You assume that people value their time and the money equally. But this is trivially false. Some people really want to make every last penny they can, and others just want to make enough to comfortably support them and their family, with plenty left over for hobbies and savings. If there is a sufficient supply of the latter type, go nuts - but if there isn't, and you won't negotiate with the former group, you will lose them assuming others will go higher, which they will due to the lack of talent. How do you know which type is which? Easy - they'll tell you by trying to negotiate. You don't pay them more because you value their negotiation skill, you pay them more because that's what you have to pay to get that person. You might as well ask why car dealers should reward good negotiators with cheaper prices.
I didn't negotiate when I got my job, since I fall in the latter group and was happy with the offer. Sure I'd like more money if it landed in my lap, but honestly it'd only serve to fill my savings a bit faster and I think my compensation is fair. Other things are more important to me. If I wanted to fight tooth and nail for every cent than I'd do that at hiring time and relentlessly seek other jobs afterwards, jumping ship at the first sign of a higher offer.
This is a stupid idea. Since people don't value money the same way, they will have to pick a number that will be too high for some and too low for others. They will lose the "too low" folks, and they will overpay the "too high" folks who were willing to work for less. Neither is good business.
I am frankly offended by the idea that I need protecting (and then offended again when I'm the 'oppressor' despite facing the same 'problem'). Apparently unlike modern-day feminists, I believe that women are smart enough that they can decide for themselves whether a particular job offer is worth their labor.
Short answer: no. But if you're on the ground they probably don't need to, strictly speaking.
Much better to be in the plane and refuse to land. Don't be like this guy and cooperate. Though if he didn't land, apparently Sgt. Yosemite Sam was going to start firing his handgun at the glider 3000 feet in the air (and hoping the bullets went... where, exactly, when they missed?) so take that with a grain of salt.
There are two powers that can compel a plane to land: 1) the FAA and 2) a military intercept (which itself only works because they'll just shoot you down if you don't obey). Well they're really the same because if you don't comply with #1 they'll just use #2. Local, state, or even federal law enforcement cannot compel an aircraft to land - the FAA has sole authority for the country's airspace.
Now if you're on the ground, of course, they can put their hands on you regardless of whether they're technically allowed to. If the drone pilot was licensed appropriately then you'd have a serious case on your hands, but there's like 20 of those in the country at the moment so odds are this will be nabbing people violating the regs to begin with and the FAA will probably not bother to get involved.
I'm not saying everything should be for me, but what more is there to say about DST, even in relation to IT issues? It's just the same stuff we've been talking about - on Slashdot and elsewhere - forever. Yes, it makes things inconvenient, and yes some people don't like it and want to get rid of it. We'll have the people railing against it while slightly fewer say "actually I kind of like it", and some guys in the corner will say "we should just use GMT for everything" and it'll all happen again - right on schedule! - in ~8 months. There's nothing even different (like a new study) this year, just "remember this is happening again and how it makes you mad? let's all complain in the comments!". All the linked things are from 2014 or earlier. Might as well have an article about how some people still don't like Windows 8, or that taxes are due on April 15.
It just feels like a Two Minute's Hate at this point, and I object to that on principle.
I don't generally complain about articles on Slashdot, but this is ridiculous. It reminds me of that Simpsons episode with the newspaper having the front-page headline "Christmas Occurs". I like reading about some not-strictly-tech stuff on Slashdot, but can we please not have articles to remind us of something that's marked on the calendar?
I don't think it's fair to compare Snowden to this genius. Leaving Assange aside (yeah, I'm lazy and he's slightly harder to defend), Snowden alerted the world to serious problems with our various intelligence groups who were doing something quite widely considered to be unethical at best, and probably illegal. And if you're going to say that it wasn't up to him to make that decision, and others (the ones in charge) didn't think it was unethical so he should've just followed his orders, I'm pretty sure we decided as a planet to hang people despite that logic before.
You can prove them wrong but it's like playing chess with a pigeon - you think you're winning, and then the pigeon shits on the board and flies off. Point being that reasoning with these people is a waste of everyone's time because their concerns are not based on reason, so reason can't defuse them. More likely that they'll see you as some sort of government operative, the existence of which PROVES that they're right!
That said - why is this guy crazy, you ask? Well first of all:
There are ways to go about it, but this isn't it...
I'm curious, which ways are that?
Well clearly it's not his way either - it's not like we're all talking about that time we might have had a global positioning system until this guy ruined it, is it? The GPS literally reached "initial operating capacity" (continuous worldwide coverage) on schedule about a year later. I never even heard of this guy until now.
More broadly, sure the GPS is a military invention and is run by the military (though overseen by a committee, and other GNSS are run by different militaries with no particular love for the US). But it didn't take long for it to be opened up to civilians - only one satellite had been launched! By now even Selective Availability has been turned off, and can not be turned on (the new satellites can't do it). Yes, the SA thing was after this guy's rampage, but he's sticking with his story, so I'll count it.
GPS is one of the greatest peacetime things that military technology has ever done (in a long line of technical advances fueled by the military). Think about it - the average person now has at least two devices that know where they are in absolute terms on the Earth's surface, to within a few feet. This has never happened before! People had maps, which are a big enough breakthrough on their own, but are comparatively inaccurate, need to be kept up-to-date, and require some skill to use - and you have to know basically where you are relative to identifiable landmarks in order to use them. Planes can fly routings more precisely, or even directly to the destination, saving fuel and freeing up congested airways. And instrument approaches are now possible to virtually any point on earth - no expensive phased-array radio antenna on the ground to maintain, just define a few points in a database and publish a chart. And all that thousands of years of naval navigation technology (like the sextant, or the clock)? - unnecessary, except perhaps as a backup. Cars with turn-by-turn directions, virtually eliminating the big road atlas or fold-out maps everyone had to have and mess with while driving (and far more accurate that your aunt's "turn right by the, well there used to be a farm there but now it's just a field" directions). Track logs of running and biking sessions to evaluate speed, performance, and trends. Nanosecond-scale timekeeping, allowing for previously-impossible management of the power grid and other distributed systems. Slightly in the future, self-driving cars - and more we haven't even imagined yet. By comparison the military's usage is unsophisticated and unthreatening - it's just a lighter-weight replacement for systems they already had like LORAN and allows bombs to be placed somewhat more accurately and easily than e.g. a laser sight.
Point being, he's arguing (still!) for the destruction of something that would be a far, far greater loss to peaceful civilians around the world than it would be for the military. With all the countries that know how to shoot down satellites nowadays (why did they develop that? hmm), does he think the militaries don't have a conti
Glad he's apparently (basically) alright. I fly small planes and they're incredibly awesome, and very liberating and fun, but... yeah, they have only one engine and if it quits you have a problem ("it's a fan to keep the pilot cool - turn it off and watch him sweat!"). Every pilot is constantly keeping an eye out for landing sites, and unlike non-pilots we love heights because it means gliding distance to make it to one. Takeoff is obviously the worst time to lose an engine, and in some ways the most likely - you're really demanding 100% of the performance of the engine, propeller, etc, at a low airspeed (=less cooling) and you're doing it for the first time since you got in the plane. You might think you can make it back to the airport - but that's such a bad idea it's called "the impossible turn" since you'll waste some of your precious lift making the turn. This is why we check our engines thoroughly - regularly with maintenance, and in particular with a "run-up" to high power immediately before takeoff to check the gauges and systems at that high throttle position. But stuff still goes wrong every once in a while, and then you have to do what you can. A bunch of pilot coworkers are in the area and one swung by to check it out. He said that the (wood) prop was intact, which suggests that it wasn't even turning ("windmilling") at impact time, and that he did a bang-up job landing that thing with no engine - golf courses aren't great compared to say an empty field, but if those are in short supply they do quite well. A golf course near my airport is my contingency plan as well - let's hope I never need it.
And lest anybody think otherwise, Harrison Ford is quite an experienced airplane and helicopter pilot, with thousands of hours. He even did his own flying in a movie where he played a pilot (apparently this gave the insurance company a heart attack and he had to fight them on it). So he probably handled it better than most pilots would.
The movie is about a recluse with a dark secret, who, despite not fitting in and being generally weird, finds a purpose for himself and a way to make a contribution to the war, only to see his greatest accomplishments hidden from view and perverted by the security state.
Sigh. I saw the movie and it was a well-executed film, but it was essentially about a made-up person. I agree with your summary of the fictional character, but not the man. Turing was certainly eccentric, but he had friends, was liked by his colleagues, and had a good sense of humor. As terrible as his chemical castration was, it certainly didn't ruin his mind - he did some interesting work on mathematical biology inspired by those very changes. And he died more than a year after the end of his "treatment". And it was recast as an "us-vs-them" story, which simply isn't true - thousands of people were working on breaking Enigma and made steady progress throughout the war, with the support of the entire chain of command (in particular the Commander Denniston).
He's such an interesting person with a fascinating story - it's a real damn shame they basically invented a character to give his name.
Re:Let's see if HTTP/2 is adopted faster than IPv6
on
HTTP/2 Finalized
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· Score: 1
There are fewer parties - a few servers and a few clients, both which are updated fairly frequently (the servers because admins, the clients because auto-update) are the only ones that matter. Google already supports HTTP/2 (nee SPDY) so a huge percentage of internet traffic is already set up to use it as soon as browsers update (Chrome has had it as SPDY for years, Firefox has it or will soon).
The v6 slowness was always the ISP (both on the client and server) and the CPE. Now that most of the big US ISPs have their heads on straight, things are looking better for v6 - but Joe Blow bought a WRT54G in 2005 and damned if he'll replace it - it works fine, after all, and who can blame him?
Despite all this, v6 is actually happening. About 5.8% of all Google's global traffic is v6, and that's more than double from last year. In the US, it's more like 13.9% - which puts us 3rd globally (a rare thing in which the US is internet-competitive). Interestingly, if you zoom in the global graph it's clear that workplaces are far behind residential connections (weekends are a big jump).
The White House is prohibited airspace (P-56). There are no conditions in which a civilian would be allowed to operate there (otherwise it would merely be restricted airspace, and you could obtain permission). You pretty much have to be the President's helicopter to be allowed in (that is, convince the folks with the missiles to not shoot you down, which they will do if you don't comply with their fighter-jet intercept).
The rules for operating in the DC SFRA can not be complied with by any drone on the market today (they require radio communication and a discrete transponder code).
If they had developed a small patch for the problem, I'm pretty sure OEMs wouldn't have a problem pushing it to the users.
Hahahahahahahahaha, seriously? This is fixed in 4.4 and the OEMs aren't rolling that out. What makes you think they'll roll out anything, especially because most manufacturers have a long history of not rolling stuff out?
I'm guessing Google just got tired of making patches nobody would ever see.
Yeah, I have no idea why gender is relevant here specifically. But in my experience women are more put off by the threat of mediocrity, so perhaps being told "you'll probably never truly excel in this" is more off-putting to them. Men are generally fairly mulish as well, and will (in my experience, of myself as well as others) generally take discouragement as a challenge. It's a cliche, but there's some truth to the idea that "you tell a man not to do something, that's the first thing he wants to do" while women take more of a cue from peers as to a reasonable, safe path. Some of those stubborn men will succeed, but it'll be painful for the rest.
Men should, but historically (or at least the last ~200 years) men were expected to work outside the house (i.e., for money) and provide food and shelter for his family, and women were expected to keep the house in order and raise the kids. But it's been a common complaint of men - as long as people have been asking, anyway - that they weren't around for more of their kids' lives. The damage of social expectations cuts both ways here.
It's foolish and offensive to suggest that women weren't working all those years - of course they were, and hard, too. Someone has to do this work, though, and when both parents work it's left to cleaning services and daycare and so on, which has its own concerns. Companies are starting to get better about paternity leave, though, which is helping a bit. Men are actually picking up these "domestic" tasks at an increasing rate - though unfortunately it's more because men were disproportionately hurt in the workplace these past few years than an actual conscious choice. Still, there's biological factors that mean that women will likely outnumber men in their children's care - between breastfeeding, the rigors of childbirth, and hormonal effects that we call "bonding", mothers tend to be more attached than fathers. Not that fathers aren't strongly attached to their children, but oxytocin is a powerful hormone and most of its effects are female-specific...
I think more people would be at home with the kids if they could be, actually. Usually 2 parents need to work nowadays just to break into the middle class... Now that the stigma of "house-husband" is deteriorating somewhat, one wonders if men wouldn't prefer to stay home if their wife could provide for the whole family. I know I'd consider it, playing video games while the kids are at school and the housework is done... or if I got bored I could freelance with no pressure to actually make lots of money....
Yeah, the first one was left over from editing, my mistake. I meant to move it to the second for emphasis but forgot to remove the first usage - I cringed a bit when I saw that it was still there.
And I did mean 'actually true in all cases' - to my knowledge, at least, every provider that has implemented some sort of payment for better service has ended up degrading service for non-payees. Even if only passively by foregoing needed infrastructure upgrades unless somebody else foots the bill.
Sure. The only problem with that world is that literally the immediately obvious next step is to degrade service pending a payment. This is already happening in literally every place that has such a scheme as the one you describe. That's the problem with non-neutrality - once an ISP realizes they can get paid for better service, they will do everything in their not inconsiderable power to force every provider's hand.
Hard to argue with that advice - if you don't want to be subject to the laws of another jurisdiction, you should avoid that jurisdiction in general. It's like the bubblegum laws in Singapore - sure, you probably don't agree with it, but if you go there (or keep your bubble-gum there) you should expect to be bound by them.
Google makes no secret of the fact that they are a US company and bound by US laws, though there is an industry-wide effort to convince the legal system that, for data they merely have custody of, the "jurisdiction" should be that of the user in question (see the current Microsoft case, with its numerous amicus curaie briefs)
Are you fucking kidding me? They got served a lawful warrant and spent 2.5yr to fight it and had to eventually comply. Look, you may prefer an anarchy where people can just get away with crimes, but I prefer the Bill of Rights:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If that was followed - and it seems like it was - then what's the problem? Just because there's abuse going on doesn't mean that everything - or even a preponderance - is abuse.
- Warrants are an important and useful tool for law enforcement to keep peace and order in a society, and need to be possible to execute when given lawfully.
- Law enforcement (specifically the TLAs) has been abusing various methods of extracting information from individuals, companies, and networks.
Both of these things can be true at the same time. That's what makes this, and most other matters of public policy, complicated. It is adolescent stupidity (or libertarianism, but I repeat myself) to think that we could just do away with the government's ability to execute a lawful warrant without severe repercussions. We can and should fight against their improper use, just as we can and should fight the improper use of the rest of our laws, but just like (most of) the rest of our laws they are there for a reason.
Yeah, but the WORD type hasn't had a relationship to the actual word size for 20 years. As you said upthread "The only reason it's called a WORD on Windows is because of legacy backwards-compatibility issues."
It was stupid for them to lock processor-dependent stuff into the API and it means you get these ridiculous anachronisms. Especially ridiculous that "WORD" is intended to mean a fixed-size value, when "word" is defined by its processor-dependence. The API is full of this nonsense - WPARAM and LPARAM originally referred to WORD- and LONG-length parameters, respectively, but now they're both 32 bit. LPCSTR - what the hell is a long pointer? So by now it's just random junk If they wanted a 16-bit value, they should've called it an int16 or a twobyte or... hell, something that described what it actually was. But no, they were intending to describe the actual word size, and then got caught with their pants down when it changed (as anybody could see it would).
Microsoft is to be commended for their backwards-compatibility, but it makes these poor design choices especially visible. By contrast, the POSIX API is almost completely free of anything machine-dependent, to the point that it can be a bit tricky to use sometimes "when the rubber meets the road". But at least it's consistent.
You know, 'word' actually means something, and it never referred to a particular number of bits - it was always a property of the architecture. Generally, word size == register size == memory address == unit of memory that can be operated on. 32-bit machines are 32-bit because they have 32 bit registers, and the size of a memory address is 32 bits long (=4GB), and you can't move less than 32 bits to/from RAM.
So, yeah, it absolutely depends on the CPU, because it's the fundamental unit of the CPU. It's actually hard to imagine a less useless specification...
So by analogy, if I every time I saw you I grabbed your crotch[1] you shouldn't get offended, because I never meant to offend you.
Probably not. I mean, it'd be a bit weird, but I'd set the boundary, explain that it made me uncomfortable, and expect it to not happen again. If it continued it would be something other than offense.
Honestly, I don't get offended very much because I consider "offense" to be intricately tied with intent. If someone spat at me or flipped me off or something, I'd take it as it was intended. There's lots of explicit ways various cultures have to indicate "I intend to offend you", and in my culture, those are two pretty good ones. But other cultures have different ones, and they generally don't apply to outsiders. A Frenchman wouldn't be offended if you shied away from a "faire la bise", unless it was your cultural norm as well. The Japanese have a very complex business card etiquette. Someone doing business in Japan regularly should make a point of getting to know this, but a one-off instance of a Japanese person interacting with someone from a different culture shouldn't be offended if somebody doesn't realize that just taking the card and pocketing it after a glance is considered offensive. Indian culture has a thing about shaking with the left hand since that's the... "wiping hand" (gotta do something if you have no toilet paper). These are generally amusing tidbits shared later (by either party), not tense moments.
It's hard enough to get offense straight when it's entire cultures - when it's random individual's sensitivities it becomes impossible. I will behave in a way I believe to be appropriate - if it offends you, the onus is on you to realize that I didn't mean to offend, because that's how interpersonal relationships work. I will make a good faith effort to avoid doing that in the future - if it's reasonably accommodable - to avoid repeating it with you, but I expect you to forgive my lapses since this stuff is hard (especially for me).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's a lot of people who can't tolerate other people behaving in ways contrary to their exact wishes. We generally call them "two year olds".
I can't imagine being offended more than a few times a year. It sounds exhausting - that is, with my definition of offense. But since you're explicitly saying that intent doesn't count, clearly we disagree. I'd call your definition more like "mild irritation". And I don't think I can (and have so far failed to) really interact with you, or people like you - I mean that 100% seriously. I don't mean to presume to tell you when you or anybody else should be offended, but I think you, bible-thumpers w.r.t evolution, and the anti-gays have a lot in common when it comes to offense thresholds...
Bull shit. Sorry, but as a pasty-white American I commonly get asked this - and in this exact form:
Someone: Where are you from? Me: New Jersey, northern part Someone: No, I mean your parents/ancestors/family/etc Me: Oh, a bit Irish, a bit German, [family history]
You know why? It's because we're a nation of immigrants. Almost everybody here including me and her "comes from" somewhere else. The only reason I don't often get asked specifically about my parents is because I look further down the generations. I'm sure my great-great-grandmother (a German 'Weber' in Ohio) was asked about her parents' origin since she looked rather more German than I do.
If someone is interpreting this as a "microaggression" in the absence of any... you know, aggression - then they can not be interacted with because they have a worldview that everybody is out to get them. And that's really sad. It's a victimhood that's enforced - if you don't feel like a victim, it's just because you've internalized the attitudes or it's a "microaggression" you're missing or something. It's like no-true-Scotsman applied to feeling like crap. I mean, you're a woman/Asian/black/etc - you must be a victim somehow, right?
I'm not kidding. It's becoming increasingly dangerous to have conversations with people lest you slip off the cliff. It's a shame because frank conversations in good faith is the best way we know of to dispel prejudice... you know, friendships with people unlike yourself and so on.
Sorry, that should have been "a very small fraction, like the amount you could stick a pole into" followed by the quote:
If you're a pilot, but not a crop duster, what are you doing flying at low altitudes when not around an airport?
--
Anyways, I just thought I'd add that I really don't have anything against drones or RC planes or anything as such, just their reckless operation. Just as the big jumboes tolerate me, I figure I should tolerate them. But my life is on the line, so I expect them to know the rules that keep us safe. I trained for 70 hours of flying time, and took a written, oral, and practical test to get my flying privileges. I know the FARs and so does everybody else in the sky, and we all follow them or people die. I'm not being melodramatic, people die all the time. Here's one from a few weeks ago where the guy likely (the report's not done) broke the rules and paid the price. The regulations are absolutely written in blood.
RC folks practice pretty hard as well, and they have a very good community that's interested in interoperating with "the system" and keeping everyone safe. The drone guys - as has been demonstrated - do not. The growing list of encounters that this article is about shows that self-policing isn't working. All I want is for people to know the rules and be held accountable to them - which is pretty much why the FAA is working their way up to requiring some sort of certification.
I cannot emphasize this enough - I consider the drone fliers to be the equivalent of a drunk driver, except worse since at least a drunk is also risking his own neck. They're going to kill someone, and it's only a matter of time.
Slashdot Mirror
You assume that people value their time and the money equally. But this is trivially false. Some people really want to make every last penny they can, and others just want to make enough to comfortably support them and their family, with plenty left over for hobbies and savings. If there is a sufficient supply of the latter type, go nuts - but if there isn't, and you won't negotiate with the former group, you will lose them assuming others will go higher, which they will due to the lack of talent. How do you know which type is which? Easy - they'll tell you by trying to negotiate. You don't pay them more because you value their negotiation skill, you pay them more because that's what you have to pay to get that person. You might as well ask why car dealers should reward good negotiators with cheaper prices.
I didn't negotiate when I got my job, since I fall in the latter group and was happy with the offer. Sure I'd like more money if it landed in my lap, but honestly it'd only serve to fill my savings a bit faster and I think my compensation is fair. Other things are more important to me. If I wanted to fight tooth and nail for every cent than I'd do that at hiring time and relentlessly seek other jobs afterwards, jumping ship at the first sign of a higher offer.
This is a stupid idea. Since people don't value money the same way, they will have to pick a number that will be too high for some and too low for others. They will lose the "too low" folks, and they will overpay the "too high" folks who were willing to work for less. Neither is good business.
I am frankly offended by the idea that I need protecting (and then offended again when I'm the 'oppressor' despite facing the same 'problem'). Apparently unlike modern-day feminists, I believe that women are smart enough that they can decide for themselves whether a particular job offer is worth their labor.
I work on Public DNS, and we have that printed out and put up on our wall. Made our day when that came out :)
Short answer: no. But if you're on the ground they probably don't need to, strictly speaking.
Much better to be in the plane and refuse to land. Don't be like this guy and cooperate. Though if he didn't land, apparently Sgt. Yosemite Sam was going to start firing his handgun at the glider 3000 feet in the air (and hoping the bullets went... where, exactly, when they missed?) so take that with a grain of salt.
There are two powers that can compel a plane to land: 1) the FAA and 2) a military intercept (which itself only works because they'll just shoot you down if you don't obey). Well they're really the same because if you don't comply with #1 they'll just use #2. Local, state, or even federal law enforcement cannot compel an aircraft to land - the FAA has sole authority for the country's airspace.
Now if you're on the ground, of course, they can put their hands on you regardless of whether they're technically allowed to. If the drone pilot was licensed appropriately then you'd have a serious case on your hands, but there's like 20 of those in the country at the moment so odds are this will be nabbing people violating the regs to begin with and the FAA will probably not bother to get involved.
I'm not saying everything should be for me, but what more is there to say about DST, even in relation to IT issues? It's just the same stuff we've been talking about - on Slashdot and elsewhere - forever. Yes, it makes things inconvenient, and yes some people don't like it and want to get rid of it. We'll have the people railing against it while slightly fewer say "actually I kind of like it", and some guys in the corner will say "we should just use GMT for everything" and it'll all happen again - right on schedule! - in ~8 months. There's nothing even different (like a new study) this year, just "remember this is happening again and how it makes you mad? let's all complain in the comments!". All the linked things are from 2014 or earlier. Might as well have an article about how some people still don't like Windows 8, or that taxes are due on April 15.
It just feels like a Two Minute's Hate at this point, and I object to that on principle.
I don't generally complain about articles on Slashdot, but this is ridiculous. It reminds me of that Simpsons episode with the newspaper having the front-page headline "Christmas Occurs". I like reading about some not-strictly-tech stuff on Slashdot, but can we please not have articles to remind us of something that's marked on the calendar?
Didn't Gears go away because its features got folded into HTML5? Seems like a much better solution than an optional proprietary plugin.
I don't think it's fair to compare Snowden to this genius. Leaving Assange aside (yeah, I'm lazy and he's slightly harder to defend), Snowden alerted the world to serious problems with our various intelligence groups who were doing something quite widely considered to be unethical at best, and probably illegal. And if you're going to say that it wasn't up to him to make that decision, and others (the ones in charge) didn't think it was unethical so he should've just followed his orders, I'm pretty sure we decided as a planet to hang people despite that logic before.
You can prove them wrong but it's like playing chess with a pigeon - you think you're winning, and then the pigeon shits on the board and flies off. Point being that reasoning with these people is a waste of everyone's time because their concerns are not based on reason, so reason can't defuse them. More likely that they'll see you as some sort of government operative, the existence of which PROVES that they're right!
That said - why is this guy crazy, you ask? Well first of all:
There are ways to go about it, but this isn't it...
I'm curious, which ways are that?
Well clearly it's not his way either - it's not like we're all talking about that time we might have had a global positioning system until this guy ruined it, is it? The GPS literally reached "initial operating capacity" (continuous worldwide coverage) on schedule about a year later. I never even heard of this guy until now.
More broadly, sure the GPS is a military invention and is run by the military (though overseen by a committee, and other GNSS are run by different militaries with no particular love for the US). But it didn't take long for it to be opened up to civilians - only one satellite had been launched! By now even Selective Availability has been turned off, and can not be turned on (the new satellites can't do it). Yes, the SA thing was after this guy's rampage, but he's sticking with his story, so I'll count it.
GPS is one of the greatest peacetime things that military technology has ever done (in a long line of technical advances fueled by the military). Think about it - the average person now has at least two devices that know where they are in absolute terms on the Earth's surface, to within a few feet. This has never happened before! People had maps, which are a big enough breakthrough on their own, but are comparatively inaccurate, need to be kept up-to-date, and require some skill to use - and you have to know basically where you are relative to identifiable landmarks in order to use them. Planes can fly routings more precisely, or even directly to the destination, saving fuel and freeing up congested airways. And instrument approaches are now possible to virtually any point on earth - no expensive phased-array radio antenna on the ground to maintain, just define a few points in a database and publish a chart. And all that thousands of years of naval navigation technology (like the sextant, or the clock)? - unnecessary, except perhaps as a backup. Cars with turn-by-turn directions, virtually eliminating the big road atlas or fold-out maps everyone had to have and mess with while driving (and far more accurate that your aunt's "turn right by the, well there used to be a farm there but now it's just a field" directions). Track logs of running and biking sessions to evaluate speed, performance, and trends. Nanosecond-scale timekeeping, allowing for previously-impossible management of the power grid and other distributed systems. Slightly in the future, self-driving cars - and more we haven't even imagined yet. By comparison the military's usage is unsophisticated and unthreatening - it's just a lighter-weight replacement for systems they already had like LORAN and allows bombs to be placed somewhat more accurately and easily than e.g. a laser sight.
Point being, he's arguing (still!) for the destruction of something that would be a far, far greater loss to peaceful civilians around the world than it would be for the military. With all the countries that know how to shoot down satellites nowadays (why did they develop that? hmm), does he think the militaries don't have a conti
Glad he's apparently (basically) alright. I fly small planes and they're incredibly awesome, and very liberating and fun, but... yeah, they have only one engine and if it quits you have a problem ("it's a fan to keep the pilot cool - turn it off and watch him sweat!"). Every pilot is constantly keeping an eye out for landing sites, and unlike non-pilots we love heights because it means gliding distance to make it to one. Takeoff is obviously the worst time to lose an engine, and in some ways the most likely - you're really demanding 100% of the performance of the engine, propeller, etc, at a low airspeed (=less cooling) and you're doing it for the first time since you got in the plane. You might think you can make it back to the airport - but that's such a bad idea it's called "the impossible turn" since you'll waste some of your precious lift making the turn. This is why we check our engines thoroughly - regularly with maintenance, and in particular with a "run-up" to high power immediately before takeoff to check the gauges and systems at that high throttle position. But stuff still goes wrong every once in a while, and then you have to do what you can. A bunch of pilot coworkers are in the area and one swung by to check it out. He said that the (wood) prop was intact, which suggests that it wasn't even turning ("windmilling") at impact time, and that he did a bang-up job landing that thing with no engine - golf courses aren't great compared to say an empty field, but if those are in short supply they do quite well. A golf course near my airport is my contingency plan as well - let's hope I never need it.
And lest anybody think otherwise, Harrison Ford is quite an experienced airplane and helicopter pilot, with thousands of hours. He even did his own flying in a movie where he played a pilot (apparently this gave the insurance company a heart attack and he had to fight them on it). So he probably handled it better than most pilots would.
Or Google Contributor?
The movie is about a recluse with a dark secret, who, despite not fitting in and being generally weird, finds a purpose for himself and a way to make a contribution to the war, only to see his greatest accomplishments hidden from view and perverted by the security state.
Sigh. I saw the movie and it was a well-executed film, but it was essentially about a made-up person. I agree with your summary of the fictional character, but not the man. Turing was certainly eccentric, but he had friends, was liked by his colleagues, and had a good sense of humor. As terrible as his chemical castration was, it certainly didn't ruin his mind - he did some interesting work on mathematical biology inspired by those very changes. And he died more than a year after the end of his "treatment". And it was recast as an "us-vs-them" story, which simply isn't true - thousands of people were working on breaking Enigma and made steady progress throughout the war, with the support of the entire chain of command (in particular the Commander Denniston).
He's such an interesting person with a fascinating story - it's a real damn shame they basically invented a character to give his name.
There are fewer parties - a few servers and a few clients, both which are updated fairly frequently (the servers because admins, the clients because auto-update) are the only ones that matter. Google already supports HTTP/2 (nee SPDY) so a huge percentage of internet traffic is already set up to use it as soon as browsers update (Chrome has had it as SPDY for years, Firefox has it or will soon).
The v6 slowness was always the ISP (both on the client and server) and the CPE. Now that most of the big US ISPs have their heads on straight, things are looking better for v6 - but Joe Blow bought a WRT54G in 2005 and damned if he'll replace it - it works fine, after all, and who can blame him?
Despite all this, v6 is actually happening. About 5.8% of all Google's global traffic is v6, and that's more than double from last year. In the US, it's more like 13.9% - which puts us 3rd globally (a rare thing in which the US is internet-competitive). Interestingly, if you zoom in the global graph it's clear that workplaces are far behind residential connections (weekends are a big jump).
The White House is prohibited airspace (P-56). There are no conditions in which a civilian would be allowed to operate there (otherwise it would merely be restricted airspace, and you could obtain permission). You pretty much have to be the President's helicopter to be allowed in (that is, convince the folks with the missiles to not shoot you down, which they will do if you don't comply with their fighter-jet intercept).
The rules for operating in the DC SFRA can not be complied with by any drone on the market today (they require radio communication and a discrete transponder code).
If they had developed a small patch for the problem, I'm pretty sure OEMs wouldn't have a problem pushing it to the users.
Hahahahahahahahaha, seriously? This is fixed in 4.4 and the OEMs aren't rolling that out. What makes you think they'll roll out anything, especially because most manufacturers have a long history of not rolling stuff out?
I'm guessing Google just got tired of making patches nobody would ever see.
Yeah, I have no idea why gender is relevant here specifically. But in my experience women are more put off by the threat of mediocrity, so perhaps being told "you'll probably never truly excel in this" is more off-putting to them. Men are generally fairly mulish as well, and will (in my experience, of myself as well as others) generally take discouragement as a challenge. It's a cliche, but there's some truth to the idea that "you tell a man not to do something, that's the first thing he wants to do" while women take more of a cue from peers as to a reasonable, safe path. Some of those stubborn men will succeed, but it'll be painful for the rest.
Men should, but historically (or at least the last ~200 years) men were expected to work outside the house (i.e., for money) and provide food and shelter for his family, and women were expected to keep the house in order and raise the kids. But it's been a common complaint of men - as long as people have been asking, anyway - that they weren't around for more of their kids' lives. The damage of social expectations cuts both ways here.
It's foolish and offensive to suggest that women weren't working all those years - of course they were, and hard, too. Someone has to do this work, though, and when both parents work it's left to cleaning services and daycare and so on, which has its own concerns. Companies are starting to get better about paternity leave, though, which is helping a bit. Men are actually picking up these "domestic" tasks at an increasing rate - though unfortunately it's more because men were disproportionately hurt in the workplace these past few years than an actual conscious choice. Still, there's biological factors that mean that women will likely outnumber men in their children's care - between breastfeeding, the rigors of childbirth, and hormonal effects that we call "bonding", mothers tend to be more attached than fathers. Not that fathers aren't strongly attached to their children, but oxytocin is a powerful hormone and most of its effects are female-specific...
I think more people would be at home with the kids if they could be, actually. Usually 2 parents need to work nowadays just to break into the middle class... Now that the stigma of "house-husband" is deteriorating somewhat, one wonders if men wouldn't prefer to stay home if their wife could provide for the whole family. I know I'd consider it, playing video games while the kids are at school and the housework is done... or if I got bored I could freelance with no pressure to actually make lots of money....
Yeah, the first one was left over from editing, my mistake. I meant to move it to the second for emphasis but forgot to remove the first usage - I cringed a bit when I saw that it was still there.
And I did mean 'actually true in all cases' - to my knowledge, at least, every provider that has implemented some sort of payment for better service has ended up degrading service for non-payees. Even if only passively by foregoing needed infrastructure upgrades unless somebody else foots the bill.
Sure. The only problem with that world is that literally the immediately obvious next step is to degrade service pending a payment. This is already happening in literally every place that has such a scheme as the one you describe. That's the problem with non-neutrality - once an ISP realizes they can get paid for better service, they will do everything in their not inconsiderable power to force every provider's hand.
Hard to argue with that advice - if you don't want to be subject to the laws of another jurisdiction, you should avoid that jurisdiction in general. It's like the bubblegum laws in Singapore - sure, you probably don't agree with it, but if you go there (or keep your bubble-gum there) you should expect to be bound by them.
Google makes no secret of the fact that they are a US company and bound by US laws, though there is an industry-wide effort to convince the legal system that, for data they merely have custody of, the "jurisdiction" should be that of the user in question (see the current Microsoft case, with its numerous amicus curaie briefs)
Are you fucking kidding me? They got served a lawful warrant and spent 2.5yr to fight it and had to eventually comply. Look, you may prefer an anarchy where people can just get away with crimes, but I prefer the Bill of Rights:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If that was followed - and it seems like it was - then what's the problem? Just because there's abuse going on doesn't mean that everything - or even a preponderance - is abuse.
- Warrants are an important and useful tool for law enforcement to keep peace and order in a society, and need to be possible to execute when given lawfully.
- Law enforcement (specifically the TLAs) has been abusing various methods of extracting information from individuals, companies, and networks.
Both of these things can be true at the same time. That's what makes this, and most other matters of public policy, complicated. It is adolescent stupidity (or libertarianism, but I repeat myself) to think that we could just do away with the government's ability to execute a lawful warrant without severe repercussions. We can and should fight against their improper use, just as we can and should fight the improper use of the rest of our laws, but just like (most of) the rest of our laws they are there for a reason.
Yeah, but the WORD type hasn't had a relationship to the actual word size for 20 years. As you said upthread "The only reason it's called a WORD on Windows is because of legacy backwards-compatibility issues."
It was stupid for them to lock processor-dependent stuff into the API and it means you get these ridiculous anachronisms. Especially ridiculous that "WORD" is intended to mean a fixed-size value, when "word" is defined by its processor-dependence. The API is full of this nonsense - WPARAM and LPARAM originally referred to WORD- and LONG-length parameters, respectively, but now they're both 32 bit. LPCSTR - what the hell is a long pointer? So by now it's just random junk If they wanted a 16-bit value, they should've called it an int16 or a twobyte or... hell, something that described what it actually was. But no, they were intending to describe the actual word size, and then got caught with their pants down when it changed (as anybody could see it would).
Microsoft is to be commended for their backwards-compatibility, but it makes these poor design choices especially visible. By contrast, the POSIX API is almost completely free of anything machine-dependent, to the point that it can be a bit tricky to use sometimes "when the rubber meets the road". But at least it's consistent.
You know, 'word' actually means something, and it never referred to a particular number of bits - it was always a property of the architecture. Generally, word size == register size == memory address == unit of memory that can be operated on. 32-bit machines are 32-bit because they have 32 bit registers, and the size of a memory address is 32 bits long (=4GB), and you can't move less than 32 bits to/from RAM.
So, yeah, it absolutely depends on the CPU, because it's the fundamental unit of the CPU. It's actually hard to imagine a less useless specification...
So by analogy, if I every time I saw you I grabbed your crotch[1] you shouldn't get offended, because I never meant to offend you.
Probably not. I mean, it'd be a bit weird, but I'd set the boundary, explain that it made me uncomfortable, and expect it to not happen again. If it continued it would be something other than offense.
Honestly, I don't get offended very much because I consider "offense" to be intricately tied with intent. If someone spat at me or flipped me off or something, I'd take it as it was intended. There's lots of explicit ways various cultures have to indicate "I intend to offend you", and in my culture, those are two pretty good ones. But other cultures have different ones, and they generally don't apply to outsiders. A Frenchman wouldn't be offended if you shied away from a "faire la bise", unless it was your cultural norm as well. The Japanese have a very complex business card etiquette. Someone doing business in Japan regularly should make a point of getting to know this, but a one-off instance of a Japanese person interacting with someone from a different culture shouldn't be offended if somebody doesn't realize that just taking the card and pocketing it after a glance is considered offensive. Indian culture has a thing about shaking with the left hand since that's the ... "wiping hand" (gotta do something if you have no toilet paper). These are generally amusing tidbits shared later (by either party), not tense moments.
It's hard enough to get offense straight when it's entire cultures - when it's random individual's sensitivities it becomes impossible. I will behave in a way I believe to be appropriate - if it offends you, the onus is on you to realize that I didn't mean to offend, because that's how interpersonal relationships work. I will make a good faith effort to avoid doing that in the future - if it's reasonably accommodable - to avoid repeating it with you, but I expect you to forgive my lapses since this stuff is hard (especially for me).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's a lot of people who can't tolerate other people behaving in ways contrary to their exact wishes. We generally call them "two year olds".
I can't imagine being offended more than a few times a year. It sounds exhausting - that is, with my definition of offense. But since you're explicitly saying that intent doesn't count, clearly we disagree. I'd call your definition more like "mild irritation". And I don't think I can (and have so far failed to) really interact with you, or people like you - I mean that 100% seriously. I don't mean to presume to tell you when you or anybody else should be offended, but I think you, bible-thumpers w.r.t evolution, and the anti-gays have a lot in common when it comes to offense thresholds...
Bull shit. Sorry, but as a pasty-white American I commonly get asked this - and in this exact form:
Someone: Where are you from?
Me: New Jersey, northern part
Someone: No, I mean your parents/ancestors/family/etc
Me: Oh, a bit Irish, a bit German, [family history]
You know why? It's because we're a nation of immigrants. Almost everybody here including me and her "comes from" somewhere else. The only reason I don't often get asked specifically about my parents is because I look further down the generations. I'm sure my great-great-grandmother (a German 'Weber' in Ohio) was asked about her parents' origin since she looked rather more German than I do.
If someone is interpreting this as a "microaggression" in the absence of any... you know, aggression - then they can not be interacted with because they have a worldview that everybody is out to get them. And that's really sad. It's a victimhood that's enforced - if you don't feel like a victim, it's just because you've internalized the attitudes or it's a "microaggression" you're missing or something. It's like no-true-Scotsman applied to feeling like crap. I mean, you're a woman/Asian/black/etc - you must be a victim somehow, right?
I'm not kidding. It's becoming increasingly dangerous to have conversations with people lest you slip off the cliff. It's a shame because frank conversations in good faith is the best way we know of to dispel prejudice... you know, friendships with people unlike yourself and so on.
Sorry, that should have been "a very small fraction, like the amount you could stick a pole into" followed by the quote:
If you're a pilot, but not a crop duster, what are you doing flying at low altitudes when not around an airport?
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Anyways, I just thought I'd add that I really don't have anything against drones or RC planes or anything as such, just their reckless operation. Just as the big jumboes tolerate me, I figure I should tolerate them. But my life is on the line, so I expect them to know the rules that keep us safe. I trained for 70 hours of flying time, and took a written, oral, and practical test to get my flying privileges. I know the FARs and so does everybody else in the sky, and we all follow them or people die. I'm not being melodramatic, people die all the time. Here's one from a few weeks ago where the guy likely (the report's not done) broke the rules and paid the price. The regulations are absolutely written in blood.
RC folks practice pretty hard as well, and they have a very good community that's interested in interoperating with "the system" and keeping everyone safe. The drone guys - as has been demonstrated - do not. The growing list of encounters that this article is about shows that self-policing isn't working. All I want is for people to know the rules and be held accountable to them - which is pretty much why the FAA is working their way up to requiring some sort of certification.
I cannot emphasize this enough - I consider the drone fliers to be the equivalent of a drunk driver, except worse since at least a drunk is also risking his own neck. They're going to kill someone, and it's only a matter of time.