Context is really damn important, and you're using even less of it than the summary. The third party website in question is a Verizon portal, not AOL/Y!/MSN's respective sites.
Of course, Rutland VT (where TFA comes from) isn't exactly known for being tech-savvy, so the meaning could have been a bit clearer, but read enough of it and it's fairly clear. I go into it a bit more in a post above, but this quote without creative trimming makes it fairly clear what the intent is:
FairPoint spokeswoman Beth Fastiggi said Friday that Internet customers will keep their existing user names and passwords but will use a different domain: myfairpoint.net.
Starting Jan. 31, users of e-mail software applications like Microsoft Outlook can begin adjusting their e-mail settings. The process can be automated by visiting www.activate.MyFairPoint.net/emailupdate and following the instructions. Users can also update their settings manually.
Web-based e-mail users can continue to access their e-mail at the Verizon Web site until Feb. 6. After that date, Fastiggi said users will need to log on to www.MyFairPoint.net. Customers then click on Web mail and type in their existing user name@myfairpoint.net and existing password.
AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will continue to have access to content but will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal.
Fastiggi said e-mail will automatically be forwarded from a customer's Verizon e-mail address to myfairpoint.net for three months, until April 30.
And as someone currently in NH who lived in VT for most of his life, I'll point out that, by and large, the only people who actually believe in those mottos are growing-pot-on-the-porch hippie types that nobody takes seriously, and suffice to say aren't exactly internet-savvy.
FWIW, I did see a bumper sticker on a Verizon service van saying something to the general effect of "Fairpoint is the only company worse than we are!" and had to agree. Even still, you're lucky to have one option for a broadband provider in many parts of VT and NH, let alone two. I can't speak for Maine but assume it's about the same.
HOWEVER, after looking at TFA (ignore sig, please), it looks like a quote has been pulled wildly out of context:
Starting Jan. 31, users of e-mail software applications like Microsoft Outlook can begin adjusting their e-mail settings. The process can be automated by visiting www.activate.MyFairPoint.net/emailupdate and following the instructions. Users can also update their settings manually.
Web-based e-mail users can continue to access their e-mail at the Verizon Web site until Feb. 6. After that date, Fastiggi said users will need to log on to www.MyFairPoint.net. Customers then click on Web mail and type in their existing user name@myfairpoint.net and existing password.
AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will continue to have access to content but will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal.
Fastiggi said e-mail will automatically be forwarded from a customer's Verizon e-mail address to myfairpoint.net for three months, until April 30.
Sounds like all that's going to happen is Verizon will be killing off their portal which was previously doing some level of integration w/ AOL, Y!, and MSN, and those who have been bought out by Fairpoint will no longer be able to use it. Which makes sense, as they're no longer Verizon customers.
Have you seen how our legal system works these days? The whole thing would completely fall apart with any level of transparency, never mind audience feedback. It's easy enough to get someone jailed when they're being judged by a dozen people who couldn't think up an excuse to get out of jury duty... not so much when you've got ten thousand pointing out the flaws and inaccuracies in the prosecution's arguments.
Have you ever used a school computer before? At least through high school, the IT department could monitor any system logged into the network (observe-only VNC basically, though they could control them as well if desired). I assume that's the case at most schools, and probably most businesses.
The thing is that unless you're doing something completely idiotic, the IT department has much better things to do with its time than see what freshman are googling for.
I really doubt the remote monitoring would work when the machine is off the school's network, unless they had rigged something bizarre up that would automatically VPN in whenever a net connection was available. I find getting VNC working reliably from outside of my home network for one or two machines to be enough of a pain in the ass with full access to everything, and I know what I'm doing. Unless most of these students have business-class routing hardware at home with static IPs, it's pretty unfeasable (but not impossible) to do any real remote monitoring from outside of the local network.
Having rambled about all of that, the parental controls in OS X are pretty easy to configure and set up to run on a timer, but that just gives you control over what apps can be installed/opened at what times for the most part. Whether you'd really be able to enforce them (legally or logistically) outside of school hours is another matter entirely. Just boot off a firewire drive where the student has admin access and the problem goes away. Hell, the hard drives are quite accessible - it would be easy enough to just keep a 'home' and 'school' drive if you could be truly bothered.
So basically, filter the school's net connection with a squid server to satisfy the relevant laws and provide parents with appropriate tools that are available should they be deemed necessary.
With any machine really (Macs, especially), you can try to spend all of your time dealing with the odd student or two that would keep some warezed-up disk image on a bootable firewire drive and never really solve the problem, or just ignore it and get back to fixing the printer problems that your supervisor is bitching about. Trying to deal with students that know how to initiate an ssh tunnel to their home machine is a complete waste of time - they're smart, know what they're doing, and have a lot more free time to screw around than you do.
I agree - don't ask, don't tell seems to be a pretty decent policy. I pretty much had an unspoken agreement with my high school IT department that so long as I wouldn't show other people how to bypass their security measures and I didn't do anything that would kill the network or get someone arrested, they'd ignore my screwing about.
I think we've come to accept that as being truth, but I don't remember reading anywhere in the Preamble that specifies the constitution doesn't apply to public schools. And while I'm no constitutional scholar, I'm confident that any state law removing a right granted by the constitution is illegal and void (though when it comes up, it's certainly not always enforced by the courts as such).
Were I malicious, I could grab the e-mail address you share in your title line, look through your/. 'friends' list for other accounts with posted addresses, and e-mail you a malicious link "From" one of them. How would that be different?
It would be no different. I think the more interesting problem here is that while social engineering attacks are pretty damn easy to pull off with complete strangers (I speak from experience; I did some harmless stuff ages ago just to see), they move into the realm of trivial when these same attacks appear to come from "friends" - which is presumably the case with those originating from Facebook messages.
For what it's worth, Facebook at least filters some links warning that you're going to go to an external site and that they're not in control of that content, etc. Not all of them, but it's a start. Were they to run all external links through that filter and combine it with Google's malware host lists, they could probably go farther to prevent these kinds of attacks.
No, obviously there's not a whole lot they can do to make sure that IE is patched and as safe as it can be, but they've implemented some measures in some places to make sure you won't get that far. Which is really as much as you can ask for. Even if you can train all of your 140m users to not click suspicious links (yeah, right), they'll probably still trust links that appear to be from an acquaintance.
Paper trees are always re-planted after being cut down (it would get unsustainable very quickly if this didn't happen) - and generally also have a lot of recycled material in the final product. The tree-cutting damage comes from the food industry clearing the way for beef cows or corn crops.
Never mind how insanely expensive ink is. The wasted ink is by far worse than the wasted paper. If you want to save a few sheets, shrink your print margins; either way, there's really no net gain or loss in trees.
Yeah, well only Vista64 requires signed drivers. It's merely a recommendation for Vista32, nor as anyone ever tried to claim otherwise (this was done, AFAIK, to ease the upgrade from XP to Vista, before MS found out that nobody was upgrading... ironically, bad third-party drivers have caused almost all of my bad experiences in Vista, and having required signed (read: tested to be not utter crap) drivers from the start probably would have gone a long way in avoiding the current disaster). Hell, I think even XP complains if you try to use an unsigned driver. I can't speak for OS X, as the only time I need to worry about it is when I tried to set up my printer, in which case I was the one complaining about drivers (fucking printer manufacturers...)
The PS2 has a tray-loading drive like the 360, and I've never heard of one gouging discs, much less seen a dozen of them (I worked at a video/game rental store a few years back). Granted I did have to disassemble my PS2 some time ago to re-align the laser so it would actually read the discs properly, and had Sony do the same once while it was still warrantied, but it never hurt the discs.
Like most Slashdotters, I've seen my fair share of optical drives. And the 360 is the only unit I have EVER seen that damages discs in such a unique, irreparable, and thorough way - and I'm not exactly courteous to my optical drives (my MBP's slot load has to be held open with a flathead screwdriver when inserting/removing a disc due to being dented so badly; I've moved DVD drives from one bay to another in a PC while it was running, etc)
I too consider the 360 to be one of MS's better products, own one, and while I try to avoid the console wars have defended it on occasion (then again, I've also defended Vista... from my MBP in OS X no less, despite being an Apple fan). But it's DVD drive sucks, full stop. It's inexplicably loud and must have some absurdly tight tolerances within to be able to cause so much damage to discs so easily. I'm honestly impressed that the drive itself holds up so well, even after the laser has gouged a disc.
The bit I am still obviously (and painfully) missing is that you somehow expect a company to semi-earthquake proof their console so that if something should indeed bump it enough to have it wobble about (like in this example, a slight earthquake) so that it doesn't even have a chance of scratching a disc?
It's not rocket science. As I explained in a post above, it could be done using accelerometer data from within the unit (there's at least one that controls the orientation of the controller connection/RROD lights; probably a separate one within the laptop hard drive for its own head-parking mechanism). If movement beyond a certain threshold is detected, stop the disc spinning. Pretty much every top-load CD/DVD player does just this if the door is opened while the power is on; there's no reason a specialized computer can't do the same for it's tray-load drive based off accelerometer data.
Given the billion or so dollars they've spent on extended warranties for the unit, I doubt a couple tens of hours of programmer time is very financially significant, nor is the bandwidth to push out a patch.
Yanking the cord won't stop the disc spinning immediately. The PSX (good times) would abruptly stop the disc spinning - within a second or so - if you opened the disc door while the console was on; if you power it down and immediately open the door, it would continue to spin for another twenty seconds. Yay, momentum!
Now taking this knowledge to a more practical level... let's assume that the fail-safe for the drive (no power) is the same as that of every other optical drive in the history of man - the laser is off, but nothing is done to stop the disc's momentum. As you'd expect from both a software and electrical standpoint. We know there's at least some sort of very primitive accelerometer in the 360 - it's how the controller indicator rings know how to orient themselves (people demonstrating this in real time are, of course, the ones with scratched discs). The laptop drive in the unit probably has one as well, for that "I'm falling, locking the drive heads" thing whose name escapes me at the moment.
Anyways, applying some sort of software-based trick that quickly stops the disc spinning when movement of the console is detected could solve this problem. At least if we assume that discs are only ever damaged in consoles that are re-oriented while a disc is spinning within, which isn't the case if plenty of anecdotal evidence is to be believed. But it could still help, and with no additional hardware cost to boot.
For home use? That would be more than fine. My former fileserver box had a gig only because I had it sitting around, but for only a couple of users that's more than enough. When it's accessing the same files over and over again as you may get on a busy network you'll want the extra RAM, but the raw CPU speed tends to be the limiting factor in network speed unless the system employs specialized network hardware (and the < $500 "cheap" units never do). My system was specced with... I think a 2GHz Celeron and 1GB of RAM and was pretty much limited in transfer speed by the hard drive itself - and got about the same network speeds on otherwise the same network as the drives do in their new home (a current-model Mac Pro with 10GB RAM and 8 2.8GHz Xeon cores).
I wouldn't think that 256MB of RAM would be limiting speeds until you've got at least 25 people that are frequently hitting the box. I'm no expert on the matter, but that "feels" about right to me. Unless you decided to use Vista as the host OS (I traditionally use XP as a fileserver OS just because setting up the shares is so damn simple, but as the rest of the house/home office is OS X now, I just moved the drives).
As for the WiFi router thing... I wouldn't bother with it. I'd replace the router, but not with a full PC. That's just overkill (at least for a home office), and is wasting power and asking for one of the many moving parts to fail. I personally use a GigE Apple Airport Extreme b/g/n and for the most part have been pretty happy with it. Never any performance issues anyways, but it (at least with the firmware I have) doesn't support uPNP, just Apple's semi-proprietary NAT-PMP which makes some apps a little unhappy. As such, I have it acting as just a Wifi repeater and gigabit switch, and let a very old D-link b/g router do the actual firewall stuff.
Well I'm pro-abortion, so now you have. The world is overcrowded already, and the people that really need abortions (the type that has six kids within eight years of each other, all under eleven, screaming for candy in WalMart) are the ones that never get them.
Unpopular view? Sure. It's not something I tend to bring up at dinner, but I don't see how less idiots bring kids that they'll never be able to support into the world is a bad thing.
I don't know if there's any Mozilla funding beyond the ad revenue on the Firefox home page and search box, but they could rig that up without Google's explicit blessing by changing the home page. As of now, Firefox defaults to google.com/someaffiliatecode, but it could easily be updated to go to mozilla.com/googlecustomsearch with (as far as I'm aware) no drop in revenue, and certainly minimal coding efforts.
Google's interest in the browser market is promoting web standards, by and large. I'm sure it's a hell of a lot easier for their crawler to weight content with valid, semantic markup correctly than a bunch of tables with unclosed cells. Which means better search results, which means that more people use Google's search, which means that more people see Google's ads, which means more money for them.
As for Sun with Open and Star Office... well that's a mystery that probably exists just so we can ponder it.
$60? Fuck. Our Charter bill is something like $140/mo (which includes digital cable, as I can't convince the rest of the household to get rid of that crap, but even still is insanely overpriced)
Well hopefully the cameras they have in their car or that you have pointed at your door streaming live 24/7 can be used as evidence against the cop for conducting an illegal search.
Don't count on it, but if you're able to prove that it was an illegal search (no warrant, no reasonable suspicion, and you didn't give them permission), then anything they find would be inadmissible in court.
At least in the US, evidence found against you found in an illegal search* cannot be used against you. If the search was legal (warrant attained or reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing), then it's your fault for having done whatever other stuff you get hit with, regardless of why you/your home/vehicle was searched. Don't confuse this with secondary offenses, like not having your seat belt on in many states (they can't pull you over specifically for that, but can add it to the ticket).
* if they can see the bag of weed (or whatever) on your back seat through the window, not only is it legal for them to arrest you for it, but it also gives them reasonable suspicion to search the rest of the vehicle without attaining a warrant, even if you protest.
IANAL, YMMV, laws vary by state, etc. And all bets tend to be off at border stops, especially internationally. As far as I'm aware, they have the legal (USA PATRIOT act legal, anyways) right to search your vehicle entirely at any international border.
But back to the topic at hand, if your computer is legitimately siezed, I think you should at least be able to know what processes were used to search for X when Y was found. If they want to arrest you for possession of goat porn, and then they find CP, you should be able to find out that the latter came up when they did a general search for porn, rather than when they explicitly searched for it. Or if they find pirated media when searching for CP, which would be a lot harder to accidentally find by the same 'legit' search. It'll never happen, and good luck auditing the police's methods even if you had the right to do so. Just encrypt all of your crap, and don't have illegal stuff.
Talent doesn't disappear due to a bad system, though it certainly may be wasted in such an environment. Either you're able to pick up on new concepts and ideas easily or you're not. And if you are able (as the best and brightest tend to be), you'll pick it up somewhere. With the entire knowledge of the human race seconds away, having teachers cram facts down your throat isn't the way that the gifted will be getting ahead. If they don't understand something, they'll look for the answer, and learn along the way.
It's much more a matter of motivation than one of the learning environment.
(having said that, I'll definitely agree with anyone claiming that our educational system is in desperate need of an overhaul)
I agree with C. I self-taught myself enough to get by from working on modifying a MUD around age 12, though I'd done some QBasic several years before that even (very simple stuff, but what would you expect from a third grader?). I also got into some HTML around the same age, and as that's now my primary source of income it was probably a pretty good choice. Given how much stuff is shifting to web-based apps as compared to their former desktop equivalents (SaaS in particular), it would probably be a very practical choice.
As others have mentioned, it's also very easy to get into PHP once you know a bit of C. Not so much on the newer OO stuff (in my experience, it seemed pointless until I actually had a need for it, at which point it became the most awesome thing ever), but enough to make some dynamic pages at least. And god knows how many PHP-based odd jobs are out there.
I don't see what being gifted has to due with anything. Programming isn't hard to learn unless you have no interest in learning it - but that's true of a ton of stuff. Or maybe I was gifted but just never got the label. Whatever.
I'm not sure I'd quite agree with that statement. At least some amount of OOP tends to be just well-organized functional programming. Yes, methods will generally modify the state of an object, but static methods especially will often just return some value based off the parameter they're called with. Granted, they may often be some sort of pseudo-constructors that return an instance of their parent class, but you can do that just as easily with a function as a static method.
Yes, by and large they're two totally different ways of doing things, but you can't pretend that there's no overlap between them.
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Context is really damn important, and you're using even less of it than the summary. The third party website in question is a Verizon portal, not AOL/Y!/MSN's respective sites.
Of course, Rutland VT (where TFA comes from) isn't exactly known for being tech-savvy, so the meaning could have been a bit clearer, but read enough of it and it's fairly clear. I go into it a bit more in a post above, but this quote without creative trimming makes it fairly clear what the intent is:
FairPoint spokeswoman Beth Fastiggi said Friday that Internet customers will keep their existing user names and passwords but will use a different domain: myfairpoint.net.
Starting Jan. 31, users of e-mail software applications like Microsoft Outlook can begin adjusting their e-mail settings. The process can be automated by visiting www.activate.MyFairPoint.net/emailupdate and following the instructions. Users can also update their settings manually.
Web-based e-mail users can continue to access their e-mail at the Verizon Web site until Feb. 6. After that date, Fastiggi said users will need to log on to www.MyFairPoint.net. Customers then click on Web mail and type in their existing user name@myfairpoint.net and existing password.
AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will continue to have access to content but will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal.
Fastiggi said e-mail will automatically be forwarded from a customer's Verizon e-mail address to myfairpoint.net for three months, until April 30.
And as someone currently in NH who lived in VT for most of his life, I'll point out that, by and large, the only people who actually believe in those mottos are growing-pot-on-the-porch hippie types that nobody takes seriously, and suffice to say aren't exactly internet-savvy.
FWIW, I did see a bumper sticker on a Verizon service van saying something to the general effect of "Fairpoint is the only company worse than we are!" and had to agree. Even still, you're lucky to have one option for a broadband provider in many parts of VT and NH, let alone two. I can't speak for Maine but assume it's about the same.
HOWEVER, after looking at TFA (ignore sig, please), it looks like a quote has been pulled wildly out of context:
Sounds like all that's going to happen is Verizon will be killing off their portal which was previously doing some level of integration w/ AOL, Y!, and MSN, and those who have been bought out by Fairpoint will no longer be able to use it. Which makes sense, as they're no longer Verizon customers.
Have you seen how our legal system works these days? The whole thing would completely fall apart with any level of transparency, never mind audience feedback. It's easy enough to get someone jailed when they're being judged by a dozen people who couldn't think up an excuse to get out of jury duty... not so much when you've got ten thousand pointing out the flaws and inaccuracies in the prosecution's arguments.
I doubt that argument works when it's the defendant that's looking to get the legal proceedings broadcast.
I'm pretty sure that microwaving your hard drive only aids in microwave destruction.
Have you ever used a school computer before? At least through high school, the IT department could monitor any system logged into the network (observe-only VNC basically, though they could control them as well if desired). I assume that's the case at most schools, and probably most businesses.
The thing is that unless you're doing something completely idiotic, the IT department has much better things to do with its time than see what freshman are googling for.
I really doubt the remote monitoring would work when the machine is off the school's network, unless they had rigged something bizarre up that would automatically VPN in whenever a net connection was available. I find getting VNC working reliably from outside of my home network for one or two machines to be enough of a pain in the ass with full access to everything, and I know what I'm doing. Unless most of these students have business-class routing hardware at home with static IPs, it's pretty unfeasable (but not impossible) to do any real remote monitoring from outside of the local network.
Having rambled about all of that, the parental controls in OS X are pretty easy to configure and set up to run on a timer, but that just gives you control over what apps can be installed/opened at what times for the most part. Whether you'd really be able to enforce them (legally or logistically) outside of school hours is another matter entirely. Just boot off a firewire drive where the student has admin access and the problem goes away. Hell, the hard drives are quite accessible - it would be easy enough to just keep a 'home' and 'school' drive if you could be truly bothered.
So basically, filter the school's net connection with a squid server to satisfy the relevant laws and provide parents with appropriate tools that are available should they be deemed necessary.
With any machine really (Macs, especially), you can try to spend all of your time dealing with the odd student or two that would keep some warezed-up disk image on a bootable firewire drive and never really solve the problem, or just ignore it and get back to fixing the printer problems that your supervisor is bitching about. Trying to deal with students that know how to initiate an ssh tunnel to their home machine is a complete waste of time - they're smart, know what they're doing, and have a lot more free time to screw around than you do.
I agree - don't ask, don't tell seems to be a pretty decent policy. I pretty much had an unspoken agreement with my high school IT department that so long as I wouldn't show other people how to bypass their security measures and I didn't do anything that would kill the network or get someone arrested, they'd ignore my screwing about.
I think we've come to accept that as being truth, but I don't remember reading anywhere in the Preamble that specifies the constitution doesn't apply to public schools. And while I'm no constitutional scholar, I'm confident that any state law removing a right granted by the constitution is illegal and void (though when it comes up, it's certainly not always enforced by the courts as such).
It would be no different. I think the more interesting problem here is that while social engineering attacks are pretty damn easy to pull off with complete strangers (I speak from experience; I did some harmless stuff ages ago just to see), they move into the realm of trivial when these same attacks appear to come from "friends" - which is presumably the case with those originating from Facebook messages.
For what it's worth, Facebook at least filters some links warning that you're going to go to an external site and that they're not in control of that content, etc. Not all of them, but it's a start. Were they to run all external links through that filter and combine it with Google's malware host lists, they could probably go farther to prevent these kinds of attacks.
No, obviously there's not a whole lot they can do to make sure that IE is patched and as safe as it can be, but they've implemented some measures in some places to make sure you won't get that far. Which is really as much as you can ask for. Even if you can train all of your 140m users to not click suspicious links (yeah, right), they'll probably still trust links that appear to be from an acquaintance.
Paper trees are always re-planted after being cut down (it would get unsustainable very quickly if this didn't happen) - and generally also have a lot of recycled material in the final product. The tree-cutting damage comes from the food industry clearing the way for beef cows or corn crops.
Never mind how insanely expensive ink is. The wasted ink is by far worse than the wasted paper. If you want to save a few sheets, shrink your print margins; either way, there's really no net gain or loss in trees.
Yeah, well only Vista64 requires signed drivers. It's merely a recommendation for Vista32, nor as anyone ever tried to claim otherwise (this was done, AFAIK, to ease the upgrade from XP to Vista, before MS found out that nobody was upgrading... ironically, bad third-party drivers have caused almost all of my bad experiences in Vista, and having required signed (read: tested to be not utter crap) drivers from the start probably would have gone a long way in avoiding the current disaster). Hell, I think even XP complains if you try to use an unsigned driver. I can't speak for OS X, as the only time I need to worry about it is when I tried to set up my printer, in which case I was the one complaining about drivers (fucking printer manufacturers...)
The PS2 has a tray-loading drive like the 360, and I've never heard of one gouging discs, much less seen a dozen of them (I worked at a video/game rental store a few years back). Granted I did have to disassemble my PS2 some time ago to re-align the laser so it would actually read the discs properly, and had Sony do the same once while it was still warrantied, but it never hurt the discs.
Like most Slashdotters, I've seen my fair share of optical drives. And the 360 is the only unit I have EVER seen that damages discs in such a unique, irreparable, and thorough way - and I'm not exactly courteous to my optical drives (my MBP's slot load has to be held open with a flathead screwdriver when inserting/removing a disc due to being dented so badly; I've moved DVD drives from one bay to another in a PC while it was running, etc)
I too consider the 360 to be one of MS's better products, own one, and while I try to avoid the console wars have defended it on occasion (then again, I've also defended Vista... from my MBP in OS X no less, despite being an Apple fan). But it's DVD drive sucks, full stop. It's inexplicably loud and must have some absurdly tight tolerances within to be able to cause so much damage to discs so easily. I'm honestly impressed that the drive itself holds up so well, even after the laser has gouged a disc.
The bit I am still obviously (and painfully) missing is that you somehow expect a company to semi-earthquake proof their console so that if something should indeed bump it enough to have it wobble about (like in this example, a slight earthquake) so that it doesn't even have a chance of scratching a disc?
It's not rocket science. As I explained in a post above, it could be done using accelerometer data from within the unit (there's at least one that controls the orientation of the controller connection/RROD lights; probably a separate one within the laptop hard drive for its own head-parking mechanism). If movement beyond a certain threshold is detected, stop the disc spinning. Pretty much every top-load CD/DVD player does just this if the door is opened while the power is on; there's no reason a specialized computer can't do the same for it's tray-load drive based off accelerometer data.
Given the billion or so dollars they've spent on extended warranties for the unit, I doubt a couple tens of hours of programmer time is very financially significant, nor is the bandwidth to push out a patch.
Yanking the cord won't stop the disc spinning immediately. The PSX (good times) would abruptly stop the disc spinning - within a second or so - if you opened the disc door while the console was on; if you power it down and immediately open the door, it would continue to spin for another twenty seconds. Yay, momentum!
Now taking this knowledge to a more practical level... let's assume that the fail-safe for the drive (no power) is the same as that of every other optical drive in the history of man - the laser is off, but nothing is done to stop the disc's momentum. As you'd expect from both a software and electrical standpoint. We know there's at least some sort of very primitive accelerometer in the 360 - it's how the controller indicator rings know how to orient themselves (people demonstrating this in real time are, of course, the ones with scratched discs). The laptop drive in the unit probably has one as well, for that "I'm falling, locking the drive heads" thing whose name escapes me at the moment.
Anyways, applying some sort of software-based trick that quickly stops the disc spinning when movement of the console is detected could solve this problem. At least if we assume that discs are only ever damaged in consoles that are re-oriented while a disc is spinning within, which isn't the case if plenty of anecdotal evidence is to be believed. But it could still help, and with no additional hardware cost to boot.
Sounds a bit like the Dyson AirBlade.
For home use? That would be more than fine. My former fileserver box had a gig only because I had it sitting around, but for only a couple of users that's more than enough. When it's accessing the same files over and over again as you may get on a busy network you'll want the extra RAM, but the raw CPU speed tends to be the limiting factor in network speed unless the system employs specialized network hardware (and the < $500 "cheap" units never do). My system was specced with... I think a 2GHz Celeron and 1GB of RAM and was pretty much limited in transfer speed by the hard drive itself - and got about the same network speeds on otherwise the same network as the drives do in their new home (a current-model Mac Pro with 10GB RAM and 8 2.8GHz Xeon cores).
I wouldn't think that 256MB of RAM would be limiting speeds until you've got at least 25 people that are frequently hitting the box. I'm no expert on the matter, but that "feels" about right to me. Unless you decided to use Vista as the host OS (I traditionally use XP as a fileserver OS just because setting up the shares is so damn simple, but as the rest of the house/home office is OS X now, I just moved the drives).
As for the WiFi router thing... I wouldn't bother with it. I'd replace the router, but not with a full PC. That's just overkill (at least for a home office), and is wasting power and asking for one of the many moving parts to fail. I personally use a GigE Apple Airport Extreme b/g/n and for the most part have been pretty happy with it. Never any performance issues anyways, but it (at least with the firmware I have) doesn't support uPNP, just Apple's semi-proprietary NAT-PMP which makes some apps a little unhappy. As such, I have it acting as just a Wifi repeater and gigabit switch, and let a very old D-link b/g router do the actual firewall stuff.
-2147483648 dead kittens?
Damn, go easy on that thing.
Well I'm pro-abortion, so now you have. The world is overcrowded already, and the people that really need abortions (the type that has six kids within eight years of each other, all under eleven, screaming for candy in WalMart) are the ones that never get them.
Unpopular view? Sure. It's not something I tend to bring up at dinner, but I don't see how less idiots bring kids that they'll never be able to support into the world is a bad thing.
I don't know if there's any Mozilla funding beyond the ad revenue on the Firefox home page and search box, but they could rig that up without Google's explicit blessing by changing the home page. As of now, Firefox defaults to google.com/someaffiliatecode, but it could easily be updated to go to mozilla.com/googlecustomsearch with (as far as I'm aware) no drop in revenue, and certainly minimal coding efforts.
Google's interest in the browser market is promoting web standards, by and large. I'm sure it's a hell of a lot easier for their crawler to weight content with valid, semantic markup correctly than a bunch of tables with unclosed cells. Which means better search results, which means that more people use Google's search, which means that more people see Google's ads, which means more money for them.
As for Sun with Open and Star Office... well that's a mystery that probably exists just so we can ponder it.
$60? Fuck. Our Charter bill is something like $140/mo (which includes digital cable, as I can't convince the rest of the household to get rid of that crap, but even still is insanely overpriced)
Well hopefully the cameras they have in their car or that you have pointed at your door streaming live 24/7 can be used as evidence against the cop for conducting an illegal search.
Don't count on it, but if you're able to prove that it was an illegal search (no warrant, no reasonable suspicion, and you didn't give them permission), then anything they find would be inadmissible in court.
IANAL.
At least in the US, evidence found against you found in an illegal search* cannot be used against you. If the search was legal (warrant attained or reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing), then it's your fault for having done whatever other stuff you get hit with, regardless of why you/your home/vehicle was searched. Don't confuse this with secondary offenses, like not having your seat belt on in many states (they can't pull you over specifically for that, but can add it to the ticket).
* if they can see the bag of weed (or whatever) on your back seat through the window, not only is it legal for them to arrest you for it, but it also gives them reasonable suspicion to search the rest of the vehicle without attaining a warrant, even if you protest.
IANAL, YMMV, laws vary by state, etc. And all bets tend to be off at border stops, especially internationally. As far as I'm aware, they have the legal (USA PATRIOT act legal, anyways) right to search your vehicle entirely at any international border.
But back to the topic at hand, if your computer is legitimately siezed, I think you should at least be able to know what processes were used to search for X when Y was found. If they want to arrest you for possession of goat porn, and then they find CP, you should be able to find out that the latter came up when they did a general search for porn, rather than when they explicitly searched for it. Or if they find pirated media when searching for CP, which would be a lot harder to accidentally find by the same 'legit' search. It'll never happen, and good luck auditing the police's methods even if you had the right to do so. Just encrypt all of your crap, and don't have illegal stuff.
My 2c
Talent doesn't disappear due to a bad system, though it certainly may be wasted in such an environment. Either you're able to pick up on new concepts and ideas easily or you're not. And if you are able (as the best and brightest tend to be), you'll pick it up somewhere. With the entire knowledge of the human race seconds away, having teachers cram facts down your throat isn't the way that the gifted will be getting ahead. If they don't understand something, they'll look for the answer, and learn along the way.
It's much more a matter of motivation than one of the learning environment.
(having said that, I'll definitely agree with anyone claiming that our educational system is in desperate need of an overhaul)
I agree with C. I self-taught myself enough to get by from working on modifying a MUD around age 12, though I'd done some QBasic several years before that even (very simple stuff, but what would you expect from a third grader?). I also got into some HTML around the same age, and as that's now my primary source of income it was probably a pretty good choice. Given how much stuff is shifting to web-based apps as compared to their former desktop equivalents (SaaS in particular), it would probably be a very practical choice.
As others have mentioned, it's also very easy to get into PHP once you know a bit of C. Not so much on the newer OO stuff (in my experience, it seemed pointless until I actually had a need for it, at which point it became the most awesome thing ever), but enough to make some dynamic pages at least. And god knows how many PHP-based odd jobs are out there.
I don't see what being gifted has to due with anything. Programming isn't hard to learn unless you have no interest in learning it - but that's true of a ton of stuff. Or maybe I was gifted but just never got the label. Whatever.
I'm not sure I'd quite agree with that statement. At least some amount of OOP tends to be just well-organized functional programming. Yes, methods will generally modify the state of an object, but static methods especially will often just return some value based off the parameter they're called with. Granted, they may often be some sort of pseudo-constructors that return an instance of their parent class, but you can do that just as easily with a function as a static method.
Yes, by and large they're two totally different ways of doing things, but you can't pretend that there's no overlap between them.