"Ask your favourite well-driller if he'll let you airdrop him into a remote disaster zone to drill a water well today for $8k"
Considering lots of wells are dug by people living in these nations, I'd imagine that if you offered someone $8K ($3K more than the typical cost) for a weeks work (depending on the depth and nature of the well), they'd bite your hand off.
There'd be plenty of money left to transport enough water to last people until the well was ready to use. Alternatively you could just drop a few of these alongside a well worker : http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/water_transport_ross.php . Same principle, 1/20th the cost and they have the advantage of working in the dark and providing a way of transporting the water.
I was only giving an example, you're the one that seems to be upset.
This needs to be set up (need to find a good location, need to assemble it, can't start it working in the night), a steady supply of salt water is needed to feed into it, people need to be trained to clean or change the filters.
This isn't going to be a rapid response system either. A lot of the examples given in the article (desert farmland, Haiti 1 year on) are situations where a medium to long term solution is needed.
A lot of these stories make the news not because of their validity, but because they're MIT.
The headline idea has a lots of flaws. For $8000 you can dig a well and install a pump that can supply the water for 250 people. Not only that, you'd have enough money left over to either cover any repair costs for a long time or to put towards another pump. A lot of African villages already have problems with more complex electric pumps, not being able to afford to pay for maintenance so the pumps sit inactive. This desalination plant will have the same issue but with the added expense of filters.
How often do you need to replace the filter? 300litres of salt water means 10kg of salt that presumably is stopped by the filter so it would quickly clog up and have to be rinsed several times a day. More problematic are the 450g of other impurities the filter would pick up that may not wash out. I can't see a filter lasting long.
Some of the basic bugs and design issues in GIMP (for Windows) have me tearing my hair out.
-Disappearing mouse pointer in the save dialogue when I have to click a random area to get it to re-appear (and hope I don't press a button doing so).
-When I've selected the file type in 'Save As' that's the file type I want to save as, I shouldn't have to retype the extension.
-Restoring from the task bar or switching between windows is a buggy mess. Sometimes the GIMP window appears/goes to the front, most of the time it fails to do so.
If I get a 5mm screw from "Scott's screws" and decide to one day switch to "Sam's Screws" I don't have to worry about retraining staff for how to use them. A screw is a screw. Likewise if I contract someone to make a fuel tank to a certain specifications, I would hope that they would produce a near identical fuel tank to another company given the same specs.
If you were to put Open Office and MS Office on everyone's PC it would cost a fortune. Staff would need extra training for it, support staff would have increased amounts of issues to sort, you'd have issues with some saving in OO formats, some in Office formats and so on. All just incase MS goes under or dramatically increase their prices so that you can't afford it.
It's frankly cheaper and easier to stick to a single Office suite and on the off chance something happens, then you can switch and pay for the retraining and implementation.
(Abritrary high percentage pulled out my ass)% of people won't ever have to use the spare tire in their car. That spare tire is still vitally important to have though.
It's all well and good saying "you probably won't ever use that feature" but at some point you may actually need it. Heck your job may be very specialised and one obscure feature that 'no one' uses makes your job much much easier. It's better to have a feature and not need it than to need a feature and not have it.
*types in his user name*
"What that's not me!"
"... I wonder if it recognises my real name"
*types in real name*
*system now has the information it needs to link the user name to real name*
Murdoch's paywall was hardly a miserable failure. The subscriber figures they gave initially did indicate a massive drop in reader numbers but when you compare the amount each user is worth as an ad viewer, compared to how much they're worth as a subscriber, at worst they only had a slight drop in revenue (I did the figures in that other story, CBA to work through them again), at best they had a slight rise in revenue. It does at least hint that a paywall solution is a lot more viable than lots of people thought.
And that was based off of their initial subscriber figures, if they've experienced a reasonable amount of subscriber growth, they would be making more money than with the ad supported site. Would be interested in knowing if their figures have gone up or down.
They almost certainly check how the power gets drained between certain stretches of cabling for maintenance purposes. If, for example, they notice a stretch of cable is losing 2KW of power more than they'd expect it could indicate damaged cable or that that the power is getting partially grounded somehow.
Laggy menus. the vast majority of menus are server side. You have to wait for them to load (1-3 seconds normally, 5+ seconds for vendors)
-Awful interface design. No keyboard shortcuts. To interact with a crystal I don't double click or right click it, I have to open up the main menu and select a menu that only displays near a crystal (I actually had to look up how to interact with crystals).
-Crafting requires you to go through 4 or so (laggy) menus and confirmations. You then start a (slow) crafting process where you're given no information what to do and how to lower the chance of failure. Most crafting requires materials only made by other professions
-No AH. Instead you've got to manually visit dozens of player stores and hope one of them has the item you're after. Laggy menus make this even more of a chore.
-Worthless maps.
-NPC do not give any directions at all. They'll say things like "go get some materials from xyz". You then have to open a help website if you want to know where XYZ is because the game gives you no help at all.
-Limits to the number of guildleves (quests), XP and skill points you can get. All on different counters, all reset in different ways, all punishing the player for playing the game they've paid to subscribe to.
-Worlds are filled with copy and paste scenary.
-Nowhere near enough content. Only story comes from story quests you get once in a blue moon. Other than that it's solo grinding or guildleves.
-Even creating an account is a mission in itself. You have to deal with stupid amounts of unexplained jargon even at this stage, you have to sign up to some paypal clone (with its own cumbersome registration process). Oh and they put on a leaflet in big letters "YOUR REGISTRATION CODE", silly me, I thought that was the code I should use to register. 30 Minutes of wondering how I enter a code with that format, I discovered that wasn't the registration code, that was a code to enable me to use the forums. The code I really wanted was on the back of the manual.
If he changes lanes without giving you a reasonable time to adjust your speed and distance, that's his fault. Changing lanes then slamming on the brakes is a dangerous lane change and the police and insurance companies will deem the person changing lanes to be at fault.
If you eased back putting some space between you and him, then some unspecified time later he brakes heavily and you're unable to brake in time; that would be your fault for not allowing enough distance and/or not reacting fast enough.
The rule of thumb is to allow 2 seconds distance between you and the car in front (use the road markings to judge this). This will give you plenty of leeway to change speeds to match the driver in front for all but the most extreme braking. If the driver does a tires screeching brake it's probable the accident is unavoidable but that would be their fault and there would be physical evidence on the road. In your scenerio it's unlikely the driver would be able to keep control of the vehicle is they braked that hard anyway.
TLDR : allow a 2 second gap and you'll have a good chance of avoid all but the most extreme scenarios. Always maintain the 2 sec gap (4 sec when wet, 10 sec in snow).
It's not that hard. Policing large events and festivals frequently involves the organisers being billed for it, sometimes retroactively, sometimes in advance. Any fire service that doesn't have a good idea of what the costs are when the firemen are called out frankly have utterly incompetent book keepers. They know how many man hours it took, how much any materials cost, maintenence and wear and tear on equiptment. You can even bill the time it takes for someone to calculate this.
You then claim this money off of his insurance or get a court to enforce him to pay it back in installments (when again, you can bill him for any costs arising through doing this).
People don't want to see a hollywood take on the creation on how a student became mega rich and created a piece of software they use every day. They want to watch a 2 hour lecture on a subject they probably wouldn't care about even if they knew what it was about.
I know I was angry when the Lord of the Ring movies didn't at all explain how Tolkien's orcs and elves were inspired by other stories and folk lore! Where was the explanation of how he created Elvish? These films were completely impossible to enjoy without all this background information that gives context on how it was possible for the books to have been written!
Slashdot's system is perhaps the best (although I'm not a fan of users rating comments). The combination of encouraging people to spend their points on voting up and preventing people from voting if they comment on a story does improve the quality somewhat.
I look at Reddit's godawful system where you entire threads between two people with 0 scores for every post (they've been modding down the other person's scores in the argument), the ease of which someone can go to a user's page who they are annoyed with and systematically mark down every post they've made in the last day or so without having to read them and cannot understand for the life of me why people rate it so highly.
You rarely get good debate on Reddit, you get circlejerks over pro-cannabis, extreme anti-cop attitudes and Daily Show gush fests. I laughed at the whole Ron Paul thing and everyone on that site becoming financial experts who, unlike every economist in power around the world, thought that a gold backed economy was the best thing ever.
That 10% of priests being paedophiles is utter utter garbage. You cannot just 'extrapolate' a small, non-random sample (which itself is most likely the worst figures they could find) and claim it as proof that 10% of all priests are pedophiles.
I stood outside a poodle lovers dog show and asked 10 people what their favourite type of dog was. 90% said poodle, extrapolating that, 90% of the world love poodles more than any other dog!
7% of the audience is a lot of people. There are probably 10 million left handed DS owners. You can't ignore 10 million customers.
Sorry, if the controls can be designed for a right handed person, they can also be designed for a left handed person, there is no excuse other than lazyness.
There are some games where the face buttons don't mirror the D-pad. This games can potentially be near impossible to play if you're a leftie.
I believe FFXII Revevant Wings is one such game. The D-pad controls the camera, the face buttons do special commands. The game requires a lot of manual control for the camera and it was very difficult to play.
Also, the 3DS only has an analogue pad on the left side. Lefties are fucked. It's already been confirmed that Kid Ikarus requires use of the analogue pad and stylus at the same time.
There's no way of tracking or disabling unauthorised users.
I kinda thought that was half the point of this system. Afterall, if the haystack admins can track users, it's probably possible for someone else to as well.
I did miss that but given there is no background information whatsoever to the article and barely any more in the EFF post. Is it surprising?
The headline says "EFF says stop using haystack", the article says it's the EFF saying not to use it and posts a twitter quote that implies the EFF made the recommendation on the basis that they thought the software was garbage.
The article and headline are misleading and only 1 of the four links actually gives a clear indication of what's going on.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ask your favourite well-driller if he'll let you airdrop him into a remote disaster zone to drill a water well today for $8k"
Considering lots of wells are dug by people living in these nations, I'd imagine that if you offered someone $8K ($3K more than the typical cost) for a weeks work (depending on the depth and nature of the well), they'd bite your hand off.
There'd be plenty of money left to transport enough water to last people until the well was ready to use. Alternatively you could just drop a few of these alongside a well worker : http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/water_transport_ross.php . Same principle, 1/20th the cost and they have the advantage of working in the dark and providing a way of transporting the water.
I was only giving an example, you're the one that seems to be upset.
This needs to be set up (need to find a good location, need to assemble it, can't start it working in the night), a steady supply of salt water is needed to feed into it, people need to be trained to clean or change the filters.
This isn't going to be a rapid response system either. A lot of the examples given in the article (desert farmland, Haiti 1 year on) are situations where a medium to long term solution is needed.
A lot of these stories make the news not because of their validity, but because they're MIT.
The headline idea has a lots of flaws. For $8000 you can dig a well and install a pump that can supply the water for 250 people. Not only that, you'd have enough money left over to either cover any repair costs for a long time or to put towards another pump. A lot of African villages already have problems with more complex electric pumps, not being able to afford to pay for maintenance so the pumps sit inactive. This desalination plant will have the same issue but with the added expense of filters.
How often do you need to replace the filter? 300litres of salt water means 10kg of salt that presumably is stopped by the filter so it would quickly clog up and have to be rinsed several times a day. More problematic are the 450g of other impurities the filter would pick up that may not wash out. I can't see a filter lasting long.
I upgraded to Maverick Meerkat last week. I was most disappointed when it failed to give me cheap deals on my car insurance.
Too obscure?
Some of the basic bugs and design issues in GIMP (for Windows) have me tearing my hair out.
-Disappearing mouse pointer in the save dialogue when I have to click a random area to get it to re-appear (and hope I don't press a button doing so).
-When I've selected the file type in 'Save As' that's the file type I want to save as, I shouldn't have to retype the extension.
-Restoring from the task bar or switching between windows is a buggy mess. Sometimes the GIMP window appears/goes to the front, most of the time it fails to do so.
If I get a 5mm screw from "Scott's screws" and decide to one day switch to "Sam's Screws" I don't have to worry about retraining staff for how to use them. A screw is a screw. Likewise if I contract someone to make a fuel tank to a certain specifications, I would hope that they would produce a near identical fuel tank to another company given the same specs.
If you were to put Open Office and MS Office on everyone's PC it would cost a fortune. Staff would need extra training for it, support staff would have increased amounts of issues to sort, you'd have issues with some saving in OO formats, some in Office formats and so on. All just incase MS goes under or dramatically increase their prices so that you can't afford it.
It's frankly cheaper and easier to stick to a single Office suite and on the off chance something happens, then you can switch and pay for the retraining and implementation.
(Abritrary high percentage pulled out my ass)% of people won't ever have to use the spare tire in their car. That spare tire is still vitally important to have though.
It's all well and good saying "you probably won't ever use that feature" but at some point you may actually need it. Heck your job may be very specialised and one obscure feature that 'no one' uses makes your job much much easier. It's better to have a feature and not need it than to need a feature and not have it.
*types in his user name*
"What that's not me!"
"... I wonder if it recognises my real name"
*types in real name*
*system now has the information it needs to link the user name to real name*
Pfft, Isaac Newton has already been the main villain of one series, he doesn't need a minor part in another!
Murdoch's paywall was hardly a miserable failure. The subscriber figures they gave initially did indicate a massive drop in reader numbers but when you compare the amount each user is worth as an ad viewer, compared to how much they're worth as a subscriber, at worst they only had a slight drop in revenue (I did the figures in that other story, CBA to work through them again), at best they had a slight rise in revenue. It does at least hint that a paywall solution is a lot more viable than lots of people thought.
And that was based off of their initial subscriber figures, if they've experienced a reasonable amount of subscriber growth, they would be making more money than with the ad supported site. Would be interested in knowing if their figures have gone up or down.
They almost certainly check how the power gets drained between certain stretches of cabling for maintenance purposes. If, for example, they notice a stretch of cable is losing 2KW of power more than they'd expect it could indicate damaged cable or that that the power is getting partially grounded somehow.
Here's an overview of the issues with FFXIV:
Laggy menus. the vast majority of menus are server side. You have to wait for them to load (1-3 seconds normally, 5+ seconds for vendors)
-Awful interface design. No keyboard shortcuts. To interact with a crystal I don't double click or right click it, I have to open up the main menu and select a menu that only displays near a crystal (I actually had to look up how to interact with crystals).
-Crafting requires you to go through 4 or so (laggy) menus and confirmations. You then start a (slow) crafting process where you're given no information what to do and how to lower the chance of failure. Most crafting requires materials only made by other professions
-No AH. Instead you've got to manually visit dozens of player stores and hope one of them has the item you're after. Laggy menus make this even more of a chore.
-Worthless maps.
-NPC do not give any directions at all. They'll say things like "go get some materials from xyz". You then have to open a help website if you want to know where XYZ is because the game gives you no help at all.
-Limits to the number of guildleves (quests), XP and skill points you can get. All on different counters, all reset in different ways, all punishing the player for playing the game they've paid to subscribe to.
-Worlds are filled with copy and paste scenary.
-Nowhere near enough content. Only story comes from story quests you get once in a blue moon. Other than that it's solo grinding or guildleves.
-Even creating an account is a mission in itself. You have to deal with stupid amounts of unexplained jargon even at this stage, you have to sign up to some paypal clone (with its own cumbersome registration process). Oh and they put on a leaflet in big letters "YOUR REGISTRATION CODE", silly me, I thought that was the code I should use to register. 30 Minutes of wondering how I enter a code with that format, I discovered that wasn't the registration code, that was a code to enable me to use the forums. The code I really wanted was on the back of the manual.
If he changes lanes without giving you a reasonable time to adjust your speed and distance, that's his fault. Changing lanes then slamming on the brakes is a dangerous lane change and the police and insurance companies will deem the person changing lanes to be at fault.
If you eased back putting some space between you and him, then some unspecified time later he brakes heavily and you're unable to brake in time; that would be your fault for not allowing enough distance and/or not reacting fast enough.
The rule of thumb is to allow 2 seconds distance between you and the car in front (use the road markings to judge this). This will give you plenty of leeway to change speeds to match the driver in front for all but the most extreme braking. If the driver does a tires screeching brake it's probable the accident is unavoidable but that would be their fault and there would be physical evidence on the road. In your scenerio it's unlikely the driver would be able to keep control of the vehicle is they braked that hard anyway.
TLDR : allow a 2 second gap and you'll have a good chance of avoid all but the most extreme scenarios. Always maintain the 2 sec gap (4 sec when wet, 10 sec in snow).
It's not that hard. Policing large events and festivals frequently involves the organisers being billed for it, sometimes retroactively, sometimes in advance. Any fire service that doesn't have a good idea of what the costs are when the firemen are called out frankly have utterly incompetent book keepers. They know how many man hours it took, how much any materials cost, maintenence and wear and tear on equiptment. You can even bill the time it takes for someone to calculate this.
You then claim this money off of his insurance or get a court to enforce him to pay it back in installments (when again, you can bill him for any costs arising through doing this).
People don't want to see a hollywood take on the creation on how a student became mega rich and created a piece of software they use every day. They want to watch a 2 hour lecture on a subject they probably wouldn't care about even if they knew what it was about.
I know I was angry when the Lord of the Ring movies didn't at all explain how Tolkien's orcs and elves were inspired by other stories and folk lore! Where was the explanation of how he created Elvish? These films were completely impossible to enjoy without all this background information that gives context on how it was possible for the books to have been written!
It's an escalation bug. That means any exploit or hole in any application can potentially become a remote root so long as it delivers this code.
You can't paper over the fact that this is a very dangerous hole.
Slashdot's system is perhaps the best (although I'm not a fan of users rating comments). The combination of encouraging people to spend their points on voting up and preventing people from voting if they comment on a story does improve the quality somewhat.
I look at Reddit's godawful system where you entire threads between two people with 0 scores for every post (they've been modding down the other person's scores in the argument), the ease of which someone can go to a user's page who they are annoyed with and systematically mark down every post they've made in the last day or so without having to read them and cannot understand for the life of me why people rate it so highly.
You rarely get good debate on Reddit, you get circlejerks over pro-cannabis, extreme anti-cop attitudes and Daily Show gush fests. I laughed at the whole Ron Paul thing and everyone on that site becoming financial experts who, unlike every economist in power around the world, thought that a gold backed economy was the best thing ever.
That 10% of priests being paedophiles is utter utter garbage. You cannot just 'extrapolate' a small, non-random sample (which itself is most likely the worst figures they could find) and claim it as proof that 10% of all priests are pedophiles.
I stood outside a poodle lovers dog show and asked 10 people what their favourite type of dog was. 90% said poodle, extrapolating that, 90% of the world love poodles more than any other dog!
7% of the audience is a lot of people. There are probably 10 million left handed DS owners. You can't ignore 10 million customers.
Sorry, if the controls can be designed for a right handed person, they can also be designed for a left handed person, there is no excuse other than lazyness.
There are some games where the face buttons don't mirror the D-pad. This games can potentially be near impossible to play if you're a leftie.
I believe FFXII Revevant Wings is one such game. The D-pad controls the camera, the face buttons do special commands. The game requires a lot of manual control for the camera and it was very difficult to play.
Also, the 3DS only has an analogue pad on the left side. Lefties are fucked. It's already been confirmed that Kid Ikarus requires use of the analogue pad and stylus at the same time.
That's just stupid.
The article clearly indicates that it will be next year for the year of the Linux desktop!
tldr version:
There's no way of tracking or disabling unauthorised users.
I kinda thought that was half the point of this system. Afterall, if the haystack admins can track users, it's probably possible for someone else to as well.
I read another blog post about this incident and it sounds pretty serious. Especially the stuff involving the purple monkey dishwasher.
All information that would be ever so helpful in the summary or any of the linked articles.
I did miss that but given there is no background information whatsoever to the article and barely any more in the EFF post. Is it surprising?
The headline says "EFF says stop using haystack", the article says it's the EFF saying not to use it and posts a twitter quote that implies the EFF made the recommendation on the basis that they thought the software was garbage.
The article and headline are misleading and only 1 of the four links actually gives a clear indication of what's going on.