US Government: AHHHHHHH it's like admitting sex exists. Don't do it, don't do it!
This is Insightful? Give me a break.
First,.xxx solves absolutely no problems. It will not make porn easier to filter (why use.xxx if everyone is filtering it?). Arguments about specific TLDs aside, I seriously doubt that.xxx in particular has much to with this situation. Rather,.xxx is a symptom of a larger problem.
ICANN has stopped working to serve the public's interests. The proliferation of new TLDs, including.xxx, has been brought about for a single purpose: to make registrars more money. With.xxx its been nothing but a blatant extortion campaign against large companies -- "register, or else". If the goal of this direction is to fundamentally change the hierarchical nature of DNS (say, to move from www.microsoft.com and yro.slashdot.org to www.microsoft and yro.slashdot), then that is probably a good idea in the long run, but the way in which they're going about it is nothing more than a money grab.
Put simply, ICANN has stopped working for a better and more stable public Internet and has instead taken a dive directly into the registrars pockets. I personally would like nothing more than to see the US stick it to ICANN if it will help put them back on the right track (or work towards their outright replacement).
Wow, so the Indian military works with major US vendors like Norton to spy on their own people (and I assume other countries people since it will be the same source????)
I assume they have the source code so they can insert extra bits and dispatch spyware the next time Norton auto-updates?
You get an auto-update, they get a spyware app into your PC. Is that it? I don't think the scandal here is that the source code was stolen, it is a scandal that Norton cooperates will military spyware!!
Wow, +4 already? The tinfoils must be up and about today.
Believe it or not, most major software vendors have licenses and policies in place (e.g., Microsoft) to allow sensitive institutions (governments, defense contractors, etc) access to their source code. The primary reason is actually the opposite of what you say. Customers such as the Indian government want to be able to see what's actually in the code before they agree to buy and install it on their own systems and network.
Think of it as the 1% always getting to run open-source software because they have the clout to demand it (and under strict a NDA).
Wait, how is this different than the failure that was vendors.slashdot.org back in 2006/2007?
Surely I'm not the only one who remembers when they invited Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and I forget who else to participate in tech discussions, and it turned into a total flop? I can't find the original Slashdot story talking about it (pulled down?), but I think it was somewhere around here.
The article does come up with a few very interesting apps that are out there - such as giving a doctor the ability to view different x-ray images without having to touch anything. I can imagine that this sort of thing would be VERY useful to an operating room where the doctors aren't supposed to touch anything after they have scrubbed down.
Wow, that's the first time I've heard of anything a gesture-based (i.e. Minority Report) interface would be good for. Allowing a surgeon to manipulate an image display without touching anything is just cool.
As to the costs of joining the program (moving to Seattle, 6% cut, etc), it might be worth it if you get to have face-to-face contact with the engineers and developers of the Kinect SDK. Having the engineering team right there listening to comments, complaints, and suggestions to improve and modify the SDK would be very helpful.
It's also interesting to read his open letter to Coyne that is posted along with the video.
He may be wrong, deluded, full of himself, or just lying, but I have a strong sense that the reporting of this whole event was very badly skewed against Haught. At least now, with the presentations and video made available, we can see how it really played out.
For example, before we turned off IE 10, we changed the default privacy setting from allowing some cookies to completely blocking all cookies. We then turned the browser off, rebooted, and IE 10 appeared to have completely disappeared from the PC. But when we went back into the settings, turned IE 10 back on, and rebooted again, the browser was back -- but with our customized settings, not the default. That would appear to indicate that Microsoft doesn’t really remove the browser entirely, but rather just hides it – with customized settings and all.
OMFG! A conspiracy unmasked! User settings aren't deleted!
So, because IE doesn't delete your settings it isn't being removed? By this same stupid logic we can determine that almost no modern software is ever actually removed.
I'm quite astounded with the depth of these morons' investigation.
I am a lawyer interested in science and tech policy, but with no actual computer skills (i.e., I programmed a few lines of HTML in my youth, but that's about it).
What's the point if you can't bill clients while reading?
Hello, I'd like to introduce you to the False Premise.
Besides, people who are replacing their real computer with whatever the current "hot seller" is are not the primary customer of computer component retailers.
Assuming they don't do anything stupid to themselves, NewEgg is going to be just fine.
My mail server is a legitimate server. What the hell makes Verizon, Gmail, or my hosting provider any more legitimate than me? Because they're big companies?
A "legitimate server" has a dedicated IP address which won't be immediately under suspicion by other servers just because of its address. That's all I meant. If you want to run a server from home, I'd suggest getting commercial service that comes with a static IP address.
Even if I didn't run my mail off of my own Internet connection, requiring email to be gatewayed through a chosen few high priests is a bad, bad, bad idea from any perspective. Any significant collection of power will ALWAYS result in an equally significant abuse of that power.
Again, get business-class Internet service and you can create your own "high priest".
I get it morons spam, but how about opening it for users on request when we want to have mailservers?
Internet service with blocked ports is not really internet service.
And I get it that 0.03% of users are like you and want to run a mailserver at home. Unfortunately, 60% of users have spam-spewing malware infesting their machine and blocking port 25 on all the big ISP networks is a huge step forward to reduce botnet/zombie spam.
Does Verizon not have an SMTP gateway you can use? I know when on a Comcast connection I can simply open up smtp.comcast.net and it will relay mail for me. A quick look shows they probably do, though you might have to do smarthost and authentication. Pretty easy.
Besides, any competent spam filter will increase the spam rating for mail sent directly from a network like Verizon and Comcast anyway. You're better off using a legitimate server (Verizon, Gmail, your hosting provider, whatever) to send those messages.
It's a little sad to see all that light pollution. I wonder my children eill ever be able to see the milky way... without having to pay for a space trip.
As others mentioned, there are plenty of places you can go that still offer a pristine view of the night sky. Light pollution drops off pretty rapidly as you get away from the source.
This summer we had a mini family reunion at my uncle's cabin in southwest Montana. Possibly the best part for me was getting away from the city and seeing the night sky the way it is truly meant to be seen. The sheer number of stars and their brightness is mind-boggling and yet so easily lost and forgotten in even a smaller city. When you see the stars, planets, and galaxies (including our own) laid out above you it is so easy to understand why ancient humans gave so much thought and concern over the heavens. It's impossible to look at that and not start thinking about all kinds of possibilities (and start feeling very small).
One thing I found surprising was the astounding number of satellites visible from the ground. They move across the sky at a pretty fast clip and there are so many. At one point I could see 5 in the sky at the same time, all moving different directions. Very neat.
Since C# never aimed to run on non-windows, it's also not a fair comparison of designs, because the goals were different.
Plain wrong. C# is a platform-agnostic language with a standards-defined specification. The CLR and CIL specifications are also 100% platform independent.
What is tied to Windows is Microsoft's implementation of their CLR and CIL compiler. This is what Mono implements for other platforms.
When you click on the Windows Desktop tile, you’re thrown back into the familiar Windows 7 desktop, with the Taskbar running along the bottom and the not-so-touch-friendly desktop icons of old.
Obviously I can't speak for 2000 Start Menus, but I can't see it being impossible.
But in the earlier article about the interface they go on to say:
[The classic desktop] is where Microsoft wants you to run applications such as Office and Photoshop: apps that were designed for mouse and keyboard, not touch. Applications can still be pinned to the Taskbar, but infuriatingly the Windows Desktop Start button just throws you back to the touchscreen Start Menu. The Start Menu of old has completely disappeared. This makes it nigh-on impossible to quickly launch an application that isn’t already pinned to your Taskbar, let alone launch items such as the Control Panel.
If Microsoft truly leaves PC users in the dark to this extent then the year Windows 8 is released really will be the Year of the Linux desktop -- and Microsoft will have handed it to them on a silver platter.
I know that I personally will give up on Windows and move to whatever desktop environment lets me work with a full size computer effectively. I do NOT want to deal with dumbass touch interfaces on a PC, whether that's Windows 8, iOS, or frakking Unity.
That was my thought as well when they first presented the system, and claims of "simultaneous identification of up to 8 plates per second" were tossed around.
At first there really did seem to be a problem with either the database backend doing the lookups or the cameras themselves. You could be fully stopped at the gate and it would be 6-12 seconds before the gate would open. They seemed to fix that after a month or two. Not soon after is when they started mounting the cameras I as I mentioned, and one of these is facing a 4-lane 35 MPH road, so it must be working pretty well.
The other problem is the way they have the cameras mounted. Because this was fitted onto an existing structure the camera can only see your plate once your car is only about feet away from the gate. This means you're forced to come to almost a full stop (or just slow way down) to give the gate time to come up.
Since you said you've worked on these systems, can I ask you a question? From looking at the cameras and knowing they work when it's dark, I assume they use infrared light to function. Does that sound right? If that's the case, wouldn't you be able to block them by putting an IR filter over your license plate? Such a filter should be transparent to normal light, so I can't imagine it's (very) illegal in most places.
The US faced down the fucking USSR. The USSR could literally destroy the world, and we had a policy of going toe to toe with them if they messed with us or our allies. We were just as ready to jab the 'blow up the god damn world' as they were, if not more so. We went nearly a decade in that mindset without pissing away our civil liberties.
I agree with the sentiment of your post, but I also think it's important not to gloss over history.
The truth is that more than a few people had problems during the Red Scare (both of them), but even more so as a result of McCarthyism. While we may have done better then than we are doing today, the US didn't weather the Cold War without any blemishes on civil rights or liberties.
How is this a slippery slope? The cars are parked in a public place, with license plates easily viewable. There is no expectation of privacy in this case.
I believe the slippery slope the submitter is referring to is the widespread dissemination of license plate reading cameras. As with most technologies, it can be used for both good and ill.
For example, it can be a convenience. This article is one example (helping people find their cars). Another is for controlled-access areas such as the university I attend. They recently switched from a RFID-style windshield sticker to these license plate cameras, claiming it will be faster to open the gates (false), that it would be less prone to failure (also false).
The slippery part of these devices is that it's all to easy to re-purpose them. Very soon after installing the cameras at the controlled-access gates my university started mounting them on curbside free-standing poles all over campus. It is almost impossible to drive through campus (which I acknowledge is private property) without having your plate scanned. I'm sure this has somehow been sold as "keeping campus safe." Of course, what it really is, is a waste of money and an erosion of privacy.
The same type of scenario could easily happen over an entire city once this technology becomes common enough. Pretty soon there's enough coverage that law enforcement (or anyone else, for that matter) might be able to pay for (or coerce via legislation) private owners to give them access to the data. Now "criminals" can be caught by simply driving past that Chevron station on the corner and detailed data mining of your personal travel habits is effortless and completely legal. The entire vehicle-owning public is suddenly under constant, real-time surveillance.
I realize there is limited expectation of privacy in public places, and that license plates are easily visible on the outside of your vehicle. That doesn't change that this is an erosion of privacy. Just as stalking a person all over a city isn't legal, doing effectively the same thing via electronic means shouldn't be either (without a valid warrant).
The mailing list has been awash in outrage and suprise as prices rise much higher than most can support
This is one reason I'm always critical of people who blindly say "Move your $X to Google $SERVICE! It's free for $PREDICATE usage!"
TANSTAAFL, even if it is Google. Sooner or later (usually based on how fast $SERVICE reaches some critical mass) you better be willing to pay up. At least the classic software model tells you how much it costs up front.
The ribbon wouldn't be anywhere near so bad if it had a "quick search" feature. Either a box or some kind of keyboard focus capture where you can start typing a word and it would search all possible command names and descriptions, displaying the results in the ribbon. The number of commands is small enough that such a search could be extremely fast.
For example, search for "paste" and you get a ribbon bar with the options:
Paste | Paste Special | Paste as Text | Paste as HTML | Quick Paste | Paste as New Foo
I hate searching through all the ribbon panes to find a simple command. A good example another poster mentioned is where the "create zip archive" button is. A quick search for "zip" would make that painless.
Given the focus on searching in Windows Vista and 7 I can't fathom why they haven't done this yet.
Process Explorer allows you to search by resource and close an open handle forcibly. Won't work against a system process but should work for anything else.
Forcibly closing file handles behind a program's back is almost always a really bad idea. The program holding the handle has no reason to expect that the handle has been closed and will continue to use it. Sometimes this just results in an invalid handle error, but if the handle has been re-issued it might mean that program A unintentionally closes (or writes to!) program B's handle (since the internal handle identifiers are re-used by the kernel).
I'm pretty sure Raymond Chen (of the OldNewThing blog) wrote about this, but I can't find the article now.
The Guarantee does not apply to: Our competitors' website prices, offers that include financing, bundling of items, free items, pricing errors, mail-in offers, competitors' service prices, items that are advertised as limited-quantity, out of stock, open-box, clearance, refurbished/used items, BestBuy.com Midnight Sale and special hour sale events, BestBuy.com Outlet Center and Marketplace items, and items for sale Thanksgiving Day through the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Emphasis mine. I'm 100% confident that the HP tablet will be marked as both "limited-quantity" and "clearance".
well right there in the article its talking about driving cars up it... never mind the MILES of gravity its seriously talking about cars driving up it
I used to be very critical of space elevators as well... until I bothered to read up on the ideas behind them. If you're actually interested in learning more, check out these two articles:
As just a quick example, putting a payload in orbit with rockets ranges from $4,000/kg to $40,000/kg depending on the rocket type. Estimates for the cost of electricity to move an elevator into orbit is around $220/kg with current power transfer capabilities, becoming cheaper as that technology improves. And, if you assume that power becomes cheaper to produce in the same timeframe as space elevator components become feasible (ala fusion or something else), this payload delivery cost will be even lower.
Nobody is suggesting we break ground on the base stations today. It's simply an interesting idea for putting things in orbit, and maybe a good goal/benchmark for the development of new high-strength materials.
Unfortunately not but it's nice that a scam alert site comes up first.
Google indexes Slashdot comments, but will not pay any attention to links they contain. All URLs inside comments include the rel="nofollow" attribute, excluding them from participating in search engine ranking.
Slashdot Mirror
US Government: AHHHHHHH it's like admitting sex exists. Don't do it, don't do it!
This is Insightful? Give me a break.
First, .xxx solves absolutely no problems. It will not make porn easier to filter (why use .xxx if everyone is filtering it?). Arguments about specific TLDs aside, I seriously doubt that .xxx in particular has much to with this situation. Rather, .xxx is a symptom of a larger problem.
ICANN has stopped working to serve the public's interests. The proliferation of new TLDs, including .xxx, has been brought about for a single purpose: to make registrars more money. With .xxx its been nothing but a blatant extortion campaign against large companies -- "register, or else". If the goal of this direction is to fundamentally change the hierarchical nature of DNS (say, to move from www.microsoft.com and yro.slashdot.org to www.microsoft and yro.slashdot), then that is probably a good idea in the long run, but the way in which they're going about it is nothing more than a money grab.
Put simply, ICANN has stopped working for a better and more stable public Internet and has instead taken a dive directly into the registrars pockets. I personally would like nothing more than to see the US stick it to ICANN if it will help put them back on the right track (or work towards their outright replacement).
Stealing source code from Symantec is like stealing your neighbor's garbage.
Hey, maybe if the source is published publicly, some bright person(s) can improve it and issue a "fork" of Symantec's code :)
All they probably have to do is remove a few speed up loops!
Wow, so the Indian military works with major US vendors like Norton to spy on their own people (and I assume other countries people since it will be the same source????)
I assume they have the source code so they can insert extra bits and dispatch spyware the next time Norton auto-updates?
You get an auto-update, they get a spyware app into your PC. Is that it?
I don't think the scandal here is that the source code was stolen, it is a scandal that Norton cooperates will military spyware!!
Wow, +4 already? The tinfoils must be up and about today.
Believe it or not, most major software vendors have licenses and policies in place (e.g., Microsoft) to allow sensitive institutions (governments, defense contractors, etc) access to their source code. The primary reason is actually the opposite of what you say. Customers such as the Indian government want to be able to see what's actually in the code before they agree to buy and install it on their own systems and network.
Think of it as the 1% always getting to run open-source software because they have the clout to demand it (and under strict a NDA).
Occupy Microsoft!
Wait, how is this different than the failure that was vendors.slashdot.org back in 2006/2007?
Surely I'm not the only one who remembers when they invited Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and I forget who else to participate in tech discussions, and it turned into a total flop? I can't find the original Slashdot story talking about it (pulled down?), but I think it was somewhere around here.
The article does come up with a few very interesting apps that are out there - such as giving a doctor the ability to view different x-ray images without having to touch anything. I can imagine that this sort of thing would be VERY useful to an operating room where the doctors aren't supposed to touch anything after they have scrubbed down.
Wow, that's the first time I've heard of anything a gesture-based (i.e. Minority Report) interface would be good for. Allowing a surgeon to manipulate an image display without touching anything is just cool.
As to the costs of joining the program (moving to Seattle, 6% cut, etc), it might be worth it if you get to have face-to-face contact with the engineers and developers of the Kinect SDK. Having the engineering team right there listening to comments, complaints, and suggestions to improve and modify the SDK would be very helpful.
It's also interesting to read his open letter to Coyne that is posted along with the video.
He may be wrong, deluded, full of himself, or just lying, but I have a strong sense that the reporting of this whole event was very badly skewed against Haught. At least now, with the presentations and video made available, we can see how it really played out.
Tomcat just crashed
Well, at least it's not all bad!
From T (useless) FA:
For example, before we turned off IE 10, we changed the default privacy setting from allowing some cookies to completely blocking all cookies. We then turned the browser off, rebooted, and IE 10 appeared to have completely disappeared from the PC. But when we went back into the settings, turned IE 10 back on, and rebooted again, the browser was back -- but with our customized settings, not the default. That would appear to indicate that Microsoft doesn’t really remove the browser entirely, but rather just hides it – with customized settings and all.
OMFG! A conspiracy unmasked! User settings aren't deleted!
So, because IE doesn't delete your settings it isn't being removed? By this same stupid logic we can determine that almost no modern software is ever actually removed.
I'm quite astounded with the depth of these morons' investigation.
I am a lawyer interested in science and tech policy, but with no actual computer skills (i.e., I programmed a few lines of HTML in my youth, but that's about it).
What's the point if you can't bill clients while reading?
FTFY ;)
Hello, I'd like to introduce you to the False Premise.
Besides, people who are replacing their real computer with whatever the current "hot seller" is are not the primary customer of computer component retailers.
Assuming they don't do anything stupid to themselves, NewEgg is going to be just fine.
My mail server is a legitimate server. What the hell makes Verizon, Gmail, or my hosting provider any more legitimate than me? Because they're big companies?
A "legitimate server" has a dedicated IP address which won't be immediately under suspicion by other servers just because of its address. That's all I meant. If you want to run a server from home, I'd suggest getting commercial service that comes with a static IP address.
Even if I didn't run my mail off of my own Internet connection, requiring email to be gatewayed through a chosen few high priests is a bad, bad, bad idea from any perspective. Any significant collection of power will ALWAYS result in an equally significant abuse of that power.
Again, get business-class Internet service and you can create your own "high priest".
I get it morons spam, but how about opening it for users on request when we want to have mailservers?
Internet service with blocked ports is not really internet service.
And I get it that 0.03% of users are like you and want to run a mailserver at home. Unfortunately, 60% of users have spam-spewing malware infesting their machine and blocking port 25 on all the big ISP networks is a huge step forward to reduce botnet/zombie spam.
Does Verizon not have an SMTP gateway you can use? I know when on a Comcast connection I can simply open up smtp.comcast.net and it will relay mail for me. A quick look shows they probably do, though you might have to do smarthost and authentication. Pretty easy.
Besides, any competent spam filter will increase the spam rating for mail sent directly from a network like Verizon and Comcast anyway. You're better off using a legitimate server (Verizon, Gmail, your hosting provider, whatever) to send those messages.
It's a little sad to see all that light pollution. I wonder my children eill ever be able to see the milky way... without having to pay for a space trip.
As others mentioned, there are plenty of places you can go that still offer a pristine view of the night sky. Light pollution drops off pretty rapidly as you get away from the source.
This summer we had a mini family reunion at my uncle's cabin in southwest Montana. Possibly the best part for me was getting away from the city and seeing the night sky the way it is truly meant to be seen. The sheer number of stars and their brightness is mind-boggling and yet so easily lost and forgotten in even a smaller city. When you see the stars, planets, and galaxies (including our own) laid out above you it is so easy to understand why ancient humans gave so much thought and concern over the heavens. It's impossible to look at that and not start thinking about all kinds of possibilities (and start feeling very small).
One thing I found surprising was the astounding number of satellites visible from the ground. They move across the sky at a pretty fast clip and there are so many. At one point I could see 5 in the sky at the same time, all moving different directions. Very neat.
Since C# never aimed to run on non-windows, it's also not a fair comparison of designs, because the goals were different.
Plain wrong. C# is a platform-agnostic language with a standards-defined specification. The CLR and CIL specifications are also 100% platform independent.
What is tied to Windows is Microsoft's implementation of their CLR and CIL compiler. This is what Mono implements for other platforms.
Ah, that makes sense. So, I suppose you might blind the camera day and night by putting high intensity IR LEDs around your license plate?
Unfortunately, I imagine driving anywhere off-campus with either of these in place is probably against the law.
When you click on the Windows Desktop tile, you’re thrown back into the familiar Windows 7 desktop, with the Taskbar running along the bottom and the not-so-touch-friendly desktop icons of old.
Obviously I can't speak for 2000 Start Menus, but I can't see it being impossible.
But in the earlier article about the interface they go on to say:
[The classic desktop] is where Microsoft wants you to run applications such as Office and Photoshop: apps that were designed for mouse and keyboard, not touch. Applications can still be pinned to the Taskbar, but infuriatingly the Windows Desktop Start button just throws you back to the touchscreen Start Menu. The Start Menu of old has completely disappeared. This makes it nigh-on impossible to quickly launch an application that isn’t already pinned to your Taskbar, let alone launch items such as the Control Panel.
If Microsoft truly leaves PC users in the dark to this extent then the year Windows 8 is released really will be the Year of the Linux desktop -- and Microsoft will have handed it to them on a silver platter.
I know that I personally will give up on Windows and move to whatever desktop environment lets me work with a full size computer effectively. I do NOT want to deal with dumbass touch interfaces on a PC, whether that's Windows 8, iOS, or frakking Unity.
That was my thought as well when they first presented the system, and claims of "simultaneous identification of up to 8 plates per second" were tossed around.
At first there really did seem to be a problem with either the database backend doing the lookups or the cameras themselves. You could be fully stopped at the gate and it would be 6-12 seconds before the gate would open. They seemed to fix that after a month or two. Not soon after is when they started mounting the cameras I as I mentioned, and one of these is facing a 4-lane 35 MPH road, so it must be working pretty well.
The other problem is the way they have the cameras mounted. Because this was fitted onto an existing structure the camera can only see your plate once your car is only about feet away from the gate. This means you're forced to come to almost a full stop (or just slow way down) to give the gate time to come up.
Since you said you've worked on these systems, can I ask you a question? From looking at the cameras and knowing they work when it's dark, I assume they use infrared light to function. Does that sound right? If that's the case, wouldn't you be able to block them by putting an IR filter over your license plate? Such a filter should be transparent to normal light, so I can't imagine it's (very) illegal in most places.
Thanks.
The US faced down the fucking USSR. The USSR could literally destroy the world, and we had a policy of going toe to toe with them if they messed with us or our allies. We were just as ready to jab the 'blow up the god damn world' as they were, if not more so. We went nearly a decade in that mindset without pissing away our civil liberties.
I agree with the sentiment of your post, but I also think it's important not to gloss over history.
The truth is that more than a few people had problems during the Red Scare (both of them), but even more so as a result of McCarthyism. While we may have done better then than we are doing today, the US didn't weather the Cold War without any blemishes on civil rights or liberties.
How is this a slippery slope? The cars are parked in a public place, with license plates easily viewable. There is no expectation of privacy in this case.
I believe the slippery slope the submitter is referring to is the widespread dissemination of license plate reading cameras. As with most technologies, it can be used for both good and ill.
For example, it can be a convenience. This article is one example (helping people find their cars). Another is for controlled-access areas such as the university I attend. They recently switched from a RFID-style windshield sticker to these license plate cameras, claiming it will be faster to open the gates (false), that it would be less prone to failure (also false).
The slippery part of these devices is that it's all to easy to re-purpose them. Very soon after installing the cameras at the controlled-access gates my university started mounting them on curbside free-standing poles all over campus. It is almost impossible to drive through campus (which I acknowledge is private property) without having your plate scanned. I'm sure this has somehow been sold as "keeping campus safe." Of course, what it really is, is a waste of money and an erosion of privacy.
The same type of scenario could easily happen over an entire city once this technology becomes common enough. Pretty soon there's enough coverage that law enforcement (or anyone else, for that matter) might be able to pay for (or coerce via legislation) private owners to give them access to the data. Now "criminals" can be caught by simply driving past that Chevron station on the corner and detailed data mining of your personal travel habits is effortless and completely legal. The entire vehicle-owning public is suddenly under constant, real-time surveillance.
I realize there is limited expectation of privacy in public places, and that license plates are easily visible on the outside of your vehicle. That doesn't change that this is an erosion of privacy. Just as stalking a person all over a city isn't legal, doing effectively the same thing via electronic means shouldn't be either (without a valid warrant).
</tinfoil hat>
The mailing list has been awash in outrage and suprise as prices rise much higher than most can support
This is one reason I'm always critical of people who blindly say "Move your $X to Google $SERVICE! It's free for $PREDICATE usage!"
TANSTAAFL, even if it is Google. Sooner or later (usually based on how fast $SERVICE reaches some critical mass) you better be willing to pay up. At least the classic software model tells you how much it costs up front.
The ribbon wouldn't be anywhere near so bad if it had a "quick search" feature. Either a box or some kind of keyboard focus capture where you can start typing a word and it would search all possible command names and descriptions, displaying the results in the ribbon. The number of commands is small enough that such a search could be extremely fast.
For example, search for "paste" and you get a ribbon bar with the options:
Paste | Paste Special | Paste as Text | Paste as HTML | Quick Paste | Paste as New Foo
I hate searching through all the ribbon panes to find a simple command. A good example another poster mentioned is where the "create zip archive" button is. A quick search for "zip" would make that painless.
Given the focus on searching in Windows Vista and 7 I can't fathom why they haven't done this yet.
Process Explorer allows you to search by resource and close an open handle forcibly. Won't work against a system process but should work for anything else.
Forcibly closing file handles behind a program's back is almost always a really bad idea. The program holding the handle has no reason to expect that the handle has been closed and will continue to use it. Sometimes this just results in an invalid handle error, but if the handle has been re-issued it might mean that program A unintentionally closes (or writes to!) program B's handle (since the internal handle identifiers are re-used by the kernel).
I'm pretty sure Raymond Chen (of the OldNewThing blog) wrote about this, but I can't find the article now.
Should have read a bit more closely there, buddy:
The Guarantee does not apply to: Our competitors' website prices, offers that include financing, bundling of items, free items, pricing errors, mail-in offers, competitors' service prices, items that are advertised as limited-quantity, out of stock, open-box, clearance, refurbished/used items, BestBuy.com Midnight Sale and special hour sale events, BestBuy.com Outlet Center and Marketplace items, and items for sale Thanksgiving Day through the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Emphasis mine. I'm 100% confident that the HP tablet will be marked as both "limited-quantity" and "clearance".
Oops. Oh well, at least you beat the rush!
well right there in the article its talking about driving cars up it ... never mind the MILES of gravity its seriously talking about cars driving up it
I used to be very critical of space elevators as well... until I bothered to read up on the ideas behind them. If you're actually interested in learning more, check out these two articles:
Space Elevator
Space Elevator Economics
As just a quick example, putting a payload in orbit with rockets ranges from $4,000/kg to $40,000/kg depending on the rocket type. Estimates for the cost of electricity to move an elevator into orbit is around $220/kg with current power transfer capabilities, becoming cheaper as that technology improves. And, if you assume that power becomes cheaper to produce in the same timeframe as space elevator components become feasible (ala fusion or something else), this payload delivery cost will be even lower.
Nobody is suggesting we break ground on the base stations today. It's simply an interesting idea for putting things in orbit, and maybe a good goal/benchmark for the development of new high-strength materials.
Unfortunately not but it's nice that a scam alert site comes up first.
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