What happened to your family was terribly unfortunate.
It bears repeating though that it is also terribly unusual - more so now than it was in the '80s. We live in a far, far safer (although not perfect) world today then we did when we were kids by almost every possible measurement.
I'm sure that the independence you got from your paper route and your relative freedom helped to make you the strong person that you are today, even though it wasn't without some small risk.
In what way would the 2-3 word dictionary definition of acorn actually help you, really? Bearing in mind that you wouldn't be able to figure out what that oak nut was if you didn't already know its name, so that doesn't count.
The random online definition from google is "the fruit of the oak, a smooth oval nut in a rough cuplike base." Very useful I guess assuming that you know the word acorn, you don't know what it is, but you do know what an oak tree is.
This is also just the "top 13K" words edition - think of it like a cache rather than long term storage.
Really? When I was a kid, I caught minnows (and tadpoles-- are those in there?) and collected acorns. We had a blackberry bush. Seriously, these are rather everyday words in the Western world.
Everyday words that everybody knows would actually be great candidates for removal from a small pocket dictionary. You want moderately common words that not everyone would understand, but where a few word definition is more useful than an encyclopedic explanation.
Its simpler than that. Present ID, get a token. Use an electronic voting machine (eliminates multi-language issues, hanging chads, etc) to do two things - generate an electronic record of your vote and fill out a nice human-readable record of your vote. Read the human-readable portion, if you're not happy then you can swap it for another token (it gets shredded and your electronic votes get invalidated). If you are happy then you post it into a one-way slot into a sealed box.
Votes are counted electronically. Some percentage of all polling places have their boxes opened in public and the votes counted by hand; this is then compare to the electronic record to ensure accuracy. In case of a dispute, the human-readable versions win.
95% of the advantages of (in-place) electronic voting, better-than-ever transparency, no abusable audit trail to tie your votes back to you.
Turned out USB-only wasn't so nice as advertised. Broken USB drivers? No keyboard. Oh, and the drivers on the Windows CD might be broken. What fun that was figuring out why the keyboard worked in BIOS but not in Windows at install time.
Wow. Sounds like Microsoft released a really shitty implementation of the USB only switch. Why would breaking the USB driver be any more likely (or even possible short of deliberate sabotage) than breaking the PS/2 driver anyway?
So, no. The much vaunted "Apple showed their foresight by ditching floppies" was a red herring if everyone needed to rush out and hang an external drive off the USB port anyway.
I'd agree that lots of people did go and get external floppy drives, I knew quite a few of them myself. The vast majority used them rarely, if ever, but wanted the perceived security - and since they were external, most of them ended up in a drawer gathering dust after a little while anyway. Those habits generally lasted far less than the lifetime of that form factor too, which helps everyone else who comes along.
Again, somebody has to be first - and the first major provider to do something always ends up getting slammed by their competitors since spreading FUD is easier than dismissing it and it makes for great checkbox-advertising points.
Bullshit. That is the same excuse Apple fans have been using for Apple for the last 15 years. Apple leaves out a VERY common feature and choice that everyone else but Apple has and uses with little to no problems and people claim it is for YOUR benefit. How many different things in this world have the ability to plug in some type of standard memory card? How many does Apple have? It has nothing to do with support and the overall the overall experience.
You know, somebody always has to go first.
People acted like the sky was falling when Apple got rid of PS/2 ports and moved to USB only - then when they realized what a superior experience it gave, they all followed suit. Similarly when Apple got rid of the floppy drive and then, years later, the optical drive and on some of their machines even the Ethernet ports. In all cases there were adapters available for the (very) few people who actually needed them, and in all cases despite the massive FUD being produced everything worked just fine.
Apple wants to avoid cases where users blame Apple for sluggish application performance, skipping music/video, bugs, etc... that are a result of something that Apple can't control or exert influence over.
Than how about they add some memory dedicated to the OS? The stuff is not that expensive these days...
And if they did people would be complaining about Apple using up memory that they paid for that's currently vacant just to handle a once-yearly iOS upgrade. At least this way most people can get use of the memory most of the time, its a damn sight simpler, and it allows Apple to report bigger numbers legitimately. Why wouldn't they do it the way that they are, especially knowing that they'd get abuse for it either way?
Yup. When my last company was a fledgling and we had more time than money, I was flying from Austin to Boston (through Dallas) and it saved several hundred dollars for my coworker to hop a SWA flight from Dallas to Austin and then join me on the AUS-DFW-BOS trip. Really stupid, and yes he simply got off the plane in Dallas on the way back.
I would like to fly Delta leaving my destination, but Southwest on my return. Can't do that with a round trip purchase, despite the availability of flights! Absolute bullshit!
How is that bullshit? You want to buy two different things from two totally different merchants!
That's like complaining that you want to get a Chipotle burrito for lunch and an In&Out burger for dinner and its bullshit that you can't do that with a single transaction.
Someone as simple as YouTube could probably handle that, but for any complex interactions I'll be damned if I'm going to take my time statefully rendering HTML pages on the server (about the most expensive and restrictive operations you can do) just for the truly minute fraction of one percent that won't trust their browsers to execute dynamic code in a nice secure sandbox. Sorry, but I'm with those guys now. You're gonna need a lot of rakes.
Almost everything but for an easy kill let's talk about real clustering that f'n works. MySQL, even with the 3rd party solutions out there (and I've tried many of them) doesn't get close to Oracle for a truly vertical and horizontal multi-datacenter cluster.
If you don't need that, MySQL is decent, although at least recently was still lacking in simple things like online index creation (adding an index to a table with hundreds of millions of rows shouldn't lock the table for hours, mmmkay?). Sure, there are very elaborate workarounds involving machine failovers, but there shouldn't have to be.
Its not the language, its the libraries, the conventions, the external resources. I picked up Ruby and Python, Node and even dusted off my PHP chops to write some modules for a client a few months ago. It wasn't hard, but I spent 20% of my time on the language, 50% figuring out what libraries to use, and another 30% making damn sure that my novice attempts were at least idiomatic and didn't come across as novice (including having them vetted by more seasoned users).
Anyone can write a for() loop in anything. Knowing the massive standard libraries for a language well enough to leverage them (for example, in Java I still see people dragging in external Base64 implementations that haven't been needed in a decade but once were) takes far, far longer.
I want people to write clean code that will be well understood and maintainable by others 5 years from now, not someone who just figures out how to get code to compile.
In the US, the employer probably has liability insurance that will pay most of the money. I would guess the liability insurance company probably requires the employer not to hire felons -- or charges a much higher premium to employers who hire felons.
Liability insurance gets even worse than that. If you believe that your accuser doesn't have a case but the insurance company is willing to settle, then if you go ahead and defend yourself you will have no protection if you lose. If you choose to settle because of this (most do) then your insurer gets to raise your rates because you've had a settlement against you. I know that's the way it is in the medical field and have seen nothing to indicate anything different anywhere else.
I'm actually a permanent resident here in the US. It doesn't bug me that much that I don't get to vote for President and other federal offices, but everywhere from there on down just uses that privilege to define their own. It really makes no sense to me that after living ni a city for over a decade I can't have a voice in who's elected to the truly local position of dogcatcher:)
As opposed to Windows' filesystems? Are they somehow a standard everybody must follow?
Well, FAT is basically the defacto standard since almost every random device supports it, so in the most important colloquial sense of the word standard, "Yes."
Sorry, of you can't see that when Real advertises that the DRMed music you buy from them will play on an iPod without problem, Apple will have to make sure it does - then you are obviously a fanboy.
So if Apple advertises that apps written for OS X will run on Windows, its suddenly Microsoft's fault if they don't? Or are you saying that once someone's found a bug in your system and written an exploit for it that you should be required to never again patch that bug?
There would be a process in which your scenario would have worked by the way - Real could have chosen to license FairPlay, at which point they would have been able to claim exactly that and be backed up by their contract with Apple. They didn't.
Of course, to be able to read that "ecological" ebook, you just need to extract and rape the planet of non-renewable rare metals so you can manufacture the various device display and electronics components...
Its a crying shame that most software developers don't use computers. Then we'd be able to solve that problem "for free" as they say. Oh, well...
People blame silly decisions on "PCI" all the time as well. I'm not a QSA but I do a lot of work in payments and took my last small company through PA-DSS level 1, so I've got some background there.
Having said that, anyone who touches a credit card should generally be in a PCI scope - even if you're a small mom-n-pop bookstore that takes Stripe. The worst abuse that I've seen though is trying to convince people that they should go all the way to "level one" compliance. The levels are based on your processing volume, with 4 being the lowest and 1 the highest. There's a self-abasement questionnaire, level 4 takes about 15 minutes, 2 takes all of 30 minutes (each with a truly trivial systems scan if you're doing work on the internet). Level 1, on the other hand, is designed for people staggering amounts of money and requires expensive on-site audits.
Like premium gas, there's no reason to level up beyond where you need to be except for silly marketing purposes - yet more and more people who trust their consultant advisors are doing so, because its a relatively easy way for consultants to make bank.
Make the case that your solution is cheaper than the existing solution if it is in fact cheaper.
It may not be. Don't assume that everyone who came before you is an idiot - they may well have ended up where they are now due to a series of compromises to work around issues that you know nothing about. Why not ask someone who's been involved in the security decisions for a few years why things are the way that they are first?
THAT is why many people avoid Apple like the plague. They've lost their lead, had their fun and are now fighting fowl.
Yup. Random mostly-unsubstantiated rumors that totally happened to a friend of your cousin's roommate are indeed why many people avoid Apple products. Others know that things like this - including such goodies as the "if you hold it the wrong way it dies," issue - are totally overblown if not completely fictional.
An awful lot of people put an awful lot of music on their iPods that wasn't bought from Apple. It all basically worked. The plural of anecdote may not really be data, but in a lot of ways its far more trustworthy than random anti-Apple stories coming out of the woodwork.
If they didn't keep your transaction open, they wouldn't be able to charge you for damage or incidentals. It's why hotels require credit cards for bookings in the first place. Usually they haven't seen your room when you check out.
Unless they saved the credit card number, either directly or through vaulting at their provider. Both of those are easy and common, and the second one is even safe (since it only allows that particular merchant to charge the card at will, it doesn't appeal to thieves like an actual credit card number would).
Except... Once the guests are at the hotel and checking in, the hotel will ask for their credit card and pre-auth the amount. Why would you pre-auth a card marked not to be used except if the guests do not show up? This card you should reserve the cost of a single night at the time of booking, and clear once the guests arrive.
Because that's the only way to tell that its a real credit card instead of a bunch of made up numbers that happen to look like a credit card number. The whole reason that pre-authorizations exist is to allow people to show that they're "good for the debt" without actually paying for it (yet).
Slashdot Mirror
What happened to your family was terribly unfortunate.
It bears repeating though that it is also terribly unusual - more so now than it was in the '80s. We live in a far, far safer (although not perfect) world today then we did when we were kids by almost every possible measurement.
I'm sure that the independence you got from your paper route and your relative freedom helped to make you the strong person that you are today, even though it wasn't without some small risk.
In what way would the 2-3 word dictionary definition of acorn actually help you, really? Bearing in mind that you wouldn't be able to figure out what that oak nut was if you didn't already know its name, so that doesn't count.
The random online definition from google is "the fruit of the oak, a smooth oval nut in a rough cuplike base." Very useful I guess assuming that you know the word acorn, you don't know what it is, but you do know what an oak tree is.
This is also just the "top 13K" words edition - think of it like a cache rather than long term storage.
Really? When I was a kid, I caught minnows (and tadpoles-- are those in there?) and collected acorns. We had a blackberry bush. Seriously, these are rather everyday words in the Western world.
Everyday words that everybody knows would actually be great candidates for removal from a small pocket dictionary. You want moderately common words that not everyone would understand, but where a few word definition is more useful than an encyclopedic explanation.
"From tiny acorns grow mighty oaks"
In the future kids will see that poster at Spencer's Gifts and say, "WTF?"
That's good then - puts it in the same category as everything else at Spencer's Gifts.
Its simpler than that. Present ID, get a token. Use an electronic voting machine (eliminates multi-language issues, hanging chads, etc) to do two things - generate an electronic record of your vote and fill out a nice human-readable record of your vote. Read the human-readable portion, if you're not happy then you can swap it for another token (it gets shredded and your electronic votes get invalidated). If you are happy then you post it into a one-way slot into a sealed box.
Votes are counted electronically. Some percentage of all polling places have their boxes opened in public and the votes counted by hand; this is then compare to the electronic record to ensure accuracy. In case of a dispute, the human-readable versions win.
95% of the advantages of (in-place) electronic voting, better-than-ever transparency, no abusable audit trail to tie your votes back to you.
Turned out USB-only wasn't so nice as advertised. Broken USB drivers? No keyboard. Oh, and the drivers on the Windows CD might be broken. What fun that was figuring out why the keyboard worked in BIOS but not in Windows at install time.
Wow. Sounds like Microsoft released a really shitty implementation of the USB only switch. Why would breaking the USB driver be any more likely (or even possible short of deliberate sabotage) than breaking the PS/2 driver anyway?
So, no. The much vaunted "Apple showed their foresight by ditching floppies" was a red herring if everyone needed to rush out and hang an external drive off the USB port anyway.
I'd agree that lots of people did go and get external floppy drives, I knew quite a few of them myself. The vast majority used them rarely, if ever, but wanted the perceived security - and since they were external, most of them ended up in a drawer gathering dust after a little while anyway. Those habits generally lasted far less than the lifetime of that form factor too, which helps everyone else who comes along.
Again, somebody has to be first - and the first major provider to do something always ends up getting slammed by their competitors since spreading FUD is easier than dismissing it and it makes for great checkbox-advertising points.
Bullshit. That is the same excuse Apple fans have been using for Apple for the last 15 years. Apple leaves out a VERY common feature and choice that everyone else but Apple has and uses with little to no problems and people claim it is for YOUR benefit. How many different things in this world have the ability to plug in some type of standard memory card? How many does Apple have? It has nothing to do with support and the overall the overall experience.
You know, somebody always has to go first.
People acted like the sky was falling when Apple got rid of PS/2 ports and moved to USB only - then when they realized what a superior experience it gave, they all followed suit. Similarly when Apple got rid of the floppy drive and then, years later, the optical drive and on some of their machines even the Ethernet ports. In all cases there were adapters available for the (very) few people who actually needed them, and in all cases despite the massive FUD being produced everything worked just fine.
Apple wants to avoid cases where users blame Apple for sluggish application performance, skipping music/video, bugs, etc... that are a result of something that Apple can't control or exert influence over.
Than how about they add some memory dedicated to the OS? The stuff is not that expensive these days...
And if they did people would be complaining about Apple using up memory that they paid for that's currently vacant just to handle a once-yearly iOS upgrade. At least this way most people can get use of the memory most of the time, its a damn sight simpler, and it allows Apple to report bigger numbers legitimately. Why wouldn't they do it the way that they are, especially knowing that they'd get abuse for it either way?
Yup. When my last company was a fledgling and we had more time than money, I was flying from Austin to Boston (through Dallas) and it saved several hundred dollars for my coworker to hop a SWA flight from Dallas to Austin and then join me on the AUS-DFW-BOS trip. Really stupid, and yes he simply got off the plane in Dallas on the way back.
I would like to fly Delta leaving my destination, but Southwest on my return. Can't do that with a round trip purchase, despite the availability of flights! Absolute bullshit!
How is that bullshit? You want to buy two different things from two totally different merchants!
That's like complaining that you want to get a Chipotle burrito for lunch and an In&Out burger for dinner and its bullshit that you can't do that with a single transaction.
Someone as simple as YouTube could probably handle that, but for any complex interactions I'll be damned if I'm going to take my time statefully rendering HTML pages on the server (about the most expensive and restrictive operations you can do) just for the truly minute fraction of one percent that won't trust their browsers to execute dynamic code in a nice secure sandbox. Sorry, but I'm with those guys now. You're gonna need a lot of rakes.
Almost everything but for an easy kill let's talk about real clustering that f'n works. MySQL, even with the 3rd party solutions out there (and I've tried many of them) doesn't get close to Oracle for a truly vertical and horizontal multi-datacenter cluster.
If you don't need that, MySQL is decent, although at least recently was still lacking in simple things like online index creation (adding an index to a table with hundreds of millions of rows shouldn't lock the table for hours, mmmkay?). Sure, there are very elaborate workarounds involving machine failovers, but there shouldn't have to be.
Its not the language, its the libraries, the conventions, the external resources. I picked up Ruby and Python, Node and even dusted off my PHP chops to write some modules for a client a few months ago. It wasn't hard, but I spent 20% of my time on the language, 50% figuring out what libraries to use, and another 30% making damn sure that my novice attempts were at least idiomatic and didn't come across as novice (including having them vetted by more seasoned users).
Anyone can write a for() loop in anything. Knowing the massive standard libraries for a language well enough to leverage them (for example, in Java I still see people dragging in external Base64 implementations that haven't been needed in a decade but once were) takes far, far longer.
I want people to write clean code that will be well understood and maintainable by others 5 years from now, not someone who just figures out how to get code to compile.
Also allow people to test their own meat and meds at purchase because fuck those regulations - the consumer should look out for themselves, amiright?
In the US, the employer probably has liability insurance that will pay most of the money. I would guess the liability insurance company probably requires the employer not to hire felons -- or charges a much higher premium to employers who hire felons.
Liability insurance gets even worse than that. If you believe that your accuser doesn't have a case but the insurance company is willing to settle, then if you go ahead and defend yourself you will have no protection if you lose. If you choose to settle because of this (most do) then your insurer gets to raise your rates because you've had a settlement against you. I know that's the way it is in the medical field and have seen nothing to indicate anything different anywhere else.
I'm actually a permanent resident here in the US. It doesn't bug me that much that I don't get to vote for President and other federal offices, but everywhere from there on down just uses that privilege to define their own. It really makes no sense to me that after living ni a city for over a decade I can't have a voice in who's elected to the truly local position of dogcatcher :)
As opposed to Windows' filesystems? Are they somehow a standard everybody must follow?
Well, FAT is basically the defacto standard since almost every random device supports it, so in the most important colloquial sense of the word standard, "Yes."
Sorry, of you can't see that when Real advertises that the DRMed music you buy from them will play on an iPod without problem, Apple will have to make sure it does - then you are obviously a fanboy.
So if Apple advertises that apps written for OS X will run on Windows, its suddenly Microsoft's fault if they don't? Or are you saying that once someone's found a bug in your system and written an exploit for it that you should be required to never again patch that bug?
There would be a process in which your scenario would have worked by the way - Real could have chosen to license FairPlay, at which point they would have been able to claim exactly that and be backed up by their contract with Apple. They didn't.
Of course, to be able to read that "ecological" ebook, you just need to extract and rape the planet of non-renewable rare metals so you can manufacture the various device display and electronics components...
Its a crying shame that most software developers don't use computers. Then we'd be able to solve that problem "for free" as they say. Oh, well...
People blame silly decisions on "PCI" all the time as well. I'm not a QSA but I do a lot of work in payments and took my last small company through PA-DSS level 1, so I've got some background there.
Having said that, anyone who touches a credit card should generally be in a PCI scope - even if you're a small mom-n-pop bookstore that takes Stripe. The worst abuse that I've seen though is trying to convince people that they should go all the way to "level one" compliance. The levels are based on your processing volume, with 4 being the lowest and 1 the highest. There's a self-abasement questionnaire, level 4 takes about 15 minutes, 2 takes all of 30 minutes (each with a truly trivial systems scan if you're doing work on the internet). Level 1, on the other hand, is designed for people staggering amounts of money and requires expensive on-site audits.
Like premium gas, there's no reason to level up beyond where you need to be except for silly marketing purposes - yet more and more people who trust their consultant advisors are doing so, because its a relatively easy way for consultants to make bank.
Make the case that your solution is cheaper than the existing solution if it is in fact cheaper.
It may not be. Don't assume that everyone who came before you is an idiot - they may well have ended up where they are now due to a series of compromises to work around issues that you know nothing about. Why not ask someone who's been involved in the security decisions for a few years why things are the way that they are first?
THAT is why many people avoid Apple like the plague. They've lost their lead, had their fun and are now fighting fowl.
Yup. Random mostly-unsubstantiated rumors that totally happened to a friend of your cousin's roommate are indeed why many people avoid Apple products. Others know that things like this - including such goodies as the "if you hold it the wrong way it dies," issue - are totally overblown if not completely fictional.
An awful lot of people put an awful lot of music on their iPods that wasn't bought from Apple. It all basically worked. The plural of anecdote may not really be data, but in a lot of ways its far more trustworthy than random anti-Apple stories coming out of the woodwork.
If they didn't keep your transaction open, they wouldn't be able to charge you for damage or incidentals. It's why hotels require credit cards for bookings in the first place. Usually they haven't seen your room when you check out.
Unless they saved the credit card number, either directly or through vaulting at their provider. Both of those are easy and common, and the second one is even safe (since it only allows that particular merchant to charge the card at will, it doesn't appeal to thieves like an actual credit card number would).
Except... Once the guests are at the hotel and checking in, the hotel will ask for their credit card and pre-auth the amount. Why would you pre-auth a card marked not to be used except if the guests do not show up? This card you should reserve the cost of a single night at the time of booking, and clear once the guests arrive.
Because that's the only way to tell that its a real credit card instead of a bunch of made up numbers that happen to look like a credit card number. The whole reason that pre-authorizations exist is to allow people to show that they're "good for the debt" without actually paying for it (yet).