It was more accurate back when the grid had to be phase locked. Now, many parts of the grid use long distance DC transmittion lines, which are converted back to AC.
The power companies do recognise that many clocks are tied to the mains frequency, so they try to make the average frequency 60 or 50 Hz.
You don't have to tamper with the analog sound around the microphone, you just have to tamper with the digital recording enough to fool the algorithm the determines the recording is "correct". If you have access to the original recording, the algorithm and the database, you'd be able to do this.
Studies have shown that even innocent suspects will confess when presented with overwhelming (fake) evidence.
It's almost like "if there's a way to automatically determine X, there's an automatic way to fake X.
Wait, it *is* that way.
In the future there'll be no way to determine reality, because we'll all just be disembodied heads in vats, networked into vaste reality generating machines.
I saw some research into people that "Were Never Sick a Day in Their Lives". Turns out these people get the common cold just as much as the rest of the population, but they don't get the immune system avalanche that give normal humans their symptoms. So even though their not sick, they are infecting the rest of us.
Anyway, imagine you are a boss, and your promotion/bonus is tied to quantifiable goals. You have on your team someone who is never sick, and someone who is sick all the time. Who do you want to keep on your team? Who are you going to give the raise? As long as you work in an environment where "performance" is measured and rewarded, you don't want to appear as a non-performer.
Physical lock makers will tell you that their cheap locks are pickable. But they'll sell you "security" locks that cost much, much more, and are much more resistant to lockpicks. Several manufacturers have offered bounties for anyone that can pick their locks.
Did Onity offer customers the choice of good and better locks and the customers cheaped out, or was this the best they had?
In a sane world (which the legal system is not), that massive shit of dense legalese would be clear proof that the EULA was never meant to be read or understood by the user.
Hmm, how about a legal principle that correlates the value of an object with the size of the EULA. Companies would get 256 bytes to start with, then 1 byte per $10. Any part of the contract after the limit would be null and void.
Standard things like songs, cars, and houses could just provide a link to the relevant law and leave it at that.
I've also thought that a law that discourages companies from claiming rights they don't have would be a good idea.
It's hard for the average nerd, you either have to be so small and invisible that you can take off at a moment's notice, or maintain shell corporations that own all the stuff that might get taken. If you own a house, or have a family that you care about, fugetaboutit.
There's some good advice about the antenna above, but you may find the the quality of the coax and it's length have more affect on performance than the type of antenna you use.
You might even be better puting the entire router/antenna system up high, and running power and ethernet down. (Of couse putting the whole thing in a waterproof plastic box.)
Why not offer two "phone gateways" for your support? One for customers with existing support contract, and another for those without...
The non-support number should always go to the sales department. Once the person is taking to someone in sales, payment can be arranged.
Sales people have a hard enough time selling to people who have never heard of their product. Selling to someone who knows, uses, and needs your product is a dream jobs for a real salesperson.
Your "Free Support" phone line should go directly to the sales department. Any good salesperson will be able to use these calls to generate real sales.
A great salesperson will make the person feel like they are being taken care of, as they are being pumped for information that will eventually lead to a sale.
In the past, people have been kidnapped and it's take days to get phone records. Since a criminal will rarely stop at stealing just one cellphone, tracking stolen phones seem like a good idea.
I've heard news reports of people's phones and credit cards being stolen, and the police having them immediately canceled. Bad Idea(tm). If an easily traceable item is stolen, it should be flagged in the system. You don't have to automatically authorize large purchases or long calls, but allowing some activity on the stolen item could lead to it's recovery. A deactivated device will be quickly discarded. With a cell phone, you could easily send it a signal to pretend to drop calls and have lousy service while you are tracing it.
Legend has it that when Intel first showed the 4004 to the Navy, one of the Admirals said something like, "A computer on a chip is nice, but how do you repair it?" He was thinking that you'd use micro-tweezers and soldering irons to fix bad chips, instead of just replacing them wholesale.
There are many CPUs that are only available as a PC board with several chips. I can envision a day when the whole motherboard is the unit of replacement.
I've worked with enterprise monitoring/ distribution tools, advertised as "Just write a few scripts on your target machines, and it works" After all the scripts where written, they dwarfted the original product, and when the new version was released, everything had to be reworked, because the old and new versions had different APIs.
Now I'm working on an Oracle OUD 11.x installation that doesn't do exactly what we want. The sales engineer said, oh you can write a custum plugin to do that. "Ok", I said, "Will the custom plugin run in OUD 12.x?". Probably not, was the answer.
Setting either SAP or Oracle ~properly~ requires expert knowledge, and running either ~properly~ requires expert knowledge. This is expected, because it's an extremely complex product which is meant to be deeply customized to your own business solutions.
I hear this, but I think, "A C complier is a extremely complex product meant to be deeply customized to your own business solutions." Yet GCC is relatively easy to install, and once installed I can start customzing right away. I can even use customizations that I've written years before and expect them to run with little or no modification. (C programs)
Installing the product, and running a test case should be a no-brainer, no matter how big the product is. After it's installed and running, then you can start to add business customizations that might be difficult and time consuming.
"Software quality is inversely proportional to cost". In other words, the more expensive a given piece of software is, the crappier it is. Oracle and SAP are the NUMBER ONE offenders in this regard.
For almost all multi-million dollar software, by the time you are installing it, the contracts have been signed, and the money is spent. Then, your bosses will fight tooth and nail to justify having spent $10,000,000 on the new system. They just don't want to hear that a $10,000 Linux solution will work better. Usually, their jobs depend on *not* looking for better products.
See, "The Sunk Cost Fallacy"
I would start by trying to engineer whole classes of faults out at the language level, as has been done with buffer overflows and garbage collection.
I once started a library of C wrappers that would handle most normal and a few abnormal errors. For instance, the fopen() wrapper instead of saying "no such file or directory", would tackle each part of a path like/usr/etc/subdir/file and tell you where it couldn't go further. If there was a permission problem, it would say "Cannot search/usr/etc/subdir", or if subdir didn't exists, it would say so, rather than just spitting back the whole path and letting the user figure out what went wrong. It used C preprocessor tricks to get the source file and line number where the function was called.
It was call the ED (Error Detecting) library. You could set environment variables to shut it up or make it more verbose.
I never got much interest or traction. It's under the Purdue Research Foundation license, but I don't think the code is available anywhere.
Many places judges are not trained, they are elected. Some aren't even lawyers.
An extension of the small claims process for interstate companies would help. The lawsuit wouldn't last more than a day, and the Judge would be impartial.
The question becomes, what do we do to fix this so that consumers are truly protected?"
Congresss needs to step in and clarify. Either just git rid of the class action (and replace it with what?) or confirm that all consumers have a class action right, no matter the language of the contract.
Even more far out, would be arbitration reform. Instead of arbitrators being hired by the companies that have a stake in the outcome, make the companies pay into a pool for each instance of arbitration they are called to. The arbitrator for a specific dispute would be pulled randomly from a pool of trained arbitrators. The could be industry specific pools, or just train the arbitrators in contract law. Of course if I were such an arbitrator, I'd throw out any contract over N pages. (Unless both parties had actual input into the contract)
It sure will be nice when there is video evidence to show the real story."
Unfortunately, there's always a sampling bias with any recording device. The "real story" could easily be right off camera, or between frames.
Of course, if there are enough of these, and multiple officers at the scene, you might be able to stitch together the whole scene. On the other hand, most police mistakes occur at night in challanging situations for small video cameras.
...
Back then, people could recite Homer's illiad in verbatim (or very close) because stories, news, and information was passed around by word-of-mouth, not by paper, or books...
Really. Kind of hard to prove this. Try to find two ancient stories whose writers used the same spellings, much less told the exact same story.
How do you know that the first person to write down the Illiad didn't make it up, all of it including the blind poet for dramatic purpose? Other texts might mention Homer, but they could have read about him from the 1st writer.
Slashdot Mirror
It was more accurate back when the grid had to be phase locked. Now, many parts of the grid use long distance DC transmittion lines, which are converted back to AC.
The power companies do recognise that many clocks are tied to the mains frequency, so they try to make the average frequency 60 or 50 Hz.
You don't have to tamper with the analog sound around the microphone, you just have to tamper with the digital recording enough to fool the algorithm the determines the recording is "correct". If you have access to the original recording, the algorithm and the database, you'd be able to do this.
Studies have shown that even innocent suspects will confess when presented with overwhelming (fake) evidence.
We're finding out that many forensic "experts" are faking their expertise, and essentially lying on the witness stand.
No need to fake evidence, just find a friendly "expert" to tell the jury what you want them to hear.
It's almost like "if there's a way to automatically determine X, there's an automatic way to fake X.
Wait, it *is* that way.
In the future there'll be no way to determine reality, because we'll all just be disembodied heads in vats, networked into vaste reality generating machines.
I saw some research into people that "Were Never Sick a Day in Their Lives". Turns out these people get the common cold just as much as the rest of the population, but they don't get the immune system avalanche that give normal humans their symptoms. So even though their not sick, they are infecting the rest of us.
Anyway, imagine you are a boss, and your promotion/bonus is tied to quantifiable goals. You have on your team someone who is never sick, and someone who is sick all the time. Who do you want to keep on your team? Who are you going to give the raise? As long as you work in an environment where "performance" is measured and rewarded, you don't want to appear as a non-performer.
Physical lock makers will tell you that their cheap locks are pickable. But they'll sell you "security" locks that cost much, much more, and are much more resistant to lockpicks. Several manufacturers have offered bounties for anyone that can pick their locks.
Did Onity offer customers the choice of good and better locks and the customers cheaped out, or was this the best they had?
In a sane world (which the legal system is not), that massive shit of dense legalese would be clear proof that the EULA was never meant to be read or understood by the user.
Hmm, how about a legal principle that correlates the value of an object with the size of the EULA. Companies would get 256 bytes to start with, then 1 byte per $10. Any part of the contract after the limit would be null and void.
Standard things like songs, cars, and houses could just provide a link to the relevant law and leave it at that.
I've also thought that a law that discourages companies from claiming rights they don't have would be a good idea.
It's hard for the average nerd, you either have to be so small and invisible that you can take off at a moment's notice, or maintain shell corporations that own all the stuff that might get taken. If you own a house, or have a family that you care about, fugetaboutit.
There's some good advice about the antenna above, but you may find the the quality of the coax and it's length have more affect on performance than the type of antenna you use.
You might even be better puting the entire router/antenna system up high, and running power and ethernet down. (Of couse putting the whole thing in a waterproof plastic box.)
You can prototype it with a laptop and a ladder.
Why not offer two "phone gateways" for your support? One for customers with existing support contract, and another for those without...
The non-support number should always go to the sales department. Once the person is taking to someone in sales, payment can be arranged.
Sales people have a hard enough time selling to people who have never heard of their product. Selling to someone who knows, uses, and needs your product is a dream jobs for a real salesperson.
Your "Free Support" phone line should go directly to the sales department. Any good salesperson will be able to use these calls to generate real sales.
A great salesperson will make the person feel like they are being taken care of, as they are being pumped for information that will eventually lead to a sale.
In the past, people have been kidnapped and it's take days to get phone records. Since a criminal will rarely stop at stealing just one cellphone, tracking stolen phones seem like a good idea.
I've heard news reports of people's phones and credit cards being stolen, and the police having them immediately canceled. Bad Idea(tm). If an easily traceable item is stolen, it should be flagged in the system. You don't have to automatically authorize large purchases or long calls, but allowing some activity on the stolen item could lead to it's recovery. A deactivated device will be quickly discarded. With a cell phone, you could easily send it a signal to pretend to drop calls and have lousy service while you are tracing it.
Legend has it that when Intel first showed the 4004 to the Navy, one of the Admirals said something like, "A computer on a chip is nice, but how do you repair it?" He was thinking that you'd use micro-tweezers and soldering irons to fix bad chips, instead of just replacing them wholesale.
There are many CPUs that are only available as a PC board with several chips. I can envision a day when the whole motherboard is the unit of replacement.
I've worked with enterprise monitoring/ distribution tools, advertised as "Just write a few scripts on your target machines, and it works" After all the scripts where written, they dwarfted the original product, and when the new version was released, everything had to be reworked, because the old and new versions had different APIs.
Now I'm working on an Oracle OUD 11.x installation that doesn't do exactly what we want. The sales engineer said, oh you can write a custum plugin to do that. "Ok", I said, "Will the custom plugin run in OUD 12.x?". Probably not, was the answer.
Setting either SAP or Oracle ~properly~ requires expert knowledge, and running either ~properly~ requires expert knowledge. This is expected, because it's an extremely complex product which is meant to be deeply customized to your own business solutions.
I hear this, but I think, "A C complier is a extremely complex product meant to be deeply customized to your own business solutions." Yet GCC is relatively easy to install, and once installed I can start customzing right away. I can even use customizations that I've written years before and expect them to run with little or no modification. (C programs)
Installing the product, and running a test case should be a no-brainer, no matter how big the product is. After it's installed and running, then you can start to add business customizations that might be difficult and time consuming.
"Software quality is inversely proportional to cost". In other words, the more expensive a given piece of software is, the crappier it is. Oracle and SAP are the NUMBER ONE offenders in this regard.
For almost all multi-million dollar software, by the time you are installing it, the contracts have been signed, and the money is spent. Then, your bosses will fight tooth and nail to justify having spent $10,000,000 on the new system. They just don't want to hear that a $10,000 Linux solution will work better. Usually, their jobs depend on *not* looking for better products. See, "The Sunk Cost Fallacy"
I would start by trying to engineer whole classes of faults out at the language level, as has been done with buffer overflows and garbage collection.
I once started a library of C wrappers that would handle most normal and a few abnormal errors. For instance, the fopen() wrapper instead of saying "no such file or directory", would tackle each part of a path like /usr/etc/subdir/file and tell you where it couldn't go further. If there was a permission problem, it would say "Cannot search /usr/etc/subdir", or if subdir didn't exists, it would say so, rather than just spitting back the whole path and letting the user figure out what went wrong. It used C preprocessor tricks to get the source file and line number where the function was called.
It was call the ED (Error Detecting) library. You could set environment variables to shut it up or make it more verbose.
I never got much interest or traction. It's under the Purdue Research Foundation license, but I don't think the code is available anywhere.
... big businesses that count on them ruling in their favor more often than courts would in consumer cases.
AFAIK, it's not just "more often", it's like greater than 90% of the time.
Many places judges are not trained, they are elected. Some aren't even lawyers.
An extension of the small claims process for interstate companies would help. The lawsuit wouldn't last more than a day, and the Judge would be impartial.
The question becomes, what do we do to fix this so that consumers are truly protected?"
Congresss needs to step in and clarify. Either just git rid of the class action (and replace it with what?) or confirm that all consumers have a class action right, no matter the language of the contract.
Even more far out, would be arbitration reform. Instead of arbitrators being hired by the companies that have a stake in the outcome, make the companies pay into a pool for each instance of arbitration they are called to. The arbitrator for a specific dispute would be pulled randomly from a pool of trained arbitrators. The could be industry specific pools, or just train the arbitrators in contract law. Of course if I were such an arbitrator, I'd throw out any contract over N pages. (Unless both parties had actual input into the contract)
... Can a defendant use the footage against the police?
How easy are they to crush under a Jack Boot?
It sure will be nice when there is video evidence to show the real story."
Unfortunately, there's always a sampling bias with any recording device. The "real story" could easily be right off camera, or between frames.
Of course, if there are enough of these, and multiple officers at the scene, you might be able to stitch together the whole scene. On the other hand, most police mistakes occur at night in challanging situations for small video cameras.
Rent part of it for income and live on the other part. The alternative is to rent your square feet from someone else or keep moving.
... Back then, people could recite Homer's illiad in verbatim (or very close) because stories, news, and information was passed around by word-of-mouth, not by paper, or books. ..
Really. Kind of hard to prove this. Try to find two ancient stories whose writers used the same spellings, much less told the exact same story.
How do you know that the first person to write down the Illiad didn't make it up, all of it including the blind poet for dramatic purpose? Other texts might mention Homer, but they could have read about him from the 1st writer.
The day you make a TV show that's more interesting than f*cking, the TV group is doomed. Full immersion, 3d feely-vision could fit the bill.