Wonder how that works if my car is started with a toggle switch because the real ignition switch went bad... Is it illegal to leave my toggle switch on the harness?
I don't think criminal prosecution is the way to go. It's bad, but typically I'm not a fan of making incompetence in private matters criminal.
What I do believe should happen is twofold:
1) Any breach should come with mandatory disclosure and civil liability. Basically, we should be able to get a class action suit going for the time and effort necessary to change all of our card numbers, etc. in the event of a breach, plus costs for checking credit reports, etc. I'm sorry, but my credit card company changed my card number four times in a year on account of "breaches", and I could never find out who the hell it was. It's a sometimes expensive inconvenience when you're on a trip, don't get the notice, and suddenly your credit card stops working. Or the hours spent changing over all of your automatic bill payments. Considering I make around $70/hour when it's all said and done, my time cleaning up their mess is not cheap, and I expect to be able to bill them for it.
2) If the credit card companies were smart, they'd levy serious increases in the fees they change to process cards from any processor or retailer that causes a breach. Or, better yet, cut them off entirely from processing until they passed a rigorous security screening. The idea of losing potentially weeks of business due to your payment processing being cut off would definitely motivate better security.
Basically, I don't see the need to bring in the slow, grinding wheels of the criminal justice system. A few adjustments to laws governing civil liability and disclosure requirements would very quickly make the industry adapt to much greater security.
How do you figure they won't flicker? Incoming power is still 60Hz, and to fix that they'd need to incorporate a rather large capacitor, which would in turn foul up the power factor, etc...
I'd say it's definitely desirable to have something in between. I use self-signed SSL to encrypt my connections between random public web terminals and my webmail server at home. I don't really care about trust, since I'm 99% percent certain that I'm really connecting to my box. I do want encryption, though, so as to avoid random snoopers from seeing my username/password combo, or reading my mail.
I realize you can make the argument that an encrypted tunnel to an unverified host isn't really security (and I agree), but I don't need 100% security. I'd like it, but given the cost for certificates and the only minor nuisance of entering an exception, the cost/benefit ratio isnt' there. I need only part of a truly secure solution (the encryption part) to defeat 95% of the problems (random packet sniffers, etc.) I'm willing to live with the rest of the risk for reduced cost, because cost/benefit doesn't work out for getting a certificate for my own webmail server.
Or, alternately, the users have a program that enables them to do something that no open source alternative can do. They pay something to compensate the author for giving them this ability.
I'm a pragmatist. I use software to get work done. I fundamentally believe that free software is better because I can tinker, tune, and extend it as I need, but if it takes something proprietary to *get the job done* at a price I feel is a fair trade (cheaper than writing my own, doing it the hard way, etc.), then so be it.
Slavery it is not. Remember that freedom isn't just about allowing users to do as you think they should - it's about the users being free to do whatever they want, including entering into contracts you might find onerous.
Let me change that slightly: "Highly *creative* *motivated* people can do great things with mediocre equipment but run-of-the-mill people can't do anything with the best equipment money can buy"
Most important thing is identify your creative, smart people and nurture them - or at least don't repetitively piss them off. So many companies these days want to dumb everything down so that any generic bottom-rung programmer can be hired - and they get exactly what they pay for. Value those individuals who not only are technically proficient, but also know your business and how to align the two sides.
Actually I found the fact they would go off on personal tangents or rants to be one of the more endearing parts of the show. There are other podcasts out there that cover Linux / F/OSS news and have guests, but most of them are far too sterile and professional as hosts. They'd do great on a *real* radio network or some such (aside from their content being fit to a niche), but they're not that much fun to listen to. The LR guys were funny as hell, and I've listened to most of the back episodes on various long road trips lately. I damn near ran off the road near Paducah because I got to laughing so hard.
Sorry, though, to the parent poster - Mr. Procter will remain my favorite of the hosts.
I can tell you as an employer, we scan all the popular "social networking" sites before looking at someone as a possible employee.
Hell, that's what I'm counting on - my own personal website has a far more diversified list of my projects (as well as source code, schematics, and other bits and pieces) than you'll ever get from a resume. Of course then again it's not on some trendy "social network" site - it's my name, as a domain, that I've owned for years. I figure, if they're going to look, why not show off? (And not in the suggestive 18-25 girl sense - though being single again, I wish our recruiters would look for that sort of thing.)
Funny, Word from about eight years ago was the last version I actually *liked*. Then they started adding tons of "features" and bloat that I had no use for, and I started hating how "helpful" it wanted to be.
Knowing that my complete move to Linux is inevitable at this point (XP was okay, except for the activation crap, and I tried Vista and hated it...), I switched to OO a couple years ago and haven't looked back.
Re:A big "duh" to the auto industry
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
No kidding. *I* saw this coming years ago (read: 2003), and dumped my two Suburbans while they were still worth something on the used market. I kept my pickup until early last year, when I "gave" it to my ex as part of the settlement. She can't afford to sell it, and can't afford to fill it. Yeah, I'm still grinning ear-to-ear on that one. Book values were still high in early 2007...
Now I drive my 15 year old Civic most days, and I have my CR-V for those times that I need AWD / greater clearance / etc.
The real answer is that the American auto companies got complacent and lazy while the trucks were selling well. They made a ton of profits, built generally good products (my GM truck was about the most reliable thing I've ever owned, considering the rough service life it saw) and ignored R&D for the inevitable price spike in fuel. They're getting exactly what they deserve - years of profit-taking with little investment in innovation, and the market is now crushing them. Market forces at work, folks.
Agreed - nearly every time I get called, I'm dismissed by one side or the other (usually don't know which) after they get the questionnaires back from all of the prospective jurors. Oddly enough, I've found that in conversations with my fellow dismissed jurors, they're usually technical professionals like myself (engineers, scientists, accountants, generally analytical types). The folks that stay? I can't say for sure, but they usually don't look the part of the former group, and some of the ones I've spoken with are typically not professionals. I won't say that they're stupid, but they're not typically the hard-core analytical types.
You don't need the internet to get to work Actually, yes I do. I'm a telecommuter. Please stop assuming that you can generalize your life out to everyone else.
I maintain a very core business component library for a Fortune 500 company - let's just say that the library in question is about 50,000 lines and encapsulates our business enough to send it out to customers who use our service. It runs in a little over 300,000 devices every day, ranging from handheld units based on m86ks up to PCs, x86 servers, Sun boxes, and a few IBM mainframes. It literally runs everywhere, because it's the core logic of what we do.
What fixes a warning on one system creates one on another compiler/target platform. Eventually I just said "fuck it" and, while trying to eliminate most of the legitimate ones, just started ignoring the rest. We've had one production bug in the last eight years, and it was caught in the alpha stage of the rollout.
Warnings are just irritating sometimes, particularly the ones where the compiler is warning you about legitimate ANSI C.
Use it in any project that isn't GPL'd. Agreed - this is a particular problem when it comes to library code that folks have either intentionally or ignorantly GPL'd. If I'm not modifying the library code, just using it, I don't want to have to jump through hoops on the calling interface. I don't want to have to build as a shared library with a runtime link. It's a pain, and an unnecessary headache. I'm more than happy to help distribute the source I built against, but I don't want it GPLing my app in the process.
So, the freedom I want is the freedom to license my code as I see fit, while still making use of the high quality of free software (libraries) and supporting them with bugfixes, patches, and another distribution point. With the GPL, you're really only free to make more GPL software. Part of freedom is allowing people to do things you don't like and/or don't agree with. That part seems to have been lost here.
I've been moving my own personal released code to BSD lately, and my professional code, well, is largely internal apps for my employer.
Just put some gay people in the opposite direction, preferably within 1000 yards of a school or church. The right wing nutjobs will quickly determine that hating them must take priority over any other possible national issue (economy, energy, environment, defense/foreign policy, etc.)
You can move electric power a long way with relatively low losses, given high enough voltage transmission lines. HVDC will even improve performance over the conventional AC lines for adequately long runs. (Basically you have to overcome the converter inefficiencies before it becomes practical)
ABB has a very nice graph of typical losses for a 1.2GW line here: http://www.abb.com/cawp/GAD02181/C1256D71001E0037C125683200658E0C.aspx
Even for conventional AC lines, the losses aren't really that bad over a thousand miles or so
True, but which would occur more regularly in Texas?
1) Moron tosses cigarette out of truck, starts brush fire 2) Moron tries to burn something outside in high winds, starts brush fire 3) Lightning 4) Wind generator suffers unexpected, catastrophic failure and does what you see here
Sorry, I live in Colorado, and I've learned that when it comes to wildfires, always bet on morons. Lightning comes in a close second.
AC's got it right. For those who are TLTRTFM (Too Lazy To...), what the poster should have said is that they help channel charge carriers away from the junction so that they don't immediately recombine. *That* is one of the holy grails of PV design, and one of the reasons that current production cells are incredibly inefficient.
The problem is that a large portion of the lab performance-enhancing techniques are so insanely expensive that they *can't* go into production. Many of them - particularly exotic materials or multi-junction cells - are prohibitively expensive to make, given the meager performance improvements. I think Nanosolar has the right idea for now - craptastic cells made cheap. Who cares if they're large if they're incredibly inexpensive?
Slashdot Mirror
Wonder how that works if my car is started with a toggle switch because the real ignition switch went bad... Is it illegal to leave my toggle switch on the harness?
I don't think criminal prosecution is the way to go. It's bad, but typically I'm not a fan of making incompetence in private matters criminal.
What I do believe should happen is twofold:
1) Any breach should come with mandatory disclosure and civil liability. Basically, we should be able to get a class action suit going for the time and effort necessary to change all of our card numbers, etc. in the event of a breach, plus costs for checking credit reports, etc. I'm sorry, but my credit card company changed my card number four times in a year on account of "breaches", and I could never find out who the hell it was. It's a sometimes expensive inconvenience when you're on a trip, don't get the notice, and suddenly your credit card stops working. Or the hours spent changing over all of your automatic bill payments. Considering I make around $70/hour when it's all said and done, my time cleaning up their mess is not cheap, and I expect to be able to bill them for it.
2) If the credit card companies were smart, they'd levy serious increases in the fees they change to process cards from any processor or retailer that causes a breach. Or, better yet, cut them off entirely from processing until they passed a rigorous security screening. The idea of losing potentially weeks of business due to your payment processing being cut off would definitely motivate better security.
Basically, I don't see the need to bring in the slow, grinding wheels of the criminal justice system. A few adjustments to laws governing civil liability and disclosure requirements would very quickly make the industry adapt to much greater security.
How do you figure they won't flicker? Incoming power is still 60Hz, and to fix that they'd need to incorporate a rather large capacitor, which would in turn foul up the power factor, etc...
Does No One Understand English Any More?
Given your description, I'll stick with my earlier assertion that it's all Greek to me.
I'd say it's definitely desirable to have something in between. I use self-signed SSL to encrypt my connections between random public web terminals and my webmail server at home. I don't really care about trust, since I'm 99% percent certain that I'm really connecting to my box. I do want encryption, though, so as to avoid random snoopers from seeing my username/password combo, or reading my mail.
I realize you can make the argument that an encrypted tunnel to an unverified host isn't really security (and I agree), but I don't need 100% security. I'd like it, but given the cost for certificates and the only minor nuisance of entering an exception, the cost/benefit ratio isnt' there. I need only part of a truly secure solution (the encryption part) to defeat 95% of the problems (random packet sniffers, etc.) I'm willing to live with the rest of the risk for reduced cost, because cost/benefit doesn't work out for getting a certificate for my own webmail server.
Or, alternately, the users have a program that enables them to do something that no open source alternative can do. They pay something to compensate the author for giving them this ability.
I'm a pragmatist. I use software to get work done. I fundamentally believe that free software is better because I can tinker, tune, and extend it as I need, but if it takes something proprietary to *get the job done* at a price I feel is a fair trade (cheaper than writing my own, doing it the hard way, etc.), then so be it.
Slavery it is not. Remember that freedom isn't just about allowing users to do as you think they should - it's about the users being free to do whatever they want, including entering into contracts you might find onerous.
Let me change that slightly:
"Highly *creative* *motivated* people can do great things with mediocre equipment but run-of-the-mill people can't do anything with the best equipment money can buy"
Most important thing is identify your creative, smart people and nurture them - or at least don't repetitively piss them off. So many companies these days want to dumb everything down so that any generic bottom-rung programmer can be hired - and they get exactly what they pay for. Value those individuals who not only are technically proficient, but also know your business and how to align the two sides.
Actually I found the fact they would go off on personal tangents or rants to be one of the more endearing parts of the show. There are other podcasts out there that cover Linux / F/OSS news and have guests, but most of them are far too sterile and professional as hosts. They'd do great on a *real* radio network or some such (aside from their content being fit to a niche), but they're not that much fun to listen to. The LR guys were funny as hell, and I've listened to most of the back episodes on various long road trips lately. I damn near ran off the road near Paducah because I got to laughing so hard.
Sorry, though, to the parent poster - Mr. Procter will remain my favorite of the hosts.
I can tell you as an employer, we scan all the popular "social networking" sites before looking at someone as a possible employee.
Hell, that's what I'm counting on - my own personal website has a far more diversified list of my projects (as well as source code, schematics, and other bits and pieces) than you'll ever get from a resume. Of course then again it's not on some trendy "social network" site - it's my name, as a domain, that I've owned for years. I figure, if they're going to look, why not show off? (And not in the suggestive 18-25 girl sense - though being single again, I wish our recruiters would look for that sort of thing.)
Funny, Word from about eight years ago was the last version I actually *liked*. Then they started adding tons of "features" and bloat that I had no use for, and I started hating how "helpful" it wanted to be.
Knowing that my complete move to Linux is inevitable at this point (XP was okay, except for the activation crap, and I tried Vista and hated it...), I switched to OO a couple years ago and haven't looked back.
No kidding. *I* saw this coming years ago (read: 2003), and dumped my two Suburbans while they were still worth something on the used market. I kept my pickup until early last year, when I "gave" it to my ex as part of the settlement. She can't afford to sell it, and can't afford to fill it. Yeah, I'm still grinning ear-to-ear on that one. Book values were still high in early 2007...
Now I drive my 15 year old Civic most days, and I have my CR-V for those times that I need AWD / greater clearance / etc.
The real answer is that the American auto companies got complacent and lazy while the trucks were selling well. They made a ton of profits, built generally good products (my GM truck was about the most reliable thing I've ever owned, considering the rough service life it saw) and ignored R&D for the inevitable price spike in fuel. They're getting exactly what they deserve - years of profit-taking with little investment in innovation, and the market is now crushing them. Market forces at work, folks.
Agreed - nearly every time I get called, I'm dismissed by one side or the other (usually don't know which) after they get the questionnaires back from all of the prospective jurors. Oddly enough, I've found that in conversations with my fellow dismissed jurors, they're usually technical professionals like myself (engineers, scientists, accountants, generally analytical types). The folks that stay? I can't say for sure, but they usually don't look the part of the former group, and some of the ones I've spoken with are typically not professionals. I won't say that they're stupid, but they're not typically the hard-core analytical types.
Same thing we do every night, Pinky - pillage. Duh.
Slow as fuck, bloated as fuck, and runs in fewer places than I can port ANSI C. What exactly was there to like again?
I maintain a very core business component library for a Fortune 500 company - let's just say that the library in question is about 50,000 lines and encapsulates our business enough to send it out to customers who use our service. It runs in a little over 300,000 devices every day, ranging from handheld units based on m86ks up to PCs, x86 servers, Sun boxes, and a few IBM mainframes. It literally runs everywhere, because it's the core logic of what we do.
What fixes a warning on one system creates one on another compiler/target platform. Eventually I just said "fuck it" and, while trying to eliminate most of the legitimate ones, just started ignoring the rest. We've had one production bug in the last eight years, and it was caught in the alpha stage of the rollout.
Warnings are just irritating sometimes, particularly the ones where the compiler is warning you about legitimate ANSI C.
Delimiters for those of us who are either too sloppy/lazy/defiant to create "properly formatted code"...
Python - don't mind the language, but absolutely *hate* the whitespace thing, which is why I seldom ever use it.
So, the freedom I want is the freedom to license my code as I see fit, while still making use of the high quality of free software (libraries) and supporting them with bugfixes, patches, and another distribution point. With the GPL, you're really only free to make more GPL software. Part of freedom is allowing people to do things you don't like and/or don't agree with. That part seems to have been lost here.
I've been moving my own personal released code to BSD lately, and my professional code, well, is largely internal apps for my employer.
Just put some gay people in the opposite direction, preferably within 1000 yards of a school or church. The right wing nutjobs will quickly determine that hating them must take priority over any other possible national issue (economy, energy, environment, defense/foreign policy, etc.)
Doubt it - generation is only a fraction of your electric bill. The transmission and distribution folks get a very healthy cut, usually.
I'd not only proudly invest in the company, I'd be a customer, too. I'm even a bird watcher, but I really, really hate grackles and starlings.
You can move electric power a long way with relatively low losses, given high enough voltage transmission lines. HVDC will even improve performance over the conventional AC lines for adequately long runs. (Basically you have to overcome the converter inefficiencies before it becomes practical)
ABB has a very nice graph of typical losses for a 1.2GW line here:
http://www.abb.com/cawp/GAD02181/C1256D71001E0037C125683200658E0C.aspx
Even for conventional AC lines, the losses aren't really that bad over a thousand miles or so
True, but which would occur more regularly in Texas?
1) Moron tosses cigarette out of truck, starts brush fire
2) Moron tries to burn something outside in high winds, starts brush fire
3) Lightning
4) Wind generator suffers unexpected, catastrophic failure and does what you see here
Sorry, I live in Colorado, and I've learned that when it comes to wildfires, always bet on morons. Lightning comes in a close second.
AC's got it right. For those who are TLTRTFM (Too Lazy To ...), what the poster should have said is that they help channel charge carriers away from the junction so that they don't immediately recombine. *That* is one of the holy grails of PV design, and one of the reasons that current production cells are incredibly inefficient.
The problem is that a large portion of the lab performance-enhancing techniques are so insanely expensive that they *can't* go into production. Many of them - particularly exotic materials or multi-junction cells - are prohibitively expensive to make, given the meager performance improvements. I think Nanosolar has the right idea for now - craptastic cells made cheap. Who cares if they're large if they're incredibly inexpensive?