Cindy Sheehan getting arrested for wearing an anti-war t-shirt was a pretty good example of how in the US, our basic assumed freedoms are not exactly what they appear.
I've watched plenty of people get arrested for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don't want to make this a Dem vs. Rep thing, being a worthless leader is hardly a party specific character trait. Most of the absurd arrests are from an overzealous idiot somewhere relatively low on the totem pole, but violations of the basic rights we were all told we have in elementary school happen on a daily basis all over the country and it is rare that those violations are addressed in any meaningful manner.
Everybody here has entirely too much faith in the electronics that are in place in commercial aircraft.
The wiring on board is all exceptionally thin and shielded poorly - per spec, and on a great deal of commercial planes the wiring has significant corrosion.
An industry wide test for interference factors may not indicate a great deal of problems with cell phones, but it would end up resulting in the requirement for replacing the wiring in a great deal of airplanes, at an impressive cost - because planes would have to be grounded (losing revenue from air travel), gutted, re-wired, and re-certified.
If they thought it was one or two planes, the airlines might suck up the cost (assuming crowd control and airphone revenue were not factors), but we're talking hundreds of planes, if not thousands.
The fear of having hundreds of planes grounded in order to allow cell phones is the primary factor pushing against it. Everything else is window dressing.
I personally don't care what kind of crime has been committed. Throwing a guy in jail because he won't let you see his home video for a year is a crime in and of itself.
He obviously had reasons for not giving it up. It could be that there was other information on the same tape he didn't want prosecutors to see. It could be that it was terribly inconvenient to provide the video. It could be that there was nothing on the video in the first place. Or heck, it could be that he video taped himself vandalizing the car.
It's his private property, and the government has no right to it, or at least should not have a right to it. The slippery slope has already been laid for the government to take whatever property they want - just about anything could be justified with one lying cop, one aggressive prosecutor, and/or one judge.
Agreed. You also have to take into account that SCOTUS does not agree to hear every appeal put forth to them, but a subset of those where an appeal has merit, among a series of other deciding factors that can change at any given point and time.
No court is immune from bad decisions - even SCOTUS. Whether a court leans towards private interests, corporate interests, left, or right shouldn't matter to the people - as long as ALL of the courts aren't leaning in one particular direction (one that is unfair to the people).
Your vote in the Slashdottit system will help insure the best stories are presented to our readers, with hyper accurate numbers to indicate their relevance and general awesomeness. Only by requiring the contribution of every random user of the internet can we guarantee the most scientifically perfect numbers will be generated. These numbers will guarantee that every story that appears on Slashdot will be interesting, insightful, and flawless. Vote early, vote often.
I saw those things and I thought to myself "No! Not slashdot!" Hysterical.
Actually, registration changes the potential damages from actual damages, to the greater of statutory damages or actual damages - which is a pretty significant difference in this particular case because if not formally registered, the students would be limited in obtaining a dollar amount equal to the actual commercial value of their work, which wouldn't be much.
Fair use is arguable, but it's not a very strong one IMO.
The terms of service are not always enforceable, and they certainly place some liability on the educational institution if they require coursework ownership be assigned to a third party company for explicit and direct profitable use. They terms certainly do not consider the point that the works submitted may be submitted by someone other than the copyright owner, which given their business model is a very large point to not address. While they are under no legal obligation to explore it, the fact that they obviously chose not to tells the whole story.
Oracle performs better in enterprise environments, hands down. Oracle Clustering is more intelligently implemented than SQL Clustering. PL/SQL scripts are easier to debug than those in MS SQL.
OTOH, SQL Server is extremely simple to install and administer for low volume environments. DTS Provides a nice simple transport mechanism. Enterprise manager, while kludgy, is relatively intuitive.
For fine tuning, Oracle provides finer control - but that's not to say that SQL doesn't provide a lot of control over DB Tuning features.
Then there are the little things that crop up over experienced usage - like the first time you try to take a MS SQL backup from one machine to another and end up perplexed for an hour. Or when you're 6 gig backup file won't copy from one machine to another without 3rd party software (really a windows issue, not SQL Specific). Or when you discover that you can't replicate certain tables or columns, can't copy blobs using sql scripts, etc. Things like that.
A lot of applications treat the database as a storage engine and leave platform specific performance enhancements by the wayside in favor of database-agnostity. Because of this, MySQL is much closer to being a legitimate competitor than you would think. People talk about "ACID Compliance", but really most applications don't need ACID Compliance and just because you can't do something one particular way doesn't mean it can't be done.
There are always a lot of complaints about the security of any Diebold voting machines. Then there's the constant complaint of a paper trail (my county now has paper-trail making diebold machines).
What people should be pushing for is a voting system on commodity hardware. There's no sense in putting a million dollars forward for a small amount of "proprietary" machines that are all crap anyways. The only reason for wrapping a software solution in proprietary hardware like this is security through obscurity.
Instead of complaining all the time about Diebold et all, what we should be doing is putting together a GPL voting solution. Once it is mature and stable, push our representatives to make the move.
Several years ago, I signed up for an earthlink dial-up account so I could have access in Hawaii. There was a minimum 12 month subscription, but I figured having a backup was a good idea. Of course it auto-renewed and they charged me monthly for 2 years. My credit card expired and they sent me e-mails saying the account would be cancelled. Having not used the service at all, I decided that was a good idea. Then they started sending me threatening mail. Then they started calling me. Each time they called, I explained that I did want the account to be cancelled - so please go ahead and do it. After the fifth call, I made them stay on the phone until they could confirm cancellation of the account (I had been promised by each of the four previous callers that it would be cancelled per my wishes). This time, they transferred me to a "cancellation specialist." I again asked to cancel the account, explaining that it had been unused for years and I simply did not use their service. To cancel, she wanted a) my account number (which I don't know), b) my social security number (which there is no reason to ask for, c) the credit card number associated with the account (which had long since expired and changed), d) my account login and password (which I don't know), e) the phone number associated with the account (apparently not the number they used to call me) - not just one of these things, all of them. Since I could not provide her with ALL of this information, she told me I had to send a REGISTERED AND CERTIFIED letter to earthlink to cancel - and that the letter would have to contain all of this information save my login and password. Of course, they would neither provide me with my login information, nor my password.
Directly From the article: ================ A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised a review of Bush's move.
"It's something we're going to look into," the aide said ================ Nothing like the media anonymizing you, twisting your words around, and then putting your exact words right afterwards thinking nobody will notice.
Have a peek over at the forums at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, SearchEngineWatch, or any number of other webmaster related sites. This happens all the time. It is an issue that webmasters have had to deal with for some time now. Google at least provides some input for you if you can be bothered to register a sitemap with them.
Google has several billion pages in their index, and a significant portion of them are spam. Their business model relies on them having internal methods of dealing with web spam and it is not feasible or desirable for them to produce a list of violations to each and every person who runs afoul of their algorithms.
This is far from the most popular or important site this has happened to. Wordpress was delisted, as was BMW, Syndic8, and many others. This guy is using the controversial nature of his subject matter in an attempt to draw more attention. Get in line buddy, there is a long list of people whining all over the web about the same thing. Are you more important because the word Christianity is loosely affiliated with your site? Nope.
Do a little googling yourself and you can pretty easily figure out how to resolve the problem. It takes some time, and there are ways to accelerate the process. If you are that reliant on Google, it is time to start participating in some webmaster communities and figure out how to play ball with the Search Engines. Just like everybody else.
It would be easier to simply use a video camera over the shoulder of an ATM visitor, and just as effective.
Using the information directly at an ATM to get a couple of hundred dollars would be too much effort, too high risk, and too little return. More likely, the PIN would be used to obtain larger sums of cash via other methods - calling in a bank transfer or something to that effect.
While on the surface it seems unlikely that somebody would go through the hassle, if one gained access to the ATM network, and had means to unencrypt the traffic at least in part, there is a great deal more potential for crime than simply obtaining an ATM PIN number.
Banks shouldn't be reliant on security at the switches either - all it takes is one bad employee to reduce the effectiveness of on site security to nothing, and I imagine with the pay rates they are kicking out, there are more than a few employees vulnerable to trouble of one sort or another.
I've found that once a page has layout it will begin rendering and not before. CSS imported in the body do not prevent rendering. CSS imported in the HEAD will. In fact, the css and javascript in the head section seem to need downloading prior to rendering.
I have also found that cached CSS and Javascript can play with you a little bit. When developing a site you tend to see an expected set of behaviors based on your own experience with a site - but you can find later that having the external files either cached or not cached can have an effect on things. (i.e. a cached javascript file with a load event may be triggered before the DOM is ready if you aren't checking for the readiness of the DOM itself)
ETAG headers are very important as well. Running "tail -f access.log" while you browse your own site will show a lot of redundant calls to javascript, css, and image files that should be cached but aren't. IE has a setting of "Check for new content" or something like that that really fouls up css background images without proper expiration headers (lots of flickering).
There is still a significant portion of the web community that utilizes dialup connections. These users are seemingly ignored by many popular sites. I try to get pages to load in under 8 seconds for dialup users, but with any significant javascript or CSS it is sometimes a difficult task. It's much easier on consecutive page loads by forcing cacheing, but that doesn't matter one bit if the user goes elsewhere because the initial page load was too slow.
There are certainly a plethora of optimization techniques not even touched on in this article. I know that Google and Yahoo are very keen on these subjects and it's worth taking a look at the source of some of their pages for ideas. Last I checked, they could care less about validation, though. But with the bandwidth they must utilize saving a few bytes here and there can mean significant dollar differences at the end of the month and what truly matters is whether or not the browser renders the page correctly.
Government produced information is inherently public property. Weather feeds are almost all fed off of government produced data - and that data is reformatted and made pretty for public consumption by private companies who have created revenue models based on that data publication.
There is no sound reasoning to privatizing the data or making it more difficult to obtain. It's out there, we pay to have it produced, and the government shouldn't be saddled with the responsibility of re-structuring the data post original publication. If people want the data in a different format - i.e. with maps, then a third party should be producing it. The fact that a third party produced a site with realtime data is neither here nor there, and has no more terrorist implications than the reproduction of most other government data.
The side benefits that a service like this provides are immense - it can greatly reduce the strain on the emergency service organizations because they can minimize their efforts in information publication and refocus them on providing emergency services.
I can certainly blame my career for problems I've had with my wife, but that makes it a little too easy doesn't it? In the end, every aspect of my career that has affected my home life is the result of a decision I've made. Most of those decisions could be changed on a day in and day out basis. I would think that most IT guys have enough of a logical mindset to understand that jobs don't hurt marriages, people do.
As far as kids and custody goes, I don't really have any info to comment with. The people in my social circle that are divorced don't have kids.
But as far as kids and happiness through divorce goes - rare is the situation where a child is happy once their parents are divorced. The child can move on and grow up to live a normal life, but there will be permanent mental scarring and more than likely some personality quirks to go with it.
Before getting divorced you really have to ask yourself - Is this so important that I should permanently scar my children? Is this so important that I should risk losing my children? There are scenarios that exist where the right answer is yes. There are many more where the right answer is no.
I had trouble with Bank of America - and I have no compunction about spreading the truth. This was well before any Patriot Act excuses came around. My grandma sent me a check to buy a car. I deposited it in the ATM. They pulled the money out of her account and did not deposit it in my account. Then they froze my account. I spent my entire work week on the phone arguing with the bank until eventually I reached a vice president that unfroze my account. My favorite part was when they told me that after 60 days they would send me a check for whatever amount THEY THOUGHT they owed me. This was all because they had the wrong name on my account - using my middle name for my last name - even though my last name was on my checks.
The same branch did a similar thing to my roommate when she deposited a check from her mother - pulling the money out of her mother's account, but not depositing it in hers. That caused her mortgage to bounce.
In both situations, we ended up getting our money - but we both went through a huge headache to get it, and I was treated like a criminal during the process.
So I hate bank of america. A lot of people do, with good reason. Sue me.
While impressive, the feat was accomplished over a single optical fiber using proprietary amplifiers not in production. It certainly is innovative, but it is not an indication of speeds you will see in consumer level services. I see these high-bandwidth paradigms being very useful in the medical industry in the near future - especially for things like transferring high quality MRI images from hospital to hospital with very little delay, or in transferring patient ICU data to a centralized monitoring center - which is currently being done, but super-high bandwidth models open up avenues of information that are not currently available - anything from real-time HI-DEF video from the room, to real-time control of in-room instrumentation.
I understand that people want to make money off of their websites. I understand that a lot of people are dying to get published on slashdot because of the traffic flood and the ensuing revenue that follows either because of impressions or because even the anti-advertising slashdot crowd exhibits a click through rate.
But why force me to read 8 pages? Each page has roughly 25 lines of real content and less than 250 words. That and 301 links all designed to get their 25 line articles at the top of the SE listings. What happened to content being important? Even if this is interesting, the greedy, spammy practices that have invaded all of the social networking sites have to be at least slowed down.
At the very least this site should have provided an outline of what the companies are in the intro. At best, slashdot would provide a set of basic quality guidelines that would be the minimum standards for link publication. From a small webmaster standpoint, a lot of guys are faced with "how do I compete with that?" - the answer is often to pick up similar design, structure, and promotional tactics. The lack of quality control standards in most "Web 2.0" comunities have encouraged quality-free sites to spread like wildfire. Slashdot is a closed, moderated system and because of it's age, popularity, the fact that the staff and the even the audience are a little more technically savvy than most - it should have a model that other sites should follow. I see less of this kind of a problem here than on digg or others, but I just had to rant because this FA is a prime example of something that shouldn't be published (IMO).
And really? Are there 9 articles? I only see 8 pages and of the one's I looked at, I never saw a page talking about more than one company.
You can't say that GM and Ford have corrected their problems. I have owned several of their cars produced within the last 15 years and they have been among the worst cars I have ever owned. You can't walk into a dealership without feeling dirty for either service or sales. They actually gave me back my Mustang after having drained the brake fluid and not replacing it. I spent a year and a half disputing a rattling problem in a vehicle that they refused to acknowledge until I discovered that they actually produced an "Anti-rattling" kit. My Jaguar was a beautiful car, but had the most bizarre set of problems I've ever heard of (a door and sunroof that opened only when they were in the right mood, occasionally working headlights, etc.)
Conversely, having owned two BMWs and a Mercedes I ended up getting amazing deals on the cars, have no complaints about them, and the service departments actually performed extra work at no charge each and every visit as opposed to the good old american companies that won't even honor their posted service prices, don't do work as agreed, and pressure you into paying for more service which they may or may not accomplish, but they will certainly charge you for.
Ford and GM have business models that are inherently dishonest and produce products not designed to withstand the test of time.
But back to the subject at hand - it's not like it would have taken six months of testing to realize that the batteries are not safe. It took me less than an hour with my Inspiron to realize that the laptop could not spend a lot of time on my own lap. Complaints about the powerbook batteries started popping up almost immediately when they were first released. The forecasting of a recall I'm sure was made early on.
It's certainly par for the course that a company who attains significant market share begins to produce less than quality products - but that doesn't mean everybody does.
What happened in this case, I'm sure, is that production could not be slowed because demand was too high. Stopping production meant a reduction in revenue and stock price. They made a conscious decision to produce bad products knowing that the financial ramifications of a recall would be less than the financial ramifications of a production stoppage. A stoppage would not only have immediate impact as far as revenue and stock price, it also would have heavily motivated competitors to attack their clients with potentially better quality products. Dell and Apple would have claimed, rightfully, breach of contract and significantly reduced marketshare overnight.
Just for the record, I was trying to show this article to my wife who was complaining about the fact that you can't take fridge packs on airplanes which makes flying with little kids nearly impossible. I can't wait for some people with badges to show up at my house because I searched google for airplane bomb and airplane security.
The feature set does not sound any different than the HDTivo that I've had for years. It does sound like the user interface has been upgraded, but nothing that would make me or anyone else that has an HDTivo upgrade. Even the capacity is the same. How is this news?
Slashdot Mirror
Cindy Sheehan getting arrested for wearing an anti-war t-shirt was a pretty good example of how in the US, our basic assumed freedoms are not exactly what they appear.
I've watched plenty of people get arrested for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don't want to make this a Dem vs. Rep thing, being a worthless leader is hardly a party specific character trait. Most of the absurd arrests are from an overzealous idiot somewhere relatively low on the totem pole, but violations of the basic rights we were all told we have in elementary school happen on a daily basis all over the country and it is rare that those violations are addressed in any meaningful manner.
Everybody here has entirely too much faith in the electronics that are in place in commercial aircraft.
The wiring on board is all exceptionally thin and shielded poorly - per spec, and on a great deal of commercial planes the wiring has significant corrosion.
An industry wide test for interference factors may not indicate a great deal of problems with cell phones, but it would end up resulting in the requirement for replacing the wiring in a great deal of airplanes, at an impressive cost - because planes would have to be grounded (losing revenue from air travel), gutted, re-wired, and re-certified.
If they thought it was one or two planes, the airlines might suck up the cost (assuming crowd control and airphone revenue were not factors), but we're talking hundreds of planes, if not thousands.
The fear of having hundreds of planes grounded in order to allow cell phones is the primary factor pushing against it. Everything else is window dressing.
I personally don't care what kind of crime has been committed. Throwing a guy in jail because he won't let you see his home video for a year is a crime in and of itself.
He obviously had reasons for not giving it up. It could be that there was other information on the same tape he didn't want prosecutors to see. It could be that it was terribly inconvenient to provide the video. It could be that there was nothing on the video in the first place. Or heck, it could be that he video taped himself vandalizing the car.
It's his private property, and the government has no right to it, or at least should not have a right to it. The slippery slope has already been laid for the government to take whatever property they want - just about anything could be justified with one lying cop, one aggressive prosecutor, and/or one judge.
Agreed. You also have to take into account that SCOTUS does not agree to hear every appeal put forth to them, but a subset of those where an appeal has merit, among a series of other deciding factors that can change at any given point and time.
No court is immune from bad decisions - even SCOTUS. Whether a court leans towards private interests, corporate interests, left, or right shouldn't matter to the people - as long as ALL of the courts aren't leaning in one particular direction (one that is unfair to the people).
Your vote in the Slashdottit system will help insure the best stories are presented to our readers, with hyper accurate numbers to indicate their relevance and general awesomeness. Only by requiring the contribution of every random user of the internet can we guarantee the most scientifically perfect numbers will be generated. These numbers will guarantee that every story that appears on Slashdot will be interesting, insightful, and flawless. Vote early, vote often.
I saw those things and I thought to myself "No! Not slashdot!" Hysterical.
Actually, registration changes the potential damages from actual damages, to the greater of statutory damages or actual damages - which is a pretty significant difference in this particular case because if not formally registered, the students would be limited in obtaining a dollar amount equal to the actual commercial value of their work, which wouldn't be much.
Fair use is arguable, but it's not a very strong one IMO.
The terms of service are not always enforceable, and they certainly place some liability on the educational institution if they require coursework ownership be assigned to a third party company for explicit and direct profitable use. They terms certainly do not consider the point that the works submitted may be submitted by someone other than the copyright owner, which given their business model is a very large point to not address. While they are under no legal obligation to explore it, the fact that they obviously chose not to tells the whole story.
Oracle performs better in enterprise environments, hands down. Oracle Clustering is more intelligently implemented than SQL Clustering. PL/SQL scripts are easier to debug than those in MS SQL.
OTOH, SQL Server is extremely simple to install and administer for low volume environments. DTS Provides a nice simple transport mechanism. Enterprise manager, while kludgy, is relatively intuitive.
For fine tuning, Oracle provides finer control - but that's not to say that SQL doesn't provide a lot of control over DB Tuning features.
Then there are the little things that crop up over experienced usage - like the first time you try to take a MS SQL backup from one machine to another and end up perplexed for an hour. Or when you're 6 gig backup file won't copy from one machine to another without 3rd party software (really a windows issue, not SQL Specific). Or when you discover that you can't replicate certain tables or columns, can't copy blobs using sql scripts, etc. Things like that.
A lot of applications treat the database as a storage engine and leave platform specific performance enhancements by the wayside in favor of database-agnostity. Because of this, MySQL is much closer to being a legitimate competitor than you would think. People talk about "ACID Compliance", but really most applications don't need ACID Compliance and just because you can't do something one particular way doesn't mean it can't be done.
There are always a lot of complaints about the security of any Diebold voting machines. Then there's the constant complaint of a paper trail (my county now has paper-trail making diebold machines).
What people should be pushing for is a voting system on commodity hardware. There's no sense in putting a million dollars forward for a small amount of "proprietary" machines that are all crap anyways. The only reason for wrapping a software solution in proprietary hardware like this is security through obscurity.
Instead of complaining all the time about Diebold et all, what we should be doing is putting together a GPL voting solution. Once it is mature and stable, push our representatives to make the move.
Several years ago, I signed up for an earthlink dial-up account so I could have access in Hawaii. There was a minimum 12 month subscription, but I figured having a backup was a good idea. Of course it auto-renewed and they charged me monthly for 2 years. My credit card expired and they sent me e-mails saying the account would be cancelled. Having not used the service at all, I decided that was a good idea. Then they started sending me threatening mail. Then they started calling me. Each time they called, I explained that I did want the account to be cancelled - so please go ahead and do it. After the fifth call, I made them stay on the phone until they could confirm cancellation of the account (I had been promised by each of the four previous callers that it would be cancelled per my wishes). This time, they transferred me to a "cancellation specialist." I again asked to cancel the account, explaining that it had been unused for years and I simply did not use their service. To cancel, she wanted a) my account number (which I don't know), b) my social security number (which there is no reason to ask for, c) the credit card number associated with the account (which had long since expired and changed), d) my account login and password (which I don't know), e) the phone number associated with the account (apparently not the number they used to call me) - not just one of these things, all of them. Since I could not provide her with ALL of this information, she told me I had to send a REGISTERED AND CERTIFIED letter to earthlink to cancel - and that the letter would have to contain all of this information save my login and password. Of course, they would neither provide me with my login information, nor my password.
Earthlink is on my list.
I was joking... but thanks - very informative.
If it was so bright, how come nobody ever saw it before?
Directly From the article:
================
A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised a review of Bush's move.
"It's something we're going to look into," the aide said
================
Nothing like the media anonymizing you, twisting your words around, and then putting your exact words right afterwards thinking nobody will notice.
Have a peek over at the forums at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, SearchEngineWatch, or any number of other webmaster related sites. This happens all the time. It is an issue that webmasters have had to deal with for some time now. Google at least provides some input for you if you can be bothered to register a sitemap with them.
Google has several billion pages in their index, and a significant portion of them are spam. Their business model relies on them having internal methods of dealing with web spam and it is not feasible or desirable for them to produce a list of violations to each and every person who runs afoul of their algorithms.
This is far from the most popular or important site this has happened to. Wordpress was delisted, as was BMW, Syndic8, and many others. This guy is using the controversial nature of his subject matter in an attempt to draw more attention. Get in line buddy, there is a long list of people whining all over the web about the same thing. Are you more important because the word Christianity is loosely affiliated with your site? Nope.
Do a little googling yourself and you can pretty easily figure out how to resolve the problem. It takes some time, and there are ways to accelerate the process. If you are that reliant on Google, it is time to start participating in some webmaster communities and figure out how to play ball with the Search Engines. Just like everybody else.
My favorite part of his campaign was on election night.
"If you elect Bill Clinton, we'll all be plucking chickens for a living!" - with a picture of a chicken to go with it.
It would be easier to simply use a video camera over the shoulder of an ATM visitor, and just as effective.
Using the information directly at an ATM to get a couple of hundred dollars would be too much effort, too high risk, and too little return. More likely, the PIN would be used to obtain larger sums of cash via other methods - calling in a bank transfer or something to that effect.
While on the surface it seems unlikely that somebody would go through the hassle, if one gained access to the ATM network, and had means to unencrypt the traffic at least in part, there is a great deal more potential for crime than simply obtaining an ATM PIN number.
Banks shouldn't be reliant on security at the switches either - all it takes is one bad employee to reduce the effectiveness of on site security to nothing, and I imagine with the pay rates they are kicking out, there are more than a few employees vulnerable to trouble of one sort or another.
I've found that once a page has layout it will begin rendering and not before. CSS imported in the body do not prevent rendering. CSS imported in the HEAD will. In fact, the css and javascript in the head section seem to need downloading prior to rendering.
I have also found that cached CSS and Javascript can play with you a little bit. When developing a site you tend to see an expected set of behaviors based on your own experience with a site - but you can find later that having the external files either cached or not cached can have an effect on things. (i.e. a cached javascript file with a load event may be triggered before the DOM is ready if you aren't checking for the readiness of the DOM itself)
ETAG headers are very important as well. Running "tail -f access.log" while you browse your own site will show a lot of redundant calls to javascript, css, and image files that should be cached but aren't. IE has a setting of "Check for new content" or something like that that really fouls up css background images without proper expiration headers (lots of flickering).
There is still a significant portion of the web community that utilizes dialup connections. These users are seemingly ignored by many popular sites. I try to get pages to load in under 8 seconds for dialup users, but with any significant javascript or CSS it is sometimes a difficult task. It's much easier on consecutive page loads by forcing cacheing, but that doesn't matter one bit if the user goes elsewhere because the initial page load was too slow.
There are certainly a plethora of optimization techniques not even touched on in this article. I know that Google and Yahoo are very keen on these subjects and it's worth taking a look at the source of some of their pages for ideas. Last I checked, they could care less about validation, though. But with the bandwidth they must utilize saving a few bytes here and there can mean significant dollar differences at the end of the month and what truly matters is whether or not the browser renders the page correctly.
I absolutely agree with everything you say.
Government produced information is inherently public property. Weather feeds are almost all fed off of government produced data - and that data is reformatted and made pretty for public consumption by private companies who have created revenue models based on that data publication.
There is no sound reasoning to privatizing the data or making it more difficult to obtain. It's out there, we pay to have it produced, and the government shouldn't be saddled with the responsibility of re-structuring the data post original publication. If people want the data in a different format - i.e. with maps, then a third party should be producing it. The fact that a third party produced a site with realtime data is neither here nor there, and has no more terrorist implications than the reproduction of most other government data.
The side benefits that a service like this provides are immense - it can greatly reduce the strain on the emergency service organizations because they can minimize their efforts in information publication and refocus them on providing emergency services.
I can certainly blame my career for problems I've had with my wife, but that makes it a little too easy doesn't it? In the end, every aspect of my career that has affected my home life is the result of a decision I've made. Most of those decisions could be changed on a day in and day out basis. I would think that most IT guys have enough of a logical mindset to understand that jobs don't hurt marriages, people do.
As far as kids and custody goes, I don't really have any info to comment with. The people in my social circle that are divorced don't have kids.
But as far as kids and happiness through divorce goes - rare is the situation where a child is happy once their parents are divorced. The child can move on and grow up to live a normal life, but there will be permanent mental scarring and more than likely some personality quirks to go with it.
Before getting divorced you really have to ask yourself - Is this so important that I should permanently scar my children? Is this so important that I should risk losing my children? There are scenarios that exist where the right answer is yes. There are many more where the right answer is no.
I had trouble with Bank of America - and I have no compunction about spreading the truth. This was well before any Patriot Act excuses came around. My grandma sent me a check to buy a car. I deposited it in the ATM. They pulled the money out of her account and did not deposit it in my account. Then they froze my account. I spent my entire work week on the phone arguing with the bank until eventually I reached a vice president that unfroze my account. My favorite part was when they told me that after 60 days they would send me a check for whatever amount THEY THOUGHT they owed me. This was all because they had the wrong name on my account - using my middle name for my last name - even though my last name was on my checks.
The same branch did a similar thing to my roommate when she deposited a check from her mother - pulling the money out of her mother's account, but not depositing it in hers. That caused her mortgage to bounce.
In both situations, we ended up getting our money - but we both went through a huge headache to get it, and I was treated like a criminal during the process.
So I hate bank of america. A lot of people do, with good reason. Sue me.
That's 24,626,865 cheeseburgers apiece.
While impressive, the feat was accomplished over a single optical fiber using proprietary amplifiers not in production. It certainly is innovative, but it is not an indication of speeds you will see in consumer level services. I see these high-bandwidth paradigms being very useful in the medical industry in the near future - especially for things like transferring high quality MRI images from hospital to hospital with very little delay, or in transferring patient ICU data to a centralized monitoring center - which is currently being done, but super-high bandwidth models open up avenues of information that are not currently available - anything from real-time HI-DEF video from the room, to real-time control of in-room instrumentation.
I understand that people want to make money off of their websites. I understand that a lot of people are dying to get published on slashdot because of the traffic flood and the ensuing revenue that follows either because of impressions or because even the anti-advertising slashdot crowd exhibits a click through rate.
But why force me to read 8 pages? Each page has roughly 25 lines of real content and less than 250 words. That and 301 links all designed to get their 25 line articles at the top of the SE listings. What happened to content being important? Even if this is interesting, the greedy, spammy practices that have invaded all of the social networking sites have to be at least slowed down.
At the very least this site should have provided an outline of what the companies are in the intro. At best, slashdot would provide a set of basic quality guidelines that would be the minimum standards for link publication. From a small webmaster standpoint, a lot of guys are faced with "how do I compete with that?" - the answer is often to pick up similar design, structure, and promotional tactics. The lack of quality control standards in most "Web 2.0" comunities have encouraged quality-free sites to spread like wildfire. Slashdot is a closed, moderated system and because of it's age, popularity, the fact that the staff and the even the audience are a little more technically savvy than most - it should have a model that other sites should follow. I see less of this kind of a problem here than on digg or others, but I just had to rant because this FA is a prime example of something that shouldn't be published (IMO).
And really? Are there 9 articles? I only see 8 pages and of the one's I looked at, I never saw a page talking about more than one company.
You can't say that GM and Ford have corrected their problems. I have owned several of their cars produced within the last 15 years and they have been among the worst cars I have ever owned. You can't walk into a dealership without feeling dirty for either service or sales. They actually gave me back my Mustang after having drained the brake fluid and not replacing it. I spent a year and a half disputing a rattling problem in a vehicle that they refused to acknowledge until I discovered that they actually produced an "Anti-rattling" kit. My Jaguar was a beautiful car, but had the most bizarre set of problems I've ever heard of (a door and sunroof that opened only when they were in the right mood, occasionally working headlights, etc.)
Conversely, having owned two BMWs and a Mercedes I ended up getting amazing deals on the cars, have no complaints about them, and the service departments actually performed extra work at no charge each and every visit as opposed to the good old american companies that won't even honor their posted service prices, don't do work as agreed, and pressure you into paying for more service which they may or may not accomplish, but they will certainly charge you for.
Ford and GM have business models that are inherently dishonest and produce products not designed to withstand the test of time.
But back to the subject at hand - it's not like it would have taken six months of testing to realize that the batteries are not safe. It took me less than an hour with my Inspiron to realize that the laptop could not spend a lot of time on my own lap. Complaints about the powerbook batteries started popping up almost immediately when they were first released. The forecasting of a recall I'm sure was made early on.
It's certainly par for the course that a company who attains significant market share begins to produce less than quality products - but that doesn't mean everybody does.
What happened in this case, I'm sure, is that production could not be slowed because demand was too high. Stopping production meant a reduction in revenue and stock price. They made a conscious decision to produce bad products knowing that the financial ramifications of a recall would be less than the financial ramifications of a production stoppage. A stoppage would not only have immediate impact as far as revenue and stock price, it also would have heavily motivated competitors to attack their clients with potentially better quality products. Dell and Apple would have claimed, rightfully, breach of contract and significantly reduced marketshare overnight.
Just for the record, I was trying to show this article to my wife who was complaining about the fact that you can't take fridge packs on airplanes which makes flying with little kids nearly impossible. I can't wait for some people with badges to show up at my house because I searched google for airplane bomb and airplane security.
The feature set does not sound any different than the HDTivo that I've had for years. It does sound like the user interface has been upgraded, but nothing that would make me or anyone else that has an HDTivo upgrade. Even the capacity is the same. How is this news?