How come nearly all those school shootings happened in Rural areas?
You mean like Columbine/Littleton, CO? You know, the place where the school shooting that put school shootings on the map, and in everyone's face? The only school shooting that was about popular kids excluding kids that didn't conform (lots of the other shootings are about relationships, personal vendettas, etc etc. Columbine is the definitive "we were sick of being excluded" shooting)
Do you suppose that Littleton is a small, rural area, full of intolerant hilljacks?
Or, is it a posh suburb, with a bunch if uppity whites who think they're hot snot because they have rich parents? People with 0 dimensional personalities, who have nothing actually going for them and are slowly realizing their destiny of being mid-pack in the big money, big-city, anonymous, co-dependant, fruitless American "life"?
I can't say - I haven't been there. But, FYI, Littleton/Columbine are southwestern suburbs of Denver. They're even inside the interstate loop.
I can't see that you actually have any substance to any "argument" you've tried making. It's clear you think poorly of rural America. I don't doubt that you've had some bad experiences. Even so, the notion that cities are objectively "better" than rural areas is laughable. Just accept that people have differing tastes and get on with life.
Actually i'd say large municipalities are much worse about demanding conformity via legal action. My understanding is that it is effectively impossible to get an apartment without paying an apartment broker in large new-england cities, and there are laws to support this. In Massechusetts, it is apparently illegal to do construction work without police officers present, so you have cops parked in cruisers whereever there are construction sites. Street parking infront of your own house? -- illegal. Hell the "small" city of Redmond, WA requires a building permit to move your refrigerator to another outlet (true story!)
As we know, the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.
I'd much rather live in a place where conformity built a sense of community, but one could choose to swim upstream with social ostracization being the only potential downside. Comparatively, "community" in large cities is about passing laws to try and keep your neighbors from doing things you dont like. If I'm going to go against the grain, i'd rather have people pissed off at me than cops arresting me. Wouldn't you?
As an aside - when i lived in seattle there was a HUGE uproar over a bunch of blacks beating the crap out of some white people during a mardi gras party in pioneer square. IIRC, it was just 1 or 2 whites.. women i think? And like 10 black people just beating them senseless. Because it was black-on-white violence, the mayor/media etc claimed it was not racially motivated.
The idea that race violence, sex/gender violence, etc aren't problems in cities is patently false.
work ethic, intelligence, and problem solving ability are widely distributed across the planet. There is not a monopoly on these desirable traits in large cities.
There are people who are good employees and add to the bottom line of the company they work for, that have no desire to live in a large city. Businesses will be successful when they most effectively compete for the employee talent they need.
Also, I can see the monocultural effect* of large cities has already affected you. There are people that prefer not to live in large cities, for a variety of good reasons.
* despite places like NYC effectively implementing the "Mosaic of Subcultures" pattern (read Christopher Alexander), people born and bred in large cities are by and large socially dependant on others, and not necessarily ideologically different than their neighbors. Witness the solidarity of liberal/democratic voting in all the ubran areas of the US. I don't mean to suggest that you dont have an issue of monoculturalism but with the opposite political slant in rural america, but for problem solving ability, self reliability, and work ethic, i will choose someone raised on a farm _every time_ over a city-slicker. When you grow up solving all of your own problems just to be able to _eat_ reliably, or teaching yourself how to repair broken equipment in the middle of a field because nobody else is there to help you, an office job is trivial, comparatively.
2 Years ago I voluntarily left Seattle/Redmond for North Dakota.
Microsoft has an office here (we acquired Great Plains Software, which was a reasonably successful company in its own right) so it was a move I could make and stay with the same company (MS), but get a different setting/lifestyle.
If anything happens to this Microsoft office, or even my job personally, I am screwed. There is nothing anywhere near here paying MS salaries for software development. The closest would be Minneapolis, a 3 hr drive, and then you've got cost of living problems similar to the Seattle area.
That said, as long as it works, it's great. Lots of people here live on hobby farms 30-45mins away that are enormous. There's no traffic, people are friendly and non-uppity (try finding that in Seattle).
As far as technology in AG equipment.. yeah, its pretty cool. Multiple guys i work with wrote embedded software for AG machinery. Also, anyone that grew up here grew up on a farm so i've gotten to see what farm life is like via some friends i've made. Even the family farmer can debt finance used equipment that has onboard GPS. A friend of ours has a variable-track front-boom sprayer. This thing is like Optimus prime.. it unfolds and transforms and all kinds of stuff. It auto adjusts the fluid pressure in the boom to compensate for vehicle speed, and when it turns it slows down delivery to the inboard side of the boom (because it moves over crops more slowly). It uses GPS to partition your field into rows of travel and will tell you if you're veering off course (which can be helpful when you're driving through a sea of crops). The latest equipment will essentially drive itself along calculated GPS routes to cover an entire section of land.
This particular friend of ours also has a satellite weather/data terminal system. Pretty neat.. its a dedicated box that a normal PC mouse/kb/monitor plug into.. hooked up to a sat dish. It gives him 24/7 weather information, futures trading info.. crop yield reports from other markets, basically anything that would be interesting to a farmer.
Still, as much technology is available to the farmer, the family farm still struggles more often then it succeeds. Lots of operations are going with contract-harvesters.. companies that buy the biggest combines brand new, show up, and harvest your whole operation in a day, then move on to the next guy. This is good because the cost of these machines is outrageous.. and because they show up on the used market a few years later. It's bad because it's a loss of self-sufficiency for farmers.. and it suggests that equipment will continue to get more and more expensive even though technology is supposed to make things cheaper.
There are companies now that sell satellite thermal / IR data of field flybys.. you can say something about the productivity of a certain section of soil for a certain crop.. and take that data into account for how you do future rotations and plantings. If you correlate the previous years yeild data vs how much seeding you did there vs how much spraying you did etc etc, you can start to make some wise decisions about what plants will do best in what sections of land, on a rotating basis.
There's a lot of really, really interesting software work that can be applied to old fashioned problems, but nobody sees the glamour in writing software to do these sorts of things. The idea of "software developer" in my head is someone that lives in a big city, spends too much on coffee, has an Aeron chair.. and gets paid entirely too much money for what boils down to web surfing at work all day. It's less like that now that the.com boom has ended, but i still feel like the "meat and potatoes" software developer gets no real exposure in this country.. programmers working at banks/insurance companies, doing factory control, doing embedded work for cash registers, engine controllers, etc etc etc. In many cases, these sorts of jobs are closer to the industries they support.. i.e. guy
i was merely trying to illuminate the lack of historical perspective in your post. As other posters have mentioned - early viruses _were_ OS agnostic. Later on, platforms without proper user segmentation/memory protection (like Dos, Win 3.x, and Mac OS pre-X) all had viruses written for them.
As an aside, viruses do tend to be platform specific now, and "platform" means more than operating system. For instance, viruses that spread from one website to another via hijacking a browser. The browser is vulnerable, but the virus targets servers _and_ browsers.
Or the outlook/word macro viruses. These are application-specific viruses. You can use windows but be totally immune to these viruses if you dont have/use those particular applications.
The idea that there is a correlation between product security and # of viruses developed and in circulation, and that that is the only correlation, is false.
We can see that, observationally, the security of something like SunOS 4 or IRIX 4 was very very poor, yet there were few/any? viruses for those platforms.
Additionally, viruses as a type of attack are less interesting than they used to be. What makes a virus a virus is its self replicating nature. Why does it self replicate? So it is more likely to be run again and again. It needs to insert itself into as many programs as possible because invoking those programs/execution containers (in the case of word macro viruses) is how it delivers its payload and continues to spread. That is no longer the case today - platforms are always on, with long running service type processes. Malware can create new processes on the fly without user intervention. The "infect as many files as possible to increase liklihood of execution" is not really a relevant attack paradigm in a modern, always connected operating system.
In any case, there is nothing about OS X or any UNIX for that matter that makes it fundamentally more virus-resistant than Windows NT based systems. In each platform, the user is still required to do something for a virus to work. In the case of Windows, there are lots more ways that code can be executed, and the penetratino of these mechanisms is higher, but the former is a features issue and the latter is a market penetation issue.
If 90% of the population were using Mac OS X, we'd see more Mac OS X malware (2nd issue). 90% of the population wont ever use Mac OS X, because it lacks the features people want (the first issue - we don't build execution engines into various contexts just to make malware easier to develop. There are legitimate reasons why users would want Macros in Excel or HTML in their email. The problem is balancing flexibility of features with security in the face of increasing hostility)
You seem to be saying what I am saying above. Microsoft programmers are not managed in such a way that they can possibly deliver a nicely finished product. Is that correct?
While Microsoft has its share of political problems and redundant layers of management (IMO), thats not actually what i meant.
When considering how to deliver Vista, we had a few options, all of which were unattractive
- keep working on it until its "done" -- and ship multiple years later than we wanted to, by which time customers have moved in droves elsewhere, generations of new partner hardware has gone unsupported/unutilized, the entire pace of the windows software world has slowed. Legitimate customer issues we deemed to expensive to address in XP / 2k3 take that much longer to get into customer hands.
- cut a bunch of stuff completely to make it by date blah -- despite the # of bugs that we ship with, we are very bug averse and risk averse. if we dont think something will be done enough and meet the quality bar, we dont let it in the box. -- nobody is thrilled about doing date driven releases but everyone understands why sometimes its better to get a working product with a subset of features into the hands of customers sooner
I would characterize our situation, in general, for everything we do, as: "we have a variety of choices, each of which will piss off somebody"
We're in the business of minimizing the valence of "sombody"
There were NO virii for MacOS 6/7/8/9. There were no Mac A/V products for those platforms.
I wouldn't be surprised if MacOS had a disproportionately large # of virii written for it, compared to its market share. And they were always nasty to get rid of, IME.
I've owned machines running DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0, 3.1, OS/2 2.1, OS/2 2.11, Windows 2k Server, Windows XP, Solaris 2.4, Solaris 2.5, Solaris 2.5.1, Solaris 2.6, IRIX 6.2, IRIX 6.5, NeXTSTEP 2.x, NeXTStep 3.3, OpenStep 4.2, OpenBSD 2.{5,6,7,8}, Linux TAMU, Slackware 1.0 (and a bunch of subsequent versions).
Do you know what?
I have never had a virus of any kind on any of those machines.
The best anti-virus protection is inbetween your ears.
Ironically, my IRIX machine was remote rooted, and i had a DOS successfully launched against my Solaris 2.6 machine (sunkill.. made telmod eat cpu/ram in kernel time).
My windows machines have comparatively been trouble free.
What the hell do you people do where your machines are always screwed up with malware on them? Do you not even bother to think about the consequences of your actions?
this is just stupid. Do you honestly beleive "we" (microsoft employees) just sit around thinking "crap, we accidentally made this a bit too good. Quick, lets check in a bunch of integer overflows and null-dereferences!" ?
Or maybe you think that our product cycle works like this:
1: generally define what we think should go into product 2: bust ass for multiple YEARS trying to get it all done 3: modify plan in light of things that happened in multi-year time frame 4: arbitrarily decide to NOT ship 50% of our features because they were all the way done and worked great, but, you know.. we need more stuff to ship in the future
Unfortuneately, as you're all too aware, we have a big, 20 year backlog of bugs and design problems, and we hope to chip away a little more than we add with each new feature, which we also have a multi-year long queue of new stuff we think we can add. The only feature-complete peice of software i am aware of is TeX. That means that for everything _we_ make, we think there's more left to do.
Do you beleive that there is no progress in the field of computing? Do you honestly think we pay developers and testers to sit around doing nothing for years at a time?
Every person i work with is frustrated about - how long it takes us to ship - how many features we have to cut - anytime a bug affects a customer
Nobody i work with is saying "lets save that for the next version, because we cant think of enough new stuff to make a new version. All the ideas we're capable of having, we've already had, and we just need to space them out."
I can tell you i was pissed off when i heard some of the cuts for Vista. I bet the Vista team was 200x as pissed as i was - they weren't working crazy hours just so dipshits on slashdot could ask when we'd get around to "cloning OSX".
What you propose sounds interesting, but how is it different than the part of my message you quoted? What you describe would be a govt institution that artificially creates a market for the re-use of IP, which is what I was trying to express (apparently, i did not do so successfully)
One "downside" i see is that it's not clear that the inventor has any say in how they are compensated; the PTO apparently decides that? That puts the balance of power a bit more into the hands of the govt than i feel ok with.. although with the legal environment being what it is, its hard to imagine it could be any worse than the net negative affect of litigation.. but if there's 1 govt department that can exceed my expectations for lousyness.. its the patent office:)
I am an MS employee (although my posting is DEFINITELY my own opinion and has no relation to anything that might be the position of my employer).
I am against software patents, such as they exist today in the US.
I am _for_ government granting artificial protections to people/organizations that create IP, because i beleive that authors, software developers, and musicians deserve to have some say in how money is made from their intellectual property, and it seems necessary to make the model work (at least for pharmecutical companies). These protections should last for a limited time and focus on letting the inventor recoup their development costs, plus a nice profit, and then after the granted time period, the general public freely benefits from the work. I beleive this is called copyright, but its been badly perverted in the US.
It is my claim that Microsoft is not esecially obnoxious w.r.t. software patents. Consideration of history will show that we get sued, via software patents, alot more than we sue others. Our acquisition of patents and patening as much as we can is only reasonable, given the litiguous, absurd software patening environment we're in.
I would expect that we're in favor of software patent stuff in europe because it helps to level the playing field cross-market.
I would _like_ it to be the case that there are no software patents anywhere. We've lost a lot of money due to absurd patent lawsuits (Eolas, for instance).
The final thing to consider is how patents affect F/OSS. This is a hard one for me to have a coherent opinion on. Everybody, no matter where they work, wrote and continues to write software in their free time at home. Nothing is more fundamental than the individual right of creating things.
On the other hand, its frustrating for me to see F/OSS software that is just outright cloning other, commercially developed software. It's frustrating because the work to do design, UI research, feature consideration/development, etc etc was done by a company, and took time and money. Writing the code is a small part of the job of shipping software, and when you're cloning commercial software for F/OSS projects, you only do the coding work, and you're "using" the rest of it without the original people being compensated in any way.
I wrestle with these two opposing positions - i want people to be able to write whatever software they want. I don't want people to be able to clone the work of others (with less effort) and give it away for free [especially for the stated motive of trying to "ruin" the original creator - which is often the case with F/OSS and Microsoft]
I lean in favor of the individual, and my response to corporate anti-cloning interests is along the lines of "i guess you'll just have to out-innovate the cloners instead of resting on your laurels" (which is another concept that originally showed up in Copyright)
I think many people are worried (rightly so) that Microsoft will use software patents to block F/OSS cloning of microsoft products/technologies. I am not sure what all the motivations are, but there are a lot of contributing issues. Yes, we want people to buy our stuff instead of using freeware clones. Yes, we are _required_ to persue possible patent infringers for our patents to remain valid. Yes, there is a software patent industry, that for better or worse, we _have_ to participate in. There are other reasons probalby, and i dont know what mix of them causes what action by us for what project/person "out there".
I've never talked to a single engineer - here or at any place - that is happy with the US software patent landscape. These are all people that get paid to write code, and have healthy at-home projects going.
I think everyone that writes software struggles with "how do i keep my job?" vs "how do i retain the freedom to create whatever i want to?"
i want to call your message a horrible troll, but it doesn't even make sense. trolls are usually a particuarly obnoxious, but plausible, point of view, presented as-fact with no supporting evidence.
nothing about what you're written is plausible.
The most ridiculous thing you wrote -- that really convinced me to respond -- was the bit about non-buggy code for reliable systems/aircraft being written in C/C++.
With this gem, you immediately disqualify yourself from any possible further serious consideration. Managed platforms like java and.net were invented precisely because of the difficulty of C/C++ environments. I'm not saying java/.net are showing up in aircraft (yet?), but C/C++ is NOT known for its non bugginess and stellar reliability:)
In any case, the one avionics system i have a dim knowledge of is the F-15 program, and my understanding is that it primarily used Ada... which you dont mention at all.
My last little lecture here, to try and set you straight:
people that take religous or ideological positions about technology ("C is the best language ever", "Fortan is better than C#") are hurting themselves and the industry. Any given technolgy has good and bad points about it, for a particular targeted use, implemented by a particular team/engineer, and deployed/supported for a specified time.
With programming languages and development environments, there is no hammer that makes every problem a nail.
from what i've read internally, the Cable Companies are a much bigger slice of that problem than Microsoft.
MS is only pro-DRM in the sense that, without any DRM, content providers wont get onboard with PCs, and if there is going to be DRM, Microsoft might as well make it so that it at least works right in windows (and beacuse nobody could possibly write software worse than media companies...)
Think about it from MS's perspective. Anytime something doesn't "just work", a user is potentially going to call for support, or have a negative experience and tell a bunch of people about it. Media playback, TV tuning, etc, all needs to work painlesly. DRM complicates that quite a bit, and causes real headaches for users.
The other place MS cares about DRM / sneakiness is Xbox. Given the problems with piracy in the console space, and the subsidization of the hardware, i think those are reasonable places to want it (from MS's perspective).
Although one irritating quirk is that in the current builds (MCE 2005 w/ Rollup #2, code named "Emerald"), MCE will not detect an ATSC tuner card unless an NTSC tuner is also installed.
Multi-tuner HDTV from disjoint networks was a core scenario for Emerald. (i.e. MCE knows what your SD tuners have, what channels your HD tuner have, when shows show up both places that you prefer HD, etc)
A co-worker tells me it works well, looks fabulous.
CableCard is happening this year. Also, DirecTV has struck a deal with MS to somehow get HD content off of DTV boxes onto MCE boxes. Details aren't clear, but at least they're finally talking.
I feel like I've seen this before somewhere.. some company figures out a way to suck the energy out of living things and then sells it as plentiful cheap power to humanity.
But woe befalls them all when it is determined what damage this causes the planet, and thus humanity.
Congratulations. Now we know that the Black Technology known as the "Lambda Driver" was first developed in Germany... a few years from now.
Have you been paying attention to the ASIMO? We're less than 20 years away from man-made ArmSlave unts. All the parts/subsystems are falling into place.
I would think the MS would have a department of crackers and hackers to try to do shit like this. Also, didn't any of the original developers think of this when they wrote it or did they think the exploit was so remote, that it'll never happen?
We have a few security-focused assets in the company.
There is a team that grew out of some of the company-wide security folks that are sort of the "gatekeepers" now for all software that leaves the building.. you have to pass their audits, which are primarily about running internally brewed tools against your source code and binaries. As we get better at this stuff we update our tools and as the tools find things the developers get smarter about not writing dumb code to begin with, the testers get better at writing evil tests, and the PMs get better about recognizing that a feature is a problem-by-design to begin with.
This team will also do some code/design review, and will make you justify any bugs you decided to "Won't Fix" during the developmnent cycle. Our bug tracking systems have all been amended to include lots of rich info re: security/threat impact, and this team mines that data as well.
They do _very_ limited penetration testing.
Distributed across teams there are security "representatives" that are supposed to coordinate training and getting the latest tools/best practices out to the developers/testers at large.
Development teams are required to create threat models for all feature areas. The threat model library must be presented to the "gatekeeper" team described earlier as well.
Some teams are building local penetration testing teams.. which ahve product/feature area domain expertise.. but also understand the art of penetration testing. We don't have enough "centralized" resources to have a crack team of pen testers that cover all products. They can provide guidance/expertise/interviewing/whatever, but ultimately cant cover the whole company. Building a culture of grey-hat minded people and sprinkling them through-out every product team takes a long time.
Note that everything i am describing did not exist at MS 5 years ago. Blaster, Nimda, CodeRed, Melissa, etc really kicked our ass with customers. In a way, we needed all those so that internally people could really justify making the investments needed in security. There was a lot of sentiment along the lines of "we got to be #1 with the way we've been doing things, who are you to argue?", from a lot of really smart, strong-minded people.
Breaking that and reforming them to the new religion takes time.
We have a _huge_ debt of bad code, bad practices, bad developers, bad testers, and bad managers. We've been working pretty hard to pay down that debt. When i say "bad developer" i mean "developer that wrote code for years, never having to care about security", not that the developer is stupid/has malcious/intentionally poor habits.
Based on how often we issue patches, # of patches released for a given product, etc now compared to say, Win2k, i think the changes are already starting to pay dividends for us. Server 2003 is a lot better out-of-box than Server 2000 was. If nothing else, when i read a design doc or look at a bug report now and feel like it might be a problem, and say so, people take me more seriously. They aren't as apt to play the "it's not my problem" or "that can't happen in the real world" games as they were just a few years ago.
I'm not saying these are (necessarily) insurmountable, but:
One doesn't really have _full_ flexibility in binary layout. There are issues like word alignment to be aware of.
Windows needs to know how to get the address of a symbol, by name, dynamically. Even if you change the address underneath, the exploit only needs to call a routine to just call the moved function by name.
One of the advantages of DLLs is that the text (code) segments are shared cross-process. If you want to make the loader muck with the images per-process, you effectively have static libraries. This is lethal on server type applications with hundreds or thousands of separate address spaces.
Note that if you _dont_ do per-process space scrambling, your exploit can just scan its entire address space to see where the relocated stuff is, because it will be the same in all the other address spaces on the box.
Finally - this was a spec defect - my understanding is that the code is actually running as designed.. it's just a facility that has no business in a modern, assumed-hostile computing world.
While that's comfortable to know now, we detonated the first h-bomb in the early 50s over Bikini Atoll. Clearly that device didn't cause auto-ignition, so its safe to say its _possible_ to detonate them without that affect.
I wonder.. who really _knew_ until _after_ there was an earth left post Bikini-Atoll ?
How much of this stuff can your uncle talk about legally? He should write a book:)
Yeah, i'd start investing in companies that make anti-matter storage bottles, because the stuff is literally everywhere and we need to catch-em-all Pokemon style with our magic anti-matter-collector jars. We've got anti-matter just leaking out of everything, dying to be used to answer all of our clean/renewable energy problems.
While AM research is cool, making it and storing it is still energy expensive compared to the release of am/m reactions. (last time i looked.. im happy to be out of date! )
It seems unlikely that we'll get sustainable, net-gain am/m reactors until after we've figured out sustainable, net-gain fusion. At least with fusion, we have plenty of hydryogen looking for something to do, and keeping a bottle of it isn't exactly an exotic phyics problem. Not so with AM.
IIRC, the real concern about atmospheric ignition was for the hydrogen bomb, due to the abundance of hydrogen in the atmosphere.
When talking about nuclear weapons, the convention seems to be that "atomic" discusses fission devices, and "thermonuclear" discusses fusion devices.
The risk of atmospheric ignition was really only discussed seriously for thermonuclear devices, i thought?
The manhattan project dealt with the construction of atomic devices. I would imagine that the h-bomb work (led by Edward Teller, iirc) had a different name...
I made the case that SUV's actually aren't a net safety increase for you. But the horrible vehicle you drive definitely causes aggregately less safe conditions for others - its less controllable, more likely to not do what you want it to, and harder to stop / will do more damage when it does hit something.
So, its not safer for you, and its not safer for anyone else either.
Moving on - Most poeople think they're a better driver than most. That's part of the problem.
Clearly, most people must be wrong.
While I admire you for using your turn signal, what reason do you have to think you are a better driver than other people? Have you had more driver training? Are you vastly more intelligent, with better reflexes, etc ? Without knowing anything about your intelligence, i will bet that there have been professional race drivers both dumber and smarter than you are, and all of them are much better drivers than you. So clearly driving aptitude is not merely an issue of ones intelligence.
So what reason do you have to think you're an above average driver? Has your driving instruction, practice, and knowledge grossly eclipsed that of the average driver? If not, why would you think you're better than average?
the X360 A/V architecture is pretty open ended. For instance, you can get a VGA pack for it to drive VGA displays directly.
I can't say for sure that an HDCP/HDMI output box is a sure-thing, but there was a lot of flexibility designed in up front, so i think its very possible.
the best way to be a safe driver is situational awareness.
You can choose to optimize for avoiding accidents, or you can choose to optimize for an irrational hope that the ones you do have will be survivable.
By selecting an SUV, you've done the latter.
However, by doing so, you've chosen to have more accidents, more often. SUV's, irrespective of any other factors, have less grip than lighter vehicles merely because of their excessive weight, and because the load/grip ratio on modern tires is non-linear.. there's a fall off as load increases.
Additionally, the excessive girth of most SUVs means that you're fighting significantly more inertia than other vehicles. The horrible twist and non-rigidity in the construction means that any evasive maneuvers are uselessly slow - the body of the truck twists instead of directing the tires to move.
Everything the vehicle does is slow.. numb... subdued.
The high roll center means that more weight is transferred in all accelerative movements.. when turning you move more weight to the outside edge.. when braking you unload the rear tires more.. prior to high-roll-center SUVs being commonplace, rollovers were pretty much unheard of on paved roads. (when you leave the road, that's a different story).
even if you are the most situationally aware driver, when you pilot an SUV, you are motivating a stick of butter across a pan. You're driving a numb, useless instrument instead of a precision machine with proper dynamics.
You will be in more accidents, because you're driving a vehicle more likely to roll, more likely to twist/bend under dynamic conditions, that takes longer to stop, turn, and change direction, and which has lower road-adhesion characteristics for a given tire design than a lighter car would.
Also, your increased mass will tend to cause more damage to others around you.
All of this.. because you think you are better off if someone hits _you_? You've chosen a vehicle that makes it more likely you'll get hit (because it cant evade effectively.. and it's an enormous target). Your vehicle is more likely to roll in a side impact. Your vehicle has a very weak chassis, so unless the collision hits in just the right spot, the amount of body deflection and passenger intrusion will be more severe than in a well made unibody car.
I live in the midwest, so i understand the utility and necessity of large, ladder-frame vehicles perfectly well. But i dont own one, because i am not a farmer, construction foreman, or other blue-collar contractor. Trucks and SUVs have a purpose, but passenger safety for daily driving isn't it.
sorry for your bad experience.. i think it depends on the personalities of the contractor and the other people on the team.
I don't know anything specifically about why GLEAM wouldn't allow you to join, but in general, non-blues are excluded from all kinds of things due to nobody understanding the legal issues involved and nobody being a real advocate of contractor "rights" [these are not really "rights" issues but thats the word that seems to describe the feeling best in my mind] enough to try and understand / resolve them.
Even though contractors sign NDAs and all that, we get advice from legal all the time that certain topics are not open to discussion when non-FTEs are present. Many internal mailing-lists at MS are FTE only.. sometimes because there is a real business need and others because the FTEs dont want to have to worry about what they say.
So did your experience on the bus cause you to look away from MS?
Also, im not sure how it works at other places, but at MS there is NO implication that a contractor will ever become a full timer. I've interviewed candidates for both types of positions - the duration, intensity, and nature of the interviews are completely different. We're looking for different things, depending on which type of position we're hiring for. Yes, many contractors do end up getting FTE positions, but its by no means an expected or even a desired thing from a company perspective.
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How come nearly all those school shootings happened in Rural areas?
You mean like Columbine/Littleton, CO? You know, the place where the school shooting that put school shootings on the map, and in everyone's face? The only school shooting that was about popular kids excluding kids that didn't conform (lots of the other shootings are about relationships, personal vendettas, etc etc. Columbine is the definitive "we were sick of being excluded" shooting)
Do you suppose that Littleton is a small, rural area, full of intolerant hilljacks?
Or, is it a posh suburb, with a bunch if uppity whites who think they're hot snot because they have rich parents? People with 0 dimensional personalities, who have nothing actually going for them and are slowly realizing their destiny of being mid-pack in the big money, big-city, anonymous, co-dependant, fruitless American "life"?
I can't say - I haven't been there. But, FYI, Littleton/Columbine are southwestern suburbs of Denver. They're even inside the interstate loop.
I can't see that you actually have any substance to any "argument" you've tried making. It's clear you think poorly of rural America. I don't doubt that you've had some bad experiences. Even so, the notion that cities are objectively "better" than rural areas is laughable. Just accept that people have differing tastes and get on with life.
Actually i'd say large municipalities are much worse about demanding conformity via legal action. My understanding is that it is effectively impossible to get an apartment without paying an apartment broker in large new-england cities, and there are laws to support this. In Massechusetts, it is apparently illegal to do construction work without police officers present, so you have cops parked in cruisers whereever there are construction sites. Street parking infront of your own house? -- illegal. Hell the "small" city of Redmond, WA requires a building permit to move your refrigerator to another outlet (true story!)
As we know, the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.
I'd much rather live in a place where conformity built a sense of community, but one could choose to swim upstream with social ostracization being the only potential downside. Comparatively, "community" in large cities is about passing laws to try and keep your neighbors from doing things you dont like. If I'm going to go against the grain, i'd rather have people pissed off at me than cops arresting me. Wouldn't you?
As an aside - when i lived in seattle there was a HUGE uproar over a bunch of blacks beating the crap out of some white people during a mardi gras party in pioneer square. IIRC, it was just 1 or 2 whites.. women i think? And like 10 black people just beating them senseless. Because it was black-on-white violence, the mayor/media etc claimed it was not racially motivated.
The idea that race violence, sex/gender violence, etc aren't problems in cities is patently false.
work ethic, intelligence, and problem solving ability are widely distributed across the planet. There is not a monopoly on these desirable traits in large cities.
There are people who are good employees and add to the bottom line of the company they work for, that have no desire to live in a large city. Businesses will be successful when they most effectively compete for the employee talent they need.
Also, I can see the monocultural effect* of large cities has already affected you. There are people that prefer not to live in large cities, for a variety of good reasons.
* despite places like NYC effectively implementing the "Mosaic of Subcultures" pattern (read Christopher Alexander), people born and bred in large cities are by and large socially dependant on others, and not necessarily ideologically different than their neighbors. Witness the solidarity of liberal/democratic voting in all the ubran areas of the US. I don't mean to suggest that you dont have an issue of monoculturalism but with the opposite political slant in rural america, but for problem solving ability, self reliability, and work ethic, i will choose someone raised on a farm _every time_ over a city-slicker. When you grow up solving all of your own problems just to be able to _eat_ reliably, or teaching yourself how to repair broken equipment in the middle of a field because nobody else is there to help you, an office job is trivial, comparatively.
2 Years ago I voluntarily left Seattle/Redmond for North Dakota.
.com boom has ended, but i still feel like the "meat and potatoes" software developer gets no real exposure in this country.. programmers working at banks/insurance companies, doing factory control, doing embedded work for cash registers, engine controllers, etc etc etc. In many cases, these sorts of jobs are closer to the industries they support.. i.e. guy
Microsoft has an office here (we acquired Great Plains Software, which was a reasonably successful company in its own right) so it was a move I could make and stay with the same company (MS), but get a different setting/lifestyle.
If anything happens to this Microsoft office, or even my job personally, I am screwed. There is nothing anywhere near here paying MS salaries for software development. The closest would be Minneapolis, a 3 hr drive, and then you've got cost of living problems similar to the Seattle area.
That said, as long as it works, it's great. Lots of people here live on hobby farms 30-45mins away that are enormous. There's no traffic, people are friendly and non-uppity (try finding that in Seattle).
As far as technology in AG equipment.. yeah, its pretty cool. Multiple guys i work with wrote embedded software for AG machinery. Also, anyone that grew up here grew up on a farm so i've gotten to see what farm life is like via some friends i've made. Even the family farmer can debt finance used equipment that has onboard GPS. A friend of ours has a variable-track front-boom sprayer. This thing is like Optimus prime.. it unfolds and transforms and all kinds of stuff. It auto adjusts the fluid pressure in the boom to compensate for vehicle speed, and when it turns it slows down delivery to the inboard side of the boom (because it moves over crops more slowly). It uses GPS to partition your field into rows of travel and will tell you if you're veering off course (which can be helpful when you're driving through a sea of crops). The latest equipment will essentially drive itself along calculated GPS routes to cover an entire section of land.
This particular friend of ours also has a satellite weather/data terminal system. Pretty neat.. its a dedicated box that a normal PC mouse/kb/monitor plug into.. hooked up to a sat dish. It gives him 24/7 weather information, futures trading info.. crop yield reports from other markets, basically anything that would be interesting to a farmer.
Still, as much technology is available to the farmer, the family farm still struggles more often then it succeeds. Lots of operations are going with contract-harvesters.. companies that buy the biggest combines brand new, show up, and harvest your whole operation in a day, then move on to the next guy. This is good because the cost of these machines is outrageous.. and because they show up on the used market a few years later. It's bad because it's a loss of self-sufficiency for farmers.. and it suggests that equipment will continue to get more and more expensive even though technology is supposed to make things cheaper.
There are companies now that sell satellite thermal / IR data of field flybys.. you can say something about the productivity of a certain section of soil for a certain crop.. and take that data into account for how you do future rotations and plantings. If you correlate the previous years yeild data vs how much seeding you did there vs how much spraying you did etc etc, you can start to make some wise decisions about what plants will do best in what sections of land, on a rotating basis.
There's a lot of really, really interesting software work that can be applied to old fashioned problems, but nobody sees the glamour in writing software to do these sorts of things. The idea of "software developer" in my head is someone that lives in a big city, spends too much on coffee, has an Aeron chair.. and gets paid entirely too much money for what boils down to web surfing at work all day. It's less like that now that the
i was merely trying to illuminate the lack of historical perspective in your post. As other posters have mentioned - early viruses _were_ OS agnostic. Later on, platforms without proper user segmentation/memory protection (like Dos, Win 3.x, and Mac OS pre-X) all had viruses written for them.
As an aside, viruses do tend to be platform specific now, and "platform" means more than operating system. For instance, viruses that spread from one website to another via hijacking a browser. The browser is vulnerable, but the virus targets servers _and_ browsers.
Or the outlook/word macro viruses. These are application-specific viruses. You can use windows but be totally immune to these viruses if you dont have/use those particular applications.
The idea that there is a correlation between product security and # of viruses developed and in circulation, and that that is the only correlation, is false.
We can see that, observationally, the security of something like SunOS 4 or IRIX 4 was very very poor, yet there were few/any? viruses for those platforms.
Additionally, viruses as a type of attack are less interesting than they used to be. What makes a virus a virus is its self replicating nature. Why does it self replicate? So it is more likely to be run again and again. It needs to insert itself into as many programs as possible because invoking those programs/execution containers (in the case of word macro viruses) is how it delivers its payload and continues to spread. That is no longer the case today - platforms are always on, with long running service type processes. Malware can create new processes on the fly without user intervention. The "infect as many files as possible to increase liklihood of execution" is not really a relevant attack paradigm in a modern, always connected operating system.
In any case, there is nothing about OS X or any UNIX for that matter that makes it fundamentally more virus-resistant than Windows NT based systems. In each platform, the user is still required to do something for a virus to work. In the case of Windows, there are lots more ways that code can be executed, and the penetratino of these mechanisms is higher, but the former is a features issue and the latter is a market penetation issue.
If 90% of the population were using Mac OS X, we'd see more Mac OS X malware (2nd issue). 90% of the population wont ever use Mac OS X, because it lacks the features people want (the first issue - we don't build execution engines into various contexts just to make malware easier to develop. There are legitimate reasons why users would want Macros in Excel or HTML in their email. The problem is balancing flexibility of features with security in the face of increasing hostility)
You seem to be saying what I am saying above. Microsoft programmers are not managed in such a way that they can possibly deliver a nicely finished product. Is that correct?
While Microsoft has its share of political problems and redundant layers of management (IMO), thats not actually what i meant.
When considering how to deliver Vista, we had a few options, all of which were unattractive
- keep working on it until its "done"
-- and ship multiple years later than we wanted to, by which time customers have moved in droves elsewhere, generations of new partner hardware has gone unsupported/unutilized, the entire pace of the windows software world has slowed. Legitimate customer issues we deemed to expensive to address in XP / 2k3 take that much longer to get into customer hands.
- cut a bunch of stuff completely to make it by date blah
-- despite the # of bugs that we ship with, we are very bug averse and risk averse. if we dont think something will be done enough and meet the quality bar, we dont let it in the box.
-- nobody is thrilled about doing date driven releases but everyone understands why sometimes its better to get a working product with a subset of features into the hands of customers sooner
I would characterize our situation, in general, for everything we do, as:
"we have a variety of choices, each of which will piss off somebody"
We're in the business of minimizing the valence of "sombody"
There were NO virii for MacOS 6/7/8/9. There were no Mac A/V products for those platforms.
I wouldn't be surprised if MacOS had a disproportionately large # of virii written for it, compared to its market share. And they were always nasty to get rid of, IME.
I've owned machines running DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0, 3.1, OS/2 2.1, OS/2 2.11, Windows 2k Server, Windows XP, Solaris 2.4, Solaris 2.5, Solaris 2.5.1, Solaris 2.6, IRIX 6.2, IRIX 6.5, NeXTSTEP 2.x, NeXTStep 3.3, OpenStep 4.2, OpenBSD 2.{5,6,7,8}, Linux TAMU, Slackware 1.0 (and a bunch of subsequent versions).
Do you know what?
I have never had a virus of any kind on any of those machines.
The best anti-virus protection is inbetween your ears.
Ironically, my IRIX machine was remote rooted, and i had a DOS successfully launched against my Solaris 2.6 machine (sunkill.. made telmod eat cpu/ram in kernel time).
My windows machines have comparatively been trouble free.
What the hell do you people do where your machines are always screwed up with malware on them? Do you not even bother to think about the consequences of your actions?
this is just stupid. Do you honestly beleive "we" (microsoft employees) just sit around thinking "crap, we accidentally made this a bit too good. Quick, lets check in a bunch of integer overflows and null-dereferences!" ?
Or maybe you think that our product cycle works like this:
1: generally define what we think should go into product
2: bust ass for multiple YEARS trying to get it all done
3: modify plan in light of things that happened in multi-year time frame
4: arbitrarily decide to NOT ship 50% of our features because they were all the way done and worked great, but, you know.. we need more stuff to ship in the future
Unfortuneately, as you're all too aware, we have a big, 20 year backlog of bugs and design problems, and we hope to chip away a little more than we add with each new feature, which we also have a multi-year long queue of new stuff we think we can add. The only feature-complete peice of software i am aware of is TeX. That means that for everything _we_ make, we think there's more left to do.
Do you beleive that there is no progress in the field of computing? Do you honestly think we pay developers and testers to sit around doing nothing for years at a time?
Every person i work with is frustrated about
- how long it takes us to ship
- how many features we have to cut
- anytime a bug affects a customer
Nobody i work with is saying "lets save that for the next version, because we cant think of enough new stuff to make a new version. All the ideas we're capable of having, we've already had, and we just need to space them out."
I can tell you i was pissed off when i heard some of the cuts for Vista. I bet the Vista team was 200x as pissed as i was - they weren't working crazy hours just so dipshits on slashdot could ask when we'd get around to "cloning OSX".
How did you get modded insightful?
What you propose sounds interesting, but how is it different than the part of my message you quoted? What you describe would be a govt institution that artificially creates a market for the re-use of IP, which is what I was trying to express (apparently, i did not do so successfully)
:)
One "downside" i see is that it's not clear that the inventor has any say in how they are compensated; the PTO apparently decides that? That puts the balance of power a bit more into the hands of the govt than i feel ok with.. although with the legal environment being what it is, its hard to imagine it could be any worse than the net negative affect of litigation.. but if there's 1 govt department that can exceed my expectations for lousyness.. its the patent office
I am an MS employee (although my posting is DEFINITELY my own opinion and has no relation to anything that might be the position of my employer).
I am against software patents, such as they exist today in the US.
I am _for_ government granting artificial protections to people/organizations that create IP, because i beleive that authors, software developers, and musicians deserve to have some say in how money is made from their intellectual property, and it seems necessary to make the model work (at least for pharmecutical companies). These protections should last for a limited time and focus on letting the inventor recoup their development costs, plus a nice profit, and then after the granted time period, the general public freely benefits from the work. I beleive this is called copyright, but its been badly perverted in the US.
It is my claim that Microsoft is not esecially obnoxious w.r.t. software patents. Consideration of history will show that we get sued, via software patents, alot more than we sue others. Our acquisition of patents and patening as much as we can is only reasonable, given the litiguous, absurd software patening environment we're in.
I would expect that we're in favor of software patent stuff in europe because it helps to level the playing field cross-market.
I would _like_ it to be the case that there are no software patents anywhere. We've lost a lot of money due to absurd patent lawsuits (Eolas, for instance).
The final thing to consider is how patents affect F/OSS. This is a hard one for me to have a coherent opinion on. Everybody, no matter where they work, wrote and continues to write software in their free time at home. Nothing is more fundamental than the individual right of creating things.
On the other hand, its frustrating for me to see F/OSS software that is just outright cloning other, commercially developed software. It's frustrating because the work to do design, UI research, feature consideration/development, etc etc was done by a company, and took time and money. Writing the code is a small part of the job of shipping software, and when you're cloning commercial software for F/OSS projects, you only do the coding work, and you're "using" the rest of it without the original people being compensated in any way.
I wrestle with these two opposing positions - i want people to be able to write whatever software they want. I don't want people to be able to clone the work of others (with less effort) and give it away for free [especially for the stated motive of trying to "ruin" the original creator - which is often the case with F/OSS and Microsoft]
I lean in favor of the individual, and my response to corporate anti-cloning interests is along the lines of "i guess you'll just have to out-innovate the cloners instead of resting on your laurels" (which is another concept that originally showed up in Copyright)
I think many people are worried (rightly so) that Microsoft will use software patents to block F/OSS cloning of microsoft products/technologies. I am not sure what all the motivations are, but there are a lot of contributing issues. Yes, we want people to buy our stuff instead of using freeware clones. Yes, we are _required_ to persue possible patent infringers for our patents to remain valid. Yes, there is a software patent industry, that for better or worse, we _have_ to participate in. There are other reasons probalby, and i dont know what mix of them causes what action by us for what project/person "out there".
I've never talked to a single engineer - here or at any place - that is happy with the US software patent landscape. These are all people that get paid to write code, and have healthy at-home projects going.
I think everyone that writes software struggles with "how do i keep my job?" vs "how do i retain the freedom to create whatever i want to?"
i want to call your message a horrible troll, but it doesn't even make sense. trolls are usually a particuarly obnoxious, but plausible, point of view, presented as-fact with no supporting evidence.
.net were invented precisely because of the difficulty of C/C++ environments. I'm not saying java/.net are showing up in aircraft (yet?), but C/C++ is NOT known for its non bugginess and stellar reliability :)
nothing about what you're written is plausible.
The most ridiculous thing you wrote -- that really convinced me to respond -- was the bit about non-buggy code for reliable systems/aircraft being written in C/C++.
With this gem, you immediately disqualify yourself from any possible further serious consideration. Managed platforms like java and
In any case, the one avionics system i have a dim knowledge of is the F-15 program, and my understanding is that it primarily used Ada... which you dont mention at all.
My last little lecture here, to try and set you straight:
people that take religous or ideological positions about technology ("C is the best language ever", "Fortan is better than C#") are hurting themselves and the industry. Any given technolgy has good and bad points about it, for a particular targeted use, implemented by a particular team/engineer, and deployed/supported for a specified time.
With programming languages and development environments, there is no hammer that makes every problem a nail.
from what i've read internally, the Cable Companies are a much bigger slice of that problem than Microsoft.
MS is only pro-DRM in the sense that, without any DRM, content providers wont get onboard with PCs, and if there is going to be DRM, Microsoft might as well make it so that it at least works right in windows (and beacuse nobody could possibly write software worse than media companies...)
Think about it from MS's perspective. Anytime something doesn't "just work", a user is potentially going to call for support, or have a negative experience and tell a bunch of people about it. Media playback, TV tuning, etc, all needs to work painlesly. DRM complicates that quite a bit, and causes real headaches for users.
The other place MS cares about DRM / sneakiness is Xbox. Given the problems with piracy in the console space, and the subsidization of the hardware, i think those are reasonable places to want it (from MS's perspective).
Although one irritating quirk is that in the current builds (MCE 2005 w/ Rollup #2, code named "Emerald"), MCE will not detect an ATSC tuner card unless an NTSC tuner is also installed.
Multi-tuner HDTV from disjoint networks was a core scenario for Emerald. (i.e. MCE knows what your SD tuners have, what channels your HD tuner have, when shows show up both places that you prefer HD, etc)
A co-worker tells me it works well, looks fabulous.
CableCard is happening this year. Also, DirecTV has struck a deal with MS to somehow get HD content off of DTV boxes onto MCE boxes. Details aren't clear, but at least they're finally talking.
I feel like I've seen this before somewhere.. some company figures out a way to suck the energy out of living things and then sells it as plentiful cheap power to humanity.
But woe befalls them all when it is determined what damage this causes the planet, and thus humanity.
Oh Cu-lau-do, please save us!
Congratulations. Now we know that the Black Technology known as the "Lambda Driver" was first developed in Germany... a few years from now.
Have you been paying attention to the ASIMO? We're less than 20 years away from man-made ArmSlave unts. All the parts/subsystems are falling into place.
I would think the MS would have a department of crackers and hackers to try to do shit like this. Also, didn't any of the original developers think of this when they wrote it or did they think the exploit was so remote, that it'll never happen?
We have a few security-focused assets in the company.
There is a team that grew out of some of the company-wide security folks that are sort of the "gatekeepers" now for all software that leaves the building.. you have to pass their audits, which are primarily about running internally brewed tools against your source code and binaries. As we get better at this stuff we update our tools and as the tools find things the developers get smarter about not writing dumb code to begin with, the testers get better at writing evil tests, and the PMs get better about recognizing that a feature is a problem-by-design to begin with.
This team will also do some code/design review, and will make you justify any bugs you decided to "Won't Fix" during the developmnent cycle. Our bug tracking systems have all been amended to include lots of rich info re: security/threat impact, and this team mines that data as well.
They do _very_ limited penetration testing.
Distributed across teams there are security "representatives" that are supposed to coordinate training and getting the latest tools/best practices out to the developers/testers at large.
Development teams are required to create threat models for all feature areas. The threat model library must be presented to the "gatekeeper" team described earlier as well.
Some teams are building local penetration testing teams.. which ahve product/feature area domain expertise.. but also understand the art of penetration testing. We don't have enough "centralized" resources to have a crack team of pen testers that cover all products. They can provide guidance/expertise/interviewing/whatever, but ultimately cant cover the whole company. Building a culture of grey-hat minded people and sprinkling them through-out every product team takes a long time.
Note that everything i am describing did not exist at MS 5 years ago. Blaster, Nimda, CodeRed, Melissa, etc really kicked our ass with customers. In a way, we needed all those so that internally people could really justify making the investments needed in security. There was a lot of sentiment along the lines of "we got to be #1 with the way we've been doing things, who are you to argue?", from a lot of really smart, strong-minded people.
Breaking that and reforming them to the new religion takes time.
We have a _huge_ debt of bad code, bad practices, bad developers, bad testers, and bad managers. We've been working pretty hard to pay down that debt. When i say "bad developer" i mean "developer that wrote code for years, never having to care about security", not that the developer is stupid/has malcious/intentionally poor habits.
Based on how often we issue patches, # of patches released for a given product, etc now compared to say, Win2k, i think the changes are already starting to pay dividends for us. Server 2003 is a lot better out-of-box than Server 2000 was. If nothing else, when i read a design doc or look at a bug report now and feel like it might be a problem, and say so, people take me more seriously. They aren't as apt to play the "it's not my problem" or "that can't happen in the real world" games as they were just a few years ago.
I'm not saying these are (necessarily) insurmountable, but:
One doesn't really have _full_ flexibility in binary layout. There are issues like word alignment to be aware of.
Windows needs to know how to get the address of a symbol, by name, dynamically. Even if you change the address underneath, the exploit only needs to call a routine to just call the moved function by name.
One of the advantages of DLLs is that the text (code) segments are shared cross-process. If you want to make the loader muck with the images per-process, you effectively have static libraries. This is lethal on server type applications with hundreds or thousands of separate address spaces.
Note that if you _dont_ do per-process space scrambling, your exploit can just scan its entire address space to see where the relocated stuff is, because it will be the same in all the other address spaces on the box.
Finally - this was a spec defect - my understanding is that the code is actually running as designed.. it's just a facility that has no business in a modern, assumed-hostile computing world.
what cannot work? atmospheric hydrogen ignition?
:)
While that's comfortable to know now, we detonated the first h-bomb in the early 50s over Bikini Atoll. Clearly that device didn't cause auto-ignition, so its safe to say its _possible_ to detonate them without that affect.
I wonder.. who really _knew_ until _after_ there was an earth left post Bikini-Atoll ?
How much of this stuff can your uncle talk about legally? He should write a book
Yeah, i'd start investing in companies that make anti-matter storage bottles, because the stuff is literally everywhere and we need to catch-em-all Pokemon style with our magic anti-matter-collector jars. We've got anti-matter just leaking out of everything, dying to be used to answer all of our clean/renewable energy problems.
While AM research is cool, making it and storing it is still energy expensive compared to the release of am/m reactions. (last time i looked.. im happy to be out of date! )
It seems unlikely that we'll get sustainable, net-gain am/m reactors until after we've figured out sustainable, net-gain fusion. At least with fusion, we have plenty of hydryogen looking for something to do, and keeping a bottle of it isn't exactly an exotic phyics problem. Not so with AM.
IIRC, the real concern about atmospheric ignition was for the hydrogen bomb, due to the abundance of hydrogen in the atmosphere.
When talking about nuclear weapons, the convention seems to be that "atomic" discusses fission devices, and "thermonuclear" discusses fusion devices.
The risk of atmospheric ignition was really only discussed seriously for thermonuclear devices, i thought?
The manhattan project dealt with the construction of atomic devices. I would imagine that the h-bomb work (led by Edward Teller, iirc) had a different name...
I made the case that SUV's actually aren't a net safety increase for you. But the horrible vehicle you drive definitely causes aggregately less safe conditions for others - its less controllable, more likely to not do what you want it to, and harder to stop / will do more damage when it does hit something.
So, its not safer for you, and its not safer for anyone else either.
Moving on - Most poeople think they're a better driver than most. That's part of the problem.
Clearly, most people must be wrong.
While I admire you for using your turn signal, what reason do you have to think you are a better driver than other people? Have you had more driver training? Are you vastly more intelligent, with better reflexes, etc ? Without knowing anything about your intelligence, i will bet that there have been professional race drivers both dumber and smarter than you are, and all of them are much better drivers than you. So clearly driving aptitude is not merely an issue of ones intelligence.
So what reason do you have to think you're an above average driver? Has your driving instruction, practice, and knowledge grossly eclipsed that of the average driver? If not, why would you think you're better than average?
the X360 A/V architecture is pretty open ended. For instance, you can get a VGA pack for it to drive VGA displays directly.
I can't say for sure that an HDCP/HDMI output box is a sure-thing, but there was a lot of flexibility designed in up front, so i think its very possible.
the best way to be a safe driver is situational awareness.
You can choose to optimize for avoiding accidents, or you can choose to optimize for an irrational hope that the ones you do have will be survivable.
By selecting an SUV, you've done the latter.
However, by doing so, you've chosen to have more accidents, more often. SUV's, irrespective of any other factors, have less grip than lighter vehicles merely because of their excessive weight, and because the load/grip ratio on modern tires is non-linear.. there's a fall off as load increases.
Additionally, the excessive girth of most SUVs means that you're fighting significantly more inertia than other vehicles. The horrible twist and non-rigidity in the construction means that any evasive maneuvers are uselessly slow - the body of the truck twists instead of directing the tires to move.
Everything the vehicle does is slow.. numb... subdued.
The high roll center means that more weight is transferred in all accelerative movements.. when turning you move more weight to the outside edge.. when braking you unload the rear tires more.. prior to high-roll-center SUVs being commonplace, rollovers were pretty much unheard of on paved roads. (when you leave the road, that's a different story).
even if you are the most situationally aware driver, when you pilot an SUV, you are motivating a stick of butter across a pan. You're driving a numb, useless instrument instead of a precision machine with proper dynamics.
You will be in more accidents, because you're driving a vehicle more likely to roll, more likely to twist/bend under dynamic conditions, that takes longer to stop, turn, and change direction, and which has lower road-adhesion characteristics for a given tire design than a lighter car would.
Also, your increased mass will tend to cause more damage to others around you.
All of this.. because you think you are better off if someone hits _you_? You've chosen a vehicle that makes it more likely you'll get hit (because it cant evade effectively.. and it's an enormous target). Your vehicle is more likely to roll in a side impact. Your vehicle has a very weak chassis, so unless the collision hits in just the right spot, the amount of body deflection and passenger intrusion will be more severe than in a well made unibody car.
I live in the midwest, so i understand the utility and necessity of large, ladder-frame vehicles perfectly well. But i dont own one, because i am not a farmer, construction foreman, or other blue-collar contractor. Trucks and SUVs have a purpose, but passenger safety for daily driving isn't it.
Congratulations, you've been deluded.
sorry for your bad experience.. i think it depends on the personalities of the contractor and the other people on the team.
I don't know anything specifically about why GLEAM wouldn't allow you to join, but in general, non-blues are excluded from all kinds of things due to nobody understanding the legal issues involved and nobody being a real advocate of contractor "rights" [these are not really "rights" issues but thats the word that seems to describe the feeling best in my mind] enough to try and understand / resolve them.
Even though contractors sign NDAs and all that, we get advice from legal all the time that certain topics are not open to discussion when non-FTEs are present. Many internal mailing-lists at MS are FTE only.. sometimes because there is a real business need and others because the FTEs dont want to have to worry about what they say.
So did your experience on the bus cause you to look away from MS?
Also, im not sure how it works at other places, but at MS there is NO implication that a contractor will ever become a full timer. I've interviewed candidates for both types of positions - the duration, intensity, and nature of the interviews are completely different. We're looking for different things, depending on which type of position we're hiring for. Yes, many contractors do end up getting FTE positions, but its by no means an expected or even a desired thing from a company perspective.