems in that office was many many times more than what came out of any othter office dealing with new PCs.
Personally, I think the Wii was great. Especially if you ignore all that Wii sports related stuff. The first party games are awesome. SM Galaxy, Paper Mario, The New SMB, Twilight Princess, Metroid. Plus the fact that you can buy all the old console games. I mean, I'm not running out to buy them all, but it was a great feature. I can't believe it took so long for something like that to happen. Also, there's a lot of great WiiWare titiles. It's nice to be able to spend only $10 and get a really great game. Apart from the graphics, the Wii had just about everything I wanted out of a console. Without breaking the bank. Sure they are all cheap now, but when they were all shiny and new, the Wii had a very clear price advantage, and gave me many years of solid gaming. Well worth the money I paid.
For mathematics this is probably completely possible. The more mathy courses I took Algebra & Geometry, discrete math, and others didn't require a calculator. It more stuff like science, physics, and engineering classes that tend to lean more on the calculator usage. Granted in many of those cases you don't need anything more complex than a basic scientific calculator, but in many cases it really helps. Plus, it prepares you for the real world, where you'll be using a calculator for most of your work. I say, just let them use the calculator, and write the exam as though it's open book.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting points are here.
Increased uptake of treatment.[19]
Reduction in HIV diagnoses amongst drug users by 71%[20]
Reduction in drug related deaths. [21]
So, while there was more people taking drugs, they were being treated for their problems, and there was a reduction in HIV diagnosis and death. It's ok if people are taking drugs, as long as they are doing so in a controlled fashion. If overall there is less harm, I would have to say that decriminalization was a good thing.
Kind of funny, since they are only using a hash, why not just allow any length of password. The hash will always be the same length, regardless of the length of the password. You could even allow users to upload a file as their password, in order to allow for non-typeable byte values in order to increase entropy. If you stored the files for each website on a truecrypt partition that automatically dismounted after a timeout, it would probably be about as secure as using keepass, and the actually password would be very strong.
The operative word being "try". If you want to try out a language for the first time, those are probably good solutions, as they let you try out the language without installing anything, which can sometimes be more difficult than it should be. I have yet to see an online IDE that comes anywhere close to being as productive as working on your own actual machine. Although I'm sure upon mentioning this, that someone will point me towards something that is at least passably good.
You're lucky. In Canada Amazon recently switch to UPS from Canada Post. UPS just leaves the package on the door step without even ringing the bell, or knocking. Canada Post was great. We all use community mail boxes anyway, no door-to-door delivery for most new neighbourhoods. Instead you walk (or drive if you're really lazy) about a block away at most, and get your package there. They have an extra large mailbox for packages and they leave the key for that in your mailbox if you have a package. Then you drop the key back in the outgoing mail slot for the carrier to pick up the next day. If your package is too big, they will attempt delivery, and if you aren't home, the leave it as a local postal facility which is usually no more than 2-3 KM away, and located in a pharmacy most of the time, sometimes a corner store. Great system. UPS is terrible for home deliveries. Works great for businesses most of the time, but their residential service is terrible.
To be fair, way back when Active Desktop was touted, everyone (those who had internet at least) were still dialing into their internet connection. And almost all web pages were static pages, hand edited by people, and not applications. People back then didn't spend all their computing time on the web browser. They spent time playing games, in their word processor, email client, IM chat client, IRC, managing finances (quickbooks, excel, or quattro pro), and writing programs. Except for writing programs, I would have to say that just about all those tasks are now done solely in the web browser for a large majority of people, and the vast majority of people will never write a program. So while it may not be the right GUI for you, there's a lot of people that never leave their browser anyway, so anything that isn't their browser just ends up getting in the way.
In that world, online banking wouldn't even by on the WWW. There would be not website where you could do your banking, because the "best available" isn't http servers with SSL. We have much stronger encryption, and we have much less hackable networks. The problem is, is that they are way to inconvenient for the common user to connect to. I mean, ideally you'd create a VPN with the bank, using Private key encryption with a lot of bits. And now somebody is going to come along and tell me that indeed, this isn't enoung, and that we should be using one time pads delivered by trained assassins., with another group of ninjas watching the assassin to ensure there's not man in the middle attack. In everything, even banks, there has to be a compromise. You have to ask, what is good enough for your threat level, and for the users trying to access your system. SSL is secure enough for almost all environments, and is dumb simple for anyone to use. Anything beyond that, you are probably just kidding yourself anyway, because the weakest link is the end user.
I just have to say, "And nothing of importance was lost". Seriously most people don't care that much about having every single email they've ever sent or received archived for history. Do you record every telephone call? Every conversation? Do you keep IM chat logs? This is the equivalient of what most people use email for. I won't worry that much if all my email disappeared tomorrow. I mean, it's nice and all that the email is there to look at, and I don't actually delete any email, since gmail offers basically unlimited storage. However I don't think my life would be that worse if all my email went missing. I might be kind of disappointed in gmail. Might even switch email providers, but I don't think it would be anything to worry about.
Exactly. If you follow the information on the Panoptoclick site, then it tells you to disable a bunch of stuff, that only a very small number of people will do. Toss in that information with tracking your IP to a city, and you are probably very unique, yet panoptoclick says you aren't unique anymore. I think the methods for determining uniqueness are very flawed. I mean, if everybody followed the recommendations they put out, then the entire internet would look homogeneous, and everyone would be the same, and untrackable. However, this is entirely not the case, and following their directions makes you stick out in a crowd.
I've always wondered about this stuff. If you're one of the 6 people on the internet who care about this stuff, and therefore block all their fingerprint methods, doesn't that make you somewhat unique? Wouldn't it make more sense to return a random list of fonts, a random user agent, and randomize all the other information they are fingerprinting you with to make it seem like you're a different person every time, rather than being one of only 6 people who have a very simple UserAgent string, with no extra stuff tacked on the end?
Easy enough to accomplish with an animated GIF.
I took a course in parallel programming. We worked with MPI in C if anyone is curious or interested. The hardest part was completely changing the way you thought about programming. It was like the first time you looked at prolog. Or the first time you tried a functional language like scheme. If you've only ever done procedural, it can be quite a big deal to switch. Also, it's quite a bit harder to debug multithreaded code, as the exact order of the instructions is different everytime you run it. Tracking down a deadlock and other problems that only exist in parallel programs can be quite difficult. Anybody who thinks thread syncronization is a solved problem has never written a complex multithreaded application, or is a programming genius. Most likely the former.
I guess I should consider myself lucky. At least all the keyboards I've encountered have all the keys.
Actually, I've always thought that software was kind of weird in that respect. They get copyright on the code and binaries. They get patents (country dependant) on the software. They also get trademarks on various things used within the software. And on top of that they have trade secret protection, because they don't have to release the source code, even if they have something pantented. Which I think is kind of absurd. If you want to patent something, the code for your implementation should have to be submitted as part of the patent, so that others don't have to reimplement the patent based on some vague english prose definition of what your software does.
I've always cursed about non standard computer interfaces. What is it with newer keyboards messing around with the F (F1-F12) keys. On my laptop, the default setup is that you have to push fn+Fkey to get the actual function key, otherwise, you get the multimedia keys to control the volume screen brightness and such. Luckily that's configurable, but only through the BIOS. Also, a lot of keyboard manufacturers (HP) seem to thik it's alright to mess with the insert/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdown keys. The difference between hitting delete and insert can be quite annoying. Others seem to mess with the placement of the \ key, although that's more acceptable. Imagine if they started messing with the key placement on pianos, sorry, G is now next to E, or now the notes go high to low as you go left to right. Why people think they can improve on a standard interface that people have already gotten used to is beyond me. The keyboard and mouse (I prefer trackballs) is quite ubiquitous and understood by all. I don't think this whole gesture thing improves anything.
You could make the exact same argument against alcohol. Alcohol is way more harmful than pot, both in terms of addiction, and in terms of overdosing.
Maybe there should be a clause that unless the charges are actually terrorist/intelligence related, that any information obtained under the guise of "terror" should be inadmissible for any other offenses. So, if they searched your files without a warrant under the terror label, and found information about how you were selling drugs, then this information could not be used in court, as they got it without a warrant. If however, they found that you had plans to blow up a building, then they could use the information. However, there would be one loop hole in that they could mine everyone's data, or just people that were somewhat suspect to find out who was guilty, and then once they knew what you were doing, go through the proper channels to find other data that they could arrest you with. Once you know who's committing the crimes, it's pretty easy to find evidence against them.
Government funded healthcare goes a long way to cover medical expenses. Also, I'm a big fan of being responsible for your own mishaps. You can get (term) life insurance or injury insurance for yourself if you're really that worried about being hit by a car. Sure in the very rare event that somebody hits you with a car, while walking, it would be nice to get some money out of them, but you can't really bank on that, as a lot of the bad drivers out there have no insurance/license anyway, and probably not much of a job either. There's so many other ways you can get hurt/killed where the person reponsible wouldn't have insurance that would cover it, or there wouldn't be anybody responsible at all, that you should probably have insurance anyway. Unless you have no family and no debts, then you could probably forgo the insurance, but that doesn't describe most people.
Three simple words. No fault insurance. In the event of an accident, your insurance covers your car and your injuries. There are no legal battles, because everyone is responsible for insuring themselves. They do this where I live. If you decide not to drive with insurance, then you aren't covered, regardless of whether or not the accident is your fault.
I do this using password safe. Just back up the file to your phone and an USB key every so often. You sync your phone everyday anyway. If you don't sync your phone, pick another device you sync all the time,like your mp3 player, or what have you. Or just sync the file to drop box if you like and it syncs to all your comupters. It's encrypted anyway. Choose a single strong password and you've gone a long way to opening yourself up to all kinds of attack vectors.
For most people, $60 isn't a sweet spot, It's an overly expensive amount. Of all the entertainment options out there, games cost the most. More than movies, more than music, more than books. And don't tell me that games cost more to make, because movies cost much more than games, and are still able to keep the costs down for the end user. The problem is games is that the prices haven't come down since they were shipped on expensive cartridges that actually required the game cost a lot of money. Not games come on DVD, and most don't even have much of a manual. The barrage of people buying 99 cent games on their phone, and $5 to $15 games directly on their console shows that people really do want to pay less for games, but that for some reason the game development companies haven't started to bring prices down as much as they should.
According to wikipedia, the atmosphere extends 100 km up. This volcano has quite a way to go before it hits space. Although it may have made it up to the stratosphere.
That's a refurb. If there's one thing I've learned in shopping for computers for many years, it's, "NEVER BUY REFURBS". You could probably get that same machine for an extra $50. It's seriously not worth it to have a product that someone already else found defective. I've seen so many refurbs ship with problems right out of the box. People think they are saving money. But in the end they're just buying a headache. While I'm sure that somebody will chime in with their anecdote of how well their refurb has worked for them, I have worked in an office that tried to run all the systems from refurbs. The number of problems in that office was many many times more than what came out of any othter office dealing with new PCs.
Personally, I think the Wii was great. Especially if you ignore all that Wii sports related stuff. The first party games are awesome. SM Galaxy, Paper Mario, The New SMB, Twilight Princess, Metroid. Plus the fact that you can buy all the old console games. I mean, I'm not running out to buy them all, but it was a great feature. I can't believe it took so long for something like that to happen. Also, there's a lot of great WiiWare titiles. It's nice to be able to spend only $10 and get a really great game. Apart from the graphics, the Wii had just about everything I wanted out of a console. Without breaking the bank. Sure they are all cheap now, but when they were all shiny and new, the Wii had a very clear price advantage, and gave me many years of solid gaming. Well worth the money I paid.
NTFS works fine on my linux boxes using NTFS-3G. Does Mac lack support for NTFS?
For mathematics this is probably completely possible. The more mathy courses I took Algebra & Geometry, discrete math, and others didn't require a calculator. It more stuff like science, physics, and engineering classes that tend to lean more on the calculator usage. Granted in many of those cases you don't need anything more complex than a basic scientific calculator, but in many cases it really helps. Plus, it prepares you for the real world, where you'll be using a calculator for most of your work. I say, just let them use the calculator, and write the exam as though it's open book.