I and my sister fought all of the time when we were younger and we both knew where the guns ammo and keys to the gun locks were and we never even threatened each other with such a thing.
I'm not particularly surprised by this. My kids fight, and they do things they're not supposed to, but they can be surprisingly responsible about other things.
Firearm education is the answer.
Education is definitely crucial, but nothing is 100% effective.
At the end of the day, they ARE kids, making bad decisions is part of childhood, and its safe to assume that even with proper education some kids are going to make some poor decisions without falling to the level of "mentally unfit".
If a thousand clones of your father educated a million kids... some of them are still going to make a bad call. The mistake is often as simple as succumbing to peer pressure to show a friend who doesn't have suitable education his dad's guns.
It also doesn't help that all your teaching is undermined by the gun glorification culture we live in.
I've worked with phds and high school dropouts and I've never noticed any difference except that the dropouts are less entitled.
Yes there are some excellent high school dropouts out there.
But lets be fair, you said you are sampling from people you worked with. That means you are only looking at the subset of high school dropouts who got jobs.
That's something of the cream of the crop with that bunch.:)
When you're assaulted outside of your home, you generally have very little time to react, which is precisely why most dedicated carry guns these days have no manual safeties (but compensate with a long and heavy trigger pull), and why the standard way to carry is with a round in the chamber.
And *perhaps* those guns shouldn't be smart guns, if acceptable reliability requirements can't be met. But there are lots of other guns.
In case of a home invasion, you generally get a fair bit more time to prepare yourself before you have to face the assailan
Generally if you have that kind of time, you have time to just escape, and that's a MUCH better use of your time.
Getting into a shootout with a criminal is going to result in someone getting shot. There's no reason to assume its going to be them and not you, especially if you are out numbered.
In case of biometric safes, they are in fact known to be not particularly reliable, but most include a regular keypad as a fallback option
And then you are back to having an option your kid may know. Most peoples combinations are patterns, significant numbers/dates to them, and they are written down somewhere. Odds are the people who live in your house with you for years on end and more or less have the run of the place, will have opportunity to see you enter the code, be able to guess the combination, find where its written down, or even just brute force likely combinations if they are so inclined.
But, of course, this only goes for firearms intended for defensive use, not for hunting guns or firearms.
Right, I think smart guns for sports and hunting make a lot of sense.
I think the real reason why there is objection to that stuff is because of the amount of complexity it adds to the firearm. Firearm actions are, mechanically, rather simple devices, with most trickery handled by tight tolerances and accurate timing, not by the complexity of the mechanism. I think there is a sort of emotional rejection of something that is part of the basic gun action, yet is so complicated that it can't even be properly serviced by the owner.
Hmm...This is actually a really interesting point, and you are right. It does potentially change a gun into something that has a "complex black box component" in its critical operation path.
Perhaps like with cars this aversion will gradually disappear. I myself have an emotional rejection of keyless push to start cars... I just *like* having a key, and turning it for example, and don't like push to start with remote fob systems. Similarly I don't like F1 style "electronic flappy paddle gearboxes" either, and prefer the old manual transmission with a clutch, and this is despite knowing that the F1 style gearboxes are higher performance, with faster shift times, etc.
While I can point out all sorts of failure modes that only affect the new systems, the reality is that they are very reliable in practice. I know that my accusations while theoretically valid are largely baseless - and that in my case it is more just an emotional attachment to mechanical solutions than any real benefit to them.
The same could well apply to guns, and its an interesting point that you raised.
The game was "cracked" by the game developers themselves.
Exactly, it wasn't cracked. It was "cracked".
And released by them. This is not a cracked game, this is a crippled for-free release.
It wasn't presented to the public as a crippleware/shareware/demo version though. The people that downloaded it thought they were getting a cracked copy of the full game.
There was a scandal recently where some (quite popular) gun safe models were shown to be easy to open - literally just banging them randomly would have done that
Yeah I was aware of those, and that's beyond pathetic, but its not what I was referring to. I assumed a good safe.
It doesn't need to have a key, either - the best models either have an electronic code pad, or a fingerprint reader (or both).
I wouldn't put it past my kids to know an electronic code. Either by watching me, or just knowing me.
But the more interesting point about this is that we're back at square one. The "big objection" to smart guns is "oh noes, if it doesn't read my finger properly it'll get me killed as a valiantly defend my home..." if you put an electronic code and finger print reader on the safe... well then that could fail too, and you won't be able to get your guns out to shoot the people breaking into your home.
Why is a finger print reader on the safe good, but on the gun bad?
1. You will have people who get complacent about safety. They will leave loaded firearms on the bench with the expectation that it won't fire without 'authorization'.
No. You won't. Because anyone who does that will be ejected from the range the same as they do now.
And besides, putting seat belts and airbags in cars hasn't prompted people to drive more recklessly.
2. In the event of a misfire (the best way to describe a trigger pull without a discharge), you will have a moment of confusion, and the person is likely to try and diagnose the error. This may be adjusting their grip, pushing a button, tapping it, etc. However all of these actions will be occuring on a firearm that has a live round in the chamber. Anything that takes the persons attention away from keeping a loaded firearm pointed in a safe direction is dangerous.
I'm not really seeing this a major source of death.
Even if this were true, its basically the seatbelt and airbag arguments all over again. Some people have died because they were trapped in a vehicle by them, but the number of lives they save so far outweighs the harm that its an absurd reason not to wear a seat belt.
For responsible owners, trigger locks and gun safes take care of that. Trigger locks in particular are pretty much foolproof.
Well, except that any kid over about 5 can defeat them trivially. I assume your knows how to open the safe and where the keys are to the locks.
A bit of peer pressure to "see the guns" and some decidedly bad judgement by the child is all it takes for a tragedy.
Do I think smart guns are the answer to all our problems? Of course not, but I don't see them as a horrible idea that must be stamped out either. The intense levels of objection to it on slashdot is simply tin-foil-hat levels of absurd.
For people who won't use either of the above, I doubt they'd buy a "smart gun" in the first place. They'll just get a Saturday night special and stick it into the bedroom table, loaded.
Agreed. But just because something won't stop 100% of the problem doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Lock up the firearm, or store it in a place unreachable by children.
There is no place unreachable by a child over about 5 years old. And locks? Your kids live with you, they'll know where the keys are. Combinations? Odds are they'll figure those out too. These are good measures to take, but hardly fool proof.
Teach any children that you have that firearms are not toys and should never be touched unless handed to them by you.
You mean my daughter and son would stop fighting if I just taught them that it was wrong and that they must respect each other. I've only been doing that for a decade and they still get into fights, so while its definitely the right approach, its hardly responsible parenting to assume your guns won't ever be misused simply because you taught your kids not to touch them.
Be a responsible gun owner and it will prevent more accidental shootings than this ever will.
So why isn't a fingerprint safety not just another part of being a responsible gun owner in a home with kids?
Plus if I already have the guns locked up and out of reach, I've already accepted that they will be much less accessible in the canonical "home invasion self defense" scenario... If accepting that is a part of responsible gun ownership why exactly is a secondary safety so objectionable to you?
And in combat situations...REALLY bad idea... Lives will be lost to this.
A lot of people buy guns for sporting situations, not combat situations, and complaints about the guns effectiveness in a combat situation is about as relevant as complaints about a fencing rapier in a combat situation.
For some people, buying the gun to use in combat, yes, there are a lot of legitimate questions to be asked.
For a lot of people, buying the gun for other purposes, its a REALLY good idea.
When I pull the trigger, I want the gun to fire. I doubt this will be reliable enough to depend upon.
A gun bought for hunting? For target shooting? A gun that you keep at home properly locked up in a safe with the ammo stored separately? Why not get a smart gun? Worst case if it fails, an old soup can lives an extra day.
Its not like you were going to use it on criminals who bust into your bedroom in the middle of the night.
For the gun you keep loaded under your pillow at night, fine, I can see why you want that one to fire without fail. Your Rambo self defense fantasy, while I think its deeply flawed, is not an entirely invalid concern.
But not every gun is purchased for that purpose, and there's no reason for every gun to be as ideally suited for that purpose as possible.
Because when I pull the trigger, I'm not worried if some tiny percentage of the time the paper target doesn't get an immediate hole put into it. That "risk" is worth the extra safety to me.
And if I'm ever in a life or death situation where I must use that gun against a person... what of it? Would I rather have a gun without an extra safety? Sure. At that particular moment I'd also rather it be a standard issue M4 Carbine or some other purpose built tool for the job instead of a handgun I use for shooting targets. If wishes were horses, right?
In reality, if that situation were to actually arise I guess I'd be grateful to have anything on me at all, because usually I'm not carrying anything much more lethal than a plastic fork.
I do believe Neil_Brown was talking about iTunes crashing on Windows.
So was I. I don't really disagree with the flamebait mod I ate for it either though - it was somewhat deserved.:)
But still, 2004 would have been itunes version 4 on XP, and there is really no real excuse for that to be constantly crashing unless there were driver problems or the itunes database was corrupt, or (some of) the music files themselves were malformed in some way.
I would expect anyone who could set up a linux solution for themselves would be able to resolve why itunes was crashing on windows and fix it.
So when I read about people talking about how they switched to linux because x on windows crashed all the time... that's like having a car with a stalling problem and "solving it" by buying a kit car and building it. Sure that's great, but If you can do that, you could have fixed the issue with the original car if they had tried.
This isn't in the 90s anymore. Windows has been relatively stable for quite a while now.
Re:All of worlds music just for $26 million
on
iTunes Store Turns 10
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What's even neater is that you'd be dead of old age before you could listen to all of it. (Feel free to run the numbers, I did. I assumed a 3 minute track, life expectancy of 100, that you started listening at birth, and that you don't need to sleep.) You still can't get through it all.)
Actually I'm not sure if that's neat or not... more sad really.
The most important "layer of trust" to use your phrase is to ensure that your EMAIL has a strong password, and that it is not the same as anything else. Your email password is the weak link, thanks to the forgot-password-reset (or god forbid password recovery) functionality of most other online properties.
And this raises a problem. Email is frequently used... so long pass phrases are inconvenient.
And worse, we have it saved in our phones, and on our laptops, so we don't have to re-enter it every 5 minutes. So if we lose our device, we're hosed. I don't want to put in a long passphrase everytime i unlock my PC, I want to enter in a long passphrase to unlock my phone even less. So while I have a good password on my email, if my phone is stolen I'm potentially hosed.
The more I think about it, password reset functionality by email is -inherently- a bad idea. We should almost really have a 2ndary "secure" email that we don't use except for managing password changes etc. The problem with that of course is that no systems support having a separate email just for password recovery, so if you set one up you'd miss all the other mail from the site that you would presumably want to receive.
I actually found it easier to use that iTunes on Windows, which, for me, crashed more often than it worked.
Its hard to be impressed with your geek cred for getting Linux to work well for you when you can't manage to run windows without turning it into a steaming pile...
After all, Ubuntu was released in 2004 and the only people who still really had issues with windows crashing in 2004 were people who didn't know what they were doing.:)
she went around to a number of doctors and asked them about it, they all told her not to worry, and it was better than finding out I was drinking.
Until you get picked up for trafficking and just blew your chances of ever having the career you wanted thanks to the criminal record you just picked up, not to mention the stint in jail.
Being pro-legalization of pot is perfectly rational. Actually smoking up is still pretty stupid.
Still smoke pot, almost never drink.
Relativism at its finest. It being less stupid than something even worse is a pretty thin justification for doing something.
Your still smoking. Its not like that is good for you.
and it was better than finding out I was drinking.
Better than binge drinking sure. Better than having a glass of wine at dinner? Not so much. Most users of alcohol don't get drunk, or even 'buzzy' when they drink. That's not why they drink.
I've never met anyone who smokes pot in a parallel manner to the way most people consume alcohol. In my experience at least, people who smoke pot want to "feel it".
Not sure why I'm posting though... you've already convinced yourself of your self-righteousness, and your mind is likely completely closed on the subject.
You think someone signing up for a Netflix account with a low monthly fee doesn't realise that they're paying for a limited-time subscription and instead thinks they're buying a copy of everything they can watch on Netflix?
I don't think anyone with half a brain is confused about netflix.
What about the someone who "bought" Portal 2 on Steam? Or a box of Microsoft Office?
The servers go down, and you discover you don't have anything. The copy you have installed might continue to run... but you can't reinstall it after wiping the device. Office won't activate. Portal 2 demands you connect to a steam that isn't there.
What you don't have is a right to enjoy someone else's content on whatever terms you feel like or to enjoy it without compensating them at all for their work to create it. That's illegal whether DRM is used or not.
And with DRM I don't have the right to enjoy the content on whatever terms I like EVEN after I've paid for it.
Yes and no. Yes there would absolutely be rioting, but it -would- also solve the problem.
People would literally not be able to afford to get to work. So they would quit and find a closer job, or move closer to work. Or both.
Simultaneously employers would find their employees completely unwilling to show up for work unless they got substantial raises to cover the cost of showing up. Employers would embrace telecommuting, move their offices to locales more accessible to employees, etc.
Public transit would take off as a vastly less expensive alternative to commuting.
And people would flee the city en masse to work elsewhere. Abandoning suburban homes devalued by the fact that they are no longer inhabitable by people who plan to work in the city.
The market would sort it out.
Or the city is burnt to the ground in the riots, torn apart by crime due to the massive unemployment and severe turmoil that would ensue.
Either way, if you take a long enough view the problem is solved. I'd hate to live through the transition though, and would lynch anyone that suggested it.
Air is a public good because it is "both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others."
I take it you haven't been to a Chinese industrial area.
Actually... even the smog in LA gets pretty bad.
Maybe an individual can't reduce availability much all by himself, but if enough of them build factories without pollution controls you'll be carrying your air around in a bottle soon enough.
you can't enforce a termination fee without a contract enforcing it.
There is no contract for the phone service.
There is still contract if you take out a loan on a new phone that just covers that loan. If you want to exit the service early, you have to pay off the principle.
Is it 'misleading'? A little bit, yes, because they say its no contract, but if you want to pay for your phone over a 2 year period well then you still need a contract for THAT.
I think this is definitely a good direction for the industry to go, and its unfortunate that they are getting slapped a bit for it, but they do need to be clear that the service has no contract, but the purchase of a subsidized phone is essentially a separate loan agreement for that phone, and that you do have to sign a contract to take out that loan.
Private acts really are not done in places where they can be observed by others.
I completely disagree. The conversation at the next table at the restaurant may be within earshot of my table, and I may overhear a few things. But it is still a "semi-private conversation". The patrons at the next table over implicitly accept that their conversation is not "completely private" in a setting like that.
But that doesn't amount to implicit acceptance that I pull up a chair and start taking notes, nor does it amount to implicit acceptance that I hide a microphone in the candle to record everything they say and stream it to youtube.
The reality is that if it is done withing public view it can not be private.
Polite society dictates that even though I can hear things not intended for my ears that I don't put them on the internet. The law isn't so subtle as polite society, but that doesn't mean we should accept that anything not actually illegal is perfectly fine.
Of course if you want to be this much on the bleeding edge it's not $1000 once every five years, it's every time there's something a little bit better and sell the old one
typically, something like that is going to be annual, and not much more often than that. Plus they can recoup a decent amount reselling it. A gtx590 will still go for $350-450 on ebay.
So far, the Al Queda link isn't that convincing to me, and mostly seems present to stir the pot, generate headlines, and make the arrest even more prestigious than it otherwise would be.
"Al Queda plot foiled!" looks better in print than "2 losers plan to derail a train foiled"
Seriously, they keep mentioning "the Al Queda link", but so far it sounds like Al Queda didn't do much of anything beyond someone known to be associated with Al Queda gave them a high five on the internet for the plot./eyeroll
If a member of Anonymous, who is also a member of the Catholic church, and an employee at Microsoft gave me a high five when I told them I was going to launch a denial of service attack on Sony should the headline read?
"Catholic Church, Costco, and Anonymous all linked to terrorist plot..."
"A spokesman for Microsoft denies it was involved in a plot to damage competitor Sony, but notes that Sony has been the victim of data breaches before and that Xbox live customers are better protected" "A spokesman claiming to be from anonymous said they did it, but his membership in the clandestine organization could not be verified." "Pope refuses to comment on Church involvement in the Sony hacking incident..."
Still not clear on why it only works on XP and not Win7..?
No device drivers for the interface is a common issue.
How many PCI, or even USB video capture solutions from around 2000 work with windows 7? How many venders released windows 7 64-bit driver updates for your 2002 TV tuner cards?
Some of the really old stuff is still using 16-bit software and serial port software that don't like USB adapters but will still run on XP if there is a built in COM port.
This type of stuff doesn't like Windows 7 at all, and doesn't like virtualization much either.
One product line im familiar with uses a pci frame grabber card that was discontinued years ago. You can't get replacement cards, never mind windows 7 drivers. The vendor has a retrofit to change the interface to USB but it isn't cheap, and it isn't compatible with the old software. So you have to buy the retrofit AND upgrade the software if you want to use Windows 7. Its cheaper than buying a new instrument, but as long as the old interface card still works, its even cheaper to just stay with XP.
Another has a belkin usb camera as a minor internal component for which windows 7 drivers don't exist, so the camera's have to be retrofitted for the instrument to work with windows 7.
Slashdot Mirror
I and my sister fought all of the time when we were younger and we both knew where the guns ammo and keys to the gun locks were and we never even threatened each other with such a thing.
I'm not particularly surprised by this. My kids fight, and they do things they're not supposed to, but they can be surprisingly responsible about other things.
Firearm education is the answer.
Education is definitely crucial, but nothing is 100% effective.
At the end of the day, they ARE kids, making bad decisions is part of childhood, and its safe to assume that even with proper education some kids are going to make some poor decisions without falling to the level of "mentally unfit".
If a thousand clones of your father educated a million kids... some of them are still going to make a bad call. The mistake is often as simple as succumbing to peer pressure to show a friend who doesn't have suitable education his dad's guns.
It also doesn't help that all your teaching is undermined by the gun glorification culture we live in.
I've worked with phds and high school dropouts and I've never noticed any difference except that the dropouts are less entitled.
Yes there are some excellent high school dropouts out there.
But lets be fair, you said you are sampling from people you worked with. That means you are only looking at the subset of high school dropouts who got jobs.
That's something of the cream of the crop with that bunch. :)
When you're assaulted outside of your home, you generally have very little time to react, which is precisely why most dedicated carry guns these days have no manual safeties (but compensate with a long and heavy trigger pull), and why the standard way to carry is with a round in the chamber.
And *perhaps* those guns shouldn't be smart guns, if acceptable reliability requirements can't be met. But there are lots of other guns.
In case of a home invasion, you generally get a fair bit more time to prepare yourself before you have to face the assailan
Generally if you have that kind of time, you have time to just escape, and that's a MUCH better use of your time.
Getting into a shootout with a criminal is going to result in someone getting shot. There's no reason to assume its going to be them and not you, especially if you are out numbered.
In case of biometric safes, they are in fact known to be not particularly reliable, but most include a regular keypad as a fallback option
And then you are back to having an option your kid may know. Most peoples combinations are patterns, significant numbers/dates to them, and they are written down somewhere. Odds are the people who live in your house with you for years on end and more or less have the run of the place, will have opportunity to see you enter the code, be able to guess the combination, find where its written down, or even just brute force likely combinations if they are so inclined.
But, of course, this only goes for firearms intended for defensive use, not for hunting guns or firearms.
Right, I think smart guns for sports and hunting make a lot of sense.
I think the real reason why there is objection to that stuff is because of the amount of complexity it adds to the firearm. Firearm actions are, mechanically, rather simple devices, with most trickery handled by tight tolerances and accurate timing, not by the complexity of the mechanism. I think there is a sort of emotional rejection of something that is part of the basic gun action, yet is so complicated that it can't even be properly serviced by the owner.
Hmm...This is actually a really interesting point, and you are right. It does potentially change a gun into something that has a "complex black box component" in its critical operation path.
Perhaps like with cars this aversion will gradually disappear. I myself have an emotional rejection of keyless push to start cars... I just *like* having a key, and turning it for example, and don't like push to start with remote fob systems. Similarly I don't like F1 style "electronic flappy paddle gearboxes" either, and prefer the old manual transmission with a clutch, and this is despite knowing that the F1 style gearboxes are higher performance, with faster shift times, etc.
While I can point out all sorts of failure modes that only affect the new systems, the reality is that they are very reliable in practice. I know that my accusations while theoretically valid are largely baseless - and that in my case it is more just an emotional attachment to mechanical solutions than any real benefit to them.
The same could well apply to guns, and its an interesting point that you raised.
The game was "cracked" by the game developers themselves.
Exactly, it wasn't cracked. It was "cracked".
And released by them. This is not a cracked game, this is a crippled for-free release.
It wasn't presented to the public as a crippleware/shareware/demo version though. The people that downloaded it thought they were getting a cracked copy of the full game.
There was a scandal recently where some (quite popular) gun safe models were shown to be easy to open - literally just banging them randomly would have done that
Yeah I was aware of those, and that's beyond pathetic, but its not what I was referring to. I assumed a good safe.
It doesn't need to have a key, either - the best models either have an electronic code pad, or a fingerprint reader (or both).
I wouldn't put it past my kids to know an electronic code. Either by watching me, or just knowing me.
But the more interesting point about this is that we're back at square one. The "big objection" to smart guns is "oh noes, if it doesn't read my finger properly it'll get me killed as a valiantly defend my home..." if you put an electronic code and finger print reader on the safe... well then that could fail too, and you won't be able to get your guns out to shoot the people breaking into your home.
Why is a finger print reader on the safe good, but on the gun bad?
1. You will have people who get complacent about safety. They will leave loaded firearms on the bench with the expectation that it won't fire without 'authorization'.
No. You won't. Because anyone who does that will be ejected from the range the same as they do now.
And besides, putting seat belts and airbags in cars hasn't prompted people to drive more recklessly.
2. In the event of a misfire (the best way to describe a trigger pull without a discharge), you will have a moment of confusion, and the person is likely to try and diagnose the error. This may be adjusting their grip, pushing a button, tapping it, etc. However all of these actions will be occuring on a firearm that has a live round in the chamber. Anything that takes the persons attention away from keeping a loaded firearm pointed in a safe direction is dangerous.
I'm not really seeing this a major source of death.
Even if this were true, its basically the seatbelt and airbag arguments all over again. Some people have died because they were trapped in a vehicle by them, but the number of lives they save so far outweighs the harm that its an absurd reason not to wear a seat belt.
Its grasping at straws.
For responsible owners, trigger locks and gun safes take care of that. Trigger locks in particular are pretty much foolproof.
Well, except that any kid over about 5 can defeat them trivially. I assume your knows how to open the safe and where the keys are to the locks.
A bit of peer pressure to "see the guns" and some decidedly bad judgement by the child is all it takes for a tragedy.
Do I think smart guns are the answer to all our problems? Of course not, but I don't see them as a horrible idea that must be stamped out either. The intense levels of objection to it on slashdot is simply tin-foil-hat levels of absurd.
For people who won't use either of the above, I doubt they'd buy a "smart gun" in the first place. They'll just get a Saturday night special and stick it into the bedroom table, loaded.
Agreed. But just because something won't stop 100% of the problem doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Lock up the firearm, or store it in a place unreachable by children.
There is no place unreachable by a child over about 5 years old. And locks? Your kids live with you, they'll know where the keys are. Combinations? Odds are they'll figure those out too. These are good measures to take, but hardly fool proof.
Teach any children that you have that firearms are not toys and should never be touched unless handed to them by you.
You mean my daughter and son would stop fighting if I just taught them that it was wrong and that they must respect each other. I've only been doing that for a decade and they still get into fights, so while its definitely the right approach, its hardly responsible parenting to assume your guns won't ever be misused simply because you taught your kids not to touch them.
Be a responsible gun owner and it will prevent more accidental shootings than this ever will.
So why isn't a fingerprint safety not just another part of being a responsible gun owner in a home with kids?
Plus if I already have the guns locked up and out of reach, I've already accepted that they will be much less accessible in the canonical "home invasion self defense" scenario... If accepting that is a part of responsible gun ownership why exactly is a secondary safety so objectionable to you?
"What does this accomplish?"
"Someone picking up a dropped gun in a fight and using it against its owner? " - That's one scenario.
But the main benefit I can see is that it would be that it would be another layer to help stops kids from accidentally firing the gun.
And in combat situations...REALLY bad idea... Lives will be lost to this.
A lot of people buy guns for sporting situations, not combat situations, and complaints about the guns effectiveness in a combat situation is about as relevant as complaints about a fencing rapier in a combat situation.
For some people, buying the gun to use in combat, yes, there are a lot of legitimate questions to be asked.
For a lot of people, buying the gun for other purposes, its a REALLY good idea.
When I pull the trigger, I want the gun to fire. I doubt this will be reliable enough to depend upon.
A gun bought for hunting? For target shooting? A gun that you keep at home properly locked up in a safe with the ammo stored separately? Why not get a smart gun? Worst case if it fails, an old soup can lives an extra day.
Its not like you were going to use it on criminals who bust into your bedroom in the middle of the night.
For the gun you keep loaded under your pillow at night, fine, I can see why you want that one to fire without fail. Your Rambo self defense fantasy, while I think its deeply flawed, is not an entirely invalid concern.
But not every gun is purchased for that purpose, and there's no reason for every gun to be as ideally suited for that purpose as possible.
Because when I pull the trigger, I'm not worried if some tiny percentage of the time the paper target doesn't get an immediate hole put into it. That "risk" is worth the extra safety to me.
And if I'm ever in a life or death situation where I must use that gun against a person... what of it? Would I rather have a gun without an extra safety? Sure. At that particular moment I'd also rather it be a standard issue M4 Carbine or some other purpose built tool for the job instead of a handgun I use for shooting targets. If wishes were horses, right?
In reality, if that situation were to actually arise I guess I'd be grateful to have anything on me at all, because usually I'm not carrying anything much more lethal than a plastic fork.
I do believe Neil_Brown was talking about iTunes crashing on Windows.
So was I. I don't really disagree with the flamebait mod I ate for it either though - it was somewhat deserved. :)
But still, 2004 would have been itunes version 4 on XP, and there is really no real excuse for that to be constantly crashing unless there were driver problems or the itunes database was corrupt, or (some of) the music files themselves were malformed in some way.
I would expect anyone who could set up a linux solution for themselves would be able to resolve why itunes was crashing on windows and fix it.
So when I read about people talking about how they switched to linux because x on windows crashed all the time... that's like having a car with a stalling problem and "solving it" by buying a kit car and building it. Sure that's great, but If you can do that, you could have fixed the issue with the original car if they had tried.
This isn't in the 90s anymore. Windows has been relatively stable for quite a while now.
What's even neater is that you'd be dead of old age before you could listen to all of it. (Feel free to run the numbers, I did. I assumed a 3 minute track, life expectancy of 100, that you started listening at birth, and that you don't need to sleep.) You still can't get through it all.)
Actually I'm not sure if that's neat or not... more sad really.
The most important "layer of trust" to use your phrase is to ensure that your EMAIL has a strong password, and that it is not the same as anything else. Your email password is the weak link, thanks to the forgot-password-reset (or god forbid password recovery) functionality of most other online properties.
And this raises a problem. Email is frequently used... so long pass phrases are inconvenient.
And worse, we have it saved in our phones, and on our laptops, so we don't have to re-enter it every 5 minutes. So if we lose our device, we're hosed. I don't want to put in a long passphrase everytime i unlock my PC, I want to enter in a long passphrase to unlock my phone even less. So while I have a good password on my email, if my phone is stolen I'm potentially hosed.
The more I think about it, password reset functionality by email is -inherently- a bad idea. We should almost really have a 2ndary "secure" email that we don't use except for managing password changes etc. The problem with that of course is that no systems support having a separate email just for password recovery, so if you set one up you'd miss all the other mail from the site that you would presumably want to receive.
I actually found it easier to use that iTunes on Windows, which, for me, crashed more often than it worked.
Its hard to be impressed with your geek cred for getting Linux to work well for you when you can't manage to run windows without turning it into a steaming pile...
After all, Ubuntu was released in 2004 and the only people who still really had issues with windows crashing in 2004 were people who didn't know what they were doing. :)
she went around to a number of doctors and asked them about it, they all told her not to worry, and it was better than finding out I was drinking.
Until you get picked up for trafficking and just blew your chances of ever having the career you wanted thanks to the criminal record you just picked up, not to mention the stint in jail.
Being pro-legalization of pot is perfectly rational.
Actually smoking up is still pretty stupid.
Still smoke pot, almost never drink.
Relativism at its finest. It being less stupid than something even worse is a pretty thin justification for doing something.
Your still smoking. Its not like that is good for you.
and it was better than finding out I was drinking.
Better than binge drinking sure. Better than having a glass of wine at dinner? Not so much. Most users of alcohol don't get drunk, or even 'buzzy' when they drink. That's not why they drink.
I've never met anyone who smokes pot in a parallel manner to the way most people consume alcohol. In my experience at least, people who smoke pot want to "feel it".
Not sure why I'm posting though... you've already convinced yourself of your self-righteousness, and your mind is likely completely closed on the subject.
You think someone signing up for a Netflix account with a low monthly fee doesn't realise that they're paying for a limited-time subscription and instead thinks they're buying a copy of everything they can watch on Netflix?
I don't think anyone with half a brain is confused about netflix.
What about the someone who "bought" Portal 2 on Steam? Or a box of Microsoft Office?
The servers go down, and you discover you don't have anything. The copy you have installed might continue to run... but you can't reinstall it after wiping the device. Office won't activate. Portal 2 demands you connect to a steam that isn't there.
What you don't have is a right to enjoy someone else's content on whatever terms you feel like or to enjoy it without compensating them at all for their work to create it. That's illegal whether DRM is used or not.
And with DRM I don't have the right to enjoy the content on whatever terms I like EVEN after I've paid for it.
Yes and no. Yes there would absolutely be rioting, but it -would- also solve the problem.
People would literally not be able to afford to get to work. So they would quit and find a closer job, or move closer to work. Or both.
Simultaneously employers would find their employees completely unwilling to show up for work unless they got substantial raises to cover the cost of showing up. Employers would embrace telecommuting, move their offices to locales more accessible to employees, etc.
Public transit would take off as a vastly less expensive alternative to commuting.
And people would flee the city en masse to work elsewhere. Abandoning suburban homes devalued by the fact that they are no longer inhabitable by people who plan to work in the city.
The market would sort it out.
Or the city is burnt to the ground in the riots, torn apart by crime due to the massive unemployment and severe turmoil that would ensue.
Either way, if you take a long enough view the problem is solved. I'd hate to live through the transition though, and would lynch anyone that suggested it.
Air is a public good because it is "both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others."
I take it you haven't been to a Chinese industrial area.
Actually... even the smog in LA gets pretty bad.
Maybe an individual can't reduce availability much all by himself, but if enough of them build factories without pollution controls you'll be carrying your air around in a bottle soon enough.
you can't enforce a termination fee without a contract enforcing it.
There is no contract for the phone service.
There is still contract if you take out a loan on a new phone that just covers that loan. If you want to exit the service early, you have to pay off the principle.
Is it 'misleading'? A little bit, yes, because they say its no contract, but if you want to pay for your phone over a 2 year period well then you still need a contract for THAT.
I think this is definitely a good direction for the industry to go, and its unfortunate that they are getting slapped a bit for it, but they do need to be clear that the service has no contract, but the purchase of a subsidized phone is essentially a separate loan agreement for that phone, and that you do have to sign a contract to take out that loan.
Private acts really are not done in places where they can be observed by others.
I completely disagree. The conversation at the next table at the restaurant may be within earshot of my table, and I may overhear a few things. But it is still a "semi-private conversation". The patrons at the next table over implicitly accept that their conversation is not "completely private" in a setting like that.
But that doesn't amount to implicit acceptance that I pull up a chair and start taking notes, nor does it amount to implicit acceptance that I hide a microphone in the candle to record everything they say and stream it to youtube.
The reality is that if it is done withing public view it can not be private.
Polite society dictates that even though I can hear things not intended for my ears that I don't put them on the internet. The law isn't so subtle as polite society, but that doesn't mean we should accept that anything not actually illegal is perfectly fine.
Of course if you want to be this much on the bleeding edge it's not $1000 once every five years, it's every time there's something a little bit better and sell the old one
typically, something like that is going to be annual, and not much more often than that. Plus they can recoup a decent amount reselling it. A gtx590 will still go for $350-450 on ebay.
yeah... the costco ref should be microsoft... revised it... missed the change. :p
1) They mention "Al Queda in Iran."
So far, the Al Queda link isn't that convincing to me, and mostly seems present to stir the pot, generate headlines, and make the arrest even more prestigious than it otherwise would be.
"Al Queda plot foiled!"
looks better in print than
"2 losers plan to derail a train foiled"
Seriously, they keep mentioning "the Al Queda link", but so far it sounds like Al Queda didn't do much of anything beyond someone known to be associated with Al Queda gave them a high five on the internet for the plot. /eyeroll
If a member of Anonymous, who is also a member of the Catholic church, and an employee at Microsoft gave me a high five when I told them I was going to launch a denial of service attack on Sony should the headline read?
"Catholic Church, Costco, and Anonymous all linked to terrorist plot..."
"A spokesman for Microsoft denies it was involved in a plot to damage competitor Sony, but notes that Sony has been the victim of data breaches before and that Xbox live customers are better protected"
"A spokesman claiming to be from anonymous said they did it, but his membership in the clandestine organization could not be verified."
"Pope refuses to comment on Church involvement in the Sony hacking incident..."
This stuff just writes itself. :p
Still not clear on why it only works on XP and not Win7 ..?
No device drivers for the interface is a common issue.
How many PCI, or even USB video capture solutions from around 2000 work with windows 7? How many venders released windows 7 64-bit driver updates for your 2002 TV tuner cards?
Some of the really old stuff is still using 16-bit software and serial port software that don't like USB adapters but will still run on XP if there is a built in COM port.
This type of stuff doesn't like Windows 7 at all, and doesn't like virtualization much either.
One product line im familiar with uses a pci frame grabber card that was discontinued years ago. You can't get replacement cards, never mind windows 7 drivers. The vendor has a retrofit to change the interface to USB but it isn't cheap, and it isn't compatible with the old software. So you have to buy the retrofit AND upgrade the software if you want to use Windows 7. Its cheaper than buying a new instrument, but as long as the old interface card still works, its even cheaper to just stay with XP.
Another has a belkin usb camera as a minor internal component for which windows 7 drivers don't exist, so the camera's have to be retrofitted for the instrument to work with windows 7.