As a young man, I was flirting with becoming a dedicated coin collector and I was already an avid photographer. The Smithsonian had a position available for just such a person. The position required studying their collection, documenting it both in words and photos, and acting as a resource person for all things numismatic. Even the educational requirements weren't too high which is understandable since many/most/nearly all top-drawer numismatists are largely self-educated.
The catch? The job paid, IIRC, about USD$15K per year. Living in DC, that would have meant camping out under a bridge somewhere.
My point? I imagine that many of the same forces would be at work when it comes to a position as a computer historian. Such a job would be fascinating but the market value of such services would likely be low. The people who would employ you would be doing it as a service to the hobby population. As a self-employed person, you might be able to deal in collectible computers, if an when such a market ever develops. (And it's out there, actually. There are people paying premium dollars for rebuilt Tandy 102s and the like. But it's certainly not yet a huge market.) I think the best feedback so far is from folks suggesting academic pursuits.
Of course, if old computers suddenly start to get fashionably "collectible," all bets are off.
Well, OK. I'll grant that in theory. But y'know something? Most people that speak ill of NTSC standards have never seen the full potential of the standard. Most TV sets are so horribly adjusted, right from the factory, that the pictures are flat awful. (In fact, most TVs don't even have user-accessible controls adequate to properly display an NTSC-compliant picture. The really good set-up guys use expensive testing equipment and usually have to screw around with things inside the chassis.) Much of this is done so that they are viewable in over-lit rooms. But if you've ever had the experience of seeing a PROPERLY adjusted, high-quality TV in a dark room, you would be VERY pleasantly surprised by the quality of the picture. It ain't real life, but it's astoundingly better than what most people are accustomed to.
Poke around at www.theperfectvision.com if you're actually interested in getting the best possible picture on your TV.
>>>Here's an example: Here in Texas, it's a state law that if you LOOK into someone's car, you can be arrested for attempted burglary.
>>I seriously doubt that...States can pass whatever laws they want. Thank goodness the Supreme court can discard ridiculous laws (if indeed Texas has such a law).
That's a good observation and a reasonable extrapolation from common sense. Allow me to pontificate a bit and, hopefully, illustrate.
We had a flap in the newspapers here recently about a district attorney (in Brazoria county) who refused to prosecute some questionable cases. She caught hell from people who said "But you MUST prosecute! It's the law!"
One of the most telling commentaries on the whole fiasco was a statement from a local organization, The Public Official Oversight Forum, that read, in part: "Her critics do not understand that 85 percent of the 2000 or so laws passed by our Legislature every session do not pass constitutional muster. No officer of this state has any kind of ridiculous 'duty' to enforce an unconstitiutional law." (For the whole story, check the last few issues at www.houstonpress.com.)
If something like this can make the mainstream press, please trust me when I say that we have such a law. It was even highlighted a few years ago when a "trap" car (I forget what they put in the front seat to make it so interesting to passers-by) was set up at a local beach and used by officers to establish probable cause for detaining people.
One last note - Last time I checked (and I admit to being totally out of touch with state politics for many years), here in Texas we have a part-time legislature that meets for 140 days every 2 years. It's always been a political cliche that the people would be better served if they met for 2 days every 140 years...
>>IMHO, if the employer is going to put you through any sort of training, they should give you a raise reflective of your new abilities.
Good point. In my case, the training made me eligible for a higher position and more money when combined with additional experience. Now that I have the year of additional experience they wanted, they did hit me with a promotion and hefty raise just a month ago. But I had to stick it out for a year at my old salary till I proved that the training had stuck and I could actually perform above my old level.
My employer spent over US$20K training me last year. They knew that I could have walked out the door right after I got the training, but there was no contract or other such nonsense. They understand that the work they will get from me will be worth far more than they spent, even if I only stick around for 6 months. Any employer who doesn't realize that is sufficiently clueless that I would question the wisdom of continuing to work there.
Having said that, I can still see the point of not wanting people to leave immediately after expensive training. But if you're in an extremely bleeding edge position where raw training, without experience, makes you that much more employable, then that training is going to be outdated in six months, anyway. (Of course, your skills won't be outdated in six months because you will have continued to practice them and learn new things. Natch.) So what's the employer to do? How about asking for a *reasonable* training contract? I could see a commitment to continue working for 6 months. I could even see making you liable for the cost of the training during that six months on a pro-rated basis. But requiring the entire cost back if you leave in 11 months is just too draconian for my tastes.
>>I feel port-scanning is similar to looking at a house. Looking is OK as long as you don't try to break-in.
It depends. Here's an example: Here in Texas, it's a state law that if you LOOK into someone's car, you can be arrested for attempted burglary. That's right - if you are walking through a parking lot, see something interesting on the front seat of a parked car, and stop to look at it, you can be arrested for attempted burglary. The theory is that even looking into the car is none of your business and to do so means that you have actually begun the process of committing a burglary.
So there are lots of people who think, in plenty of contexts other than just network administration, that engaging in actions that are a necessary precursor to a crime is the equivalent of beginning to commit that crime. The question, of course, is where do you draw the line.
"There should be no fair use. Quoting is just a form of piracy."
"He was reading a magazine about guns. Convict him of murder! Quick! Before he gets a chance to actually do it!"
There are even people who take this to the most ridiculous extreme:
"Of course all men are rapists. Why else would they be born with the tools to do the crime?"
Now, port scanning is in one of those grey areas. It's not bad in and of itself, but it is often a precursor to bad things. So people tend to mix it up with the acts that often follow. Don't blame them. That sort of fuzzy thinking happens all the time, as the examples above illustrate.
This is my response to the original question of "Why do people get so upset?" Frankly, I haven't a clue as to how to deal with them. They have a point. You have a point. And if you try to decide who's right (since both sides have valid positions), you wind up having to sacrifice reason and truth to make a decision.
Good luck. This is the sort of conundrum that makes life interesting.
I hate to suggest a change of tack,
but digital photography is one of those areas that changes so fast that
a better/faster/cheaper way to do something may well pop up right after
you implement an expensive solution to a problem.
Case in point - the new Sony Mavica that writes directly to mini-CDs.
There's a page here that will give
you some basic info. ZD has a puff piece
here that may also be of use.
Frankly, this looks like a much better, much simpler, much cheaper, and, optionally,
higher resolution way to meet your needs. Even if the thing isn't available yet, it'd be cheaper and easier
to fly to Japan and get one than to do the sort of thing you're contemplating. You could even afford to get two so you'll always have a backup.
I had the benefit of an employer who sent me to a half-dozen of the SCO authorized courses. Luckily, I went during the off-season for that particular training center and had several classes to myself as well as a very sharp and flexible instructor who completely customized the content to me when I was the only student. (I've been, literally, to hundreds of courses in my day. The instructor that I had, Peter Lauda, was one of the best I've ever experienced. Just an incredibly knowledgeable guy with a talent for helping folks understand. He'd probably be too casual a guy for many folks, but I found him spot-on. And anyway, even if he'd been lousy, his knowledge of where to go in the evening to watch the Harleys go by and get a drink would have been enough to make him memorable.:) That excellent experience provided a great foundation.
That being said, I also learned a great deal from things I did on my own. First, I ordered both OpenServer Release 5 and Unixware from SCO for minimal cost from this page. Then I installed both several times on machines at home, making lots of mistakes and learning from every one of them. Eventually, I got boxes talking to each other at the house. During all this time, I used the manuals that came with the software and SCO's extensive online support.
Frankly, I think I could have done my job just from what I learned online and at home, but the classroom experience sure made it easier.
>>I'm not aware of any sites still running either of the SCO unix implementations in anger.
If you ever get a visit from a Revenue Officer with the Internal Revenue Service, check out the laptop that s/he is using. It's 100% SCO OSR 5.0.4. Suffice it to say that behind the Treasury Dept firewall, all the servers set up to directly support those folks are also OSR 5.0.4. Thus we have many thousand *very* serious users with all their *totally* mission-critical apps running under SCO Unix.
It's old. It's not fancy. But it works. And with big clients like that, SCO definitely brings value to this deal.
I think the poster knows what's right - quit AND blow the whistle. The problem with such a decision, of course, is all the other things you have to give up - cool coworkers and a steady paycheck being just two.
If it's any help, though, the poster should consider an additional factor. Corporate culture flows from the top down. There may be just a relatively few unethical folks at the top (who think of themselves not as unethical but as savvy businessmen, but that's another discussion), but they establish the work climate for all their subordinates. If they are unethical, the subtle message that fudging here and there is OK will become the standard operating procedure for the company. This will show up in small, perhaps tolerable ways on a steady basis. Maybe you can stand that. But this sort of attitude at the top eventually bites your butt big-time. These people are the sort who will raid your retirement fund and then brag to shareholders about how they "leveraged a previously dormant asset." These are the kinds of people who will eventually fire you for some trumped-up crap if you have the audacity to show excessive integrity.
Quit. Tell them why you're quitting. And make sure your desk is already cleared of all personal items prior to informing them of your intention to leave. (Do I need to mention that any evidence you might need in the future when these jerks sue you should also already have been duplicated, copied to disk, etc., and hidden in your home long before you make a single noise to anyone about leaving? Didn't think so...)
Never saw a recession? Never saw a war!
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 1
I know this is heretical. But here goes.
Fire destroys the forest. Yet the forest grows back, lusher and more dense than before.
A new open-source program will be criticized, hacked on, screwed-up, and reviled for the thousand bugs in it. Yet, in the process, truly useful software comes into being.
You do a bench press with more weight than ever before. Your muscles are stressed, damaged and wind up sore. Yet, in a couple of days, you are stronger than ever before.
It is stress that defines limits and helps move them. It is the stress of being tested that makes anything grow, improve, and achieve a greater percentage of its potential. Without resistance, there is no forward motion.
Conversely, no system - biological, social, political, or any other - can survive the atrophy that a lack of stress causes. Parasites and diseases, opportunistic creatures that they are, move in and accelerate the downward slide of any system that is not constantly moving forward and being challenged.
And a society or culture that is untested cannot truly understand what about it is weak, evil, negative and unnecessary because those bugs will not have been revealed during the rigors of testing.
This is what we're seeing now. We have a bunch of tech-savvy folks who think their knowledge of arcane languages is somehow admirable. Because their knowledge possesses some value in the marketplace, they delude themselves into believing *they* have value.
It ain't so.
These "cyberselfish" folks aren't any more valuable to the world than the least-educated homeless person in America. They are, in fact, just lucky to be born in a certain place at a certain time. Nothing more.
And they shouldn't delude themselves into thinking anything else.
Don't agree? Think you're hot stuff? Then answer a few simple questions...
What ideas and principles are so important to you that you would unhesitatingly die for them?
What person is so loved by you that you would unhesitatingly die so that they might live?
Do these questions seem unreasonably extreme to you? If they do, you don't know crap. Was your first instinct to answer "Well, I'd find a way to not have to die"? If so, you don't know crap.
It was just a few short decades ago that men (and yes, in that day and time, it was mostly men, even though I use the term properly to apply to both sexes) left their families and their comfortable lives in droves so that they might die on the sands of foreign beaches, spilling their blood so that a great evil could be beaten back. And it was in the aftermath of that world war that men reached to the stars.
And yet, wishing as all parents do to spare their offspring from excessive stress, that generation gave birth to the first super-selfish generation that gave birth to the generation that doesn't even have enough gumption to view selfishness as an ideal. Instead, they just view it as one more component of the way the world works, a mechanism that functions against a background of little more than apathy toward their fellow man. Give 'em their Napster and their dotcom money and they trick themselves into thinking they're happy.
This situation will not last. I don't know where the break will come, but it will. Political sharks already smell the blood in the water and are circling for the kill. Mistakes with certain nasty virii currently contained in human-run research labs are all too foreseeable. The bomb is now small enough to fit into a basketball or maybe smaller. All these and a thousand other things hold the potential to stress all of society to and beyond the breaking point.
The human race will again be tested on a large scale. It's inevitable. Good and bad people alike will die. The selfish tech gurus who live in their own little world will be forced to look outside themselves, will be forced to decide what they are willing to die for. And those who refuse to decide will die anyway, though for no purpose.
The big decisions in life aren't "What language should I learn next so that I can make more money?" The big decisions are "What will I do that secures life and liberty for my fellow man?" If you aren't asking yourself those questions, if you haven't ever thought of them, then you're just a waste of skin, no matter how smart or rich you are. If you haven't thought of them, you are not ready for the tests, the stress that will inevitably come.
All of this is not to say that the ability to manipulate data isn't power. It is, of a sort. But when that power is wielded without guiding principles, it serves no ultimate purpose and is, in the end, meaningless.
Don't be meaningless, people. If you know tech stuff, that's fine. But you also need to know who you are and what you believe in. When you know those things, you can use the tech stuff to make the world a better place.
That's the legacy you should be pondering, not anything that's affected by estate taxes.
>>>>IE: a department store, cannot pick out a specific individuals and claim they are trespassing while allowing the rest of the public free access.
Well, yeah. Maybe.
Err....actually....no.
The golden rule applies here. He who has the gold makes the rules. Want a good example? Try looking a little *too* out of the ordinary in The Galleria in Houston, Texas. To protect their reputation as the most elite mall in the area, The Galleria owners long ago took a few cases to court and managed to establish a precedent that it is private property. The shoppers are there as invited guests, at the pleasure of the management only. And anyone can be ordered out at any time, just like you could order a guest out of your house for essentially any reason.
Put your hair up in a flame-pink mohawk, put on some studded leathers, show off some tattoos, and effect a menacing scowl. Then try to shop at The Galleria. You'll find yourself followed until enough backup can be rounded up. Then you'll be escorted out. Make more than a peep of protest and you'll find yourself waking up in the back of a squad car, wondering how you got all those bruises.
And no judge is going to give you a scintilla of sympathy.
So the judge in this case was wrong? So what? The law says what judges say it says. The Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. And when those rulings are not well thought out, like this one, we all suffer.
I'm trying to remember who it was back in my BBSing days who did this. I *think* it was Galacticomm with their WorldGroup product that allowed you to enforce quoting ratios automatically. The administrator specified a minimum allowed ratio of new content to quoted content. No posting would be accepted that didn't provide the specified minimum of original content. I always thought it was a great feature.
Surely someone has come up with something similar for lists. At least I hope so. Some of the lists I subscribe to could *really* use it.:-)
I don't like this state of affairs any more than anyone else. But I do feel the need to point out that there *is* a legitimate reason for the methodology the feds have chosen.
Can you say "Chain of Custody?"
Evidence in criminal investigations is precious stuff. Plenty of cases have been lost by prosecutors when defense attorneys pointed out that the evidence being used against their client *might* not be kosher. Documents could have been altered. Drugs switched. DNA evidence botched. Or any of a zillion other scenarios.
Because of this, law enforcement agencies try their best to enforce an airtight chain of custody on any evidence they acquire. You work in the lab and need to re-test those drugs? The property clerk has to sign off that he let the drugs out of his hands and into the hands of an authorized person. The lab tech has to sign their life away that they now possess the evidence and will handle it in accordance with the law. And there better not be even ten minutes when that evidence is out of the control of a sworn law enforcement officer! That's all it takes to get a case thrown out.
In the case of wiretaps, what's the FBI to do? If they know that evidence may come into existence in the future (which is why they set up the wiretap in the first place), they must make sure that they establish custody of the evidence as soon as possible and never let it out of their hands. Serving a court order on an ISP that says "Hey, would you guys please keep track of this person's email for us? We'll be back to pick it up later." just won't cut it. Any defense attorney worth his salt will point out that email (or whatever) logs *could* have been altered by the ISP employees. In such a scenario, then, the law enforcement officers in the case *cannot* certify that such alteration did not occur because they were not in custody of the evidence at all times.
Defendant goes free. Slam dunk for the defense.
So what's the FBI to do? If 'net taps are legal, how on earth can they be carried out without breaking the chain of custody of the evidence?
Any genius here wanna answer that one?
Personally, I think we need to just make sure that the data gathered is rendered meaningless through ubiquitous encryption. But till that happens and law enforcement agencies give up on the whole concept of 'net taps, I don't see what else they can do *but* try to install boxes that only they control.
This is odd. Why does the article refer primarily to "screen names"? Prices, for example, are quotes on a "per screen name" basis. There's also "aliases," "email addresses," "handles," "nick(name)s" and more. AFAIK, the term "screen name" is almost exclusively an AOL phenomenon. Do these guys just hang out in AOL chat rooms and scour the AOL home pages?
Point Two:
Are these folks even old enough to remember Kibo?
I don't know about anyone else, but I began to assume many years ago that many postings come from corporate moles. After all, if Kibo can do what he did for his own amusement, how trivial would it be for a company that, say, makes canoes to send someone into rec.* to spend a little time, make some friends, then start posting positive stuff about their products? It would be exceedingly trivial.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that it's been going on for years.
In Japan, it's legal to jam cell phones and there's a good market for jamming boxes. They tend to work within a given radius, depending on their power. Unfortunately, I can't find a good link about this in Japan, but they get a passing mention at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ chronicle/archive/1999/12/17/ED59334.DTL&t ype=news
There are other places where jamming happens. Check out http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980422S00 06 for an article on an Israeli company making jamming devices.
Finally, maybe someone can dig up an URL for paint that blocks cell transmissions. I saw the stuff discussed on a television magazine show a while back. The manufacturer indicated it worked pretty well most of the time. In a restaurant with lots of glass, it would at least interfere with cell phones, making the reception bad enough for most people to give up on the call. In a windowless environment like a theatre, where the cell phones inside would be entirely enclosed in a box of the paint, he indicated that reception was nearly impossible. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to anything about this product.
Personally, I wish my favorite restaurants would use both technologies. Or employ bouncers to throw rude cell users out on their butts the instant their phones start ringing.
Hell, I heard one of the damn things go off at a funeral a few months ago. Right there at the graveside! The dude with the phone grabbed it and walked away from the area, but still...
>>If this is true, how could any court treat it as such to be broken up and sold to pay creditors Isn't this whole thing more about what's in an original privacy agreement than what a court orders?
A bankruptcy court judge can do anything s/he damn well pleases. More importantly, though, even if their sense of fairness is fully functional (which isn't always a good bet), they aren't going to protect anyone's privacy unless they know about the issue. And that's where things get weird.
If nowbankrupt.com wants to sell off their info, they have to declare it as an asset in filings with the court. In those filings, they have to reveal if anyone has a claim on those assets. Those named parties (claimants) are supposed to receive notice of the bankruptcy action and be afforded an opportunity to file with the court to protect their interests.
Obviously, none of this has happened. The nowbankrupt.coms that are selling this info are clearly telling the court that the assets (iow, the info) is wholly owned by them without any encumbrances.
Is nowbankrupt.com lying when they make this declaration to the court? I don't know. It depends on the agreements that nowbankrupt.com had with folks back in the day. But even if you think you have an agreement with nowbankrupt.com that comprises an encumbrance on your data, the court can't recognize it unless the court is told about it. And since nowbankrupt.com didn't list you as a creditor/claimant/interested party, you didn't even get notification of the bankruptcy action. You never even knew you needed to hire an attorney to file with the court to protect your interests!
These questions can't be settled unless someone: 1. Happens to find out that a.com they've given info to has gone bankrupt, 2. Happens to find out that their info is going to be sold, 3. Believes they have a claim on that info, 4. Gets pissed, 5. Has money, 6. Hires a lawyer and files with the court, and 7. Manages to accomplish all this before the bankruptcy action is concluded. It does little good to find out a year after the fact.
The kicker? For every dotcom that goes under, go back to #1 and start over. (This last is the reason that, much as it pains me to say it, government regulation is needed here.)
No, IANAL, but I've sure been involved in way too many bankruptcies.
Everyone's Internet at http://www.ev1.net/dsl/ allowed servers as of a couple of months ago. At that time, their FAQ specifically addressed the issue and said that servers WERE allowed. I'm not so sure now, though. They've changed their FAQ, making it far shorter and less detailed. It no longer mentions personal servers.
Of course the analog shapes the digital! The silly talk occasionally bandied about concerning the death of universities in favor of some digital alternative illustrates this perfectly.
How so? I learned as a youngster that universities will always be with us. Growing up in an age of (to paraphrase Austin Powers) sex, drugs, and a consequence-free environment gives me a more basic view of the social role of college. And there's no way that role can be supplanted by anything online.
Let me make the point another way. When I was a senior in high school, there was a drama teacher who would counsel students who were sharp enough for college but considering not going because they seemed to have some sort of short-term employment opportunities that were drawing them. If the guidance counselor failed to persuade them to go to college, this drama teacher would call them aside for "the talk." "The talk" went, roughly: "Look, dumbass, college is four years of unlimited sex and alcohol paid for by your parents. Are you really stupid enough to NOT go?"
Every single student he counseled, IIRC, decided to go to college.
Now, show me the online university that can match that sales pitch!
I reiterate: The analog shapes, controls, and provides the sole justification for the existence of the digital.
The Internal Revenue Service runs an all-SCO Unix OSR 5.0.4 network for field collection officers. Everything, from the laptops to the servers, is 100% text-based. There's no X running anywhere; the users see only menus generated by shell scripts. The system is fast, stable, reliable and very easy to administer.
The Revenue Officers who use the system have all gone through the same phases. Phase One: What the hell are you doing giving us this outdated, ugly technology? Phase Two: OK, if I have to use it I will, but I won't like it and it probably won't work, anyway. How can any computer without a mouse be any good? Phase Three: Hey - this thing works OK! Phase Four: Try to take away my system and I'll kill you!!!
Now the powers-that-be have taken a short break from their continual bowing and praying to Redmond for just long enough to require that all officers must be equipped with laptops running WinNT. (The servers are being left untouched for now.) The chosen method to port our dozens of applications is Interix. Prototyping starts late this year and production rollout is scheduled for Spring, 2001. There are literally billions of dollars at risk if this thing screws up.
My point? If the same question is posted a year from now, I'll be able to give one whompin' good example of how this stuff works in the real world.
Personally, I view the changeover with some trepidation. As an SA, I get a slower, less reliable OS for my users and more network traffic. My ability to do desktop administration (which I try to help out with) goes out the window. The only upside is that the execs in Washington get to brag about how they are creating a homogeneous environment that should lead to more consistent administration procedures.
I hope I turn out to be wrong and everything winds up being peachy-keen. But for now, I'm not looking forward to this.
>>But Ebay violating their own EULA is an important blow against consumer rights...
Well, yeah, but it's also par for the course. Remember that Ebay stomped all over gun sellers, capriciously changing their EULA to make it all seem all right.
Removing auctions on whatever pretense holds sway at the moment is business as usual for them.
I am continually amazed at how people overlook the simple fact that sales tax is the duty of the consumer. Online purchases are not tax free. You simply owe the tax to the state in which you reside and received the merchandise. It's your obligation to report the tax due and pay it. And while enforcement may be fraught with practical problems and you may have never heard of a state that pursued an individual for sales tax, be assured that it does happen with some frequency.
The most notable cases to hit the news were from several years ago and came out of Florida. It wasn't uncommon for retirees to move to Florida with a side trip to High Point NC and environs. (That area, fyi, is the center of the furniture manufacturing universe.) They would pick out and pay for an entire houseful of new furniture to go with their new lives and pay no tax since the delivery was going to go to their new digs in Florida. The Florida Dept of Revenue eventually got wise and starting stopping delivery trucks coming into the state and checking their contents. When they found a big shipment going to someone, they would bill the Florida resident for the sales tax.
The same thing can happen anywhere. I'm surprised that the state tax auditors from Texas don't call up the state tax auditors from whatever state Gateway is from and make an offer like: "Hey, you guys audit Gateway. We'll audit Dell. Then we'll swap workpapers. That way, we can hit the streets and collect all the sales tax on systems shipped in from out of state."
Look for something like this to happen soon if it hasn't already.
Actually, no. The tags, called EZ Tags, issued by the Harris County Toll Road Authority, don't have bar codes to be read at the toll plaza.
When I removed and replaced by defective tag, it came apart because the glue affixing it to the windshield is mighty powerful stuff. Inside, I saw one small circuit board and one coin-shaped battery. The tag is some sort of low-powered radio transmitter. Now that I have a properly functioning tag, the toll plaza never fails to pick me up at 70mph.
Here's a little story about technological line-killing for you.
I hate lines. I love the toll roads around Houston but the lines are often onerous, so I've got one of those tags affixed to my windshield that lets me go through toll plazas in the "posted at 45mph, just keep in under 80" line. Everything's hunky-dory, right?
Wrong.
I got a letter from the county district attorney the other day. It seems I owe USD$1225 in unpaid fees and tolls for going through the toll plazas without paying. WTF?
It took a lengthy, painful investigation to find out what happened. Essentially, my windshield tag only worked occasionally, so a picture was snapped of me each time I went through the toll plaza. The license plate on my car was then compared to people with toll road accounts. If my number was found, they'd just charge my account for the toll. My number wasn't found, though, because it had been incorrectly keyed into their database. I was sent exactly one uncertified letter with an invoice for the unpaid tolls. (I either didn't get it or just mistook it for my regular monthly statement and didn't pay attention.)
Now this has been referred to the county attorney for collection. The toll road people admit that it's their fault that my account wasn't charged. They admit that it was their faulty equipment that caused the problem. But since it's been referred to the lawyers, "There's nothing we can do." The county attorney just says "Pay up or lose your car and get a criminal conviction the next time we catch you on a toll road."
I've got three days to pay. I have no choice but to pay. If I choose to fight it, I'll wind up arrested on the side of the road before the matter can be resolved and, because of where I work, I'll lose my job.
Yeah - technology is an unalloyed joy that will save our souls while shortening lines everywhere.
Uh-huh.
If you believe that, I've got a bridge you might be interested in...
Slashdot Mirror
This might prove illustrative.
As a young man, I was flirting with becoming a dedicated coin collector and I was already an avid photographer. The Smithsonian had a position available for just such a person. The position required studying their collection, documenting it both in words and photos, and acting as a resource person for all things numismatic. Even the educational requirements weren't too high which is understandable since many/most/nearly all top-drawer numismatists are largely self-educated.
The catch? The job paid, IIRC, about USD$15K per year. Living in DC, that would have meant camping out under a bridge somewhere.
My point? I imagine that many of the same forces would be at work when it comes to a position as a computer historian. Such a job would be fascinating but the market value of such services would likely be low. The people who would employ you would be doing it as a service to the hobby population. As a self-employed person, you might be able to deal in collectible computers, if an when such a market ever develops. (And it's out there, actually. There are people paying premium dollars for rebuilt Tandy 102s and the like. But it's certainly not yet a huge market.) I think the best feedback so far is from folks suggesting academic pursuits.
Of course, if old computers suddenly start to get fashionably "collectible," all bets are off.
:-)
The New Internet Computer seems to have what you're looking for.
>>>VHS/NTSC quality is truly awful
Well, OK. I'll grant that in theory. But y'know something? Most people that speak ill of NTSC standards have never seen the full potential of the standard. Most TV sets are so horribly adjusted, right from the factory, that the pictures are flat awful. (In fact, most TVs don't even have user-accessible controls adequate to properly display an NTSC-compliant picture. The really good set-up guys use expensive testing equipment and usually have to screw around with things inside the chassis.) Much of this is done so that they are viewable in over-lit rooms. But if you've ever had the experience of seeing a PROPERLY adjusted, high-quality TV in a dark room, you would be VERY pleasantly surprised by the quality of the picture. It ain't real life, but it's astoundingly better than what most people are accustomed to.
Poke around at www.theperfectvision.com if you're actually interested in getting the best possible picture on your TV.
>>>Here's an example: Here in Texas, it's a state law that if you LOOK into someone's car, you can be arrested for attempted burglary.
>>I seriously doubt that...States can pass whatever laws they want. Thank goodness the Supreme court can discard ridiculous laws (if indeed Texas has such a law).
That's a good observation and a reasonable extrapolation from common sense. Allow me to pontificate a bit and, hopefully, illustrate.
We had a flap in the newspapers here recently about a district attorney (in Brazoria county) who refused to prosecute some questionable cases. She caught hell from people who said "But you MUST prosecute! It's the law!"
One of the most telling commentaries on the whole fiasco was a statement from a local organization, The Public Official Oversight Forum, that read, in part: "Her critics do not understand that 85 percent of the 2000 or so laws passed by our Legislature every session do not pass constitutional muster. No officer of this state has any kind of ridiculous 'duty' to enforce an unconstitiutional law." (For the whole story, check the last few issues at www.houstonpress.com.)
If something like this can make the mainstream press, please trust me when I say that we have such a law. It was even highlighted a few years ago when a "trap" car (I forget what they put in the front seat to make it so interesting to passers-by) was set up at a local beach and used by officers to establish probable cause for detaining people.
One last note - Last time I checked (and I admit to being totally out of touch with state politics for many years), here in Texas we have a part-time legislature that meets for 140 days every 2 years. It's always been a political cliche that the people would be better served if they met for 2 days every 140 years...
>>IMHO, if the employer is going to put you through any sort of training, they should give you a raise reflective of your new abilities.
Good point. In my case, the training made me eligible for a higher position and more money when combined with additional experience. Now that I have the year of additional experience they wanted, they did hit me with a promotion and hefty raise just a month ago. But I had to stick it out for a year at my old salary till I proved that the training had stuck and I could actually perform above my old level.
My employer spent over US$20K training me last year. They knew that I could have walked out the door right after I got the training, but there was no contract or other such nonsense. They understand that the work they will get from me will be worth far more than they spent, even if I only stick around for 6 months. Any employer who doesn't realize that is sufficiently clueless that I would question the wisdom of continuing to work there.
Having said that, I can still see the point of not wanting people to leave immediately after expensive training. But if you're in an extremely bleeding edge position where raw training, without experience, makes you that much more employable, then that training is going to be outdated in six months, anyway. (Of course, your skills won't be outdated in six months because you will have continued to practice them and learn new things. Natch.) So what's the employer to do? How about asking for a *reasonable* training contract? I could see a commitment to continue working for 6 months. I could even see making you liable for the cost of the training during that six months on a pro-rated basis. But requiring the entire cost back if you leave in 11 months is just too draconian for my tastes.
>>I feel port-scanning is similar to looking at a house. Looking is OK as long as you don't try to break-in.
It depends. Here's an example: Here in Texas, it's a state law that if you LOOK into someone's car, you can be arrested for attempted burglary. That's right - if you are walking through a parking lot, see something interesting on the front seat of a parked car, and stop to look at it, you can be arrested for attempted burglary. The theory is that even looking into the car is none of your business and to do so means that you have actually begun the process of committing a burglary.
So there are lots of people who think, in plenty of contexts other than just network administration, that engaging in actions that are a necessary precursor to a crime is the equivalent of beginning to commit that crime. The question, of course, is where do you draw the line.
"There should be no fair use. Quoting is just a form of piracy."
"He was reading a magazine about guns. Convict him of murder! Quick! Before he gets a chance to actually do it!"
There are even people who take this to the most ridiculous extreme:
"Of course all men are rapists. Why else would they be born with the tools to do the crime?"
Now, port scanning is in one of those grey areas. It's not bad in and of itself, but it is often a precursor to bad things. So people tend to mix it up with the acts that often follow. Don't blame them. That sort of fuzzy thinking happens all the time, as the examples above illustrate.
This is my response to the original question of "Why do people get so upset?" Frankly, I haven't a clue as to how to deal with them. They have a point. You have a point. And if you try to decide who's right (since both sides have valid positions), you wind up having to sacrifice reason and truth to make a decision.
Good luck. This is the sort of conundrum that makes life interesting.
I hate to suggest a change of tack, but digital photography is one of those areas that changes so fast that a better/faster/cheaper way to do something may well pop up right after you implement an expensive solution to a problem.
Case in point - the new Sony Mavica that writes directly to mini-CDs. There's a page here that will give you some basic info. ZD has a puff piece here that may also be of use.
Frankly, this looks like a much better, much simpler, much cheaper, and, optionally, higher resolution way to meet your needs. Even if the thing isn't available yet, it'd be cheaper and easier to fly to Japan and get one than to do the sort of thing you're contemplating. You could even afford to get two so you'll always have a backup.
I had the benefit of an employer who sent me to a half-dozen of the SCO authorized courses. Luckily, I went during the off-season for that particular training center and had several classes to myself as well as a very sharp and flexible instructor who completely customized the content to me when I was the only student. (I've been, literally, to hundreds of courses in my day. The instructor that I had, Peter Lauda, was one of the best I've ever experienced. Just an incredibly knowledgeable guy with a talent for helping folks understand. He'd probably be too casual a guy for many folks, but I found him spot-on. And anyway, even if he'd been lousy, his knowledge of where to go in the evening to watch the Harleys go by and get a drink would have been enough to make him memorable. :) That excellent experience provided a great foundation.
That being said, I also learned a great deal from things I did on my own. First, I ordered both OpenServer Release 5 and Unixware from SCO for minimal cost from this page. Then I installed both several times on machines at home, making lots of mistakes and learning from every one of them. Eventually, I got boxes talking to each other at the house. During all this time, I used the manuals that came with the software and SCO's extensive online support.
Frankly, I think I could have done my job just from what I learned online and at home, but the classroom experience sure made it easier.
>>I'm not aware of any sites still running either of the SCO unix implementations in anger.
If you ever get a visit from a Revenue Officer with the Internal Revenue Service, check out the laptop that s/he is using. It's 100% SCO OSR 5.0.4. Suffice it to say that behind the Treasury Dept firewall, all the servers set up to directly support those folks are also OSR 5.0.4. Thus we have many thousand *very* serious users with all their *totally* mission-critical apps running under SCO Unix.
It's old. It's not fancy. But it works. And with big clients like that, SCO definitely brings value to this deal.
I think the poster knows what's right - quit AND blow the whistle. The problem with such a decision, of course, is all the other things you have to give up - cool coworkers and a steady paycheck being just two.
If it's any help, though, the poster should consider an additional factor. Corporate culture flows from the top down. There may be just a relatively few unethical folks at the top (who think of themselves not as unethical but as savvy businessmen, but that's another discussion), but they establish the work climate for all their subordinates. If they are unethical, the subtle message that fudging here and there is OK will become the standard operating procedure for the company. This will show up in small, perhaps tolerable ways on a steady basis. Maybe you can stand that. But this sort of attitude at the top eventually bites your butt big-time. These people are the sort who will raid your retirement fund and then brag to shareholders about how they "leveraged a previously dormant asset." These are the kinds of people who will eventually fire you for some trumped-up crap if you have the audacity to show excessive integrity.
Quit. Tell them why you're quitting. And make sure your desk is already cleared of all personal items prior to informing them of your intention to leave. (Do I need to mention that any evidence you might need in the future when these jerks sue you should also already have been duplicated, copied to disk, etc., and hidden in your home long before you make a single noise to anyone about leaving? Didn't think so...)
I know this is heretical. But here goes.
Fire destroys the forest. Yet the forest grows back, lusher and more dense than before.
A new open-source program will be criticized, hacked on, screwed-up, and reviled for the thousand bugs in it. Yet, in the process, truly useful software comes into being.
You do a bench press with more weight than ever before. Your muscles are stressed, damaged and wind up sore. Yet, in a couple of days, you are stronger than ever before.
It is stress that defines limits and helps move them. It is the stress of being tested that makes anything grow, improve, and achieve a greater percentage of its potential. Without resistance, there is no forward motion.
Conversely, no system - biological, social, political, or any other - can survive the atrophy that a lack of stress causes. Parasites and diseases, opportunistic creatures that they are, move in and accelerate the downward slide of any system that is not constantly moving forward and being challenged.
And a society or culture that is untested cannot truly understand what about it is weak, evil, negative and unnecessary because those bugs will not have been revealed during the rigors of testing.
This is what we're seeing now. We have a bunch of tech-savvy folks who think their knowledge of arcane languages is somehow admirable. Because their knowledge possesses some value in the marketplace, they delude themselves into believing *they* have value.
It ain't so.
These "cyberselfish" folks aren't any more valuable to the world than the least-educated homeless person in America. They are, in fact, just lucky to be born in a certain place at a certain time. Nothing more.
And they shouldn't delude themselves into thinking anything else.
Don't agree? Think you're hot stuff? Then answer a few simple questions...
What ideas and principles are so important to you that you would unhesitatingly die for them?
What person is so loved by you that you would unhesitatingly die so that they might live?
Do these questions seem unreasonably extreme to you? If they do, you don't know crap. Was your first instinct to answer "Well, I'd find a way to not have to die"? If so, you don't know crap.
It was just a few short decades ago that men (and yes, in that day and time, it was mostly men, even though I use the term properly to apply to both sexes) left their families and their comfortable lives in droves so that they might die on the sands of foreign beaches, spilling their blood so that a great evil could be beaten back. And it was in the aftermath of that world war that men reached to the stars.
And yet, wishing as all parents do to spare their offspring from excessive stress, that generation gave birth to the first super-selfish generation that gave birth to the generation that doesn't even have enough gumption to view selfishness as an ideal. Instead, they just view it as one more component of the way the world works, a mechanism that functions against a background of little more than apathy toward their fellow man. Give 'em their Napster and their dotcom money and they trick themselves into thinking they're happy.
This situation will not last. I don't know where the break will come, but it will. Political sharks already smell the blood in the water and are circling for the kill. Mistakes with certain nasty virii currently contained in human-run research labs are all too foreseeable. The bomb is now small enough to fit into a basketball or maybe smaller. All these and a thousand other things hold the potential to stress all of society to and beyond the breaking point.
The human race will again be tested on a large scale. It's inevitable. Good and bad people alike will die. The selfish tech gurus who live in their own little world will be forced to look outside themselves, will be forced to decide what they are willing to die for. And those who refuse to decide will die anyway, though for no purpose.
The big decisions in life aren't "What language should I learn next so that I can make more money?" The big decisions are "What will I do that secures life and liberty for my fellow man?" If you aren't asking yourself those questions, if you haven't ever thought of them, then you're just a waste of skin, no matter how smart or rich you are. If you haven't thought of them, you are not ready for the tests, the stress that will inevitably come.
All of this is not to say that the ability to manipulate data isn't power. It is, of a sort. But when that power is wielded without guiding principles, it serves no ultimate purpose and is, in the end, meaningless.
Don't be meaningless, people. If you know tech stuff, that's fine. But you also need to know who you are and what you believe in. When you know those things, you can use the tech stuff to make the world a better place.
That's the legacy you should be pondering, not anything that's affected by estate taxes.
>>>>IE: a department store, cannot pick out a specific individuals and claim they are trespassing while allowing the rest of the public free access.
Well, yeah. Maybe.
Err....actually....no.
The golden rule applies here. He who has the gold makes the rules. Want a good example? Try looking a little *too* out of the ordinary in The Galleria in Houston, Texas. To protect their reputation as the most elite mall in the area, The Galleria owners long ago took a few cases to court and managed to establish a precedent that it is private property. The shoppers are there as invited guests, at the pleasure of the management only. And anyone can be ordered out at any time, just like you could order a guest out of your house for essentially any reason.
Put your hair up in a flame-pink mohawk, put on some studded leathers, show off some tattoos, and effect a menacing scowl. Then try to shop at The Galleria. You'll find yourself followed until enough backup can be rounded up. Then you'll be escorted out. Make more than a peep of protest and you'll find yourself waking up in the back of a squad car, wondering how you got all those bruises.
And no judge is going to give you a scintilla of sympathy.
So the judge in this case was wrong? So what? The law says what judges say it says. The Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. And when those rulings are not well thought out, like this one, we all suffer.
I'm trying to remember who it was back in my BBSing days who did this. I *think* it was Galacticomm with their WorldGroup product that allowed you to enforce quoting ratios automatically. The administrator specified a minimum allowed ratio of new content to quoted content. No posting would be accepted that didn't provide the specified minimum of original content. I always thought it was a great feature.
:-)
Surely someone has come up with something similar for lists. At least I hope so. Some of the lists I subscribe to could *really* use it.
I don't like this state of affairs any more than anyone else. But I do feel the need to point out that there *is* a legitimate reason for the methodology the feds have chosen.
Can you say "Chain of Custody?"
Evidence in criminal investigations is precious stuff. Plenty of cases have been lost by prosecutors when defense attorneys pointed out that the evidence being used against their client *might* not be kosher. Documents could have been altered. Drugs switched. DNA evidence botched. Or any of a zillion other scenarios.
Because of this, law enforcement agencies try their best to enforce an airtight chain of custody on any evidence they acquire. You work in the lab and need to re-test those drugs? The property clerk has to sign off that he let the drugs out of his hands and into the hands of an authorized person. The lab tech has to sign their life away that they now possess the evidence and will handle it in accordance with the law. And there better not be even ten minutes when that evidence is out of the control of a sworn law enforcement officer! That's all it takes to get a case thrown out.
In the case of wiretaps, what's the FBI to do? If they know that evidence may come into existence in the future (which is why they set up the wiretap in the first place), they must make sure that they establish custody of the evidence as soon as possible and never let it out of their hands. Serving a court order on an ISP that says "Hey, would you guys please keep track of this person's email for us? We'll be back to pick it up later." just won't cut it. Any defense attorney worth his salt will point out that email (or whatever) logs *could* have been altered by the ISP employees. In such a scenario, then, the law enforcement officers in the case *cannot* certify that such alteration did not occur because they were not in custody of the evidence at all times.
Defendant goes free. Slam dunk for the defense.
So what's the FBI to do? If 'net taps are legal, how on earth can they be carried out without breaking the chain of custody of the evidence?
Any genius here wanna answer that one?
Personally, I think we need to just make sure that the data gathered is rendered meaningless through ubiquitous encryption. But till that happens and law enforcement agencies give up on the whole concept of 'net taps, I don't see what else they can do *but* try to install boxes that only they control.
Point One:
This is odd. Why does the article refer primarily to "screen names"? Prices, for example, are quotes on a "per screen name" basis. There's also "aliases," "email addresses," "handles," "nick(name)s" and more. AFAIK, the term "screen name" is almost exclusively an AOL phenomenon. Do these guys just hang out in AOL chat rooms and scour the AOL home pages?
Point Two:
Are these folks even old enough to remember Kibo?
I don't know about anyone else, but I began to assume many years ago that many postings come from corporate moles. After all, if Kibo can do what he did for his own amusement, how trivial would it be for a company that, say, makes canoes to send someone into rec.* to spend a little time, make some friends, then start posting positive stuff about their products? It would be exceedingly trivial.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that it's been going on for years.
In Japan, it's legal to jam cell phones and there's a good market for jamming boxes. They tend to work within a given radius, depending on their power. Unfortunately, I can't find a good link about this in Japan, but they get a passing mention at/ chronicle/archive/1999/12/17/ED59334.DTL&t ype=news
0 06
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
There are other places where jamming happens. Check out
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980422S0
for an article on an Israeli company making jamming devices.
Finally, maybe someone can dig up an URL for paint that blocks cell transmissions. I saw the stuff discussed on a television magazine show a while back. The manufacturer indicated it worked pretty well most of the time. In a restaurant with lots of glass, it would at least interfere with cell phones, making the reception bad enough for most people to give up on the call. In a windowless environment like a theatre, where the cell phones inside would be entirely enclosed in a box of the paint, he indicated that reception was nearly impossible. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to anything about this product.
Personally, I wish my favorite restaurants would use both technologies. Or employ bouncers to throw rude cell users out on their butts the instant their phones start ringing.
Hell, I heard one of the damn things go off at a funeral a few months ago. Right there at the graveside! The dude with the phone grabbed it and walked away from the area, but still...
>>If this is true, how could any court treat it as such to be broken up and sold to pay creditors Isn't this whole thing more about what's in an original privacy agreement than what a court orders?
.com they've given info to has gone bankrupt,
A bankruptcy court judge can do anything s/he damn well pleases. More importantly, though, even if their sense of fairness is fully functional (which isn't always a good bet), they aren't going to protect anyone's privacy unless they know about the issue. And that's where things get weird.
If nowbankrupt.com wants to sell off their info, they have to declare it as an asset in filings with the court. In those filings, they have to reveal if anyone has a claim on those assets. Those named parties (claimants) are supposed to receive notice of the bankruptcy action and be afforded an opportunity to file with the court to protect their interests.
Obviously, none of this has happened. The nowbankrupt.coms that are selling this info are clearly telling the court that the assets (iow, the info) is wholly owned by them without any encumbrances.
Is nowbankrupt.com lying when they make this declaration to the court? I don't know. It depends on the agreements that nowbankrupt.com had with folks back in the day. But even if you think you have an agreement with nowbankrupt.com that comprises an encumbrance on your data, the court can't recognize it unless the court is told about it. And since nowbankrupt.com didn't list you as a creditor/claimant/interested party, you didn't even get notification of the bankruptcy action. You never even knew you needed to hire an attorney to file with the court to protect your interests!
These questions can't be settled unless someone:
1. Happens to find out that a
2. Happens to find out that their info is going to be sold,
3. Believes they have a claim on that info,
4. Gets pissed,
5. Has money,
6. Hires a lawyer and files with the court, and
7. Manages to accomplish all this before the bankruptcy action is concluded. It does little good to find out a year after the fact.
The kicker? For every dotcom that goes under, go back to #1 and start over. (This last is the reason that, much as it pains me to say it, government regulation is needed here.)
No, IANAL, but I've sure been involved in way too many bankruptcies.
Everyone's Internet at http://www.ev1.net/dsl/ allowed servers as of a couple of months ago. At that time, their FAQ specifically addressed the issue and said that servers WERE allowed. I'm not so sure now, though. They've changed their FAQ, making it far shorter and less detailed. It no longer mentions personal servers.
But I still think they'd be worth a call.
Of course the analog shapes the digital! The silly talk occasionally bandied about concerning the death of universities in favor of some digital alternative illustrates this perfectly.
How so? I learned as a youngster that universities will always be with us. Growing up in an age of (to paraphrase Austin Powers) sex, drugs, and a consequence-free environment gives me a more basic view of the social role of college. And there's no way that role can be supplanted by anything online.
Let me make the point another way. When I was a senior in high school, there was a drama teacher who would counsel students who were sharp enough for college but considering not going because they seemed to have some sort of short-term employment opportunities that were drawing them. If the guidance counselor failed to persuade them to go to college, this drama teacher would call them aside for "the talk." "The talk" went, roughly: "Look, dumbass, college is four years of unlimited sex and alcohol paid for by your parents. Are you really stupid enough to NOT go?"
Every single student he counseled, IIRC, decided to go to college.
Now, show me the online university that can match that sales pitch!
I reiterate: The analog shapes, controls, and provides the sole justification for the existence of the digital.
The Internal Revenue Service runs an all-SCO Unix OSR 5.0.4 network for field collection officers. Everything, from the laptops to the servers, is 100% text-based. There's no X running anywhere; the users see only menus generated by shell scripts. The system is fast, stable, reliable and very easy to administer.
The Revenue Officers who use the system have all gone through the same phases.
Phase One: What the hell are you doing giving us this outdated, ugly technology?
Phase Two: OK, if I have to use it I will, but I won't like it and it probably won't work, anyway. How can any computer without a mouse be any good?
Phase Three: Hey - this thing works OK!
Phase Four: Try to take away my system and I'll kill you!!!
Now the powers-that-be have taken a short break from their continual bowing and praying to Redmond for just long enough to require that all officers must be equipped with laptops running WinNT. (The servers are being left untouched for now.) The chosen method to port our dozens of applications is Interix. Prototyping starts late this year and production rollout is scheduled for Spring, 2001. There are literally billions of dollars at risk if this thing screws up.
My point? If the same question is posted a year from now, I'll be able to give one whompin' good example of how this stuff works in the real world.
Personally, I view the changeover with some trepidation. As an SA, I get a slower, less reliable OS for my users and more network traffic. My ability to do desktop administration (which I try to help out with) goes out the window. The only upside is that the execs in Washington get to brag about how they are creating a homogeneous environment that should lead to more consistent administration procedures.
I hope I turn out to be wrong and everything winds up being peachy-keen. But for now, I'm not looking forward to this.
>>But Ebay violating their own EULA is an important blow against consumer rights...
Well, yeah, but it's also par for the course. Remember that Ebay stomped all over gun sellers, capriciously changing their EULA to make it all seem all right.
Removing auctions on whatever pretense holds sway at the moment is business as usual for them.
I am continually amazed at how people overlook the simple fact that sales tax is the duty of the consumer. Online purchases are not tax free. You simply owe the tax to the state in which you reside and received the merchandise. It's your obligation to report the tax due and pay it. And while enforcement may be fraught with practical problems and you may have never heard of a state that pursued an individual for sales tax, be assured that it does happen with some frequency.
The most notable cases to hit the news were from several years ago and came out of Florida. It wasn't uncommon for retirees to move to Florida with a side trip to High Point NC and environs. (That area, fyi, is the center of the furniture manufacturing universe.) They would pick out and pay for an entire houseful of new furniture to go with their new lives and pay no tax since the delivery was going to go to their new digs in Florida. The Florida Dept of Revenue eventually got wise and starting stopping delivery trucks coming into the state and checking their contents. When they found a big shipment going to someone, they would bill the Florida resident for the sales tax.
The same thing can happen anywhere. I'm surprised that the state tax auditors from Texas don't call up the state tax auditors from whatever state Gateway is from and make an offer like: "Hey, you guys audit Gateway. We'll audit Dell. Then we'll swap workpapers. That way, we can hit the streets and collect all the sales tax on systems shipped in from out of state."
Look for something like this to happen soon if it hasn't already.
Actually, no. The tags, called EZ Tags, issued by the Harris County Toll Road Authority, don't have bar codes to be read at the toll plaza.
When I removed and replaced by defective tag, it came apart because the glue affixing it to the windshield is mighty powerful stuff. Inside, I saw one small circuit board and one coin-shaped battery. The tag is some sort of low-powered radio transmitter. Now that I have a properly functioning tag, the toll plaza never fails to pick me up at 70mph.
Here's a little story about technological line-killing for you.
I hate lines. I love the toll roads around Houston but the lines are often onerous, so I've got one of those tags affixed to my windshield that lets me go through toll plazas in the "posted at 45mph, just keep in under 80" line. Everything's hunky-dory, right?
Wrong.
I got a letter from the county district attorney the other day. It seems I owe USD$1225 in unpaid fees and tolls for going through the toll plazas without paying. WTF?
It took a lengthy, painful investigation to find out what happened. Essentially, my windshield tag only worked occasionally, so a picture was snapped of me each time I went through the toll plaza. The license plate on my car was then compared to people with toll road accounts. If my number was found, they'd just charge my account for the toll. My number wasn't found, though, because it had been incorrectly keyed into their database. I was sent exactly one uncertified letter with an invoice for the unpaid tolls. (I either didn't get it or just mistook it for my regular monthly statement and didn't pay attention.)
Now this has been referred to the county attorney for collection. The toll road people admit that it's their fault that my account wasn't charged. They admit that it was their faulty equipment that caused the problem. But since it's been referred to the lawyers, "There's nothing we can do." The county attorney just says "Pay up or lose your car and get a criminal conviction the next time we catch you on a toll road."
I've got three days to pay. I have no choice but to pay. If I choose to fight it, I'll wind up arrested on the side of the road before the matter can be resolved and, because of where I work, I'll lose my job.
Yeah - technology is an unalloyed joy that will save our souls while shortening lines everywhere.
Uh-huh.
If you believe that, I've got a bridge you might be interested in...