by requiring their laptop-carrying employees to carry their computers without data, a base OS install and nothing else. Then, one gets one's data back via secure (encrypted) FTP and reloads it.
PITA? Certainly. But better that than lose the data. However, I suspect that an increasing number of companies are going to simply decide that it just isn't worth the trouble to do business in America. I'm already hearing anecdotal accounts of this.
or whether it can be used in practical fusion facilities or not, we know that there's silicon there. A highly automated mining and metal refining facility designed to ship semiconductor-grade silicon (the crystallization is better done in microgravity) to Earth orbit might be a good way to provide the solar cells for a SPS (space power satellite) array to solve Earth's power needs and after or concurrent than that, it can be used to feed orbital wafer fabs. I've heard one can grow defect-free semiconductor crystals the size of basketballs in microgravity for cheaper CPUs with higher profit margins. That's a for instance.
There are lots of things one can do if one has zero-gravity, for practical purposes, free energy, and transportation.
Once upon a time, the American West was looked at as an unprofitable, useless wasteland.
Biometrics are powerful and useful, but they are not keys. They are useful in situations where there is a trusted path from the reader to the verifier; in those cases all you need is a unique identifier. They are not useful when you need the characteristics of a key: secrecy, randomness, the ability to update or destroy. Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they are not secrets. - Bruce Schneier
Good for separating honest people from temptation.
Otherwise, if the "bad guys" have access to your machine, you're Pwn3d. Demos have been done using pictures of people to fool facial recognition software.
Of course, if an owner has cosmetic surgery or a really nasty accident, it's the owner who'll get locked out of the machine. If they want to use biometric ID for anything but security theater, they need it as part of at least two-factor authentication. . . meaning "something you know" (i.e., a password) or something you've got (e.g. an RFID token key)
Also note that one can already run VMware Server using a Windows host, though I don't quite understand why anyone would want to. I'm using a Windows VM to run W98SE (I'm running Eudora/Windows and waiting for Eudora/Linux to become ready for prime time) and instead of having it crash daily on native hardware, it crashes every few weeks in a VM. I have no more idea than you do why one would prefer an unstable host and a stable VM to the reverse.
The only downside I've noticed with VMware Server is that there are some kinds of DOS graphic modes the virtual video card just won't do.
Buy an (female) Asian sheep. That takes care of the "girlfriend" part. Get caught by your wife and several of her friends with you and the sheep having wild, passionate sex. The divorce should follow quickly Glad I could help.
DISCLAIMER: you said nothing about looking for good advice.
vaporware patent. I think this is it. Patent examiners should not allow patents on devices that science fiction editors would reject in any story set within the next 50 years.
By the time what's described in the patent is possible, the patent will no longer be in force, and MS probably won't be around in any form.
I've been using a Palm Zire 31 PDA as an e-book reader for the last couple of years. While I could live with higher resolution and better visibility in daylight, I'm pretty happy with it. I've got 366 books on it so far, some music, and my flash card is still mostly empty. I avoid dead tree given a choice.
I doubt it. Amazon is a worldwide operation. They'd lose as much as a few percent on sales temporarily, but the tradeoff would be that once enraged NY State constituents started leaning on their state legislature, the law would be repealed and nobody would want to try it again. All they'd have to do is work up a custom page saying "We've been run out of NY State by your politicians" that would point NY State residents at the right people to complain (i.e. the state legislators representing their individual districts to via e-mail, fax, letter and phone.) and point any NY State resident who logs in to that page. Anyone with an Amazon account has an address known to Amazon, and placing that within a state legislator's district isn't rocket science.
Amazon is much more popular than the average state politician.
I use a drive mirror in a mobile rack that is unplugged when not backing up (schedule 3x a week and I'm pretty religious about it), and back up to an offline DVD-R pile monthly. My rack cost me about $20, it's a very nice aluminum case to an SATA plug. And the last time I had to replace the drive, I was up and running in 10 minutes and at the Maxtor site working on my RMA a few minutes later. (props to Maxtor, the warranty replacement was hassle-free)
And yes, I do sleep better at night. If your RAID array doesn't have some sort of separate offline/nearline backup, you shouldn't.
I back up to a mirror drive in a mobile rack, which is unplugged from the computer when not actively backing up. I back up 3x/week (IOW, when KAlarm tells me to) using a Knoppix disk modified with rsync and dar backup scripts.
The problem with RAID is the obvious one. If a disk drive in a RAID environment fails due to factors extrinsic to the drive (i.e. lightning bolt blowing up the UPS and surge protector and dumping into the PSU), every redundant drive probably goes with it. The way to avoid this is... secondary backup storage, whether to another site, NAS, a backup server, or pile of DVD-Rs.
I do straight disk image backups to a mobile rack. I do this 3x a week using a modified Knoppix disk with backup scripts (to find out how, google on alizard Knoppix) taking about 15 minutes to rsync the drives together.
Upside? If my main HD fails, I'm back up and running in 15 minutes. (I'm running LVM, so I have to change the volume ID to boot normally from a Linux initrd) For you, a bare-metal restore is going to take a lot longer.
However, I generally run out of HD space long before the drive has had time to wear out and I buy drives in pairs, one main, one mobile rack with rsync backup, and I occasionally rotate the main and backup drives to equalize wear.
not a cent to investigate the connection between Middle East oil monarchies and international terrorism funding. For why, read House of Bush, House of Saud.
highly thought of. By me as well, most of what I read for leisure is SF. (usually downloaded e-books)
And only a very, very, very small fraction of all SF writers ever get them. As I said, their recipients are no more typical of the average SF writer any more than a Nobel laureate is typical of the average practitioner in his field.
You sound like a person with a vested interest in a scene that's starting to fade.
Hugo and Nebula Award writers are about as typical of the community of people who write for money as Barney The Dinosaur is of the community of reptiles. The kind of writers I hang out with are the ones who write for the major computer technology sites.
The traditional publishers' 90% is usually professionally proofread and edited. Anyone who thinks a major publisher's imprint on a book is a guarantee of quality content really needs to read a lot more.
That said, I'm most likely to go with POD should I publish a book on Linux, and I know an increasing number of writing professionals who are either considering POD or are already personally using it. The people I hear making your argument are people who hope to be published someday.
My first published work was back in 1987. My next published work will be a how-to piece on configuring apt, it'll be on Informit in a month or so.
Upside of POD? Control of content, much higher profit per book, and control over how the book is publicized and marketed. If you actually want to sell a POD book, build your own website and promote it using the POD site as a back end to take orders, don't depend on potential readers finding your book among the thousands published on their site. And spend the extra money to buy a package including an ISBN so they can be ordered through brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Downside: No megacorporate budget to buy shelf space, but unless you're already "A" list, you aren't going to get much help from your publisher anyway. If you want a book professionally edited, find a good editor and prepare for sticker shock when you get the hourly rate and time estimate.
Remember that for a professional writer, the point behind writing is profit. You might be able to make more with 10K book sales via POD than 100K book sales via a mainstream publisher. And that very few mainstream published books earn out their advances.
retinal scanners. Yes, I know there are ways to do this with images. . . but a criminal or terrorist outfit is much more likely to use direct means to get a retinal pattern. Most people would miss an eye more than one of their fingers.
The other obvious point is. . . anyone who shows up as "Anonymous Coward" with warnings about recognized members of a community is going to get ignored or laughed at even if he's right.
I'll start worrying when my program splash screens are covered with scat pr0n or GNAA sigs.
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by requiring their laptop-carrying employees to carry their computers without data, a base OS install and nothing else. Then, one gets one's data back via secure (encrypted) FTP and reloads it.
PITA? Certainly. But better that than lose the data. However, I suspect that an increasing number of companies are going to simply decide that it just isn't worth the trouble to do business in America. I'm already hearing anecdotal accounts of this.
that anything "found" in a suspect's hard drive wasn't planted with a faked timestamp?
Imagine being accused of having 50G of downloaded bestiality and kiddie pr0n on a laptop that's never been connected to the Net.
or whether it can be used in practical fusion facilities or not, we know that there's silicon there. A highly automated mining and metal refining facility designed to ship semiconductor-grade silicon (the crystallization is better done in microgravity) to Earth orbit might be a good way to provide the solar cells for a SPS (space power satellite) array to solve Earth's power needs and after or concurrent than that, it can be used to feed orbital wafer fabs. I've heard one can grow defect-free semiconductor crystals the size of basketballs in microgravity for cheaper CPUs with higher profit margins. That's a for instance.
There are lots of things one can do if one has zero-gravity, for practical purposes, free energy, and transportation.
Once upon a time, the American West was looked at as an unprofitable, useless wasteland.
"facial recognition" spoofing including the quotation marks.
Good for separating honest people from temptation.
Otherwise, if the "bad guys" have access to your machine, you're Pwn3d. Demos have been done using pictures of people to fool facial recognition software.
Of course, if an owner has cosmetic surgery or a really nasty accident, it's the owner who'll get locked out of the machine. If they want to use biometric ID for anything but security theater, they need it as part of at least two-factor authentication. . . meaning "something you know" (i.e., a password) or something you've got (e.g. an RFID token key)
is available as a .deb from Sun for personal use for free. Main difference? USB access from the VM. (which is extremely useful)
back up very, very regularly.
Also note that one can already run VMware Server using a Windows host, though I don't quite understand why anyone would want to. I'm using a Windows VM to run W98SE (I'm running Eudora/Windows and waiting for Eudora/Linux to become ready for prime time) and instead of having it crash daily on native hardware, it crashes every few weeks in a VM. I have no more idea than you do why one would prefer an unstable host and a stable VM to the reverse.
The only downside I've noticed with VMware Server is that there are some kinds of DOS graphic modes the virtual video card just won't do.
Buy an (female) Asian sheep. That takes care of the "girlfriend" part. Get caught by your wife and several of her friends with you and the sheep having wild, passionate sex. The divorce should follow quickly Glad I could help.
DISCLAIMER: you said nothing about looking for good advice.
vaporware patent. I think this is it. Patent examiners should not allow patents on devices that science fiction editors would reject in any story set within the next 50 years.
By the time what's described in the patent is possible, the patent will no longer be in force, and MS probably won't be around in any form.
I've been using a Palm Zire 31 PDA as an e-book reader for the last couple of years. While I could live with higher resolution and better visibility in daylight, I'm pretty happy with it. I've got 366 books on it so far, some music, and my flash card is still mostly empty. I avoid dead tree given a choice.
I doubt it. Amazon is a worldwide operation. They'd lose as much as a few percent on sales temporarily, but the tradeoff would be that once enraged NY State constituents started leaning on their state legislature, the law would be repealed and nobody would want to try it again. All they'd have to do is work up a custom page saying "We've been run out of NY State by your politicians" that would point NY State residents at the right people to complain (i.e. the state legislators representing their individual districts to via e-mail, fax, letter and phone.) and point any NY State resident who logs in to that page. Anyone with an Amazon account has an address known to Amazon, and placing that within a state legislator's district isn't rocket science.
Amazon is much more popular than the average state politician.
via google: Results 1 - 10 of about 4,390 for sociopathic CEO corporate. (0.21 seconds)
I use a drive mirror in a mobile rack that is unplugged when not backing up (schedule 3x a week and I'm pretty religious about it), and back up to an offline DVD-R pile monthly. My rack cost me about $20, it's a very nice aluminum case to an SATA plug. And the last time I had to replace the drive, I was up and running in 10 minutes and at the Maxtor site working on my RMA a few minutes later. (props to Maxtor, the warranty replacement was hassle-free)
And yes, I do sleep better at night. If your RAID array doesn't have some sort of separate offline/nearline backup, you shouldn't.
I back up to a mirror drive in a mobile rack, which is unplugged from the computer when not actively backing up. I back up 3x/week (IOW, when KAlarm tells me to) using a Knoppix disk modified with rsync and dar backup scripts.
... secondary backup storage, whether to another site, NAS, a backup server, or pile of DVD-Rs.
The problem with RAID is the obvious one. If a disk drive in a RAID environment fails due to factors extrinsic to the drive (i.e. lightning bolt blowing up the UPS and surge protector and dumping into the PSU), every redundant drive probably goes with it. The way to avoid this is
I do straight disk image backups to a mobile rack. I do this 3x a week using a modified Knoppix disk with backup scripts (to find out how, google on alizard Knoppix) taking about 15 minutes to rsync the drives together. Upside? If my main HD fails, I'm back up and running in 15 minutes. (I'm running LVM, so I have to change the volume ID to boot normally from a Linux initrd) For you, a bare-metal restore is going to take a lot longer.
However, I generally run out of HD space long before the drive has had time to wear out and I buy drives in pairs, one main, one mobile rack with rsync backup, and I occasionally rotate the main and backup drives to equalize wear.
not a cent to investigate the connection between Middle East oil monarchies and international terrorism funding. For why, read House of Bush, House of Saud.
highly thought of. By me as well, most of what I read for leisure is SF. (usually downloaded e-books) And only a very, very, very small fraction of all SF writers ever get them. As I said, their recipients are no more typical of the average SF writer any more than a Nobel laureate is typical of the average practitioner in his field.
contain encrypted messages. . . the ones with random character sequences in the header and/or at the end of the post.
You sound like a person with a vested interest in a scene that's starting to fade.
Hugo and Nebula Award writers are about as typical of the community of people who write for money as Barney The Dinosaur is of the community of reptiles. The kind of writers I hang out with are the ones who write for the major computer technology sites.
90% of everything is crap.
The traditional publishers' 90% is usually professionally proofread and edited. Anyone who thinks a major publisher's imprint on a book is a guarantee of quality content really needs to read a lot more.
That said, I'm most likely to go with POD should I publish a book on Linux, and I know an increasing number of writing professionals who are either considering POD or are already personally using it. The people I hear making your argument are people who hope to be published someday.
My first published work was back in 1987. My next published work will be a how-to piece on configuring apt, it'll be on Informit in a month or so.
Upside of POD? Control of content, much higher profit per book, and control over how the book is publicized and marketed. If you actually want to sell a POD book, build your own website and promote it using the POD site as a back end to take orders, don't depend on potential readers finding your book among the thousands published on their site. And spend the extra money to buy a package including an ISBN so they can be ordered through brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Downside: No megacorporate budget to buy shelf space, but unless you're already "A" list, you aren't going to get much help from your publisher anyway. If you want a book professionally edited, find a good editor and prepare for sticker shock when you get the hourly rate and time estimate.
Remember that for a professional writer, the point behind writing is profit. You might be able to make more with 10K book sales via POD than 100K book sales via a mainstream publisher. And that very few mainstream published books earn out their advances.
retinal scanners. Yes, I know there are ways to do this with images. . . but a criminal or terrorist outfit is much more likely to use direct means to get a retinal pattern. Most people would miss an eye more than one of their fingers.
speaking as a Debian user, who cares?
The other obvious point is. . . anyone who shows up as "Anonymous Coward" with warnings about recognized members of a community is going to get ignored or laughed at even if he's right.
I'll start worrying when my program splash screens are covered with scat pr0n or GNAA sigs.
URLs will work for that purpose anymore. The problem / challenge is to find the new ones without having the FBI breaking down your door.