What on earth can it be doing such that 400MB of RAM is justified?
Tip of the day: don't think in terms of megabytes, megahertz, etc. Think in terms of money.
$75 worth of RAM should be enough for anyone. $90 of disk space is enough for MythTV, though $270 of disk space works a lot better. AMD's $60 CPU is better than Intel's $60 CPU, but Intel's $300 CPU is better than AMD's $300 CPU. And so on.
Do you want your parents and grandparents to die, homeless and destitute, because the government failed them?
No, but it's them or us.
People who paid into the system over the 40 or 50 years of their working lives quite reasonably expect to receive the benefits they earned and were promised.
They didn't do that in good faith. They knew it was a scam and cannot possibly work, just as well as we know now.
Why not blame the previous generation? The generation after us sure will.
If we don't end it now, then here's our next choice: do we try to con our kids into being the ones who die homeless, or do we accept that fate for ourselves?
We all know it has to end some day. The longer we continue the lie, the more unbearable it becomes. If we stop lying and our parents and grandparents pay the price, I don't see how that's our fault. They're the ones who tried to stick it to us.
Wait a minute, what happened to the rabid pro-free-market libertarian when you asked your second question? It looks like his arch-nemesis, a Republican, did a Man in the Middle attack. Next time, do your PK exchange correctly.
Millions of people still are satisfied with the "free with plan" basic Motorolla/Nokia with calls, text, and a few crappy games built in.
Of course they're satisfied with it. But how long will they continue to be able to get it?
Trying buying parts for a computer some time -- look at the prices -- and see what it would take to build something with 256MB of RAM, since that is "enough." You're going to find that 2GB of RAM is cheaper, because those strips are what is being mass-produced. Some day, you're going to want the cheapest, freest phone from your provider, and they are going to give you a supercomputer with integrated GPS, camera, music player, keychain, debit card magstrip emulator, universal IR remote, cigarette lighter, combo vibrating coffee-stirrer/dildo, and toaster, because it'll be cheaper for them to stock those as the low-end alternative, for the people who don't want to pay much extra for new trendy integrated stun gun or radio telescope (and even those will be free features, two generations later).
There are lots of.. little things.. that benefit from computer control, and maybe more importantly, a battery. It's efficient for them to all share one computer/battery. But once you start doing that, scale happens.
The movie studios understand this too. There's a damn good reason their ads stress "Own it now, on DVD and Blu-ray." It's what people want to hear before they put down money. If an ad said, "license it now on keychest," their sales, er I mean licensing revenue, would plummet. For all their suicidal tendencies, even Hollywood isn't trying to lose quite that fast.
Heh. I read the interview, and no where does he say Why he'd like to end anonymity.
That seems pretty astounding at first, until you realize that if he actually were to give a reason why it might possibly be desirable, people would start poking holes in his logic.
Native mobile applications are also a big factor here, and are often a far better choice
I fear you might be right, but it sure sucks. We went from an app ported to every platform, to a single app using middleware called "browser", and now we're headed back to an app for every platform? Ugh. There's got to be some way to avoid this bullshit.
if you want Linux to really take off and outnumber Windows on home PCs
Almost nobody does. Nobody cares about that. Nobody is really working on that.
Least of all, game creators. Sure, you can make a Linux-only game, but it's soooo easy to make a game portable. In fact, it requires more effort to make nonportable software, than portable software. You might go ahead and do it anyway (or just not bother with porting) but if you release the source to your game, then somebody is going to clean it up and get it to successfully compile/run for everything else. Windows and MacOS have OpenGL, Pygame, etc, even if those aren't the prefered APIs on those platforms.
Ergo, your only option is to release a proprietary game for Linux only. And then you're right back to the "nobody wants to" part. Nobody cares enough to bother doing that.
Who would do that? Certainly not pros; they want sales, so they're not going to go to extra trouble to eliminate 99% of sales. That leaves enthusiasts, and they would have to be awfully eccentric, to love Linux while simultaneously hating open source. Most will think that if releasing proprietary apps is ok, then proprietary OSes are ok too.
That's a neat story, but it means different things depending on who you tell it to.
At a shoe salesman convention, people will chuckle, smile, and nod.
At a car salesman convention, people will say, "We gotta get over there before everyone spends their limited supply on money on shoes instead of our product."
At the tribe meeting in Africa, people will say, "That exploitive yankee bastard is going to try to con us into buying crap we don't need. And last time I bought shoes, I found out they couldn't be repaired by just any cobbler, and could only be maintained by the factory."
Miguel and "open source" advocates have the first perspective. People who have been burned, see from the 3rd perspective (and possibly just out of fear, as Miguel suggests). RMS sees that 3rd perspective too, but also sees the 2nd, and that 2nd perspective is what I think -- when he's in a good mood -- he really wants to get across: support Free Software before blowing your time and money on Open Source.
Miguel and RMS just might both be right; it all depends on where you stand. I'm not interested in Mono but I don't feel threatened by it either, and I can surely understand why people who are into it, are happy to distract Microsoft with it. The worst I can say about it, is that it might be a gateway drug to.Net, and I never bought into gateway drug arguments anyway. Programmers are capable of knowing when they're crossing the line into irresponsible dependencies. Don't complain about the ones who, in the end, really just don't care, because that's their problem. Your problem is to just not do it.
BTW (almost a totally different topic), the patent fears about Mono don't make sense. It's not that patents aren't a threat, but they're a threat to everyone. If you work 8 hours in this business, then you probably unwittingly infringed someone's patent. Mono could get a C&D from Microsoft some day, making all investment into that platform retroactively a waste of time. But the same damned letter the Mono teams gets, can also be sent to the CPython or Java guys. The return address on the letter might not even be One Microsoft Way. Patents fuck up everyone, so I don't see them as a major factor in comparing projects that aren't yet known to infringe. If we were talking about, say, code that implements Theora vs h264, it would be different, because the specific problems would be known. But Mono-vs-Java? Equal risks until someone can put up or shut up by mentioning a specific patent.
Reminds me of an argument I recently had with a lefty. He thought government should do everything that business doesn't have the foresight to do. What's funny is that he was flaming religion just half an hour earlier -- organizations of people that are neither motivated by civics nor (barring Catholics) profits. People do so many things for so many reasons, some of them crazy and some of them brilliant. But talk politics with them and suddenly dollars are the only motivation that anyone has. Yeeeah, riiight.
Academics, hobbyists, philanthropists, religious nuts, crackpots: apparently none of these people exist!
Hopefully, the reason they have abstained from doing anything as stupid as installing Websense, is because Websense sucks. (It blocks stuff that isn't porn, and it doesn't block porn. If someone wants around it, they can always get around it. You need to deal with the people, not the network.)
A more cynical answer would be that they aren't running it, because they can't afford it or something like that, and that they are under the mistaken impression that if only they could get it, their problems would be solved.
Implementing all of these [list including health care reform]is a real drain on the economy
The fact that most people (including the bill authors) agree with this statement, is how I know the current health care reform bill is a fraud. Implementing health care reform would be a net gain to the GDP, i.e. generate a surplus that could be either taxed, or not wasted, making it easier to fund one of the other items on your list.
A health care "reform" that costs more than the old system -- that makes the nation poorer and weaker than it was before -- is not a reform.
And yet, the right is complaining about a shuffling of costs (changing who pays for what, and how), and both the right and left are uncomfortable about an overall increase in costs. No wonder nobody likes the bill; deep down, everyone knows that when insurance lobbyists spend over a million dollars per day for access to write a new law, it is because they know that they are going to come out ahead, at the country's expense.
Fuck that. Nobody who votes for a bill that was purchased by the insurance companies, is going to get my vote in the next election.
This isn't about socialism vs free markets. It's not right vs left. It's about a government for the people vs a government for someone else.
(I happen to agree it's an inalienable right, but) one of the interesting things about inalienable rights is that not everyone agrees just what they all are.
So regardless of what rights we have inherently, it's a good idea to go through the political process and have government pass laws to protect those rights. At least after that happens, we all have notice of which of our rights are protected, and which ones we have to protect for ourselves (by force, subterfuge, or whatever).
If the German people, overall, are willing to use deadly force against people who exercise their right to sell games where players kill Nazis, then it's good that German law does not protect people's right to sell games where players kill Nazis. Otherwise there would be a conflict and you're eventually going to get into a situation where cops and citizens are shooting at each other in the streets. The way to protect rights is to persuade a (strong) majority that it's a bad idea to infringe rights. In fact, it's the only way. Having laws that are contrary to the actual will of the people, just isn't a stable and sensible situation.
The problem with multi-threading isn't.. language support for nifty features
Not the whole problem, but actually, yes, some of the problem is with languages.
The problem with multi-threading is that some problems are damn hard to multi-thread
And some problems are not hard to multi-thread, and yet reasonably competent programmers end up sometimes screwing it up anyway. They make mistakes not because they're stupid, but because (for example) they're in a hurry. (All professional programmers are in a hurry. Ship it! Next work order!!)
There are ways we can make that situation easier.
This will only make overconfident developers shoot themselves in the foot more quickly
Ah, the old "power is dangerous" argument. You're right, and you're wrong, at the same time. Or rather, you are correct and irrelevant. Foot-shooters' problems are their problems. Your problems are your problems, and you don't want to have them. It's ok to make things easier for you. Don't worry about That Other Guy fucking up.
But this way you lose the files' permission information, which many times is very inconvenient
I guess it all depends on who you are and what you're doing. My experience is that I still haven't found a situation where it's inconvenient. There's something about removable media, that makes file ownership and permissions irrelevant. You pretty much have to assume the worst case anyway, and if you are using owners, groups, permissions etc to enforce anything, you have big problems anyway.
We all know physical access overrules permissions on disk, so we give up and say, "Yeah, if someone takes the hard drive out and puts it in another machine, there's little we can do (other than encrypt), so we're just not going to deal with that. On the bright side, no one is likely to actually do that, much less without being detected." Ah, but with removable media, that last sentence simply doesn't apply.
So what do you do about it, in the rare case (IMHO, obviously your situation is different or you wouldn't have asked) that you still want owners and permissions anyway? What fs should you use? Mu. Use a container. Tar is your filesystem. And best of all, if you have security considerations, check this out: you can trivially run your read/write pipeline through gpg or something, without having to worry about setting up encrypted filesystems or block layers.
Have you ever thought about how a "cat" scan works? Forget the 3D aspects and let's just think about how the cross-sectional pictures work.
Every given reading, is just shooting a ray through the target, and getting a single number out. This is analogous to aggregate summaries are personal details in data. You know the average income of people in zip code 12345, but no specifics. The trick is, later, just as that CT scan is going to shoot a ray through a certain point again from a different direction, your personal details are going to be summarized again by someone else, in a different way.
A picture will emerge. The CT scan is going to "see" the bone as distinct from the tissue right here at this pixel, and this person's data will be un-summarized. It just takes enough rays, and eventually all ambiguity goes away.
A long time ago (about 20 years ago, I think?) there was a neato explanation of a cat scan algorithm in Scientific American. I wish I could find it. Because I bet you could show that article to any "database guy" these days, and they'd nod and smile.
The pedestrian has no control over you and your cell phone, the absolute only thing he can nearly rely on about you is that you follow the law.
I realize you qualified that statement with "nearly" but it just isn't near enough to be "nearly.";)
Much like the driver travelling perpendicular to you from the left when you reach an intersection and see a green light, you're going straight through. You can't even see the guy coming... how the hell do you know he's going to stop at his red light and not just keep plowing away at 45mph, right into your driver side door?
You're right, I don't know. But at least my car is big enough both to be seen, and also be a deterrent. If you hit my car, you might get hurt. You hit me, you might have to go to the carwash.
And there's nothing the pedestrian can do about it either... without having been psychic, and knowing this one guy wasn't going to follow the rules that 98% of drivers do follow.
There you go: 98%. You'll be dead soon. And yes, it'll be their fault, so you can point the finger of shame at them, from your grave.
Geez, if you had exaggerated and said 99 with a few more 9s after the decimal, it would at least look like a good strategy on paper (until the real life 2% came up, killing you).
Here's what you can do about it, since it really is 98%. Stand on the sidewalk until everyone stops or makes eye contact. If you don't see them react to you, they're going to kill you. No psychic powers needed.
Please, people who assume cars will yield, don't do it. The law is on your side, but life isn't.
That's really a tough case, because while the driver is clearly in the wrong in a situation like that, the pedestrian is also clearly suicidal. They were going to be dead soon, anyway.
As a pedestrian, I trust drivers who are already stopped at a red light. I also trust the ones that I can see are slowing down. I trust the ones who I make eye-contact with. I don't like trusting in any of these cases, but I sort of have to, if I want to function. So far, so good. And yeah, it might not last.
But trust someone who doesn't qualify in one of the ways above? Trust a stranger with my life, when I have not confirmed that they are aware? No fucking way. As a pedestrian, I just don't do that. And seriously, I really would be extremely dead, long dry dust in my grave for many years right now, if that weren't my attitude.
I can't understand why anyone would step out in front of a car based on the idea that the car is required to yield. That isn't just gambling with their life: that's gambling with their life at really bad odds. I'm sorry they lost, but it really was just a matter of time. They're life expectancy is, what, maybe a couple weeks at best? There are careless drivers out there, and such a pedestrian is using a strategy for finding them. That strategy will work.
I loved analog cable, because it worked. Plug it into any tuner, and you can watch, record, etc. As a result of this, they got my money, month after month, for 8 years.
Encrypted cable is the reason they don't have me as a customer anymore. If I could be assured that stuff would just work, I would sign up, plug the cable into a HDHomeRun, and that would be the end of it. Or rather, that would be the end of it, except for the money that I would be paying them every single goddamn month.
Instead of that monthly money that they choose to not collect, I'm bittorrenting over Qwest.
Brilliant business model, Comcast. It just goes to show American business ingenuity: if you really don't want customers and are willing to do what it takes to prevent yourself from collecting revenue, there's always a way. Losing money might not be easy and the the best way to lose the most money and really stick it to your damned stockholders might not be obvious, but if you persevere, it's possible to do. Encrypted cable is the best solution -- the solution -- to the problem of excess cable TV revenue. Good job, boys.
The thing is the "view" in "plain view" is defined totally arbitrarily. The 4th Amendment to the constitution doesn't say anything about plain view; it just prevents unreasonable searches without a warrant. Over the years, the courts pulled this "plain view" stuff out of their asses.
I'm not criticizing them for that; they ultimately had to try to draw the line between what is reasonable vs unreasonable somewhere. So they made up something that most people think is fair. And now it's pounded into all our heads as though the words were actually in the Bill of Rights, even though they aren't.
The courts' decisions that the "plain viewness" of something is relevant, is a very human definition. Our eyes are a big deal, which is why they call it view instead of scent. That doesn't mean scent doesn't apply -- the courts aren't so dumb/rigid/pedantic to be unable to analogize sight with smell and apply the same criteria. But there's a reason the courts used the word "view" -- we all have a very intuitive idea of what it really means, with a lot of consensus.
What if we violate that underlying meaning?
Would you be happier if they were using some sort of electronic detector instead of a dog?
I think allowing either search (dog or electronics) without a warrant or other probably cause, is flirting with disaster. What if the officer (or machine) has radical powers, such as ability to see through walls, read people's minds (in a science fictiony "telepath" way, not by just being socially well-tuned), etc? At some point, the "plain" in "plain view" should be called into question. If the dog or machine can sniff something that a human 1.0 nose can't, maybe that's not really a reasonable search.
If the concentration is so dilute that you can't smell it, then the molecules, even if yes, they really are floating in the air, aren't in plain view. Just like if you have your drugs inside a cardboard box -- some photons actually are going through the box. We humans just can't see them. If you build a machine that can see them, or have a cop with super-powers that can see them, that doesn't mean the contents of the box are in plain view, regardless of how easily that super-powered cop can see 'em.
I do think we would all change our minds about that, if many of us did have such super-powers. If everyone knew a cardboard box does not delimit privacy, we would no longer consider objects in a box to not be in plain view. I don't mean "know" it in a rational hypothetical sense; I mean knowing it in visceral, obvious, day-to-day in-your-face kind of way, just like most of us can effortlessly and instantly perceive that a cardboard box blocks the view of whatever is inside he box.
Likewise, if we all had, and routinely hung out with, trained dogs: we would all know that faint scents that people can't smell, are still in "plain smell."
But we don't. We don't have the super-powers, nor the trained dogs, nor the electronics. I'm not saying we don't have access to them, just that they aren't part of most people's routine lives. So if you need these things to detect something, that something isn't in plain view. And more importantly: a search that uses these things, if there isn't due process, is not a reasonable search.
By charging extra for the house. Buyer: "Why are you charging extra?" Seller: "Because [peeling back some carpet] I had the foresight to install this heatsink for overclocked computers."
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Tip of the day: don't think in terms of megabytes, megahertz, etc. Think in terms of money.
$75 worth of RAM should be enough for anyone. $90 of disk space is enough for MythTV, though $270 of disk space works a lot better. AMD's $60 CPU is better than Intel's $60 CPU, but Intel's $300 CPU is better than AMD's $300 CPU. And so on.
No, but it's them or us.
They didn't do that in good faith. They knew it was a scam and cannot possibly work, just as well as we know now.
Why not blame the previous generation? The generation after us sure will.
If we don't end it now, then here's our next choice: do we try to con our kids into being the ones who die homeless, or do we accept that fate for ourselves?
We all know it has to end some day. The longer we continue the lie, the more unbearable it becomes. If we stop lying and our parents and grandparents pay the price, I don't see how that's our fault. They're the ones who tried to stick it to us.
Wait a minute, what happened to the rabid pro-free-market libertarian when you asked your second question? It looks like his arch-nemesis, a Republican, did a Man in the Middle attack. Next time, do your PK exchange correctly.
Of course they're satisfied with it. But how long will they continue to be able to get it?
Trying buying parts for a computer some time -- look at the prices -- and see what it would take to build something with 256MB of RAM, since that is "enough." You're going to find that 2GB of RAM is cheaper, because those strips are what is being mass-produced. Some day, you're going to want the cheapest, freest phone from your provider, and they are going to give you a supercomputer with integrated GPS, camera, music player, keychain, debit card magstrip emulator, universal IR remote, cigarette lighter, combo vibrating coffee-stirrer/dildo, and toaster, because it'll be cheaper for them to stock those as the low-end alternative, for the people who don't want to pay much extra for new trendy integrated stun gun or radio telescope (and even those will be free features, two generations later).
There are lots of .. little things .. that benefit from computer control, and maybe more importantly, a battery. It's efficient for them to all share one computer/battery. But once you start doing that, scale happens.
Please, think of the example this is setting for the children. Congress should immediately hold hearings about Wifi cheaters.
The movie studios understand this too. There's a damn good reason their ads stress "Own it now, on DVD and Blu-ray." It's what people want to hear before they put down money. If an ad said, "license it now on keychest," their sales, er I mean licensing revenue, would plummet. For all their suicidal tendencies, even Hollywood isn't trying to lose quite that fast.
So the solution is to subsidize pollution depending on who is doing it?
If they drive away from the gas station because they're too irresponsible to pay to fuel their gas guzzler, then arrest them for theft.
Heh. I read the interview, and no where does he say Why he'd like to end anonymity.
That seems pretty astounding at first, until you realize that if he actually were to give a reason why it might possibly be desirable, people would start poking holes in his logic.
There's no argument here. Pure flamebait.
I fear you might be right, but it sure sucks. We went from an app ported to every platform, to a single app using middleware called "browser", and now we're headed back to an app for every platform? Ugh. There's got to be some way to avoid this bullshit.
Almost nobody does. Nobody cares about that. Nobody is really working on that.
Least of all, game creators. Sure, you can make a Linux-only game, but it's soooo easy to make a game portable. In fact, it requires more effort to make nonportable software, than portable software. You might go ahead and do it anyway (or just not bother with porting) but if you release the source to your game, then somebody is going to clean it up and get it to successfully compile/run for everything else. Windows and MacOS have OpenGL, Pygame, etc, even if those aren't the prefered APIs on those platforms.
Ergo, your only option is to release a proprietary game for Linux only. And then you're right back to the "nobody wants to" part. Nobody cares enough to bother doing that.
Who would do that? Certainly not pros; they want sales, so they're not going to go to extra trouble to eliminate 99% of sales. That leaves enthusiasts, and they would have to be awfully eccentric, to love Linux while simultaneously hating open source. Most will think that if releasing proprietary apps is ok, then proprietary OSes are ok too.
Make sure you get the best hardware, too. The Osbourne 3 is optimized for Windows 8.
Miguel and "open source" advocates have the first perspective. People who have been burned, see from the 3rd perspective (and possibly just out of fear, as Miguel suggests). RMS sees that 3rd perspective too, but also sees the 2nd, and that 2nd perspective is what I think -- when he's in a good mood -- he really wants to get across: support Free Software before blowing your time and money on Open Source.
Miguel and RMS just might both be right; it all depends on where you stand. I'm not interested in Mono but I don't feel threatened by it either, and I can surely understand why people who are into it, are happy to distract Microsoft with it. The worst I can say about it, is that it might be a gateway drug to .Net, and I never bought into gateway drug arguments anyway. Programmers are capable of knowing when they're crossing the line into irresponsible dependencies. Don't complain about the ones who, in the end, really just don't care, because that's their problem. Your problem is to just not do it.
BTW (almost a totally different topic), the patent fears about Mono don't make sense. It's not that patents aren't a threat, but they're a threat to everyone. If you work 8 hours in this business, then you probably unwittingly infringed someone's patent. Mono could get a C&D from Microsoft some day, making all investment into that platform retroactively a waste of time. But the same damned letter the Mono teams gets, can also be sent to the CPython or Java guys. The return address on the letter might not even be One Microsoft Way. Patents fuck up everyone, so I don't see them as a major factor in comparing projects that aren't yet known to infringe. If we were talking about, say, code that implements Theora vs h264, it would be different, because the specific problems would be known. But Mono-vs-Java? Equal risks until someone can put up or shut up by mentioning a specific patent.
Reminds me of an argument I recently had with a lefty. He thought government should do everything that business doesn't have the foresight to do. What's funny is that he was flaming religion just half an hour earlier -- organizations of people that are neither motivated by civics nor (barring Catholics) profits. People do so many things for so many reasons, some of them crazy and some of them brilliant. But talk politics with them and suddenly dollars are the only motivation that anyone has. Yeeeah, riiight.
Academics, hobbyists, philanthropists, religious nuts, crackpots: apparently none of these people exist!
Hopefully, the reason they have abstained from doing anything as stupid as installing Websense, is because Websense sucks. (It blocks stuff that isn't porn, and it doesn't block porn. If someone wants around it, they can always get around it. You need to deal with the people, not the network.)
A more cynical answer would be that they aren't running it, because they can't afford it or something like that, and that they are under the mistaken impression that if only they could get it, their problems would be solved.
The fact that most people (including the bill authors) agree with this statement, is how I know the current health care reform bill is a fraud. Implementing health care reform would be a net gain to the GDP, i.e. generate a surplus that could be either taxed, or not wasted, making it easier to fund one of the other items on your list.
A health care "reform" that costs more than the old system -- that makes the nation poorer and weaker than it was before -- is not a reform.
And yet, the right is complaining about a shuffling of costs (changing who pays for what, and how), and both the right and left are uncomfortable about an overall increase in costs. No wonder nobody likes the bill; deep down, everyone knows that when insurance lobbyists spend over a million dollars per day for access to write a new law, it is because they know that they are going to come out ahead, at the country's expense.
Fuck that. Nobody who votes for a bill that was purchased by the insurance companies, is going to get my vote in the next election.
This isn't about socialism vs free markets. It's not right vs left. It's about a government for the people vs a government for someone else.
(I happen to agree it's an inalienable right, but) one of the interesting things about inalienable rights is that not everyone agrees just what they all are.
So regardless of what rights we have inherently, it's a good idea to go through the political process and have government pass laws to protect those rights. At least after that happens, we all have notice of which of our rights are protected, and which ones we have to protect for ourselves (by force, subterfuge, or whatever).
If the German people, overall, are willing to use deadly force against people who exercise their right to sell games where players kill Nazis, then it's good that German law does not protect people's right to sell games where players kill Nazis. Otherwise there would be a conflict and you're eventually going to get into a situation where cops and citizens are shooting at each other in the streets. The way to protect rights is to persuade a (strong) majority that it's a bad idea to infringe rights. In fact, it's the only way. Having laws that are contrary to the actual will of the people, just isn't a stable and sensible situation.
Not the whole problem, but actually, yes, some of the problem is with languages.
And some problems are not hard to multi-thread, and yet reasonably competent programmers end up sometimes screwing it up anyway. They make mistakes not because they're stupid, but because (for example) they're in a hurry. (All professional programmers are in a hurry. Ship it! Next work order!!)
There are ways we can make that situation easier.
Ah, the old "power is dangerous" argument. You're right, and you're wrong, at the same time. Or rather, you are correct and irrelevant. Foot-shooters' problems are their problems. Your problems are your problems, and you don't want to have them. It's ok to make things easier for you. Don't worry about That Other Guy fucking up.
I guess it all depends on who you are and what you're doing. My experience is that I still haven't found a situation where it's inconvenient. There's something about removable media, that makes file ownership and permissions irrelevant. You pretty much have to assume the worst case anyway, and if you are using owners, groups, permissions etc to enforce anything, you have big problems anyway.
We all know physical access overrules permissions on disk, so we give up and say, "Yeah, if someone takes the hard drive out and puts it in another machine, there's little we can do (other than encrypt), so we're just not going to deal with that. On the bright side, no one is likely to actually do that, much less without being detected." Ah, but with removable media, that last sentence simply doesn't apply.
So what do you do about it, in the rare case (IMHO, obviously your situation is different or you wouldn't have asked) that you still want owners and permissions anyway? What fs should you use? Mu. Use a container. Tar is your filesystem. And best of all, if you have security considerations, check this out: you can trivially run your read/write pipeline through gpg or something, without having to worry about setting up encrypted filesystems or block layers.
Have you ever thought about how a "cat" scan works? Forget the 3D aspects and let's just think about how the cross-sectional pictures work.
Every given reading, is just shooting a ray through the target, and getting a single number out. This is analogous to aggregate summaries are personal details in data. You know the average income of people in zip code 12345, but no specifics. The trick is, later, just as that CT scan is going to shoot a ray through a certain point again from a different direction, your personal details are going to be summarized again by someone else, in a different way.
A picture will emerge. The CT scan is going to "see" the bone as distinct from the tissue right here at this pixel, and this person's data will be un-summarized. It just takes enough rays, and eventually all ambiguity goes away.
A long time ago (about 20 years ago, I think?) there was a neato explanation of a cat scan algorithm in Scientific American. I wish I could find it. Because I bet you could show that article to any "database guy" these days, and they'd nod and smile.
I realize you qualified that statement with "nearly" but it just isn't near enough to be "nearly." ;)
You're right, I don't know. But at least my car is big enough both to be seen, and also be a deterrent. If you hit my car, you might get hurt. You hit me, you might have to go to the carwash.
There you go: 98%. You'll be dead soon. And yes, it'll be their fault, so you can point the finger of shame at them, from your grave.
Geez, if you had exaggerated and said 99 with a few more 9s after the decimal, it would at least look like a good strategy on paper (until the real life 2% came up, killing you).
Here's what you can do about it, since it really is 98%. Stand on the sidewalk until everyone stops or makes eye contact. If you don't see them react to you, they're going to kill you. No psychic powers needed.
Please, people who assume cars will yield, don't do it. The law is on your side, but life isn't.
That's really a tough case, because while the driver is clearly in the wrong in a situation like that, the pedestrian is also clearly suicidal. They were going to be dead soon, anyway.
As a pedestrian, I trust drivers who are already stopped at a red light. I also trust the ones that I can see are slowing down. I trust the ones who I make eye-contact with. I don't like trusting in any of these cases, but I sort of have to, if I want to function. So far, so good. And yeah, it might not last.
But trust someone who doesn't qualify in one of the ways above? Trust a stranger with my life, when I have not confirmed that they are aware? No fucking way. As a pedestrian, I just don't do that. And seriously, I really would be extremely dead, long dry dust in my grave for many years right now, if that weren't my attitude.
I can't understand why anyone would step out in front of a car based on the idea that the car is required to yield. That isn't just gambling with their life: that's gambling with their life at really bad odds. I'm sorry they lost, but it really was just a matter of time. They're life expectancy is, what, maybe a couple weeks at best? There are careless drivers out there, and such a pedestrian is using a strategy for finding them. That strategy will work.
I loved analog cable, because it worked. Plug it into any tuner, and you can watch, record, etc. As a result of this, they got my money, month after month, for 8 years.
Encrypted cable is the reason they don't have me as a customer anymore. If I could be assured that stuff would just work, I would sign up, plug the cable into a HDHomeRun, and that would be the end of it. Or rather, that would be the end of it, except for the money that I would be paying them every single goddamn month.
Instead of that monthly money that they choose to not collect, I'm bittorrenting over Qwest.
Brilliant business model, Comcast. It just goes to show American business ingenuity: if you really don't want customers and are willing to do what it takes to prevent yourself from collecting revenue, there's always a way. Losing money might not be easy and the the best way to lose the most money and really stick it to your damned stockholders might not be obvious, but if you persevere, it's possible to do. Encrypted cable is the best solution -- the solution -- to the problem of excess cable TV revenue. Good job, boys.
The thing is the "view" in "plain view" is defined totally arbitrarily. The 4th Amendment to the constitution doesn't say anything about plain view; it just prevents unreasonable searches without a warrant. Over the years, the courts pulled this "plain view" stuff out of their asses.
I'm not criticizing them for that; they ultimately had to try to draw the line between what is reasonable vs unreasonable somewhere. So they made up something that most people think is fair. And now it's pounded into all our heads as though the words were actually in the Bill of Rights, even though they aren't.
The courts' decisions that the "plain viewness" of something is relevant, is a very human definition. Our eyes are a big deal, which is why they call it view instead of scent. That doesn't mean scent doesn't apply -- the courts aren't so dumb/rigid/pedantic to be unable to analogize sight with smell and apply the same criteria. But there's a reason the courts used the word "view" -- we all have a very intuitive idea of what it really means, with a lot of consensus.
What if we violate that underlying meaning?
I think allowing either search (dog or electronics) without a warrant or other probably cause, is flirting with disaster. What if the officer (or machine) has radical powers, such as ability to see through walls, read people's minds (in a science fictiony "telepath" way, not by just being socially well-tuned), etc? At some point, the "plain" in "plain view" should be called into question. If the dog or machine can sniff something that a human 1.0 nose can't, maybe that's not really a reasonable search.
If the concentration is so dilute that you can't smell it, then the molecules, even if yes, they really are floating in the air, aren't in plain view. Just like if you have your drugs inside a cardboard box -- some photons actually are going through the box. We humans just can't see them. If you build a machine that can see them, or have a cop with super-powers that can see them, that doesn't mean the contents of the box are in plain view, regardless of how easily that super-powered cop can see 'em.
I do think we would all change our minds about that, if many of us did have such super-powers. If everyone knew a cardboard box does not delimit privacy, we would no longer consider objects in a box to not be in plain view. I don't mean "know" it in a rational hypothetical sense; I mean knowing it in visceral, obvious, day-to-day in-your-face kind of way, just like most of us can effortlessly and instantly perceive that a cardboard box blocks the view of whatever is inside he box.
Likewise, if we all had, and routinely hung out with, trained dogs: we would all know that faint scents that people can't smell, are still in "plain smell."
But we don't. We don't have the super-powers, nor the trained dogs, nor the electronics. I'm not saying we don't have access to them, just that they aren't part of most people's routine lives. So if you need these things to detect something, that something isn't in plain view. And more importantly: a search that uses these things, if there isn't due process, is not a reasonable search.
By charging extra for the house. Buyer: "Why are you charging extra?" Seller: "Because [peeling back some carpet] I had the foresight to install this heatsink for overclocked computers."