Cause java itself isn't as platform independent as it claims to be. Good luck trying to get your GUI to display correctly on every supported OS. All cause they don't use a standardised library like GTK or Qt really.
You forgot to mention Ruby and Java have some of the worst syntax possible really. Inconsistent use of capital letters is the main problem really. To give an example of what I mean (yes I know it doesn't actually occur like this, but due to lack of any particular name popping up in my head this will do to show the problem): throwException and ThrowException. The issue with this is that you'll run into "method does not exist" and you'll be looking all over your code except to the capital letters of the particular function, cause it follows the same naming scheme as the one above it. Think again!
And I don't see why you would want anything to run on the JVM anyway now that I come to think of it. It's only as crossplatform as Sun/Oracle made it. They have to spend months to port it to a new platform since it's written in C/C++. Hence why the claim that it can outperform an application written in those two is a joke unless the developer was drunk at the time he wrote his code, and even then. Stick to standard C/C++ and use a general GUI library like GTK or Qt and your application will be just as portable, you have your freedom of syntax, good development tools (no need to stick to annoyances like Eclipse, Netbeans,...), etc. .
I find the description of cheating some people use here is rather questionable. You have two types of copying something from the internet. (And I'm specifically talking about engineering from this point onward)
The initial problem is the way things are done. We usually get projects in engineering. Not exactly things you can copy and paste of the internet. But you can take the idea, or you can take the text describing the idea. The former is acceptable, the latter isn't. Yet in many cases in the US the former is also deemed cheating from what I've seen on slashdot. While it's essentially the same as paying a visit to the university/college library and reading through several books. The thing is, you still have to understand the idea, apply it to the specific situation and figure out if it works. On the other hand if you copy a few lines of text simply mention where you got them from and mark the part you quoted. Obviously stealing entire works is totally unacceptable.
Another thing I don't get is how they consider having the question databases is cheating. Over here a lot of the tutors actually encourage us to share the questions of the exams with other students and to argue and debate about them. As such we have a forum that now spans back about a decade and we constructed a list of just about every possible question for every subject combined with the answers and logical reasoning behind it. But nobody in their right mind can possibly learn all of that by heart. If you still manage to learn all of it by heart you'll pass the exam no matter what since you learned the entire course anyway. But it is a useful tool to prepare for exams and tests. Not to mention that students often have their own tricks or insights into certain things that a professor just won't be able to explain.
Over here its at the lecturers discretion. For some classes (mainly those related to programming or IT in general) its allowed to use a laptop during lectures. On the other hand you really don't need to pull out your laptop during something related to math (they already complain about calculators there in fact...). I think that's the best system for it. Cause in some classes you really are better of using a laptop. Listening to somebody talk about a programming language for several hours without being able to actually try it out isn't very productive. And sure you might check facebook or slashdot once in a while. But if you weren't using a laptop you'd find some other way to keep yourself occupied. Like drawing, playing games on your phone,...
Great, a ruby fan boy... Where did I claim porting adds new features? I'm saying porting is one of the reasons Perl became so wide spread. Additionally Perl 5.x still receives updates so I wouldn't call it old either. And Perl is a mature language that won't see much changes anymore at this point, get used to it. If you want new and shiny Perl really isn't the language for you.
If you want powerful syntax, the ability to quickly write code that will still perform well then Perl really is the primary choice. Perl can in fact beat Java in performance on certain areas to give you an idea about just how damn fast it is. Ruby isn't even close to either in terms of performance.
And sure many things in the CPAN archive are filled with duplicates. But again lets look at the quality of the code. Writing something in Perl takes a lot more skill than writing something similar in Ruby as such the code produced by the average Perl "programmer" is statistically going to be better. Again something you will have to accept. And Perl code will never look nice, again get used to it. Perl is a contest about how much you can put in a single line. Ruby is something people use to mess around in. Whenever a project becomes serious they have to start stepping away from Ruby cause it becomes a hassle to maintain the code. Performance drops like a brick and scaling becomes rather complicated compared to languages like Perl, PHP, Python and others.
For all its flaws I'd still rather write things in Perl than in Ruby; Cause in the end of the day I know if I need to quickly do something Perl is up to the job every single time. I have yet to run into a case where Perl failed to deliver the results. Ruby and Python on the other hand...
Ruby might have the quantity. But does it have the quality of Perl modules? I seriously doubt so. Many Ruby programmers aren't nearly as experienced as the Perl folks. Ruby will generally be used by people who think it's cool cause of it's "OO-ness" (Don't ask me why that's supposed to be a huge advantage, but that was somebody's pro-Ruby argument once). Perl on the other hand is often used by experienced system administrators. At that point you clearly see a difference in target group. Additionally Ruby isn't as nearly wide spread as Perl. Keep in mind Perl is one of the first things that gets ported to a new platform along with C/C++ compilers and other tools meaning it'll always stay ahead of Ruby no matter how it gets.
Well, quick google search indicates you need about 300kg to knock somebody out. In other words about 3000 newton. So lets leave acceleration out of the question at first and simply look at the pressure required to generate such a force. Lets assume the jar has a 5cm radius. So the surface area of the lid would be about 0.0078 cm^2 in other words (don't have a calculator at hand so could make mistakes on the math). And since pressure is force on surface area we can assume it'll take about 3.8 bar of pressure. Its not impossible for the glass to contain that pressure. But I really doubt the lid would stay on the jar. And we all love F=m*a right? Well yeah, to apply that amount of force it'd need to be accelerating at 300000 m/s^2... So yeah, this is pretty stupid, I think they left out some piece of information in the story.
Before anybody shoots me for this, read it first. Learn COBOL, and this isn't a joke either. Most old financial systems are still written in COBOL and there's still a demand for COBOL programmers cause of that. It pays well, quite some job opportunities,.... Obviously there are moral issues with promoting COBOL and its usage. If you don't want to go down that road go for C/C++ and X86 assembly. Skilled assembly programmers won't be lacking a job either most of the time.
Honestly the main issue with java is when and how people use it.
To give an example of when not to use java: You don't want to be writing a heavy 3D game engine in java, sure it'll work. But C++ will be a lot faster (to the point where it's clearly visible to the user). At that point you have to wonder if java is the correct solution. C++ might offer a bit more difficulty to write the initial program and will punish you more severe if you do make a mistake. But the end result is worthwhile. Java is good for office applications, 2D games and other non-CPU and graphics intensive tasks.
On the how people use it issue,they wish to force the object oriented on everything. Objects used right make code easy to manage and read. Objects used wrong add several layers that you have to fight your way through when debugging. Not to mention as java is compiled to byte code that keeps most of the original code in the same structure. This means you'll actually have to go through that much layers of objects to execute something. On the other hand in C++ the optimizer will most likely try to take care of it and reduce the complexity. This is what annoys me about most java programs in fact. They use a large amount of objects just cause they can, not cause they should. Simple procedural code is often easier to read and faster in most cases, so why bother wrapping it in an object of its own and then calling it from within the object?
Well, I guess this is another bunch of sites that I won't be using any longer. I don't mind advertisements if they don't annoy me too much. If I actually have to start paying attention to them or watch them... Don't count me in. And EA's site is already horribly slow. They're going to add video advertisements now? Its going to make Ruby on Rails look like a racing car.
Most mobile phone operators already keep statistics on who you call when (they need it for billing information in case somebody doesn't agree with their bill) and emergency services are capable of pinning down the location of mobile phones in less than a minute. And ISPs are already required to keep quite some information as well by EU regulations. So I'm not really sure this will change anything. Except provide a legal framework to (ab)use this information.
Programming is a great exercise. But please don't teach them Java, Basic, C# or Ruby. We already have enough of those idiots on the internet... Teach them C and C++, it might be harder but it'll help them a lot later on.
If/when there is an automatic tracking system in place, which gathers for example just location updated (RFID, cell phone, credit card use, car register plate on OCR traffic cameras, in a few years face recognition on security cameras...), it's very easy to just store everything. Once the system is set up, tracking only some individuals is more work everywhere (except at the data-centres holding the data, where more disks need to be installed).
Yes, and why bother to track RFID tags if you can locate the person down to a few meters precision far more easily using mobile phone antennas?
Yeah, but I'm talking about retroactive tracking. They can certainly start to track my cell phone (hopefully for a legally valid reasons only), which is very different for doing a database search for all locations my cell phone has been, and even more different from database actually having combined information from many sources.
By that same logic you could say mobile telephones shouldn't be used either cause the government can track them. Yet they've been around for years and a sort of tracking database system has actually been put in place ages ago and yet it hasn't been used to enslave us all. In fact the system has saved so much lives already (tracking criminals to a certain area, giving emergency services precise locations,...).
Eh. Paranoia would be believing that it's already being done. Wisdom is trying to make sure it will not start being done.
Actually, no this is just plain paranoia. Judging from how bent you seem on proving yourself right you are probably the type of person that covers their house in tin foil.
So any doorway or turnstile could be a place to read and store RFIDs of everybody passing through? That's a trivial amount of information per sensor to store and index when it's only the RFID, (relative) timestamp and sensor ID.
Yes, and once again mobile phone is far easier to track. "Not to mention they could record all your calls!" This is sort of pointless. If a few people walk through the door at the same time your RFID reader is already going to have problems actually.
Yeah, sounds silly, except for stored surveillance data, it's enough to assume that some future government has some evil intentions. Now do you honestly believe that no future government will have any evil intentions?
It's still fine if you only care about yourself, but consider that these "evil intentions" affect just 0.1% of the population. That's bad stuff happening for quite a many people, because of the original whatever "good" reasons the storage of tracking info was started.
Yes, and when they start tracking or storing all of it you can start complaining. But until they start doing that stop the paranoia. You are suggesting we eliminate a useful technology cause it MIGHT be used for something bad.
Lets take a look at history in fact. A simple example is dynamite (maybe not the best to compare it to but it should make the point clear), originally it was invented to make mining safer, faster,... yet it had great potential for abuse. And it did get abused, but the benefits are still there.
Or actually something that is closer to what you're suggesting. The spoon should be banned cause you could potentially kill somebody with it!
I somehow feel like I'm repeating myself, governments have better things to do than track everybody and everything. If they want to track somebody or a certain group of people they'll do it no matter what, tracking 100 people or tracking 1000 won't raise the costs of their operation that much. If they're so poised on tracking you, they can already track your mobile phone everywhere you go anyway actually; yet I'm sure you're constantly using it. You probably have a digital tv that could keep track of everything you watch and they could have filled your computer's HD with trojans through a backdoor the manufacturer was forced to install and the microwave oven could keep track of how much times you eat per day and kill you if it deems you're not an economical asset by using the RFID tag in your identity card to target you and boil you from the inside out. Really, where does the paranoia stop, but yes the government is out to get all of us!
Not to mention the technical challenge of reading a near field RFID tag from a distance of over 1m. You might think it's easy but guess what, it isn't. Near field is generally anything under 20cm. And while that might seem pointless to you, anybody who ever bothered to study electronics will note there are a few problems with the tracking theory at this point. The coil and electronics in the RFID tag were designed with this distance in mind and as such are limited in power. You might be familiar with the law of Biot-Savart. Next combine it with the definition of magnetic flux and you might want to slap the result inside the electromagnetic induction formula and you'll see how unrealistic this task really is.
Additionally why is it people automatically make the assumption the government only has evil intentions?
Yes, and the government is out on tracking everybody! Really if they want to track you they will no matter what. If I have to choose between a RFID chip in my ID card or a tinfoil hat and wallet. I'll take the RFID chip cause the chance of it being useful exceeds the chance of the government bothering to track everything I do.
To make it clear internet providers in Belgium are fairly strict on traffic limitations. Up until early this year the common limit was 20-30GB. Now Telenet is trying a fair user policy that isn't exactly fair at all. But yeah, they offer a line with more than 50mbps and are amazed people might actually like download things. Actually it's sort of idiotic considering the speed vs what you're actually allowed to upload/download. Most people can get to their limit in a single afternoon easily if they really wanted.
If the government was interested in spying on your daily activities (and that's extremely unlikely if you're the type of person that goes "OH NOES RFID IS EVIL") they'd do it no matter what,they're not going to bother putting RFID trackers every 100 meters to track everybody's location. If you think so you might also want to break out the tinfoil hats.
RFID has its applications and it shouldn't be used for transferring extremely sensitive data. Right now most of the arguments are at about the same level of saying a chip card is dangerous cause the data on the chip might not be encrypted and you could lose it and somebody might come along with a card reader. But really I love having to just sweep my wallet past the reader to get my student discount in the cafeteria instead of having to get the card out of my wallet and holding it 5 seconds in front of a bar code reader.
On top of a diary she could write a couple of letters that you could keep somewhere locked up in a safe until certain events (like when they graduate, get married, have children, etc.) so you can give them to your children when the time is right. Might help your wife as she can still speak to them that way when she can't be there in person. And they'll have something physical to remind them about their mother.
Cupholder in works great. I sort of turned an old cd drive into a cup holder when I faced a similar problem. Works great but gets quite messy if you spill anything (the open/close tray button never worked since that and I can't find a small enough electric motor to replace it and my other CD drive now has a coffee colour inside).
Meaningfull or not.. Assuming you use windows you can get the signal strength rather easy. (Since most of those damned manufacturers supply crap linux drivers that'll be the case most likely) The easiest one is using this crappy new api they came up with. Reference here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd323271(v=VS.85).aspx specifically look at IMbnSignal.
Their are several virusses that delete all music files and filesharing programs on your computer. (I got my bittorent deleted by one of them, while actualy i only used it to download a linux distro that is free to distribute)
MediaSentry is illegal to. How do we call these things? Spy techniques, hacking, illegal data transfering, usage of connection that you don't own without allowance of the owner of the connection and so on.
Last time i checked even the secret services here in belgium need to request allowance to spy on somebody his data transfer, then a company isn't allowed to do that at all. first point to sue them
Hacking, looking into computers without allowance of users is called hacking. And its illegal. second point to sue them.
Illegal datatransfer, Sending log data like process logs and keylogs aren't legal without the owner of the computer knowing it. third point to sue them.
Usage of connection that isn't yours. who pays all the bandwidth? The owner of the connection, so the owner of the connection needs to give allowance to use it. Since this hasn't been given to the RIAA they aren't allowed to upload data from your pc like logs and screenshots. fourth point.
That are 4 things they do illegal. + Spreading of virusses that damages data (it deletes programs). That are like 5 things you can sue them for.
So they better take a look at their own things before sueing other people...
I think microsoft windows is going to get less popular in the next years.
anyway... I personaly think that for the moment linux still needs a bit more reshaping in the next years. Its still user unfriendly at some points, if i switch my graphics card from slot as example xserv refuses to start. What causes quite some headaches. But i'm sure this is going to get fixed in the near feature. If linux its hardware support went up to (aka companies release sourcecode of drivers).
Linux can be used by mainstream home users to just browse and mail a bit. But if we want to get it that way a lott of work needs to be done. Else it will not be for our generation to see linux take the market over from windows.
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Cause java itself isn't as platform independent as it claims to be. Good luck trying to get your GUI to display correctly on every supported OS. All cause they don't use a standardised library like GTK or Qt really.
You forgot to mention Ruby and Java have some of the worst syntax possible really. Inconsistent use of capital letters is the main problem really. To give an example of what I mean (yes I know it doesn't actually occur like this, but due to lack of any particular name popping up in my head this will do to show the problem): throwException and ThrowException. The issue with this is that you'll run into "method does not exist" and you'll be looking all over your code except to the capital letters of the particular function, cause it follows the same naming scheme as the one above it. Think again!
And I don't see why you would want anything to run on the JVM anyway now that I come to think of it. It's only as crossplatform as Sun/Oracle made it. They have to spend months to port it to a new platform since it's written in C/C++. Hence why the claim that it can outperform an application written in those two is a joke unless the developer was drunk at the time he wrote his code, and even then. Stick to standard C/C++ and use a general GUI library like GTK or Qt and your application will be just as portable, you have your freedom of syntax, good development tools (no need to stick to annoyances like Eclipse, Netbeans, ...), etc. .
Duke Nukem won't allow you to censor him, he'll just kick your ass.
I find the description of cheating some people use here is rather questionable. You have two types of copying something from the internet. (And I'm specifically talking about engineering from this point onward)
The initial problem is the way things are done. We usually get projects in engineering. Not exactly things you can copy and paste of the internet. But you can take the idea, or you can take the text describing the idea. The former is acceptable, the latter isn't. Yet in many cases in the US the former is also deemed cheating from what I've seen on slashdot. While it's essentially the same as paying a visit to the university/college library and reading through several books. The thing is, you still have to understand the idea, apply it to the specific situation and figure out if it works. On the other hand if you copy a few lines of text simply mention where you got them from and mark the part you quoted. Obviously stealing entire works is totally unacceptable.
Another thing I don't get is how they consider having the question databases is cheating. Over here a lot of the tutors actually encourage us to share the questions of the exams with other students and to argue and debate about them. As such we have a forum that now spans back about a decade and we constructed a list of just about every possible question for every subject combined with the answers and logical reasoning behind it. But nobody in their right mind can possibly learn all of that by heart. If you still manage to learn all of it by heart you'll pass the exam no matter what since you learned the entire course anyway. But it is a useful tool to prepare for exams and tests. Not to mention that students often have their own tricks or insights into certain things that a professor just won't be able to explain.
Over here its at the lecturers discretion. For some classes (mainly those related to programming or IT in general) its allowed to use a laptop during lectures. On the other hand you really don't need to pull out your laptop during something related to math (they already complain about calculators there in fact...). I think that's the best system for it. Cause in some classes you really are better of using a laptop. Listening to somebody talk about a programming language for several hours without being able to actually try it out isn't very productive. And sure you might check facebook or slashdot once in a while. But if you weren't using a laptop you'd find some other way to keep yourself occupied. Like drawing, playing games on your phone, ...
Great, a ruby fan boy... Where did I claim porting adds new features? I'm saying porting is one of the reasons Perl became so wide spread. Additionally Perl 5.x still receives updates so I wouldn't call it old either. And Perl is a mature language that won't see much changes anymore at this point, get used to it. If you want new and shiny Perl really isn't the language for you. If you want powerful syntax, the ability to quickly write code that will still perform well then Perl really is the primary choice. Perl can in fact beat Java in performance on certain areas to give you an idea about just how damn fast it is. Ruby isn't even close to either in terms of performance. And sure many things in the CPAN archive are filled with duplicates. But again lets look at the quality of the code. Writing something in Perl takes a lot more skill than writing something similar in Ruby as such the code produced by the average Perl "programmer" is statistically going to be better. Again something you will have to accept. And Perl code will never look nice, again get used to it. Perl is a contest about how much you can put in a single line. Ruby is something people use to mess around in. Whenever a project becomes serious they have to start stepping away from Ruby cause it becomes a hassle to maintain the code. Performance drops like a brick and scaling becomes rather complicated compared to languages like Perl, PHP, Python and others. For all its flaws I'd still rather write things in Perl than in Ruby; Cause in the end of the day I know if I need to quickly do something Perl is up to the job every single time. I have yet to run into a case where Perl failed to deliver the results. Ruby and Python on the other hand...
Ruby might have the quantity. But does it have the quality of Perl modules? I seriously doubt so. Many Ruby programmers aren't nearly as experienced as the Perl folks. Ruby will generally be used by people who think it's cool cause of it's "OO-ness" (Don't ask me why that's supposed to be a huge advantage, but that was somebody's pro-Ruby argument once). Perl on the other hand is often used by experienced system administrators. At that point you clearly see a difference in target group. Additionally Ruby isn't as nearly wide spread as Perl. Keep in mind Perl is one of the first things that gets ported to a new platform along with C/C++ compilers and other tools meaning it'll always stay ahead of Ruby no matter how it gets.
Well, quick google search indicates you need about 300kg to knock somebody out. In other words about 3000 newton. So lets leave acceleration out of the question at first and simply look at the pressure required to generate such a force. Lets assume the jar has a 5cm radius. So the surface area of the lid would be about 0.0078 cm^2 in other words (don't have a calculator at hand so could make mistakes on the math). And since pressure is force on surface area we can assume it'll take about 3.8 bar of pressure. Its not impossible for the glass to contain that pressure. But I really doubt the lid would stay on the jar. And we all love F=m*a right? Well yeah, to apply that amount of force it'd need to be accelerating at 300000 m/s^2 ... So yeah, this is pretty stupid, I think they left out some piece of information in the story.
Before anybody shoots me for this, read it first. Learn COBOL, and this isn't a joke either. Most old financial systems are still written in COBOL and there's still a demand for COBOL programmers cause of that. It pays well, quite some job opportunities, .... Obviously there are moral issues with promoting COBOL and its usage. If you don't want to go down that road go for C/C++ and X86 assembly. Skilled assembly programmers won't be lacking a job either most of the time.
Honestly the main issue with java is when and how people use it. To give an example of when not to use java: You don't want to be writing a heavy 3D game engine in java, sure it'll work. But C++ will be a lot faster (to the point where it's clearly visible to the user). At that point you have to wonder if java is the correct solution. C++ might offer a bit more difficulty to write the initial program and will punish you more severe if you do make a mistake. But the end result is worthwhile. Java is good for office applications, 2D games and other non-CPU and graphics intensive tasks. On the how people use it issue,they wish to force the object oriented on everything. Objects used right make code easy to manage and read. Objects used wrong add several layers that you have to fight your way through when debugging. Not to mention as java is compiled to byte code that keeps most of the original code in the same structure. This means you'll actually have to go through that much layers of objects to execute something. On the other hand in C++ the optimizer will most likely try to take care of it and reduce the complexity. This is what annoys me about most java programs in fact. They use a large amount of objects just cause they can, not cause they should. Simple procedural code is often easier to read and faster in most cases, so why bother wrapping it in an object of its own and then calling it from within the object?
Well, I guess this is another bunch of sites that I won't be using any longer. I don't mind advertisements if they don't annoy me too much. If I actually have to start paying attention to them or watch them... Don't count me in. And EA's site is already horribly slow. They're going to add video advertisements now? Its going to make Ruby on Rails look like a racing car.
Most mobile phone operators already keep statistics on who you call when (they need it for billing information in case somebody doesn't agree with their bill) and emergency services are capable of pinning down the location of mobile phones in less than a minute. And ISPs are already required to keep quite some information as well by EU regulations. So I'm not really sure this will change anything. Except provide a legal framework to (ab)use this information.
Actually USB ports can provide up to 500mA. So yeah assuming that was the case, 2.5W / usb port. So the guy built himself a 75W heating plate.
Programming is a great exercise. But please don't teach them Java, Basic, C# or Ruby. We already have enough of those idiots on the internet... Teach them C and C++, it might be harder but it'll help them a lot later on.
If/when there is an automatic tracking system in place, which gathers for example just location updated (RFID, cell phone, credit card use, car register plate on OCR traffic cameras, in a few years face recognition on security cameras...), it's very easy to just store everything. Once the system is set up, tracking only some individuals is more work everywhere (except at the data-centres holding the data, where more disks need to be installed).
Yes, and why bother to track RFID tags if you can locate the person down to a few meters precision far more easily using mobile phone antennas?
Yeah, but I'm talking about retroactive tracking. They can certainly start to track my cell phone (hopefully for a legally valid reasons only), which is very different for doing a database search for all locations my cell phone has been, and even more different from database actually having combined information from many sources.
By that same logic you could say mobile telephones shouldn't be used either cause the government can track them. Yet they've been around for years and a sort of tracking database system has actually been put in place ages ago and yet it hasn't been used to enslave us all. In fact the system has saved so much lives already (tracking criminals to a certain area, giving emergency services precise locations, ...).
Eh. Paranoia would be believing that it's already being done. Wisdom is trying to make sure it will not start being done.
Actually, no this is just plain paranoia. Judging from how bent you seem on proving yourself right you are probably the type of person that covers their house in tin foil.
So any doorway or turnstile could be a place to read and store RFIDs of everybody passing through? That's a trivial amount of information per sensor to store and index when it's only the RFID, (relative) timestamp and sensor ID.
Yes, and once again mobile phone is far easier to track. "Not to mention they could record all your calls!" This is sort of pointless. If a few people walk through the door at the same time your RFID reader is already going to have problems actually.
Yeah, sounds silly, except for stored surveillance data, it's enough to assume that some future government has some evil intentions. Now do you honestly believe that no future government will have any evil intentions?
It's still fine if you only care about yourself, but consider that these "evil intentions" affect just 0.1% of the population. That's bad stuff happening for quite a many people, because of the original whatever "good" reasons the storage of tracking info was started.
Yes, and when they start tracking or storing all of it you can start complaining. But until they start doing that stop the paranoia. You are suggesting we eliminate a useful technology cause it MIGHT be used for something bad.
Lets take a look at history in fact. A simple example is dynamite (maybe not the best to compare it to but it should make the point clear), originally it was invented to make mining safer, faster, ... yet it had great potential for abuse. And it did get abused, but the benefits are still there.
Or actually something that is closer to what you're suggesting. The spoon should be banned cause you could potentially kill somebody with it!
I somehow feel like I'm repeating myself, governments have better things to do than track everybody and everything. If they want to track somebody or a certain group of people they'll do it no matter what, tracking 100 people or tracking 1000 won't raise the costs of their operation that much. If they're so poised on tracking you, they can already track your mobile phone everywhere you go anyway actually; yet I'm sure you're constantly using it. You probably have a digital tv that could keep track of everything you watch and they could have filled your computer's HD with trojans through a backdoor the manufacturer was forced to install and the microwave oven could keep track of how much times you eat per day and kill you if it deems you're not an economical asset by using the RFID tag in your identity card to target you and boil you from the inside out. Really, where does the paranoia stop, but yes the government is out to get all of us! Not to mention the technical challenge of reading a near field RFID tag from a distance of over 1m. You might think it's easy but guess what, it isn't. Near field is generally anything under 20cm. And while that might seem pointless to you, anybody who ever bothered to study electronics will note there are a few problems with the tracking theory at this point. The coil and electronics in the RFID tag were designed with this distance in mind and as such are limited in power. You might be familiar with the law of Biot-Savart. Next combine it with the definition of magnetic flux and you might want to slap the result inside the electromagnetic induction formula and you'll see how unrealistic this task really is. Additionally why is it people automatically make the assumption the government only has evil intentions?
Yes, and the government is out on tracking everybody! Really if they want to track you they will no matter what. If I have to choose between a RFID chip in my ID card or a tinfoil hat and wallet. I'll take the RFID chip cause the chance of it being useful exceeds the chance of the government bothering to track everything I do.
To make it clear internet providers in Belgium are fairly strict on traffic limitations. Up until early this year the common limit was 20-30GB. Now Telenet is trying a fair user policy that isn't exactly fair at all. But yeah, they offer a line with more than 50mbps and are amazed people might actually like download things. Actually it's sort of idiotic considering the speed vs what you're actually allowed to upload/download. Most people can get to their limit in a single afternoon easily if they really wanted.
If the government was interested in spying on your daily activities (and that's extremely unlikely if you're the type of person that goes "OH NOES RFID IS EVIL") they'd do it no matter what,they're not going to bother putting RFID trackers every 100 meters to track everybody's location. If you think so you might also want to break out the tinfoil hats. RFID has its applications and it shouldn't be used for transferring extremely sensitive data. Right now most of the arguments are at about the same level of saying a chip card is dangerous cause the data on the chip might not be encrypted and you could lose it and somebody might come along with a card reader. But really I love having to just sweep my wallet past the reader to get my student discount in the cafeteria instead of having to get the card out of my wallet and holding it 5 seconds in front of a bar code reader.
On top of a diary she could write a couple of letters that you could keep somewhere locked up in a safe until certain events (like when they graduate, get married, have children, etc.) so you can give them to your children when the time is right. Might help your wife as she can still speak to them that way when she can't be there in person. And they'll have something physical to remind them about their mother.
And these two are related how?
Cupholder in works great. I sort of turned an old cd drive into a cup holder when I faced a similar problem. Works great but gets quite messy if you spill anything (the open/close tray button never worked since that and I can't find a small enough electric motor to replace it and my other CD drive now has a coffee colour inside).
Meaningfull or not.. Assuming you use windows you can get the signal strength rather easy. (Since most of those damned manufacturers supply crap linux drivers that'll be the case most likely) The easiest one is using this crappy new api they came up with. Reference here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd323271(v=VS.85).aspx specifically look at IMbnSignal.
Their are several virusses that delete all music files and filesharing programs on your computer. (I got my bittorent deleted by one of them, while actualy i only used it to download a linux distro that is free to distribute)
MediaSentry is illegal to.
How do we call these things?
Spy techniques, hacking, illegal data transfering, usage of connection that you don't own without allowance of the owner of the connection and so on.
Last time i checked even the secret services here in belgium need to request allowance to spy on somebody his data transfer, then a company isn't allowed to do that at all.
first point to sue them
Hacking, looking into computers without allowance of users is called hacking.
And its illegal.
second point to sue them.
Illegal datatransfer, Sending log data like process logs and keylogs aren't legal without the owner of the computer knowing it.
third point to sue them.
Usage of connection that isn't yours. who pays all the bandwidth?
The owner of the connection, so the owner of the connection needs to give allowance to use it. Since this hasn't been given to the RIAA they aren't allowed to upload data from your pc like logs and screenshots.
fourth point.
That are 4 things they do illegal.
+ Spreading of virusses that damages data (it deletes programs).
That are like 5 things you can sue them for.
So they better take a look at their own things before sueing other people...
I think microsoft windows is going to get less popular in the next years.
anyway...
I personaly think that for the moment linux still needs a bit more reshaping in the next years.
Its still user unfriendly at some points, if i switch my graphics card from slot as example xserv refuses to start. What causes quite some headaches. But i'm sure this is going to get fixed in the near feature. If linux its hardware support went up to (aka companies release sourcecode of drivers).
Linux can be used by mainstream home users to just browse and mail a bit.
But if we want to get it that way a lott of work needs to be done.
Else it will not be for our generation to see linux take the market over from windows.