Second that.
And make it a Thinkpad-Series model with MgAl rollcage, spill resistant keyboard and all that good reliability stuff we are used to from the other Thinkpads. A hundred bucks more is not a problem, but that thing positively needs to be resistant as a mobile phone or TV remote, ie. survive a fall from table height onto floor tiles.
Wind noise, vibration, engine sounds, airframe stress signs like uncommon rattling or squeaks.
A computer has no access or processing function for these reports and it has no heuristics to compensate for.
I fully expect experienced pilots to recognize or distinguish an imminent catastrophic overspeed from an imminent stall and to risk the stall instead, because it is unpleasant but survivable.
A plane without computer override can fare better in a sensors-out scenario, because pilots have something a computer cannot yet emulate: intuition, gut feeling, heuristics with secondary or tertiary or indirect approximations.
Experienced pilots can try to estimate the probable airspeed from noise, vibration, engine sounds and even the speed in relation to cloud formations passing by. They could try to guess from reported wind speed and direction compared to engine power setting, engine rpm or exhaust gas temperature and whatnot. That doesn't mean they would always fare better with these estimates, but it's better than everything the computer can do in a sensors-out or electricity-failed scenario. When all airspeed sensors report too low an airspeed, it's possible that the pilot would've given more engine power and destroyed the plane by overspeed the same way as the autopilot probably did, given the preliminary findings to date.
But the pilots can do something no computer can to date: second-guess their own decisions. Taking note of their surroundings, unusual airframe vibration or uncommon noise so they at least *have* a chance to note that somethings amiss and *not* command a speed increase because their senses and intuition tell them that their airspeed is quite sufficient no matter what the display says. They could choose to willfully wait and prepare for an actual stall to decide if the airspeed indicators were indeed right - or their intuition. A stall would make half the passengers throw up or panic, but they'd always survive it when it happened expectedly and at full cruise altitude.
Airbus still have rudimentary mechanical connections to the control surfaces, enough to hold a level flight and conduct a visual approach. Everything else would never get an airworthiness certificate. In Airbus planes, the flight computer is directly between the pilots input and the control surfaces and in nomal flight mode, it doesn't pipe that input through if it thinks the pilot inputs are bogus or unsafe.
Everywhere I've looked I've read about the computer switching to lower and "no protection" modes when it detects that critical sensors send implausible or conflicting data, to avoid the garbage-in garbage-out scenario. Which sounds fine at first.
And then I thought about the probably very rare event when all redundant sensors report the samefaulty data, when the dataset passes all sanity checks because all sensors are off by the same amount or experience the same malfunction. (Airbus and Air France seemed to have made the blunder to build a sensor redundancy group with pitot tubes from the same supplier which is a serious WTF?! in itself. I just hope they didn't chose the same or similar model.) Now let's say all pitot tubes are covered in ice and register the same value for forward airspeed which seems much lower than it really is: the computer will now spool up the engines and prevent a stall which to it seems inevitable otherwise. Compared to a human pilot, it has no real heuristics, no gut feeling and no method of interpreting vibration, sound and other clues to decide properly to discard ALL input values from the entire redundant group of sensors and insted rely on indirect cues to airspeed and possible airframe stress from overspeed.
I think Airbus will have to incorporate a flight envelope protection kill switch, a large red button to disable any influence the computer takes on the movement commands, forcing it to translate all pilot inputs directly to the servos after the kill switch is activated.
Pilots do make mistakes or cannot input fast enough to compensate for turbulence and crosswinds, which is why computerized control is a pretty useful tool - but as computers, software and sensors can fail - and fail in absolutely unpredictable ways, there should be a method to always override computer flight envelope protection. Merely pushing the stick against the computer should not be enough - it must require the pilot to willfully and explicitly enable an override mode.
With the pilots willfully and explicitly wanting to disable the computer, the pilot's will must take precedence. "Sorry Dave, I can't let you do that" is no acceptable scenario.
Excuse my rant: Some wise nerd actually hit it on the spot when he called it the "fallacy of the Death Star contractor": when you work for evil people, evil companies or evil emperors, expect to be receiving flak shortly. When you lay floor tiles or cabling on the Death Star "just for the money", expect to be blown up together with all the regular evil staff, because you then ARE regular evil staff.
You're not doing anything "just for money", you are always representing those who you work for, sometimes more, sometimes less. But those who work for jerks, comply to jerkwad policies and fulfill jerky roles will be treated as jerks themselves, of course and they would do the same the other way around.
Treating customers unfairly is either corporate or the store clerk's personal policy. In unfair treatment or actual mistake you as a customer can never really know if this is the fault of the company or the clerk. And you especially cannot know how much wiggle room the clerk really has, how much his superiors in-store have and what has to be decided by the board of directors only.
That's why making up a stink in unfair treatment can be quite reasonable: it redistributes the "cost" of unfair practices back to the dealer. And if enough customers complain, others will notice, store clerks will notice, find ways around the policy or initiate a change.
If the clerk is not up to that, they can always quit it to take another store clerk position, where they won't be yelled at but usually get the same pay. I would. Not all minimum wage employers are created equal. Clerks usually cannot maximize their income, but they can minimize their hardships to significantly improve their pay-for-pain-ratio.
If all employees of an unfair store would quit, that employer would notice and improve fast - or pay more to keep the last clerks.
Exactly. I will testify before any jury and judge, bible and king that I do not want to call for more than 200 USD in one month, come hell or high water, crisis or fortune.
Can I limit my phone to that? No. Can I make any phone company in the Free West to simply disable the entire SIM card as "probably stolen" when these limits are hit? No. Can pre-paid providers do it? Yes, all the time. Are companies offering pre-paid and post-paid, for which one branch cannot for the sake of it limit the phone bill to even 1000 USD or more, while the other branch will cut off when the last three pre-paid cents are used up? Yes. Is that probably a scam?
Well, we have pre-paid phones. Pre-paid providers know for penny and cent and millisecond when you're over your pre-paid amount.
And then, the same providers also offer fixed contract plans where they claim they have absolutely no idea how many minutes and dollars you're through this very second of the month.
I smell Napalm here, because they're simply hiding the fact that they earn a lot on all these premium numbers which no one ever calls except on freshly stolen phones.
I do actually want to block any such numbers. Any and each and all and I want to limit my phone to 100 text messages, 10 hours of talking time and 100USD equivalent each month until I say otherwise. Exception is 911 and/or one single specific number I have securely entered in advance.
That way, my phone is useless to thieves. My handset is shabby and worn and that call plan would leave them little room to do anything useful with their stolen property.
Can I get this? No.
Can I get anything similar to this? No.
Can I get anything that bears even a miniscule resemblance of it? No, no and no.
I can have a flat rate for any and all regular calls, text messages or data traffic. But I cannot make my monthly bill bulletproof against phone sex lines, premium lines and to overseas. I deliberately want my phone to stop working - or maybe ask for a password via text message - when certain limits are hit.
I can insure my car, my home, my company and everything else against everything except gross negligence, nuclear war or worse. But my cellphone plan is still a liability of about 2-3 thousand bucks when stolen. Which is the reason I have such a shitty handset: I can simply smash it to pieces when someone tries to mug me. Is better for privacy, too.
These days, any phone or cell phone technically is a credit account with absolutely no limits due to being able to rack up hours and hours calling "premium" numbers.
And unlike a credit card, your kid and any of his friends visiting your house can use that phone to call whatever expensive number they like, with no limits, no checks or any verification whatsoever. They can just start billing ridiculous amounts of money.
That's the background of this credit check: Even your ultra-flatrate-everything plan will not cover premium numbers or roaming charges. Individually disabling premium numbers, disabling roaming or disbanding this crooked concept of thievery altogether means the providers losing their huge margins on that.
Every ordinary phone plan can rack up the monetary equivalent of several expensive sports cars within one month, that's why we get credit checks equivalent to buying a house and a mortgage for that phone plan.
Or you could ask your local ACLU when all other options fail or infringe on privacy rights. Students have to have a reasonable expectation of privacy and continously scanning harddrives is almost more intrusive than unwarranted search and seizure. Just because he's living on college premises doesn't make him a slave to their Internet policy.
Man, do I hate it when administrators of whatever service run amok with their root privileges and force everyone to bow to their will. I have seen companies disabling the right mouse button for security, using IE6 (in 2009) for security or whatever idea their crackhead of operator came up with.
Throttle the net for p2p, block all websites containing four-letter words and more than five pink pixels in a row. But don't scan user's harddrives, that's none of your business.
And it feels so repressive in the subway at 11pm with no punks, no trash, no graffiti, no vandalism, no threatening behaviour and absolutely no other disgusting things to see, smell or hear. Only other repressed people minding their own business, talking on their phones, laughing with their friends, reading their books. Oh boy, are they repressed, I tell you, especially in Japan and South Korea.
Thank God I live in Europe where we have all the freedom of The West (tm) and our subways have that nice Thriller feeling, not only after sunset, but all day long. Beggars, dealers, lunatics, painters, scratchers and gropers - you name it, we have it.
I think we Westerners should get the head out of our collective behinds and remember the times when we were free from repression from the state but also from repression from individual nutjobs.
People who spray paint anything on the Grand Canyon should be shot on sight. Several times, just to be sure. It's bad enough they ruined all vertical and non-vertical walls in our cities, but willfully damaging natural monuments as important and incredible as the Grand Canyon for no reason other than pure asshattery is over the line.
Graffiti sprayers should be incarcerated for decades anyway, but in the case of natural world wonders of this scale I have zero tolerance for them using up any more of our oxygen. Graffiti sprayers are worse than thieves, because the results of their actions are visible years from now and their damages may be much higher than that of even professional shoplifters. And their actions are done for really no reason other than to imprint their name on everything they see. Which only a small circle of their fellow jerks can even read or recognize.
Anyone who's ever been to an Asian country will instantly recognize how large the effect and impact of widespread graffiti in any environment really is, because there's absolutely no Graffiti to speak of, only some sprayed rogue advertisements. Visible graffiti means law enforcement is far or ineffective and there's people around who don't respect others or others property. That feels less safe and emboldens others that law enforcement really IS ineffective and/or nobody cares about their wrongdoings.
It's becoming impossible to uphold even the most basic laws fifteen to twenty years after social norms are not enforced anymore.
If ambiguitiy of circumstances is no defense anymore, you have eliminated "in dubio pro reo". Which means you have reached THE definition - and hallmark - of repression, because everyone does ambiguos things sometimes with no ill intent at all and nobody is free when they have to judge their entire day if they're doong something ambiguous.
And no, that's no slippery slope but the bottom of it. Rock bottom.
Having just one opinion and stating it straight gets you a lot of freaks in every environment.
If that opinion touches multiculturalism either pro or contra, you're going to have a field day with mods, angry replies and straight out foe listing / banning in other forums.
No other topic is as heated as this one and when all opinions draw heavy criticism, you may as well simply state your own true one.
Care to back up your claims with a small statistic sample of lines of code?
Contenders: Firefox (JScript mandatory, would be pretty useless otherwise. You can do everything serverside, but it'll be a royal pain to wait for the response for every click.)
Busybox (which is what usually services everything in embedded Linux environments)
Special requirement: Note the functions specifically left out by the Busybox project to keep the linked executable small.
I'll tell you when I finally understand why we have 50 percent of some of our cities inhabited by first-generation immigrants from you-know-where who demand all kinds of backward bendovers from us, like banning pork and stuff.
You'd be surprised: we had massive public demonstrations when the US troops tried to pull out of several dozen bases after the Iron Curtain fell. Thousands of workers were in the process of losing their jobs and with every base closed, entire communities and small cities were strapped for cash.
It's not a black and white world. I mean, millions of people are fleeing TO the United States, not from. Can't be so terrible to live under the oh-so fascist boot of the Federal Government, can it?
I use my livingroom computer for listening to MP3s of questionable origin, random shoutcast streams, playing DVDs, playing videos of questionable origin and/or questionable contents - and using email that only it's intended recipients, my spouse and God are ever allowed to read. And even my spouse needs to cite a pretty good reason.
A USB drive is too small for MP3s and videos, a backup takes software and another drive and I certainly don't want to have everything I use or do map-able.
The moment you have a user-updateable BIOS, you have an embedded OS. And all security risks associated.
It's just the inner platform effect all over again, with every program expanding until it can read mail. I hate to stereotype it that way, but everything in the OS has a reason, which in the resource hog category is more often than not just "John Doe might need it someday". And if it wasn't included with the OS when it shipped, John Doe would complain for hours why computers need to be sooo complicated just to connect a wireless HDMI stream over his WPA2-AES secured and UPnP-enabled home network to his Wifi-enabled, but not WPA2-compliant Flatscreen.
If it's user-updateable, you have rootkits in 1..2..3. If it's not, then it's core components will be obsolete five days after leaving the factory. Everything else we have hogging our CPU and memory simply stems from this fundamental issue.
That big OS overhead usually has some reasons other than Steve Ballmer and his goons, some of them pretty good ones.
At the top of my head: security (user accounts, access rights), kernel (scheduling, process initiation and termination, memory allocation) and extensibles (everything from 3d-graphics to USB and Bluetooth).
I can open the task manager on my machine and can cite a good and valid reason for every task and service that is running. I cannot not say I'm satisfied with how much memory and CPU time each of these tasks consume, but I had disabled them a long time ago if they were truly unneeded for my daily computing needs.
I hate to have my post sound like a Matrix transcript, but all these processes have a purpose and we casually overlook theirs unless something stops working or piques our interest because it looks uncommon.
It's just not at all easy to keep track of a hundred different threads, services/deamons and utility programs. Pick several running PIDs at random, try to google what's their purpose and if you're still not convinced, just try to disable them (don't be a fool, make sure a reboot would re-enable them automatically!) and see what stops working until you reboot.
"But all I need is a browser" is easier said than done, because Joe Sixpack also wants to use Skype, download photos from his Phone or Digicam, lose his retirement funds to Online Poker, download copyright-infringing music, transfer that to his mobile phone, watch a DVD or skin flicks encoded in one pretty rare coded out of several thousand possible. And his kid plays a Shooter game with high-level DRM and the appropriate anti-DRM hack.
And after all, wherever my browser might be located and run from: if it's a medium that's not physically write-only, he'd better get some kind of virus- and rootkit protection.
The browser might seem like the core task, but there's a ton of things that need to work and interoperate properly to get that thing to fly. And it would not only suck having to program all these things in low-level languages, it'll suck as well trying to maintain and update everything in EEPROMs. If it's extensible, it's slow and hackable somehow - and if it's not extensible, the users will constantly be clamoring for new versions.
As a citizen of Germany, I can assure you, being "occupied" by US troops is the single best thing that can happen to your economy.
They usually build huge bases back in the most remote areas, generating thousands of civilian jobs, them, their civilian contractors and their employees paying some handsome taxes. They're building top-notch military hospitals where even local "natives" can get a treatment in urgent or complicated cases. The troops themselves usually behave reasonable unless drunk or agitated, but overall not much worse than all other people of the same age and comparable IQ and education level.
US troops in South Korea, Japan, Germany and some other countries boosted the local economy to growth levels unheard of before or ever since they left.
I don't think all Iraqis would like the US to leave. They're probably not too happy about non-Muslims in their country, just like we are not too happy about Muslims in our countries - but overall, the average Iraqi civilian probably benefits a LOT from having the US there instead of the Taliban forces or ol' Saddam.
Slashdot Mirror
Second that. And make it a Thinkpad-Series model with MgAl rollcage, spill resistant keyboard and all that good reliability stuff we are used to from the other Thinkpads. A hundred bucks more is not a problem, but that thing positively needs to be resistant as a mobile phone or TV remote, ie. survive a fall from table height onto floor tiles.
Wind noise, vibration, engine sounds, airframe stress signs like uncommon rattling or squeaks. A computer has no access or processing function for these reports and it has no heuristics to compensate for. I fully expect experienced pilots to recognize or distinguish an imminent catastrophic overspeed from an imminent stall and to risk the stall instead, because it is unpleasant but survivable.
A plane without computer override can fare better in a sensors-out scenario, because pilots have something a computer cannot yet emulate: intuition, gut feeling, heuristics with secondary or tertiary or indirect approximations.
Experienced pilots can try to estimate the probable airspeed from noise, vibration, engine sounds and even the speed in relation to cloud formations passing by. They could try to guess from reported wind speed and direction compared to engine power setting, engine rpm or exhaust gas temperature and whatnot. That doesn't mean they would always fare better with these estimates, but it's better than everything the computer can do in a sensors-out or electricity-failed scenario. When all airspeed sensors report too low an airspeed, it's possible that the pilot would've given more engine power and destroyed the plane by overspeed the same way as the autopilot probably did, given the preliminary findings to date.
But the pilots can do something no computer can to date: second-guess their own decisions. Taking note of their surroundings, unusual airframe vibration or uncommon noise so they at least *have* a chance to note that somethings amiss and *not* command a speed increase because their senses and intuition tell them that their airspeed is quite sufficient no matter what the display says. They could choose to willfully wait and prepare for an actual stall to decide if the airspeed indicators were indeed right - or their intuition. A stall would make half the passengers throw up or panic, but they'd always survive it when it happened expectedly and at full cruise altitude.
Airbus still have rudimentary mechanical connections to the control surfaces, enough to hold a level flight and conduct a visual approach. Everything else would never get an airworthiness certificate. In Airbus planes, the flight computer is directly between the pilots input and the control surfaces and in nomal flight mode, it doesn't pipe that input through if it thinks the pilot inputs are bogus or unsafe.
Everywhere I've looked I've read about the computer switching to lower and "no protection" modes when it detects that critical sensors send implausible or conflicting data, to avoid the garbage-in garbage-out scenario. Which sounds fine at first.
And then I thought about the probably very rare event when all redundant sensors report the samefaulty data, when the dataset passes all sanity checks because all sensors are off by the same amount or experience the same malfunction. (Airbus and Air France seemed to have made the blunder to build a sensor redundancy group with pitot tubes from the same supplier which is a serious WTF?! in itself. I just hope they didn't chose the same or similar model.) Now let's say all pitot tubes are covered in ice and register the same value for forward airspeed which seems much lower than it really is: the computer will now spool up the engines and prevent a stall which to it seems inevitable otherwise. Compared to a human pilot, it has no real heuristics, no gut feeling and no method of interpreting vibration, sound and other clues to decide properly to discard ALL input values from the entire redundant group of sensors and insted rely on indirect cues to airspeed and possible airframe stress from overspeed.
I think Airbus will have to incorporate a flight envelope protection kill switch, a large red button to disable any influence the computer takes on the movement commands, forcing it to translate all pilot inputs directly to the servos after the kill switch is activated.
Pilots do make mistakes or cannot input fast enough to compensate for turbulence and crosswinds, which is why computerized control is a pretty useful tool - but as computers, software and sensors can fail - and fail in absolutely unpredictable ways, there should be a method to always override computer flight envelope protection. Merely pushing the stick against the computer should not be enough - it must require the pilot to willfully and explicitly enable an override mode.
With the pilots willfully and explicitly wanting to disable the computer, the pilot's will must take precedence. "Sorry Dave, I can't let you do that" is no acceptable scenario.
Damn right.
Excuse my rant:
Some wise nerd actually hit it on the spot when he called it the "fallacy of the Death Star contractor": when you work for evil people, evil companies or evil emperors, expect to be receiving flak shortly. When you lay floor tiles or cabling on the Death Star "just for the money", expect to be blown up together with all the regular evil staff, because you then ARE regular evil staff.
You're not doing anything "just for money", you are always representing those who you work for, sometimes more, sometimes less. But those who work for jerks, comply to jerkwad policies and fulfill jerky roles will be treated as jerks themselves, of course and they would do the same the other way around.
Damn well said.
Treating customers unfairly is either corporate or the store clerk's personal policy. In unfair treatment or actual mistake you as a customer can never really know if this is the fault of the company or the clerk. And you especially cannot know how much wiggle room the clerk really has, how much his superiors in-store have and what has to be decided by the board of directors only.
That's why making up a stink in unfair treatment can be quite reasonable: it redistributes the "cost" of unfair practices back to the dealer. And if enough customers complain, others will notice, store clerks will notice, find ways around the policy or initiate a change.
If the clerk is not up to that, they can always quit it to take another store clerk position, where they won't be yelled at but usually get the same pay. I would. Not all minimum wage employers are created equal. Clerks usually cannot maximize their income, but they can minimize their hardships to significantly improve their pay-for-pain-ratio.
If all employees of an unfair store would quit, that employer would notice and improve fast - or pay more to keep the last clerks.
Exactly. I will testify before any jury and judge, bible and king that I do not want to call for more than 200 USD in one month, come hell or high water, crisis or fortune.
Can I limit my phone to that? No. Can I make any phone company in the Free West to simply disable the entire SIM card as "probably stolen" when these limits are hit? No. Can pre-paid providers do it? Yes, all the time. Are companies offering pre-paid and post-paid, for which one branch cannot for the sake of it limit the phone bill to even 1000 USD or more, while the other branch will cut off when the last three pre-paid cents are used up? Yes. Is that probably a scam?
Well, we have pre-paid phones. Pre-paid providers know for penny and cent and millisecond when you're over your pre-paid amount.
And then, the same providers also offer fixed contract plans where they claim they have absolutely no idea how many minutes and dollars you're through this very second of the month.
I smell Napalm here, because they're simply hiding the fact that they earn a lot on all these premium numbers which no one ever calls except on freshly stolen phones.
I do actually want to block any such numbers. Any and each and all and I want to limit my phone to 100 text messages, 10 hours of talking time and 100USD equivalent each month until I say otherwise. Exception is 911 and/or one single specific number I have securely entered in advance.
That way, my phone is useless to thieves. My handset is shabby and worn and that call plan would leave them little room to do anything useful with their stolen property.
Can I get this? No.
Can I get anything similar to this? No.
Can I get anything that bears even a miniscule resemblance of it? No, no and no.
I can have a flat rate for any and all regular calls, text messages or data traffic. But I cannot make my monthly bill bulletproof against phone sex lines, premium lines and to overseas. I deliberately want my phone to stop working - or maybe ask for a password via text message - when certain limits are hit.
I can insure my car, my home, my company and everything else against everything except gross negligence, nuclear war or worse. But my cellphone plan is still a liability of about 2-3 thousand bucks when stolen. Which is the reason I have such a shitty handset: I can simply smash it to pieces when someone tries to mug me. Is better for privacy, too.
These days, any phone or cell phone technically is a credit account with absolutely no limits due to being able to rack up hours and hours calling "premium" numbers.
And unlike a credit card, your kid and any of his friends visiting your house can use that phone to call whatever expensive number they like, with no limits, no checks or any verification whatsoever. They can just start billing ridiculous amounts of money.
That's the background of this credit check:
Even your ultra-flatrate-everything plan will not cover premium numbers or roaming charges.
Individually disabling premium numbers, disabling roaming or disbanding this crooked concept of thievery altogether means the providers losing their huge margins on that.
Every ordinary phone plan can rack up the monetary equivalent of several expensive sports cars within one month, that's why we get credit checks equivalent to buying a house and a mortgage for that phone plan.
Or you could ask your local ACLU when all other options fail or infringe on privacy rights. Students have to have a reasonable expectation of privacy and continously scanning harddrives is almost more intrusive than unwarranted search and seizure. Just because he's living on college premises doesn't make him a slave to their Internet policy.
Man, do I hate it when administrators of whatever service run amok with their root privileges and force everyone to bow to their will. I have seen companies disabling the right mouse button for security, using IE6 (in 2009) for security or whatever idea their crackhead of operator came up with.
Throttle the net for p2p, block all websites containing four-letter words and more than five pink pixels in a row. But don't scan user's harddrives, that's none of your business.
And it feels so repressive in the subway at 11pm with no punks, no trash, no graffiti, no vandalism, no threatening behaviour and absolutely no other disgusting things to see, smell or hear. Only other repressed people minding their own business, talking on their phones, laughing with their friends, reading their books. Oh boy, are they repressed, I tell you, especially in Japan and South Korea.
Thank God I live in Europe where we have all the freedom of The West (tm) and our subways have that nice Thriller feeling, not only after sunset, but all day long. Beggars, dealers, lunatics, painters, scratchers and gropers - you name it, we have it.
I think we Westerners should get the head out of our collective behinds and remember the times when we were free from repression from the state but also from repression from individual nutjobs.
People who spray paint anything on the Grand Canyon should be shot on sight. Several times, just to be sure. It's bad enough they ruined all vertical and non-vertical walls in our cities, but willfully damaging natural monuments as important and incredible as the Grand Canyon for no reason other than pure asshattery is over the line.
Graffiti sprayers should be incarcerated for decades anyway, but in the case of natural world wonders of this scale I have zero tolerance for them using up any more of our oxygen. Graffiti sprayers are worse than thieves, because the results of their actions are visible years from now and their damages may be much higher than that of even professional shoplifters. And their actions are done for really no reason other than to imprint their name on everything they see. Which only a small circle of their fellow jerks can even read or recognize.
Anyone who's ever been to an Asian country will instantly recognize how large the effect and impact of widespread graffiti in any environment really is, because there's absolutely no Graffiti to speak of, only some sprayed rogue advertisements. Visible graffiti means law enforcement is far or ineffective and there's people around who don't respect others or others property. That feels less safe and emboldens others that law enforcement really IS ineffective and/or nobody cares about their wrongdoings.
It's becoming impossible to uphold even the most basic laws fifteen to twenty years after social norms are not enforced anymore.
It's about tourists in a future a thousand years from now. You obviously never watched Futurama, right? :)
If ambiguitiy of circumstances is no defense anymore, you have eliminated "in dubio pro reo". Which means you have reached THE definition - and hallmark - of repression, because everyone does ambiguos things sometimes with no ill intent at all and nobody is free when they have to judge their entire day if they're doong something ambiguous.
And no, that's no slippery slope but the bottom of it. Rock bottom.
Having just one opinion and stating it straight gets you a lot of freaks in every environment.
If that opinion touches multiculturalism either pro or contra, you're going to have a field day with mods, angry replies and straight out foe listing / banning in other forums.
No other topic is as heated as this one and when all opinions draw heavy criticism, you may as well simply state your own true one.
Care to back up your claims with a small statistic sample of lines of code?
Contenders:
Firefox (JScript mandatory, would be pretty useless otherwise. You can do everything serverside, but it'll be a royal pain to wait for the response for every click.)
Busybox (which is what usually services everything in embedded Linux environments)
Special requirement:
Note the functions specifically left out by the Busybox project to keep the linked executable small.
I'll tell you when I finally understand why we have 50 percent of some of our cities inhabited by first-generation immigrants from you-know-where who demand all kinds of backward bendovers from us, like banning pork and stuff.
You'd be surprised: we had massive public demonstrations when the US troops tried to pull out of several dozen bases after the Iron Curtain fell. Thousands of workers were in the process of losing their jobs and with every base closed, entire communities and small cities were strapped for cash.
It's not a black and white world. I mean, millions of people are fleeing TO the United States, not from. Can't be so terrible to live under the oh-so fascist boot of the Federal Government, can it?
I have an idea: I make this a phony eponymous law and call it
"Inner platform effect" :)
or
"The Every Program Evolves Until It Can Read Mail Effect"
Please, make it female lawyers with loose morals or hookers with law degrees. We need company in the evenings.
I use my livingroom computer for listening to MP3s of questionable origin, random shoutcast streams, playing DVDs, playing videos of questionable origin and/or questionable contents - and using email that only it's intended recipients, my spouse and God are ever allowed to read. And even my spouse needs to cite a pretty good reason.
A USB drive is too small for MP3s and videos, a backup takes software and another drive and I certainly don't want to have everything I use or do map-able.
The moment you have a user-updateable BIOS, you have an embedded OS. And all security risks associated.
It's just the inner platform effect all over again, with every program expanding until it can read mail. I hate to stereotype it that way, but everything in the OS has a reason, which in the resource hog category is more often than not just "John Doe might need it someday". And if it wasn't included with the OS when it shipped, John Doe would complain for hours why computers need to be sooo complicated just to connect a wireless HDMI stream over his WPA2-AES secured and UPnP-enabled home network to his Wifi-enabled, but not WPA2-compliant Flatscreen.
If it's user-updateable, you have rootkits in 1..2..3. If it's not, then it's core components will be obsolete five days after leaving the factory. Everything else we have hogging our CPU and memory simply stems from this fundamental issue.
That big OS overhead usually has some reasons other than Steve Ballmer and his goons, some of them pretty good ones.
At the top of my head: security (user accounts, access rights), kernel (scheduling, process initiation and termination, memory allocation) and extensibles (everything from 3d-graphics to USB and Bluetooth).
I can open the task manager on my machine and can cite a good and valid reason for every task and service that is running. I cannot not say I'm satisfied with how much memory and CPU time each of these tasks consume, but I had disabled them a long time ago if they were truly unneeded for my daily computing needs.
I hate to have my post sound like a Matrix transcript, but all these processes have a purpose and we casually overlook theirs unless something stops working or piques our interest because it looks uncommon.
It's just not at all easy to keep track of a hundred different threads, services/deamons and utility programs. Pick several running PIDs at random, try to google what's their purpose and if you're still not convinced, just try to disable them (don't be a fool, make sure a reboot would re-enable them automatically!) and see what stops working until you reboot.
"But all I need is a browser" is easier said than done, because Joe Sixpack also wants to use Skype, download photos from his Phone or Digicam, lose his retirement funds to Online Poker, download copyright-infringing music, transfer that to his mobile phone, watch a DVD or skin flicks encoded in one pretty rare coded out of several thousand possible. And his kid plays a Shooter game with high-level DRM and the appropriate anti-DRM hack.
And after all, wherever my browser might be located and run from: if it's a medium that's not physically write-only, he'd better get some kind of virus- and rootkit protection.
The browser might seem like the core task, but there's a ton of things that need to work and interoperate properly to get that thing to fly. And it would not only suck having to program all these things in low-level languages, it'll suck as well trying to maintain and update everything in EEPROMs. If it's extensible, it's slow and hackable somehow - and if it's not extensible, the users will constantly be clamoring for new versions.
As a citizen of Germany, I can assure you, being "occupied" by US troops is the single best thing that can happen to your economy.
They usually build huge bases back in the most remote areas, generating thousands of civilian jobs, them, their civilian contractors and their employees paying some handsome taxes. They're building top-notch military hospitals where even local "natives" can get a treatment in urgent or complicated cases. The troops themselves usually behave reasonable unless drunk or agitated, but overall not much worse than all other people of the same age and comparable IQ and education level.
US troops in South Korea, Japan, Germany and some other countries boosted the local economy to growth levels unheard of before or ever since they left.
I don't think all Iraqis would like the US to leave. They're probably not too happy about non-Muslims in their country, just like we are not too happy about Muslims in our countries - but overall, the average Iraqi civilian probably benefits a LOT from having the US there instead of the Taliban forces or ol' Saddam.