Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Not here in the states if it involves a motor vehicle. If you decline to take the drug test they immediately arrest you and take you to jail to await the judge's court order to take the test. If the test says you were intoxicated, they increase the severity of the original charges. So if you're intoxicated, you're actually better off taking the field test and having your lawyer challenge the field test later.
Not at all. The typical public survey is regarded as valid for precisely the reason that it is thought to be completely at random.* Given the proffered objection is continuous and can never be measured by your the survey, it doesn't matter who large the sample, because of the non-random bias, it can never be regarded as representative of the entire computer population.
*Indeed this is actually one of the current points of contention amongst surveyors as the advent of the cell phone may be inducing biases into traditional techniques.
Except it isn't. There hasn't been any warming for 20 years. Now, 10 years ago when this was pointed out, they said it was a statistical fluke and we'd need 15 years before it could be regarded as anything else. When we hit 15, it jumped to 20. Now that we've hit 20, they've bumped the number again. The Warmists really need to go march on the streets next to the guy holding the sign saying "The End of the World in Near."
That's funny!
Because the only reason I have to support those pieces (yes by policy were required to install both 32 and 64 bit versions) of shit is the multiple browser apps used at my work place. I suppose the internal group releasing their updates in nominally a "reputable firm" but given that until 2 months ago they insisted that unless you were running 7.49 they wouldn't provide troubleshooting support, that's a very, very broad definition of nominal. They did actually announce they were going to 8.51 about a month after .51 was released, so at least the frequency of their updates may be improving. But they still wouldn't help with .51 before the announced it.
Because the exploit being covered in the article is Flash not Java.
As for the lie that they haven't been bashing Java, well that's just an outright lie. For the last 6 months every time yet another Java exploit has been announced, there has been an article properly bashing Java.
Depends on who is rigging the lottery. Certainly there's no logic to it from the State's perspective. But if you're not the state, I can see someone thinking they might be able to rig it to win more than they would ever be paid for doing their job.
In some places the solution to this is that if you work for the agency running the lottery, you can't play the game(s).
Depends on what you mean by "really work".
For the most part they do reliably detect whether or not you are nervous about answering the question. Of course discerning exactly why you were nervous is a whole other question.
Also, the notable exception to their reliability are sociopaths. They'll pretty much pass any lie detector test you give them, or fail if they think that's the optimal path.
Actually it is fairly easy if you have access to the machine, just not immediately obvious. You use latex paint to weight most of the balls so they won't be drawn. In 1980 scammers managed to "win" the Pennsylvania Daily Lottery drawing with the number 666 by using this technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Pennsylvania_Lottery_scandal
While I like the idea, there's one small but very significant flaw in your plan. Drones of this sort aren't licensed, so there's no good way to track down the owner, other than maybe locating them at the time of the incident. Yes, if they find them, I'm all for throwing them in jail. I'm just not sure 5 years is long enough.
Any legit use must obviously be coordinated with firefighter control and he did allow for "any other technology to take down..."
It is incontrovertible that given people have been, are, and will continue to be exceptionally stupid in even the worst of circumstances, the only viable solution is to give the firefighters the legal authority and the means to take down the drones.
I suspect on most modern cars the computer always controls the braking even when you're depressing the brake pedal. That's certainly part of how ABS solutions work, and you need it if you're implementing some sort of automatic anti-tailgating or blind spot braking mechanisms that's how you'd implement that as well.
As other posters pointed out, the real problem is that that control subsystem was connected to the public internet.
It's a crazy quilt of regs over here. Feds regulate MPG through taxation and the NTSB does crash testing which I believe is mandatory. But it isn't necessarily illegal to produce an unsafe car. You just have to be able to survive the class action lawsuit which will inevitably follow. OTOH the NTSB can issue recall orders if as a result of complaints they determine the vehicle is unsafe.
Most regulation happens at the local level with Kalifornia having the most weight because of their high population. But the thoroughness of inspections is spotty. For example, I grew up in Pennsylvania. While growing up vehicles had to be inspected by licensed servicing stations every 6 months. They checked a variety of the standard stuff including body integrity (lack of rust), brakes, and tire wear. Somewhere along the way they switched to once a year (nominally cheaper, but all the inspection stations jacked their prices to make up for the lost business). I now reside in The People's Republic of Maryland. Despite state mandated emissions inspections every two years at state run stations, there are no corresponding laws about vehicle inspections. If you buy a used car, or transfer in from another state you have to have an inspection at the time you register the vehicle. After that, nothing.
Depends on whether or not they can remove the last Balmerism that keeps on giving: that the desktop and phone have to have the same OS. Problem there is I don't think it's just a Balmerism, it's a Gatesism, too.
But if they finally see that light, don't count them out. I think people would like to see at least one more vendor for phone OSes. Two is too risky on the monopoly side.
And it is doubtful they ever will.
Investors want to see the kind of growth MS saw in the 90s. That isn't going to happen. The computer industry then was young and taking over the world. Now that they've conquered it, we're down to maintenance and the revenues you can generate from that.
This is MS's Michael Dell moment. Do they recognize the change in their market? Do they make changes that allow them to survive it and be profitable (even if it doesn't match the level "investors want"), or do they miss it and become another artifact of history?
Sad isn't it?
You've got people who are 95%+ intent on doing something good for somebody who would otherwise likely (again in the 95%+ range):
- die
- constantly suffer great pain
- be crippled
- or some combination of all of the above
and unless everything goes as perfectly as it does for the forensic investigators in a CSI tv show, somebody is out to sue the living day lights out of them.
So, assuming each of the reported numbers is unique (that is a malfunction that leads to a death was counted only as death and not both) that give the robots an error rate of 0.5% compared to Between two and four per cent of operations in the US suffer from complications or somewhere between 4 and 8 times safer than a fleshie. And that's assuming the 2-4% isn't underestimating issues for unreported recoveries (or what the rest of us would probably call coverups). Yet no change in the headline. Isn't that rather, (oh what was that usual derogatory comparison I see in the comments oh yes) Daily Mail like?
I don't consider myself a friend of either. It strikes me as rather foolish to treat a corporation whose sole reason for being is making money as if it were a friend. They are what they are. That being said, it strikes me as foolish to allow Apple to continue to shake down random competitors for government granted monopolies that should never have been granted (regardless of whether they are called patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc.).
Gads the Apple fanbois are as rabid as their lawyers.
IF Apple had licensed properly, they would have gotten the FRAND rates. Just because it's FRAND doesn't negate the obligation to pay for the patents involved. Break the law and the FRAND agreement is null and void. Paying on the full price of the device is the price paid for KNOWINGLY infringing on the patent.
People are urged to install the update as soon as possible, and long before miscreants begin to exploit the vulnerability to spread malware and misery.
You're already too late. The whole reason we know about this vulnerability is precisely that the miscreants found it, were subsequently hacked, and the exploit was posted to the internet.
People who have never seen, let alone run a 386 really ought not spew in the forums.
Yes, I was running a Windows 3.11 workstation on a 386 with math coprocessor back in the day, never had a problem with displaying bit mapped fonts on either my paper white (DTP work) or color monitor (CAD). And your whole CAD argument is just right out of your arse. Granted I was running Autocad which most folks don't consider real CAD, but the relevant fonts for it were additional drawings.
Detroit might win for empty, but I'll put the roads in Philly up against the roads in Detroit any day of the week for title of worst. Couple years ago we made the mistake of taking the main road through there when leaving a convention and my friend wound up with two damaged wheels.
When you start with a false premise, nothing deduced afterward is reliable.
Despite Tim's claims and derision for the gold bugs, I don't see that the US or the UK really are any better off for printing boatloads of money. The economy isn't improving. People aren't going to work. The number of people being helped by the inflation is vastly smaller than the number it is going to seriously hurt going forward. Despite government fiddling with the numbers the economy is still teetering on the edge of the Second Great Recession without an actual intervening recovery. I expect the sum of the downturns will be worse than the Great Depression.
Nothing.
At that level of paranoia you're also certifying the factory and your transport service and implementing high level security controls for their facilities. Alos, think armored car transport principles without the obviousness of the armored car.
I'd settle for a physical switch instead of a jumper. Depending on the motherboard some of those *&%*$!! jumpers were smaller than an eye glasses screw.
Also, all MBs these days should have a double BIOS setup: One flashable which is the primary boot chip, one ROM which by flipping another switch/setting another jumper can be used to restore the BIOS that originally shipped with the MB.
We've done away with the list. If you've been on travel, when you get back, it gets wiped and fresh image is installed.
Not that that would have helped with this particular hack.
If you're sufficiently paranoid these days, the correct procedure is actually to chuck it all to a reseller as soon as it comes back and give them a new, fresh out of the box, not re-furbed laptop. The BIOS, the hard drive, even the mouse might have been compromised with malware your OotB AV suite simply isn't equipped to deal with.
Once a primary source of Apple's income, the iPod has fallen out of favor these days as users moved from dedicated media players to smartphones.
Not true at all. I'd love to pickup an actual iPod with a decent amount of music storage (say on the order of 100G) and maybe a bluetooth connection for the car. No need for a camera or wifi, just the usb to my Windows PC to synch my music collection. But Apple don't make/market those anymore.
Not exactly. We're using more total energy but we're using it more efficiently. "We" in this instance being the entire planet and not just the GB or the US. There is some debate about how much less we might be using if all the places coming online were using current technology.
I think your essential point still stands: we're not on the exponential curve the alarmists cry havoc about. More probably a straight line and possibly asymptotically decreasing.
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