These criminal scum need to be stopped. The City of London Police are abusing their power to enforce civil matters and shut down legitimate search engines. Apparently no-one is watching the watchers.
Copyright infringement is a criminal matter, not a civil one. Our duly elected governments have passed various (albeit baddly concieved) laws making this the responsibility of the police to enforce as a criminal matter. Therefore the police are kind of forced into doing this sort of stuff. I agree with some of your sentiment, but factually you are utterly incorrect.
If you are going to post about what a stupid move this sort of thing is, and how ineffective it will turn out to be then fine, that is correct. It is however worth remembering that UK law has made dealing in illegal copies of copyright works a criminal offence since the copyright, designs and patents act of 1988 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_Act_1988).
There was some debate as to whether linking to something that was on a different server and therefore held by someone else was covered by this, but I believe most of that debate was held in the US as here in the UK it was covered by the same act that codified this as "secondary infringement" and also made it a criminal offence.
The net result of this is in this case, the police were just doing there job by enforcing criminal law. The fact that you think that the law is unjust and should be changed does not stop the plod from having to enforce it.
Yup. Except a key is not much added complexity when considering how complex an entire car is.
I am not so sure about that. Here in the UK we used to have tremendous problems with cars being nicked, mainly because mechanical keys were so straight forward to bypass. The motor industry here was encouraged to invest heavily in this though so now we have some of the most secure keys in the world protecting our cars. We have things like immobilisers as standard, so the actual mechanical key is not really any good unless the electronics in the fob is also working and present.
Car keys used to be pretty basic, and maybe they still are in the US (although I doubt it), but in most of the europe they are complex little remote controls such that manufacturers are now starting to do away with they actual key bit and just leave a fob. That way the car does things like auto unlock when you move within a few feet of it and just have a start button for the engine.
You might say that this is not actually a feature you want, and I might even agree. The fact is though that most car keys are very far from basic compared to the rest the car. The truth is that the security on modern cars is often the most advanced part to keep one step ahead of the criminals.
What utter crap. So any debate about gun safety or firearms law is off limits because some people on both sides of the coin have strong opinions and cannot believe how anyone in their right mind would be on the other side of the argument?
You only need to look at some of the moderation in this thread to see examples where people have been moderated as troll despite it being obvious they are actually posting pretty honestly held beliefs. Dismissing other points of view as a troll is just an easy way out so you do not have to listen to their point of view and recognise it as being valid, even if you personally do not agree.
Personally, I think anyone who would want to live in a society with so many guns is completely bonkers since they certainly do not make them any safer from crime, and judging by the shit successive governments have got away with they aren't doing much to protect from tyranny. I have no idea how the US could remove all the guns from circulation though so can entirely understand most people who have to live in that society wanting a gun for their own protection even though that act was exacerbating the problem for society as a whole.
The reality is that some people disagree with you, deal with it. that is what makes people so amazing is that we can have amazingly diverse beliefs in some areas but be in complete agreement in others.
What's really going on is that pro-gun groups are pretty certain (with good reason!) that these smart guns don't work reliably, and likely never will.
Nah, I reckon they could be made to work perfectly reliably based on the other things we can do and enough time and investment. If you look at the amazing things with have accomplished technologically, even in cases where absolute reliability or as near to it as damn is needed we have done pretty well given enough investment.
The real reason the NRA says things like "let the market decide" is that they know full well that very few people will pay extra for these sort of firearms, especially the amount extra that a working technology would cost. Most people will just go for the cheaper option then keep the gun hidden in the bedroom where only they can get to it, but in a locked box away from their kids. A gunsafe with a combination lock is always going to be cheaper than a fingerprint reader, even if there is the chance someone you do not want to know the combination like your kids (or wife after she found out you were screwing the neighbour:-) ) might discover it.
if the gun literally didn't work half the days out of the year, you would be saving 250 lives at the cost of 25, before you count accidents
Though you're (deliberately, of course) not counting the thousands and thousands of cases each year where defensive brandishment stops an attack. That number hugely exceeds the number of deaths by any method. I'd be more than happy to fetch out a handgun in such a situation, but would not be happy to find that it can't ultimately work because I've got gloves on, or my fingertips are dirty, or a battery is low, or it's too cold out, or I forgot my magic bracelet. Or it happens to be my wife's gun, since her's was handier than mine.
I actually very much doubt there are too many cases where you pull a gun on someone defensively and end up not using it in the US. The problem is that in the US too many criminals have guns too, you are not going to pull a gun on someone and tell them to "freeze" unless you are a cop, if you are a civilian in your own home and surprise an intruder you are going to confirm them as an intruder, then fire as soon as possible to ensure they do not have a chance to do the same to you.
Anything else is just a recipe for being shot as the criminal pulls his gun and fires. He knows that anyone he comes across is trouble, since he has already broken in, and is looking at prison time plus the possibility of being lawfully shot. He has so much to lose, he might as well just fire at everything he sees then sort it out later. If you shout anything chances are he will just turn and fire in the direction of the noise on instinct, especially since he may very well have been in that situation before and done the same.
The only advantage you have is that you know your home, you know which floorboards creak and such like and can use that to surprise him. If you do it successfully, you have one, very slim opportunity to get a stopping shot in before he does exactly that to you. Only he will most likely follow up his stopping shot with an execution, followed by the same to anyone else in the residence to make sure no witnesses remain.
The truth is that I am extremely glad I live in a country which has never really let the firearms genie out of the bottle and where there are very few guns in circulation compared to the US. Just being caught with an illegal firearm in this country gets you 5 years in prison, even if it was just a fake and you were pretending it was real. This is a very heavy sentence compared to what you would get for other offences where you could earn a similar financial reward, you could beat someone half to death in their own home and get less time believe it or not.
We have very few cases of the sort of home invasion robbery where a gun would help defend yourself, I guess because most criminals will try and make sure they brake into houses where people are out, or will just run off if they hear people wake up. The only exception to this would be targeting old people since they put up less resistance, and once again, this would get you far less time inside than if you brandished a gun (providing they survived, murder is the exception).
As with all DRM schemes, it's only a matter of time before this is broken.
DRM being crackable is not actually that important, what matters is how difficult it is for the average user. You only have to make it slightly tricky or add some slight perceived risk to downloading pirated stuff and they will choose to pay for it instead. For most people with a bit of cash the hassle factor of DRM is what keeps them on the straight and narrow, for the people without cash who cares, they probably would not have paid for it anyway.
Some people who pirate lots of stuff eventually grow into big paid consumers of stuff when they get a bit money, but when they do they often end up forgetting about their strict stance on DRM and just sign up with Netflix or Lovefilm or whatever based on how convenient it is for them. Who cares about keeping a copy of the latest crap to come out of content permanently, just give us lots of stuff to watch on demand and most of the time as consumers those of us with money are happy.
Does Firefox's architecture actually get in the way of users eventually pirating the content?
It's not really the job of browser vendors to make sure you can be a freeloading shithead is it? Their job is to make a product that as many people find useful as possible and that means a certain amount of mass appeal. Refusing to support this part of the standard would have robbed Firefox of more users than they will lose by supporting it.
The reality is that people who view piracy as some sort of moral duty and right like you do are in the minority, that is why most of the public quite happily go along with more stringent copyright laws being drafted by the politicians they elect. That means that creating a browser that will be unusable for certain sites that want to protect their content will just drive users away.
BTW, I actually also think DRM is a joke and a complete waste of space and that more companies should trust us to buy their content if we like it. I spend a fortune on services like netflix and cable TV. I also think though that people who refuse to pay should do without, pure and simple. Anything other than that is freeloading off those of us who pay.
Initial police response to confirm is only minutes away, delaying everything whilst waiting for swat is tens of minutes.
This is a nice idea, but what happens to that lone officer checking up if this is a real hostage situation with well armed felons? He is put in a life or death situation where he may end up as another hostage.
It's all very well to say that he should investigate subtly, but how can he? He can't enter without permission or warrant to he has to knock on the door and see who answers. If the person who answers is crook and it is hostage situation he is not going to confirm very much after they invite him in to reassure him and he suddenly finds himself looking at 3 felons, some with hostages (in a shield type configuration) and all armed.
Even if you have a couple of cops, it is pretty easy to see a way of getting the better of them if you are actually the sort of felons these calls purport to be from or reporting. The reality is that one of the reasons for the SWAT response is that this is safest for the police.
Mine doesn't. Its fairly easy to setup your mail server to only accept mail from properly configured mail servers, in which case you can ensure the message came from a server that should be responsible for sending you a message from that address.
Nice idea, but fails in practice if used in a commercial setting where each rejected email may be a lost sale.
The number of our clients or commercial partners who have mail servers that do things like spoof from addresses is quite alot. If they use things like online hosted accounting software, hosted CRM systems and other similar stuff it often spoofs the person who is sending you the messages from address even though the mail server sending it is actually running on the web server that provided the software. Unfortunately this is pretty common place so most small business have to be a little more flexible in their anti spam solution.
Whitelisting is a useful tool to cope with some of this, but the problem is that new leads who you have not spoken to yet will not be in the list and those are the emails you really need to get through.
Maybe things are different if you work for MS, IBM or someone but after almost a decade working in various small businesses as a system admin who had to deal with spam I can say that in that world flexibility is key.
The web developers I know have more work than they can handle. If you're good at building websites, make a portfolio and start marketing yourself. That gives you a flexible schedule to work around your studies, pays better, if less reliably, and gives you independence.
It is a stretch to call creating single person websites "Web Developers". I know there is probably no better name, but it is setting your sights pretty low if you aim to do that as a career. It also doesn't always provide the job security of many technical jobs.
The really hard bits of web development are about working as part of a team, working on other peoples code just as quickly as if it was your own, learning to adapt to other peoples way of coding and design principles without it affecting your productivity. Also, learning to write technical documents is a huge part of being a web developer. This is not just about the comments, this is about preparing yourself for when you are a technical architect who provides guidance to web developers on large projects or being able to document that API you created so someone else can use it.
Then there is the learning about how development teams are organised, how software is tested and deployed, how you debug complicated systems, how you track changes and change requests. You might use some of this in small projects, but until you really get stuck in to working on a bigger project you never realise how essential some of this stuff is to them but how useful it can be in the small stuff too.
Robbing yourself of working on large projects means you will probably never be as good a web developer as you could be.
I couldn't agree more. Making websites is not computer science. Try focusing on related core areas: say distributed computing (Hadoop and the like). Work on your data structures and algorithms. Get into low level aspects of computing to get a good grip of computer architecture. Dabble a little in natively compiled languages such as C/C++ as well to see what a paradigm shift interpreted languages give you.
I agree with your learning list, but there is one huge bit missing: API's. So many areas of software development now require you know how to integrate with someone else's API and also how to create one yourself.
The "knowledge" is no longer useful or monetizable in a world where a 20$ GPS device can do a better job and an internet connected device can do a perfect job, taking congestion into account etc.
You obviously did not read my post. No computer or device can match a human being when the you ask complicated questions like "the pub with the yellow sign off chancery lane", Google Maps or Siri or whatever are just not good enough yet.
Try asking Google maps to directions to "Nazi Dog" from any place in london, it is useless and shows you nothing. Here is a link to what a cabbie would be able to tell you: http://golondon.about.com/od/l...
Weird yes, but this is the sort of stuff you have to learn to be a cabbie.
I would still say it is useful to be able to ask for a destination by something like "that pub off chancery lane with the yellow sign"
There may be some cases where the cabbie knows more than the combined knowledge of the internet, but those cases are few and getting fewer all the time.
Its not about knowing more, its about how you retrieve the information. A human being is always better at understanding what you are asking for than a computer when asking complicated questions.
I thought it didn't support loading things concurrently and instead forced this slow, one after the other approach that meant Linux generally took about 10 seconds longer to boot than any other modern OS?
You might not consider a slow boot time broken, but some people do.
Does that mean the entire LBC can be defined as a terror organization and placed in whatever Britain's equivalent of Guantanamo Bay is?
This could be a doubly pointed demonstration: Uber becomes the defacto 'taxi' service of London, and the government shows exactly what will happen if anybody things to provoke demonstrations which might infringe upon the steady operation of infrastructure:)
The problem with the uber drivers though is that they may have no clue where they are going. These cabbies doing the protesting are Londons black cab drivers, that means they have passed "The Knowledge" know london pretty intimately:
This does mean I entirely agree with their protest, but comparing them to any other taxi drivers elsewhere is not a great comparison because no other Taxis in the world are expected to pass such a ridiculously difficult exam first.
You might say this is pointless now that Sat-Navs are so ubiquitous, but I would still say it is useful to be able to ask for a destination by something like "that pub off chancery lane with the yellow sign" and he instantly names it and drives you there. It is also useful if you get the road name you are going to slightly wrong and can't find it with Google maps, just jump in cab. I have actually done this one night when I had been drinking and the cabbie had a right laugh about taking me somewhere that was only two minutes away, but I had already spent 20 minutes cluelessly walking around so was more than happy to pay him the minimum fare.
Most of the time London Black Cabs are pretty awesome, if a little expensive.
Being non-identifiable was a safety issue with regard to the police, because it was shown on many occasions that the striking miners were not adverse to taking action against identified individuals and their families.
Not really. Most of the police on riot duty during the miners strike were Met officers bussed in from London or, allegedly also members of the UK armed forces so their families has sod all to fear as they were miles away. The local bobbies generally hated them and were kept well out of the way to stop them having to aggressively police their neighbours.
Is there any single incident you can reference where the miners victimised local cops or their families in the manner you describe? If so please do.
There were plenty of incidences of them doing this to scab miners though (miners who crossed the picket lines), but that is not what you describe even though it is not really any better.
The mere existence of footage that invades someone's privacy is reason enough for concern.
Not here in the UK. You are recorded a million times from every angle in public places thanks to all the CCTV, there is no expectation of privacy in a public place what so ever.
In terms of if the police enter a private place like your home the police can probably just declare they are constantly recording at all times before they enter and most of the public would not have a problem with it. The only exception would probably be people like family liaison officers who get to go and tell people they kids just died in a road traffic accident or other victim support officers.
Writing to flash memory needs a surprising amount of electricity.
Not really. Things like GoPro are designed to be worn during sports and not interfere with the athletes mobility too much and they can still stretch to 3 or 4 hours recording. The average UK cop wears a ton of gear, including stab vests and god knows what else. Including a battery that meant they could easily give up to 6 or 7 hours recording for the addition of a few pounds should not be too bigger problem.
No, it is not. Part of the role of these camera should be to force the Police to be constantly held account for all their actions while on duty. We had a recent incident here in the news where a UK bunch of UK soldiers shot dead an injured Afghan insurgent, the only reason it was found out though was because they made a mess of turning off one of the squaddies body cams and recorded themselves committing murder. This clearly shows the people wearing these cannot be trusted with and on off switch, that way even if the cover the lens it will still be recording audio which may well be equally important.
This should be an additional reminder to the police that they are our public servants and we do not live in a police state where they are above the law, something they do occasional forget at the moment, particularly when dealing with demonstrations.
I understand that this may involve vast amounts of data storage but the average UK cop wears quite a lot of very expensive kit, adding a 1Tb 2.5in SSD should not be a problem from a cost of bulk perspective. They don't carry guns routinely here in the UK so I reckon a this would be lighter than that and could even be built into the back of the stab vests without a problem.
The real trick will be making sure the camera is switched on for spur of the moment stuff, like where an incident happens when the officer is actually present, so perhaps some kind of automatic activation based on feedback from accelerometers and similar activity detectors is also required. If the sensors detect that the officer has started to run, there is a jolt to the camera, or some other abnormal activity, then start recording until the camera is manually disabled again.
Even assuming that you do not have the ability to store the vast amount of data from an always recording camera, the UK police had a much better solution to the one you suggest that they issued to the city cops on bikes in London years ago: they had an always recording camera that kept a 2 or 3 minute buffer at all times so the officer could press a button and it dumped the previous 2 or 3 minutes footage from the buffer to permanent storage.
It might be worth something like that you suggest as a backup for if the cop is just randomly attacked or something and knocked out cold so he was unable to press the button, but I reckon it would be damn hard to get right so it didn't do this just because they sat down to heavily in the donut shop:)
It's also worth knowing that here the UK all cops have a panic button on their radios that screams "HELP" very quietly to every other cop in the area. They are trained to hit that at the drop of a hat if they think they need assistance so making that also do the recording thing at the same time should not be a problem.
When an accident is inevitable the car will simply try to stop as quickly as possible. It won't make any attempt to swerve or select a target. It's only consideration will be stopping the car as quickly as possible. It's a sound tactic from a legal point of view. Unless the car itself made a mistake leading to the accident any resulting injuries are someone else's fault.
Yup. Since this is the recommended approach to drivers at present anyway, especially here in the UK where I live.
If you try to swerve and avoid a major collision and have a minor collision with an innocent party in a different lane you are probably going to end up having to pay for the damage to their car out of your insurance. You are legally basically expected to try and stop, but if you are unable to in time then to just pile on in to whatever pulled out into your lane and claim on their insurance. Of course if they were already in your lane and they just hit the breaks for no apparent reason and you end up stacking into them then it is always your fault for driving too close as far as insurance goes.
Once you start including wonderful rules like this as dictated by individual countries legal systems I would imagine programming driver-less cars is going to get a lot more complicated.
It will be a Google car. Partly paid by ads and data collected while used. As such it should - of course - behave in the best interest of the real costumers. I.e. not you!:)
So it would also check if any Apple or MS employees were nearby and automatically swerve into them?
I am sure. They correctly realized that there was little value in rote memorization.
Maybe it depends on the quality of institution you attend, but my teachers at least were more concerned with whether or not I knew how and when to apply a given formula than rote memorization of it. Sure, they had limits; you could only bring in one sheet of formulas for a given midterm or final (which was well more than enough), but most of the time they wrote the necessary equations right on the board.
As we're even more well connected, with everyone carrying a cellphone in their pocket capable of accessing nearly the whole of recorded public human knowledge in seconds, people are coming around to realize that memorization isn't as important as understanding - or almost as good, knowing how to search for information to gain understanding.
Maybe it depends on institution, maybe also things are changing now with more coursework based degrees. I agree with you that understanding is far more important than learning by wrote in a real world setting, but in my experience all academic subjects up until you study for a master degree here in the UK enable you to obtain a passing grade more easily without understanding by simple memorisation due to the exam based nature of how they are assessed and how those exams are marked en masse, often by people with very little discretion about how they award marks.
As to cell phones, they are irrelevant in my time at uni because you could not take them into the assessment hall. Computer calculators had to be reset at the start, and sheets of equations never included the derivations which were the bits you earned the most points for reeling off from memory.
People might have realised that understanding is important, but have universities kept up?:)
There are certain classes where 'remembering' is the most important part of the class, but at least in my engineering and science classes, 'knowing' and 'understanding' had slightly higher priority.
Are you sure? When I studied Physics knowing and understanding were fairly important, but at least equally important if not more so was the ability to reel off a mathematical derivation at will. Generally you could not work through the derivation in the allotted exam time, unless you were doing most of it from memory with a bit of logic checking along the way.
Knowing and understanding might be the ideal but that is much harder to test in a written exam and mark in a uniform way so you end up assigning values to random tit bits of information if they can be remembered by the student at will.
If you're using Word or OpenOffice, that might be a problem. If you're using LaTeX, it's not, provided that you're a reasonably quick typist and have memorized the standard mathematical commands. I ended up typing all of my lecture notes for my statistics Ph.D. classes without much of a hassle. In fact, most of the students in my classes came to me for portions of my lecture notes, as I was able to capture all of the important comments that the professors would make in haste while continuing on with a derivation or proof.
When I read this I immediately though that this would be a trade off. The benefit you mention, against the fact that the repeatedly rewriting your notes helped you memorise them.
You needed to do this when taking written notes because the lecturers would generally fly along so fast you had to scrawl everything down just to keep up, so as soon as you got home that day (or in the break period after the lecture if their was one) you first job was to write your notes up in a more neat, organised fashion, while also making sure all the proofs made mathematical sense.
This meant that even if you did the minimum possible work you still ended up going over the same stuff at least twice to help it sink in. If you use typed notes and get everything down first time round, then you have no reason to revisit them until exam time and then you will most likely have forgotten the first going over in the lecture. Some diligent students might, but many will not.
This is one of the cases where what seems like a pointless waste of effort at the time is actually important as it is the slightly dull repetition of something that really helps it sink in to long term memory so you can recall it months later.
Yeah, but you will get way more "hot chicks" with the Tesla.
Its no Lambo.
A Tesla looks like a Hyundai i45 (which I admit, is pretty stylish for a Hyundai). A Tesla looks average by todays standards.
The problem Tesla owners have with chicks is they'll never pass the Kristin Scott Thomas test. You pull up to Kristin Scott Thomas' house for your date with your Tesla and she doesn't notice anything about your car. So a Tesla owner immediately starts talking about the technology, how quite it is, range, MPG calculations and before he's even finished explaining how advanced the engine is, Kristin has popped back inside the house and locked the doors.
Its not about looks about how dirty they are.
The chicks you do pull with your Tesla will definitely do things Kristin Scott Thomas won't as they are more likely to be hippy types and hippie women are great.
Slashdot Mirror
These criminal scum need to be stopped. The City of London Police are abusing their power to enforce civil matters and shut down legitimate search engines. Apparently no-one is watching the watchers.
Copyright infringement is a criminal matter, not a civil one. Our duly elected governments have passed various (albeit baddly concieved) laws making this the responsibility of the police to enforce as a criminal matter. Therefore the police are kind of forced into doing this sort of stuff. I agree with some of your sentiment, but factually you are utterly incorrect.
If you are going to post about what a stupid move this sort of thing is, and how ineffective it will turn out to be then fine, that is correct. It is however worth remembering that UK law has made dealing in illegal copies of copyright works a criminal offence since the copyright, designs and patents act of 1988 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_Act_1988).
There was some debate as to whether linking to something that was on a different server and therefore held by someone else was covered by this, but I believe most of that debate was held in the US as here in the UK it was covered by the same act that codified this as "secondary infringement" and also made it a criminal offence.
The net result of this is in this case, the police were just doing there job by enforcing criminal law. The fact that you think that the law is unjust and should be changed does not stop the plod from having to enforce it.
Yup. Except a key is not much added complexity when considering how complex an entire car is.
I am not so sure about that. Here in the UK we used to have tremendous problems with cars being nicked, mainly because mechanical keys were so straight forward to bypass. The motor industry here was encouraged to invest heavily in this though so now we have some of the most secure keys in the world protecting our cars. We have things like immobilisers as standard, so the actual mechanical key is not really any good unless the electronics in the fob is also working and present.
Car keys used to be pretty basic, and maybe they still are in the US (although I doubt it), but in most of the europe they are complex little remote controls such that manufacturers are now starting to do away with they actual key bit and just leave a fob. That way the car does things like auto unlock when you move within a few feet of it and just have a start button for the engine.
You might say that this is not actually a feature you want, and I might even agree. The fact is though that most car keys are very far from basic compared to the rest the car. The truth is that the security on modern cars is often the most advanced part to keep one step ahead of the criminals.
Enough said....
What utter crap. So any debate about gun safety or firearms law is off limits because some people on both sides of the coin have strong opinions and cannot believe how anyone in their right mind would be on the other side of the argument?
You only need to look at some of the moderation in this thread to see examples where people have been moderated as troll despite it being obvious they are actually posting pretty honestly held beliefs. Dismissing other points of view as a troll is just an easy way out so you do not have to listen to their point of view and recognise it as being valid, even if you personally do not agree.
Personally, I think anyone who would want to live in a society with so many guns is completely bonkers since they certainly do not make them any safer from crime, and judging by the shit successive governments have got away with they aren't doing much to protect from tyranny. I have no idea how the US could remove all the guns from circulation though so can entirely understand most people who have to live in that society wanting a gun for their own protection even though that act was exacerbating the problem for society as a whole.
The reality is that some people disagree with you, deal with it. that is what makes people so amazing is that we can have amazingly diverse beliefs in some areas but be in complete agreement in others.
What's really going on is that pro-gun groups are pretty certain (with good reason!) that these smart guns don't work reliably, and likely never will.
Nah, I reckon they could be made to work perfectly reliably based on the other things we can do and enough time and investment. If you look at the amazing things with have accomplished technologically, even in cases where absolute reliability or as near to it as damn is needed we have done pretty well given enough investment.
The real reason the NRA says things like "let the market decide" is that they know full well that very few people will pay extra for these sort of firearms, especially the amount extra that a working technology would cost. Most people will just go for the cheaper option then keep the gun hidden in the bedroom where only they can get to it, but in a locked box away from their kids. A gunsafe with a combination lock is always going to be cheaper than a fingerprint reader, even if there is the chance someone you do not want to know the combination like your kids (or wife after she found out you were screwing the neighbour :-) ) might discover it.
if the gun literally didn't work half the days out of the year, you would be saving 250 lives at the cost of 25, before you count accidents
Though you're (deliberately, of course) not counting the thousands and thousands of cases each year where defensive brandishment stops an attack. That number hugely exceeds the number of deaths by any method. I'd be more than happy to fetch out a handgun in such a situation, but would not be happy to find that it can't ultimately work because I've got gloves on, or my fingertips are dirty, or a battery is low, or it's too cold out, or I forgot my magic bracelet. Or it happens to be my wife's gun, since her's was handier than mine.
I actually very much doubt there are too many cases where you pull a gun on someone defensively and end up not using it in the US. The problem is that in the US too many criminals have guns too, you are not going to pull a gun on someone and tell them to "freeze" unless you are a cop, if you are a civilian in your own home and surprise an intruder you are going to confirm them as an intruder, then fire as soon as possible to ensure they do not have a chance to do the same to you.
Anything else is just a recipe for being shot as the criminal pulls his gun and fires. He knows that anyone he comes across is trouble, since he has already broken in, and is looking at prison time plus the possibility of being lawfully shot. He has so much to lose, he might as well just fire at everything he sees then sort it out later. If you shout anything chances are he will just turn and fire in the direction of the noise on instinct, especially since he may very well have been in that situation before and done the same.
The only advantage you have is that you know your home, you know which floorboards creak and such like and can use that to surprise him. If you do it successfully, you have one, very slim opportunity to get a stopping shot in before he does exactly that to you. Only he will most likely follow up his stopping shot with an execution, followed by the same to anyone else in the residence to make sure no witnesses remain.
The truth is that I am extremely glad I live in a country which has never really let the firearms genie out of the bottle and where there are very few guns in circulation compared to the US. Just being caught with an illegal firearm in this country gets you 5 years in prison, even if it was just a fake and you were pretending it was real. This is a very heavy sentence compared to what you would get for other offences where you could earn a similar financial reward, you could beat someone half to death in their own home and get less time believe it or not.
We have very few cases of the sort of home invasion robbery where a gun would help defend yourself, I guess because most criminals will try and make sure they brake into houses where people are out, or will just run off if they hear people wake up. The only exception to this would be targeting old people since they put up less resistance, and once again, this would get you far less time inside than if you brandished a gun (providing they survived, murder is the exception).
As with all DRM schemes, it's only a matter of time before this is broken.
DRM being crackable is not actually that important, what matters is how difficult it is for the average user. You only have to make it slightly tricky or add some slight perceived risk to downloading pirated stuff and they will choose to pay for it instead. For most people with a bit of cash the hassle factor of DRM is what keeps them on the straight and narrow, for the people without cash who cares, they probably would not have paid for it anyway.
Some people who pirate lots of stuff eventually grow into big paid consumers of stuff when they get a bit money, but when they do they often end up forgetting about their strict stance on DRM and just sign up with Netflix or Lovefilm or whatever based on how convenient it is for them. Who cares about keeping a copy of the latest crap to come out of content permanently, just give us lots of stuff to watch on demand and most of the time as consumers those of us with money are happy.
Does Firefox's architecture actually get in the way of users eventually pirating the content?
It's not really the job of browser vendors to make sure you can be a freeloading shithead is it? Their job is to make a product that as many people find useful as possible and that means a certain amount of mass appeal. Refusing to support this part of the standard would have robbed Firefox of more users than they will lose by supporting it.
The reality is that people who view piracy as some sort of moral duty and right like you do are in the minority, that is why most of the public quite happily go along with more stringent copyright laws being drafted by the politicians they elect. That means that creating a browser that will be unusable for certain sites that want to protect their content will just drive users away.
BTW, I actually also think DRM is a joke and a complete waste of space and that more companies should trust us to buy their content if we like it. I spend a fortune on services like netflix and cable TV. I also think though that people who refuse to pay should do without, pure and simple. Anything other than that is freeloading off those of us who pay.
Initial police response to confirm is only minutes away, delaying everything whilst waiting for swat is tens of minutes.
This is a nice idea, but what happens to that lone officer checking up if this is a real hostage situation with well armed felons? He is put in a life or death situation where he may end up as another hostage.
It's all very well to say that he should investigate subtly, but how can he? He can't enter without permission or warrant to he has to knock on the door and see who answers. If the person who answers is crook and it is hostage situation he is not going to confirm very much after they invite him in to reassure him and he suddenly finds himself looking at 3 felons, some with hostages (in a shield type configuration) and all armed.
Even if you have a couple of cops, it is pretty easy to see a way of getting the better of them if you are actually the sort of felons these calls purport to be from or reporting. The reality is that one of the reasons for the SWAT response is that this is safest for the police.
Mine doesn't. Its fairly easy to setup your mail server to only accept mail from properly configured mail servers, in which case you can ensure the message came from a server that should be responsible for sending you a message from that address.
Nice idea, but fails in practice if used in a commercial setting where each rejected email may be a lost sale.
The number of our clients or commercial partners who have mail servers that do things like spoof from addresses is quite alot. If they use things like online hosted accounting software, hosted CRM systems and other similar stuff it often spoofs the person who is sending you the messages from address even though the mail server sending it is actually running on the web server that provided the software. Unfortunately this is pretty common place so most small business have to be a little more flexible in their anti spam solution.
Whitelisting is a useful tool to cope with some of this, but the problem is that new leads who you have not spoken to yet will not be in the list and those are the emails you really need to get through.
Maybe things are different if you work for MS, IBM or someone but after almost a decade working in various small businesses as a system admin who had to deal with spam I can say that in that world flexibility is key.
The web developers I know have more work than they can handle. If you're good at building websites, make a portfolio and start marketing yourself. That gives you a flexible schedule to work around your studies, pays better, if less reliably, and gives you independence.
It is a stretch to call creating single person websites "Web Developers". I know there is probably no better name, but it is setting your sights pretty low if you aim to do that as a career. It also doesn't always provide the job security of many technical jobs.
The really hard bits of web development are about working as part of a team, working on other peoples code just as quickly as if it was your own, learning to adapt to other peoples way of coding and design principles without it affecting your productivity. Also, learning to write technical documents is a huge part of being a web developer. This is not just about the comments, this is about preparing yourself for when you are a technical architect who provides guidance to web developers on large projects or being able to document that API you created so someone else can use it.
Then there is the learning about how development teams are organised, how software is tested and deployed, how you debug complicated systems, how you track changes and change requests. You might use some of this in small projects, but until you really get stuck in to working on a bigger project you never realise how essential some of this stuff is to them but how useful it can be in the small stuff too.
Robbing yourself of working on large projects means you will probably never be as good a web developer as you could be.
I couldn't agree more. Making websites is not computer science. Try focusing on related core areas: say distributed computing (Hadoop and the like). Work on your data structures and algorithms. Get into low level aspects of computing to get a good grip of computer architecture. Dabble a little in natively compiled languages such as C/C++ as well to see what a paradigm shift interpreted languages give you.
I agree with your learning list, but there is one huge bit missing: API's. So many areas of software development now require you know how to integrate with someone else's API and also how to create one yourself.
The "knowledge" is no longer useful or monetizable in a world where a 20$ GPS device can do a better job and an internet connected device can do a perfect job, taking congestion into account etc.
You obviously did not read my post. No computer or device can match a human being when the you ask complicated questions like "the pub with the yellow sign off chancery lane", Google Maps or Siri or whatever are just not good enough yet.
Try asking Google maps to directions to "Nazi Dog" from any place in london, it is useless and shows you nothing. Here is a link to what a cabbie would be able to tell you: http://golondon.about.com/od/l...
Weird yes, but this is the sort of stuff you have to learn to be a cabbie.
I would still say it is useful to be able to ask for a destination by something like "that pub off chancery lane with the yellow sign"
There may be some cases where the cabbie knows more than the combined knowledge of the internet, but those cases are few and getting fewer all the time.
Its not about knowing more, its about how you retrieve the information. A human being is always better at understanding what you are asking for than a computer when asking complicated questions.
How does systems affect me during the minute it takes my computer to boot while I'm making coffee?
Some people choose to use that minute more constructively while their minions make them coffee :)
Init works great. It's not broken, dont fix it.
I thought it didn't support loading things concurrently and instead forced this slow, one after the other approach that meant Linux generally took about 10 seconds longer to boot than any other modern OS?
You might not consider a slow boot time broken, but some people do.
Does that mean the entire LBC can be defined as a terror organization and placed in whatever Britain's equivalent of Guantanamo Bay is?
This could be a doubly pointed demonstration: Uber becomes the defacto 'taxi' service of London, and the government shows exactly what will happen if anybody things to provoke demonstrations which might infringe upon the steady operation of infrastructure :)
The problem with the uber drivers though is that they may have no clue where they are going. These cabbies doing the protesting are Londons black cab drivers, that means they have passed "The Knowledge" know london pretty intimately:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://www.theknowledgetaxi.co...
This does mean I entirely agree with their protest, but comparing them to any other taxi drivers elsewhere is not a great comparison because no other Taxis in the world are expected to pass such a ridiculously difficult exam first.
You might say this is pointless now that Sat-Navs are so ubiquitous, but I would still say it is useful to be able to ask for a destination by something like "that pub off chancery lane with the yellow sign" and he instantly names it and drives you there. It is also useful if you get the road name you are going to slightly wrong and can't find it with Google maps, just jump in cab. I have actually done this one night when I had been drinking and the cabbie had a right laugh about taking me somewhere that was only two minutes away, but I had already spent 20 minutes cluelessly walking around so was more than happy to pay him the minimum fare.
Most of the time London Black Cabs are pretty awesome, if a little expensive.
Being non-identifiable was a safety issue with regard to the police, because it was shown on many occasions that the striking miners were not adverse to taking action against identified individuals and their families.
Not really. Most of the police on riot duty during the miners strike were Met officers bussed in from London or, allegedly also members of the UK armed forces so their families has sod all to fear as they were miles away. The local bobbies generally hated them and were kept well out of the way to stop them having to aggressively police their neighbours.
Is there any single incident you can reference where the miners victimised local cops or their families in the manner you describe? If so please do.
There were plenty of incidences of them doing this to scab miners though (miners who crossed the picket lines), but that is not what you describe even though it is not really any better.
The mere existence of footage that invades someone's privacy is reason enough for concern.
Not here in the UK. You are recorded a million times from every angle in public places thanks to all the CCTV, there is no expectation of privacy in a public place what so ever.
In terms of if the police enter a private place like your home the police can probably just declare they are constantly recording at all times before they enter and most of the public would not have a problem with it. The only exception would probably be people like family liaison officers who get to go and tell people they kids just died in a road traffic accident or other victim support officers.
As noted, battery life would be a problem.
Writing to flash memory needs a surprising amount of electricity.
Not really. Things like GoPro are designed to be worn during sports and not interfere with the athletes mobility too much and they can still stretch to 3 or 4 hours recording. The average UK cop wears a ton of gear, including stab vests and god knows what else. Including a battery that meant they could easily give up to 6 or 7 hours recording for the addition of a few pounds should not be too bigger problem.
Being able to turn it off is fine;
No, it is not. Part of the role of these camera should be to force the Police to be constantly held account for all their actions while on duty. We had a recent incident here in the news where a UK bunch of UK soldiers shot dead an injured Afghan insurgent, the only reason it was found out though was because they made a mess of turning off one of the squaddies body cams and recorded themselves committing murder. This clearly shows the people wearing these cannot be trusted with and on off switch, that way even if the cover the lens it will still be recording audio which may well be equally important.
This should be an additional reminder to the police that they are our public servants and we do not live in a police state where they are above the law, something they do occasional forget at the moment, particularly when dealing with demonstrations.
I understand that this may involve vast amounts of data storage but the average UK cop wears quite a lot of very expensive kit, adding a 1Tb 2.5in SSD should not be a problem from a cost of bulk perspective. They don't carry guns routinely here in the UK so I reckon a this would be lighter than that and could even be built into the back of the stab vests without a problem.
The real trick will be making sure the camera is switched on for spur of the moment stuff, like where an incident happens when the officer is actually present, so perhaps some kind of automatic activation based on feedback from accelerometers and similar activity detectors is also required. If the sensors detect that the officer has started to run, there is a jolt to the camera, or some other abnormal activity, then start recording until the camera is manually disabled again.
Even assuming that you do not have the ability to store the vast amount of data from an always recording camera, the UK police had a much better solution to the one you suggest that they issued to the city cops on bikes in London years ago: they had an always recording camera that kept a 2 or 3 minute buffer at all times so the officer could press a button and it dumped the previous 2 or 3 minutes footage from the buffer to permanent storage.
It might be worth something like that you suggest as a backup for if the cop is just randomly attacked or something and knocked out cold so he was unable to press the button, but I reckon it would be damn hard to get right so it didn't do this just because they sat down to heavily in the donut shop :)
It's also worth knowing that here the UK all cops have a panic button on their radios that screams "HELP" very quietly to every other cop in the area. They are trained to hit that at the drop of a hat if they think they need assistance so making that also do the recording thing at the same time should not be a problem.
When an accident is inevitable the car will simply try to stop as quickly as possible. It won't make any attempt to swerve or select a target. It's only consideration will be stopping the car as quickly as possible. It's a sound tactic from a legal point of view. Unless the car itself made a mistake leading to the accident any resulting injuries are someone else's fault.
Yup. Since this is the recommended approach to drivers at present anyway, especially here in the UK where I live.
If you try to swerve and avoid a major collision and have a minor collision with an innocent party in a different lane you are probably going to end up having to pay for the damage to their car out of your insurance. You are legally basically expected to try and stop, but if you are unable to in time then to just pile on in to whatever pulled out into your lane and claim on their insurance. Of course if they were already in your lane and they just hit the breaks for no apparent reason and you end up stacking into them then it is always your fault for driving too close as far as insurance goes.
Once you start including wonderful rules like this as dictated by individual countries legal systems I would imagine programming driver-less cars is going to get a lot more complicated.
It will be a Google car. Partly paid by ads and data collected while used. As such it should - of course - behave in the best interest of the real costumers. I.e. not you! :)
So it would also check if any Apple or MS employees were nearby and automatically swerve into them?
I am sure. They correctly realized that there was little value in rote memorization.
Maybe it depends on the quality of institution you attend, but my teachers at least were more concerned with whether or not I knew how and when to apply a given formula than rote memorization of it. Sure, they had limits; you could only bring in one sheet of formulas for a given midterm or final (which was well more than enough), but most of the time they wrote the necessary equations right on the board.
As we're even more well connected, with everyone carrying a cellphone in their pocket capable of accessing nearly the whole of recorded public human knowledge in seconds, people are coming around to realize that memorization isn't as important as understanding - or almost as good, knowing how to search for information to gain understanding.
Maybe it depends on institution, maybe also things are changing now with more coursework based degrees. I agree with you that understanding is far more important than learning by wrote in a real world setting, but in my experience all academic subjects up until you study for a master degree here in the UK enable you to obtain a passing grade more easily without understanding by simple memorisation due to the exam based nature of how they are assessed and how those exams are marked en masse, often by people with very little discretion about how they award marks.
As to cell phones, they are irrelevant in my time at uni because you could not take them into the assessment hall. Computer calculators had to be reset at the start, and sheets of equations never included the derivations which were the bits you earned the most points for reeling off from memory.
People might have realised that understanding is important, but have universities kept up? :)
There are certain classes where 'remembering' is the most important part of the class, but at least in my engineering and science classes, 'knowing' and 'understanding' had slightly higher priority.
Are you sure? When I studied Physics knowing and understanding were fairly important, but at least equally important if not more so was the ability to reel off a mathematical derivation at will. Generally you could not work through the derivation in the allotted exam time, unless you were doing most of it from memory with a bit of logic checking along the way.
Knowing and understanding might be the ideal but that is much harder to test in a written exam and mark in a uniform way so you end up assigning values to random tit bits of information if they can be remembered by the student at will.
If you're using Word or OpenOffice, that might be a problem. If you're using LaTeX, it's not, provided that you're a reasonably quick typist and have memorized the standard mathematical commands. I ended up typing all of my lecture notes for my statistics Ph.D. classes without much of a hassle. In fact, most of the students in my classes came to me for portions of my lecture notes, as I was able to capture all of the important comments that the professors would make in haste while continuing on with a derivation or proof.
When I read this I immediately though that this would be a trade off. The benefit you mention, against the fact that the repeatedly rewriting your notes helped you memorise them.
You needed to do this when taking written notes because the lecturers would generally fly along so fast you had to scrawl everything down just to keep up, so as soon as you got home that day (or in the break period after the lecture if their was one) you first job was to write your notes up in a more neat, organised fashion, while also making sure all the proofs made mathematical sense.
This meant that even if you did the minimum possible work you still ended up going over the same stuff at least twice to help it sink in. If you use typed notes and get everything down first time round, then you have no reason to revisit them until exam time and then you will most likely have forgotten the first going over in the lecture. Some diligent students might, but many will not.
This is one of the cases where what seems like a pointless waste of effort at the time is actually important as it is the slightly dull repetition of something that really helps it sink in to long term memory so you can recall it months later.
Yeah, but you will get way more "hot chicks" with the Tesla.
Its no Lambo.
A Tesla looks like a Hyundai i45 (which I admit, is pretty stylish for a Hyundai). A Tesla looks average by todays standards.
The problem Tesla owners have with chicks is they'll never pass the Kristin Scott Thomas test. You pull up to Kristin Scott Thomas' house for your date with your Tesla and she doesn't notice anything about your car. So a Tesla owner immediately starts talking about the technology, how quite it is, range, MPG calculations and before he's even finished explaining how advanced the engine is, Kristin has popped back inside the house and locked the doors.
Its not about looks about how dirty they are.
The chicks you do pull with your Tesla will definitely do things Kristin Scott Thomas won't as they are more likely to be hippy types and hippie women are great.