California makes a lot of really great cheeses, so maybe you're just not going to the right stores. Whole Foods is a good start, or (if you're in the Bay Area), your local foodie or hippie place (Berkeley Bowl, Cheese Board, Piazza's, etc.) Cowgirl Creamery if you get there.
On the other hand, Japan has all kinds of amazing over-packaged overly-instant foods, some of which are available here, to balance out the delicate nutritious real stuff.
The problem with Dropbox isn't just that it exposes Windows insecurities, it's also that it makes it easy to export lots of stuff out of your company, potentially with wimpy passwords, to a storage system which your company doesn't have any control over - Dropbox doesn't even have to tell your company if they've gotten a subpoena or "friendly" FBI request for the material, and with no contract, there's no way to specify data retention limits.
At $DAYJOB, we've got a Dropbox-like service (at least the "upload/download from browser" part of it, not the "glom onto everything" part), because it's useful to have something like that. It goes to our own storage, and has encryption we've got control over, and it keeps the employees from needing to find other ways around the firewall's block on Dropbox uploads.
The reason BitTorrent traffic is falling is that everybody's downloaded all the old movies already. So now we're just getting the new ones, not catching up on backlog.
If the client were a correctional facility, they wouldn't be home-brewing a cheap system out of baling wire, they'd be buying a commercial firewall with URL filtering capabilities and virus checkers, marked up to rip-off prices as a favor to some politically connected contractor, and the prisoners themselves wouldn't have access to it.
Comcast actually has done things this egregious - maybe you remember the "Get a Cable Modem, Go To Jail" event from the late 90s. But it's pretty rare.
The reason UVerse behaves differently from DSL is that the DSL circuit used copper all the way back to your telco office, while UVerse uses copper from your house to a box a block or two away, and then fiber back to the telco office. The shorter distance means it can use a different DSL technology that gets up to about 25 Mbps (some of which is used for television, the rest for data.) The long distance with your older DSL means there's more inherent noise from the wiring, and more opportunities for other things to add noise along the way.
That's not an issue of who's offering the service, it's an issue of the technology they're using to provide it. Verizon's giving you those speeds because they're using DSL, which carries data over dedicated telephone copper lines, and the speeds you can get depend on your distance from the telco office and the quality of the copper (which was designed for low-bandwidth analog voice.) Newer DSL technology isn't going to be significantly faster - that's about as fast as you can get at residential distances. That's why VZ is rolling out FIOS where they can, and AT&T is rolling out UVerse (which uses fiber to the block and newer DSL for the very short distance from the box on your block to your house.) Calling it "crippled themselves by simply relying on old DSL technology" is bogus - you're talking about replacing their entire wiring plant.
Your cable service uses different technology, running shared media for multiple households. Yes, DOCSIS 3 gives them better bandwidth than DOCSIS 1 did, but it's using the same cable plant - those upgrades are comparable to what happened to DSLAM evolution back in the late 90s. The fact that your bandwidth sometimes drops to 3 Mbps is consistent with the fact that you're competing with your neighbors for bandwidth - DSL wouldn't do that unless the backhaul from the DSLAM to the main routers was badly oversubscribed. The cable plant issues for your carrier include how many households they're serving on a given cable segment, and whether they're installing more head ends to keep up with demand.
The bandwidth you get from ADSL is going to depend on the quality of the lines between your home and your DSLAM, but those aren't going to vary radically by time of day - either you'll get full speed, or lousy speed, or medium speed, or whatever, but it doesn't depend on what your neighbors are doing.
If your bandwidth's dropping at night like that, it's almost certainly because there's not enough bandwidth from the DSLAM back to the ISP's main routers. It's possible that your neighbor's kid has discovered Bittorrent...
The US, Canadian, and UK ISPs that impose data caps on their customers got the idea from the Australians. But in return, the "can't run a server at home" idea was a US cable company invention, back when they had really limited upstream capacity and were worried about people hogging their neighborhood bandwidth running porn servers (especially when the telco was running "Get DSL so you won't have to worry about web hogs" ads on TV.)
Because childish and divisive remarks have been a core of the Republican strategy for over a decade, especially aggressively against Obama. You don't think the "Socialist socialist socialist!" stuff is just spontaneous, do you? Or the Birther nonsense? Or the attacks on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?
That's purely aside from their actual policies, most of which involve fiscal irresponsibility while blaming the other party for social spending while they increase military spending without raising taxes to pay for it, or suddenly discovering that Federal debts are a problem after they've tripled the debt and are getting kicked out of office (you don't think that timing was accidental either, do you?)
If you want to attack a building or two with EMP, you could have fun with one of those explosive flux capacitor thingies, but if you're doing it for terrorism you could just as well use a truck-bomb. (Maybe some "We're not the Anonymous you're looking for" group might feel like taking out a stock exchange without killing people, but it's pretty much a niche-player attack, especially since stock exchanges do use good backups, especially post-9/11/2001.)
The real threat from EMP is taking out a whole country's computing infrastructure at once, and to do that you're basically looking at a nuclear attack. Not very many nuclear powers are interested in doing that to another nuclear power.
EMP is a really interesting threat if a country or non-state actor is willing to launch high-altitude nuclear weapons over their target country, which is to say, if somebody's crazy enough to start a nuclear war. The Cold War's over, the Chinese have more sense, North Korea probably can't figure out how to make a working nuke or get it high enough up in the air over Japan to do EMP, and most Arab or Iranian crazies know that Israel has 200 nukes and would probably respond to a nuclear attack by taking out Mecca.
On the other hand, we've long abandoned most technologies that could easily be adapted to surviving EMP. Integrated circuits running at lower and lower voltages and currents are more susceptible to than transistors or vacuum tubes, surface-mount technology is more susceptible than big components with big wires soldered together, and more electronics is running on batteries and low voltage and isn't paying as much attention to grounding. On the other hand, we're using a lot more fiber, burying a lot more cable even when we are using copper, and using much higher frequencies so antennas as much smaller, all of which help a bit.
The US telephone companies did a lot of EMP-related testing on their equipment during the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, but that was mostly gone even before the Bell System breakup in 1984. (I worked with some people who'd take equipment out to the desert where Really Big Capacitors would simulate lightning and EMP.) It's one thing to harden relay-based switches in a regulated-monopoly environment, or even to harden the early simpler generation of electronic switching, but it wasn't realistic to do that to the newer integrated circuit technology in a competitive equipment market.
It was probably less than ten years ago that I stopped into an Irish bar in San Francisco and looked at one of the freebie newspapers. Noraid were still trying to raise funds for the IRA, though they've been getting less respect than in the old days.
And besides, Bush and Cheney came into office promising to turn the US into a militarized police state, and were planning the Iraq war from their first week in office, so it's not like ruining the place was that hard.
You need to do more than just use vacuum tubes - you need to pay a lot of attention to grounding, and to any wires that might be long enough to act as an antenna, and sometimes you need to add capacitors or resistors in various places to bleed off unwanted current.
And even relay-based equipment's at risk - it's possible for power surges to weld contacts together, or short out thin wires.
A lot of those failures have been projects that were labelled as "Success!", because they worked out well for the people receiving the money, regardless of whether they did any good for the taxpayers. It's not just the bombs that didn't explode or the ships that sank or airplanes that couldn't fly, it's also the bombs that successfully blew up targets they shouldn't have been dropped on, battleships we didn't need, and airplanes designed to fight the Cold War.
This project really annoys me, though. My commute takes me right by the plant, usually at slow speeds waiting for the freeway exit, so I've been able to watch the construction from the beginning. At first there was no obvious work, just picketers complaining about non-union labor, then construction starting, then the building frame going up and the skin going on, and presumably work happening inside as well. And then instead of opening it's closed. I hope the potential buyers actually go through with it and do something useful with the factory.
Bankruptcy isn't just about "moving on" and "getting closure", though accountants do like to acknowledge such things as much as divorced New Agers do. A more significant concern is that when a person or business goes bankrupt, they've usually got some assets left, and multiple creditors that they owe money to, and bankruptcy law is fundamentally about allocating the assets fairly among the creditors. There's also some social policy (because we don't want people starving on the streets), and some incentive to the bankrupt party to cooperate.
The TSA has a history of stealing stuff from people's checked luggage and occasionally even their hand luggage or laptops. Maybe these cameras will be used to catch some of those thieves?
In those cases, the patent system is all the intellectual property protection they need. If somebody sees their Kickstarter campaign early, they're free to contact them to license the patent.
Most Kickstarter projects I've seen have been "I've done some cool art/music/OpenHardwareDesign, and I want to raise funds to print the book/CD/CircuitBoards", and those aren't really at risk if they're seen early either.
Back when popups were around, either before we had popup blockers or after they got around the first versions of blockers, I clicked on all of them. Unfortunately, clicking on the "X" was probably not what they advertisers had in mind:-)
It was. In reality it was less likely to be done on the way back from classes, and much more likely to happen in the evenings, often with beer involved:-)
The submitter's not in America, he's in Germany, so ranting about US attitudes is off-topic. I don't know much about the German market, but having a BA is pretty commonly useful in business, and if you're thinking about doing project management professionally, here in the US it helps to have some professional certification in that. Also, I don't know how much college you have taken already; whether you're looking for two years or four can make a big difference in your plans.
If you haven't had a good course in algorithms and data structures, you'll benefit from that, and you're going to need math if you don't have that, but you can take those along with the Business Informatics, and if you're thinking about going into management, you're not going to be doing compiler design or operating system development yourself anyway.
Most cats I've had do just fine free-feeding on dry food, but my two current ones are overweight. (One was a four-year-old rescue cat who weighed about 18 pounds when we got him.) So they're not only on diet food, but they get fed less than they want, twice a day. (Fat cat is down to 17 pounds, after a couple years of this.)
So any time I'm near the kitchen, if they haven't been fed in a couple of hours, they'll tell me it's time to feed them. Even if they have just been fed, as long as they've gone through most of their food, that's good enough to claim they haven't been fed yet. (They're not bugging me for food right now, but that's because it's nap time, and there's a patch of sun they're both sleeping in, but after they wake up they'll start claiming that nobody's fed them all day!
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 70s we used to use loud music to agitate the water in our bongs - it made them much more effective and, like, cosmic!
California makes a lot of really great cheeses, so maybe you're just not going to the right stores. Whole Foods is a good start, or (if you're in the Bay Area), your local foodie or hippie place (Berkeley Bowl, Cheese Board, Piazza's, etc.) Cowgirl Creamery if you get there.
On the other hand, Japan has all kinds of amazing over-packaged overly-instant foods, some of which are available here, to balance out the delicate nutritious real stuff.
The problem with Dropbox isn't just that it exposes Windows insecurities, it's also that it makes it easy to export lots of stuff out of your company, potentially with wimpy passwords, to a storage system which your company doesn't have any control over - Dropbox doesn't even have to tell your company if they've gotten a subpoena or "friendly" FBI request for the material, and with no contract, there's no way to specify data retention limits.
At $DAYJOB, we've got a Dropbox-like service (at least the "upload/download from browser" part of it, not the "glom onto everything" part), because it's useful to have something like that. It goes to our own storage, and has encryption we've got control over, and it keeps the employees from needing to find other ways around the firewall's block on Dropbox uploads.
The reason BitTorrent traffic is falling is that everybody's downloaded all the old movies already. So now we're just getting the new ones, not catching up on backlog.
If the client were a correctional facility, they wouldn't be home-brewing a cheap system out of baling wire, they'd be buying a commercial firewall with URL filtering capabilities and virus checkers, marked up to rip-off prices as a favor to some politically connected contractor, and the prisoners themselves wouldn't have access to it.
Comcast actually has done things this egregious - maybe you remember the "Get a Cable Modem, Go To Jail" event from the late 90s. But it's pretty rare.
The ISP is the town government's water monopoly. Are you sure you want municipal Internet service?
The reason UVerse behaves differently from DSL is that the DSL circuit used copper all the way back to your telco office, while UVerse uses copper from your house to a box a block or two away, and then fiber back to the telco office. The shorter distance means it can use a different DSL technology that gets up to about 25 Mbps (some of which is used for television, the rest for data.) The long distance with your older DSL means there's more inherent noise from the wiring, and more opportunities for other things to add noise along the way.
That's not an issue of who's offering the service, it's an issue of the technology they're using to provide it. Verizon's giving you those speeds because they're using DSL, which carries data over dedicated telephone copper lines, and the speeds you can get depend on your distance from the telco office and the quality of the copper (which was designed for low-bandwidth analog voice.) Newer DSL technology isn't going to be significantly faster - that's about as fast as you can get at residential distances. That's why VZ is rolling out FIOS where they can, and AT&T is rolling out UVerse (which uses fiber to the block and newer DSL for the very short distance from the box on your block to your house.) Calling it "crippled themselves by simply relying on old DSL technology" is bogus - you're talking about replacing their entire wiring plant.
Your cable service uses different technology, running shared media for multiple households. Yes, DOCSIS 3 gives them better bandwidth than DOCSIS 1 did, but it's using the same cable plant - those upgrades are comparable to what happened to DSLAM evolution back in the late 90s. The fact that your bandwidth sometimes drops to 3 Mbps is consistent with the fact that you're competing with your neighbors for bandwidth - DSL wouldn't do that unless the backhaul from the DSLAM to the main routers was badly oversubscribed. The cable plant issues for your carrier include how many households they're serving on a given cable segment, and whether they're installing more head ends to keep up with demand.
The bandwidth you get from ADSL is going to depend on the quality of the lines between your home and your DSLAM, but those aren't going to vary radically by time of day - either you'll get full speed, or lousy speed, or medium speed, or whatever, but it doesn't depend on what your neighbors are doing.
If your bandwidth's dropping at night like that, it's almost certainly because there's not enough bandwidth from the DSLAM back to the ISP's main routers. It's possible that your neighbor's kid has discovered Bittorrent...
The US, Canadian, and UK ISPs that impose data caps on their customers got the idea from the Australians. But in return, the "can't run a server at home" idea was a US cable company invention, back when they had really limited upstream capacity and were worried about people hogging their neighborhood bandwidth running porn servers (especially when the telco was running "Get DSL so you won't have to worry about web hogs" ads on TV.)
Because childish and divisive remarks have been a core of the Republican strategy for over a decade, especially aggressively against Obama. You don't think the "Socialist socialist socialist!" stuff is just spontaneous, do you? Or the Birther nonsense? Or the attacks on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?
That's purely aside from their actual policies, most of which involve fiscal irresponsibility while blaming the other party for social spending while they increase military spending without raising taxes to pay for it, or suddenly discovering that Federal debts are a problem after they've tripled the debt and are getting kicked out of office (you don't think that timing was accidental either, do you?)
If you want to attack a building or two with EMP, you could have fun with one of those explosive flux capacitor thingies, but if you're doing it for terrorism you could just as well use a truck-bomb. (Maybe some "We're not the Anonymous you're looking for" group might feel like taking out a stock exchange without killing people, but it's pretty much a niche-player attack, especially since stock exchanges do use good backups, especially post-9/11/2001.)
The real threat from EMP is taking out a whole country's computing infrastructure at once, and to do that you're basically looking at a nuclear attack. Not very many nuclear powers are interested in doing that to another nuclear power.
EMP is a really interesting threat if a country or non-state actor is willing to launch high-altitude nuclear weapons over their target country, which is to say, if somebody's crazy enough to start a nuclear war. The Cold War's over, the Chinese have more sense, North Korea probably can't figure out how to make a working nuke or get it high enough up in the air over Japan to do EMP, and most Arab or Iranian crazies know that Israel has 200 nukes and would probably respond to a nuclear attack by taking out Mecca.
On the other hand, we've long abandoned most technologies that could easily be adapted to surviving EMP. Integrated circuits running at lower and lower voltages and currents are more susceptible to than transistors or vacuum tubes, surface-mount technology is more susceptible than big components with big wires soldered together, and more electronics is running on batteries and low voltage and isn't paying as much attention to grounding. On the other hand, we're using a lot more fiber, burying a lot more cable even when we are using copper, and using much higher frequencies so antennas as much smaller, all of which help a bit.
The US telephone companies did a lot of EMP-related testing on their equipment during the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, but that was mostly gone even before the Bell System breakup in 1984. (I worked with some people who'd take equipment out to the desert where Really Big Capacitors would simulate lightning and EMP.) It's one thing to harden relay-based switches in a regulated-monopoly environment, or even to harden the early simpler generation of electronic switching, but it wasn't realistic to do that to the newer integrated circuit technology in a competitive equipment market.
It was probably less than ten years ago that I stopped into an Irish bar in San Francisco and looked at one of the freebie newspapers. Noraid were still trying to raise funds for the IRA, though they've been getting less respect than in the old days.
And besides, Bush and Cheney came into office promising to turn the US into a militarized police state, and were planning the Iraq war from their first week in office, so it's not like ruining the place was that hard.
"Attack at night!"
You need to do more than just use vacuum tubes - you need to pay a lot of attention to grounding, and to any wires that might be long enough to act as an antenna, and sometimes you need to add capacitors or resistors in various places to bleed off unwanted current.
And even relay-based equipment's at risk - it's possible for power surges to weld contacts together, or short out thin wires.
A lot of those failures have been projects that were labelled as "Success!", because they worked out well for the people receiving the money, regardless of whether they did any good for the taxpayers. It's not just the bombs that didn't explode or the ships that sank or airplanes that couldn't fly, it's also the bombs that successfully blew up targets they shouldn't have been dropped on, battleships we didn't need, and airplanes designed to fight the Cold War.
This project really annoys me, though. My commute takes me right by the plant, usually at slow speeds waiting for the freeway exit, so I've been able to watch the construction from the beginning. At first there was no obvious work, just picketers complaining about non-union labor, then construction starting, then the building frame going up and the skin going on, and presumably work happening inside as well. And then instead of opening it's closed. I hope the potential buyers actually go through with it and do something useful with the factory.
Bankruptcy isn't just about "moving on" and "getting closure", though accountants do like to acknowledge such things as much as divorced New Agers do. A more significant concern is that when a person or business goes bankrupt, they've usually got some assets left, and multiple creditors that they owe money to, and bankruptcy law is fundamentally about allocating the assets fairly among the creditors. There's also some social policy (because we don't want people starving on the streets), and some incentive to the bankrupt party to cooperate.
The TSA has a history of stealing stuff from people's checked luggage and occasionally even their hand luggage or laptops. Maybe these cameras will be used to catch some of those thieves?
In those cases, the patent system is all the intellectual property protection they need. If somebody sees their Kickstarter campaign early, they're free to contact them to license the patent.
Most Kickstarter projects I've seen have been "I've done some cool art/music/OpenHardwareDesign, and I want to raise funds to print the book/CD/CircuitBoards", and those aren't really at risk if they're seen early either.
Back when popups were around, either before we had popup blockers or after they got around the first versions of blockers, I clicked on all of them. Unfortunately, clicking on the "X" was probably not what they advertisers had in mind :-)
It was. In reality it was less likely to be done on the way back from classes, and much more likely to happen in the evenings, often with beer involved :-)
The submitter's not in America, he's in Germany, so ranting about US attitudes is off-topic. I don't know much about the German market, but having a BA is pretty commonly useful in business, and if you're thinking about doing project management professionally, here in the US it helps to have some professional certification in that. Also, I don't know how much college you have taken already; whether you're looking for two years or four can make a big difference in your plans.
If you haven't had a good course in algorithms and data structures, you'll benefit from that, and you're going to need math if you don't have that, but you can take those along with the Business Informatics, and if you're thinking about going into management, you're not going to be doing compiler design or operating system development yourself anyway.
Most cats I've had do just fine free-feeding on dry food, but my two current ones are overweight. (One was a four-year-old rescue cat who weighed about 18 pounds when we got him.) So they're not only on diet food, but they get fed less than they want, twice a day. (Fat cat is down to 17 pounds, after a couple years of this.)
So any time I'm near the kitchen, if they haven't been fed in a couple of hours, they'll tell me it's time to feed them. Even if they have just been fed, as long as they've gone through most of their food, that's good enough to claim they haven't been fed yet. (They're not bugging me for food right now, but that's because it's nap time, and there's a patch of sun they're both sleeping in, but after they wake up they'll start claiming that nobody's fed them all day!