I read this and went "this is news?" Then I read the supposition that nobody outside of Australia does this and I lost it. I vote this the stupidest article in many months.
I thankfully have never had a phone stolen, but my mother and several of my friends have. The carriers range from AT&T to Verizon to T-mobile to Sprint to Boost mobile, to Orange and O2 in the UK. Universally, they called up the carrier and the IMEI number has been blacklisted, or the equivalent for Sprint/Verizon/CDMA phones. Banning the IMSI, which is tied to the phone, makes it useless since it is no longer more than an iPod Touch (or equivalent Android device). Those bans are effective within a country, since they share lists with each other. One of my friends has actually gotten her phone back when the guy went to the local T-Mobile store and tried to buy a prepaid SIM and it didn't work. The store called the police from the back room and kept the guy busy, and they came and picked him up. Apparently it's policy for them since it happens pretty frequently.
This is all in the backwards US, with our relatively small GSM contingent. In other countries it's clearly much easier, since there's just a list.
I'm not a small guy, but I'm certainly not 6'8". We don't have monitors, being BLS, so I go by the 2" mark. That does tend to break bones, but again in the ones with osteoporosis (which is many of them). It's possible you're looking for a greater depth than I am, and I don't have enough to go by for whether that's an improvement or unimportant past a certain depth. Could also just be luck of the draw.
The frail little old folks, their ribs break if you do a sternal rub. I wasn't really including them, since I take it as given that doing CPR is going to break bones. They break hips if they turn suddenly, some of them, so it seems like cheating to count them. But of the healthy-ish (40-60yo) people I've seen who've had an AMI, their bones don't typically break. The exceptions are those who are so fat that you're not sure when you're even compressing the chest cavity, since it's like pushing on a pillow. Their bones break because I don't want to under-compress.
I agree that rib breakage is really common. I was more concerned with the characterization of it as an indicator that compressions were being done correctly. It's something that is likely to happen, but if you're doing compressions to an adequate depth, and you don't cave in a rib, the answer isn't "push harder".
If you do it by the book, place your hands correctly, and the bones are healthy, and you use the appropriate amount of force, you won't break any bones. If the person is elderly and has osteoporosis or something (which is obviously really common), or your hands slip a little off the sternum, or they're fat and you're not sure how hard you need to push, or you get a little overzealous, you'll break bones or separate the sternum.
It's not "supposed" to happen, if you do it by the book, but it's really common. I always go by, if they can bitch you out about how you did CPR on them, you've won. I've broken bones in only about a third of my CPRs, including about a third of my saves, so it's not like I'm just not pushing hard enough.
As far as field sobriety tests go, any good cop is more watching how you behave than how you do on the test, noticing the smell of alcohol on your breath, etc. Like the heel-to-toe walk - someone who is sober, even if they fail to do the test, will fail it in a very different way than somebody whose motor control is sufficiently impaired as to hinder driving. Same with the backwards-alphabet test - sober people will tend to do it in blocks of 4-5 letters, then stop and think about the next one, and drunk people will just ramble or repeat when their brain doesn't provide the answer. You can try itself the next time you're drunk (if you drink) and see how you do - it's quite distinct from a sober performance, and in a predictable way. The cop doesn't care about what you do - he cares about how you do it.
And for the false positives, I've never heard of a field sobriety test not being followed with a breathalyzer. Sometimes they delay until they're' back at the station if it's undeniably obvious, or admitted to.
The only instance I can find is when he filed a countersuit regarding a FOIA request trying to get private emails. It wasn't trying to silence dissent, that's just how you dispute a request.
I've met people who have biology degrees from quality institutions, and they don't 'believe' in evolution. I've met their professors, and I ask them how they could possibly get a degree in it, and their response was essentially that they had fully mastered the material... they simply didn't agree with it.
There's something to be said for that argument. But personally I believe the scientific method is "all-or-nothing" - either you agree that it works, or you don't.
Can't tell if you're trolling or really believe that nonsense. I'd go through and disprove each of your points, but I'm sick of it. Show some support for your assertions. That link you posted is 7 years old, and only applied to a very small part in the first place anyway.
But that's his point. That's what "Add a newsletter subscription form" means. If it doesn't do anything, then it's just a form. And if it puts it some random place in the database, then it didn't subscribe them to the newsletter and so it's not a newsletter subscription form.
If somebody came to me and said "Add a newsletter subscription form", I'd write a form that did what it said on the tin. Precision is good, but not when it's at the expense of understanding. The most precise definition of what you want is the source code, why not give them that? Oh, because you're paying them to translate your requirements into code.
I'm almost a socialist, but you're right on. The classic example is the electrical market - when the utility owned the plants, transmission, and distribution, they made their money by convincing the regulators they had to raise rates. Plant inefficiency actually helped them do this.
And in that form, they were a natural monopoly. But simply splitting up the three parts made everything vastly better, as long as the split was handled properly. But now that production is competitive and the transmission companies are common carriers, a company can pay for power to be created and transmitted to them - and there's competition for that business, so reliability has gone up and prices have fallen.
For anyone who hasn't read up on it, basically there's a graph of quantity vs marginal $/MW, sorted by $/MW so it's monotonically increasing (though not linearly). Things like solar and wind are at the very bottom (since they cost nothing to run), hydro, then nukes, coal, gas, oil, peakers (jet turbines), etc. Every day, they predict how much they'll need for the next day (plus a margin) and tell all the plants below it to be ready. The key is that everybody gets the market rate. The last plant to turn on makes no profit, and the solar plants make (near) 100% profit at any load. So there's an enormous incentive to move down that graph.
It works. It really does, for the past 10-15 years. Prices fall, reliability rises, plants get cleaner. It's because they're not making money by convincing regulators, they're making money by moving down that graph.
I should note that the company with the wires is still regulated, but even they've been split into physical maintenance and procurement divisions - you can swap out the procurement side and the small line fee is still present, but you're not buying your electricity from the local utility any more. You're buying it from someone else. The reason it's cheaper is because the local utility has to be the "provider of last resort"; they pick you up if you don't pay your bill to the other one, so they need to buy a little bit extra. And yes it's all the same power, but the dollars match everything up and if you go through it, it does actually make sense to think about paying for those exact megawatts to get to you (since they're all the same) and it simplifies things.
The tags aren't necessarily relevant to the outside world, and perhaps provide a little too much insight into the development process.
I once tagged something "shitFinallyFixedNow" at 4AM while working on a final project in school. Needless to say, I didn't push that tag to the professor....
In May 2011, the PBS program Need To Know cited a statement by Gary Samore, White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, in which he said, "we're glad they [the Iranians] are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them", offering "winking acknowledgement" of US involvement in Stuxnet. According to the British Daily Telegraph, a showreel that was played at a retirement party for the head of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Gabi Ashkenazi, included references to Stuxnet as one of his operational successes as the IDF chief of staff.
You were doing well until you went off on some weird tangent about factual relativism. Not sure where that came from. All "hard to dispute" means is that it's not easy to dispute - not that it can't be done. But there is significant evidence that nation-states were involved, and the propensity of evidence suggests two nation-states in particular.
I already said, I don't have any Apple products, except for a Macbook I bought because it was the cheapest computer with the specs at the time (I did have an educational discount). It ended up being about $100 cheaper than the comparable Dell or Lenovo, all discount prices, and has held up much better than any other laptop I've owned. Plus, it came with a real Unix OS to boot.
And the Galaxy Tab has a resolution of 1024x600, while the iPad is 1024x768. Not sure how you figure the Galaxy Tab as "much higher". Perhaps you're talking about the Galaxy Tab 10.1, which came out several months after the iPad 2 and is marginally faster (GPU-wise, the CPU seems nearly identical).
So I'll grant that v10.1 is a solid competitor, and even better in some respects (screen, GPU). But for the same price, it's hard to pick it over the iPad which has a ton of software and a better interface, and longer support (just look at the 10.1v)
Not sure why you're resorting to ad homenims on this one.
To be fair, it's hard to dispute that it wasn't Israeli code with significant US assistance. But I haven't really seen anybody "convicting" them over it.
I thought Stuxnet was a master stroke. Disrupt someone's nuclear capability as effectively as bombing, but without any collateral damage and covertly enough that they can't link it to you solidly enough to consider it an act of war.
I say this as somebody who doesn't have an iPad and can't figure out why people want one...
Apple really has pulled something off with the iPad that I think hasn't happened in a long time. There are finally serious competitors to the first iPad, but they're more expensive and not quite as slick. The Galaxy Tab is probably the closest right about now, but it's just not as good. Nothing comes close to the second one in terms of performance, and it's still just $500. This is aside from all the user-interface things that don't figure into the specs.
I've never seen anything like it. Apple released the first iPad almost 2 years ago and there aren't really any serious competitors. There are serious competitors to the first one, but they came out only just before the release of the second one! A brand new Galaxy Tab is still $500, is a lower resolution, and slower than it's also-$500 competitor!
The iPad is honestly the cheapest option, but the best anyway. A pretty interesting thing for Apple, even though their high prices are mostly a myth anyway (the cheapest laptop for the specs I wanted was a mac). As we see here, by cutting the price back (and even eating a loss) you lose functionality very quickly.
I suppose you could, but how well would it work? Presumably you'd connect the voice coil right to some sort of waterproof diaphragm, in which case it's just a super-durable speaker, but wouldn't that severely dull the frequency response - regardless of compensation?
More troubling, there's a lot less force pushing on that microphone than there is (potentially) on the speaker. And you can't really compensate for what you lack to begin with.
My usage of "need" was imprecise. You can wrap a phone in cellophane and it'll still work just fine, so it's not a necessity... but that's not really what I meant.
I disagree with the GP for many reasons, but connectorless phones would be awesome. And my inductive charging unit goes nearly as fast as my cable - full charge in an hour or two.
However, he does forget that phones need holes for audio and mic. And if you have any holes, what's the point?
God I remember that demo! It was actually a little spooky... they'd fly behind you and the hairs on the back of your neck would stand up because your brain was telling you there was a huge bee back there.
That Came on my brand new Compaq which had Windows 98, an AMD K6-3D at about 200mhz, 32MB of RAM, and a 4GB HDD.
Slashdot Mirror
I read this and went "this is news?" Then I read the supposition that nobody outside of Australia does this and I lost it. I vote this the stupidest article in many months.
I thankfully have never had a phone stolen, but my mother and several of my friends have. The carriers range from AT&T to Verizon to T-mobile to Sprint to Boost mobile, to Orange and O2 in the UK. Universally, they called up the carrier and the IMEI number has been blacklisted, or the equivalent for Sprint/Verizon/CDMA phones. Banning the IMSI, which is tied to the phone, makes it useless since it is no longer more than an iPod Touch (or equivalent Android device). Those bans are effective within a country, since they share lists with each other. One of my friends has actually gotten her phone back when the guy went to the local T-Mobile store and tried to buy a prepaid SIM and it didn't work. The store called the police from the back room and kept the guy busy, and they came and picked him up. Apparently it's policy for them since it happens pretty frequently.
This is all in the backwards US, with our relatively small GSM contingent. In other countries it's clearly much easier, since there's just a list.
Finally, Wikipedia talks about this like it's old news. It's literally in the third sentence of the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMEI#Blacklist_of_stolen_devices
I'm not a small guy, but I'm certainly not 6'8". We don't have monitors, being BLS, so I go by the 2" mark. That does tend to break bones, but again in the ones with osteoporosis (which is many of them). It's possible you're looking for a greater depth than I am, and I don't have enough to go by for whether that's an improvement or unimportant past a certain depth. Could also just be luck of the draw.
The frail little old folks, their ribs break if you do a sternal rub. I wasn't really including them, since I take it as given that doing CPR is going to break bones. They break hips if they turn suddenly, some of them, so it seems like cheating to count them. But of the healthy-ish (40-60yo) people I've seen who've had an AMI, their bones don't typically break. The exceptions are those who are so fat that you're not sure when you're even compressing the chest cavity, since it's like pushing on a pillow. Their bones break because I don't want to under-compress.
I agree that rib breakage is really common. I was more concerned with the characterization of it as an indicator that compressions were being done correctly. It's something that is likely to happen, but if you're doing compressions to an adequate depth, and you don't cave in a rib, the answer isn't "push harder".
If you do it by the book, place your hands correctly, and the bones are healthy, and you use the appropriate amount of force, you won't break any bones. If the person is elderly and has osteoporosis or something (which is obviously really common), or your hands slip a little off the sternum, or they're fat and you're not sure how hard you need to push, or you get a little overzealous, you'll break bones or separate the sternum.
It's not "supposed" to happen, if you do it by the book, but it's really common. I always go by, if they can bitch you out about how you did CPR on them, you've won. I've broken bones in only about a third of my CPRs, including about a third of my saves, so it's not like I'm just not pushing hard enough.
(EMT-B, AHA CPR instructor)
I saw this in London about 5 years ago. I suppose I could've been mistaken, but I remember being struck by it when I saw it.
As far as field sobriety tests go, any good cop is more watching how you behave than how you do on the test, noticing the smell of alcohol on your breath, etc. Like the heel-to-toe walk - someone who is sober, even if they fail to do the test, will fail it in a very different way than somebody whose motor control is sufficiently impaired as to hinder driving. Same with the backwards-alphabet test - sober people will tend to do it in blocks of 4-5 letters, then stop and think about the next one, and drunk people will just ramble or repeat when their brain doesn't provide the answer. You can try itself the next time you're drunk (if you drink) and see how you do - it's quite distinct from a sober performance, and in a predictable way. The cop doesn't care about what you do - he cares about how you do it.
And for the false positives, I've never heard of a field sobriety test not being followed with a breathalyzer. Sometimes they delay until they're' back at the station if it's undeniably obvious, or admitted to.
In the UK, the green light blinks before it turns yellow. I've always wondered why we don't do that here.
The only instance I can find is when he filed a countersuit regarding a FOIA request trying to get private emails. It wasn't trying to silence dissent, that's just how you dispute a request.
Any others?
Such as?
I've met people who have biology degrees from quality institutions, and they don't 'believe' in evolution. I've met their professors, and I ask them how they could possibly get a degree in it, and their response was essentially that they had fully mastered the material... they simply didn't agree with it.
There's something to be said for that argument. But personally I believe the scientific method is "all-or-nothing" - either you agree that it works, or you don't.
Sounds like the SPD fucked up big, and the feds came in to sort it out because they broke the law.
I fail to see how that's a police state.
Can't tell if you're trolling or really believe that nonsense. I'd go through and disprove each of your points, but I'm sick of it. Show some support for your assertions. That link you posted is 7 years old, and only applied to a very small part in the first place anyway.
But that's his point. That's what "Add a newsletter subscription form" means. If it doesn't do anything, then it's just a form. And if it puts it some random place in the database, then it didn't subscribe them to the newsletter and so it's not a newsletter subscription form.
If somebody came to me and said "Add a newsletter subscription form", I'd write a form that did what it said on the tin. Precision is good, but not when it's at the expense of understanding. The most precise definition of what you want is the source code, why not give them that? Oh, because you're paying them to translate your requirements into code.
I'm almost a socialist, but you're right on. The classic example is the electrical market - when the utility owned the plants, transmission, and distribution, they made their money by convincing the regulators they had to raise rates. Plant inefficiency actually helped them do this.
And in that form, they were a natural monopoly. But simply splitting up the three parts made everything vastly better, as long as the split was handled properly. But now that production is competitive and the transmission companies are common carriers, a company can pay for power to be created and transmitted to them - and there's competition for that business, so reliability has gone up and prices have fallen.
For anyone who hasn't read up on it, basically there's a graph of quantity vs marginal $/MW, sorted by $/MW so it's monotonically increasing (though not linearly). Things like solar and wind are at the very bottom (since they cost nothing to run), hydro, then nukes, coal, gas, oil, peakers (jet turbines), etc. Every day, they predict how much they'll need for the next day (plus a margin) and tell all the plants below it to be ready. The key is that everybody gets the market rate. The last plant to turn on makes no profit, and the solar plants make (near) 100% profit at any load. So there's an enormous incentive to move down that graph.
It works. It really does, for the past 10-15 years. Prices fall, reliability rises, plants get cleaner. It's because they're not making money by convincing regulators, they're making money by moving down that graph.
I should note that the company with the wires is still regulated, but even they've been split into physical maintenance and procurement divisions - you can swap out the procurement side and the small line fee is still present, but you're not buying your electricity from the local utility any more. You're buying it from someone else. The reason it's cheaper is because the local utility has to be the "provider of last resort"; they pick you up if you don't pay your bill to the other one, so they need to buy a little bit extra. And yes it's all the same power, but the dollars match everything up and if you go through it, it does actually make sense to think about paying for those exact megawatts to get to you (since they're all the same) and it simplifies things.
Well, considering the DOJ is part of the Executive Branch, he does. Indirectly, through the Attorney General, but he's still part of the Cabinet.
This is evidenced by the few high-profile times where the President has instructed the DOJ to stop prosecuting things (making them de facto legal)
Wasn't this the charge against the woman in the Megan Meier suicide? As I recall, it didn't work. The judge essentially said that the law was too vague to mean that ToS violations counted as unauthorized access
The DoJ can say whatever want, but they'll have a hard time of it. A federal court set precedent saying the opposite.
The tags aren't necessarily relevant to the outside world, and perhaps provide a little too much insight into the development process.
I once tagged something "shitFinallyFixedNow" at 4AM while working on a final project in school. Needless to say, I didn't push that tag to the professor....
(Wikipedia and its citations)
You were doing well until you went off on some weird tangent about factual relativism. Not sure where that came from. All "hard to dispute" means is that it's not easy to dispute - not that it can't be done. But there is significant evidence that nation-states were involved, and the propensity of evidence suggests two nation-states in particular.
I already said, I don't have any Apple products, except for a Macbook I bought because it was the cheapest computer with the specs at the time (I did have an educational discount). It ended up being about $100 cheaper than the comparable Dell or Lenovo, all discount prices, and has held up much better than any other laptop I've owned. Plus, it came with a real Unix OS to boot.
And the Galaxy Tab has a resolution of 1024x600, while the iPad is 1024x768. Not sure how you figure the Galaxy Tab as "much higher". Perhaps you're talking about the Galaxy Tab 10.1, which came out several months after the iPad 2 and is marginally faster (GPU-wise, the CPU seems nearly identical).
So I'll grant that v10.1 is a solid competitor, and even better in some respects (screen, GPU). But for the same price, it's hard to pick it over the iPad which has a ton of software and a better interface, and longer support (just look at the 10.1v)
Not sure why you're resorting to ad homenims on this one.
To be fair, it's hard to dispute that it wasn't Israeli code with significant US assistance. But I haven't really seen anybody "convicting" them over it.
I thought Stuxnet was a master stroke. Disrupt someone's nuclear capability as effectively as bombing, but without any collateral damage and covertly enough that they can't link it to you solidly enough to consider it an act of war.
Genius, IMHO.
I say this as somebody who doesn't have an iPad and can't figure out why people want one...
Apple really has pulled something off with the iPad that I think hasn't happened in a long time. There are finally serious competitors to the first iPad, but they're more expensive and not quite as slick. The Galaxy Tab is probably the closest right about now, but it's just not as good. Nothing comes close to the second one in terms of performance, and it's still just $500. This is aside from all the user-interface things that don't figure into the specs.
I've never seen anything like it. Apple released the first iPad almost 2 years ago and there aren't really any serious competitors. There are serious competitors to the first one, but they came out only just before the release of the second one! A brand new Galaxy Tab is still $500, is a lower resolution, and slower than it's also-$500 competitor!
The iPad is honestly the cheapest option, but the best anyway. A pretty interesting thing for Apple, even though their high prices are mostly a myth anyway (the cheapest laptop for the specs I wanted was a mac). As we see here, by cutting the price back (and even eating a loss) you lose functionality very quickly.
I suppose you could, but how well would it work? Presumably you'd connect the voice coil right to some sort of waterproof diaphragm, in which case it's just a super-durable speaker, but wouldn't that severely dull the frequency response - regardless of compensation?
More troubling, there's a lot less force pushing on that microphone than there is (potentially) on the speaker. And you can't really compensate for what you lack to begin with.
My usage of "need" was imprecise. You can wrap a phone in cellophane and it'll still work just fine, so it's not a necessity... but that's not really what I meant.
I like being able to use Bluetooth. I wouldn't much like being forced to.
I disagree with the GP for many reasons, but connectorless phones would be awesome. And my inductive charging unit goes nearly as fast as my cable - full charge in an hour or two.
However, he does forget that phones need holes for audio and mic. And if you have any holes, what's the point?
It's perjury. Which is ostensibly better than fines.
Here's hoping
God I remember that demo! It was actually a little spooky... they'd fly behind you and the hairs on the back of your neck would stand up because your brain was telling you there was a huge bee back there.
That Came on my brand new Compaq which had Windows 98, an AMD K6-3D at about 200mhz, 32MB of RAM, and a 4GB HDD.
And now I feel old...