Phone companies will quite frequently attempt to pass off certain charges to the consumer through "fees." For example, the Universal Service Fee is a payment from you that goes directly to the FCC for the Universal Service Fund, the fund that pays for eRate, the government subsidization program that helps fund schools' telecommunication access (POTS, internet, long-distance, equipment to keep it all in order). The same thing is done with 911 access. The government bills the providers, and the providers just pass the bill onto consumers.
When our school switched over from AT&T to a regional long-distance provider, the rep at the regional company gave me a little insight to AT&T's various "fees." Ever take a look at the "FCC Line Charge"? According to AT&T (requires flash, and you'll need to zoom in to read the thing), it is an "FCC-approved flat-rate monthly charge paid by consumers to their Local Telephone Company so that the Local Telephone Company can recover the costs, not recovered in local rates, that are associated with connecting customers to the long distance network." Now don't you love how that works? They can advertise that their phone line only costs $18 a month, then hit you up for another $11 to cover costs that are "not recovered in local rates." And how about the "Carrier Cost Recovery Fee?" AT&T just doesn't want to have to pay their own property taxes, so they pass the cost onto consumers. I was told by the rep that AT&T has been known to pass whatever fees it can to the consumer, whatever can be FCC and state approved. Even approved "expansion fees" can be funneled into paying for new office buildings that "house infrastructure."
Alright, before I begin, I will openly admit to being a Karma whore here, leeching off of a strong thread, but this was the closest discussion I could find that fits with what I want to say. I think I have a valid feature here that I want to see, and since it's late in the day, I hope someone will notice and consider this. That being established...
As a network admin, I have and use IE 6 for ONE REASON: In a heartbeat, I can disable internet access by establishing a localhost proxy using Active Directory on the Win2K server, and *BAM*, the kid looses their internet. Along with heavy restrictions that make installing their own programs next to difficult (disabling the "Internet Options" dialog box for example), plus a general ignorance among the student population regarding what a proxy is, kids haven't circumvented this. And the only reason why this is so easy to do is because Internet Explorer policies are worked directly into AD, it's already built into Win2K / XP / Server, and it's painless to implement.
If I could do the same with Firefox, I would adapt it in a heartbeat. Now, before someone thinks to make mention of setting up a policy that sets the computer's network to use a localhost proxy, recall that Firefox, with the checkmark of a single option box, allows you to buypass Windows' proxy settings. And enabling / disabling a localhost proxy is just one of the many policies I can set with AD. Now, I don't know if it's actually feasible to create AD policies for any software not built into Windows. And for any smart-alec who says that I should just look up the registry setting responsible for saving the proxy settings, I can't disable the "Preferences..." function that allows them to go back into the settings dialog and change it manually. Plus, it's a lot more work for me to do all this registry manhandling when it is so easy to just make an immediate change to a policy in AD.
Or, AT LEAST create registry settings (and document them, and create reg keys that we can automatically download, save, and push with any policy we desire) that lock down almost every function of Firefox imaginable, making it an unchangable web browser...that would at least be a start.
And if that DOES exist, someone please point me in the right direction. I'd sure like to know how to set it up (considering that Microsoft won't be providing IE 7 for Win2K, and I'd love to stick with Win2K and Win2K Server as long as possible...best thing IMO to ever come from Redmond).
you're likely to hear similar complaints about the cost of the textbooks, the rip-off buyout prices at local college bookstores and insidious publishers who keep changing editions every few years just to change the page numbers and kill off the used books market.
I'm a high school teacher who just had a marvelous time over the summer trying to order our next set of pre-calc books for our district. I needed to phone the company to find out the price of the textbooks in order to draft a price quote for the district before they would approve the order. I was trying to find out from the salesperson what the price of the pre-calc books were, using the ISBN from the sample book they had sent us. The problem I was having was that the ISBN of the sample book I had was different from the ISBN of the book that they were selling on the website, and both were different from the ISBN of the textbook that the salesman gave me over the phone. It took another 30 minute call to find out why.
Apparently, the ISBN of the book on the website was the wrong website. The pre-calc book I was searching for was published by Pearson Education, which owns a whole slew of subsidiary publishers, including Prentice Hall, Scott Foresman, Addison Wesley... I found the book I was looking for on Addison Wesley's website, though the book I wanted was apparently on Prentice Hall's website. But here's the kicker...The salesperson from the original inquiry gave me the ISBN for the college bound edition, instead of the High School bound edition. When I asked what the difference was (they were priced the same), she explained that the high school binding is much stronger and is meant to last for a good seven-eight years of abuse, while the college binding is only designed to last for two years before it starts to fall apart. I was surprised, and I asked the salesperson why the college kids get the poorer binding. She explained that the college bookstores (though I'm sure the publishers love this as well) don't profit as well of used book sales, so they want books to have a short lifespan. It's easier when the book is falling apart for them to refuse buyback.
And it makes perfect sense. I remember a whole bunch of my textbooks that would really fall apart in a year's time back in college, and I always wondered why my high school books could take so much more abuse and still come out alright. My prob-stat book in particular was shedding pages faster than a balding man would shed hair. Just another way publishers are trying to screw students in the long run.
But I really feel the need to ask this question, and hope someone out there in/. might work for the TSA or other security company, and/or hardware manufacturing, and might give a good answer to this question.
The parent poster mentioned sneaking C4 in a laptop battery. I was wondering the same thing about a hard drive. When you think about it, both are small, but certainly have enough volume to put explosives inside of the casing that would cause a very significant detonation onboard an airplane. And would screeners really see that on their scanners? I'd imagine that to the lazy eye, it would just be another object like any other inside a laptop. I doubt most screeners would be particular about looking for the platters inside a hard drive, let alone know that a hard drive is a necessary part of a laptop. I'm sure that if you were to hand these explosive laptops to 20 terrorists, at least one would get through, and it only takes one. I've gone on a number of domestic and international flights, and the laptop is a carry-on object. I've never seen any bomb-sniffing dogs sniff my carry-on luggage, so I think the TSA are the only checkpoint for an attack such as this.
Now, I've never seen all of what those modern x-ray scanners are able to detect, so if there's anybody with knowledge on the subject, I'd sure appreciate an explination of whether or not this is feasable.
Oh, and for anybody who wants to try and accuse me of aiding terrorists, I get my information from the six-o'clock news. They give me all these great ideas each and every day on how to cause devistation to America (blow up the Hoover Dam, San Fransisco bridge, Alaska Oil pipeline, the Lincoln tunnel... thank you Dan Rathers). America can't always be 100% secure, and I think most/. readers are intelligent enough to know that when there's a will, there's always going to be a way. Does anybody honestly think we can keep every port of entry secure? If you truly do, do some reading on the Akwesasne reservation.
It appears that EMI has seen that P2P can be a legitimate medium for which to distribute music to consumers, but it still has a lot to learn:
The premium subscription service tier uses Microsoft's Janus DRM technology...for unlimited access to music in the Qtrax network. Subscribers will also have the ability to transfer content to Windows Media enabled portable devices for as long as the subscription stays active.
1) You don't ever own the music. It's being licensed, and as soon as you cancel your subscription, the DRM will stop the music from playing.
2) You can't burn the music to a CD, still the most common method for playing music.
3) You can't play the music on any portable device that doesn't support Windows Media, meaning iPod owners can't transfer the music to their iPods.
EMI doesn't seem to understand that consumers want to take their music with them, not leave it on the computer. The #1 portable music player right now is the CD player, and iPod is #2. You can't have a viable competitor in the market if you cut off the top two music players, parading your DRM agenda. This service won't fly.
Microsoft plans a new release this year and is trying to get Office into more consumers' hands at a cheaper price while persuading businesses to buy higher-priced versions."
Working as a tech coordinator in Minnesota, we can buy Office Pro 2003 licenses for $50 each. I don't know how much businesses can purchase licenses for, so I can't compare that, but the retail Office Pro 2003 runs for $449 for the full version. But Microsoft isn't just targeting schools.
Any family that, well, basically has a kid in school (according to the fine print, even Kindergarten works, all the way through college) in the state of Minnesota can order Microsoft Office Pro 2003 Student and Teacher Edition for $90 (or standard edition for $80). Sure, you just get a CD and a license, but that's all you need. I'm pretty sure Microsoft has this deal with some other states also, but I'm not sure which ones.
So, if you're a kid, you're in college, you're a parent with a kid, or a parent with a college student, you get a discount...that should keep most people covered for another 40 years. Although, I have yet to see a senior citizen discount...
I'm busy applying for some free Windows product licenses for some donated computers to our school. We have the option of putting one of two operating systems on it:
Windows 98 SE
Windows 2000
I find it interesting that even Microsoft doesn't have faith in their own "next version" (Windows ME). Ouch.
...I don't know what Lucas's basis of judgement was on that comment (but then again, who really knows why Lucas makes the decisions that he does...). However, after the move Crash won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and considering that the movie had a huge list of big-name actors, yet only had a budget of $6.5 million dollars, I can see where he's coming from.
Yet, what nobody seems to understand in Hollywood is that what movie go-ers crave is a good storyline. Sure, it's fun to see how much of a world you can create with the marvels of modern technology, and there are plenty of times and plenty of people who are attracted to a movie for the action, adventure, and eye-candy, but what so many producers are forgetting is replay value.
The perfect example that flies in the face of Lucas's comment is the movie Titanic. The budget for that movie in '98 was a whopping $200 million, when nobody ever imagined spending that much on a film before. It stayed #1 at the box office for FOUR MONTHS!!! Why? Because it had replay value.
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum is the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here's a movie that never had a wide distribution and never played in more than 200 theaters at a time during its release, yet holds the record for the most box office revenue ever taken in by a movie with such a limited release, $135 million. Again, the movie has replay value.
Star Wars Ep. 4-6 has a ton of replay value. Star Wars Ep. 1-3, on the other hand, has very little replay value. Huge explosions, big-name actors, and expensive CGI effects make for a strong initial showing, but without a good story, aren't worth watching again.
But the question that really jumps out in my mind to ask is this:
After living in Egypt for a year, the biggest frustration I can recall with computers is how unreliable the power was. Due to the spikes and surges, the school I taught at would normally go through about 5 power supplies a month (for a building with about 200 computers). Any serious business who wants to protect their computer from an unwanted surge has at minimum a voltage regulator, and at maximum a UPS. Our school paid a company in Europe to host their website, as most Egyptian businesses did.
Is there any power infrastructure advancements that are being made to better support the growing rise of computer use in the middle east?
First, the article says that, the compound invented by Paul D. Savage of Brigham Young University appears to hunt down and kill HIV.
Now, doing an actual search on Brigham Young's website turns up 0 hits for "Paul D. Savage". It does, however, turn up quite a few hits for just Paul Savage. In fact, it turns up this dude, a "Paul B. Savage". He seems pretty smart (MS Word document link). Plus, he's gotten recognition for research in T-Cells, important information that could really help figure out how to stop T-Cell destruction by the AIDS virus.
I guess either the press release is really trying to piggy-back on some smart dude, and hide their tracks by swapping a middle initial, or the Salt Lake Tribune just can't get their middle initials straight. Maybe this "Ceragenins" is something new and undiscovered as well, just like "Paul D. Savage". They both return zero hits when you try to search for them.
The TV sitcom "Dinosaurs" was such a wonderful show. It was an excellent satire, paralleling the Dinosaur's "modern" world with our own. As soon as I read this article, I immediately thought of the final episode of this sitcom.
In the final episode, a comet is heading towards the planet, and the "We Say So" corporation devises a way of destroying the comet using "modern" technology, only to find that it has a consequence. Each "solution" cause a larger and larger problem, only to be "fixed" with another "solution", causing an ever-growing problem. I forget the entire sequence of events, but in the final stage, they kill all the plant life on the planet. They figure that to bring the plant life back, they need to make it rain. Rain is formed by clouds. Clouds are formed by erupting volcanos. So, naturally, forcing all the volcanos to erupt will cause clouds to form, causing rain to fall and restore the plant life for all the earth. The episode finishes with the corporation detinating bombs inside volcanos, causing all the volcanos to erupt, blackening the sky, causing the start of the ice age.
Words of wisdom from Dinosaur Earl Sinclair: "It's so easy to take advantage of nature because it's always there, and technology is so bright and shiny and new."
Let the Earth take care of nature. We're so focused on manipulating nature for the survival of every single life on Earth, we lose site of the fact that every now and then, nature has to correct our mistakes to restore its own balance, whether in the form of a plague, a change in the weather patterns, or an ice age.
This isn't the norm. Any company who understands that downtime = $$$ down the crapper knows that investing money in human resource training pays for itself down the road.
You didn't give any detail about how large of a domain is in your hands, and I don't know exactly how much you so far understand or don't understand about Win2K3 administration, but I'll leave that for someone else to post on.
Following this thread, there are three things that you must do in order to succeed in a precarious position such as this:
1) Take a crash course in Win2K3 server, because that's what you're responsible for. Someone might want to start up a thread with recommendations about where to begin.
2) Open up lines of communication between you and the managers. The computer network has become the modern spinal cord of the business workforce, and communication leads to familiarity leads to confidence. In times of storm (i.e. network downtime), your company will have to put their trust in you that they'll make it through.
3) Explain the situation to your managers in a language they understand: the almighty dollar. Tell them the truth. They threw their money in a garbage bin when they trained the wrong person. Failure to invest in proper training for IT staff leads to increased downtime leads to loss of commerce leads to loss of money. Tell them that they will lose money because their investments (e-commerce) right now are not proected (properly trained personnel). It's all about money.
And if nobody listens, I would be very cautious. Find another job that will better support you as you become a better admin, rather than be put in one where, when something serious goes down, you get all the blame. Better to be led away from the fire than to lead someone into it.
...if he can actually prove that he owns the music on the iPod.
A 60-gigabyte video iPod loaded with 11,800 songs, with a starting bid of $799. The iPod alone would cost about $400. 'I don't see how it's different than selling a used CD,' seller Steve Brinn, a Cincinnati pediatrician, wrote in an e-mail to USA TODAY. 'If the music industry asked me not to do it, I just wouldn't do it.'"
The example we get in the article summary has a few conditions to consider. IF the seller actually owned all that music, and has proof of ownership (i.e. receipts), then transfer of sale is perfectly legal, especially since it's sold on a medium (the iPod). (Parallel example: I can order a custom-track CD from a music publisher online, get the CD, then sell the CD later.)
But come on... eleven thousand, eight hundred songs? He would have had to shell out $11,800 for all that music! There's no way that he'd part with it then for $800. In a case like this, it almost seems like the seller is deliberately inflating the value of the merchandise, without himself legally owning any of that music. That's piracy.
Reading the article, we get something even more dubiouly legal, a "condition of sale":
In the listing, the seller says the buyer [of a "brand new" 60-giabyte video iPod loaded with 10,000 songs plus more than 50 movies and TV shows] "must already own all of the music and DVDs.... If not, they must delete them as soon as they receive it in the mail." The item sold for $551 on Monday.
Oh my goodness, where do I even begin? So I can sell someone a gun, say, and then tell them, "If you've ever been convicted of a violent crime, then you must never use this gun," and then I'm off the hook? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. The seller has certain responsibilites that they must abide by for a legal sale. For guns, it's doing a background check. For iPods, it's owning the music that comes on the iPod.
If you own this music, you either a) transfer the music to a computer and delete it from the iPod, then sell the iPod, or b) sell the music with the iPod, including the proof of ownership. Anything else, and you're seriously in danger of getting the RIAA on your ass.
Having a couple of fuel stops, every other one say, that produce E85 would be great and I'd run it.
First, the summary of this article is incorrect about E85. Minnesota is not the only state that offers E85. North and South Dakota, as well as Iowa, offer the alternative fuel.
Second, while I cannot link to any articles to back up my statements, it is only because the Fargo Forum charges for archived news articles. But much of what I write is passed on from an article written in the newspaper about the fuel and its overall cost.
Information about the prevalence of E85:
* E85 is a fuel which is 85% Ethanol, 15% gasoline (hence the name E85). It differs from normal (100%) unleaded fuel, as well as 85% gasoline / 15% ethanol fuel offered in North Dakota and Minnesota (and other places I'm sure, but am not positive about).
* To relate to the prior post in the thread, urban centers all along I-94 between Fargo and Minneapolis stock E85 (and I'm sure many other places as well, but I'm going by regional knowledge here). Fargo's metro area has at least nine stations that I know of that carry the fuel, spread all around the city.
* There's certainly a market for the fuel, with many car lots reporting that consumers are specifically requesting for cars that run the fuel. Many adverts in the paper have specifically included alternative-fuel capabilities as a highlighted feature for cars on their lot.
However, there are a few things that were highlighted in a Fargo Form article about two months ago that are worth mentioning:
* E85 is a subsidized fuel. Byron Dorgan has been pushing bill after bill through Congress supporting subsidies on corn grown for ethanol production as well as for ethanol fuel production in energy bills. Because of this, it is currently selling as cheap as $1.60 right now (about 25% less cost / gallon than gasoline, and is usually consistent like that). The further away from the freeway though, the higher the cost (50 miles away in Detroit Lakes, and it sells for $1.78 / gallon).
* Filling a tank with E85 will lead to lower horsepower and decreased fuel economy. In a local study done by the Fargo Forum with five different vehicles, they noticed anywhere from a 15% to a 25% decrease in miles / gallon. In addition, the article made mention that there is no current known long-term cost for increased maintenance that the fuel may cause.
* Ethanol still is a fuel which produces exhaust. While many will promote that you're only putting back into the air what the corn plants took from it to grow, this is incorrect. In the refinement process for producing ethanol, there is a lot of pollution generated from the refining process, though if I remember correctly, overall, ethanol still produces just slightly less pollution than gasoline.
* The only true advantage that Ethanol has is that it's produced in the United States, so the country does not depend foreign oil. At the same time, nobody has raised issue yet with the possibility that a bad harvest could send E85 prices through the roof.
Though New York may soon sell E85 at a gas station near you, there is currently not to much great reason to switch to it.
To expand on that question...
on
Ask The Mythbusters
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I remember the episode where you were trying to make the Intrepid taxi tip over using a jet engine, but were unable to use a commercial 737 jet due to "safety concerns" with your insurance company.
What is going on behind the scenes that we don't see on camera to keep all your stunts and myth busting as safe as possible? Also, after seeing you turn a hydrolic lift into a catapult (hoisted up on empty shipping cargo crates, no less), how can a commercial 737 jet be considered unsafe?
The new initiative will allow vendors to get their software "certified" as easy to remove and not containing spyware.
That sounds like a great idea. Let's certify software to make sure that it doesn't do anything that it shouldn't. And of course, everybody's going to want to get this certification, right? Because, every piece of software that we install on our system, we've had a chance to make sure that it's "certified", right?
It makes about as much sense as certify everybody who promises not to commit murder. Yea, that will stop the killing.
Since when did we ever stop to consider the long-term effects of our actions? It appears like the human motto has always been, "Out of sight, out of mind" when it comes to waste that needs to be disposed. For example, each week, I put all my trash in a bag and place it on the curb. Then, there's no more trash. Who's to tell me that trash I just disposed of will take thousands or tens of thousands of years to decompose? What trash? I don't see any trash.
We pay people to distance us from the filth we generate. It gives us peace of mind to be rid of our rubbish. And so we continue to find ways of not eliminating pollution, but rather just finding methods of distancing ourselves from it. The garbage man takes my trash. The nuclear power plant stores its waste in a concrete bunker. While we're at it, let's just suck all the CO2 we pumped into the air we breathe and pump it down 3000 feet into the ocean. Or, if that's too expensive, let's just package it and release it in Mongolia. I mean, I don't live there, so as far as I can tell, I won't have to worry about it anymore....
Ever stop to wonder for a second how our world might change if EVERYBODY was required to have their own landfill in their own backyard?
If this deal ends up to be anything like Steve Jobs' bout with the music industry, the movie industry will price their movie downloads as much as it costs to rent one at the video store ($3 to $4) for a single download. May as well spend the money to go rent the DVD for the extra features...AND THEN RIP IT TO MY COMPUTER ANYWAYS!...
Oops...I said the loud part soft and the soft part loud...ugh.
God creates man. God creates flu. Flu kills man. God creates new man. New man creates flu....
And what do you think comes next?
Seriously, this is really borderline sadistic when scientists recreate a virus responsible for killing 50 million people to "better understand the threat of a future worldwide epidemic from bird flu." Why don't we at the same time resurrect Hitler so that we can "better understand the threat of a future worldwide sadistic totalitarian dictator/terrorist"? Hmm? How would that sound to the public?
But in particular, the most important one to consider is your first. The key statement that Symmantec states that you must read into is the number of vulnerabilities "disclosed".
With Mozilla being open source, anybody can examine the inner workings of the browser to find a vulnerability. All it takes is someone who cares about making their browser more secure to "disclose" a bug.
With IE, the only way to find a vulnerability is to poke and prod IE from the outside, rather than examining the code directly. And no vulnerabilities exist until Microsoft says they exist. Just because we can't see what's behind the curtain is no valid means of declaring IE the more secure browser.
Also, has anybody taken a tally yet about how many vulnerabilities IE has now had to fix over its 5+ years of existance at version 6?
The whole thing, once laminated in plastic, is just a millimeter thick, and 6cm by 3cm in size...0.2 millilitres of urine the battery will provide around 1.5 volts, with a maximum power output of 1.5 milli-Watts
So, let's get some facts...Jeeves says that normal humans feel the need to urinate when they hold 150 - 200mL of urine in their bladder. 200mL sounds decent for this math.
200mL / 0.2mL per battery = 1000 batteries that can be charged on a normal fill of urine.
1000 batteries * 1.5 mW per battery = 1.5 W 1000 batteries * 1.5 V per battery = 1500 V 1.5W / 1500V =.001 Amps = 1mA
So, my own piss only has as much power as a spark of static electricity. Sorry folks, but it's going to take more than one run to the toilet to power your laptop.
This is supposed to be an apology? That's like rubbing salt into the wound before you put a band-aid on it.
Just read what they have to say...
Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts [from Google].
Translation: Google handed us the knife. Then, we stabbed Google. Who's committed the sin? The knife.
Google UK has told us that we'll have to talk to Google US to find out whether we too have fallen under the writ of excommunication. As we share all information with our American brethren it is hard to see how it could be any other way, but we humbly await news of our fate.
Translation: since Google now has as much power as the Pope, we can only ask for its blessing, though this is difficult, considering that the Vatican (aka Mountain View, CA) is so far away.
Google UK's inability to explain the local implications of the decision could be read as the results of an angry, irrational action dictated in isolation from the top of a large and disparate organization.
We asked our church here in the UK whether we have committed sin. They don't know, because the Vatican (aka Mountain View, CA) defines sin for them. Perhaps the Church is flawed.
And forgive us too for any effect Google's righteous wrath will have on our coverage of issues affecting the company.
Translation: We have just committed blasphemy against the Church, we know that we shall incur the wrath of God! Run away, less you be turned to a pillar of salt!
It's wrong. Don't do it. Google says so.
Translation: In the end, don't mess with the Pope, because we all need his blessing to get to Heaven.
we're still using technology that's just a slight spin on the old dot matrix printers.
A "slight spin"? Not even close. Dot matrix printers were a percussion printer. You had an ink-soaked ribbon that flew over the head of the printer, with the head consisting of a number of hammers (called pins) arranged in a matrix that would impress the ink (like typewriters) upon the page. Different pins fired depending on the letter that was to be printed.
Inkjets, which used to be called "bubblejets" (better description of what they do), would use a heat element on the printer head to actually boil the ink so that a single bubble of ink would seap out through a tiny crack in the printer head, creating a spec of ink on the page. Modern printer heads consist of about 300 - 500 of these little cracks for ink to seap out.
The only thing similar between inkjets and dot-matrix printers is that both create a letter (or piece of an image) through dots, rather than solid color.
What is Microsoft's current strategy on working with Linux?
a) avoiding (completely ignoring its existance) b) accommodating (passively letting Linux have its way) c) competing (assertively fighting Linux) d) collaborating (assertively working with Linux so that both can succeed) e) compromising (give and take...somewhere in between)
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Phone companies will quite frequently attempt to pass off certain charges to the consumer through "fees." For example, the Universal Service Fee is a payment from you that goes directly to the FCC for the Universal Service Fund, the fund that pays for eRate, the government subsidization program that helps fund schools' telecommunication access (POTS, internet, long-distance, equipment to keep it all in order). The same thing is done with 911 access. The government bills the providers, and the providers just pass the bill onto consumers.
When our school switched over from AT&T to a regional long-distance provider, the rep at the regional company gave me a little insight to AT&T's various "fees." Ever take a look at the "FCC Line Charge"? According to AT&T (requires flash, and you'll need to zoom in to read the thing), it is an "FCC-approved flat-rate monthly charge paid by consumers to their Local Telephone Company so that the Local Telephone Company can recover the costs, not recovered in local rates, that are associated with connecting customers to the long distance network." Now don't you love how that works? They can advertise that their phone line only costs $18 a month, then hit you up for another $11 to cover costs that are "not recovered in local rates." And how about the "Carrier Cost Recovery Fee?" AT&T just doesn't want to have to pay their own property taxes, so they pass the cost onto consumers. I was told by the rep that AT&T has been known to pass whatever fees it can to the consumer, whatever can be FCC and state approved. Even approved "expansion fees" can be funneled into paying for new office buildings that "house infrastructure."
Alright, before I begin, I will openly admit to being a Karma whore here, leeching off of a strong thread, but this was the closest discussion I could find that fits with what I want to say. I think I have a valid feature here that I want to see, and since it's late in the day, I hope someone will notice and consider this. That being established...
As a network admin, I have and use IE 6 for ONE REASON: In a heartbeat, I can disable internet access by establishing a localhost proxy using Active Directory on the Win2K server, and *BAM*, the kid looses their internet. Along with heavy restrictions that make installing their own programs next to difficult (disabling the "Internet Options" dialog box for example), plus a general ignorance among the student population regarding what a proxy is, kids haven't circumvented this. And the only reason why this is so easy to do is because Internet Explorer policies are worked directly into AD, it's already built into Win2K / XP / Server, and it's painless to implement.
If I could do the same with Firefox, I would adapt it in a heartbeat. Now, before someone thinks to make mention of setting up a policy that sets the computer's network to use a localhost proxy, recall that Firefox, with the checkmark of a single option box, allows you to buypass Windows' proxy settings. And enabling / disabling a localhost proxy is just one of the many policies I can set with AD. Now, I don't know if it's actually feasible to create AD policies for any software not built into Windows. And for any smart-alec who says that I should just look up the registry setting responsible for saving the proxy settings, I can't disable the "Preferences..." function that allows them to go back into the settings dialog and change it manually. Plus, it's a lot more work for me to do all this registry manhandling when it is so easy to just make an immediate change to a policy in AD.
Or, AT LEAST create registry settings (and document them, and create reg keys that we can automatically download, save, and push with any policy we desire) that lock down almost every function of Firefox imaginable, making it an unchangable web browser...that would at least be a start.
And if that DOES exist, someone please point me in the right direction. I'd sure like to know how to set it up (considering that Microsoft won't be providing IE 7 for Win2K, and I'd love to stick with Win2K and Win2K Server as long as possible...best thing IMO to ever come from Redmond).
you're likely to hear similar complaints about the cost of the textbooks, the rip-off buyout prices at local college bookstores and insidious publishers who keep changing editions every few years just to change the page numbers and kill off the used books market.
I'm a high school teacher who just had a marvelous time over the summer trying to order our next set of pre-calc books for our district. I needed to phone the company to find out the price of the textbooks in order to draft a price quote for the district before they would approve the order. I was trying to find out from the salesperson what the price of the pre-calc books were, using the ISBN from the sample book they had sent us. The problem I was having was that the ISBN of the sample book I had was different from the ISBN of the book that they were selling on the website, and both were different from the ISBN of the textbook that the salesman gave me over the phone. It took another 30 minute call to find out why.
Apparently, the ISBN of the book on the website was the wrong website. The pre-calc book I was searching for was published by Pearson Education, which owns a whole slew of subsidiary publishers, including Prentice Hall, Scott Foresman, Addison Wesley... I found the book I was looking for on Addison Wesley's website, though the book I wanted was apparently on Prentice Hall's website. But here's the kicker...The salesperson from the original inquiry gave me the ISBN for the college bound edition, instead of the High School bound edition. When I asked what the difference was (they were priced the same), she explained that the high school binding is much stronger and is meant to last for a good seven-eight years of abuse, while the college binding is only designed to last for two years before it starts to fall apart. I was surprised, and I asked the salesperson why the college kids get the poorer binding. She explained that the college bookstores (though I'm sure the publishers love this as well) don't profit as well of used book sales, so they want books to have a short lifespan. It's easier when the book is falling apart for them to refuse buyback.
And it makes perfect sense. I remember a whole bunch of my textbooks that would really fall apart in a year's time back in college, and I always wondered why my high school books could take so much more abuse and still come out alright. My prob-stat book in particular was shedding pages faster than a balding man would shed hair. Just another way publishers are trying to screw students in the long run.
But I really feel the need to ask this question, and hope someone out there in /. might work for the TSA or other security company, and/or hardware manufacturing, and might give a good answer to this question.
... thank you Dan Rathers). America can't always be 100% secure, and I think most /. readers are intelligent enough to know that when there's a will, there's always going to be a way. Does anybody honestly think we can keep every port of entry secure? If you truly do, do some reading on the Akwesasne reservation.
The parent poster mentioned sneaking C4 in a laptop battery. I was wondering the same thing about a hard drive. When you think about it, both are small, but certainly have enough volume to put explosives inside of the casing that would cause a very significant detonation onboard an airplane. And would screeners really see that on their scanners? I'd imagine that to the lazy eye, it would just be another object like any other inside a laptop. I doubt most screeners would be particular about looking for the platters inside a hard drive, let alone know that a hard drive is a necessary part of a laptop. I'm sure that if you were to hand these explosive laptops to 20 terrorists, at least one would get through, and it only takes one. I've gone on a number of domestic and international flights, and the laptop is a carry-on object. I've never seen any bomb-sniffing dogs sniff my carry-on luggage, so I think the TSA are the only checkpoint for an attack such as this.
Now, I've never seen all of what those modern x-ray scanners are able to detect, so if there's anybody with knowledge on the subject, I'd sure appreciate an explination of whether or not this is feasable.
Oh, and for anybody who wants to try and accuse me of aiding terrorists, I get my information from the six-o'clock news. They give me all these great ideas each and every day on how to cause devistation to America (blow up the Hoover Dam, San Fransisco bridge, Alaska Oil pipeline, the Lincoln tunnel
It appears that EMI has seen that P2P can be a legitimate medium for which to distribute music to consumers, but it still has a lot to learn:
The premium subscription service tier uses Microsoft's Janus DRM technology...for unlimited access to music in the Qtrax network. Subscribers will also have the ability to transfer content to Windows Media enabled portable devices for as long as the subscription stays active.
1) You don't ever own the music. It's being licensed, and as soon as you cancel your subscription, the DRM will stop the music from playing.
2) You can't burn the music to a CD, still the most common method for playing music.
3) You can't play the music on any portable device that doesn't support Windows Media, meaning iPod owners can't transfer the music to their iPods.
EMI doesn't seem to understand that consumers want to take their music with them, not leave it on the computer. The #1 portable music player right now is the CD player, and iPod is #2. You can't have a viable competitor in the market if you cut off the top two music players, parading your DRM agenda. This service won't fly.
Microsoft plans a new release this year and is trying to get Office into more consumers' hands at a cheaper price while persuading businesses to buy higher-priced versions."
Working as a tech coordinator in Minnesota, we can buy Office Pro 2003 licenses for $50 each. I don't know how much businesses can purchase licenses for, so I can't compare that, but the retail Office Pro 2003 runs for $449 for the full version. But Microsoft isn't just targeting schools.
Any family that, well, basically has a kid in school (according to the fine print, even Kindergarten works, all the way through college) in the state of Minnesota can order Microsoft Office Pro 2003 Student and Teacher Edition for $90 (or standard edition for $80). Sure, you just get a CD and a license, but that's all you need. I'm pretty sure Microsoft has this deal with some other states also, but I'm not sure which ones.
So, if you're a kid, you're in college, you're a parent with a kid, or a parent with a college student, you get a discount...that should keep most people covered for another 40 years. Although, I have yet to see a senior citizen discount...
What's next? The "Condom Crusader?" ...
Oh. On second notice, I guess "Condom Crusader" came first.
I find it interesting that even Microsoft doesn't have faith in their own "next version" (Windows ME). Ouch.
...I don't know what Lucas's basis of judgement was on that comment (but then again, who really knows why Lucas makes the decisions that he does...). However, after the move Crash won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and considering that the movie had a huge list of big-name actors, yet only had a budget of $6.5 million dollars, I can see where he's coming from.
Yet, what nobody seems to understand in Hollywood is that what movie go-ers crave is a good storyline. Sure, it's fun to see how much of a world you can create with the marvels of modern technology, and there are plenty of times and plenty of people who are attracted to a movie for the action, adventure, and eye-candy, but what so many producers are forgetting is replay value.
The perfect example that flies in the face of Lucas's comment is the movie Titanic. The budget for that movie in '98 was a whopping $200 million, when nobody ever imagined spending that much on a film before. It stayed #1 at the box office for FOUR MONTHS!!! Why? Because it had replay value.
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum is the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here's a movie that never had a wide distribution and never played in more than 200 theaters at a time during its release, yet holds the record for the most box office revenue ever taken in by a movie with such a limited release, $135 million. Again, the movie has replay value.
Star Wars Ep. 4-6 has a ton of replay value. Star Wars Ep. 1-3, on the other hand, has very little replay value. Huge explosions, big-name actors, and expensive CGI effects make for a strong initial showing, but without a good story, aren't worth watching again.
* Facts and figures taken from Wikipedia.
But the question that really jumps out in my mind to ask is this:
After living in Egypt for a year, the biggest frustration I can recall with computers is how unreliable the power was. Due to the spikes and surges, the school I taught at would normally go through about 5 power supplies a month (for a building with about 200 computers). Any serious business who wants to protect their computer from an unwanted surge has at minimum a voltage regulator, and at maximum a UPS. Our school paid a company in Europe to host their website, as most Egyptian businesses did.
Is there any power infrastructure advancements that are being made to better support the growing rise of computer use in the middle east?
There are a few things to ponder...
First, the article says that, the compound invented by Paul D. Savage of Brigham Young University appears to hunt down and kill HIV.
Now, doing an actual search on Brigham Young's website turns up 0 hits for "Paul D. Savage". It does, however, turn up quite a few hits for just Paul Savage. In fact, it turns up this dude, a "Paul B. Savage". He seems pretty smart (MS Word document link). Plus, he's gotten recognition for research in T-Cells, important information that could really help figure out how to stop T-Cell destruction by the AIDS virus.
I guess either the press release is really trying to piggy-back on some smart dude, and hide their tracks by swapping a middle initial, or the Salt Lake Tribune just can't get their middle initials straight. Maybe this "Ceragenins" is something new and undiscovered as well, just like "Paul D. Savage". They both return zero hits when you try to search for them.
The TV sitcom "Dinosaurs" was such a wonderful show. It was an excellent satire, paralleling the Dinosaur's "modern" world with our own. As soon as I read this article, I immediately thought of the final episode of this sitcom.
In the final episode, a comet is heading towards the planet, and the "We Say So" corporation devises a way of destroying the comet using "modern" technology, only to find that it has a consequence. Each "solution" cause a larger and larger problem, only to be "fixed" with another "solution", causing an ever-growing problem. I forget the entire sequence of events, but in the final stage, they kill all the plant life on the planet. They figure that to bring the plant life back, they need to make it rain. Rain is formed by clouds. Clouds are formed by erupting volcanos. So, naturally, forcing all the volcanos to erupt will cause clouds to form, causing rain to fall and restore the plant life for all the earth. The episode finishes with the corporation detinating bombs inside volcanos, causing all the volcanos to erupt, blackening the sky, causing the start of the ice age.
Words of wisdom from Dinosaur Earl Sinclair: "It's so easy to take advantage of nature because it's always there, and technology is so bright and shiny and new."
Let the Earth take care of nature. We're so focused on manipulating nature for the survival of every single life on Earth, we lose site of the fact that every now and then, nature has to correct our mistakes to restore its own balance, whether in the form of a plague, a change in the weather patterns, or an ice age.
This isn't the norm. Any company who understands that downtime = $$$ down the crapper knows that investing money in human resource training pays for itself down the road.
You didn't give any detail about how large of a domain is in your hands, and I don't know exactly how much you so far understand or don't understand about Win2K3 administration, but I'll leave that for someone else to post on.
Following this thread, there are three things that you must do in order to succeed in a precarious position such as this:
1) Take a crash course in Win2K3 server, because that's what you're responsible for. Someone might want to start up a thread with recommendations about where to begin.
2) Open up lines of communication between you and the managers. The computer network has become the modern spinal cord of the business workforce, and communication leads to familiarity leads to confidence. In times of storm (i.e. network downtime), your company will have to put their trust in you that they'll make it through.
3) Explain the situation to your managers in a language they understand: the almighty dollar. Tell them the truth. They threw their money in a garbage bin when they trained the wrong person. Failure to invest in proper training for IT staff leads to increased downtime leads to loss of commerce leads to loss of money. Tell them that they will lose money because their investments (e-commerce) right now are not proected (properly trained personnel). It's all about money.
And if nobody listens, I would be very cautious. Find another job that will better support you as you become a better admin, rather than be put in one where, when something serious goes down, you get all the blame. Better to be led away from the fire than to lead someone into it.
...if he can actually prove that he owns the music on the iPod.
... If not, they must delete them as soon as they receive it in the mail." The item sold for $551 on Monday.
A 60-gigabyte video iPod loaded with 11,800 songs, with a starting bid of $799. The iPod alone would cost about $400. 'I don't see how it's different than selling a used CD,' seller Steve Brinn, a Cincinnati pediatrician, wrote in an e-mail to USA TODAY. 'If the music industry asked me not to do it, I just wouldn't do it.'"
The example we get in the article summary has a few conditions to consider. IF the seller actually owned all that music, and has proof of ownership (i.e. receipts), then transfer of sale is perfectly legal, especially since it's sold on a medium (the iPod). (Parallel example: I can order a custom-track CD from a music publisher online, get the CD, then sell the CD later.)
But come on... eleven thousand, eight hundred songs? He would have had to shell out $11,800 for all that music! There's no way that he'd part with it then for $800. In a case like this, it almost seems like the seller is deliberately inflating the value of the merchandise, without himself legally owning any of that music. That's piracy.
Reading the article, we get something even more dubiouly legal, a "condition of sale":
In the listing, the seller says the buyer [of a "brand new" 60-giabyte video iPod loaded with 10,000 songs plus more than 50 movies and TV shows] "must already own all of the music and DVDs.
Oh my goodness, where do I even begin? So I can sell someone a gun, say, and then tell them, "If you've ever been convicted of a violent crime, then you must never use this gun," and then I'm off the hook? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. The seller has certain responsibilites that they must abide by for a legal sale. For guns, it's doing a background check. For iPods, it's owning the music that comes on the iPod.
If you own this music, you either a) transfer the music to a computer and delete it from the iPod, then sell the iPod, or b) sell the music with the iPod, including the proof of ownership. Anything else, and you're seriously in danger of getting the RIAA on your ass.
Having a couple of fuel stops, every other one say, that produce E85 would be great and I'd run it.
First, the summary of this article is incorrect about E85. Minnesota is not the only state that offers E85. North and South Dakota, as well as Iowa, offer the alternative fuel.
Second, while I cannot link to any articles to back up my statements, it is only because the Fargo Forum charges for archived news articles. But much of what I write is passed on from an article written in the newspaper about the fuel and its overall cost.
Information about the prevalence of E85:
* E85 is a fuel which is 85% Ethanol, 15% gasoline (hence the name E85). It differs from normal (100%) unleaded fuel, as well as 85% gasoline / 15% ethanol fuel offered in North Dakota and Minnesota (and other places I'm sure, but am not positive about).
* To relate to the prior post in the thread, urban centers all along I-94 between Fargo and Minneapolis stock E85 (and I'm sure many other places as well, but I'm going by regional knowledge here). Fargo's metro area has at least nine stations that I know of that carry the fuel, spread all around the city.
* There's certainly a market for the fuel, with many car lots reporting that consumers are specifically requesting for cars that run the fuel. Many adverts in the paper have specifically included alternative-fuel capabilities as a highlighted feature for cars on their lot.
However, there are a few things that were highlighted in a Fargo Form article about two months ago that are worth mentioning:
* E85 is a subsidized fuel. Byron Dorgan has been pushing bill after bill through Congress supporting subsidies on corn grown for ethanol production as well as for ethanol fuel production in energy bills. Because of this, it is currently selling as cheap as $1.60 right now (about 25% less cost / gallon than gasoline, and is usually consistent like that). The further away from the freeway though, the higher the cost (50 miles away in Detroit Lakes, and it sells for $1.78 / gallon).
* Filling a tank with E85 will lead to lower horsepower and decreased fuel economy. In a local study done by the Fargo Forum with five different vehicles, they noticed anywhere from a 15% to a 25% decrease in miles / gallon. In addition, the article made mention that there is no current known long-term cost for increased maintenance that the fuel may cause.
* Ethanol still is a fuel which produces exhaust. While many will promote that you're only putting back into the air what the corn plants took from it to grow, this is incorrect. In the refinement process for producing ethanol, there is a lot of pollution generated from the refining process, though if I remember correctly, overall, ethanol still produces just slightly less pollution than gasoline.
* The only true advantage that Ethanol has is that it's produced in the United States, so the country does not depend foreign oil. At the same time, nobody has raised issue yet with the possibility that a bad harvest could send E85 prices through the roof.
Though New York may soon sell E85 at a gas station near you, there is currently not to much great reason to switch to it.
I remember the episode where you were trying to make the Intrepid taxi tip over using a jet engine, but were unable to use a commercial 737 jet due to "safety concerns" with your insurance company.
What is going on behind the scenes that we don't see on camera to keep all your stunts and myth busting as safe as possible? Also, after seeing you turn a hydrolic lift into a catapult (hoisted up on empty shipping cargo crates, no less), how can a commercial 737 jet be considered unsafe?
The new initiative will allow vendors to get their software "certified" as easy to remove and not containing spyware.
That sounds like a great idea. Let's certify software to make sure that it doesn't do anything that it shouldn't. And of course, everybody's going to want to get this certification, right? Because, every piece of software that we install on our system, we've had a chance to make sure that it's "certified", right?
It makes about as much sense as certify everybody who promises not to commit murder. Yea, that will stop the killing.
Since when did we ever stop to consider the long-term effects of our actions? It appears like the human motto has always been, "Out of sight, out of mind" when it comes to waste that needs to be disposed. For example, each week, I put all my trash in a bag and place it on the curb. Then, there's no more trash. Who's to tell me that trash I just disposed of will take thousands or tens of thousands of years to decompose? What trash? I don't see any trash.
...
We pay people to distance us from the filth we generate. It gives us peace of mind to be rid of our rubbish. And so we continue to find ways of not eliminating pollution, but rather just finding methods of distancing ourselves from it. The garbage man takes my trash. The nuclear power plant stores its waste in a concrete bunker. While we're at it, let's just suck all the CO2 we pumped into the air we breathe and pump it down 3000 feet into the ocean. Or, if that's too expensive, let's just package it and release it in Mongolia. I mean, I don't live there, so as far as I can tell, I won't have to worry about it anymore.
Ever stop to wonder for a second how our world might change if EVERYBODY was required to have their own landfill in their own backyard?
If this deal ends up to be anything like Steve Jobs' bout with the music industry, the movie industry will price their movie downloads as much as it costs to rent one at the video store ($3 to $4) for a single download. May as well spend the money to go rent the DVD for the extra features...AND THEN RIP IT TO MY COMPUTER ANYWAYS! ...
Oops...I said the loud part soft and the soft part loud...ugh.
Let's see here...
...
God creates man.
God creates flu.
Flu kills man.
God creates new man.
New man creates flu.
And what do you think comes next?
Seriously, this is really borderline sadistic when scientists recreate a virus responsible for killing 50 million people to "better understand the threat of a future worldwide epidemic from bird flu." Why don't we at the same time resurrect Hitler so that we can "better understand the threat of a future worldwide sadistic totalitarian dictator/terrorist"? Hmm? How would that sound to the public?
But in particular, the most important one to consider is your first. The key statement that Symmantec states that you must read into is the number of vulnerabilities "disclosed".
With Mozilla being open source, anybody can examine the inner workings of the browser to find a vulnerability. All it takes is someone who cares about making their browser more secure to "disclose" a bug.
With IE, the only way to find a vulnerability is to poke and prod IE from the outside, rather than examining the code directly. And no vulnerabilities exist until Microsoft says they exist. Just because we can't see what's behind the curtain is no valid means of declaring IE the more secure browser.
Also, has anybody taken a tally yet about how many vulnerabilities IE has now had to fix over its 5+ years of existance at version 6?
The whole thing, once laminated in plastic, is just a millimeter thick, and 6cm by 3cm in size...0.2 millilitres of urine the battery will provide around 1.5 volts, with a maximum power output of 1.5 milli-Watts
.001 Amps = 1mA
So, let's get some facts...Jeeves says that normal humans feel the need to urinate when they hold 150 - 200mL of urine in their bladder. 200mL sounds decent for this math.
200mL / 0.2mL per battery = 1000 batteries that can be charged on a normal fill of urine.
1000 batteries * 1.5 mW per battery = 1.5 W
1000 batteries * 1.5 V per battery = 1500 V
1.5W / 1500V =
So, my own piss only has as much power as a spark of static electricity. Sorry folks, but it's going to take more than one run to the toilet to power your laptop.
This is supposed to be an apology? That's like rubbing salt into the wound before you put a band-aid on it.
Just read what they have to say...
Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts [from Google].
Translation: Google handed us the knife. Then, we stabbed Google. Who's committed the sin? The knife.
Google UK has told us that we'll have to talk to Google US to find out whether we too have fallen under the writ of excommunication. As we share all information with our American brethren it is hard to see how it could be any other way, but we humbly await news of our fate.
Translation: since Google now has as much power as the Pope, we can only ask for its blessing, though this is difficult, considering that the Vatican (aka Mountain View, CA) is so far away.
Google UK's inability to explain the local implications of the decision could be read as the results of an angry, irrational action dictated in isolation from the top of a large and disparate organization.
We asked our church here in the UK whether we have committed sin. They don't know, because the Vatican (aka Mountain View, CA) defines sin for them. Perhaps the Church is flawed.
And forgive us too for any effect Google's righteous wrath will have on our coverage of issues affecting the company.
Translation: We have just committed blasphemy against the Church, we know that we shall incur the wrath of God! Run away, less you be turned to a pillar of salt!
It's wrong. Don't do it. Google says so.
Translation: In the end, don't mess with the Pope, because we all need his blessing to get to Heaven.
we're still using technology that's just a slight spin on the old dot matrix printers.
A "slight spin"? Not even close. Dot matrix printers were a percussion printer. You had an ink-soaked ribbon that flew over the head of the printer, with the head consisting of a number of hammers (called pins) arranged in a matrix that would impress the ink (like typewriters) upon the page. Different pins fired depending on the letter that was to be printed.
Inkjets, which used to be called "bubblejets" (better description of what they do), would use a heat element on the printer head to actually boil the ink so that a single bubble of ink would seap out through a tiny crack in the printer head, creating a spec of ink on the page. Modern printer heads consist of about 300 - 500 of these little cracks for ink to seap out.
The only thing similar between inkjets and dot-matrix printers is that both create a letter (or piece of an image) through dots, rather than solid color.
Let's put it in more business-like terms:
What is Microsoft's current strategy on working with Linux?
a) avoiding (completely ignoring its existance)
b) accommodating (passively letting Linux have its way)
c) competing (assertively fighting Linux)
d) collaborating (assertively working with Linux so that both can succeed)
e) compromising (give and take...somewhere in between)