Critical Mass is different things to different people, and people ride for different reasons. A few do ride to screw with motorists -- but they're typically the minority, and their fellow riders get them to cut that crap out or not come back.
As for cars getting their mirrors bashed or other similar acts of vandalism, that's pretty rare. Most riders are just out there to ride and have a good time. Red lights are often run, yes, "no more than two abreast" is flaunted (as it should be with hundreds of cyclists on a road) but beyond that... it's mostly just a fun big bike ride.
As for "encouraging traffic harmony" -- that's really not the point for most. Perhaps the biggest reason people do it is that it's fun, and if there's a message it's more "we're here!" than anything else.
If you want to read more, the Wikipedia page on it is a pretty good starting point.
Then the sensors are faulty. Properly adjusted, they will reliably pick up a bicycle. Even a bicycle with a carbon fiber frame -- the wheels alone are enough to trigger a properly adjusted sensor.
In Austin, you can call 311 (the non-emergency line) and report an intersection where it doesn't work and they'll fix it in a few days.
Texas does the same thing, and I imagine many other US states have done this too.
To make matters worse, Texas recently made the value of a used car for tax purposes based on blue book value or something similar, so if you sell a used car, they'll look up the value as if it was in good condition -- even if the car has been totaled. You can get the car appraised and use that value instead of the looked up value, but that costs about $300 -- often more than the tax will be for an older car. Licensed dealers are not subject to any of this -- they still use the actual sales price.
In any event, the IRS wanting their cut is not a new thing. The only new thing here is that they're now watching more carefully -- beyond that, the rules are generally unchanged. If you make a profit, the IRS wants their cut -- it doesn't really matter how you made this money -- with very very few exceptions.
... using comparatively horribly primitive technology?
It's not really that horribly primitive, at least not compared to 2010 technology rather than 2245 technology.
Sure, we've got better computers, sensors, cameras, etc. today -- but rockets haven't changed that much since then. They're made with similar materials (well, we probably like things like carbon fiber more now, but our new materials and methods aren't *that* much better than what was used 40 years ago) and fuels. And our new high technology does make it that much more expensive.
Going to the moon was hard 40 years ago. It might be marginally easier now (if you can get past the financial part of things) -- but it's still hard.
2117 m^3/year is 1531 gallons/day.
9943 m^3/year is 7192 gallons/day.
That's a lot of water in both cases. Looking at my water bill, my family of five (in the US -- Texas) used 2900 gallons last month. That's 19 gallons per person per day. I realize that it's not quite summer yet, where our water usage will double or so -- so let's say the average is 30 gallons/day -- but even so, does industry really use 240 times as much water as individuals?
The United States Secret Service doesn't enforce those laws, so bringing that into this conversation is pointless.
You can nitpick about it all you want, but the Secret Service are police, and they do a police job, with police tactics and tools. Sure, they may be somewhat different than the rank and file police, but ultimately -- they're still police, and people would be wise to treat them like police or other men with guns (i.e. don't talk to them, don't invite them in, don't consent, no sudden moves, etc.)
I'm pretty sure if the SS thought a threat to the President (or a counterfeiting operation, I guess) was at your house -- they'd get a warrant and break the door down just like SWAT does for drug operations. (The local police SWAT team would probably even help.) And if your seven year old granddaughter got shot and killed during this raid, well, she's still dead.
The entire conversation is pointless at some level.
2) Motorcycles are too small to set off magnetic sensors where lights are not timed, so motorcyclists must pull into the intersection and then clear as the light shifts to red.
If this is true, then the sensors are not properly calibrated.
BICYCLES will set these sensors off reliably when they're properly calibrated. Even bicycles with carbon fiber frames.
Here in Austin, when you find an intersection that you can't trigger with your bicycle, you call 311, and they'll send somebody out within a few days and get it fixed.
It's entirely possible that he did contact the EFF.
But the EFF can't fight every battle -- they go after the land-breaking ones, the ones that will have the highest benefit/cost ratio. It's not clear that this is such a battle.
To be fair, the title of the article is "A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux" -- rather different from the/. title of "Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C".
The title of the article is certainly correct, and if you're sticking to ELF and don't care about your language, it's likely as small as you're going to get. But as for what the/. article said, you can likely get even smaller with a.out format, and do be aware that even the article referenced isn't doing it with C.
First of all, he's cheating a bit -- this really isn't a C program anymore -- it's an assembly program. Since it's apparently OK to change languages, we could simply do this --
#!/bin/sh exit 42
... though that's obviously violating the spirit of the exercise.
But it's possible he could make it shorter. Linux has used ELF since 1.2, but it used the a.out format before that (yes, gcc still creates a file called a.out by default, but the reasons for that are historical -- the name of the output file and the format really are unrelated.) And it looks like modern kernels still have the code for CONFIG_HAVE_AOUT even if it doesn't seem to really be enabled often anymore.
In any event, a.out is a good deal simpler than elf. I'll bet he could make his program even shorter by using it.
Of course, that's for perl 6 -- which hasn't been released, and it's hard to tell when or if it'll ever be released.
Personally, I think a lot of the perl hate comes from the perl users getting stuff solved fast and (often) ugly, when the perl haters spend far more time creating their (often) far prettier solutions. If the programs need to be written quickly, I'd say perl would be the language to use (except that it's not permitted, of course.) If the programs need to execute quickly, C -- but it'll take longer to write them. In most cases (real world and contests!), time to write the program is more important than execution time -- though I'm not familiar with this contest.
... it wasn't the LHC, but it still screwed him up pretty nicely, even if it didn't kill him.
The LHC analogy is a pretty good one, though it's not clear how dense the beam is in the LHC vs. what would be found in outer space -- it's probably more dense in the LHC.
And yes, the anonymous coward who said this is old news is absolutely right -- it's been discussed in science fiction for decades now, usually with some sort of shield that protects people and perhaps even collects the hydrogen for use in the spacecraft's fusion engines.
It gives the hacker more chances to sniff the connection, but less time to decrypt whatever was sniffed during the beginning of a connection and use it to take over the connection.
It could go either way, depending on whatever vulnerabilities may be found in OpenSSH in the future (or are already known, but not public knowledge.)
Personally, I'd think that going for more, shorter lasting connections would be safer than fewer, longer lasting ones, simply because if they can figure out your password from the key exchange, they can probably do it every time, so it doesn't matter if it's one or many times -- they go it. Of course, this assumes a future vulnerability...
The right to remain silent (which comes from the fifth amendment) includes the right to not talk to police. About anything, really.
And since nobody can really know ALL the laws, simply reporting an observed crime to the police could very well incriminate you in some crime, either the crime you're reporting or something else (watching a cock fight? illegal. Being out after curfew? Illegal. Who knows what laws you might have violated simply by being there, and when you report this crime, you're telling them that you were there.)
For more on this --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuchttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE
[ I'm referring to the concept of seeing something that moves faster than the speed of light, not anything else here, just so it's clear ]
Consider this situation --
You've got a big sphere. Let's say it's 93 million miles in radius (the size of our radius around the sun -- it's a figure we're all familiar with anyways.)
In the middle of this sphere is a man. He has a laser, and he's shining it on the sphere. Since the man is still, the laser is not moving.
But, then the man starts spinning, once per second. The laser takes about 8 minutes to reach the edge of the sphere, but once it does, the dot starts going around the outside of the sphere, once per second. If you do the math, that means the dot is moving 584,000,000 miles per second -- which is about 3100 times the speed of light.
The light from the laser is still going at the speed of light, but the dot appears to be moving at over 3000 times the speed of light. But it's just a location -- the spot that the laser is hitting right now -- it doesn't mean that something tangible is exceeding the speed of light, and therefore Einstein isn't proved wrong by it.
My point is, it doesn't require some really strange neutron star situation to picture a situation where something might appear to be traveling faster than the speed of light.
in your example Sears is only charging the applicable sales tax for where the physical store is located. Imagine if every time you walked into a Sears you had to present an ID with an address and your sales tax was based on your physical address, even if you lived out of state from where the store you were shopping at was located.
He wasn't exactly clear, but what if you order it at sears.com? If there's a Sears store in that state, and they're the same business entity, then they DO have to work out your sales tax based on your physical address.
Considering that there's a Sears in most states, they would have to do this for most of the country.
... unless they can make the claim that Sears stores and sears.com are different entities. Which I imagine they do -- but then they still have to handle the really screwed up tax situation, but at least just for one state -- the one that sears.com is in.
My wife made custom purses a few years back. She had to collect Texas sales tax. Much of her business was over the Internet, and much was in Texas, so she had to figure out where people live and charge them the proper tax -- she had to keep track of every single sale. It was a serious pain in the ass for her, but the alternative was to not sell the purses (which she finally decided to do.)
A drop of water is a lot smaller than 0.1 cm^3. This is hardly a scientific study, but they measured 0.025 g, which works out to about 0.025 cm^3 -- 8 times smaller.
Of course, drops come in lots of different sizes, but I'm guessing that one was on the large side. At some point the drop will get too large for surface tension to properly hold it together and it breaks up -- (assuming it's falling in gravity, anyways.)
In general I support Terry's decision as well. However, if it were me, I'd never have let it get this far.
Once they talk about firing me or having me arrested (!), or even once somebody of high enough rank asks for it, I write down why it's inappropriate, that I'm doing it under duress, and give that to them and HR along with the passwords. Then I get another job, because obviously this one sucks.
As for what the french people actually did, I do not know, but encryption *was* illegal there during the early period of the `Internet era'.
I was a sysadmin (in the US) at the time, and my boss was from France. He was a ssh user, but needed telnet access set up (I set it up with s/key so at least passwords couldn't be sniffed) while he was there visiting family. Perhaps he could have used ssh safely, but he certainly was aware that this was illegal and was quite concerned about it -- he was worried he wouldn't be able to log in and check mail and such, at least until I suggested s/key (which wasn't a perfect solution, but it was good enough.)
It just seems ironic to see encryption software coming from there -- this wasn't *that* long ago.
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Critical Mass is different things to different people, and people ride for different reasons. A few do ride to screw with motorists -- but they're typically the minority, and their fellow riders get them to cut that crap out or not come back.
As for cars getting their mirrors bashed or other similar acts of vandalism, that's pretty rare. Most riders are just out there to ride and have a good time. Red lights are often run, yes, "no more than two abreast" is flaunted (as it should be with hundreds of cyclists on a road) but beyond that ... it's mostly just a fun big bike ride.
As for "encouraging traffic harmony" -- that's really not the point for most. Perhaps the biggest reason people do it is that it's fun, and if there's a message it's more "we're here!" than anything else.
If you want to read more, the Wikipedia page on it is a pretty good starting point.
In Austin, you can call 311 (the non-emergency line) and report an intersection where it doesn't work and they'll fix it in a few days.
In Ontario, every sale of a car is taxed.
Texas does the same thing, and I imagine many other US states have done this too. To make matters worse, Texas recently made the value of a used car for tax purposes based on blue book value or something similar, so if you sell a used car, they'll look up the value as if it was in good condition -- even if the car has been totaled. You can get the car appraised and use that value instead of the looked up value, but that costs about $300 -- often more than the tax will be for an older car. Licensed dealers are not subject to any of this -- they still use the actual sales price.
In any event, the IRS wanting their cut is not a new thing. The only new thing here is that they're now watching more carefully -- beyond that, the rules are generally unchanged. If you make a profit, the IRS wants their cut -- it doesn't really matter how you made this money -- with very very few exceptions.
... using comparatively horribly primitive technology?
It's not really that horribly primitive, at least not compared to 2010 technology rather than 2245 technology.
Sure, we've got better computers, sensors, cameras, etc. today -- but rockets haven't changed that much since then. They're made with similar materials (well, we probably like things like carbon fiber more now, but our new materials and methods aren't *that* much better than what was used 40 years ago) and fuels. And our new high technology does make it that much more expensive.
Going to the moon was hard 40 years ago. It might be marginally easier now (if you can get past the financial part of things) -- but it's still hard.
9943 m^3/year is 7192 gallons/day.
That's a lot of water in both cases. Looking at my water bill, my family of five (in the US -- Texas) used 2900 gallons last month. That's 19 gallons per person per day. I realize that it's not quite summer yet, where our water usage will double or so -- so let's say the average is 30 gallons/day -- but even so, does industry really use 240 times as much water as individuals?
The United States Secret Service doesn't enforce those laws, so bringing that into this conversation is pointless.
You can nitpick about it all you want, but the Secret Service are police, and they do a police job, with police tactics and tools. Sure, they may be somewhat different than the rank and file police, but ultimately -- they're still police, and people would be wise to treat them like police or other men with guns (i.e. don't talk to them, don't invite them in, don't consent, no sudden moves, etc.)
I'm pretty sure if the SS thought a threat to the President (or a counterfeiting operation, I guess) was at your house -- they'd get a warrant and break the door down just like SWAT does for drug operations. (The local police SWAT team would probably even help.) And if your seven year old granddaughter got shot and killed during this raid, well, she's still dead.
The entire conversation is pointless at some level.
Of course. Though I now use trn and slrn ... I like trn better, but it's not maintained and it gives me some grief that slrn doesn't ...
2) Motorcycles are too small to set off magnetic sensors where lights are not timed, so motorcyclists must pull into the intersection and then clear as the light shifts to red.
If this is true, then the sensors are not properly calibrated.
BICYCLES will set these sensors off reliably when they're properly calibrated. Even bicycles with carbon fiber frames.
Here in Austin, when you find an intersection that you can't trigger with your bicycle, you call 311, and they'll send somebody out within a few days and get it fixed.
But the EFF can't fight every battle -- they go after the land-breaking ones, the ones that will have the highest benefit/cost ratio. It's not clear that this is such a battle.
To be fair, the title of the article is "A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux" -- rather different from the /. title of "Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C".
The title of the article is certainly correct, and if you're sticking to ELF and don't care about your language, it's likely as small as you're going to get. But as for what the /. article said, you can likely get even smaller with a.out format, and do be aware that even the article referenced isn't doing it with C.
But it's possible he could make it shorter. Linux has used ELF since 1.2, but it used the a.out format before that (yes, gcc still creates a file called a.out by default, but the reasons for that are historical -- the name of the output file and the format really are unrelated.) And it looks like modern kernels still have the code for CONFIG_HAVE_AOUT even if it doesn't seem to really be enabled often anymore.
In any event, a.out is a good deal simpler than elf. I'll bet he could make his program even shorter by using it.
Personally, I think a lot of the perl hate comes from the perl users getting stuff solved fast and (often) ugly, when the perl haters spend far more time creating their (often) far prettier solutions. If the programs need to be written quickly, I'd say perl would be the language to use (except that it's not permitted, of course.) If the programs need to execute quickly, C -- but it'll take longer to write them. In most cases (real world and contests!), time to write the program is more important than execution time -- though I'm not familiar with this contest.
The LHC analogy is a pretty good one, though it's not clear how dense the beam is in the LHC vs. what would be found in outer space -- it's probably more dense in the LHC.
And yes, the anonymous coward who said this is old news is absolutely right -- it's been discussed in science fiction for decades now, usually with some sort of shield that protects people and perhaps even collects the hydrogen for use in the spacecraft's fusion engines.
It gives the hacker more chances to sniff the connection, but less time to decrypt whatever was sniffed during the beginning of a connection and use it to take over the connection.
It could go either way, depending on whatever vulnerabilities may be found in OpenSSH in the future (or are already known, but not public knowledge.)
Personally, I'd think that going for more, shorter lasting connections would be safer than fewer, longer lasting ones, simply because if they can figure out your password from the key exchange, they can probably do it every time, so it doesn't matter if it's one or many times -- they go it. Of course, this assumes a future vulnerability ...
The right to remain silent (which comes from the fifth amendment) includes the right to not talk to police. About anything, really. And since nobody can really know ALL the laws, simply reporting an observed crime to the police could very well incriminate you in some crime, either the crime you're reporting or something else (watching a cock fight? illegal. Being out after curfew? Illegal. Who knows what laws you might have violated simply by being there, and when you report this crime, you're telling them that you were there.) For more on this -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE
Bridge Commander was indeed excellent. I also liked the RTS ST:Armada -- it was cheesy, but fun.
Of course, I liked TA:Kingdoms too. It wasn't as good as TA, but I still liked it.
Though I do agree -- it was weird how you played 98% of the game with your very first weapon. Sure, you could use others, but why?
[ I'm referring to the concept of seeing something that moves faster than the speed of light, not anything else here, just so it's clear ]
Consider this situation --
You've got a big sphere. Let's say it's 93 million miles in radius (the size of our radius around the sun -- it's a figure we're all familiar with anyways.)
In the middle of this sphere is a man. He has a laser, and he's shining it on the sphere. Since the man is still, the laser is not moving.
But, then the man starts spinning, once per second. The laser takes about 8 minutes to reach the edge of the sphere, but once it does, the dot starts going around the outside of the sphere, once per second. If you do the math, that means the dot is moving 584,000,000 miles per second -- which is about 3100 times the speed of light.
The light from the laser is still going at the speed of light, but the dot appears to be moving at over 3000 times the speed of light. But it's just a location -- the spot that the laser is hitting right now -- it doesn't mean that something tangible is exceeding the speed of light, and therefore Einstein isn't proved wrong by it.
My point is, it doesn't require some really strange neutron star situation to picture a situation where something might appear to be traveling faster than the speed of light.
in your example Sears is only charging the applicable sales tax for where the physical store is located. Imagine if every time you walked into a Sears you had to present an ID with an address and your sales tax was based on your physical address, even if you lived out of state from where the store you were shopping at was located.
He wasn't exactly clear, but what if you order it at sears.com? If there's a Sears store in that state, and they're the same business entity, then they DO have to work out your sales tax based on your physical address.
Considering that there's a Sears in most states, they would have to do this for most of the country.
My wife made custom purses a few years back. She had to collect Texas sales tax. Much of her business was over the Internet, and much was in Texas, so she had to figure out where people live and charge them the proper tax -- she had to keep track of every single sale. It was a serious pain in the ass for her, but the alternative was to not sell the purses (which she finally decided to do.)
Of course, drops come in lots of different sizes, but I'm guessing that one was on the large side. At some point the drop will get too large for surface tension to properly hold it together and it breaks up -- (assuming it's falling in gravity, anyways.)
Mildly insulting is one thing. Going so far that you've basically quit your job is too far.
I assume that part of the unpleasant conversation was you suggesting that the VP or Pres get involved, and this was rebuked.
Once they talk about firing me or having me arrested (!), or even once somebody of high enough rank asks for it, I write down why it's inappropriate, that I'm doing it under duress, and give that to them and HR along with the passwords. Then I get another job, because obviously this one sucks.
As for what the french people actually did, I do not know, but encryption *was* illegal there during the early period of the `Internet era'.
I was a sysadmin (in the US) at the time, and my boss was from France. He was a ssh user, but needed telnet access set up (I set it up with s/key so at least passwords couldn't be sniffed) while he was there visiting family. Perhaps he could have used ssh safely, but he certainly was aware that this was illegal and was quite concerned about it -- he was worried he wouldn't be able to log in and check mail and such, at least until I suggested s/key (which wasn't a perfect solution, but it was good enough.)
It just seems ironic to see encryption software coming from there -- this wasn't *that* long ago.