Having used Vista for awhile, there's only 1 improvement I can actually think of: the sound mixer/volume control thing in Vista will let you mute or control volumes of individual applications.
Not the most earth-shaking thing in the world (most apps have a mechanism built in to do volume control or mute the sound, but not all, so it is nice; and some apps bury sound control in layers of menu that make it a pain to quickly mute them).
Also, I see no reason why that couldn't have been done in XP, other than MS wanted to have something to tout as an improvement in Vista.
A reasonable interpretation of unlimited, in the context of a connection which has an advertised bandwidth limit (i.e. 10mbps down/2mbps up) is that you are limited to the amount of available bandwidth advertised. If I pay for 2mbps up, I'm not really paying for 'unlimited', but I do expect to be able to upload 2mbps without being told I'm consuming 'too much' bandwidth.
Such customers aren't using 'unlimited', they are using the bandwidth that was advertised and which they payed for. When ISPs bring up arguments like "using 100x more bandwidth than other customers" it's just to try to deflect attention away from the fact that they are using exactly what was advertised and which they payed for, and there's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't MATTER that it's 100x more. Other people just *under-utilize* (should that be hyphenated? Not sure) their connections.
Generally, I agree with you. Government should not unduly interfere with business relationships. Businesses should be, mostly, free to decide who they do business with.
But, when you talk about utilities that have government granted monopolies on running cable through rights-of-way to all the buildings in a geographic area, and no one else is permitted to compete by running their own cables, then its a different story. Such a business should be subject to government regulation, including reasonable regulations that they must offer service to anyone willing to pay, and to cut off service, there should either be lack of payment for an extended period (e.g. don't cut someone off for being just 2 or 3 days late on payment), or because of a *court order* (that is, as a result of perhaps a copyright holder suing someone for copyright violation, the court finding the defendant guilty, and the court issuing an order to terminate their Internet connection; or, in a more extreme case, maybe a judge has seen sufficient evidence to show that an internet connection is likely being used for something like kiddie porn, terrorism, or the operations of some other type of criminal organization, and so issues an emergency order before the trial).
Isn't that why you pay for bandwidth? If a company advertises I can buy 5 liters of Coke a week for $2, and I drink five liters of Coke a week, and pay my $2, who are they to complain that I'm drinking more than my fair share of Coke? If they cannot afford to actually provide me 5 liters/week for $2, then they should change their advertising and product offering to something more reasonable.
"For the millionth time, file sharing is stealing. Shouting the same lie from your noise hole over and over again will never make it true."
There, I fixed it for you.
"Content creators are not owed a living."
Just like factory workers, cops, teachers, doctors, engineers, etc aren't owed a living, right?
"The quality of the vast majority of content is low, and the price is too high."
If it's so low, why are you downloading it? If it's so low, surely you can live without it? If I don't like the quality of goods at a particular store, that doesn't give me the right to steal there stuff. I just won't shop there. There's other stores, with better goods at more reasonable prices. Is it ok to steal luxury cars and goods because the prices are too high?
If you think the price is too high, just move on. Don't buy their music/movie, but don't steal it either. That's called *negotiation*. I know people think that in modern society, the concept of negotiating price is dead. It's not completely - it just works different. You might not *individually* negotatiate prices on a customer by customer basis. But, as a business, if too few people are buying your product/service, you lower the price and/or increase the quality until people are buying in sufficient volume.
"They will lose, if only because the two sides of this debate are divided by age, with the young respecting the freedom of information flow, and the old desperate to hang onto the economic privileges they lose."
Its more like the young have no patience - they want everything *NOW*, and if they can't afford it, they'll just take it; if you wait, generally the prices of anything goes down. Particularly if the quality is low - how many DVDs are in bargain bins for $3-5 in stores all over the country, because they will only sell at that price? The market works, prices on both good and bad things generally comes down over time.
Yes, there are exceptions occasionally, but those exceptions are usually things that are very popular and have gone out of print/publication (like, for example, trying to find a copy of Final Fantasy 7 means you will probably be paying more than the original price of the game when it was released, because Square stopped selling it, and there are fewer licensed copies in the market than people who want to buy it, but most things aren't collectors items).
Wrong. True, a lot of people use it to steal. That's unfortunate. But there *are* legitimate uses of P2P technologies. I've used BitTorrent to download perfectly legal ISO's of Linux distros (Ubuntu provides links to the torrent right on the Ubuntu website, though you do have to hunt a little bit to find them). Same with OpenOffice.org. IIRC, Fedora also provides a torrent of the Fedora ISOs.
There was an HD 'tv' show, a couple years ago, called MariposaHD. The producers of the show distribute it exclusively by BitTorrent (it's still available if you care to check it out - it's mostly eye candy - some guys going to different South/Central American countries and taking HD footage of scenery and chicks - lots of chicks lol). The reason I mention it, is that I think there is real potential, in the future, for using P2P technologies to legally distribute HD content. I'd like to see more online video services perhaps adopt more P2P technologies - there's no reason a for-profit company couldn't potentially use P2P to increase their market reach and profitability.
Blizzard uses BitTorrent to push out updates for World of Warcraft.
There is a LOT of potential for P2P data distribution to be used both legally and productively. Unfortunately, so many people have the mindset you do, that they fail to realize the potential of P2P. It can dramatically reduce an online publishers costs in terms of how much bandwidth they have to buy in order to provide content to huge numbers of customers. It scales well with demand (the more people downloading in a P2P network, particularly with BitTorrent, but other protocols as well, the more other peers there are to download from).
I think this gets into where people abuse headers. I NEVER put code into header files (unless it's maybe a small macro which will get in-lined by the compiler for performance reasons). Headers get things like function and class definitions - which aren't code, they're just information for the compiler to use at compile time. Also, symbolic constants (e.g. #define RED 0xFF0000).
I've not done much with Templates (I've not done much C++ coding in the past few years since I took some classes on it in college), maybe you'd put a template into a header, but again, that's something for the compiler to use at compile time, not code, IIRC?
What else would you be putting in the header? How does that duplicate code? By writing a header file once and including it in other files, aren't you *reducing* duplication?
Uhh, can you clue a programming newbie in. . . what's wrong with include files? I'm sure they can be abused, like any other feature, but aren't there good reasons C and C++ have been using include files for 20 or 30 years?
"I haven't seen anything in cloud computing that can handle main frame and midrange apps, Sun apps. .."
Wait, wasn't Sun one of the earliest proponents of the concepts behind cloud computing, but about 5 years ago, Sun was trying to get what they were calling 'utility computing' going, which was sort of a pre-cursor to the idea of cloud computing, wasn't it? Granted, they later 'canned' the Utility Computing services offering, but even now, they have a "Cloud Computing" page on the Sun Website (although, now that they are being bought by Oracle, it'll be interesting to see if they still go down that road, but it wouldn't surprise me terribly if that was something that the Oracle management might get behind).
Not only for privacy issues, but for other reasons, I think this idea kind of stinks. For many private companies, handing over their operations might offer a suitable risk/rewards ratio, but why should the day to day operations of a government be so completely in the hands of a private company?
It seems to me you are just *asking* for trouble if government, at any level, doesn't own and operate their own servers. I mean, all sorts of things could go wrong. What do you do if your State government is shut down because the FBI raids the datacenter of the company you are 'cloud-sourcing' too, because one of the *other* customers of that company has unpaid telco bills or is hosting torrents of MPAA movies or RIAA music or kiddie porn, or terrorist websites, or who-knows-what? Or the company just goes belly-up over night and suddenly shuts down operations with no announcement ahead of time? Or the company gets deep in debt, a la Chrysler and GM, and since the services it provides the state are so important, the state is 'forced' to bail them out?
There's also a greater than zero risk that the contract for this 'cloud-sourced' data hosting for the state will go not to the best provider of services, but to the most politically well-connected company (e.g. the company with the Governor or State CTO's son/daughter/sister/etc on its board of directors, and/or made the most campaign contributions, etc).
"Yes, the thief could remove the BIOS battery, but he would have to tear the case open. If he knew how to open a laptop without breaking it, he has more skill than I would associate with a petty thief."
Did it ever occur to you that the thief might be part of a larger crime organization, which organization might have a few people with pretty advanced technical skills? Or, even if they aren't, it's entirely possible/probable that after the thief fences the stolen computer, it will end up in the hands of someone both unscrupulous, and technically saavy?
Well, there is are a couple arguments for encrypting the whole drive. . .
1) Are you 100% certain that every program you use is allowing you to store data in the folder of your choosing (the TC 'drive') instead of shoving data either in program files (any app dev who puts data in Program Files needs to be taken out, have their geek card torn up, thrown on the ground, spit on, stomped on, then the dev gets beat up till they bleed, damn dumbasses, but unfortunately, it happens all the time, even with programs from very large IT vendors who should know better), or somewhere like %userprofile%\Application Data\AppName (that, at least, is not an actively *bad* place to put it, but doesn't always work well with encryption)? Or under a Unix-like environment, even if your home directories are encrypted, data might be getting saved to other folders like/usr/local,/var,/opt, etc.
2) What about the temp files directory? The page file? Interesting stuff might get stored in the temp files directory, and copies of all the encrypted data will likely be loaded into memory, and copied into the page file, at some point.
The only way to really be sure your data actually is encrypted, is to encrypt the whole drive.
If these animals are so economically valuable, why aren't we 'farming' them? I mean, instead of killing of the last 24 in the park, it seems like you should get much larger land, and raise the tigers, so you have several hundred of them, and you can fund the preservation of the tigers/elephants/whatever by selling off the body parts of a few per year.
It's like this - chickens, cattle and pigs are at very little risk of going extinct, *because* of their economic value. Why don't we apply the same principle to these endagered species to make them *not* endangered anymore? If some Chinese Billionaire wants to pay the equivalent of $1 Million USD to have a Bengal tiger rug, then shouldn't we be exploiting that by selling off the coat of one tiger and using the million bucks to fund raising more tigers?
It seems to me that *carefully managed*, very limited, legitimate, legal sale of such animal products can ensure the survival of those species, but by taking a stance of trying to completely outlaw all traffic in those products, we actually put those animals at *greater* risk, because farmers/ranchers do a much better job of managing their 'herds' than poachers do.
No farmer is going to kill off so much of his livestock that he doesn't have enough left for successful breeding, but poachers just kill whatever they can and take it.
I don't disagree with these points. All I met by my comment that engineers create jobs is that, while many products/inventions aren't successful, many successful inventions go on to have large companies with lots of employees. Steve Wozniak - guy created the Apple Computer in a garage, right? And that product led to lots of jobs for business people, laborers, and other engineers all through Apple's history. Yes, everyone is important in the success of a company, but often times the designs created by a relatively small number of engineers leads to lots more jobs. I mean, at Detroit's peak, what was the ratio of engineers to other employees at GM, Chrysler, and Ford? How many engineers did it take to design the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges vs how many construction workers, foremen, and managers? The Hoover Damn? Skyscrapers? Jet airplanes? Intel, HP, IBM, etc? (I imagine, there may be a slightly greater ratio of engineers to workers at computer companies than at other types of manufacturing, but still it's probably still quite a few more non-engineers than engineers).
B.S. Evolution doesn't happen on timescales of 20 years (I'm only 31). Kids aren't any smarter, dumber, or less or more inquisitive, except to the extent that no one has lit their imaginations on fire yet. But, it sounds like this teacher at least wants to *try*. More power to him, and I hope he finds something which fits his classroom needs.
Truly smart, creative engineers and scientists don't need to find jobs - they *create* jobs (often, not only jobs for themselves but good paying jobs for many other people). So, I'm not too worried about America's future, as long as we actually *try* to educate and excite kids about science and engineering.
When I was middle-school age, I had a *great time* with these kits sold by Radio Shack. They were basically a bunch of cheap electronic components fixed on some sort of board, with connections, and a bunch of wires you could use to connect the components together into different circuits. It even came with a book with like 40 or 100 (I don't remember the number, really) different circuits 'plans' for simple types of things you could do with the kit and discussions about how the circuits worked.
They cost like $10 or $20 back then (probably be $30 or $40 now, not sure though).
I would *highly* recommend looking into something like this. They are maybe a bit more expensive than you discussed, but they are re-usable and allow you to create lots of different things. Heck, you could maybe even figure out how to use multiples of the kits and maybe a few additional components to create something a bit more impressive to demonstrate to the class how larger electronics systems are created by configuring each kit into a specific type of circuit, then joining the kits together (that is, each kit becomes one 'components' of a larger system, maybe).
"Is there a way to configure the phone to direct all calls through a wireless router, when the router is in range?"
Yes, it's called Unlimited HotSpot Calling from T-Mobile. (Note: You may want to double check this with T-Mo, but I believe the phones and plan will work with almost any WiFi AP, not just a T-Mobile HotSpot, though that marketing page doesn't make that very clear).
Plus, with UHC (Also some times called UMA - Unlicensed Mobile Access, or GAN - Generic Access Network), you can seemlessly transition to the Cell network without having to hang up and call back.
The only problem with that package is that the unlimited calling is $10/mo, but they also require you to have a monthly plan which costs at least $40/mo, so you are looking at a minimum of $50/mo. T-Mo actually have a pre-paid program where for $100 you get 1000 minutes (which don't expire for a year), so unless you talk more than 500 minutes/mo it's not really the best deal out there. Also, as others have noted, Boost/Sprint have an unlimited $50/mo package.
Even without unlimited, the truth is that $50/mo buys a LOT of minutes. T-Mo also offers a 1000 minutes/mo plan plus unlimited nights/weekends for $40.
Interestingly, the mobile operators have apparently recently changed their pricing tiers - I could swear a year or two ago they all had $50/mo plans, but now they all have a $40/mo plan and a $60/mo plan but no $50/mo plan (T-Mo technically has a $50/mo plan, but it's the same as the $40/mo plan, plus unlimited T-Mo 2 T-Mo calling which is rather limited in it's usefulness, unless you happen to know a lot of people using T-Mobile).
"So all they have to do now is figure out how to create a gun with a light source powerful enough to move all of the nano particles stored in a bathtub without vaporizing the target, and HL2 will be a reality."
"...as shaping that traffic would likely be very visible to 'Joe Consumer' in the form of stuttering, freezes, etc of their movie stream."
Here's a solution. . . *larger buffers*. Buffering got a bad wrap a few years ago, when most Internet connections were much slower, and computers had fairly limited hard drive and memory space. Here's an idea though - if you *combine* high speed internet with reasonably large memory and disk buffers, you can effectively eliminate stuttering while still traffic shaping.
Video 'streaming' should be approached like a Tivo/DVR. . .
If you have good buffers, does it matter if the video stream is delayed 1/2 a second or even a minute now and then, if you've got several minutes of video already buffered and waiting to be played?
Heck, for HD content, I'd be willing to wait 5 or 10 minutes while it pre-buffers the first 10 or 20 minutes of video.
Like a Tivo/DVR, keep the video on the computer/set-top box, locally, after it's been received, so that when users rewind, they don't have to be *re-sent* the same video content. If they pause (or rewind to already buffered content), keep streaming into the buffer, so that when they un-pause, you have plenty of conent in the buffer for smooth playback. Then, eventually delete the content off disk once the user hasn't watched it for several days.
"The code is entirely open source and Michael Nutt told us that they are hoping for people to contribute to it by creating additional decoders supported by other browsers."
Ok, ok, I do understand that a browser plugin adds some convenience, but how about a stand-alone version (native executable, or maybe something like a Java, Python, Perl, or Lisp program [which would be cross-platform]), which I can just run either as a GUI, or even a command line. . .
png2torrent in.png out.torrent
(heck, the original torrent filename might be stored in the png, so you might only need to specify the input file, and optionally an output path/filename if you want to change the name or extract to a different directory).
Maybe a drag-and-drop icon on the desktop - drag the png to the icon, and it automatically creates the torrent on the desktop.
"What I find disheartening is the fact that businesses are no longer able to see education and training of employees as a worthwhile investment. . . they have no qualms with firing and laying off people at-will"
Why spend money to train someone you're going to lay-off in 6 months to a year from now, when you can just go out to the job market and hire someone who is already experienced, have them be productive from almost day 1, then when the (ex)CEO deploys the golden parachute and retires to the Bahamas, and you need to lay people off, they are *already done with the code* whereas the new guy you were training is just getting started?
I've often wondered something, which that article/paper touches on - how strong does a password really need to be if it's on a server which de-activates the account for X minutes if you input the wrong password like 5 or 10 times?
I mean, even a somewhat weak password is still strong enough that it'll (in almost all cases) take more than 5 or 10 tries to guess the password.
I mean, if you're talking about the encryption password for a file or other 'offline' password where no server is involved (zip with AES-256 crypto, truecrypt, etc), that's a different story, because if a would be attacker gains access to the file, they can try as many times as they like, extremely rapidly (hundreds? thousands? of tries per second).
The only place where I could see weak passwords being a problem for an online system is if, somehow, the attackers get a hold of a copy of the password database (assuming the passwords in the database are hashed/encrypted), at which point they can start high-speed brute forcing against the database, till they find the correct password, then use it against the 'live' server.
Uhh, what about using the keyboard for some of the other stuff? So, PS2-style controller + keyboard? Seems like that could maybe work? Or not. I'll just have to experiment and see what I can come up with.
While it's true that Quake 3 did that (release the game engine under GPL), I don't think the game engine for MW4 is being released under the GPL. I followed the links in the article, but I see nothing which indicates a source code release for the MW4 game engine. It just appears to me that the game is being release 'free' (as in lunch) as a promotional way of stirring up interest in the new MW game. Which is UNLIKE Quake 3, but very much like the release of Tribes and Tribes 2 for free before the release of the third Tribes game, a few years ago.
I mean, I could be wrong, but the only place I see anything comparing this release to Quake 3 is in the/. summary, and we all know what an absolutely *stellar* record/. submissions have of being factually correct in all details.
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Having used Vista for awhile, there's only 1 improvement I can actually think of: the sound mixer/volume control thing in Vista will let you mute or control volumes of individual applications.
Not the most earth-shaking thing in the world (most apps have a mechanism built in to do volume control or mute the sound, but not all, so it is nice; and some apps bury sound control in layers of menu that make it a pain to quickly mute them).
Also, I see no reason why that couldn't have been done in XP, other than MS wanted to have something to tout as an improvement in Vista.
A reasonable interpretation of unlimited, in the context of a connection which has an advertised bandwidth limit (i.e. 10mbps down/2mbps up) is that you are limited to the amount of available bandwidth advertised. If I pay for 2mbps up, I'm not really paying for 'unlimited', but I do expect to be able to upload 2mbps without being told I'm consuming 'too much' bandwidth.
Such customers aren't using 'unlimited', they are using the bandwidth that was advertised and which they payed for. When ISPs bring up arguments like "using 100x more bandwidth than other customers" it's just to try to deflect attention away from the fact that they are using exactly what was advertised and which they payed for, and there's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't MATTER that it's 100x more. Other people just *under-utilize* (should that be hyphenated? Not sure) their connections.
Generally, I agree with you. Government should not unduly interfere with business relationships. Businesses should be, mostly, free to decide who they do business with.
But, when you talk about utilities that have government granted monopolies on running cable through rights-of-way to all the buildings in a geographic area, and no one else is permitted to compete by running their own cables, then its a different story. Such a business should be subject to government regulation, including reasonable regulations that they must offer service to anyone willing to pay, and to cut off service, there should either be lack of payment for an extended period (e.g. don't cut someone off for being just 2 or 3 days late on payment), or because of a *court order* (that is, as a result of perhaps a copyright holder suing someone for copyright violation, the court finding the defendant guilty, and the court issuing an order to terminate their Internet connection; or, in a more extreme case, maybe a judge has seen sufficient evidence to show that an internet connection is likely being used for something like kiddie porn, terrorism, or the operations of some other type of criminal organization, and so issues an emergency order before the trial).
Isn't that why you pay for bandwidth? If a company advertises I can buy 5 liters of Coke a week for $2, and I drink five liters of Coke a week, and pay my $2, who are they to complain that I'm drinking more than my fair share of Coke? If they cannot afford to actually provide me 5 liters/week for $2, then they should change their advertising and product offering to something more reasonable.
"For the millionth time, file sharing is stealing. Shouting the same lie from your noise hole over and over again will never make it true."
There, I fixed it for you.
"Content creators are not owed a living."
Just like factory workers, cops, teachers, doctors, engineers, etc aren't owed a living, right?
"The quality of the vast majority of content is low, and the price is too high."
If it's so low, why are you downloading it? If it's so low, surely you can live without it? If I don't like the quality of goods at a particular store, that doesn't give me the right to steal there stuff. I just won't shop there. There's other stores, with better goods at more reasonable prices. Is it ok to steal luxury cars and goods because the prices are too high?
If you think the price is too high, just move on. Don't buy their music/movie, but don't steal it either. That's called *negotiation*. I know people think that in modern society, the concept of negotiating price is dead. It's not completely - it just works different. You might not *individually* negotatiate prices on a customer by customer basis. But, as a business, if too few people are buying your product/service, you lower the price and/or increase the quality until people are buying in sufficient volume.
"They will lose, if only because the two sides of this debate are divided by age, with the young respecting the freedom of information flow, and the old desperate to hang onto the economic privileges they lose."
Its more like the young have no patience - they want everything *NOW*, and if they can't afford it, they'll just take it; if you wait, generally the prices of anything goes down. Particularly if the quality is low - how many DVDs are in bargain bins for $3-5 in stores all over the country, because they will only sell at that price? The market works, prices on both good and bad things generally comes down over time.
Yes, there are exceptions occasionally, but those exceptions are usually things that are very popular and have gone out of print/publication (like, for example, trying to find a copy of Final Fantasy 7 means you will probably be paying more than the original price of the game when it was released, because Square stopped selling it, and there are fewer licensed copies in the market than people who want to buy it, but most things aren't collectors items).
"IP2P is used exclusively to STEAL"
Wrong. True, a lot of people use it to steal. That's unfortunate. But there *are* legitimate uses of P2P technologies. I've used BitTorrent to download perfectly legal ISO's of Linux distros (Ubuntu provides links to the torrent right on the Ubuntu website, though you do have to hunt a little bit to find them). Same with OpenOffice.org. IIRC, Fedora also provides a torrent of the Fedora ISOs.
There was an HD 'tv' show, a couple years ago, called MariposaHD. The producers of the show distribute it exclusively by BitTorrent (it's still available if you care to check it out - it's mostly eye candy - some guys going to different South/Central American countries and taking HD footage of scenery and chicks - lots of chicks lol). The reason I mention it, is that I think there is real potential, in the future, for using P2P technologies to legally distribute HD content. I'd like to see more online video services perhaps adopt more P2P technologies - there's no reason a for-profit company couldn't potentially use P2P to increase their market reach and profitability.
Blizzard uses BitTorrent to push out updates for World of Warcraft.
There is a LOT of potential for P2P data distribution to be used both legally and productively. Unfortunately, so many people have the mindset you do, that they fail to realize the potential of P2P. It can dramatically reduce an online publishers costs in terms of how much bandwidth they have to buy in order to provide content to huge numbers of customers. It scales well with demand (the more people downloading in a P2P network, particularly with BitTorrent, but other protocols as well, the more other peers there are to download from).
I think this gets into where people abuse headers. I NEVER put code into header files (unless it's maybe a small macro which will get in-lined by the compiler for performance reasons). Headers get things like function and class definitions - which aren't code, they're just information for the compiler to use at compile time. Also, symbolic constants (e.g. #define RED 0xFF0000).
I've not done much with Templates (I've not done much C++ coding in the past few years since I took some classes on it in college), maybe you'd put a template into a header, but again, that's something for the compiler to use at compile time, not code, IIRC?
What else would you be putting in the header? How does that duplicate code? By writing a header file once and including it in other files, aren't you *reducing* duplication?
Uhh, can you clue a programming newbie in. . . what's wrong with include files? I'm sure they can be abused, like any other feature, but aren't there good reasons C and C++ have been using include files for 20 or 30 years?
"I haven't seen anything in cloud computing that can handle main frame and midrange apps, Sun apps. . ."
Wait, wasn't Sun one of the earliest proponents of the concepts behind cloud computing, but about 5 years ago, Sun was trying to get what they were calling 'utility computing' going, which was sort of a pre-cursor to the idea of cloud computing, wasn't it? Granted, they later 'canned' the Utility Computing services offering, but even now, they have a "Cloud Computing" page on the Sun Website (although, now that they are being bought by Oracle, it'll be interesting to see if they still go down that road, but it wouldn't surprise me terribly if that was something that the Oracle management might get behind).
Not only for privacy issues, but for other reasons, I think this idea kind of stinks. For many private companies, handing over their operations might offer a suitable risk/rewards ratio, but why should the day to day operations of a government be so completely in the hands of a private company?
It seems to me you are just *asking* for trouble if government, at any level, doesn't own and operate their own servers. I mean, all sorts of things could go wrong. What do you do if your State government is shut down because the FBI raids the datacenter of the company you are 'cloud-sourcing' too, because one of the *other* customers of that company has unpaid telco bills or is hosting torrents of MPAA movies or RIAA music or kiddie porn, or terrorist websites, or who-knows-what? Or the company just goes belly-up over night and suddenly shuts down operations with no announcement ahead of time? Or the company gets deep in debt, a la Chrysler and GM, and since the services it provides the state are so important, the state is 'forced' to bail them out?
There's also a greater than zero risk that the contract for this 'cloud-sourced' data hosting for the state will go not to the best provider of services, but to the most politically well-connected company (e.g. the company with the Governor or State CTO's son/daughter/sister/etc on its board of directors, and/or made the most campaign contributions, etc).
"Yes, the thief could remove the BIOS battery, but he would have to tear the case open. If he knew how to open a laptop without breaking it, he has more skill than I would associate with a petty thief."
Did it ever occur to you that the thief might be part of a larger crime organization, which organization might have a few people with pretty advanced technical skills? Or, even if they aren't, it's entirely possible/probable that after the thief fences the stolen computer, it will end up in the hands of someone both unscrupulous, and technically saavy?
Well, there is are a couple arguments for encrypting the whole drive. . .
1) Are you 100% certain that every program you use is allowing you to store data in the folder of your choosing (the TC 'drive') instead of shoving data either in program files (any app dev who puts data in Program Files needs to be taken out, have their geek card torn up, thrown on the ground, spit on, stomped on, then the dev gets beat up till they bleed, damn dumbasses, but unfortunately, it happens all the time, even with programs from very large IT vendors who should know better), or somewhere like %userprofile%\Application Data\AppName (that, at least, is not an actively *bad* place to put it, but doesn't always work well with encryption)? Or under a Unix-like environment, even if your home directories are encrypted, data might be getting saved to other folders like /usr/local, /var, /opt, etc.
2) What about the temp files directory? The page file? Interesting stuff might get stored in the temp files directory, and copies of all the encrypted data will likely be loaded into memory, and copied into the page file, at some point.
The only way to really be sure your data actually is encrypted, is to encrypt the whole drive.
If these animals are so economically valuable, why aren't we 'farming' them? I mean, instead of killing of the last 24 in the park, it seems like you should get much larger land, and raise the tigers, so you have several hundred of them, and you can fund the preservation of the tigers/elephants/whatever by selling off the body parts of a few per year.
It's like this - chickens, cattle and pigs are at very little risk of going extinct, *because* of their economic value. Why don't we apply the same principle to these endagered species to make them *not* endangered anymore? If some Chinese Billionaire wants to pay the equivalent of $1 Million USD to have a Bengal tiger rug, then shouldn't we be exploiting that by selling off the coat of one tiger and using the million bucks to fund raising more tigers?
It seems to me that *carefully managed*, very limited, legitimate, legal sale of such animal products can ensure the survival of those species, but by taking a stance of trying to completely outlaw all traffic in those products, we actually put those animals at *greater* risk, because farmers/ranchers do a much better job of managing their 'herds' than poachers do.
No farmer is going to kill off so much of his livestock that he doesn't have enough left for successful breeding, but poachers just kill whatever they can and take it.
I don't disagree with these points. All I met by my comment that engineers create jobs is that, while many products/inventions aren't successful, many successful inventions go on to have large companies with lots of employees. Steve Wozniak - guy created the Apple Computer in a garage, right? And that product led to lots of jobs for business people, laborers, and other engineers all through Apple's history. Yes, everyone is important in the success of a company, but often times the designs created by a relatively small number of engineers leads to lots more jobs. I mean, at Detroit's peak, what was the ratio of engineers to other employees at GM, Chrysler, and Ford? How many engineers did it take to design the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges vs how many construction workers, foremen, and managers? The Hoover Damn? Skyscrapers? Jet airplanes? Intel, HP, IBM, etc? (I imagine, there may be a slightly greater ratio of engineers to workers at computer companies than at other types of manufacturing, but still it's probably still quite a few more non-engineers than engineers).
B.S. Evolution doesn't happen on timescales of 20 years (I'm only 31). Kids aren't any smarter, dumber, or less or more inquisitive, except to the extent that no one has lit their imaginations on fire yet. But, it sounds like this teacher at least wants to *try*. More power to him, and I hope he finds something which fits his classroom needs.
Truly smart, creative engineers and scientists don't need to find jobs - they *create* jobs (often, not only jobs for themselves but good paying jobs for many other people). So, I'm not too worried about America's future, as long as we actually *try* to educate and excite kids about science and engineering.
When I was middle-school age, I had a *great time* with these kits sold by Radio Shack. They were basically a bunch of cheap electronic components fixed on some sort of board, with connections, and a bunch of wires you could use to connect the components together into different circuits. It even came with a book with like 40 or 100 (I don't remember the number, really) different circuits 'plans' for simple types of things you could do with the kit and discussions about how the circuits worked.
They cost like $10 or $20 back then (probably be $30 or $40 now, not sure though).
I would *highly* recommend looking into something like this. They are maybe a bit more expensive than you discussed, but they are re-usable and allow you to create lots of different things. Heck, you could maybe even figure out how to use multiples of the kits and maybe a few additional components to create something a bit more impressive to demonstrate to the class how larger electronics systems are created by configuring each kit into a specific type of circuit, then joining the kits together (that is, each kit becomes one 'components' of a larger system, maybe).
"Is there a way to configure the phone to direct all calls through a wireless router, when the router is in range?"
Yes, it's called Unlimited HotSpot Calling from T-Mobile. (Note: You may want to double check this with T-Mo, but I believe the phones and plan will work with almost any WiFi AP, not just a T-Mobile HotSpot, though that marketing page doesn't make that very clear).
Plus, with UHC (Also some times called UMA - Unlicensed Mobile Access, or GAN - Generic Access Network), you can seemlessly transition to the Cell network without having to hang up and call back.
The only problem with that package is that the unlimited calling is $10/mo, but they also require you to have a monthly plan which costs at least $40/mo, so you are looking at a minimum of $50/mo. T-Mo actually have a pre-paid program where for $100 you get 1000 minutes (which don't expire for a year), so unless you talk more than 500 minutes/mo it's not really the best deal out there. Also, as others have noted, Boost/Sprint have an unlimited $50/mo package.
Even without unlimited, the truth is that $50/mo buys a LOT of minutes. T-Mo also offers a 1000 minutes/mo plan plus unlimited nights/weekends for $40.
Interestingly, the mobile operators have apparently recently changed their pricing tiers - I could swear a year or two ago they all had $50/mo plans, but now they all have a $40/mo plan and a $60/mo plan but no $50/mo plan (T-Mo technically has a $50/mo plan, but it's the same as the $40/mo plan, plus unlimited T-Mo 2 T-Mo calling which is rather limited in it's usefulness, unless you happen to know a lot of people using T-Mobile).
"So all they have to do now is figure out how to create a gun with a light source powerful enough to move all of the nano particles stored in a bathtub without vaporizing the target, and HL2 will be a reality."
There, fixed it for you.
"...as shaping that traffic would likely be very visible to 'Joe Consumer' in the form of stuttering, freezes, etc of their movie stream."
Here's a solution. . . *larger buffers*. Buffering got a bad wrap a few years ago, when most Internet connections were much slower, and computers had fairly limited hard drive and memory space. Here's an idea though - if you *combine* high speed internet with reasonably large memory and disk buffers, you can effectively eliminate stuttering while still traffic shaping.
Video 'streaming' should be approached like a Tivo/DVR. . .
If you have good buffers, does it matter if the video stream is delayed 1/2 a second or even a minute now and then, if you've got several minutes of video already buffered and waiting to be played?
Heck, for HD content, I'd be willing to wait 5 or 10 minutes while it pre-buffers the first 10 or 20 minutes of video.
Like a Tivo/DVR, keep the video on the computer/set-top box, locally, after it's been received, so that when users rewind, they don't have to be *re-sent* the same video content. If they pause (or rewind to already buffered content), keep streaming into the buffer, so that when they un-pause, you have plenty of conent in the buffer for smooth playback. Then, eventually delete the content off disk once the user hasn't watched it for several days.
"The code is entirely open source and Michael Nutt told us that they are hoping for people to contribute to it by creating additional decoders supported by other browsers."
Ok, ok, I do understand that a browser plugin adds some convenience, but how about a stand-alone version (native executable, or maybe something like a Java, Python, Perl, or Lisp program [which would be cross-platform]), which I can just run either as a GUI, or even a command line. . .
png2torrent in.png out.torrent
(heck, the original torrent filename might be stored in the png, so you might only need to specify the input file, and optionally an output path/filename if you want to change the name or extract to a different directory).
Maybe a drag-and-drop icon on the desktop - drag the png to the icon, and it automatically creates the torrent on the desktop.
. . . or automatically convert the image to a .jpg.
"What I find disheartening is the fact that businesses are no longer able to see education and training of employees as a worthwhile investment. . . they have no qualms with firing and laying off people at-will"
Why spend money to train someone you're going to lay-off in 6 months to a year from now, when you can just go out to the job market and hire someone who is already experienced, have them be productive from almost day 1, then when the (ex)CEO deploys the golden parachute and retires to the Bahamas, and you need to lay people off, they are *already done with the code* whereas the new guy you were training is just getting started?
I've often wondered something, which that article/paper touches on - how strong does a password really need to be if it's on a server which de-activates the account for X minutes if you input the wrong password like 5 or 10 times?
I mean, even a somewhat weak password is still strong enough that it'll (in almost all cases) take more than 5 or 10 tries to guess the password.
I mean, if you're talking about the encryption password for a file or other 'offline' password where no server is involved (zip with AES-256 crypto, truecrypt, etc), that's a different story, because if a would be attacker gains access to the file, they can try as many times as they like, extremely rapidly (hundreds? thousands? of tries per second).
The only place where I could see weak passwords being a problem for an online system is if, somehow, the attackers get a hold of a copy of the password database (assuming the passwords in the database are hashed/encrypted), at which point they can start high-speed brute forcing against the database, till they find the correct password, then use it against the 'live' server.
Uhh, what about using the keyboard for some of the other stuff? So, PS2-style controller + keyboard? Seems like that could maybe work? Or not. I'll just have to experiment and see what I can come up with.
While it's true that Quake 3 did that (release the game engine under GPL), I don't think the game engine for MW4 is being released under the GPL. I followed the links in the article, but I see nothing which indicates a source code release for the MW4 game engine. It just appears to me that the game is being release 'free' (as in lunch) as a promotional way of stirring up interest in the new MW game. Which is UNLIKE Quake 3, but very much like the release of Tribes and Tribes 2 for free before the release of the third Tribes game, a few years ago.
I mean, I could be wrong, but the only place I see anything comparing this release to Quake 3 is in the /. summary, and we all know what an absolutely *stellar* record /. submissions have of being factually correct in all details.