While I don't disagree with your direction, I think your four points are debatable.
1. The concept of the "suicide bomber" makes this less than 100%, however having the practice in place would certainly reduce incidents resulting from the inverse.
2. Firearms can be achieved with plastics now which would not come up in a metal detector - hence the new full body scanners. The alternative you suggest could be just as effective, and more closely resembles the situation with other forms of transport - nothing preventing anyone from carrying on a bus, train, boat, etc.
3. This already happens, where are you going with it?
4. Unrealistic, I think, as the human factor will not be eliminated. Invariably, something goes wrong with software and/or technology, and when it does, an intelligent, warm-blooded person needs to be there to override and save the day. As long as that override methodology exists, the human factor opens opportunity for exploitation. Your qualifier, "If enough improvements" is heavily loaded - we as a people cannot seem to create ANY secure/reliable system - traffic lights, ATM's, voting machines, personal computers, from the complex to the mundane - it will be a century (if ever) before we evolve quality, and trust to the degree that people are willing to hand their lives over to it completely.
One of those moving walk ways that moves only in the direction of the exit and completely fills the width of the exit corridor. When someone is detected trying to walk the opposite direction, it can speed up a little and wake up the guard who is posted - because there is always already a guard posted. This would be less obstructive than a turnstile door/gate which is a pain to pass luggage, wheelchairs, children's strollers, etc. through.
The first thing that struck me is that of all the occupational fields out there, engineers of varying areas of focus all have this in common: identifying problems and wanting to fix them. Apply that theme to someone who is pissed off about [insert arbitrary world affair here] and you have a potentially dangerously skilled person directing their energy into a special interest out of frustration, a need to be needed, a sense of purpose, etc... these are ungrounded people with no moral fabric and/or a faulty logic center. *shrug*
B) Are you working too many hours every day (>10)?
C) Do you get requests that your team doesn't have the expertise for?
If the answer to any of the above is YES, then you probably need additional help. A manager needs to be able to recognize when things are under control and staff accordingly.
I think the answer is simple: err on the side of caution, let the judge/jury sort it out later to avoid an unnecessary risk. Aside from the victim, who's neck do you think would be on the line if she did show up to class on Monday and sliced someone's throat open? Some would pay, because blame is always assigned, and it wouldn't be just the perpetrator, but those who had prior knowledge and took no action.
It's a typical damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. Today they are publicly damned because they did. I guarantee you that had they taken no action and something came of it, they would have been damned if they did not. Hence, err on the side of caution.
What kind of mental case do you have to be anyway to think and express murdering a fellow human? Honestly the number of people in this discussion thread who think that is a perfectly normal and natural state is nauseating. It doesn't matter that "everyone's doing it" if you have a notion of holding yourself to a higher standard. Man, I never thought I would hear myself turn into a champion of conservative values but the cynical, apathetic, indifference to amoral behavioral patterns is really disconcerting. "Ha-ha, welcome to slashdot. +5 Funny" Why do so many people think they're immune to reality until it happens to them?
Well at the risk of becoming unpopular among the Slashdot freedom zealots...
<rant>
I'm glad the school took action. 29 years old is not "almost a teenager". She is legally accountable for her actions as an adult, she can drink and vote for the U.S. president, she can drive a two-ton SUV on neighborhood streets at 120MPH at 2AM. You can't situationally decide whether or not she is an adult - it's not a shade of gray coming out of a fuzzy logic processor. She IS or is not an adult.
Don't allow her the excuse that she's a victim of her life and circumstances and that she knows not what she does. People need to know that when they do or say something stupid and they are of age, they are accountable for it. You can't joke about fire in the movie theater, bombs at the airport, assassination of political figures - there are other things you can't joke about publicly either - that's where "Dear Diary" comes in.
If there's one thing that has become completely out of hand in this country, it's the sense of self entitlement. Letting one little social disgrace slide into the next without anyone being held accountable is exactly what has led it to be ok for all the latest "kids movies" to contain completely inappropriate sexual innuendos. Or for previously completely intolerable profanity on television to pass unedited. Or for Jewish groups to be prohibited from displaying a public Menorah yet the gay pride parade is allowed to march through in full colors. This "whatever, nothing matters, nothing is sacred" attitude is woeful contributor to an expanding lack of moral direction.
Remember when, not so long ago, children used to address their parents as "sir" and "ma'am"? Seemingly gone are those days, but why? People fall into a pattern of self-indulgence, intolerance, disrespect for others, and overall denial of responsibility because it's easier than the opposite. Convenience. Credit. Fun. Easier. Faster. Bigger. More. These things rule now, yet they are tearing us apart at the seams. The people are lost...
The United States has become the most ethically challenged, self-contradictory state of disarray in the history of history. I, for one, welcome others to take a stand for what they believe in. Treating everyone else like a jerk just because you're unhappy with your own existence is not aceptable, especially in the form of a perceived threat, and should not be allowed to be the standing symbol of "Freedom".
</rant>
As any serious California surfer will tell you, a great white in the water where you are at is bad news - "leave them alone" is no consolation to people who are out in the water and get bitten, and sometimes killed. They cannot be safely dismissed out of hand. They are wild, aggressive hunters that do not think. We all know that the whites come in to feed during the winter - that has always been the case. Shark attack incident logs alone make that clear.
...As I've understood, BIOS isn't really that complicated nor does it do any heavy calculations. It basically just brings hardware up and tests it, which takes most of the time (not that the 5-6 seconds is so long wait anyway)...
In my time as a PC BIOS developer I can attest that indeed there are no heavy calculations, however there are some heavy hardware polling loops. It's a decision of the BIOS vendor whether to adhere to strict specification compliance or to optimize based on observation. Strict compliance means allowing up to 90 seconds for every ATA device to respond to identity operations - if there is no ATA drive present, you MUST wait the full 90 seconds to guarantee that no ATA-compliant drive is going to surprise you with a latent response. It's in the ATA spec.
But observations repeatedly show that no modern drive worth its weight in salt takes anywhere near that long to respond - normally if you don't get a response in a few milliseconds, then the deal's off. There are any number of specifications like this that a BIOS vendor may want to comply with for backward compatibility which will add to the polling cycles which we see as needless delays. Sometimes a BIOS vendor will want to allow for 2-3 seconds per device and poll them all in parallel so that the total polling period is only 2-3 seconds - it's a compromise between worst case scenario observations for what the vendor is prepared to support and what the spec calls for.
In this case, it seems, the new BIOS takes a no mercy approach. I can tell you from specific first hand experience that cutting the ATA polling cycle as they have to accomplish this will prevent certain older devices from working as boot disks with this BIOS. But clearly that is an acceptable situation for a system that is forward looking and not concerned with backward compatibility.
10 net has 16,777,216 addresses to be precise : it's a full class A network. I had the same thought. It's only "quite" small because people use the default settings that ship with their routers which are generally 192.168*
You set yourself up for disappointment any time you show up at a theater with expectations. Couple that with advertising that "you don't get it" in a public forum, and I'm not sure I see the point of your post. *shrug* I rather enjoyed the show.
Well I'll post this even though Slashdot is rife with hyper-critical, negative and cynical readers who would enjoy shredding something they are not open to because it can be helpful to someone who reads it with an open mind: How to be Happy, a free e-book (PDF).
Aside from absorbing that and a handful of other books on managing stress, anxiety and grounding oneself, the other two tricks I've adopted are:
* Stop reading/watching the "news"; as much as I share the concerns of most with respect to world affairs, I have found that following it too closely only makes me depressed about things I have no control over nor influence on.
* Stop watching T.V.; I actually canceled my cable and gave away my TV and game system to a local family for xmas. Not only did I have the satisfaction of giving, but I have more free time now to pursue things that actually do make me happy.
You may not be able to control your work environment, however you can control the other aspects of your life and how you choose to spend your time. Perhaps one day you will find that your life is so fulfilling outside of work that your tolerance and acceptance of imperfect circumstances at work improves to the point where it just doesn't matter to you any more.
Plenty of acorns on my property. They bug the crap out of me actually because they sprout easily and quickly turn into a root mass -> shrub -> tree in inconvenient places. I wish the squirrels and rats would get them ALL.
Back in the olden days applications used to perform some sort of benchmark on the hardware they were running on and simply advise you, self-degrade, or just plain refuse to run if your machine can't handle it. I find the software-only rendering option to be an interesting one, but as someone else pointed out, am unclear on how this is a major advancement over OpenGL. Then again, I won't touch Vista with a 10' pole, so I may never know.
I had a similar thought except that I acknowledge that nobody else is competent enough to solve their own problems and ultimately need someone to call. If you are not on staff, then the call would be going to an outside contractor/consultant. IT is a necessity whether on staff or contracted. So, what would the going contractor rates have cost the company for all the break-fix type work you've been doing, not to mention the preventative actions? I guarantee it would be a fortune that easily justifies your position.
I enjoyed the read particularly because I've done similar witch hunts myself in the past and I think it would be beneficial for others to follow their nose similarly. I'm less interested in the entertainment from tracking a legitimate business however and more so in exposure of crime rings related to fraud, ID/CC theft, domain hijacking, etc. Those ones can be pretty vast in scale and very difficult to track down. Some of them put up impressive fronts too such as legitimate "ICANN Accredited" domain registrar services, etc. - but make no mistake, they're rotten to the core. If more people actively pursued and exposed these types of organizations perhaps we'd all be a little better off...
A "grab bag" of gears doesn't make any commercial sense, not even for the hobbyist. If you want random junk parts, you may as well go to a junk yard and start dismantling vacuum cleaners and copy machines and such. I personally have a great supply of miscellaneous electromechanical parts like you describe specifically because I have dismantled junk equipment and scavenged reusable parts every time the opportunity has presented itself for 20 years.
Best thing I can think of would be some sort of robotics parts supplier who things they can provide generic gear boxes and power transfer kits, but I don't think you're going to be happy.
You scooped me. I was going to mention the same. Two hackers, $500K over 3 years is $83K/year. They could have made better money working for Google. Waste of time and prison sentence.
"The few times I looked into Mambo code it was horrible."
Same here - I've done several CMS applications as Mambo/Joomla components (extensions of sorts, for the uninitiated) over the years and finally became so fed up with the underlying code base, the restrictiveness, the little-to-no future-proofing by design that I wrote my own basic framework to link in my custom components and deleted Mambo/Joomla entirely - and never looked back. I only use one DB table from the original installation because I was too lazy to rename it: mos_users (stores user names and password md5's for logins). I wouldn't put much stock into this guy's evolutionary thinking...
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't disagree with your direction, I think your four points are debatable.
1. The concept of the "suicide bomber" makes this less than 100%, however having the practice in place would certainly reduce incidents resulting from the inverse.
2. Firearms can be achieved with plastics now which would not come up in a metal detector - hence the new full body scanners. The alternative you suggest could be just as effective, and more closely resembles the situation with other forms of transport - nothing preventing anyone from carrying on a bus, train, boat, etc.
3. This already happens, where are you going with it?
4. Unrealistic, I think, as the human factor will not be eliminated. Invariably, something goes wrong with software and/or technology, and when it does, an intelligent, warm-blooded person needs to be there to override and save the day. As long as that override methodology exists, the human factor opens opportunity for exploitation. Your qualifier, "If enough improvements" is heavily loaded - we as a people cannot seem to create ANY secure/reliable system - traffic lights, ATM's, voting machines, personal computers, from the complex to the mundane - it will be a century (if ever) before we evolve quality, and trust to the degree that people are willing to hand their lives over to it completely.
One of those moving walk ways that moves only in the direction of the exit and completely fills the width of the exit corridor. When someone is detected trying to walk the opposite direction, it can speed up a little and wake up the guard who is posted - because there is always already a guard posted. This would be less obstructive than a turnstile door/gate which is a pain to pass luggage, wheelchairs, children's strollers, etc. through.
The first thing that struck me is that of all the occupational fields out there, engineers of varying areas of focus all have this in common: identifying problems and wanting to fix them. Apply that theme to someone who is pissed off about [insert arbitrary world affair here] and you have a potentially dangerously skilled person directing their energy into a special interest out of frustration, a need to be needed, a sense of purpose, etc... these are ungrounded people with no moral fabric and/or a faulty logic center. *shrug*
... to me, the big questions are:
A) Is your backlog growing hopelessly longer?
B) Are you working too many hours every day (>10)?
C) Do you get requests that your team doesn't have the expertise for?
If the answer to any of the above is YES, then you probably need additional help. A manager needs to be able to recognize when things are under control and staff accordingly.
I think the answer is simple: err on the side of caution, let the judge/jury sort it out later to avoid an unnecessary risk. Aside from the victim, who's neck do you think would be on the line if she did show up to class on Monday and sliced someone's throat open? Some would pay, because blame is always assigned, and it wouldn't be just the perpetrator, but those who had prior knowledge and took no action.
It's a typical damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. Today they are publicly damned because they did. I guarantee you that had they taken no action and something came of it, they would have been damned if they did not. Hence, err on the side of caution.
What kind of mental case do you have to be anyway to think and express murdering a fellow human? Honestly the number of people in this discussion thread who think that is a perfectly normal and natural state is nauseating. It doesn't matter that "everyone's doing it" if you have a notion of holding yourself to a higher standard. Man, I never thought I would hear myself turn into a champion of conservative values but the cynical, apathetic, indifference to amoral behavioral patterns is really disconcerting. "Ha-ha, welcome to slashdot. +5 Funny" Why do so many people think they're immune to reality until it happens to them?
Well at the risk of becoming unpopular among the Slashdot freedom zealots...
<rant>
I'm glad the school took action. 29 years old is not "almost a teenager". She is legally accountable for her actions as an adult, she can drink and vote for the U.S. president, she can drive a two-ton SUV on neighborhood streets at 120MPH at 2AM. You can't situationally decide whether or not she is an adult - it's not a shade of gray coming out of a fuzzy logic processor. She IS or is not an adult.
Don't allow her the excuse that she's a victim of her life and circumstances and that she knows not what she does. People need to know that when they do or say something stupid and they are of age, they are accountable for it. You can't joke about fire in the movie theater, bombs at the airport, assassination of political figures - there are other things you can't joke about publicly either - that's where "Dear Diary" comes in.
If there's one thing that has become completely out of hand in this country, it's the sense of self entitlement. Letting one little social disgrace slide into the next without anyone being held accountable is exactly what has led it to be ok for all the latest "kids movies" to contain completely inappropriate sexual innuendos. Or for previously completely intolerable profanity on television to pass unedited. Or for Jewish groups to be prohibited from displaying a public Menorah yet the gay pride parade is allowed to march through in full colors. This "whatever, nothing matters, nothing is sacred" attitude is woeful contributor to an expanding lack of moral direction.
Remember when, not so long ago, children used to address their parents as "sir" and "ma'am"? Seemingly gone are those days, but why? People fall into a pattern of self-indulgence, intolerance, disrespect for others, and overall denial of responsibility because it's easier than the opposite. Convenience. Credit. Fun. Easier. Faster. Bigger. More. These things rule now, yet they are tearing us apart at the seams. The people are lost...
The United States has become the most ethically challenged, self-contradictory state of disarray in the history of history. I, for one, welcome others to take a stand for what they believe in. Treating everyone else like a jerk just because you're unhappy with your own existence is not aceptable, especially in the form of a perceived threat, and should not be allowed to be the standing symbol of "Freedom".
</rant>
If it means I can finally order my flying car, then sign me up!
"By KroNicKq // 1923Turk-Grup" <- I'm assuming this is some zit-faced loser.
As any serious California surfer will tell you, a great white in the water where you are at is bad news - "leave them alone" is no consolation to people who are out in the water and get bitten, and sometimes killed. They cannot be safely dismissed out of hand. They are wild, aggressive hunters that do not think. We all know that the whites come in to feed during the winter - that has always been the case. Shark attack incident logs alone make that clear.
yeah whatever - that's just what people with small chips say.
...As I've understood, BIOS isn't really that complicated nor does it do any heavy calculations. It basically just brings hardware up and tests it, which takes most of the time (not that the 5-6 seconds is so long wait anyway)...
In my time as a PC BIOS developer I can attest that indeed there are no heavy calculations, however there are some heavy hardware polling loops. It's a decision of the BIOS vendor whether to adhere to strict specification compliance or to optimize based on observation. Strict compliance means allowing up to 90 seconds for every ATA device to respond to identity operations - if there is no ATA drive present, you MUST wait the full 90 seconds to guarantee that no ATA-compliant drive is going to surprise you with a latent response. It's in the ATA spec.
But observations repeatedly show that no modern drive worth its weight in salt takes anywhere near that long to respond - normally if you don't get a response in a few milliseconds, then the deal's off. There are any number of specifications like this that a BIOS vendor may want to comply with for backward compatibility which will add to the polling cycles which we see as needless delays. Sometimes a BIOS vendor will want to allow for 2-3 seconds per device and poll them all in parallel so that the total polling period is only 2-3 seconds - it's a compromise between worst case scenario observations for what the vendor is prepared to support and what the spec calls for.
In this case, it seems, the new BIOS takes a no mercy approach. I can tell you from specific first hand experience that cutting the ATA polling cycle as they have to accomplish this will prevent certain older devices from working as boot disks with this BIOS. But clearly that is an acceptable situation for a system that is forward looking and not concerned with backward compatibility.
10 net has 16,777,216 addresses to be precise : it's a full class A network. I had the same thought. It's only "quite" small because people use the default settings that ship with their routers which are generally 192.168*
Just curious what, if any, influence the FAA has on Air France...
I would think 17 years, 11 months - if you can be tried as an adult, you should be allowed to live like one.
You set yourself up for disappointment any time you show up at a theater with expectations. Couple that with advertising that "you don't get it" in a public forum, and I'm not sure I see the point of your post. *shrug* I rather enjoyed the show.
Well I'll post this even though Slashdot is rife with hyper-critical, negative and cynical readers who would enjoy shredding something they are not open to because it can be helpful to someone who reads it with an open mind: How to be Happy, a free e-book (PDF).
Aside from absorbing that and a handful of other books on managing stress, anxiety and grounding oneself, the other two tricks I've adopted are:
* Stop reading/watching the "news"; as much as I share the concerns of most with respect to world affairs, I have found that following it too closely only makes me depressed about things I have no control over nor influence on.
* Stop watching T.V.; I actually canceled my cable and gave away my TV and game system to a local family for xmas. Not only did I have the satisfaction of giving, but I have more free time now to pursue things that actually do make me happy.
You may not be able to control your work environment, however you can control the other aspects of your life and how you choose to spend your time. Perhaps one day you will find that your life is so fulfilling outside of work that your tolerance and acceptance of imperfect circumstances at work improves to the point where it just doesn't matter to you any more.
Plenty of acorns on my property. They bug the crap out of me actually because they sprout easily and quickly turn into a root mass -> shrub -> tree in inconvenient places. I wish the squirrels and rats would get them ALL.
Back in the olden days applications used to perform some sort of benchmark on the hardware they were running on and simply advise you, self-degrade, or just plain refuse to run if your machine can't handle it. I find the software-only rendering option to be an interesting one, but as someone else pointed out, am unclear on how this is a major advancement over OpenGL. Then again, I won't touch Vista with a 10' pole, so I may never know.
Agreed. That's because trust is an issue. I thought while we're fantasizing about an egalitarian wonderland, why not go for the gold? ;-)
referendum.
Though it'll never happen in this hard-headed and self-serving world.
I had a similar thought except that I acknowledge that nobody else is competent enough to solve their own problems and ultimately need someone to call. If you are not on staff, then the call would be going to an outside contractor/consultant. IT is a necessity whether on staff or contracted. So, what would the going contractor rates have cost the company for all the break-fix type work you've been doing, not to mention the preventative actions? I guarantee it would be a fortune that easily justifies your position.
I enjoyed the read particularly because I've done similar witch hunts myself in the past and I think it would be beneficial for others to follow their nose similarly. I'm less interested in the entertainment from tracking a legitimate business however and more so in exposure of crime rings related to fraud, ID/CC theft, domain hijacking, etc. Those ones can be pretty vast in scale and very difficult to track down. Some of them put up impressive fronts too such as legitimate "ICANN Accredited" domain registrar services, etc. - but make no mistake, they're rotten to the core. If more people actively pursued and exposed these types of organizations perhaps we'd all be a little better off...
A "grab bag" of gears doesn't make any commercial sense, not even for the hobbyist. If you want random junk parts, you may as well go to a junk yard and start dismantling vacuum cleaners and copy machines and such. I personally have a great supply of miscellaneous electromechanical parts like you describe specifically because I have dismantled junk equipment and scavenged reusable parts every time the opportunity has presented itself for 20 years.
Best thing I can think of would be some sort of robotics parts supplier who things they can provide generic gear boxes and power transfer kits, but I don't think you're going to be happy.
good luck...
You scooped me. I was going to mention the same. Two hackers, $500K over 3 years is $83K/year. They could have made better money working for Google. Waste of time and prison sentence.
"The few times I looked into Mambo code it was horrible."
Same here - I've done several CMS applications as Mambo/Joomla components (extensions of sorts, for the uninitiated) over the years and finally became so fed up with the underlying code base, the restrictiveness, the little-to-no future-proofing by design that I wrote my own basic framework to link in my custom components and deleted Mambo/Joomla entirely - and never looked back. I only use one DB table from the original installation because I was too lazy to rename it: mos_users (stores user names and password md5's for logins). I wouldn't put much stock into this guy's evolutionary thinking...