(2) seems patently stupid to me. If you have to admit to a misdemeanor that carries a minor fine to to win, say, the cost of some massive medical bills, it seems like a no-brainer to admit that you didn't have insurance.
I hadn't considered hitting a pedestrian or cyclist, to be honest.
I suspect even with legal minimum car insurance there's no guarantee you'd be OK because the person you hit would be patched up as far as possible by the NHS. Sure they could sue you for damages, but I suspect that basic insurance cover wouldn't cover this - you'd need legal expenses cover.
Guess what? More and more people are taking the risk and driving without insurance.
The real risk isn't the fine, but the financial ruin you're facing if you ever end up in a real car accident.
What financial ruin?
There are three possible scenarios:
1. Both parties in an accident are insured. It's the insurance companies financial problem. 2. Neither party is insured. One is not likely to sue the other because it might mean admitting that they didn't have insurance either. 3. One party is insured. In this case, it would be quicker and easier for them to claim through MIB than it would be to sue the uninsured driver, and have a rather higher chance of actually recovering any losses.
(Value of car) - (Probability of getting caught) * (penalty converted to monetary value) = Expected net profit (or loss).
It probably won't work for cars, as probability is probably greater than 1/2, and if you count lost wages while being incarcerated (not to mention the cost of being an ex-felon for life), expected net loss would be too great---you might as well buy lottery tickets or go to a casino, at that point.
It's already happening for car insurance here in the UK.
You're legally obliged to have third party insurance cover. However, young drivers and drivers who are deemed "high risk" (though no insurance company will tell you exactly what they class as "high risk" so to a certain extent you have to guess) are routinely quoted well over £1,000 for cover.
Reading through court cases in my local newspaper, it seems that driving without insurance generally attracts a fine no greater than £750. (It also attracts a criminal record and is something you'd have to tell your insurance company about - who would then increase the premium still further - but if you weren't prepared to chance that in the first place you probably would have paid for insurance)
Guess what? More and more people are taking the risk and driving without insurance.
Re:Capture all aspects Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst
on
Digitizing Rare Vinyl
·
· Score: 1
And you don't have to post only one format. If there were a choice of FLAC, mp3, and ogg on the site for different prices based on file size there isn't a problem.
4000 tracks is not really that much space anyway.
My entire collection of 12k FLAC files is only 300G of space.
Now go and find somewhere to host them that can survive a slashdotting.
But also they answer for the drivers, so a "bad driver" issue is actually a kernel issue. I don't understand why "bad drivers" are not supposed to be the responsibility of MS. It's possible to design a system resilient to that kind of failure.
Well, this is very true.
However, you've got to look at the context. Firstly, Microsoft are more concerned about the system being stable on the sort of hardware bought by businesses - half-decent quality PCs and servers - and these tend to use relatively conservative hardware which has decent drivers.
Secondly, a bit of history - while the idea of true microkernels with practically every driver being a true userland process is not new, the performance penalty they introduce (which is less of an issue on modern hardware) was considered unacceptable when the NT kernel was first designed - and the kind of overhaul that would be necessary to change this is something Microsoft have historically shied away from.
No... bad drivers in Linux only halt the process. They do not bring the entire system down. That is a a major architectural difference between Windows and Linux.
If memory serves, they're threads rather than processes and all threads share the same address space. So it's quite possible for one thread to trample all over everything crashing the OS.
Linux puts most drivers in the kernel and a bad driver there can cause a panic, bringing the system down.
Not being a Linux kernel programmer, I won't comment on this except to ask a question; even if it's true, what bearing does it have on how Windows screwed up at the Olympics?
When the parent post is arguing that the problem is Microsoft choosing to put so many drivers at such an elevated position within the kernel, it demonstrates that the alternatives are not necessarily any better.
I'm not sure how it's architected in Mac OS X, but I've certainly seen kernel panics on my Mac Mini.
Ummm... "architect" is a noun.
And when one is describing how a software architect has designed a particular piece of software, IME it is perfectly acceptable to use it in this way. Put "architected" into Google and you'll get back just over 1,000,000 hits and most of the first page hits relate to software design.
Because they want someone they can call up and say, "Product X is broke. Fix it."
That's pretty much the main reason that I've ran into. A support contract being available.
In my experience, that's a bullshit reason trotted out by IT managers who have no faith in their own team and no experience of how most support contracts tend to pan out.
As far as the rest of the organisation is concerned, the person they call to say "Product X is broke. Fix it." is the IT department. How the IT department fixes it is of no consequence.
I've yet to see a support offering so good that you could reduce headcount in the IT support department, or for that matter an offering so good you could avoid hiring people who actually know what they're doing. So you certainly aren't saving in staffing costs. "We're waiting for vendor X to come back to us" may cut some ice in the early part of a major incident but it won't if the incident carries on for any significant length of time.
The only benefit I see is for commercial products whereby updates are only available to customers with a support contract.
There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?
I can answer that one for you already.
1. There may or may not be an F/OSS equivalent. But data migration is probably going to be extremely painful, and as far as everyone else in the business is concerned, any failings in the product is the IT department's problem not theirs. So the rest of the business isn't too keen on migration.
2. If it's a business application which does one of the myriad boring things which are necessary in most businesses but tend to be specific to the field, the answer to "is there a F/OSS equivalent?" is almost certainly "no".
I once wiped everything from a DD except for the MBR, the system actually booted Linux until it tryed to mount root, then it couldn't and kernel paniced, the machine frooze dead.
That was my first and only kernel panic.
Easy enough. The MBR doesn't usually require a working filesystem because it just contains a pointer to a block on the disk which contains the bootloader which itself may only contain a pointer to the location of a kernel.
Jeez. MS apologists always trot out that one. Making bad engineering acceptable will probably be Bill Gates' largest "contribution" to society.
In fairness to software engineering, if the "bad" hardware driver can crash the system, then the system is not ready for production and has more than a few show-stopping (no pun intended) bugs. Take a look at basic kernel or micro-kernel design principles and stop spreading the view that catastrophically bad design is acceptable.
Linux puts most drivers in the kernel and a bad driver there can cause a panic, bringing the system down.
Most of the BSDs, AFAIK, have some drivers in the kernel and others in userland processes.
I'm not sure how it's architected in Mac OS X, but I've certainly seen kernel panics on my Mac Mini.
There may be an embedded OS which is less susceptible to being killed by a poor driver, but for something like this you probably wouldn't bother with an embedded OS because there's so much more in the way of off-the-shelf software available to do the job for Windows and Linux.
Be careful. Some of us feel that OOP is overhyped.
I wouldn't say overhyped. I think it provides a good design framework for large systems.
However, I don't think it's always particularly well taught. To all intents and purposes, it's a superset of top-down programming - it's just that you don't apply top-down ideas until you get to the stage of writing individual methods. Thing is, as far as I could gather when I was in university only a handful of lecturers (generally the more experienced senior ones) actually understood this.
Perhaps I should have gone to a different university;)
You can prove the Earth is round by looking at a lunar eclipse. Educated people have known the shape of the Earrh for thousands of years. I have no idea why they teach us as children that everyone thought Chris Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth.
I am not a historian, but AFAIK universal education is a relatively modern thing. While I don't doubt that Christopher Columbus didn't expect to sail off the edge, I'm not sure if the same could be said for all the men on board the ship.
The vital difference is that probably 99% of avowed Flat Earthers don't actually believe it. They are just playing a role and defending an absurd position as an intellectual exercise, like a debating club where you have to advocate a point of view regardless of your personal beliefs.
How do you know the same isn't true of creationists?
The reason why pickability (or lack therof) is important is because insurance companies will, in general, cover theft if windows are broken, doors are crowbared, or there is obvious signs of forced entry. Of course, if the person breaking in is caught, its easy to tag them with breaking and entering charges
You could have at least read the post you were replying to.
Locks do not get picked.
Inside jobs involve a real key - and in those cases, it's very unlikely that the insurance will pay out because, as you say, there would be no sign of forced entry.
Burglars without inside access to keys don't spend time messing around with picking locks. They generally walk in through an open door or smash their way in and 9 times out of 10 they'll be in and out in under 10 minutes.
Look at the keypad. The numbers will be worn down. Look to see if it's an even wear, that means there are more than a few combos that work, but usually it's only one or two that are commonly shared.
Then look for the most worn, with the most dirt-- it's the first number. Elminate the clean bright keys from the pool. Eliminate zero and one; the remaining pool has the combination. It's probably just four numbers, could be five.
Now take your Timex/Sinclair and do the math.
I've done the math.
By my calculations, if security is of any importance then after a small number of wrong combinations there will be so many sirens and strobes going off and burly security guards bearing down on you that it'll be rather hard to make a discreet entrance.
You are mistaken and I don't know why people continue to perpetuate this myth. According to the Visa Debit Card page they offer the same zero liability protection to all cards processed on the Visa network. This policy started in 2000.
I note these are the US Visa pages. Do you have anything which confirms that this policy extends worldwide?
Flying Ryanair is a bit like taking a cheap bus driven by an unpleasant bouncer. It's usually the cheapest option (often by quite a ways) to get from A to B, but if you piss off the driver, he has no qualms about breaking your nose for you.
With the added bonus that as soon as air travel is involved, the law is weighted very heavily against the consumer. To carry your analogy further, you can't punch the bouncer back because he can have you locked up for years. And if you complain to the bus company, they'll tell you it's company policy for their customers to have their nose broken.
To add insult to injury, you can't sue them because various pieces of legislation have made this perfectly legal.
Certainly for any business over a very small size.
The OEM license for Windows forbids you using it for any sort of imaging or mass deployment unless you are the OEM. (Seriously, go read it some time). This artificial legal limitation doesn't exist in the corporate site licenses.
Therefore, any organisation which doesn't have a volume license for Windows falls into one of the following categories:
Not read the license properly; using an OEM version for imaging and open to all sorts of trouble
Read the license properly, doesn't care (maybe such restrictions are illegal or don't exist where they are)
Masochists. Likes all the "click next next next, now remove all this crapware" you get with OEM builds.
Too small to bother with imaging/mass deployment.
... and if they have a volume license for Windows, the PC doesn't need to ship with downgrade rights. The volume license grants them.
Gone are the days of writing to c:\windows without repercussion. Gone are the days of dropping kernel hooks in to get better app performance. Thank god.
Yes, and it only took 20 years. Well done, Microsoft. So glad you got there in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
And if language never evolved we'd all be saying "oook" to each other.
Live with it.
(2) seems patently stupid to me. If you have to admit to a misdemeanor that carries a minor fine to to win, say, the cost of some massive medical bills, it seems like a no-brainer to admit that you didn't have insurance.
What medical bills?
I hadn't considered hitting a pedestrian or cyclist, to be honest.
I suspect even with legal minimum car insurance there's no guarantee you'd be OK because the person you hit would be patched up as far as possible by the NHS. Sure they could sue you for damages, but I suspect that basic insurance cover wouldn't cover this - you'd need legal expenses cover.
Few of the ideas are original - but that's been the case in gaming since.... oooh, a very long time ago.
Most of the ideas are remarkably well executed - now that is something rather rarer.
Guess what? More and more people are taking the risk and driving without insurance.
The real risk isn't the fine, but the financial ruin you're facing if you ever end up in a real car accident.
What financial ruin?
There are three possible scenarios:
1. Both parties in an accident are insured. It's the insurance companies financial problem.
2. Neither party is insured. One is not likely to sue the other because it might mean admitting that they didn't have insurance either.
3. One party is insured. In this case, it would be quicker and easier for them to claim through MIB than it would be to sue the uninsured driver, and have a rather higher chance of actually recovering any losses.
If you don't get caught, there's no punishment.
You should factor that into your calculation:
(Value of car) - (Probability of getting caught) * (penalty converted to monetary value) = Expected net profit (or loss).
It probably won't work for cars, as probability is probably greater than 1/2, and if you count lost wages while being incarcerated (not to mention the cost of being an ex-felon for life), expected net loss would be too great---you might as well buy lottery tickets or go to a casino, at that point.
It's already happening for car insurance here in the UK.
You're legally obliged to have third party insurance cover. However, young drivers and drivers who are deemed "high risk" (though no insurance company will tell you exactly what they class as "high risk" so to a certain extent you have to guess) are routinely quoted well over £1,000 for cover.
Reading through court cases in my local newspaper, it seems that driving without insurance generally attracts a fine no greater than £750. (It also attracts a criminal record and is something you'd have to tell your insurance company about - who would then increase the premium still further - but if you weren't prepared to chance that in the first place you probably would have paid for insurance)
Guess what? More and more people are taking the risk and driving without insurance.
http://www.elpj.com/
Not digital, but I bet you anything you like you'll get a much better file by digitising the analogue output.
And you don't have to post only one format. If there were a choice of FLAC, mp3, and ogg on the site for different prices based on file size there isn't a problem.
4000 tracks is not really that much space anyway.
My entire collection of 12k FLAC files is only 300G of space.
Now go and find somewhere to host them that can survive a slashdotting.
But also they answer for the drivers, so a "bad driver" issue is actually a kernel issue.
I don't understand why "bad drivers" are not supposed to be the responsibility of MS. It's possible to design a system resilient to that kind of failure.
Well, this is very true.
However, you've got to look at the context. Firstly, Microsoft are more concerned about the system being stable on the sort of hardware bought by businesses - half-decent quality PCs and servers - and these tend to use relatively conservative hardware which has decent drivers.
Secondly, a bit of history - while the idea of true microkernels with practically every driver being a true userland process is not new, the performance penalty they introduce (which is less of an issue on modern hardware) was considered unacceptable when the NT kernel was first designed - and the kind of overhaul that would be necessary to change this is something Microsoft have historically shied away from.
No... bad drivers in Linux only halt the process. They do not bring the entire system down. That is a a major architectural difference between Windows and Linux.
If memory serves, they're threads rather than processes and all threads share the same address space. So it's quite possible for one thread to trample all over everything crashing the OS.
Linux puts most drivers in the kernel and a bad driver there can cause a panic, bringing the system down.
Not being a Linux kernel programmer, I won't comment on this except to ask a question; even if it's true, what bearing does it have on how Windows screwed up at the Olympics?
When the parent post is arguing that the problem is Microsoft choosing to put so many drivers at such an elevated position within the kernel, it demonstrates that the alternatives are not necessarily any better.
I'm not sure how it's architected in Mac OS X, but I've certainly seen kernel panics on my Mac Mini.
Ummm... "architect" is a noun.
And when one is describing how a software architect has designed a particular piece of software, IME it is perfectly acceptable to use it in this way. Put "architected" into Google and you'll get back just over 1,000,000 hits and most of the first page hits relate to software design.
Because they want someone they can call up and say, "Product X is broke. Fix it."
That's pretty much the main reason that I've ran into. A support contract being available.
In my experience, that's a bullshit reason trotted out by IT managers who have no faith in their own team and no experience of how most support contracts tend to pan out.
As far as the rest of the organisation is concerned, the person they call to say "Product X is broke. Fix it." is the IT department. How the IT department fixes it is of no consequence.
I've yet to see a support offering so good that you could reduce headcount in the IT support department, or for that matter an offering so good you could avoid hiring people who actually know what they're doing. So you certainly aren't saving in staffing costs. "We're waiting for vendor X to come back to us" may cut some ice in the early part of a major incident but it won't if the incident carries on for any significant length of time.
The only benefit I see is for commercial products whereby updates are only available to customers with a support contract.
There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?
I can answer that one for you already.
1. There may or may not be an F/OSS equivalent. But data migration is probably going to be extremely painful, and as far as everyone else in the business is concerned, any failings in the product is the IT department's problem not theirs. So the rest of the business isn't too keen on migration.
2. If it's a business application which does one of the myriad boring things which are necessary in most businesses but tend to be specific to the field, the answer to "is there a F/OSS equivalent?" is almost certainly "no".
I once wiped everything from a DD except for the MBR, the system actually booted Linux until it tryed to mount root, then it couldn't and kernel paniced, the machine frooze dead.
That was my first and only kernel panic.
Easy enough. The MBR doesn't usually require a working filesystem because it just contains a pointer to a block on the disk which contains the bootloader which itself may only contain a pointer to the location of a kernel.
Jeez. MS apologists always trot out that one. Making bad engineering acceptable will probably be Bill Gates' largest "contribution" to society.
In fairness to software engineering, if the "bad" hardware driver can crash the system, then the system is not ready for production and has more than a few show-stopping (no pun intended) bugs. Take a look at basic kernel or micro-kernel design principles and stop spreading the view that catastrophically bad design is acceptable.
Linux puts most drivers in the kernel and a bad driver there can cause a panic, bringing the system down.
Most of the BSDs, AFAIK, have some drivers in the kernel and others in userland processes.
I'm not sure how it's architected in Mac OS X, but I've certainly seen kernel panics on my Mac Mini.
There may be an embedded OS which is less susceptible to being killed by a poor driver, but for something like this you probably wouldn't bother with an embedded OS because there's so much more in the way of off-the-shelf software available to do the job for Windows and Linux.
Be careful. Some of us feel that OOP is overhyped.
I wouldn't say overhyped. I think it provides a good design framework for large systems.
However, I don't think it's always particularly well taught. To all intents and purposes, it's a superset of top-down programming - it's just that you don't apply top-down ideas until you get to the stage of writing individual methods. Thing is, as far as I could gather when I was in university only a handful of lecturers (generally the more experienced senior ones) actually understood this.
Perhaps I should have gone to a different university ;)
You can prove the Earth is round by looking at a lunar eclipse. Educated people have known the shape of the Earrh for thousands of years. I have no idea why they teach us as children that everyone thought Chris Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth.
I am not a historian, but AFAIK universal education is a relatively modern thing. While I don't doubt that Christopher Columbus didn't expect to sail off the edge, I'm not sure if the same could be said for all the men on board the ship.
I think someone is pulling a great prank. Just read this section in their FAQ:
Q: "What's underneath the Earth?" aka "What's on the bottom?" aka "What's on the other side?"
A: This is unknown. Some believe it to be just rocks, others believe the Earth rests on the back of four elephants and a turtle.
That's straight of of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.
Not true. The idea that the earth rests on the back of a turtle is not new:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
The vital difference is that probably 99% of avowed Flat Earthers don't actually believe it. They are just playing a role and defending an absurd position as an intellectual exercise, like a debating club where you have to advocate a point of view regardless of your personal beliefs.
How do you know the same isn't true of creationists?
The reason why pickability (or lack therof) is important is because insurance companies will, in general, cover theft if windows are broken, doors are crowbared, or there is obvious signs of forced entry. Of course, if the person breaking in is caught, its easy to tag them with breaking and entering charges
You could have at least read the post you were replying to.
Locks do not get picked.
Inside jobs involve a real key - and in those cases, it's very unlikely that the insurance will pay out because, as you say, there would be no sign of forced entry.
Burglars without inside access to keys don't spend time messing around with picking locks. They generally walk in through an open door or smash their way in and 9 times out of 10 they'll be in and out in under 10 minutes.
Fool.
Look at the keypad. The numbers will be worn down. Look to see if it's an even wear, that means there are more than a few combos that work, but usually it's only one or two that are commonly shared.
Then look for the most worn, with the most dirt-- it's the first number. Elminate the clean bright keys from the pool. Eliminate zero and one; the remaining pool has the combination. It's probably just four numbers, could be five.
Now take your Timex/Sinclair and do the math.
I've done the math.
By my calculations, if security is of any importance then after a small number of wrong combinations there will be so many sirens and strobes going off and burly security guards bearing down on you that it'll be rather hard to make a discreet entrance.
You are mistaken and I don't know why people continue to perpetuate this myth. According to the Visa Debit Card page they offer the same zero liability protection to all cards processed on the Visa network. This policy started in 2000.
I note these are the US Visa pages. Do you have anything which confirms that this policy extends worldwide?
Flying Ryanair is a bit like taking a cheap bus driven by an unpleasant bouncer. It's usually the cheapest option (often by quite a ways) to get from A to B, but if you piss off the driver, he has no qualms about breaking your nose for you.
With the added bonus that as soon as air travel is involved, the law is weighted very heavily against the consumer. To carry your analogy further, you can't punch the bouncer back because he can have you locked up for years. And if you complain to the bus company, they'll tell you it's company policy for their customers to have their nose broken.
To add insult to injury, you can't sue them because various pieces of legislation have made this perfectly legal.
Certainly for any business over a very small size.
The OEM license for Windows forbids you using it for any sort of imaging or mass deployment unless you are the OEM. (Seriously, go read it some time). This artificial legal limitation doesn't exist in the corporate site licenses.
Therefore, any organisation which doesn't have a volume license for Windows falls into one of the following categories:
Gone are the days of writing to c:\windows without repercussion. Gone are the days of dropping kernel hooks in to get better app performance. Thank god.
Yes, and it only took 20 years. Well done, Microsoft. So glad you got there in the end.