The providers don't care - stolen phones generate revenue the same as a non stolen, and as a bonus, the old owner needs a new phone (including a contract extension, of course...)
as long as there is no law that *forces* them to block stolen phones, they wont do shit to stop it.
Profiting from stolen goods? Sounds like a crime to me, even if it is a bit of leap...
Nuclear may well be on the way out, but not because it is inefficient or unworthy of use. We're just afraid of it.
Not afraid. Terrified. And rightly so. Nuclear power can be very safe, but not when run by corporations who answer to shareholders, or by corrupt/broke governments who won't spend money on maintenance where it is needed, or operated by people, or by robots built by people.
No citations (except those on Google's approach to such problems, which may or may not be relevant here so I won't provide them. I'm sure you can find them on Bing:). I've got no idea how the designers resolve this, but I don't really need to to reach my conclusion - for the PP's proposed sequence of events (running another car off the road because a tumbleweed blew by) to take place on a system certified for use on public roads would require a catastrophic series of failures, including, but not limited to:
. None of the hundreds of people involved in such a project being aware of the possibility of objects existing on the road that pose no risk in a collision (tumble weeds, plastic bags, rain, etc) . Nobody encountering such objects while conducting testing . Nissan's legal team not imagining such a failure . None of the certifying bodies doing any sorts of testing
And that's only at a superficial level. And even if all of the above and more went wrong and the broken feature made it into production cars, such a failure would be encountered within hours of the first such car being driven off the lot, at which point the whole range would be recalled. I just don't see how it's possible.
The world is full of engineering disasters that occured because the designer missed one little thing. Such mistakes improve the world of engineering by learning from mistakes. But peer review also helps.
Peer review is great, but shouldn't be conducted on what is essentually a press release.
The driver of the car in front of you jams on his brakes. The road is wet and your car can't stop in time. There is a truck to the left so your brand new intelligent car decides to swerve to the right because there is only a small object there and won't cause as much damage. Too bad for the student walking home from school.
This idea, while the concept has good intentions, just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen with a huge lawsuit for an ending.
Probable scenario. The driver of the car in front of you jams on his brakes. The road is wet and your car can't stop in time. There is a truck to the left so your brand new intelligent car decides to slam on the brakes and hope for the best, because there's a small object to the right that might be a student walking home from school.
Seriously, it's not rocket science. Your car isn't going to just "aim for the softest target". And in any case, if the car in front of you can stop in time then your computer assisted braking can stop you in time, assuming your vehicle has similar stopping capacity (tyres not too worn, suspension in good order, not overloaded, etc). With your reaction time replaced by the computers reaction time you are in a way better situation than you would have been without this technology.
"Worse will be when a false positive will induce an accident"
That was my first thought too. Car sees a monster tumbleweed coming and swerves me into the other lane (boom) or the ditch trying to dodge it, not realizing that Ramming Speed is fully authorized with tumbleweeds.
Even worse would be the car dodging a big dog and hitting a small kid instead.
This is why I love slashdot. Full of people brilliant enough to imagine the possibilities of how something could go wrong, but too dim to imagine that the designers have already considered it:)
The real problem is false positives: the car detects falsely a problem, avoids a non-collision, and even brakes by mistake. Worse will be when a false positive will induce an accident that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Even the Linux mdadm software will do a scheduled scan once a month in a default install
It didn't do that last time I set it up. But that was some years ago. A monthly read doesn't completely protect against this sort of problem. Two failures within a month is much more likely than two failures within the time it takes to rebuild a lost disk.
Maybe it is just a Debian thing?
The once-a-month scan doesn't solve all the problems, but an unused part of the disk can have an error on it and not get discovered for years (think LVM-on-RAID10 with unallocated extents), and there may not be just a single disk involved. You wouldn't know about the errors until a disk was replaced and it started a resync and then notices that another disk is failed (1 error = failed), and then another. Then you have a problem. I don't think it's that hard to solve - I believe you can bring up a raid in 'best effort' mode and just read the stuff off it that you want, but better not to have arrived in that situation in the first place.
I have seen SSD death many times and it is a strange sight indeed. What is interesting about it when compared to normal drives is that when normal drives fail it is - mostly - and all or nothing ordeal. A bad spot on a drive is a bad spot on a drive. With SSDs you can have a bad spot one place, reboot, and you get a bad spot in another place. Windows loaded on an SSD will exhibit all kinds of bizarre behaviour. Sometimes it will hang, sometimes it will blue-screen, sometimes it will boot normally until it tries to read or write to that random bad spot. Rebooting is like rolling the dice to see what it will do next - that is, until it fails completely.
In that failure mode it sounds like RAID may be no help at all...
Unless you periodically read through all your disks, you may not notice this for a long time
Point me to an enterprise RAID controller that doesn't do this, as well as closely monitor SMART counters??
Even the Linux mdadm software will do a scheduled scan once a month in a default install (under Debian at least... can't speak for any other distribution).
Lets just build another one of these. If the creator comes in and mucks things up again, we'll know it is a simulation after all (and us athiests will feel a right bunch of fools!)
Well, if you are in Seattle, you only have to worry about the police if you are a minority armed with a sword or knife. In that event, expect to get murdered by cops with guns. I expect the UAVs are probably to locate minorities armed with knives more efficiently.
But on the plus side, if you shoot at a police helicopter spying on you sans warrant with a.22 rifle, you will probably get charged with attempted murder. If you shoot at a UAV, you will get charged with destruction of private property. Yay?
Shooting at a UAV sounds like terrorist activity, which is a good thing as trials and due process cost a fortune.
I would vote for these only if they make the concession that any time a private citizen sees one in the air over their land they are allowed to shoot at it with an air rifle, and that if they successfully take it down over their own property it becomes theirs.
Also, in the interests of security, any and all attempts to take one down via electronic means are allowed and encouraged, with the proviso that a successful takedown requires that the exploit be published to give the police a chance to fix the bug.
And yes, I'm going to be cryonically suspended so that if the technology is not ready by the time I'm gone, I'll still be "around" so-to-speak to revive and apply the upgrades.
Good luck with that. In the overcrowded world of tomorrow, i'll be voting no on "wake up Press2ToContinue":)
the scalper actually provides a service... he buys the surplus tickets of those who can't make the event and runs the risk of holding unsold tickets.
These HFT bastards don't have any risk of holding stock as they always have a buyer to sell to when they make their trades.
That might be true of some scalpers. I think it might be regulated a little better in Australia now but recently scalpers were jumping the queue, buying bulk tickets, then reselling them at a much higher price on ebay and other retail avenues. There was no service there except to themselves.
If there were an omnipotent beeing she could build a wall that is so high that she can not jump over it and thus she would not be omnipotent.
She moves in mysterious ways. That's pretty much a universal escape clause.
Hence it follows that there is no god (as defined by the abrahamic religions). Atheism is not a question of faith.
Sure it is. I believe there is no god, and I believe there is no need for there to be a god for the universe to exist. I can't know this though because it's unknowable, and by definition the existence or non-existence of God (or invisible pink unicorns for that matter) is unprovable. I'm certainly not so arrogant as to try and prove it to you one way or the other without concrete evidence (that can never exist). Your argument about building a wall so high it cannot be jumped over does not constitute proof.
I'll have a problem with you if you start doing bad things in the name of your god(s) (as most religious organisations have done at one or more points in their existence), or start telling others how to live their lives because your god says so, but aside from that people can believe whatever they want and I won't think any less of them.
(yes, atheism is a religion...a belief based only on faith that there is no God or that there is a God...both are equally faith-based beliefs)
To which is the standard reply: "Atheism is a religion in the same sense that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
As i've said elsewhere, most athiests simply don't believe in god, and wish to discuss it no further. Some, however, preach about their atheism more than most christians preach about their god, and try to convert anyone who'll listen to their way of thinking. I agree that atheism isn't really a religion according to the dictionary definition, but some people are pretty relgious about it. Maybe it's just a matter of semantics but i see religion more as the practices revolving around your beliefs than the beliefs themselves.
I'm pretty sure I could find at least a hundred people, who will agree with me that public displays of religion is grossly offensive.
Maybe even thousands.
Which raises the question - would the UK police ever arrest a clergy member simply for public displayed religion, or is freedom of religion more important than freedom of speech?
You'll probably find a hundred people (maybe even thousands!) who are grossly offended by black people too. And asians. I think you might need some more straw..
You'll find a few christians who want to force their beliefs down your throat, but on the whole they are quite happy to worship privatel
Until you want to be allowed to do things that their religious leaders are against, like stem cell research, available contraception, public nudity, rights for atheists to hold office (in a couple of states, they're still barred by law), abortion, right to take an oath of allegiance without mentioning god (without belonging to an organization that will testify that it's against your belief), right to cuss, right to marry whoever you want, have sex for any reason (including money), or whatever else is an abomination unto Nuggan this week.
If you first rip out all the legislation that favours your religion, then come tell me to shut up. Cause right now, your silence is because you have it the way you want it. If you don't speak up for evening the playing field, you're supporting the oppressive status quo, very loudly.
I'm an athiest, so I don't believe in any deity. If ripped out all the legislation that favoured that then we'd be in a peculiar situation. If you tell me that I can't do something because your god says I can't, then you and I will have a problem. If you go to chuch on Sundays, say grace before a meal, say a prayer before bedtime, and whatever else your god demands of you, but you don't try to force any particular belief on me or anyone else, then you can believe what ever you want and I won't ever criticise you for it.
You know, I keep seeing things like this written/said by people who always claim not to have an axe to grind, but in my 50 years on this planet I've never come across that behavior. Not once.
It makes me wonder, you know? What's more likely: that this is going on all over the place yet I've completely missed it for the last five decades, or that perhaps there is an agenda there, and people are saying what they wish was true rather than what is? Yeah, I think we all know the answer to that one.
If you were my friend on facebook you'd see it. I have friends who are athiests and friends who are christians, and not one of the christians has ever raised the subject while the athiests are always on about how religion causes this and religion is bad and people who are religious are stupid. And not just in response to a comment someone else made, but completely unprovoked. They seem to care more about "converting" you than the christians do.
You'll find a few christians who want to force their beliefs down your throat, but on the whole they are quite happy to worship privately, and more power to them as long as they don't bring it to work.
My young Stepson got one of these (powerful green laser) and I was pretty much blown away at the power of it... I did see when he was unpacking it lots of warnings so I spent some time with him when he first tested it out. So we get outside at night and what is the first thing he tries to do, yep point it a plane flying overhead... so cue the huge boring lecture from me about the danger of these things and how if he gets caught pointing his laser at planes, or cars or people's eyes he will be sent to a boys home... well I think he got the point. The main thing is that kids need to understand the danger of these things and there is a responsibility for parents to keep up with the times and actually understand that "new toy"...
Aren't there laws against letting kids play with these things? You say "powerful" but don't specify the power, but i'm guessing it's high powered enough that it could blind you. And by young i assume you mean under 12 (or you would have said teenage). Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture? Kids that age are very likely to go from "hey wouldn't it be funny if..." to actually doing it without thinking it through, regardless of the number of "boring lectures" they've been submitted to. Especially when he's angling to impress a few mates. He doesn't need parental guidance, he needs parental supervision every time the thing comes out of its box. I'd be treating it with similar caution as a gun.
Slashdot Mirror
The providers don't care - stolen phones generate revenue the same as a non stolen, and as a bonus, the old owner needs a new phone (including a contract extension, of course...)
as long as there is no law that *forces* them to block stolen phones, they wont do shit to stop it.
Profiting from stolen goods? Sounds like a crime to me, even if it is a bit of leap...
Nuclear may well be on the way out, but not because it is inefficient or unworthy of use. We're just afraid of it.
Not afraid. Terrified. And rightly so. Nuclear power can be very safe, but not when run by corporations who answer to shareholders, or by corrupt/broke governments who won't spend money on maintenance where it is needed, or operated by people, or by robots built by people.
No citations (except those on Google's approach to such problems, which may or may not be relevant here so I won't provide them. I'm sure you can find them on Bing :). I've got no idea how the designers resolve this, but I don't really need to to reach my conclusion - for the PP's proposed sequence of events (running another car off the road because a tumbleweed blew by) to take place on a system certified for use on public roads would require a catastrophic series of failures, including, but not limited to:
. None of the hundreds of people involved in such a project being aware of the possibility of objects existing on the road that pose no risk in a collision (tumble weeds, plastic bags, rain, etc)
. Nobody encountering such objects while conducting testing
. Nissan's legal team not imagining such a failure
. None of the certifying bodies doing any sorts of testing
And that's only at a superficial level. And even if all of the above and more went wrong and the broken feature made it into production cars, such a failure would be encountered within hours of the first such car being driven off the lot, at which point the whole range would be recalled. I just don't see how it's possible.
The world is full of engineering disasters that occured because the designer missed one little thing.
Such mistakes improve the world of engineering by learning from mistakes.
But peer review also helps.
Peer review is great, but shouldn't be conducted on what is essentually a press release.
patented Centennial Challenges
A quick search of uspto shows that no such patent exists under that name...
The driver of the car in front of you jams on his brakes. The road is wet and your car can't stop in time. There is a truck to the left so your brand new intelligent car decides to swerve to the right because there is only a small object there and won't cause as much damage. Too bad for the student walking home from school.
This idea, while the concept has good intentions, just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen with a huge lawsuit for an ending.
Probable scenario. The driver of the car in front of you jams on his brakes. The road is wet and your car can't stop in time. There is a truck to the left so your brand new intelligent car decides to slam on the brakes and hope for the best, because there's a small object to the right that might be a student walking home from school.
Seriously, it's not rocket science. Your car isn't going to just "aim for the softest target". And in any case, if the car in front of you can stop in time then your computer assisted braking can stop you in time, assuming your vehicle has similar stopping capacity (tyres not too worn, suspension in good order, not overloaded, etc). With your reaction time replaced by the computers reaction time you are in a way better situation than you would have been without this technology.
"Worse will be when a false positive will induce an accident"
That was my first thought too. Car sees a monster tumbleweed coming and swerves me into the other lane (boom) or the ditch trying to dodge it, not realizing that Ramming Speed is fully authorized with tumbleweeds.
Even worse would be the car dodging a big dog and hitting a small kid instead.
This is why I love slashdot. Full of people brilliant enough to imagine the possibilities of how something could go wrong, but too dim to imagine that the designers have already considered it :)
The real problem is false positives: the car detects falsely a problem, avoids a non-collision, and even brakes by mistake. Worse will be when a false positive will induce an accident that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Such an anti-tailgating device already exists...
It didn't do that last time I set it up. But that was some years ago. A monthly read doesn't completely protect against this sort of problem. Two failures within a month is much more likely than two failures within the time it takes to rebuild a lost disk.
Maybe it is just a Debian thing?
The once-a-month scan doesn't solve all the problems, but an unused part of the disk can have an error on it and not get discovered for years (think LVM-on-RAID10 with unallocated extents), and there may not be just a single disk involved. You wouldn't know about the errors until a disk was replaced and it started a resync and then notices that another disk is failed (1 error = failed), and then another. Then you have a problem. I don't think it's that hard to solve - I believe you can bring up a raid in 'best effort' mode and just read the stuff off it that you want, but better not to have arrived in that situation in the first place.
I have seen SSD death many times and it is a strange sight indeed. What is interesting about it when compared to normal drives is that when normal drives fail it is - mostly - and all or nothing ordeal. A bad spot on a drive is a bad spot on a drive. With SSDs you can have a bad spot one place, reboot, and you get a bad spot in another place. Windows loaded on an SSD will exhibit all kinds of bizarre behaviour. Sometimes it will hang, sometimes it will blue-screen, sometimes it will boot normally until it tries to read or write to that random bad spot. Rebooting is like rolling the dice to see what it will do next - that is, until it fails completely.
In that failure mode it sounds like RAID may be no help at all...
Unless you periodically read through all your disks, you may not notice this for a long time
Point me to an enterprise RAID controller that doesn't do this, as well as closely monitor SMART counters??
Even the Linux mdadm software will do a scheduled scan once a month in a default install (under Debian at least... can't speak for any other distribution).
Lets just build another one of these. If the creator comes in and mucks things up again, we'll know it is a simulation after all (and us athiests will feel a right bunch of fools!)
Well, if you are in Seattle, you only have to worry about the police if you are a minority armed with a sword or knife. In that event, expect to get murdered by cops with guns. I expect the UAVs are probably to locate minorities armed with knives more efficiently.
But on the plus side, if you shoot at a police helicopter spying on you sans warrant with a .22 rifle, you will probably get charged with attempted murder. If you shoot at a UAV, you will get charged with destruction of private property. Yay?
Shooting at a UAV sounds like terrorist activity, which is a good thing as trials and due process cost a fortune.
I would vote for these only if they make the concession that any time a private citizen sees one in the air over their land they are allowed to shoot at it with an air rifle, and that if they successfully take it down over their own property it becomes theirs.
Also, in the interests of security, any and all attempts to take one down via electronic means are allowed and encouraged, with the proviso that a successful takedown requires that the exploit be published to give the police a chance to fix the bug.
And yes, I'm going to be cryonically suspended so that if the technology is not ready by the time I'm gone, I'll still be "around" so-to-speak to revive and apply the upgrades.
Good luck with that. In the overcrowded world of tomorrow, i'll be voting no on "wake up Press2ToContinue" :)
the scalper actually provides a service... he buys the surplus tickets of those who can't make the event and runs the risk of holding unsold tickets.
These HFT bastards don't have any risk of holding stock as they always have a buyer to sell to when they make their trades.
That might be true of some scalpers. I think it might be regulated a little better in Australia now but recently scalpers were jumping the queue, buying bulk tickets, then reselling them at a much higher price on ebay and other retail avenues. There was no service there except to themselves.
- Elvis is dead
Certainly is. Died last year at the ripe old age of 76 after falling down a cliff in New Zealand while filming his latest movie. Sad story.
Eve has only served to suck money out of the market by acting as an (unwanted) intermediary.
Ah. Like a scalper of concert tickets.
Thanks, btw. It's 11:36pm and I just learned something for today :)
If there were an omnipotent beeing she could build a wall that is so high that she can not jump over it and thus she would not be omnipotent.
She moves in mysterious ways. That's pretty much a universal escape clause.
Hence it follows that there is no god (as defined by the abrahamic religions). Atheism is not a question of faith.
Sure it is. I believe there is no god, and I believe there is no need for there to be a god for the universe to exist. I can't know this though because it's unknowable, and by definition the existence or non-existence of God (or invisible pink unicorns for that matter) is unprovable. I'm certainly not so arrogant as to try and prove it to you one way or the other without concrete evidence (that can never exist). Your argument about building a wall so high it cannot be jumped over does not constitute proof.
I'll have a problem with you if you start doing bad things in the name of your god(s) (as most religious organisations have done at one or more points in their existence), or start telling others how to live their lives because your god says so, but aside from that people can believe whatever they want and I won't think any less of them.
For further context, they were making a repetitive joke
Hmmm... turns out that sometimes, the funniness increases with explanation. THE AXIOM IS A LIE!
(yes, atheism is a religion...a belief based only on faith that there is no God or that there is a God...both are equally faith-based beliefs)
To which is the standard reply: "Atheism is a religion in the same sense that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
As i've said elsewhere, most athiests simply don't believe in god, and wish to discuss it no further. Some, however, preach about their atheism more than most christians preach about their god, and try to convert anyone who'll listen to their way of thinking. I agree that atheism isn't really a religion according to the dictionary definition, but some people are pretty relgious about it. Maybe it's just a matter of semantics but i see religion more as the practices revolving around your beliefs than the beliefs themselves.
I'm pretty sure I could find at least a hundred people, who will agree with me that public displays of religion is grossly offensive.
Maybe even thousands.
Which raises the question - would the UK police ever arrest a clergy member simply for public displayed religion, or is freedom of religion more important than freedom of speech?
You'll probably find a hundred people (maybe even thousands!) who are grossly offended by black people too. And asians. I think you might need some more straw..
It's not funny if you have to explain it.
(i'm not implying it was funny without the explanation... just sayin)
You'll find a few christians who want to force their beliefs down your throat, but on the whole they are quite happy to worship privatel
Until you want to be allowed to do things that their religious leaders are against, like stem cell research, available contraception, public nudity, rights for atheists to hold office (in a couple of states, they're still barred by law), abortion, right to take an oath of allegiance without mentioning god (without belonging to an organization that will testify that it's against your belief), right to cuss, right to marry whoever you want, have sex for any reason (including money), or whatever else is an abomination unto Nuggan this week.
If you first rip out all the legislation that favours your religion, then come tell me to shut up. Cause right now, your silence is because you have it the way you want it. If you don't speak up for evening the playing field, you're supporting the oppressive status quo, very loudly.
I'm an athiest, so I don't believe in any deity. If ripped out all the legislation that favoured that then we'd be in a peculiar situation. If you tell me that I can't do something because your god says I can't, then you and I will have a problem. If you go to chuch on Sundays, say grace before a meal, say a prayer before bedtime, and whatever else your god demands of you, but you don't try to force any particular belief on me or anyone else, then you can believe what ever you want and I won't ever criticise you for it.
You know, I keep seeing things like this written/said by people who always claim not to have an axe to grind, but in my 50 years on this planet I've never come across that behavior. Not once.
It makes me wonder, you know? What's more likely: that this is going on all over the place yet I've completely missed it for the last five decades, or that perhaps there is an agenda there, and people are saying what they wish was true rather than what is? Yeah, I think we all know the answer to that one.
If you were my friend on facebook you'd see it. I have friends who are athiests and friends who are christians, and not one of the christians has ever raised the subject while the athiests are always on about how religion causes this and religion is bad and people who are religious are stupid. And not just in response to a comment someone else made, but completely unprovoked. They seem to care more about "converting" you than the christians do.
You'll find a few christians who want to force their beliefs down your throat, but on the whole they are quite happy to worship privately, and more power to them as long as they don't bring it to work.
My young Stepson got one of these (powerful green laser) and I was pretty much blown away at the power of it... I did see when he was unpacking it lots of warnings so I spent some time with him when he first tested it out. So we get outside at night and what is the first thing he tries to do, yep point it a plane flying overhead... so cue the huge boring lecture from me about the danger of these things and how if he gets caught pointing his laser at planes, or cars or people's eyes he will be sent to a boys home... well I think he got the point. The main thing is that kids need to understand the danger of these things and there is a responsibility for parents to keep up with the times and actually understand that "new toy"...
Aren't there laws against letting kids play with these things? You say "powerful" but don't specify the power, but i'm guessing it's high powered enough that it could blind you. And by young i assume you mean under 12 (or you would have said teenage). Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture? Kids that age are very likely to go from "hey wouldn't it be funny if..." to actually doing it without thinking it through, regardless of the number of "boring lectures" they've been submitted to. Especially when he's angling to impress a few mates. He doesn't need parental guidance, he needs parental supervision every time the thing comes out of its box. I'd be treating it with similar caution as a gun.