The actual law says that to confiscate his camera they'd have to arrest him for taking pictures likely to be used in a terrorist attack. I imagine the court case that followed, and then the lawsuit, would be an interesting gong show.
What if they arrest him and then release him without charge? Do they have to give the camera back? do they have to give the memory card back? If so do the pictures still have to be on the card when it's given back?
That only works because alaska has a lot of natural resources compared to it's population. So they can afford to use revenue from those natrual resources to not only pay for running the government but also to pay people to live in alaska.
I guess the next question then is, why does Sales Tax matter so much?
Afaict the issue with sales tax and internet purchases in the US is not just the actual tax loss but also the fact that it gives retailers who sell to the whole US but only have a buisness presense in the odd state (preferablly states without sales tax) a massive unfair advantage over traditional retailers that have a buisness presense in most states. In theory people are supposed to pay an equivilent "use tax" to make up for the sales tax they didn't pay but afaict they rarely actually did so and some states even gave up and allowed people to pay an "estimated use tax" instead.
States cannot force out of state retailers to collect sales tax for their residence due to a supreme court descision that it would be an unreasonable burden on them (US sales tax is very complex with taxes being charged by many levels of govenment not just states).
Recently some states have been trying to put pressure on amazon to pay by widening the definition of "in-state" to include retailers with affiliates in the state. Amazon has been responding by dumping affiliates in those states (which hurts the affiliates in question far more than it hurts amazon).
One soloution for the states would be to do away with sales tax entirely (some states already don't have it) but to do that they would have to either reduce services or raise other taxes. In general those responsible for taxing people like to spread the pain so it's less obvious just how much of ones income is ending up in taxes.
I find this a slightly strange move by amazon. Maybe they think a level playing field wouldn't be so bad after all compared to the model theese states are pushing where online retailers that allow affilliates are disadvantaged relative to those that don't.
I know Income Tax is lower in the US than the UK
Afaict that depends on where in the US you live/work. The US federal income tax is lower than the UK income tax but many parts of the US also have income tax at lower levels (state, county, etc).
I spend a lot of time in a university and pretty much every desk I see has a desktop on or under it and there are roomfuls of desktops for use by the undergrads (and they do get pretty damn busy sometimes). Yes there are laptops too but they are in addition to desktops not instead of them.
The number of people buying desktops for personal use may well be going down but as long as there are jobs that involve spending all or most of ones working day sitting in front of a computer in a fixed location there will be a market for non-portable computers (which may be either traditional desktops or thin clients but afaict thin client deployments have a nasty habbit of ending in failure) as they are harder to steal, more ergonomic and cheaper for a given set of capabilities than laptops.
What's so hard about just... deleting the sensitive words?
The trouble is if you simply delete text from a word processor document you are likely to change the formatting and pagination. This can be an issue for two reasons
1: Page numbers are often used to make references to a document and therefore it may be important that they match between the unredacted and the redacted versions. 2: Depending on how the original author formatted images, tables etc they may end up in a jumbled mess when the word processor reflows the text.
So people black stuff out rather than removing it. This was fine in the days when the document released to the public was a printed document but when the document released to the public is a pdf the original text can remain under the blacking out..
The correct thing to do of course is to remove the unwanted information and fix up the formatting and pagination (either by inserting dummy stuff or otherwise). Then as a second line of defense run the tool in acrobat to check for "hidden text".
The difficult bit is explaing to non-technical users WHY this effort is necessary and making sure that they actually do it. Especially when PDF has built-in protection features that give people a false sense of security.
It's a fact of life that people will screw things up. You can attempt to reduce the number of screwups through training people, disciplining those that refuse to comply and reducing the number of people performing high risk tasks but it's almost impossible to reduce it to zero.
How many redacted documents do you think are released every year? Frankly i'm surprised we don't see stories like this far more often.
I think it's far more likely that the server is set up for name based virtual hosting (regardless of whether they are actually using it or not) and is set up to serve a blank page for unknown names.
Here in an average-sized town in Scotland I've got a 100mb connection for £35($54)/mo. No capping, no traffic shaping, no services blocked
Good for you
Afaict in most of the UK your choices are
1: BT wholesale ADSL, generally pretty shitty due to the way BT prices backend bandwidth 2: LLU ADSL, can be pretty good if the right LLU provider is in your area but fundamentally limited by the fact it's ADSL so your speeds will depend on line length and at best with be 28Mbps (and i've never seen someone with a line that good). 3: virgin media cable, available to about half of households high speeds but they traffic shape. Their top package has lighter traffic shaping than the others but P2P is still shaped (and they don't say how they identify P2P traffic).
Remember service sold by the megabit per second is typically based on 95th percentile usage, NOT average usage. So what you say is only true if your usage is near constant. Most people/companies usage isn't.
Also IIRC cogent is known for getting into peering spats that cut them off from large parts of the rest of the internet. So afaict they should only be used as part of a multihoming strategy, not as a sole provider.
Afaict astrological predictions are based on knowing where the stars were at the time a given event (e.g. someone's birth). To get that information you need to convert the time of the event in question from local time to universal time. To do that you need to know what the relationship between local time and universal time at the time of the event was. Therefore astrologers needed to compile historical information on time rules.
I'm fairly sure that Windows does not use the zoneinfo database.
Indeed, up to XP windows only stored timezone data with one set of DST rules. With vista they changed it so it could store two sets of rules for a zone to allow them to push out timezone updates earlier but they never seemed to care about accurate conversion of past or future timestamps between local time and UTC.
Zoneinfo by contrast aims to have complete historic data to 1970 and partial historic data* before that. AIUI the historic data is mostly what is in dispute here.
*Data before 1970 aims to be correct for the nominal city of the zone but they will not split zones unless there are differences after 1970.
The old fassioned way of doing hosting was that customers/responsibilities were assigned to servers in a manual and largely fixed manner. If you ordered a bigger server (or you ordered a bigger vm and there was no spare room on your host) someone had to manually set up a new server and migrate your installation to it. If a machine died it needed to be fixed ASAP because at worst services would be down and at best redundancy would have been lost.
"The cloud" is about replacing that manual and largely static allocation with dynamic computer controlled allocation. If a customer wants more capacity they request it in the admin interface. If hardware dies it's no big deal, the customer sees the equivilent of a reboot and new capacity is allocated to them automatically.
ok, so maybe a 'frying pan and fire' move as far as some of you are concerned, but VM have been providing a stable service in our area for quite some time
I can't say i've noticed a whole lot of difference. Both BT wholesale ADSL (i've never bought directly from BT) and drop out from time to time. Sufficiantly rarely that you put up with it as a home user, sufficiantly frequently that I wouldn't rely on either for a buisness.
If you are trusting an internet reliant buisness to a single "broadband" link you are being an idiot. Either get multiple broadband links from different providers or get a proper connection with a service level agrement.
Not everyone will care about the multiplayer and not everyone who was prepared to sell their copy at $x will be prepared to sell it at $(x-10). So ultimately things will probablly settle somewhere between the two extremes, used value of games with this will be reduced but probablly not by as much as $10.
Of course, people here are more performance- than price-conscious, so those i7-##0X jobs off to the right are drooltastic.
Except they aren't because while they beat the 2600K in highly multithreaded tasks they lose badly to it in tasks with four or less active threads. Afaict most desktop tasks have four or less active threads. Plus by buying them you would be buying into a dying platform. Therefore unless I really needed the features of the LGA1366/x58 platform I would probablly not buy one at this point.
And since there are rumors that Intel is flattening out its roadmap (no sense overspending when the competition is as lame as they are), anything built today will remain egoboosting for longer than the usual.
Today you have a choice between LGA1155 which has the sandy bridge cores and native sata 6G but it's a mainstream platform with limited PCIe, dual channel memory and a maximum of four cores. Or you have LGA1366 which is a high end platform with triple channel memory, lots of PCIe and the option of 4 or 6-core processors but the cores are an older (slower) design and the chipset no sata 6G (motherboard vendors often add third party sata 6G chipsets but apparently they often suck performance wise).
Soon (apparently sometime in november) LGA2011 should be coming out which will support chips with up to 8 of the latest generation cores (though desktop chips will only go up to 6-core), quad channel memory and lots of PCIe and sata 6G in the chipset.
So if you are building a high end system I would strongly suggest waiting for LGA2011
I was under the impression that the reason for not using rear facing seats was that they took up more space for a given degree of comfort due to the slope of the planes fuselage.
If the choice is being exposed to a passive sniffer vs being exposed to those prepared to perform man in the middle attacks (which carry a far higher risk of getting caught for the attacker) I'd go for the latter.
In practice, there are multiple layers of security
In a normal SSL web browser configuration there are exactly two layers of security, SSL and the security of the underlying network you are using. Break both of those and you can set up as a man in the middle and sniff the user's data.
You do realize that this has been a problem from the beginning, right?
However it is a problem that has got worse over time for several reasons.
Firstly the list of trusted CAs has been ever growing both through the addition of root certs to browsers and through the issuance of "intermediate certs" by the existing CAs. How many people know that their browser trusts the Chinese government?
Secondly people used to access the internet through relatively safe networks (while ethernet isn't secure you at least need a physical connection to mess with it). However there is a trend towards use of wifi hotspots which are usually unencrypted and relatively easy to subject to man in the middle attacks.
The largest wind farm in Europe is Whitelee Wind farm [wikipedia.org] in Scotland.
Afaict scotland doesn't have any exclusion zones arround wind turbines. Heck people seem to be encouraged to use the windfarm as a recreational area.
Even in countries that are paranoid enough to exclude the general public from windfarms it should still be possible to use the land under them for farming and similar activities with reasonable precautions.
But really this all ignores the key difference. Afaict building a windfarm is something a landowner chooses to do with their land voluntarily. Presumablly they would only do so if the value of the land to them as a windfarm is greater than the costs of making it one (in terms of other activities prevented/reduced/made less efficiant). A nuclear accident or a coal mine fire, or a chemical spill is an accident that renders an area of land uninhabitable and quite possiblly a larger area unsuitable for agriculture regardless of the landowners wishes and in the case of a nuclear accident the area rendered unusable can be a long way from the plant, it doesn't form nice circles you can plan for.
IMO accidents (and possiblly eminent domain uses) are the correct think to compare against. Not people voluntarily using the land they own to build windfarms.
To clarify my previous post it was reffering to "conventional hydro" (as was it's parent afaict). "Run of the river" hydro doesn't have this problem but that has the same problem that wind and solar have.
It's worth noting for comparison that hydroelectric power is appalling for rendering large areas uninhabitable, even when it works as planned.
And that is why there are few new hydro schemes in the west. Finding areas that are both geologically and politically suitable for turning into giant hydroelectric reservoirs is extremely difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual law says that to confiscate his camera they'd have to arrest him for taking pictures likely to be used in a terrorist attack. I imagine the court case that followed, and then the lawsuit, would be an interesting gong show.
What if they arrest him and then release him without charge? Do they have to give the camera back? do they have to give the memory card back? If so do the pictures still have to be on the card when it's given back?
That only works because alaska has a lot of natural resources compared to it's population. So they can afford to use revenue from those natrual resources to not only pay for running the government but also to pay people to live in alaska.
I guess the next question then is, why does Sales Tax matter so much?
Afaict the issue with sales tax and internet purchases in the US is not just the actual tax loss but also the fact that it gives retailers who sell to the whole US but only have a buisness presense in the odd state (preferablly states without sales tax) a massive unfair advantage over traditional retailers that have a buisness presense in most states. In theory people are supposed to pay an equivilent "use tax" to make up for the sales tax they didn't pay but afaict they rarely actually did so and some states even gave up and allowed people to pay an "estimated use tax" instead.
States cannot force out of state retailers to collect sales tax for their residence due to a supreme court descision that it would be an unreasonable burden on them (US sales tax is very complex with taxes being charged by many levels of govenment not just states).
Recently some states have been trying to put pressure on amazon to pay by widening the definition of "in-state" to include retailers with affiliates in the state. Amazon has been responding by dumping affiliates in those states (which hurts the affiliates in question far more than it hurts amazon).
One soloution for the states would be to do away with sales tax entirely (some states already don't have it) but to do that they would have to either reduce services or raise other taxes. In general those responsible for taxing people like to spread the pain so it's less obvious just how much of ones income is ending up in taxes.
I find this a slightly strange move by amazon. Maybe they think a level playing field wouldn't be so bad after all compared to the model theese states are pushing where online retailers that allow affilliates are disadvantaged relative to those that don't.
I know Income Tax is lower in the US than the UK
Afaict that depends on where in the US you live/work. The US federal income tax is lower than the UK income tax but many parts of the US also have income tax at lower levels (state, county, etc).
I spend a lot of time in a university and pretty much every desk I see has a desktop on or under it and there are roomfuls of desktops for use by the undergrads (and they do get pretty damn busy sometimes). Yes there are laptops too but they are in addition to desktops not instead of them.
The number of people buying desktops for personal use may well be going down but as long as there are jobs that involve spending all or most of ones working day sitting in front of a computer in a fixed location there will be a market for non-portable computers (which may be either traditional desktops or thin clients but afaict thin client deployments have a nasty habbit of ending in failure) as they are harder to steal, more ergonomic and cheaper for a given set of capabilities than laptops.
What's so hard about just... deleting the sensitive words?
The trouble is if you simply delete text from a word processor document you are likely to change the formatting and pagination. This can be an issue for two reasons
1: Page numbers are often used to make references to a document and therefore it may be important that they match between the unredacted and the redacted versions.
2: Depending on how the original author formatted images, tables etc they may end up in a jumbled mess when the word processor reflows the text.
So people black stuff out rather than removing it. This was fine in the days when the document released to the public was a printed document but when the document released to the public is a pdf the original text can remain under the blacking out..
The correct thing to do of course is to remove the unwanted information and fix up the formatting and pagination (either by inserting dummy stuff or otherwise). Then as a second line of defense run the tool in acrobat to check for "hidden text".
The difficult bit is explaing to non-technical users WHY this effort is necessary and making sure that they actually do it. Especially when PDF has built-in protection features that give people a false sense of security.
It's a fact of life that people will screw things up. You can attempt to reduce the number of screwups through training people, disciplining those that refuse to comply and reducing the number of people performing high risk tasks but it's almost impossible to reduce it to zero.
How many redacted documents do you think are released every year? Frankly i'm surprised we don't see stories like this far more often.
I think it's far more likely that the server is set up for name based virtual hosting (regardless of whether they are actually using it or not) and is set up to serve a blank page for unknown names.
I suspect it's mostly about money. By banning VOIP the providers can change different rates for voice than for generic data.
Here in an average-sized town in Scotland I've got a 100mb connection for £35($54)/mo. No capping, no traffic shaping, no services blocked
Good for you
Afaict in most of the UK your choices are
1: BT wholesale ADSL, generally pretty shitty due to the way BT prices backend bandwidth
2: LLU ADSL, can be pretty good if the right LLU provider is in your area but fundamentally limited by the fact it's ADSL so your speeds will depend on line length and at best with be 28Mbps (and i've never seen someone with a line that good).
3: virgin media cable, available to about half of households high speeds but they traffic shape. Their top package has lighter traffic shaping than the others but P2P is still shaped (and they don't say how they identify P2P traffic).
Cogent at $5/Mbit (~0.015/GB)
Remember service sold by the megabit per second is typically based on 95th percentile usage, NOT average usage. So what you say is only true if your usage is near constant. Most people/companies usage isn't.
Also IIRC cogent is known for getting into peering spats that cut them off from large parts of the rest of the internet. So afaict they should only be used as part of a multihoming strategy, not as a sole provider.
Afaict astrological predictions are based on knowing where the stars were at the time a given event (e.g. someone's birth). To get that information you need to convert the time of the event in question from local time to universal time. To do that you need to know what the relationship between local time and universal time at the time of the event was. Therefore astrologers needed to compile historical information on time rules.
I'm fairly sure that Windows does not use the zoneinfo database.
Indeed, up to XP windows only stored timezone data with one set of DST rules. With vista they changed it so it could store two sets of rules for a zone to allow them to push out timezone updates earlier but they never seemed to care about accurate conversion of past or future timestamps between local time and UTC.
Zoneinfo by contrast aims to have complete historic data to 1970 and partial historic data* before that. AIUI the historic data is mostly what is in dispute here.
*Data before 1970 aims to be correct for the nominal city of the zone but they will not split zones unless there are differences after 1970.
Afaict this sattelite is used for fixed services. Satphones on irridium should still work fine.
"the cloud" is about a paradigm shift in hosting.
The old fassioned way of doing hosting was that customers/responsibilities were assigned to servers in a manual and largely fixed manner. If you ordered a bigger server (or you ordered a bigger vm and there was no spare room on your host) someone had to manually set up a new server and migrate your installation to it. If a machine died it needed to be fixed ASAP because at worst services would be down and at best redundancy would have been lost.
"The cloud" is about replacing that manual and largely static allocation with dynamic computer controlled allocation. If a customer wants more capacity they request it in the admin interface. If hardware dies it's no big deal, the customer sees the equivilent of a reboot and new capacity is allocated to them automatically.
ok, so maybe a 'frying pan and fire' move as far as some of you are concerned, but VM have been providing a stable service in our area for quite some time
I can't say i've noticed a whole lot of difference. Both BT wholesale ADSL (i've never bought directly from BT) and drop out from time to time. Sufficiantly rarely that you put up with it as a home user, sufficiantly frequently that I wouldn't rely on either for a buisness.
If you are trusting an internet reliant buisness to a single "broadband" link you are being an idiot. Either get multiple broadband links from different providers or get a proper connection with a service level agrement.
Not everyone will care about the multiplayer and not everyone who was prepared to sell their copy at $x will be prepared to sell it at $(x-10). So ultimately things will probablly settle somewhere between the two extremes, used value of games with this will be reduced but probablly not by as much as $10.
Of course, people here are more performance- than price-conscious, so those i7-##0X jobs off to the right are drooltastic.
Except they aren't because while they beat the 2600K in highly multithreaded tasks they lose badly to it in tasks with four or less active threads. Afaict most desktop tasks have four or less active threads. Plus by buying them you would be buying into a dying platform. Therefore unless I really needed the features of the LGA1366/x58 platform I would probablly not buy one at this point.
And since there are rumors that Intel is flattening out its roadmap (no sense overspending when the competition is as lame as they are), anything built today will remain egoboosting for longer than the usual.
Today you have a choice between LGA1155 which has the sandy bridge cores and native sata 6G but it's a mainstream platform with limited PCIe, dual channel memory and a maximum of four cores. Or you have LGA1366 which is a high end platform with triple channel memory, lots of PCIe and the option of 4 or 6-core processors but the cores are an older (slower) design and the chipset no sata 6G (motherboard vendors often add third party sata 6G chipsets but apparently they often suck performance wise).
Soon (apparently sometime in november) LGA2011 should be coming out which will support chips with up to 8 of the latest generation cores (though desktop chips will only go up to 6-core), quad channel memory and lots of PCIe and sata 6G in the chipset.
So if you are building a high end system I would strongly suggest waiting for LGA2011
I was under the impression that the reason for not using rear facing seats was that they took up more space for a given degree of comfort due to the slope of the planes fuselage.
If the choice is being exposed to a passive sniffer vs being exposed to those prepared to perform man in the middle attacks (which carry a far higher risk of getting caught for the attacker) I'd go for the latter.
In practice, there are multiple layers of security
In a normal SSL web browser configuration there are exactly two layers of security, SSL and the security of the underlying network you are using. Break both of those and you can set up as a man in the middle and sniff the user's data.
You do realize that this has been a problem from the beginning, right?
However it is a problem that has got worse over time for several reasons.
Firstly the list of trusted CAs has been ever growing both through the addition of root certs to browsers and through the issuance of "intermediate certs" by the existing CAs. How many people know that their browser trusts the Chinese government?
Secondly people used to access the internet through relatively safe networks (while ethernet isn't secure you at least need a physical connection to mess with it). However there is a trend towards use of wifi hotspots which are usually unencrypted and relatively easy to subject to man in the middle attacks.
BTW it's slightly weird to give one distance in miles and all the other distances in km.
The largest wind farm in Europe is Whitelee Wind farm [wikipedia.org] in Scotland.
Afaict scotland doesn't have any exclusion zones arround wind turbines. Heck people seem to be encouraged to use the windfarm as a recreational area.
Even in countries that are paranoid enough to exclude the general public from windfarms it should still be possible to use the land under them for farming and similar activities with reasonable precautions.
But really this all ignores the key difference. Afaict building a windfarm is something a landowner chooses to do with their land voluntarily. Presumablly they would only do so if the value of the land to them as a windfarm is greater than the costs of making it one (in terms of other activities prevented/reduced/made less efficiant). A nuclear accident or a coal mine fire, or a chemical spill is an accident that renders an area of land uninhabitable and quite possiblly a larger area unsuitable for agriculture regardless of the landowners wishes and in the case of a nuclear accident the area rendered unusable can be a long way from the plant, it doesn't form nice circles you can plan for.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Chernobyl_radiation_map_1996.svg
IMO accidents (and possiblly eminent domain uses) are the correct think to compare against. Not people voluntarily using the land they own to build windfarms.
To clarify my previous post it was reffering to "conventional hydro" (as was it's parent afaict). "Run of the river" hydro doesn't have this problem but that has the same problem that wind and solar have.
It's worth noting for comparison that hydroelectric power is appalling for rendering large areas uninhabitable, even when it works as planned.
And that is why there are few new hydro schemes in the west. Finding areas that are both geologically and politically suitable for turning into giant hydroelectric reservoirs is extremely difficult.