Gore-Tex in running shoes. The water will get in at the top of the shoe (as it is only 3cm high), and never get out, since Gore-Tex is watertight. Besides, when running, my feet sweat, so water will end up inside the shoe even if it isn't wet outside.
Actually, Gore-Tex has some fairly magical properties that make it both waterproof yet breathable (read as lets water out). According to their website ( http://www.gore-tex.com/remote/Satellite/toc/Techn ologyOfComfortFrameset/index ) The pores in Gore-Tex material is 20,000 times smaller than a drop of water keeping the water out, yet 700 times larger than a water vapor molecule, allowing sweat to escape. What this means for you is that you're still going to have wet feet while you run, but you can tell all your friends you have Gore-Tex running shoes.
Good points. Laptops will auto-login to networks with the same SSID as their regular network, so unintentional piggybacking has got to be common as well. Aside from the added money, I can see why many ISPs like to setup the wireless network for consumers these days. My LinkSys router made it fairly easy to set up the encryption for the general person by just pushing a button on the unit, but it still doesn't do much for the person just turning on their laptop and letting it do it's thing to connect to the internet. How do you encourage someone to educate themselves about something in which they have no interest in learning beyond making it "just work?"
In this case the guy shouldn't have been charged. It seems like a crime where the coffee shop owner would have had to press charges in order to get any kind of sentencing, and clearly he didn't feel that this was a crime. Given that the guy did receive a fine and community service, it would be nice if the county handed that money over to the coffee shop to make up for all the coffee the guy never bought. Right... I won't hold my breath on that.
I think that there needs to be a paradigm shift in how people look at open networks though. Drive around any neighborhood and you'll probably have plenty of open networks visible to you, but I don't know that all those people really want people using their internet. In this case, the guy was a coffee shop owner- presumably because he really likes coffee and the atmosphere or whatever it is that said "I want to own a coffee shop." He probably knows coffee really well... but the computer networks are best left to someone else. Or perhaps he knows just enough about computers to be dangerous. Some people have a network setup for them because they dont know how, and others set it up themselves with increased security. It's the group in the middle that just plug in thier equipment and never think about the default settings.
Assuming that a great many open networks are like this, perhaps people looking to access the networks should change their thinking slightly. Instead of thinking "Here is an open network, therefore the network owner is willing to let me use it, unless he has expressly told me I should not (and even then he left his network open, didn't he?)." perhaps the thinking should be "Here is an open network but I should get express permission to use it just in case I'm not really meant to use it." Now, express permission could be a sign put up by a shop owner "Free Internet" or, maybe you read in the brochure on San Francisco that city-wide wifi is now available and you see the instructions to access it. It cannot be your NIC talking to the router though. The router is not intelligent. It only does what it is told to do, and a lot of routers will give anyone an IP address by default, whether or not the owner really wants that to happen.
I really can't assume that good internet security is common sense- I talk to way too many people who have no clue.
I used to live on a 120 ft ship that was modified a few times since being a fishing vessel. There was a small room that was rather out of the way of anything and seldom used except for the deckhands to get out of nasty clothing and slip into the bathroom/showers through the next door. In this room though there was a really rickety "closet" door and if you jiggled it the wrong way or opened it completely alarms would start sounding in the engine room on the next deck down. If you pressed the "big red button" inside of the closet, it then flooded the engine room with CO2. It's designed to put out fires, and I think it may have a twist and turn system or other mechanism to prevent accidental pushes. I guess it's also good that a good rule of thumb is to give have the chief engineer with you while you wait 30 - 60 seconds after sounding the alarm before pushing that particular button.
The evil villain types never seem to learn a good lesson. In the cartoons, the villain captures the hero, tells him an evil secret and discloses all necessary information on how to stop the evil plan once the hero undoubtedly escapes. In the real world, evil villains have people sift through trash and recreate shredded documents and then shred the documents to hide the evidence. In this case, all they really needed to do was have on last book-burning-bonfire for "old times" sake and toss in a few documents as well. Seriously... matches are so much cheaper and more effective than shredders. Heck with that... I'll get one of my henchman to rub some sticks together and save my 79 cents.
For a student all of that is worthless, especially when schools consider knowing the software more important than knowing the concepts. I agree that a student needs to understand the concepts of of what s/he is doing, but there is certainly a place to know specifics of specific software. As one currently searching for employment, I can tell you that I've seen many job listings that list experience with Windows, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Outlook, Acrobat, Quickbooks and other non-free softwares as requirements for consideration for employment. Simply put, if you don't know to use specific programs, the employer sees other candidates as more qualified than you (whether or not this is true) and you may not even get a chance at an interview. On the otherhand, I've never seen any job listing expecting any level of proficiency programs like Open Office and other open source software packages that may do the job as well as or better than non-open source software. The exception to this would be in the tech field (ie network administration) where proficiency in Linux/Unix would be required. Admittedly, I don't look at every job listing I come across, only those I think might interest me. But then, looking back on past work experiences, an Intermediate to Advanced knowledge of MS Office products has proven useful. Only in one instance did OpenOffice come in useful to me, but this was for a non-profit organization and my choices were to install illegal copies of Office, install OpenOffice, or install nothing at all. Since I was the "tech" guy, I chose OpenOffice and the people who had to use it got over the slight differences soon enough.
Why don't they move the operation to somewhere like the Philippines, where traditional pirating (in the "Argh matey, we'll be boardin' ye vessel now" sort of way) is still rampant. Let's face it... this is one of the countries with huge DVD Pirating business already, and even if there are laws against piracy, those laws are easily ignored when you pay off the right people. And this post suddenly has me looking forward to September 19th... http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Talk_Like_A_Pirate_Da y
Ah... good point... possibly more like "Well, I lost my blue prints so I just borrowed Walts..." It's nice to know that excuse is still there if I ever need it.:)
It's nice to see that this technology will be available, but I won't be long before it's regulated to the point of uselessness I think. RFIDs are going into too many things, and while 1 metre can be nice covering in some situations, it will be intrusive in others. First off Passports and Drivers licenses of many states carry RFID tags now. I can't imagine customs officials wanting to wait around while you turn off your jamming device or if a police officer would be happy if he tried to read the tag at your car instead of in the patrol car. Further, what if you're standing in line getting groceries and accidentally block the RFID of the person in front of you cause your standing too close. People better take the time to make sure they're set up correctly. A hack that increases the output power will probably be put to use by someone. I guess it boils down to that I don't trust legislators to let me keep my privacy and I don't trust non-technical people to properly set up a technical device.
Granted, the translation of whats happening in the video could be a lie, but they claim the President of the park said that they were not copying Disney. Really now, that guy needs to grow some balls. In his situation, "Heck yeah we copied Disney! What the hell are they gonna do about it? This is China!" would have been a more fitting response. Despite the long history of the stories themselves, those were pretty obviously characters based on the Disney versions. Except Shrek... that'll piss of Dreamworks. And who owns Hello Kitty?
I think things would run much smoother all over if people would simply accept 100% responsibility for their portion of the problem. Here's an extreme example:
Lets say I buy a house with a nice front yard but in a bad neighborhood somewhere. Further, I collect a million dollars and pile this money on my front lawn. I put no security systems in place, nor do i hire any guards. Then I take a trip around the world only to find my money gone when I get back. We'll also assume that the weather was perfect during my absence so no natural causes would cause the money to disappear. I call the police, tell them my money has been stolen. Obviously, if someone did indeed take the money, it wasn't there's to take. They should not have done it, there is a law against it, if they are caught, they should go to jail. On the other hand, someone should smack me upside the head for not keeping my money more secure. Even moving the money inside the house with no locked doors would have provided better security since it would not have been visible to any passerby. The cops would tell me I was a dumbass.
So in this case the school did do a number of things, they put in place security measures, had security policies and informed the students. The students willingly broke the rules and should be punished. Perhaps this accounts for 95% of the problem. The school should recognize though that there is a hole in security that is being widely exploited and current measures of prevention are not working. An exploited security hole should make its way towards the top of someone's priority list to be addressed. The school should not ignore it's contribution to the overall problem, but recognize it, adress it, and minimize further contributions to the problem.
I've spent some time traveling in Fiji, which is certainly a developing nation, though I'm not aware of them being part of the OLPC program yet. Since Fiji only has 2 cities, it is nice to know that in the larger towns, internet cafe's can still be found. What I noticed in these cafe's though is that the cafe employees really did not know much more about computers than many of the customers (locals). I even ran into a cafe owner who was shocked at how much bandwidth he would actually need to run his business when he found out how quickly he had gone over his limit in the first month of business.
The situation ends up being one where everyone is still learning. No one has gotten used to the windows (or any other OS) environment and trying something like Linux that is geared for beginner users should be easy to adapt to. I doubt most of the people using computers in these nations care if they use MS Word or OpenOffice or some other word processor- a lot of them just want to type a resume. As long as it works, they're happy.
The other thing to note is that during my 18 weeks of traveling in Fiji, I've stayed in many homes and villages. Aside from computers at high end hotels, or internet cafes, I saw 2 computers in homes. In the first instance, the computer was covered in a nice lace table cover thing so that it wasn't a distraction. In the 3 weeks I spent in the home, it didn't get turned on once. I also doubt that it was connected to the phone line, which would have been the only source of internet in this village. I think the unit may have been broken, but it would have to travel to another island to find the nearest computer repair guy.
The other house had a laptop computer. Installed was a Vodaphone Wireless card which provided 56kbps internet connection over the cell towers. The main purpose of this laptop was actually for business, in that the owner also owned a local craft shop/mini mart, and his laptop was the only internet access on the island. His shop was next door to the post office and received electricity all day. The village in which he lived though, only received electricity during evening hours.
The laptop was far more portable and useful between these computers. In other developing nations, where electricity may be rationed during the day or simply not available, it's nice to see someone providing a laptop that can be powered by batteries charged by mechanical energy. Also, having low power components to extend the life of the power seems a good idea too. I'm all for recycling old computers and giving them to people who can use them, but this will be a computer that even students in the most remote regions of developing nations will be able to use. The problem then becomes getting people to be able to teach how to use them, though I think once given the basics, kids will pick up on it right away.
From www.cia.gov: Important Notice: Friends, family, individuals, or organizations may be interested to learn that you are an applicant for or an employee of the CIA. Their interest, however, may not be benign or in your best interest. You cannot control whom they would tell. We therefore ask you to exercise discretion and good judgment in disclosing your interest in a position with the Agency. You will receive further guidance on this topic as you proceed through your CIA employment processing.
And this was taken from a page about being a librarian. Of course, after watching the made for tv move (which I am sure is very fact based) I can understand the need for this type of secrecy. Still I don't think Google is hiring any Indiana Jones / James Bond-esque types in order to save the world.
Customer Service call centers just suck. I probably should have tried this tactic with HP a month or two back. I think the big problem with so many of these places is that they refuse to admit thier own mistakes, or if they do, they refuse to properly fix the situation. In my case, I had paid for overnight shipping and the product wasn't shipped until they it was actually supposed to arrive, and even then it was shipped to the wrong address. Instead of just refunding me the cost of shipping and getting the part to me the next day, he tried to explain how it would have been impossible for me to receive the part on time. It looks like the same type of thing happened here. Someone in the customer care department made a promise and never followed through with it.
For the record, while I was on hold with HP for over hour, I got the opportunity to listen to how highly rated their customer service was. Do high service ratings really mean anything? One really shouldn't have to go outside the regular system in order to get the level of service expected from these big companies.
Hats off to whoever it was at Apple that made things right though. It's certainly better than I got.
Actually... that's a really good point there. I mean, it really wouldn't be hard for a real terrorist or someone just looking to screw things over for a while to go and buy some wire cutters, or maybe just some kindling and some matches. Quick- seal the borders and make sure everyone that wants to buy firewood, matches, hammers and wire cutters gets appropriate permits first.
Perhaps residents of San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area should be aiming to arrest the top brass of the US Army. They've got a video game http://www.americasarmy.com/ and many of the missions take place in San Francisco. Now, I know when I was in high school, there was usually an Army Recruiter that came around at lunch time to talk about the good life... and well, I bet they just might have this game on CD and be passing it on to potential recruits. Even if they don't, given that it is a free download, imagine how many students are sniping people and launching RPGs in the streets of San Francisco every day!!! I amazed the city hasn't fallen to rubble yet.
I bet with that kind of energy, if you were to run it through a flux capacitor and approached a speed of about 87 mph, then time travel could be possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Gore-Tex has some fairly magical properties that make it both waterproof yet breathable (read as lets water out). According to their website ( http://www.gore-tex.com/remote/Satellite/toc/Tech
Good points. Laptops will auto-login to networks with the same SSID as their regular network, so unintentional piggybacking has got to be common as well. Aside from the added money, I can see why many ISPs like to setup the wireless network for consumers these days. My LinkSys router made it fairly easy to set up the encryption for the general person by just pushing a button on the unit, but it still doesn't do much for the person just turning on their laptop and letting it do it's thing to connect to the internet. How do you encourage someone to educate themselves about something in which they have no interest in learning beyond making it "just work?"
In this case the guy shouldn't have been charged. It seems like a crime where the coffee shop owner would have had to press charges in order to get any kind of sentencing, and clearly he didn't feel that this was a crime. Given that the guy did receive a fine and community service, it would be nice if the county handed that money over to the coffee shop to make up for all the coffee the guy never bought. Right... I won't hold my breath on that.
I think that there needs to be a paradigm shift in how people look at open networks though. Drive around any neighborhood and you'll probably have plenty of open networks visible to you, but I don't know that all those people really want people using their internet. In this case, the guy was a coffee shop owner- presumably because he really likes coffee and the atmosphere or whatever it is that said "I want to own a coffee shop." He probably knows coffee really well... but the computer networks are best left to someone else. Or perhaps he knows just enough about computers to be dangerous. Some people have a network setup for them because they dont know how, and others set it up themselves with increased security. It's the group in the middle that just plug in thier equipment and never think about the default settings.
Assuming that a great many open networks are like this, perhaps people looking to access the networks should change their thinking slightly. Instead of thinking "Here is an open network, therefore the network owner is willing to let me use it, unless he has expressly told me I should not (and even then he left his network open, didn't he?)." perhaps the thinking should be "Here is an open network but I should get express permission to use it just in case I'm not really meant to use it." Now, express permission could be a sign put up by a shop owner "Free Internet" or, maybe you read in the brochure on San Francisco that city-wide wifi is now available and you see the instructions to access it. It cannot be your NIC talking to the router though. The router is not intelligent. It only does what it is told to do, and a lot of routers will give anyone an IP address by default, whether or not the owner really wants that to happen.
I really can't assume that good internet security is common sense- I talk to way too many people who have no clue.
I used to live on a 120 ft ship that was modified a few times since being a fishing vessel. There was a small room that was rather out of the way of anything and seldom used except for the deckhands to get out of nasty clothing and slip into the bathroom/showers through the next door. In this room though there was a really rickety "closet" door and if you jiggled it the wrong way or opened it completely alarms would start sounding in the engine room on the next deck down. If you pressed the "big red button" inside of the closet, it then flooded the engine room with CO2. It's designed to put out fires, and I think it may have a twist and turn system or other mechanism to prevent accidental pushes. I guess it's also good that a good rule of thumb is to give have the chief engineer with you while you wait 30 - 60 seconds after sounding the alarm before pushing that particular button.
The evil villain types never seem to learn a good lesson. In the cartoons, the villain captures the hero, tells him an evil secret and discloses all necessary information on how to stop the evil plan once the hero undoubtedly escapes. In the real world, evil villains have people sift through trash and recreate shredded documents and then shred the documents to hide the evidence. In this case, all they really needed to do was have on last book-burning-bonfire for "old times" sake and toss in a few documents as well. Seriously... matches are so much cheaper and more effective than shredders. Heck with that... I'll get one of my henchman to rub some sticks together and save my 79 cents.
Why don't they move the operation to somewhere like the Philippines, where traditional pirating (in the "Argh matey, we'll be boardin' ye vessel now" sort of way) is still rampant. Let's face it... this is one of the countries with huge DVD Pirating business already, and even if there are laws against piracy, those laws are easily ignored when you pay off the right people. And this post suddenly has me looking forward to September 19th... http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Talk_Like_A_Pirate_Da y
Ah... good point... possibly more like "Well, I lost my blue prints so I just borrowed Walts..." It's nice to know that excuse is still there if I ever need it. :)
It's nice to see that this technology will be available, but I won't be long before it's regulated to the point of uselessness I think. RFIDs are going into too many things, and while 1 metre can be nice covering in some situations, it will be intrusive in others. First off Passports and Drivers licenses of many states carry RFID tags now. I can't imagine customs officials wanting to wait around while you turn off your jamming device or if a police officer would be happy if he tried to read the tag at your car instead of in the patrol car. Further, what if you're standing in line getting groceries and accidentally block the RFID of the person in front of you cause your standing too close. People better take the time to make sure they're set up correctly. A hack that increases the output power will probably be put to use by someone. I guess it boils down to that I don't trust legislators to let me keep my privacy and I don't trust non-technical people to properly set up a technical device.
Granted, the translation of whats happening in the video could be a lie, but they claim the President of the park said that they were not copying Disney. Really now, that guy needs to grow some balls. In his situation, "Heck yeah we copied Disney! What the hell are they gonna do about it? This is China!" would have been a more fitting response. Despite the long history of the stories themselves, those were pretty obviously characters based on the Disney versions. Except Shrek... that'll piss of Dreamworks. And who owns Hello Kitty?
I think things would run much smoother all over if people would simply accept 100% responsibility for their portion of the problem. Here's an extreme example:
Lets say I buy a house with a nice front yard but in a bad neighborhood somewhere. Further, I collect a million dollars and pile this money on my front lawn. I put no security systems in place, nor do i hire any guards. Then I take a trip around the world only to find my money gone when I get back. We'll also assume that the weather was perfect during my absence so no natural causes would cause the money to disappear. I call the police, tell them my money has been stolen. Obviously, if someone did indeed take the money, it wasn't there's to take. They should not have done it, there is a law against it, if they are caught, they should go to jail. On the other hand, someone should smack me upside the head for not keeping my money more secure. Even moving the money inside the house with no locked doors would have provided better security since it would not have been visible to any passerby. The cops would tell me I was a dumbass.
So in this case the school did do a number of things, they put in place security measures, had security policies and informed the students. The students willingly broke the rules and should be punished. Perhaps this accounts for 95% of the problem. The school should recognize though that there is a hole in security that is being widely exploited and current measures of prevention are not working. An exploited security hole should make its way towards the top of someone's priority list to be addressed. The school should not ignore it's contribution to the overall problem, but recognize it, adress it, and minimize further contributions to the problem.
I've spent some time traveling in Fiji, which is certainly a developing nation, though I'm not aware of them being part of the OLPC program yet. Since Fiji only has 2 cities, it is nice to know that in the larger towns, internet cafe's can still be found. What I noticed in these cafe's though is that the cafe employees really did not know much more about computers than many of the customers (locals). I even ran into a cafe owner who was shocked at how much bandwidth he would actually need to run his business when he found out how quickly he had gone over his limit in the first month of business.
The situation ends up being one where everyone is still learning. No one has gotten used to the windows (or any other OS) environment and trying something like Linux that is geared for beginner users should be easy to adapt to. I doubt most of the people using computers in these nations care if they use MS Word or OpenOffice or some other word processor- a lot of them just want to type a resume. As long as it works, they're happy.
The other thing to note is that during my 18 weeks of traveling in Fiji, I've stayed in many homes and villages. Aside from computers at high end hotels, or internet cafes, I saw 2 computers in homes. In the first instance, the computer was covered in a nice lace table cover thing so that it wasn't a distraction. In the 3 weeks I spent in the home, it didn't get turned on once. I also doubt that it was connected to the phone line, which would have been the only source of internet in this village. I think the unit may have been broken, but it would have to travel to another island to find the nearest computer repair guy.
The other house had a laptop computer. Installed was a Vodaphone Wireless card which provided 56kbps internet connection over the cell towers. The main purpose of this laptop was actually for business, in that the owner also owned a local craft shop/mini mart, and his laptop was the only internet access on the island. His shop was next door to the post office and received electricity all day. The village in which he lived though, only received electricity during evening hours.
The laptop was far more portable and useful between these computers. In other developing nations, where electricity may be rationed during the day or simply not available, it's nice to see someone providing a laptop that can be powered by batteries charged by mechanical energy. Also, having low power components to extend the life of the power seems a good idea too. I'm all for recycling old computers and giving them to people who can use them, but this will be a computer that even students in the most remote regions of developing nations will be able to use. The problem then becomes getting people to be able to teach how to use them, though I think once given the basics, kids will pick up on it right away.
Maybe it thinks it's the CIA.
From www.cia.gov:
Important Notice: Friends, family, individuals, or organizations may be interested to learn that you are an applicant for or an employee of the CIA. Their interest, however, may not be benign or in your best interest. You cannot control whom they would tell. We therefore ask you to exercise discretion and good judgment in disclosing your interest in a position with the Agency. You will receive further guidance on this topic as you proceed through your CIA employment processing.
And this was taken from a page about being a librarian. Of course, after watching the made for tv move (which I am sure is very fact based) I can understand the need for this type of secrecy. Still I don't think Google is hiring any Indiana Jones / James Bond-esque types in order to save the world.
Customer Service call centers just suck. I probably should have tried this tactic with HP a month or two back. I think the big problem with so many of these places is that they refuse to admit thier own mistakes, or if they do, they refuse to properly fix the situation. In my case, I had paid for overnight shipping and the product wasn't shipped until they it was actually supposed to arrive, and even then it was shipped to the wrong address. Instead of just refunding me the cost of shipping and getting the part to me the next day, he tried to explain how it would have been impossible for me to receive the part on time. It looks like the same type of thing happened here. Someone in the customer care department made a promise and never followed through with it. For the record, while I was on hold with HP for over hour, I got the opportunity to listen to how highly rated their customer service was. Do high service ratings really mean anything? One really shouldn't have to go outside the regular system in order to get the level of service expected from these big companies. Hats off to whoever it was at Apple that made things right though. It's certainly better than I got.
Actually... that's a really good point there. I mean, it really wouldn't be hard for a real terrorist or someone just looking to screw things over for a while to go and buy some wire cutters, or maybe just some kindling and some matches. Quick- seal the borders and make sure everyone that wants to buy firewood, matches, hammers and wire cutters gets appropriate permits first.
Perhaps residents of San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area should be aiming to arrest the top brass of the US Army. They've got a video game http://www.americasarmy.com/ and many of the missions take place in San Francisco. Now, I know when I was in high school, there was usually an Army Recruiter that came around at lunch time to talk about the good life... and well, I bet they just might have this game on CD and be passing it on to potential recruits. Even if they don't, given that it is a free download, imagine how many students are sniping people and launching RPGs in the streets of San Francisco every day!!! I amazed the city hasn't fallen to rubble yet.
I bet with that kind of energy, if you were to run it through a flux capacitor and approached a speed of about 87 mph, then time travel could be possible.
if he'd simply asked Myspace to remove the offending pages. http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.f aq&Category=9&Question=39
If he'd done that instead of making such a big deal of the matter, he wouldn't have brought so much attention to his little problem.