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Yep! This is my biggest irritation when talking with freshman liberal arts majors. They don't understand economies and their long term growth.
Many people talk about how terrible children working and making so little money. Many of these people would be surprised to hear that many of these African countries that employ this type of labor are actually begging for factories to come to their rural towns. Why?:
First, without these factories there aren't many jobs nor is there much money to facilitate a healthy economy. Without these "low pay" jobs, these people aren't at the bottom of the economic ladder, their on the floor, no where near the ladder, miserably stuck in poverty for the rest of their life. The outlook is depressing.
So what happens? A factory moves in, and people living in these farms walk miles and miles, barefooted to their low paying job. Why? People aren't forced to do this, they choose to do this because they have determined it's worth the blusterous walk.
So, now they have a job! And they are making money! And what do you know, people start saving up and starting small businesses around the villages. Now there is money when there wasn't any before. People are now buying and selling, fueling the economy. Months later, no one is any longer walking to work, they bought a bike to bike to work! And as any economist will tell you, mass transportation availability is one of the most crucial aspects to developing an economy. Now, people are importing and exporting their goods to surrounding communities.
Now, while being paid very little, a whole economy has sprouted. People have transportation, can buy mosquito nets to protect them, and afford medication when the previously couldn't. Come the next generation, kids are now going to school and getting educated. Granted, by now, most of these factories are gone to other cheap labor, but their job is done, they've planted a seed leaving behind a community now on the economic ladder that is now self sustaining. They have transportation, they are getting more educated, and new jobs are emerging every week...
Child labor looks bad from a first world perspective, but sometimes people have to take a step back and realize every industrialized nation went through this phase. We are no exception.
EDIT: Due to some controversy, I will quote Jeffery Sachs who is the leader on this subject and is held in extremely high regards. Also makes for a great |
Hey everyone, I'm an economist in the making (at university) and I've learned all about these misconceptions. Yes what the OP is saying is completely true, but the world doesn't work on the basis of this or they all live like us in first world countries. If these children weren't employed by these companies then they would be forced on the street to do things you can only imagine but I won't type because its too awful.
Also first world corporations cant be argued to pay them more competitive wages because that diminishes the entire point of employing cheaper labour from foreign counties, and would make our computers and everything else skyrocket in price. Obviously there is a lot more to the situation but take it on my word or do some research yourself from credited sources and you will find that this is the best available to the children (also remind yourselves that they have the right to chose where to work and what to do, if it wasn't in their best interest they would stay in school, but they simply DO NOT have that option |
Two reasons probably: I'm assuming that the OP or the person at business insider listens to NPR, and specifically listened to this past weeks episode calls Mr Daisy goes to the apple factory.. (or something like this) which follows a mac enthusiast as he comes to the stark realization that as much as he loves his mac products he has never once thought about where they came from.
secondly, reddits age group is probably most concentrated with the highschool/college age crowd (of course there are us old folks as well), but that demographic loves the shit out of apple products. Just go to a coffee shop in or around a college campus. |
as ziip stated frankly if you own just about any electronic device it probably has at least in some part been manufactured by Foxconn. The only way to put up or shut up to companies that are working with them and basically supporting their poor human rights standards and downright illegal labor standards would be to become Amish and not use modern technology at all. With that said I personally think that even if true labor unions are illegal in China that the rest of world should step in and say to Foxconn and these other companies you are treating our fellow humans like shit if you want to continue doing so we will force these companies with our wallets to move production to a country where even if labor is cheaper the workers are treated fairly and not subjected to conditions where they are quite literally worked to death. |
As we learned from Nike in the 90s, just boycotting Apple or companies that support child labor doesn't really solve the actual problem. The boycotts on Nike were successful, Nike closed down its Bangladesh factories and stopped using child labor. The problem was, the kids were all still starving and still had starving parents. The kids dispersed into the streets and became drug mules and sex workers. While factory conditions were brutal and horrific the children were at least accounted for reachable by their parents. The situation only got worse when Nike left. |
I don't know what's going on with all the D3 fanboys but it's not like having a singleplayer suddenly makes the game oh so hackable. It's not like BF3, CoD or SC2 suddenly became full with hackers because those games had singleplayer. Yes loot generation should be server side in online play and client side in offline play, but you just assume "hurr they will just export their characters online". If that ever happens then people need to be fired because they obviously don't know how to do their jobs |
I totally agree.
I hate it when there's a certain standard of housing available for almost any level of income, an amazing public transportation system, and heavily subsidized healthcare. The housing infringes on my right and interest to live in a shitty, overpriced dwelling far from my employment; the transportation interferes with my right to not be able to go places, and my interest in being practically forced to spend more money on a less efficient form of transport; the healthcare infringes on my right to be made impoverished by being sick, and my interest of being sick. |
I've only been there once, and I definitely agree it's a nice place. Very modern, livable, and close to the rest of the world. I do plan to go there again.
I have been wanting to ask a local for a while though... where can a tourist get good food? I was really disappointed with everything I ate there. (PS people have told me food stalls at the markets. I still never found anything good there either though) |
So you feel this subreddit would be filled with articles by LodSys on how the patent system is just fine? Symantec, about what horrific things a virus can do to your Windows PC without their software? RIAA on how they're justified to do X for any given X because they are RIAA and to go against it means you are a pirate/pedophile/neonazi? Lamar Smith, extolling the virtues of him deciding your internet rights for you? (actually, that's kinda new - I'd be interested in his logic) Verizon, on how nice 4G is? That's the same logic.
People don't give a crap about articles of people expressing exactly the conformist opinion they expect from them. It's not interesting. It's what anyone with any brainpower and knowledge on the subject assumed before they started reading/listening, and in the end people stand to gain nothing. Dissenting voices on the other hand, show you a different standpoint from the norm - so even if they are nothing new, they lend weight to similar arguments, and as such they're actually interesting.
Also, "Reddit hivemind is against X" posts are about as nonsensical as it gets. Do you feel that if a collective of individuals does not think X is interesting, your opinion should prevail? If so, find an unbiased news report that covers all sides of every story, because user-upvoted news is not for you. |
There's just not that much information (photons) around at the femtosecond timescale. These femtosecond lasers usually have a repetition rate of about 80 MHz but can go up to 500 MHz (
So that's 80 million to 500 million laser pulses per second. Which corresponds to 0.000000002 seconds per pulse or more easily read as a pulse every 2 nanoseconds. The temporal duration of each pulse is on the order of 100s of femtoseconds.
So assuming that with every pulse we get some information, we're only getting it on the 2 nanosecond timescale. We get information on the femtosecond timescale by measuring what happens to each pulse many times.
I'm not at uni so I can't download their paper right now, but I'm fairly certain that the duration of acquisition of the coke bottle or the light around the corner demo is on the order of minutes/hours/days.
Also note that you can't really put these femtosecond pulses through too many optics. Since to get a pulse that's short in the temporal domain it needs to be long in the frequency domain. More simply, the pulse is made up of a broad range of wavelengths, so anytime it passes through optics, it spreads out in time as different wavelengths are refracted more or less.
Lastly, the detector they are using is a streak tube, which is basically a 1D line scan to measure the temporal profile of the return pulse/photons. So it's not like a CCD camera that captures a whole image at once in pixels. It's like a single pixel on a CCD chip. So to build up a full image of a scene, we're going to need at a minimum about 320x240 pixels = 76800 pixels
So now lets do some simple math. Assuming we could get perfect information from a single laser pulse everytime. To even build up a very small image is going to take
76800 * 2 ns = 0.153 milliseconds.
The moment we don't get perfect information from every laser pulse, the imaging time just goes up. |
this kind of stuff makes me realize just how dumb I really am.|
Not dumb, just uneducated and insufficiently motivated.
There's nothing you cannot understand. Nothing. Do you have the patience to learn what you want to learn? Perhaps not. The time? The motivation?
Hrm. I sound like anybody could be the next [Kurt Gödel]( and that's not what I mean.
That fellow in the video? The one explaining high level optics in what is certainly not his mother tongue? That represents an unbelievable effort. Tons and tons of hard-ass work.
hahaha. I get what I'm driving at now. |
I have sit loadsss of times trying to understand the concepts of theory of relativity, and length contraction and how space time matters, along with string theory and its bases.
never ever have I been able to understand that.
Everyone is intelligent, but dont count the fish's intelligence from its ability to climb a tree. Everyone has his own fields, and not everyone can understand all concepts
> |
Yeah... I really can't deny that their marketing popularized a lot of the stuff by making it a household name. And the overall market has benefited! We now have a thriving mobile application development market with quality expectations much higher than when we just had the little mobile java applets, all sold through carrier-specific stores. To be honest, what frustrates me the most with the innovation claim is the rewriting of popular history. As you said, people seem to think that Apple invented these items, rather than refining them.
Still... I'll admit that I dislike Apple as a company. Regardless of how good the products may (or may not - they've had some serious issues/flops here and there, nobody's perfect!) be, the late Jobs was something of an egomaniac, and the company seems to have inherited this. Jobs' biography was an interesting read, though.
The contrast between Jobs saying "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal" and later "I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this," sends me up the wall, even before the actual claims get looked into. Doubly so since the company is apparently copying features seen in other phones - including Android - for iOS5. Top notifications, OTA updates (about time), lock screen launching, etc. Mind you, I expect idea/concept copying and refining between companies - this is how tech evolves! Nobody copied code or actual resources. It's just when the one doing the copying is also telling everyone else that they need to be booted from the market entirely over things as basic as rounded rectangles - which Jobs apparently pointed out in everything around him when pushing for them to be added to the Macintosh OS. :/ |
Yes! And at just the frequency that makes the human mind stop producing melatonin. And at night you can have it automatically cut the blues out so your body will start producing melatonin. It's like f.lux for real life. It should make it much easier to keep your sleeping schedule healthy. |
I think this comment can be a bit misleading. The incident happened in Japan because that's where the episode was broadcast first. After the whole seizure debacle it wasn't aired in other countries.
So it's not that Japanese people are somehow more sensitive to it. If the original version had been aired in other countries you would probably have seen the same thing (which is exactly why they pulled the episode).
Still I agree that it could be problematic for some people, but by reading the wikipedia article it sounds like the strobe would have to be at a particular frequency and pretty bright so maybe they could make these so that they are not as dangerous. Then again maybe they could just put a warning on the box and leave it to the users to not do irresponsible things... |
The kind of shake he's doing is pretty easy to restabilize. [VirtualDub's DeShaker]( has been out forever. |
And so the game of cat and mouse will continue... I use NoScript and Ghostery. More and more features of more and more sites won't work until you temporarily allow more than one site to run scripts, at which point you have to temporarily allow a few more that pop up after you allow the first ones. And I have noticed more and more sites that still won't work even if every site is allowed to run scripts. They only work once all the sites are allowed and Ghostery is paused, and even then only when the page is reloaded. |
I can keep waiting in line and re-submitting patent applications hoping that it can eventually get accepted
You mean refining it until they are accepted. It's not like they just keep resubmitted the same exact application until they "get a hit."
Maybe the "flaw" you speak of is just inherent in the fact that, to expect every granted patent to be unchallengable, and to expend the amount of resources needed to get there for every application , is unrealisitic.
The legal system will find flaws in patents that have flaws, but only for those patents that actually matter. Why go through some rigorous process (more rigorous than already exists) for every application, when, as it stands now, this process is only undertaken for some patents and applications. For those that ultimately don't matter, the system is set up not to undertake the kind of expense needed to have it be "unchallengeable." |
Neither logic, nor reason were presented or demonstrated here. It was simply a summation of a the patent process. I hate that people use "logic and reason" in a reply to anything that isn't a knee-jerk reaction, or is a level headed take on things.
Turning "logic and reason" themselves into a knee-jerk reaction to anything that involves thought demeans and devalues what logic and reason are. Especially given that logic and reason are two entirely separate things, that at times can be at odds. "All cats are fish, all fish are red, ergo all cats are red" is a perfectly logical, albeit not at all reasonable statement. |
Trademark is a mark used in trade. As long as you don't use Mickey Mouse on you flower shop or something, you're okay (in this hypothetical world where Disney didn't destroy copyright).
You do know I can use trademarked products in movies and fiction and the trademark owners can't do jack shit, right? This happened in the Denzel movie Flight, where he's an alcoholic who is seen drinking Bud. Bud asked them to remove their name. Producers said no. |
Yeah, I got a new mouse recently but it didn't just work , so I had to go to the Windows Forums to find a set of configurations for my windows.org.conf file, so I restarted the windows desktop server. That ended up being a bad idea, because there was a typo I guess so it just spilled random colors all over my screen so I rebooted my computer but then it kept coming up into glitchy colors every time I rebooted it so I had to use another computer to go to the forums to find commands to use for N |
Just so you don't have to go through 7 pages, here's the entire article |
All I have to say on this is FUCK COPYRIGHT TROLLS!!!
I buy 2 to 3 times as much content as any of my friends, who dont torrent, and yet I am I the one who gets fucked over. Its just a complete load of shit, if I download anything it is to test it, most times I only download games and thats only to test them on my current rig and once I have if they work they get bought. I do download quite a bit of music, which I dont pay for all of, but seeing as how every single artist that I have "stolen" music from has at least 100 or more dollars of mine in they bank I see it as a fair fucking trade, and if I dont own their music and the music is in any way good I purchase their album or send a donation so they can keep making music that people enjoy. The copyright trolls send out continuous steams of these letters to people and don't care if there are other factors, such as I wanted to test it to make sure it works on my rig or hear the song the entire way through without jumping through 16 fucking hoops to do so, they just want to spam the letters to as many different people as they want so they can rake in money left and right because obviously the record, movie, and game companies dont already make enough money so they have to threaten people with lawsuits and slander to make them oay some imaginary sum for damages. Very few things piss me off as much as these worthless scumbags. May their pubic hair turn into razor wire and slice their penis or clitoris off. |
I'd like to see their justification for that price tag.
Think of something silly that you spent too much money on.
Now multiply your net worth by a million. |
My biggest thing against tumblr is its full of a bunch of emotional teenagers who think a black and white photo of the tree outside their house is "art" and come up with some shirty caption to make it seem so deep and sophisticated. I had one when I was 15(I'm a guy who's now 17) and I watched it go from being a cool original site full of funny stuff to a bunch of kids who are somehow art critics and philosophers at 14. Also, all the snippets from shows and songs that always somehow end up being sad even if that's not the original meaning. Also bullshit sappy fake stories (like the one about the guy being ready to propose to his "girlfriend" at the boson bombing but after a google search found out they were not dating nor knew each other iirc).
I understand I can unfollow the original blog, but I can't unfollow friends when they reblog that shit. |
As of the end of last fiscal year, Yahoo had $17.1 billion in assets, of which $5.65 billion was in cash, cash equivalents, short term investments, net receivables, and other current assets (read = highly liquid, easily accessible funds).
It has only $2.5 billion in debt, so its net worth (shareholder equity) after a couple of small adjustments is around $14.56 billion.
Last year, it earned an after-tax profit of $3.945 billion, none of which was returned to owners as dividends (they did, however, buy back nearly $2 billion worth of stock to reduce the shares outstanding and make each share more valuable). |
If they would just skip the theater altogether and charge a reasonable price there are some movies I would pay more than once for. DVD are way to expensive even after 6 months of release.
They need to realize there is little disposable income and I won't go to the theater because it's crowded, can't smoke, can't afford the concessions, and the price is outrageous for a ticket never mind 2.
If they'd just skip the theaters altogether and go straight to pay per view for like $5 they would have almost no overhead on distribution and the people viewing it would be gigantic compared to everything beside when it hits TV for the first time over a year or more later and that would be all their money and not just little here a little there.
It's insane how over complicated the release system is and how many executives and other personnel from making sure the films are secure before DVD release.
$5 a household and if 1/2 the households in the US watch it the first week thats like a 1/4 billion for just streaming it a week with almost no overhead. Heck they can put that overhead money they used to spend now into new films to stream and just keep repeating the process.
I also imagine not bringing something to the big screen and just using a lower resolution stream would cut costs also. |
There is light ahead.
Every twenty years or so in the course of Hollywood, there has been a paradigm shift in the way things are done. We're about seven years away from the next one, but you can already see it taking shape.
Not long ago, only the major studios were the only people who made movies. Every movie that hit the theaters came from one of the major studios; Warner Brothers, 20th-Century Fox, Paramount, Columbia, Universal, MGM. But eventually something changed.
At the turn of the millennium, as the cost of releasing a picture grew, the number of big budget films made each year also grew. With more pictures being made, the risk of a studio-financed picture also increased.
There were four or five big movies in the theaters, competing with one another, on any given weekend. The potential to be Titanic or Independence Day was there, but the potential to be Waterworld was there as well ( List of Box Office Bombs . So something changed.
To hedge the risk of a big-budget flop, studios started entering into split rights deals (studio splits the rights with a production company, e.g. studio gets American distribution rights, producer gets foreign), co-ventures (studios work together), and self-financed producer deals (producer pays to use the studio lots). With these arrangements, studios could maintain their investment to profit ratio: they weren't making as much profit, but they weren't shouldering the entire investment either. And this has not stopped. In fact, studios rarely finance films anymore.
Meanwhile, on television, there was a little show called E.R., or as such shows are called in the business, a loss leader. The theory was that the network could pay an exorbitant amount of money for one great television show, at a loss, and they would make the money back once viewers are locked into the channel.
Meanwhile the TV studio (Warner) that made E.R. was raking in money hand over fist. They new how much NBC needed E.R., so E.R. had all the bargaining power. So something changed.
Instead of paying the studio's demands, TV networks switched to in-house production to fill more of their airtime. They also increased contract terms for shows from 4 years to 5.5 years so talent couldn't renegotiate as often and so networks had more time to prepare new shows to keep talent within the network. The studio would come up with how much they wanted, and the network would say "No thanks, we'll produce it in-house." In response, studios had to lower their prices.
In fact, got so bad for TV studios that that some of them just called it quits. Sony comes to mind...they flat out withdrew from the TV business. They said there is no way to make money at this, if someone comes up with a better way of doing things we will come back.
And then one day video went streaming.
The next big change isn't the streaming itself, rather, it is the way streaming is going to effect the business model.
Right now, as you pointed out, we have a fragmented marketplace that goes well beyond just area restrictions. It also goes to the way you get content (though a website, through a game console, through a smart phone, etc.). To top that off, all the apps work in a different way (10 years ago you knew a little triangle meant play and a square meant stop, and every video device had those standard buttons, no more), some have adds some do not. But these are concerns that the marketplace will resolve.
The big change that is coming is the same big change that always comes in entertainment: how new content is funded.
As these services like Netflix (new-networks) compete, the major selling point is going to be content. Thus, they are left with the same choice that television financing was left with at the turn of the millennium: pay a ton of money for a loss leader just to get people to subscribe, or make premium content yourself.
It is only a matter of time before you start seeing a new round of mergers and acquisitions of studios. Within the next year one of the majors will merged or bought by a new-network.
Netflix has already embarked on self-financed productions.
In sort of the reverse order, HBO, who has long been making their own content, has entered the streaming market; but they are quickly backing themselves into a corner by partnering with cable providers.
But we're a long way from the end. The news about this Sony/Disney thing might sound good for consumers, but really it is just a way for the studios to charge the new-networks more to be able to have the content. |
It's a whole lot easier for you to be the bigger person and go find a different seat. You complain about missing the movie and needing refunds and that's just garbage. If you're not going to move then don't complain. No one's day gets messed up, some employee doesn't feel guilty and your friends don't think your a bitch. I honestly feel like you're one of those people that gets a thrill off of putting people in place and establishing your authority. You are in effect asserting that your desire for them to not text is somehow more important than their right to do as they please. |
I really think that this is the way you combat piracy. Look at our choices today:
Piracy - Free, instantly available on demand in super high quality.
Theaters - $10 (if you're lucky) per movie, you can watch it only once and you have to go out and be there at a specific time, can't pause if you have to go to the bathroom (yay RunPee).
DVDs - $20 (if you're lucky) per movie. You can watch them any time you want, and you can pause, but you have to make room for and not lose or damage the disc. HD available for Blue Ray, which costs even more. And you need to run out and buy it, or wait for delivery (yay Amazon Prime).
Rentals - $1-5 per per movie, if it's available. You can watch as many times as you want, but only within 1-3 days. Scratched/unplayable discs are a factor, too.
Digital purchases - Again $20. Why? They aren't manufacturing or shipping anything. Could you maybe cut us a break, instead of eating all of the savings yourself? Not that I imagine that it costs anywhere near $20 to burn, case, and ship a DVD. Anyway, the disc losing problem is solved, though your movie is only good for as long as the servers remain live.
Now enter streaming. For $8-10 a month, you get unlimited watchability, on-demand, frequently in HD. No worries, no hassles. The only downside is availability. Netflix has some great stuff (and now so does Amazon Prime, check out their free streaming collection for Prime users, they've really upped their game), but they have much more not-so-great stuff, and often not the thing that you want on demand. But that's what we're talking about here, making more things available via providers like Netflix.
I personally don't mind paying for content (that's how this stuff gets made), but I do mind the massive mark-ups and the lack of features that technology now affords us. Go ahead and charge for your content (or don't, the freemium and pay-what-you-want models have certainly been proven), but make the pricing reasonable and let us stream it at our convenience. Otherwise you're just encouraging piracy. |
Uh huh. Let me tell you my prison software story.
I did 52 months (of a 60 month sentence)in federal prison, the bulk at FCI Elkton in Lisbon, Ohio. Elkton is a BOP institution that has a UNICOR that the government sells in competition with outside companies that actually have to pay their workers. Furniture, cable, clothing (much of it for prisons) and other items. Elkton had two factories: a data entry facility that essentially used inmates as OCR for patent applications, entering text and Postscript codes, and an e-waste recycling plant.
The recycling plant was found to have major safety violations in about 2008 (while I was an inmate) and the entire factory was closed for some time, so Hazmat could clean the whole place out. (Probably all the cadmium from inmates smashing CRTs on an open floor, and the open-air melting of circuit boards.)
So that half of the factory was closed, and I managed to get a job as a patent data drone. Better than food services or "Faciities;" basically shoveling snow or mowing lawns with hand mowers. Because it was on my record that I had digital consulting experience, I was approached by a UNICOR manager and asked if I had any ideas for the space that used to be the e-waste disposal factory. I suggested an offline web shop to maintain the 50,000 government websites, combined with instruction in Flash and other tech that would help inmates find employment on the outside. He asked me to draw up a proposal.
I did so - with a pen on paper. (no computers or typewriters in the living units.) I drew up a typical proposal with rough financials, tech requirements, security architecture - the lot. Primitive, but it was a decent framework. I submitted it and went to my spot on the data line.
An hour later, a large female hand slammed down on my shoulder. "(my name) get the FUCK UP!!" It was the Captain: the head of security, a mean, burly, foul-faced woman whose snarl was only matched by her obvious lack of proper hygiene.
Huh?
"Get the FUCK OUT OF MY factory. You are now a "computer no" (which means no keyboards for any reason, even instruction) and if you aren't out of this building in one minute, you're off to SHU (The Hole.) MOVE!!"
Apparently my proposal ruffled some very stiff feathers, and soon after, a private consulting firm you all know came in and built an IRS sorting facility. I ended up (after a stop at Education, and pissing them off) being assigned to scrub bird shit off the sidewalks. Fuck that. I paid the guy in the cubicle next to me (who went my the proud moniker "Doughboy") $5.25 in stamps to go do my job, which paid - $5.25. A month.
So forgive me if I suggest that a prison willing to accept inmate software sounds fishy as hell. Prisons have a vested interest in promoting recidivism, and I've seen it first hand.
Edit: clarity! |
I remember when the Dropbox guys posted ton Y combintor and in hacker news they were being made fun of. Guess what, they had the right product, done the right way, at the right time while other offerings like icloud just sucked. Jobs/Apple had no idea what they were doing half the time. Even if they brought back idisk it would suck or alienate Windows users. Or wouldnt be business friendly. |
Except you can't realize anything new or brilliant because the dumbed down tools will just be templates and use cases that are already popular: sound boards, tip calculators, image displays, etc.
You need granular tools to make things that are original. Programming in a standard language is that tool. If you find loops and variables confusing, then, no, this won't help you. In fact, it'll probably hurt you as your vision gets compromised by the limitations of the dumbed-down development environment.
Also, if you're ignorant of programming you're probably ignorant of good security practices, backend stuff, backups, protocols, etc. So if you say "Well we'll write an expense tracker for work with this" and if you don't fully understand the chain of what happens from the phone to wherever these expenses are stored, how to store them, how to integrated them into your financial ERP/CRM/whatever, then you're really just causing more problems than youre solving.
Every company is hamstrung by endless shitty VBA heavy access and excel files, built by a 20 something nerdy temp, and now left to atrophy as staff have gotten used to it. Things like your cc or social security number sitting in plain-text, etc are the norm. Once in a while a company laptop gets stolen and that company (or government) has to admit to storing this stuff in excel or access with zero security controls. Whoops!
Outside of making stupid little personal projects, something like this has no chance. Every company at some time flirts with "programming with no programming" and its always a disaster or just a useless toy. |
In my circles at least: Mcafee was known as a shitty AV years before I heard about the shenanigans.
If anything I find it fitting and proper that the founder of a dysfunctional AV company and product was himself dysfunctional.
McAfee has always sucked. how many times have they fucked up in some major "oops, deleted system32, lol" kind of way? Or that time the new definition decided that office was now a virus... and so were office documents . That's poor process and thus poor management right there. This happened a lot .
McAfee should be renamed. Intel can manage whats left of the
technical talent and IP that formed the core. Presumably the screwed up process and management side of things has been shed and reborn, Intel style.
If this is the case then the product should be disassociated with that negative legacy, good for them. |
I received a year of Intel Antitheft with my laptop, provided by McAfee. I installed it because it was recommended by Intel, so I thought it was okay. It was the worst software I have ever used.
Shortly before I installed it, I also received a faulty Windows update, which forced me to do a system restore. This left Intel Antitheft provided by McAfee in a half-installed state, which meant that their installer couldn't reinstall the product. So there I was with a laptop with a motherboard which would lock once a week, an encrypted and inaccessible documents folder and the entire Intel Antitheft provided by McAfee technical support crew on Christmas holiday. After a month or so after Christmas one of their techs succeeded in installing the software, but the new installation had problems connecting to their server correctly for verification, that my laptop was not stolen.
Fast forward a couple of months of multiple remote control sessions with reinstalling the software I finally ended telling them to just remove it completely from my pc. Then it turns out that the uninstaller isn't working correctly, it is unable to decrypt all my documents, so more technical supporters are call in. In the end one of their software engineers from India got the uninstaller to remove the product (mostly) and decrypt my documents. But as he use some special uninstall flag, the uninstaller left a lot of software on my pc, among others a variant of McAfee Endpoint Encryption. These programs do not have their own uninstallers, and I am not willing to risk installing Intel Antitheft provided by McAfee yet another time, just to see if the uninstaller works this time.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I had such a bad experience with the software that I wanted to warn you. The software may have been updated to work correctly, and probably already did on most systems, but apparently not on mine. |
No you still aren't making a point. You'd have a point if say NYC had amazing service but Cairo, IL didn't. But that's not the case. In the states it doesn't matter if you're in a metropolis or rural area, service everywhere is outdated and/or expensive.
It's not a matter of the size of the states. This is a lie from the telcos that has been debunked over and over. In fact the government gave the telcos the money to upgrade broadband services a decade ago and they blew it on cell towers--not the worst expense, but then they went right on charging us for texting, a service that literally costs them nothing. |
Even though I have Time Warner, I was able to get 50 Mbps for our apartment. It's awesome and only costs us $50/month with TV. Unfortunately the TV sucks and we can't wait for Google Fiber, but this is great for now. On my phone, I sometimes get 30 Mbps. At least T-Mobile will roll out LTE-Advanced eventually and we'll get 80 Mbps... |
That doesn't count in the times I sleep, I shit and when I go to school (This is back in 2003). I can't leave my computer on at night or during the day because of Heat and Electricity bills.
ALSO 80KB/s is not the actual speed but the advertised
It was close to 40KB/s on a GOOD DAY.
So using your math, it would be two weeks.
I'm exagerating but the fact is, if i was downloading a file, it would cut out at 70-80% mark MAKING ME START ALL OVER AGAIN.
Your math is superb but it doesn't account for errors and real world variables. |
A layman shouldn't have to leave their computer on 24/7 to use the net. If 50gb is given, then 50 should be used under normal circumstances.
Who designs an elevator to that has room for 10 people but can only lift 600kg?
No one because it is dumb.
So why couldn't they have proper speeds for proper usage?
Also, rapidshare and megaupload (services alike) were horrible in resuming downloads. Mind you this is 2003, I was in year 6. I tried torrenting shows but god forbid that was slow.
No one in their right mind would go off your calculations to the T for realistic expectation. |
Just because I characterized life in Korea as anything less than perfect doesn't mean I'm not "whining" or having a shitty life. Not sure what makes you so defensive about this topic...I was just pointing that it isn't across the board ideal for everyone paying for service. Are you a repatriated gyopo or just a foreigner still in their honeymoon phase with Dae Ha Min Guk? Seems like you're all too happy to make this about some personal issue I might have (based on your assumptions and your own issues)...just because I don't indulge in blind optimism doesn't constitute "slagging off Korea". It's fucking Reddit, try not to take stuff too personally.
If you live in a small apartment building, especially an older one, the way that the telecom companies administer the routers and local connections is poorly managed. It also makes it easier for someone to steal your internet or have your service interrupted by incompetent service people (a weekly occurrence at my house for almost a year). Even if you live in a newer complex with new wiring and routers isn't a guarantee of stellar service. Mine is great, but my friend's service is awful. Maybe he just "gets what he pays for" if he has a real cheap, basic package. We had to switch ISP's TWICE to get good service...this was after the two respective companies swore up and down that their service was what I specifically requested for gaming purposes.
I get bad ping for Dayz Standalone on Korean servers...not sure if it's the game that's laggy or if it's the game. All I know is that servers in Australia, Canada, and or Asian servers are not as laggy as the ones that are supposed to be better. On those servers I get little or no lag. If service is worse on the weekend (it always is) that's an ISP issue, right? They basically sold more service than they can actually provide. Happens everywhere, even here. |
Pretty easy to explain tho:
South Koreas is roundabout 100.000 sqKm's large. When you slice the U.S. in 90 parts of same size, you got south korea, and even countries in Europe like Germany are more then three times as big. As smaller as your country is, as easier you can give 100% of the population extrememly fast internet. |
That doesn't count in the times I sleep, I shit and when I go to school (This is back in 2003). I can't leave my computer on at night or during the day because of Heat and Electricity bills.
Nothing was said about variables. You just said you couldn't. So I explained why you were wrong. Nicely I might add.
>I'm exagerating but the fact is, if i was downloading a file, it would cut out at 70-80% mark MAKING ME START ALL OVER AGAIN.
You can resume downloads... but still. That isn't the issue. What you are describing is a case for you using more bandwidth than less.
>Your math is superb but it doesn't account for errors and real world variables.
Even though you do not. MANY MANY people in this world leave their PC's running full time. But alas, this wasn't about your usage specifically. It was about you saying you couldn't hit the cap. In which case, you were wrong.
Want a real world variable? Purchase world of warcraft digitally, download it completely and play for 3 hours a day for a month. You have now hit your 50GB cap. Don't like wow? Goto youtube, let it buffer a bit between videos and watch an average of 1.6 hours of video on 720p a day. (most 720p videos stream at around 110KB/s, thats why you will need to let it buffer) |
No, that's not how it works. No bacteria exposure is bad. Fortunately, this is impossible for most people. It has implications for developing fetuses and new borns, but that's it. Limited bacteria exposure is good. Hygiene is the single most important medical discovery of human history. Seriously. Getting extra bacteria, however, doesn't improve your immune system beyond normal. You are just more likely to get sick. You've misinterpreted the hygiene hypothesis. |
It's still glass, so it will break, but is less fragile on the edges and more impact resistant than chemically-strengthened glass that manufacturers, like my employer, used before Gorilla Glass.
It's been several years since I was trained on it, but what I remember is that the edges are ground down and polished. That results in fewer imperfections along the edges. Those imperfections used to cause a high incidence of cracks from casual bumps.
I know it can still break from an edge impact, but it is so much better than it used to be.
The second thing I remember is that GG "armor" is diminished with every impact. So the steel ball test they use, if done repeatedly, would eventually break the glass.
Another thing I feel I should point out is that manufactures use different thicknesses of GG, but nobody publishes it.
Without it, I don't think there would be so many phones and tablets with large screens and edge-to-edge glass. |
Because it's not like there's a just a council of 10 people who "run the world." Let's narrow it down and talk about the US specifically. It's not like Congress can just funnel all corporate profits to themselves, and even if they're getting kickbacks from corporations (which of course some of them are) people will generally vote for someone who will act in their best interest. Unless you want to argue that the US's system is so broken that it would be literally impossible to institute a basic income while half the population starves, your argument doesn't make much sense. |
Let's think about this, this number is probably extrapolated from a hourly rate that is applied over a while month. A consultant would only charge for the work he did not a 9 to 5 job over the whole year.
For example as a consultant I could charge $500 a hour to the clients but only work say 3 hours of that in a day, with the rest taken up by travel. Now extrapolate that at 8 hours a day over a 20 day working month = $80,000. Now this a crazy high number compared to what I am actually paid. |
Good to hear. Looks at article.
Ah... four DEMOCRATIC senators... so it makes the front page, I see. Excellent.
speech at Berkeley
We have at least one US Senator that has been railing against the ever growing big brother for YEARS (and his father for years before that) and has supported Snowden's patriotic actions etc. yet nary any support from Reddit... much less either party. But plenty of front-page-making posts about Obama smiling and doing something funny etc. and daily "us vs them" type posts involving religion, abortion, guns etc. along with the multiple "Weird Al" posts making it daily.
Please stop the partisan bullshit.
Please be American and take pride in your country... and remember what a precious experiment this really is (hopefully not was).
Please take in information from all sources and form your own opinions and don't let them be molded/fed to you.... and stop the rah rah go my team BULLSHIT that is used to control us. If there was ever one issue to overrule all others, this is it.
The two parties basically exist now to give us an illusion of choice and to keep us fighting and divided.
For the love of god support those few that are actually fighting the good fight. Time is running out, if it hasn't already.
The full speech for those interested |
Sigh .
Look. I've been through four of these mergers. Four of them. I'd prefer not to name the companies or dates, more for length than anything, since I doubt you'll take me seriously in the first place.
If you think that they don't take this shit seriously, you're dead fucking wrong . I've had a front row seat for the planning and organizing of this shit. I'm a network engineer, so my piece of it is figuring out how to get our networks talking back and forth once the merger is finalized.
The amount of bullshit you have to deal with, in terms of which subjects are not allowed to be discussed, which types of planning you're allowed to talk about, and how the information is exchanged (they frequently use the metaphor "Clean Room" to discuss such things) is insane . |
They have a really good reason to keep to the truth, as people know that they aren't against file-sharing. And if you find a flaw with their reporting, please let us know! It keeps the reporting proper if you keep the pressure on all the reporters. |
Verizon can go suck a fuck. we payed $40 a month for up to 15mbps Download speeds and for years they were giving us up to 1.44 Mbps. I had enough and changed to Comcast because now we get 120mbps with a triple play deal Thats cheaper then Verizon's Internet and phone deal. only problem I've had with Comcast is their customer support lord almighty it makes me wanna bash my face in but it's over all better experience then Verizon's 10minute wait just to begin and have nothing done at all about our problems. cause you know if turn off and turn back on doesn't work it's time to send out an over priced technician that can't fix our problems anyway. |
The recordings are always legal. The Comcast employee notifies you that the call is being recorded therefor they are aware that the call is being recorded and hence you have their and your consent. |
Comcast realizes that the customer is worth roughly 800-2000/year, the cost of an attorney to even read the brief is more. Likewise the negative aspects of public outrage have severe non-monetary cost, such as shifting the climate in favor of net neutrality. |
You're right and you're wrong. While the US Constitution can never apply to private entities (except for slavery and entities fulfilling traditional government roles), if a court signs an order limiting speech, it is then the government, susceptible to the Constitution, who is potentially abridging your rights.
But, I can 100% guarantee, this issue, under these facts, would never, ever, ever, get to court, let alone a court order. It will go to arbitration. Arbitration awards are rarely overturned by a court. |
In both cases, the transactions would cost you a great deal more than purchasing from the grocery store. And that doesn't even include the amount of time and effort you would have to spend to make these things happen, or driving around to various locations.
That's funny, because you've clearly not lived in any of the communities I've lived in. I've lived in cities ranging in size from 12,000 people to 2.7 million people, and your description applies to absolutely none of them.
For example, in the town where I grew up (and where my parents still live), there's a farm a couple miles out of town that supplies free-range, grass-fed beef. (Most but not all of it is raised at that farm; they have some agreement with other farms, the nature of which I'm unaware of.) At the beginning of the season this farm usually puts sign-up sheets at local businesses and churches, and you can sign up to purchase a whole cow's worth of cuts, or a half-cow, or a quarter-cow. At the end of the season they deliver it to you in their truck (and they call ahead to make sure you're home and that you have enough space in your freezer). And for that, the price per pound is about two-thirds of what beef costs at the local grocery store, even including delivery. My mom only buys beef from the grocery store very rarely now, if at all, because she can get it cheaper by buying right from the source.
Now, according to you, I'm wrong, and this doesn't actually happen. For your assertions to be true, all of the people in my hometown who think they're buying beef from this farm must be actually paying much much more than the actual amount of money they see changing hands. The bank statements which arrive and show that smaller amount of money coming out of their account must be inaccurate, because it can't possibly be cheaper to cut out the middleman. Hmm, okay. Well, I've got the word of an aging baby boomer on the internet, and I've got what I've seen happen with my own eyes. Somehow I think I know which one is real and which one is free-range bullshit.
There's also this newfangled thing called a farmer's market. You may have heard of it during your sixty-some years on this planet? Farmers grow produce, dairies create cheeses, and bakers bake breads and pastries, and they all bring those to a prearranged location, and sell it directly to me, with no middleman. They exist in tiny towns and in gigantic cities alike. "Imagine the time it would take the individual consumer to contact the manufacturer, negotiate a price, and then pay for shipping" you say. Well, I don't need to imagine, because I can time it. It takes me four minutes to walk to the farmer's market from my apartment, about two seconds to "negotiate" a price (since they're listed on signs and I can read), and anywhere from 20-40 seconds to pay and receive my goods. The cost for each of those goods is usually noticeably less than the cost of similar-quality goods at the grocery store (assumedly because I'm not paying for marketing, I'm not paying for rude, incompetent staffers, and I'm not paying for an executive team's annual bonuses). Total time would be about eight minutes and 42 seconds. I can't even drive to the grocery store, park, get inside, and get a cart in eight minutes and 42 seconds, much less complete a transaction and get home. So buying directly from the producers is both faster and cheaper. Of course time is money, but that turns out to be irrelevant when you're saving both of them.
Now, according to you, this is also just something I'm imagining, and it doesn't actually occur in real life. Can you please explain to me, with your sixty-some years of wisdom, how I'm still alive if I've been eating imaginary food for the past ten years? Where did all those dollar bills go, if not into the hands of grateful farmers and craftsmen? Should I see a psychiatrist for the fact that I've been hallucinating two whole city blocks of thriving local businesses?
> FYI- If you don't already know what exactly you are going to buy before getting to the grocery store, then you are paying more than you need to
So you memorize the exact prices of each different brand? What a waste of time. I usually just write down, e.g. "black beans" and then when I get to the store I compare prices between different brands to identify which is cheapest, then I buy enough beans for the recipe I'm going to make. Can you explain how this strategy can possibly be leading to me paying more for those two cans of black beans than knowing the brand and size of can ahead of time? Either way, I walk out of the store with the cheapest brand and the same amount of beans. Maybe this is naive of me, but if I'm buying two 15-ounce cans of store-brand beans, how is that more expensive than first writing down "two 15-ounce cans of store-brand beans" and then buying the same two 15-ounce cans of store-brand beans? |
It's because many years back, dealers served a purpose. They kept cars available, provided a way to test drive, and could help you pick out the right car. This was before the internet was as good as it is now. After dealers were the established way to sell cars, the manufacturers started to sell directly to customers. The dealers didn't like this because the manufacturers could sell for less so they forced the manufacturers to stop and somehow even got laws passed in several states to prevent manufacturers from selling directly. |
I trust them to abide by it as they have always been open and upfront about what they are doing, and honour their commitments, the same reason I would trust any person. They have never given me good reason to doubt their word, and have owned up to the mistakes they have made. They also have crude, perhaps not workable canaries in place should they be forced to lie by court order. These may not work, but at least they are trying.
Your example of government agencies is a valid and fitting example. We trust the NTSB, because they have always been honest, and backed their findings with facts. We distrust the NSA because they cloak their activities in a shroud of secrecy, have been caught lying about doing so and generally are bad at being honest.
I am not naive about it, I have just found the evidence lies in their favor, for now. |
It is far less useful than you think, an example.
I am a manufacturer of of sex toys. (why sex toys? all add sellers are perverted peeping toms, that's why)
I know you have gone to amazon.com from your DNS query. Interesting, but not very useful.
By partnering with amazon and using for real analytics's I know Betty bought a crucifix, I don't want her at all. Meanwhile Larry bought assless chaps, I think I will market to him.
That is a more real world example of what they want to know. DNS queries have some value, but it's very limited compared to what is out there and bought and sold every day. |
Rather than an idiot I am a system administrator with nearly 20 years experience that knows exactly what information is sent with each request type and when. Privacy is always an issue, but trying to hide your IP address is futile and rather like trying to hide your address from the post office.
If you must know the reason google started their public DNS program was market research, but not for the reasons you think. They were researching the perceived speed of the web and noticed that often people were waiting on DNS when they thought a site slow. So they said we can do better DNS! and they did.
But wait spychipper!! Isn't that what the original post topic said about google DNS? that it was faster? Why by golly I think it was. Imagine that, a product doing exactly what it said it would. |
There is value in it, but as an advertising company what they want to know about you requires even greater detail than that.
Did you even read the privacy policy liked above? They are not even using the information for anything but keeping the DNS servers healthy. There are plenty of other, valid privacy concerns out there, but Google DNS is not the boogyman you are looking for. |
rant>
That's what I meant to say. #1 priority for them is profits and making the deadline. Rushing for a deadline == bad code. Bad code == Security issues. The list goes on.
The reason I say this is because, as a software developer, I constantly see the examples of these crappy applications holding together critical parts of are infrastructure. You see POS terminals runing (gasp) XP . I've seen command line windows popping up halfway through the transaction; believe me when I say I died a little then :D
I think most of the problem lies in the fact that these systems never see the light of day. If say Apple was hacked, people would be flipping out. Joe Smith's Programming LLC who wrote the point of sale system behind the counter at your local corner store? Not so much.
On the matter of healthcare.gov, I think it's a bit ironic when many say that governmental functions can and should be privatized. We all agree that the site was a complete load of BS, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that it was contracted off to a private company with profit margins to worry about.
Hell, if we got some of the NSA programmers to write the damn thing, it would have probably cured cancer by now. And it would probably be tracking our emails too... :D
This is also what I think is awesome about open source in a lot of ways- things get fixed really friggin fast . Most of the major security issues are fixed with in days or even hours. Sometimes, we don't even know they exist until after they've been fixed.
</rant>
Anyhow, that seems like enough venting. |
No, I'm saying its the duty of IT standards to minimize risk of 0-effort attacks like "I watched the teacher type the password and remembered it". The fact that the password was "just a last name" and presumably not changed is a major security risk. I mean, if I'm an attacker, and actually after sensitive information -- remember, they have all the payment information for employees on file, plenty of identities to steal -- it's trivial to try everyones last names as potential passwords. The best hacking is when no hacking happens at all- guessing a password means I could essentially stroll in, and steal the identity of every employee there, and there would be absolutely no red flags, because nothing "illicit" happened on the network. |
I agree. Password security is a critical issue, especially in a potentially hostile environment where it is protecting sensitive information. Perhaps the teacher was not provided appropriate training, but somewhere this is a failure of the school also. The kid made his choices, but so did the school. Setting a password policy that would not permit the use of a last name is not very hard and a failure of whomever allowed that. It isn't like there isn't at least 15 years of precedent for this sort of action in any school I know people to have attended. Even if these policies are just to keep honest kids honest, they are justified.
Plenty of failure to go around and be learned from. Sending the kid to the cops and scaring students is probably easier short term than fixing failed policies, procedures and training. Hopefully an appropriate government regulator will catch this and get involved to enforce proper protection of this critical information. It is highly like that some remote access is provided via that account. Imagine if this kid just sold the password to a random Internet person who turned it into great profit after acquiring the dangerous information or used it to cause a less self-inflicted embarrassing situation around the next school board election time.
Also, I wonder what the teachers current password is. Perhaps the student's last name this time? |
As an American citizen, the phrase "Land of the free, home of the brave" hasn't been a generally true statement in either regard for a very long time... and the less said about "American exceptionalism" these days the better.
We still have our moments of greatness to be sure, and I still wouldn't rather live anywhere else, but I don't hold to the "just be proud of your country and shut up" rhetoric. I don't figure the best way to solve our problems is to turn a blind eye and not even admit they exist. |
This is pretty late but)
When I was in year 8 (13-14) I accidentally logged onto an administrators account during an ICT lesson. You may be thinking how I could "accidentally" do it, well, the username of the password was "S". That was it. To make it even better there was no password. So whilst I was erasing the previous users information I accidentally hit enter and logged into the account. The teacher noticed the administrator account being logged in and told me to log off and I thought that was the end of that. The next day during tutor I was taken out of class and told that because of my ability to access private information such as grades I was banned from using any computer in the school for the rest of the time I spent there. Even better they sent a warning up to my next school (I did a Primary to Middle to Secondary system and this was in middle) saying that I was a "potential security risk" and that "measures should be taken to be protected from me". Fortunately my next school weren't complete idiots and just laughed the whole thing off. |
While I agree that the punishment was way out of proportion, I'd like to play devil's advocate. What if the scope of "who knows what this teenager might have done" included accessing sensitive documents such as gradebooks and personal emails? Kids these days are more technologically literate than we give them credit for, and for there to be some kind of fear of that would not be unreasonable to me.
But again, the kid didn't do any of those things and it was a harmless prank with a stupid outcome. |
Florida student here, I went to high school in Pinellas County, born in 1991. When I was in middle and high school we had something called the FCAT (Florida comprehensive assessment test). It's still given every year but it's been changed a bit recently I think.
Anyway, there were only a few times when you actually had to take the FCAT. Grade 10 was the big one, where you couldn't graduate high school, but also I think science in 7 or 8 grade and math in another. However, nearly every teacher and student thought you had to take it every year. My mom, being a teacher herself knew it that was all a lie so I never had to take the FCAT (though I always scored high on those types of things anyway), she just didn't want me to have to take it, and I agreed with her point of view. I only took the required tests every few years but I think when I was in grade 9, the admins at my school basically flipped out because I had a note from my mom that told them I was not to take the test. They wanted me to and I said the polite equivalent of "no, fuck you". They threatened a bunch of stuff like how I was going to be placed in remedial classes or wouldn't move up to the next grade and I told them I know which tests were required and which weren't and basically to fuck off and let me leave. Eventually I hit a saturation point where it wasn't worth it to me anymore so I took the test, opened it, and gave it back to them. They were 100% satisfied and let me go immediately. Probably because now my school would have a higher FCAT completion rate or some bs and someone, somewhere would get more money. |
The arrest isn't ridiculous, however the charge is. I was arrested for basically the same exact thing as a freshman in high school. I had the admin password(the school's street address) and me and my friends installed a pirate administration program(I think it was called 'Donald Dick') on the computers and proceeded to mess with other students over the network. We were eventually caught because one of the kids used it to send nasty messages to a teacher he didn't like and the staff began looking for students doing odd things on computers. Up until that point we were able to use our program right under teachers noses and they didn't think anything of it because it didn't look like a game or porn.
I don't know what kind of charges the other students got but I got suspended for a week, wasn't allowed to touch school computers for a calendar year, and a class 2 misdemeanor for violating a secure information system. The charge was then deferred and I had to do a year of Diversion(Under 18 probation, which is basically the same. I had drug tests, community service, decision making classes, and had to see my diversion officer once a month.) |
The ELO system was invented by a physicist. It's used by a lot of things to rate head to head competitors.
Basically in chess it's a mathematical formula to determine how many points you can raise your ELO by compared to another player.
There are different measurements of ELO based on different chess leagues but they are all 99% the same.
Think of it like this, the higher your ELO the better. Magnus Carlsen just broke Kasparov's ELO ranking. Here on FIDE's monthly rating list Carlsen's rating is 2863. Which is different than live rating, but we don't need to cover that.
Basically if player X has an ELO of 2000 and he plays player Y at an ELO of 1500, there is a formula to determine how many points each player gets/loses after the game of chess.
I don't know the formula or how to calculate it. But basically for every chess game there is a chance to lose or gain ELO points. A 2000 rated player (theoretically) beats a 1500 rated player every single time. That's a wide margin of points to be better than. Therefore he will get fewer ELO points, lets say 2 ELO. But if the 1500 rated player wins he might get 250 ELO, while a draw would also be nice for the 1500 considering the 2000 rater player should win.
Now for that 2000 rated player, let's say he's playing a player who is rated 1950 ELO. Much closer and in all actuality not much separates them skill wise. Their ratings are so close that fewer ELO points are up for grabs. Let's say the 2000 player wins and he gets 15 points, the 1950 wins he gets 30, draw would mean the 1950 would gain 10. The math stipulates that ALL higher rated players should win against all lower rated players. To me that's a little biased but it's the math. |
I believe you misunderstand the situation eeltech is describing. Many modern shows are filmed in HD – with a 16:9 aspect ratio – then letterboxed to be broadcast on an SD channel (4:3). If you watch the SD channel on an HDTV and have your television setup the (imo) correct way it pillarboxes the 4:3 signal. This effectively windowboxes the content (i.e. there are bars on top/bottom and sides).
Most HDTVs have a "zoom" option intended for exactly this situation: it crops top/bottom and sides while maintaining proper aspect ratio. If all goes well, it only crops the pillarboxing (introduced by the TV) and the letterboxing (introduced by the station). Obviously, there is some distortion from the zooming (though more expensive TVs have pretty sweet interpolation), but there is (ideally) no content lost, since the original program and television are both 16:9.
The problem eeltech and I have experienced is that it doesn't work right. When I zoom a 4:3 feed of a 16:9 program, I lose noticeable amounts of content from the top and bottom. eeltech wonders if this is because the TVs don't zoom the correct 133%, or if the TV stations don't letterbox the 16:9 content correctly. I suspect it's the latter: TV stations use a combination of slight vertical stretching and slight horizontal cropping to reduce the size of the letterboxes. For viewers on SD sets, the stretch is so unnoticeably slight and the loss due to cropping is so unnoticeably small, I imagine it was the right thing to do. For the minority like eeltech and I who:
a) spend money on an HDTV;
b) don't spend money on full HD cable;
c) know enough about their TV to use the zoom option for this situation;
d) are observant enough to notice they can't see all of Baltar's hair; and
e) are picky enough to care
it kind of sucks. Unfortunately, we are a clear minority.
In fact, I'm not even part of the minority anymore – I've upgraded to HD cable. Unfortunately, BSG is not available in Canada anywhere in HD (afaik). So, I have to watch it on an SD channel. My digital STB pillarboxes the channel for me, and feeds my TV an HD signal (and does a better job of interpolation than my cheap-ass TV would do). Now to the shitty part: the STB has no zoom function and the TV won't zoom an HD signal (since the raison-d'être of the zoom is for letterboxed content on SD channels). So, I'm stuck with windowboxing, which is better than stretching or cropping content, but still shitty. |
It's stolen property, it is not a legitimate copy. I don't want to argue hard copy vs. digital copy with you, because I already made my thoughts on that clear. You don't get to keep stolen property just because you paid for it. If I take a DVDrip of Boogie Nights and burn it to a DVD, spend a lot of time making it look legit, then sell it to someone on the street, and he then sells it to someone, the rights-holders and cops aren't going to let him keep it when they find out about it regardless of how much the middle guy tries to pay them off. The third guy is a victim of circumstance. He doesn't get to keep stolen property just because he happened to pay someone for it. Yes, it's unfortunate for both of the people who bought it from me, but that's the way it is, and guess what? If they were hard copies, nobody is going to reimburse the third guy, so he'd consider himself lucky if it were an easily reimbursable digital copy.
That's the way life is, sometimes you get fucked over for a few bucks. In this case with amazon, it even was under a dollar and they reimbursed you, so it's really amazing to me that you guys actually legitimately give a shit. I can't even begin to count the number of times someone has somehow screwed me out of a dollar, let alone all the times someone has screwed me out of quite a bit more than that. Mourn for the loss of those three quarters, two dimes, and four pennies. Take a moment of silence to remember all the times they served you with the highest degree of loyalty but were killed in the line of fire. Then pick yourself up and move on from them, you'll meet plenty more pieces of legal tender in your life, and you can only hope they will serve you as well as your previous comrades, if not better.
Stop and really think about what you're saying for a second. You're saying that people may never buy from Amazon again because they once were a little unclear about why they recalled something extremely cheap and then reimbursed everyone for it. You're also claiming that recalling a 99 cent item is completely ridiculous, even though it was an illegitimate and illegal item. Really? Honestly. |
You're still using school business models. They rely on idea protection. The whole "if i just work on this one thing, it could be my golden ticket!!!" mode of thought will NOT work in an open system. Idea diversity is needed.
You're right that the current mainstream style of business operation and incubation wouldn't work in an open system. (just as the entertainment industry's current -and outdated- business models dont work in the age of the internet)
What I'm saying (that no one really seems to be picking up on) is that a new system, an OPEN system requires new thinking. A foreknowledge that each product you create will immediately be ripped off by someone. Bigger fish, smaller fish, everyone will be trying to rip off great products.
Your best bet wouldn't be to spend your life savings on that one project, putting all your eggs in one basket. You would need to diversify. You would need to always be thinking of ways to innovate and improve. So when you release your product to the world, you would already understand that someone else is going to completely ape your product. And that someone else might have a TON of resources to throw at it.
With that in mind, you would need to always be innovating. The true thinkers would be the ones on top.
(and wouldn't things really be better if the true innovators were the ones that were making a lot of progress)
Think of other great ways you could use your product, come up with companion products which cohere with your original, keep coming up with additional products. Explore new avenues.
If MS were to include something similar in their OS, it wouldn't have NEARLY the same impact in an open market. A competitor could just replicate MS' entire OS.
The way in which different industries are lucrative would not be the same as it is in our current system. Many of the alarmingly bloated IT based companies would not be able to rely on what they currently use to generate much of their income.
I'm not saying this system would be easy or entirely feasible to launch into tomorrow or next month. But I am saying that such a system has FAR greater benefits overall and would encourage working toward the best interest of society and humanity rather than trying to get ahead personally at the expense of any poor bastard that steps in your way.
The greed-based model we have today where you look out for you and yours, and to hell with everyone else, would NEVER survive in an open market, cooperation would be encouraged simply by the nature of the system, partnerships would be forged. Businesses like MS wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Though businesses like GOOGLE most likely would. Google hasn't created anything that someone else hasn't copied. They just manage to do it better, and KEEP doing it better.
IP wouldn't be a full on source of income, but rather just a piece to the puzzle. Virtual property currently needs to be looked at differently and should be more of a supplement to property and infrastructure. |
I never said anything about personal responsibility ending . I believe that individuals have responsibilities, and so do organisations, companies, governments, etc, as well.
We are not in a good place if we allow these organisations to shirk their responsibilities, and pin everything on individuals who may or may not actually have the capacity to shoulder it .
What power does a person have when an acquaintance posts a drunken photo taken at a private house party?
What power does a young jobseeking graduate have to remove pictures taken when they were a rebellious teenager?
What power does a political protester have to distance themselves from statements that have now become illegal under a new regime?
What power does a gay person have to conceal that part of their life when they travel to homophobic countries?
Companies that vacuum up vast amounts of personal information (pretty much any major tech/internet company), have an enormous amount of power, and that is reflected in the enormous revenues and market valuations that they have.
My point is simply this: Historically, we used to be oppressed by heavy obligations to society's cumbersome rules, and we benefitted by moving away from that towards individualism. We escaped that extreme, and reaped the huge benefits of freedom.
But now we're being sucked towards the other extreme - one where no one has any obligations to eachother. It's an abrasive, Darwinian free-for-all, where an individual must keep their wits about them at all times, lest they fall prey to bigger, more powerful organisations who aren't constrained by any rules.
Individualism has great merits, but it is being taken to the extreme, and it's starting to hurt us. We need to seek the middle ground, a balance between freedom and responsibility for individuals and organisations alike.
Tech companies have not had to bear any responsibility so far. The Europeans think this isn't right, and that there is good reason for these companies to start bearing responsibility. I agree with that. This is a change, and many view this as an interference with tech companies' rights to do as they please.
I do understand why people would view this as an intrusion. I also understand that many don't trust the government to put in regulation that works, and would rather it be left alone, rather than risk bad regulation going in place. (Hang on, aren't we supposed to live in a democracy?)
But I honestly feel the other side of the debate, where powerful companies are running roughshod over individuals, needs serious and overdue attention.
We can have a debate about what responsibility, how much responsibility, technical feasibility, implementation, etc., and I'm very happy to do so. I also appreciate that people will be coming from different perspectives, so the debate will be vigorous.
In this particular case, the proposed legislation is about a "right to be forgotten". To me it sounds in principle to be a good idea. The only caveat would be limitations on people hiding from past illegal activity. Clearly that needs to be thought through carefully. |
it is not speed of transmission which causes congestion, but rather total bytes transferred
> I hope some people reconsider bandwidth caps (total bytes used) as I think they are a much better way of controlling network congestion than speed limit caps
You're spreading misinformation that sounds like an ISP talking point and that's why you're getting downvoted.
Usage caps don't solve the root cause of the problem; oversold infrastructure.
Let's say you have 3 roommates and your 100Mbit/s LAN is getting congested because of high use. Would you:
pitch in and upgrade to a 1Gbit/s network
flush money down the toilet and hope it reduces congestion
IMO the ISPs should be forced to advertise minimum speeds along with their up to speeds. If they're only buying 5% of the capacity that they're selling to customers, they should have to advertise, and guarantee, a minimum speed that is 5% of the up to speed they advertise right now.
Even with caps, they still need to be forced to be more honest in their advertising. A 10MBit/s connection with a 150GByte cap should have to be advertised with a true speed of 0.46MBit/s.
The idea of a shared (among the people) broadband infrastructure is simple. Everyone pays for a minimal amount of capacity, to cover the cost of infrastructure and network operations, and we share the excess when it's available.
Sharing infrastructure also has shortcomings. Mainly, we aren't guaranteed a minimal level of service. We tolerate the shortcomings because they (for now) are outweighed by the benefits. Most of the time we get cheaper, faster internet.
The problem with ISPs is they think we should pay a fixed rate for minimal access and pay again to use the excess. Right now we're only paying for minimal access, even though it's been prettied up by the marketing department.
If the network is truly experiencing a congestion problem, they need to upgrade infrastructure to cover peak demand. That means everyone needs to pay more for minimal access. |
I forgot where the article was, but modern SSD's don't fail nearly as much as they used to. Apparently, if you were to constantly read/write from them now, they last just as long as a normal HDD, which is 5-10 years at the max. And by then, people usually have upgraded either their drive, or entire system. |
Good point, mostly, but I am sympathetic with his approach since he was just trying to reinforce his earlier intervention. We're spending way too much time analyzing this though. |
Ok, then how should definitions change? Should we elect a panel to select words which should have their meanings changed and create new words when they are needed?
You do realize that the English you speak is completely different from English 200 years ago and it changed in exactly the way you say it shouldn't, right?
I just don't like the idea of a group of expert judges passing down the rules of language that all must follow or else ! Language is a living, changing, evolving thing. It's purpose is to let us express ourselves freely, not control our self expression. |
You should probably focus on Australia's censorship bills before worrying about ours...... Same as OP should start worrying about Canada's. This is a worldwide problem, one bill sitting in US Congress is not the only crutch we're all facing these days. Do I really care if a .ca or .au get censored? Not really, but we all need to focus on our own problems so bills like these DON'T affect the world, as SOPA is trying to do. A global cry is more easily heard than a national one. Other governments get the pressure and then pressure our government.. You've gotta start small and make it huge.
EDIT: |
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I was excited about code as a kid... Programming on MOOs, telling that turtle thing how to draw stuff, changing the Windows start-up scripts so that they'd switch the background to porn next time someone started up a computer at my school, etc...
And then I went through high school and got taught nothing about code... and spent most of my time in Software Engineering wondering when the fuck we'd code something (answer: never. Don't take software engineering if you actually want to learn how to code). It all took so long that now the ambition and imagination that I had back when I was a child has been burned away by years of bitterness and wasted time at school, being taught that programming was a chore. |
I don't frequent /r/politics but I can tell you that I disapprove of Ron Paul due to his insane economic policy. Basically he wants to go back to the gold standard. The effect would be a massive decrease in the true money supply because money would depend on how much gold exists, not how many goods or services are available.
Depending on the model used (and real economists seem to disagree) you end up with hyper-inflation, in this case prices remain constant but because of the reduced money supply your $ is actually worth a lot less than it is now (like 10 percent overnight).
Or hyper-deflation where the prices of goods and services themselves are pegged back to the standard of gold as well. Your $ is still worth far less but the prices go into a free fall. People stop buying hoping a price goes lower. The economy stalls out because the creators of the goods and services can't make their products at a low enough price and go bankrupt. (This is basically what happened to the housing market)
Either outcome is very very bad and would be much worse than the current crises. |
I DO question that!!!! (and I apologize for my baseless insult) in fact I would say the government shlould be much MORE involved with Marjuana. They should be taxing it, regulating it and controlling it, just sort of letting it go willy-nilly (like most of Paul's ideas, since hes a libertarian) would be a HORRIBLE idea. I for one cannot wait for the day that I can buy some weed and because its government regulated, I know that 1. It's high quality and safe 2. I am helping to support my government with the taxes I pay on it.
Also, I can give Paul a HUGE amount of grief for doing it "at the wrong time" because timing is everything and he made a huge mistake... and yes he did try to get marijuana legalized, but it was ENTIRELY self serving... as evidence by the fact that you (and a lot of other people, mind you) were completely and utterly fooled into liking Ron Paul because "at least he tried." Politics may have problems, but there is one thing the american public never seems to learn: the game doesnt change on a dime, and people who try to make it change like that are just getting in the way of real progress. It's amazing that the same redditors who hate Obama because "he didnt really 'change' anything" love ron paul becuase, wait for it... they think hes going to 'change' things!
Oh also, Paul didnt see that nobody was doing anything about it. The Marijuana lobby is EXTREMELY powerful and has some very very very wealthy backing and if the time was right, they'd have been out there pushing for it too, but they arent, they're biding their time until the stars are in order, because its what you have to do... |
Yeah, but he also doesn't like any of the liberal agenda stuff that /r/politics seems to love. He HATES welfare, he dislikes government environmental regulation, he is insanely pro-gun, is pretty much against all government social programs in general, and I absolutely love him.
It seems most of the dislike either comes from the fact that he is running as a Republican or that people really just don't know enough about him. I've looked very deeply into him, and there is way more to like than to dislike. I really don't get how anybody could not like him, even if they disagree with him. |
In this election? Or what I think should be done in general? Either way my only assertion is that Ron Paul isn't the answer. I started off my comments by saying that he would destroy the economy and I don't like his stances. I'm amused that this has led to such a lengthy discussion.
The reality is that Paul isn't going to get elected (ever) and even if he did congress would never go along with his policies, so the whole discussion is moot.
The discussion about this election is moot as well because the choices are Obama or Romney.
So long term:
Force all laws to have a sunset provision
Force all bills in congress to address a single issue, no riders.
Change the voting day to a weekend
Outlaw the use of special rules at the state and federal level that allow access for the entrenched parties in elections but not third parties (this is difficult because there are tons)
Implement instant runoff voting
Drop the electoral college
(Possibly, I'm not 100% sure on this) Return voting of senators back to the states instead of by direct election
Things I'd like to see but there is probably less agreement on:
Stronger regulation of banks. Basically roll back all of the deregulation from the past 30 years
Massive reduction in the size of the military
Force congress to declare war before the president can use military force (maybe worded differently but basically that the president can't use military force without some kind of authorization)
Strong consumer protections (Obama has been trying)
Stronger privacy laws.
Universal Health care
Changes to social security that would prevent the government from borrowing against it's future (the way it was originally set up) |
I use Chrome, but honestly, it's only because Firefox shits itself under the weight of less than ten userscripts. I wish they'd use a history-searching system like Firefox has.
If there's an article I read last year that I want to show someone, I can type a few words I think might be in the title, or the site URL, and Firefox finds it for me just like that. Chrome can barely even show me a page I just visited if I type in the full title. Hell, sometimes I type in 90% of the URL and get a "lol i dunno" in return.
And then there's AdBlock. I know it's improved lately, and it does much more than it used to, but it's still nowhere near as good as it was on Firefox when I stopped using it (which had to have been over a year ago now).
Download management, too. I have a pretty bad internet connection, so DownThemAll! was a godsend. There's no equivalent on Chrome, as far as I know. There's sketchy JDownloader integration, but I found DTA to be much more consistent and easy to use.
Speaking of downloads, every time Chrome does anything related to Windows Explorer (choosing a file to upload, saving a file), it freezes until I manually open up an Explorer window and then close it. Does it even on a clean install. Sometimes it doesn't unfreeze at all, and I have to re-download whatever videos I may have had open in other tabs (which is a major thing for me). |
First, it's not secrecy, it's security. Every IT experts will tell you that. Every one of you passwords must be different, have a few capitals, signs (ç&%*/...) and numbers; and be changed every now and then.
Second, please, tell me how that is complicated? My accounts passwords are probably much more secure than yours, and I don't need to remember them; Firefox does it for me, under the condition that I give my master-password. And I don't have to worry about people finding my passwords, and logging in without me knowing.
I open my browser, and enter my master password. Bam, done, 5 sec top. Reddit, gmail, facebook, etc. everything gets logged-in automatically. |
statcounter is primarily used by the english speaking world. people who speak chinese, aka, live in china, use chinese web sites. the people you source, netmarketshare, also rely on "their partner sites" so..... btw how are you suppose to "correct" for regional bias besides simply making up numbers. statcounter uses real world numbers, seems like MS wants someone to "magic" the stats so they look better. here is statcounter on why they dont weight their stats.
> netmarketshare on how they collect data : "The network includes over 40,000 websites " ... The data is compiled from approximately 160 million unique visits per month.
..
> statcounter : "sample exceeding 15 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites . " |
Really? What things did tesla brainstorm that have no real world application? Tesla worked on:
High voltage arc lighting
The polyphase AC motor
The AC long distance transmission network we still use today
High frequency transformers, well known to be more efficient
Flourescent lights
High RPM, highly efficient steam turbines
Radio
Remote control
Robotics
X-rays
The automobile ignition coil
The AND gate
Radar
Sonar
Particle beam ion cannon
And finally, the one-wire distribution of power through standing waves in the core of the earth.
Sure, Farady is awesome and AC power was known while Tesla was still studying in school, but Tesla was actually able to engineer working devices that we still use today.
Also, Tesla did almost all of this work between 1885 and 1900, before he started on the project to distribute wireless power to everyone on earth without charge in 1899, which is the project that was too difficult even for him and left him penniless and abandoned by his investors.
It was only after his death that the Supreme Court of the United States declared that Tesla had priority in the invention of radio. Tesla never saw a penny for the huge number of patents he held on radio technologies, even though he spent decades in court after 1910 trying to get paid for his inventions. |
This story is so bad it's embarrassing.
Any server that he had 30ms ping to is within NZ; minimum possible ping to the states from NZ is ~120ms (12,000km of fibre, speed of light in fibre is ~0.7c, there and back). That's excluding any switching or routing delays (or serialisation delays, if you're using a slow access method). Possibly Australia, given it's about 20-25ms away, but that'd be pushing it.
Lawful intercept in NZ is done at layer 1; permanently emplaced fibre taps on ISP routers feeding into aggregation devices. It's not done by fucking with routing. Doing what this article suggests (diverting traffic to and from him via some side trip) would be somewhere between hard and impossible without his ISP's active cooperation, which wouldn't be forthcoming without a warrant, and with a warrant you'd just use the LI infrastructure, which is completely invisible to the end user. You could potentially use BGP poisoning techniques to reroute stuff to you, but you'd be catching a shitload of stuff that wasn't Kim's traffic, it'd be fairly obvious if none went looking, and you'd piss off a bunch of gamers who got caught in the dragnet, their ISP that had to field their calls and Microsoft, whose net block you would have hijacked.
So use the fucking taps. Or bug his lines at his house, if you want to be all high-tech spy.
What happened here is that Kim was being sent to a server outside NZ or someone fucked up their routing and was tromboning traffic off the states. The GCSB may or may not have been sniffing his traffic at that point, but that sniffing would have had no impact on its routing. |
They're really not that expensive.
Also - sometime you should look into just exactly what modern spinning platter drives go through to get such high storage capacities. The |
Plot twist : the BPI people who are being tasked by the super-elderly executives to " SHUT DOWN ALL OF TEH INTERNET AND DEM STEALING WEBSITES " are actually doing mundane acts like these so that piratebay never closes down.
Incidentally it works for them aswell because finding a weird loophole through the law/legislature books is easier and cheaper to search in (torrented) pdf format.
Their kids are also happy because their underpayed and overworked dad/mom in BPI who hate their job and come home to a barely functional family dont have to be nagged by 'pocket-change' every day due to the ridiculus prices in their college bookstore. |
He's saying kim dotcom is running a superior service where the cost is free. Why pay for a service that is subpar when there is a free service that is better. |
It used to be a question of validity. The defacto standard is actual + being a suffix to an email. This however creates a dilemma. Since the goal is to allow unique emails only, understanding the defacto standard, xxxx+aa needs to discard +aa and resolve to xxxx for the purpose of uniqueness. However +aa can't be discarded because of the RFC standard. It's email providers (looking at you Google) that violated the standard, although for good use. So now we're in a state where the RFC needs to be updated to map xxxx+aa to xxxx destroying backwards compatibility . Until this occurs you can't use + in your email if a service is actually distinguishing uniqueness based on email because xxxx+aa is not an account in reality. |
The best thing about dropbox is integration. It's on every important platform and supported by nearly every app that handles files, needs to sync or backup.
I use it on my iOS devices for getting stuff into Goodreader, syncing Plaintext and backing up my Flashcards. And everything else.
They also keep every version of your file for the last 30 day, so no fear of overwriting something important with crap. And shared folders and online prewies, photo albums and more. Dropbox has a lot of features and I would be surprised and mildly impressed and happy if Mega would catch up to this anytime soon. |
XSS is achieved by sending content to the server, which includes it in some webpage without proper 'cleaning', allowing arbitrary scripts to execute in the browser. This means it can be used to read cookies and steal authentication data among other things.
Persistent XSS happens when the server stores this malicious content. The database is not directly at risk, as XSS is usually aimed at the client-side. Of course an XSS attack can be part of a bigger strategy which does involve the database (eg. compromising an admin account by XSS, then compromising the database). |
I have used Furk pretty much since it started. I found out about it when it was mentioned in a Torrent Freak article.
Basically its like this:
You can download any torrent you want straight to your furk account and then fetch it at your leisure using your favorite download manager. But heres the thing, most of the time Furk already has the file you want cached. If they don't, its normally because you are downloading something really obscure that probably has 1 seed on a 56k modem. This is no problem though because Furk will just keep downloading and notify you when its done.
But wait, there's more:
Furk provides vlc playlist files for any media it has cached. You can just stream that shit right to your desktop or phone, hell there is even an xbmc plugin.
That not enough? Do you need some transcoding... No problem, furk will transcode any movie format to mp4 so you can play it in a flash based web player or bung it on your ipod.
Not sure if the torrent you want is legit? Don't worry Furk is good enough to take screen grabs and audio clips for you to play back before you download 12 gigs of fake Batman.
They also run Kaspersky on everything so you know that the iso you are downloading doesn't contain any nasty surprises.
There are no ads or spyware, for this reason the free version has very limited bandwidth, but for a small monthly fee you will be astounded by the download speeds you get. When I was in Spain I had 100mb cable. I had no problem maxing it out using the downloadthemall download manager plugin while downloading 50 gig files from furk.
Oh yeah they unrar archives for you too so you don't have to deal with 100 rar files. |
I don't want to enter into a big argument about piracy, but all of you seem to be forgetting that this is Kim Dotcom we're talking about. He doesn't do the things he does for free speech, a free internet, or even so that others can pirate stuff. He does them solely for his own benefit, and he doesn't care who he hurts or benefits.
When he was first convicted of pirating software, and stealing credit cards in the early nineties, he mitigated his sentence by collaborating with the German authorities, giving them information about the warez scene. He even collaborated with notorious German lawyer Gravenreuth, infamous as a pirate hunter who would lure teenagers into sending him pirated games and software by posing as a young girl in Computer mag ads. He habitually lies about and wildly exaggerates his actions to put himself in the limelight, like when he claimed to have hacked Citibank and transferred money to Greenpeace (which Greenpeace assures they never got), or when he claimed to have been on a highschool for gifted youths, when in fact he was at a Hauptschule, the lowest of the three school types in Germany. And let's not forget he made his millions largely with shady insider trades with his investment company.
Bottom line and |
Thank you I am glad someone else caught this. I read "As strong as steel" and then in the first couple sentences that it was printed plastic, then quit reading the article.
There are very few if any materials that behave like steel with tensile and compressive strengths, as well as the elastic and plastic yielding and strain hardening. If a plastic had the properties of steel I am sure we would be at least investigating it for use in structural applications. |
Trivia time - I was the Asia-Pacific rep for Prof. Khoshnevis for a while. Nothing ever took off because, TBH, although his Contour Crafting technology was definitely cool, it focused far too much on being a 3D concrete house printer. The market for all-concrete constructions isn't all that large, as you might imagine.
What really needs to be done with this tech is to make it one component of an entire automatic production facility which can handle the majority of current construction materials. That way, it could be used to print concrete foundations, partial-bricks which are currently created by chopping bits off a full brick, decorative slabs, pillars, and cornices, carport floors, and driveways. I'd even use a variant on it to print mortar, and pair it with existing bricklaying robots.
But when buyers want wood and steel and tile and glass and ceramic and, yes, plasterboard, in their houses and commercial buildings, you won't get very far saying "Well, we have concrete and... more concrete." Professor K'd have more success for his machine by leasing the rights to its production to existing concreting companies, who already know the hundred-and-one places people want concrete and have access to the existing market. |
They aren't the same thing. Pirate Browser lets you get through firewalls and blocked ISPs, but provides no anonymous or encryption whatsoever . People need to realize that Pirate Browser allows users from all other the world (China for example) to get past their country's blocked websites, however PB doesn't offer exit nodes and encryption. TOR does because how it is bundled and accessed. |
Everyone has something to hide. In your case, you just confessed to a crime in a public forum.
There are many points which refute the "nothing to hide" argument, but here are two: first, even if you think you have nothing to fear from today's government, are you sure you'll have nothing to fear from tomorrow's? Or the next? The same mechanisms will be right there for future abuse.
Second, the US government has a [track record]( of using intelligence to target people who are making "undesirable" political connections. You never know when you'll fall foul of that sort of chicanery. |
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