Posts by Paul Hovnanian 2000 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Mar 2008
"They could have flagged him, but choose not to."
No red flag laws in Texas. Even now (after the latest federal bill passage) there is nothing to mandate red flag laws. Only funds for states that choose to implement them.
The next step would have to be some sort of civil commitment. That's a huge hurdle to clear as it involves checking someone into a facility for observation.
"filters and replacement units for the mainline commercial fleet should be available on a schedule that would permit the work to be largely completed by July 2023"
What exactly do they mean by "should be"? Designed? Tested? Manufacturing capacity allocated and parts supplies secured? Resources available to retrofit the aircraft fleet? Or is this more of a hopeful "should"?
Maybe the FCC shouldn't have sold a slice of the guard band to the telecoms. And now they "should" pay them back for bandwidth they they may never be permitted to use. Garmin has expressed concern about the possibility of 5G interference with their state of the art, newly designed equipment (never mind all the old stuff in use for decades). And their radio altimeters are used in helicopters for things like search and rescue or life flights to hospitals. Not something that can be confined to cell sites near airports.
That's sort of how drivers (and vehicle) licenses work now. But states have entered into "comity" agreements to recognize each others' residents license status. There are some federal laws on this topic, motivated by "interstate commerce" which is the baliwick of Congress. But it is going to take some serious legal scholarship to see how such authority would extend across state lines in the case of abortion.
Pursuing an individual across state lines for engaging in an act not legal in your state but legal in another?
That's all well and good. Until the poutine-eating tourist returns to their non-poutine state. And tracking data reveals the true purpose of their trip.
Some of those states have bounties (payable to individuals, not fines collected by the state) for their cullinary preferences. Who will be paying those? Certainly not that rich, white lady in California who wants a choice not available on the domestic Tex-Mex menu. And how will one interfere in what is essentially a private transaction? Legislation can prohibit data sharing by government entities. But not so much by individuals. I know a number of people in the private investigator/skip tracing business. And restrictive laws are mere speed bumps on the road to tracking people.
But not a very technically savvy one. I've worked for outfits where management would refuse to use e-mail. Even to summon an employee to an in-person meeting. Or place or take phone calls from anything other than a company-owned line*. No call logs. No evidence. But not anything classified. It's bad enough when the boss worries about covering his tracks after the fact. It't even scarrier when they know how to do so beforehand.
*At a previous job, I had returned a page from a superior from my home phone. Which had proven to be very embarrasing (and expensive) for the company. While speaking with him, I had a friend sitting near me who was an excellent witness to my side of the conversation. And who, in spite of repeated efforts by that company, I have never revealed the identity of.
"On the other hand: some companies have recently started to implement supposed "retention periods" after which all email gets auto-deleted."
Yes. Because courts have held that going through your records and deleting/shredding old documents in the face of imminent litigation is itself an offense. However, doing so based on a previously established schedule is acceptable.
... my iGo charger with interchangeable tips.
Actually, I still have the charger with a selection of tips (mini-USB, micro-USB plus some proprietary Dell and Lenovo laptop tips). I can piggyback a second tip off the charger and charge two different devices at the same time. From 120 Vac, 240 Vac, a 12 Vdc automotive "cigarette lighter" plug or an aircraft dc plug. But when they got out of the phone/laptop power biz, the supply of tips started to dry up. And newer formats were never developed.
They had a great bright blue LED indicator light as well. Guaranteed to keep you wide awake in a hotel room all night.
"a lack of adequate cost estimates or sufficient supporting materials to justify the amount of funding being requested"
So, am I correct in assuming that this equipment hasn't been replaced yet? Otherwise it would be a simple matter of submitting a box full of receipts and asking for reimbursement.
All sounds great until Glencore PLC corners the market on pixie dust mines. You thought you were going to dig up your own in the back garden? Think of the environmental damage created by millions of unregulated backyard mines. And then there's all that spent pixie dust which will have to be moved into long term storage. We can't just leave that lying around and possibly falling into terrorist hands. And you certainly aren't going to be pouring that goo down the loo, are you?
We had something like this happen back when I administrated an engineering data server (HP-UX). People at various sites around the company needed to connect to, edit and save various documents to file space on our server from DOS and Windows 3.x PCs. The existing solution was a product called LAN Manager/X. Which shared a piece of our server via the SMB protocol. Problem: Many engineers had configured their systems to automatically mount all their SMB shares at boot-up. Whether they needed them or not. And management, in their penny-pinching wisdom had decided to only purchase a 10 seat license for LAN Manager. So the eleventh person who needed a document was SOL until we could knock an idle session off for them to use.
My solution involved the discovery of the Samba sharing package on my Linux system. Which did the same thing as LAN Manager but had no per seat licensing limitations. It compiled and ran on HP-UX. And it offered a few hooks into its system where I was able to write a 'boot the unused sessions off the system' shell script.
Some engineers were OCD enough to watch their disk shares and manually reconnect when they got bumped. The automated process turned that into an interesting race. Reconnect ... bump ... reconnect ... bump. I no longer actually needed to kick idle sessions off (given the expanded state of share resources). But the devil in me just got a thrill out of watching what must have been obsessed people trying to hog resources they were not actually using.
"and whose manufacturer has disappeared or never got the system re-qualified"
I suspect that it's this. Particularly for medical equipment. There is a similar problem for numerically controlled machine tools originally runnig floppy based CAM files. That has been largely solved by a number of devices that emulate a floppy disk drive interface on the back end but store (hundreds of) disk images on USB drives or SD cards. But that's not something one can just retrofit to a machine that has the potential to kill a patient should something go wrong.
Not sure about New York. But Seattle has a minimum wage law which does not consider immigration status. So, no lower pay.
But since a good chunk of an employee's compensation is in the form of allocations for health care, disability, child care, union required benefits, etc, companies like to hire young people who, should it appear that their actual cost begins to rise, can just be put back on the boat.
Amazon and Starbucks are probably dreaming about staffing like this.
"Today, unless a copyright holder is attached to those requests (or someone who can make a lot of noise in the press), many companies simply ignore the requests they receive for source code. This frustrates the very thing that the GPL is designed to address."
Allow me to introduce you to ASCAP and MPAA. Be prepared to grab your ankles should you violate some copyright terms.
There are a number of law firms at the ready to step infor their 30% if needed.
I have a radio tuner with an "OFF" indicator light. The bezel surrounding the power button illuminates when plugged in but switched off. Turn the unit on and the light extinguishes.
It does make sense in that it outlines the one button you must push to make the thing go. It is easier to find in the dark (with black buttons and a black faceplate). And once turned on, lots of other panel indicators illuminate to reassure one of the state of the equipment.
Of Amazon's cloud arm, Doniz said: "AWS will help us advance Boeing's people, products, and services by enabling everyone with the latest tools, technology and expertise." Google, meanwhile, is supposed to help the airline "modernize our applications; empower our people with the latest technology, tools and expertise; and continuously innovate with rapid software changes."
Microsoft said it will enable Boeing to unlock value buried in its "vast data estate."
"I've long thought that the UK rules that deterred outdoor exercise during lockdown were a bad idea"
Some of that thinking came from studies of how far the plume of exhaled droplets extends behind a person engaged in various activities. The 2 meter rule is for standing or walking. For running, it's about 10 meters. More for cycling.
On this side of the pond, the closing of state and national parks didn't make sense. Because the extra separation that our great outdoors provides makes up for the virus clouds. And I was a bit miffed when they closed our rifle range for a while. There's nothing better for social distancing than unpacking a .50 cal Barrett and watching everyone else move to benches a few spaces away.
... in a company involved with engineering and drafting, it was common to find little Easter eggs in the drawings. One instance did go over the top though. When drawing very long objects, it is common practice to 'break' the object in some featureless region and to indicate the break with a squiggly line at both ends of the discontinuity. One drawing of a wing spar was found to have a couple of unusual break symbols that, when the drawing was folded to bring the symbols together (similar to the back page of a Mad Magazine), it resulted in an outline of a rather comely wench.
Due to the lack of humor in management (and the risk of a possible harassment suit), the drawing was re-worked and re-released.
Or an Altoids tin.
Only problem with these is that eventually you will have to take your keys out to use your car. And some ner-do-well hiding in your apartment garage with their sniffer grabs the code then. The tins do work well to prevent key fobs lying on your entry hall table from being sniffed through your front door.
"Parallelism, hardware threading, systolic arrays, NUMA, immutibility of records, transactional memory, mailboxes, caching, segmented memory architectures..."
All supported by libraries which can easily be linked into a C executable. Nobody does much more than Hello World with the basic K&R defined C.
How will all of the investment made in creating these libs carry over to Swift/Rust? Even with shims or wrappers, the underlying libs were still written in C. With all of the vulnerabilities that the new languages seek to eradicate.
... living in major metropolitan areas like Coober Pedy. Here in the USA, we have people who still depend on taking their laptop or tablet to Starbucks to borrow the WiFi. And this isn't following a storm. It's SOP. It's not the middle of nowhere either. These are people who can flip their middle finger at Bill Gates' house on their way to that Starbucks.
It was pretty bad during the height of the Covid lockdowns. People who had been using the public library's WiFi were turned away when they were closed. Some thoughtful supermarkets put WiFi hotspots in their parking lots to serve the unconnected. Broadband needs to be 1) regulated as a public utility. And 2), underserved communities need the equivalent of our Rural Electrification Administration to fill in the holes in coverage. No more handing subsidies to incumbent providers who just take them to spend on coke and hookers instead of maintenance and building out.
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