Nonetheless, it is in your interest to try and keep your name clear as best possible. Contractors rely heavily on their reputations. Your only reference is likely to be under some sort of slander law (IANAL et al) which I could see applying if the accusations are baseless.
If you are faced with 'formal' accusations (criminal charges, etc.), get a lawyer. Immediately. This includes being asked for a chat by _any_ law enforcement agency. Do not volunteer any information without consulting an attorney.
If it's "simply" an internal matter, be honest, forthcoming, accurate, and don't panic. Don't overreact. Simply try to lay out to them what you were doing, what you think happened, and how you suggest technically proving your innocence. People creating baseless accusations often don't like to be proven wrong, so be careful not to put egg on anyone's face in public, at least not without having convinced a higher-up of your innocence.
And sometimes, people just have a grudge and get pissy for no reason but to profile themselves--it's happened to me at a client site. The only thing I was able to do was to rely on my (very good) reputation with engineers and managers there, and to lay out very clearly the true events to anyone who cared to listen.
777 Virgins? Are those stewardesses on wide-body airliners?
You have a good point. On the other hand, during WWII, Japanese university students launched thousands of balloon bombs at the US west coast.
These were cheap paper constructions, and only a few hundred actually landed and started some forest fires in the Pacific Northwest, but their panic value far outstripped their actual production cost.
A model airplane, if you can mass produce them, costs a few hundred bucks. Strap a hand grenade to that with a primitive mechanical timer, and launch a few dozen at downtown Manhattan from some abandoned field and see what happens.
Although come to think of it, they'd probably be considered as just another part of Saturday night in the Bronx...:-)
I discovered a trojan on my system; thank god it wasn't a used one.
But seriously, a lot of people feel safe with "personal firewalls" as part of their DSL routers. These often just do a 'pass out any keep state', allowing no connections initiated from the 'outside' to your internal network, but permitting everything outbound.
That being said, (a) it's yer own damn fault if you have nothing better to do than play a game that requires you to spend 8 months getting a decent character together, and (b) serves people right for cheating. As you said, online cheaters are turds.
So what's stopping you from building a bigger one?
I mean, judging from the pictures on their page, the thing is tiny compared to anything manned. And without a pilot, your feasible cargo rises drastically. What would a small plutonium suitcase nuke weigh?
I have never touched, or even seen a Blackberry, so humor this as an honest question.
Can someone please explain to me how this is in any way superior to using any old phone (or a Bluetooth phone/PDA or even Treo) to check and send mail via GSM/GPRS? As an added bonus, for small sized message, you get direct phone-to-phone SMS...
Nice idea. However, it fails on one problem: there is no "Open Source Community". Or rather, there is, but it's not the sort of homogenous, integrated entity/organization that gives managers and powerpoint jockeys warm fuzzy feelings.
Rather, it's a bunch of dudes knocking out code. And for the same reason you're not going to get most of them to provide adequate documentation, which is thoroughly understandable given that (a) they're doing something for fun, and (b) they're not getting paid for it, you're not going to get these people to submit to procedures and processes, on the whole. Hobbyists will continue to build stuff on a lark, doing it the way they feel like doing it.
Now if you want to provide something like this as a service for companies hoping to use OSS, great. However, someone would have to pay for it, which takes away one of the big pluses of OSS. In fact, that's one of the reasons your average commercial entity goes for proprietary software--it's the management perception that there is an organized set of procedures and such behind its development (usually true to some degree) as well as an organization they can sue if things go pear-shaped.
I won't argue with you on the "fair use" bit--I don't really know or care. Suffice it to say that Star Wars _is_ a pretty deeply ingrained bit of popular culture, like Star Trek, or Mickey Mouse, or Betty Boop or whatever.
Regardless, if Lucas were to shut this down, it'd be cretinous to the extreme. It doesn't compete with the Star Wars mmormpgmorpgf or whatever it's called (connect, shoot shit up, quit, as opposed to connect, spend 80 bajillion hours running around looking for Jabba's Magic Spleen), and would turn away a lot of casual Star Wars fans (such as myself.)
In much of the same way that Paramount's ham-handed approach to shutting down Star Trek fan sites a few years ago made apathetic non-consumers out of otherwise potentially enthusiastic types, Lucas Arts' doing a nazi on things like this mod (which is taking an age to download!) would be a bit of a stupid move, coming hard on the heels of two utterly lackluster films in the franchise.
At a 'financial institution', if it's a bank, you are working with traders. A lot of countries have very very strict requirements as to the communications of brokers and traders--this includes having every single phone on the floor where they work (in my last company it wasn't just the trading floor, but the whole 3d floor) specially monitored.
A lot of banks and exchanges also do this to protect themselves from claims by associates/customers that they "were told abc by xyz working for you"; especially in a lawsuit-happy environment like the US, this is admissible as evidence under certain circumstances. And yes, legally the line between hard concrete evidence (a signed, witnessed contract, for example) and a cut-and-pasted supposed MSN conversation is pretty fuzzy.
That's ok, you just need one of these, also controlled by the dashboard PC.
Although to be honest, that's where I see it pushing the PII-266 envelope a bit. "Flamethrower32.exe has developed a serious error. Click here to send feedback to Microsoft support."
How physically violent is hashing? Is it all just dependant on how far the club usually runs?
No, only on how badly you retch after 5 miles and 5 pints.:-)
Seriously though, I found a HHH on Vanuatu's Efate island (look it up.) They're everywhere. And don't let the 'no nerds' thing distract you--the ones I've encountered are usually a really easy-going bunch of people (not just guys.)
Check out the architecture (probably irrelevant if you're stuck in the midwest)
Learn the language (or any language)
Read a book
Get in shape
Pick a relevant exam, and study for it
Ask through your network of friends if there's anyone around there you should meet
Work on some personal projects on a laptop (takes discipline)
Find a cafe, buy a newspaper, light a cigarette, and relax. It's summer. Enjoy it.
Write letters The best thing about working somewhere else on a project is that you don't have to worry about all the mundane crap that normally takes up all your time at home. Commuting, dealing with bills and cleaning, cooking, all fall by the wayside.
Unfortunately, this is usually offset by the longer hours; also, on most remote projects, I've been on teams; the focus was on getting the work done as quickly as possible, which results in long hours; if we did get some free time for meals and so, it was usually spent grabbing a quick bite with the team.
If you have the opportunity, don't waste the time futzing around the hotel.
Because publishing a book takes a certain amount of effort, and it's thus likely that someone with at least half a brain cell at least skimmed through the contents once, unlike most of the crap you find on the net:-)
I used to work for a corporation called Bull, a French computer manufacturer and consulting outfit.
One of that company's core products at the time was smartcard-based . The project they were really proud of consisted of a massive rollout for a chain of hospitals in France, where doctors and other staff, just by inserting a chip card into a reader on a kiosk PC, could almost instantaneously call up their user profile, including rights to patients' dossiers and user-specific access to applications. The GINA mask would even display the doctor's photo while he/she typed in the PIN code.
This was based on Windows (forget which version), but the actual functionality was developed in-house. And I'm pretty sure we weren't the first to do anything of the sort.
The geek-factor aside, as this seems like a pretty cool technical idea, I recently read a very well-put article in a Swiss paper about the rights of government.
The basic idea was that in a democracy, everything not specifically prohibited is permitted, both for citizens and "the government". This means that unless the boss, i.e. the voting public, specifically trusts and allows the government to do something, such as use information in a certain way, they are FORBIDDEN FROM DOING IT.
How to enforce this is probably academic, and I can hear the cynics already ramping up their arguments (which I probably agree with) but until this idea becomes a bit more pervasive, I wouldn't trust John Ashcroft and his counterparts around the world with this sort of power any further than I could throw DARPA.
Or mimes. It could be worse. You could be followed around the park by a bunch of mimes.
As for the "raciest street videos", there was an affair in (Michigan? Minnesota? Wisconsin?) a few years back where highway patrolmen were using the drivers license database to help each other stalk girls they liked.
And where do you think the recorded material for all the COPS clone TV shows comes from? World's stupidest drivers, crooked employees, whatever. The material is already all over TV-land (especially here in Europe, the land of data protection).
I am a straight guy with a girlfriend and a life and I like to play girl characters.
Why?
I mainly play games that involve blowing things up, and I think girls with guns are sexy. Same with girls who drive fast cars, girls who can swordfight (q.v. Emma Peel, Uma Thurman in 'Kill Bill', Charlie's Angels, yada yada yada.) And I know a lot of other guys who think the same.
Also, look at how popular Tomb Raider was. So it doesn't make a lot of sense that sword-chicks on Everquest would sell for less. Maybe the magic and fantasy geeks have a stronger desire to be CONAN THE BIG UGLY MUSCULAR BARBARIAN than those of us who already look that way.:-)
But I suppose what it all comes down to is that I wish I'd been able to spend my college years 'researching' this kind of paper.
Or maybe I just like looking at girls' butts, offscreen or on...
Slashdot Mirror
Budweiserium and devnullium.
I always thought 'strontium' somehow was a bit close to 'stronzo'...
Ok, that one's pretty, but this one is funny
Ok so it's old as the hills...
Nonetheless, it is in your interest to try and keep your name clear as best possible. Contractors rely heavily on their reputations. Your only reference is likely to be under some sort of slander law (IANAL et al) which I could see applying if the accusations are baseless.
If you are faced with 'formal' accusations (criminal charges, etc.), get a lawyer. Immediately. This includes being asked for a chat by _any_ law enforcement agency. Do not volunteer any information without consulting an attorney.
If it's "simply" an internal matter, be honest, forthcoming, accurate, and don't panic. Don't overreact. Simply try to lay out to them what you were doing, what you think happened, and how you suggest technically proving your innocence. People creating baseless accusations often don't like to be proven wrong, so be careful not to put egg on anyone's face in public, at least not without having convinced a higher-up of your innocence.
And sometimes, people just have a grudge and get pissy for no reason but to profile themselves--it's happened to me at a client site. The only thing I was able to do was to rely on my (very good) reputation with engineers and managers there, and to lay out very clearly the true events to anyone who cared to listen.
777 Virgins? Are those stewardesses on wide-body airliners?
You have a good point. On the other hand, during WWII, Japanese university students launched thousands of balloon bombs at the US west coast.
These were cheap paper constructions, and only a few hundred actually landed and started some forest fires in the Pacific Northwest, but their panic value far outstripped their actual production cost.
A model airplane, if you can mass produce them, costs a few hundred bucks. Strap a hand grenade to that with a primitive mechanical timer, and launch a few dozen at downtown Manhattan from some abandoned field and see what happens.
Although come to think of it, they'd probably be considered as just another part of Saturday night in the Bronx...
I discovered a trojan on my system; thank god it wasn't a used one.
But seriously, a lot of people feel safe with "personal firewalls" as part of their DSL routers. These often just do a 'pass out any keep state', allowing no connections initiated from the 'outside' to your internal network, but permitting everything outbound.
That being said, (a) it's yer own damn fault if you have nothing better to do than play a game that requires you to spend 8 months getting a decent character together, and (b) serves people right for cheating. As you said, online cheaters are turds.
So what's stopping you from building a bigger one?
I mean, judging from the pictures on their page, the thing is tiny compared to anything manned. And without a pilot, your feasible cargo rises drastically. What would a small plutonium suitcase nuke weigh?
I have never touched, or even seen a Blackberry, so humor this as an honest question.
Can someone please explain to me how this is in any way superior to using any old phone (or a Bluetooth phone/PDA or even Treo) to check and send mail via GSM/GPRS? As an added bonus, for small sized message, you get direct phone-to-phone SMS...
Nice idea. However, it fails on one problem: there is no "Open Source Community". Or rather, there is, but it's not the sort of homogenous, integrated entity/organization that gives managers and powerpoint jockeys warm fuzzy feelings.
Rather, it's a bunch of dudes knocking out code. And for the same reason you're not going to get most of them to provide adequate documentation, which is thoroughly understandable given that (a) they're doing something for fun, and (b) they're not getting paid for it, you're not going to get these people to submit to procedures and processes, on the whole. Hobbyists will continue to build stuff on a lark, doing it the way they feel like doing it.
Now if you want to provide something like this as a service for companies hoping to use OSS, great. However, someone would have to pay for it, which takes away one of the big pluses of OSS. In fact, that's one of the reasons your average commercial entity goes for proprietary software--it's the management perception that there is an organized set of procedures and such behind its development (usually true to some degree) as well as an organization they can sue if things go pear-shaped.
Nice idea, but needs practical development.
I won't argue with you on the "fair use" bit--I don't really know or care. Suffice it to say that Star Wars _is_ a pretty deeply ingrained bit of popular culture, like Star Trek, or Mickey Mouse, or Betty Boop or whatever.
Regardless, if Lucas were to shut this down, it'd be cretinous to the extreme. It doesn't compete with the Star Wars mmormpgmorpgf or whatever it's called (connect, shoot shit up, quit, as opposed to connect, spend 80 bajillion hours running around looking for Jabba's Magic Spleen), and would turn away a lot of casual Star Wars fans (such as myself.)
In much of the same way that Paramount's ham-handed approach to shutting down Star Trek fan sites a few years ago made apathetic non-consumers out of otherwise potentially enthusiastic types, Lucas Arts' doing a nazi on things like this mod (which is taking an age to download!) would be a bit of a stupid move, coming hard on the heels of two utterly lackluster films in the franchise.
The answer is really simple: compliance.
At a 'financial institution', if it's a bank, you are working with traders. A lot of countries have very very strict requirements as to the communications of brokers and traders--this includes having every single phone on the floor where they work (in my last company it wasn't just the trading floor, but the whole 3d floor) specially monitored.
A lot of banks and exchanges also do this to protect themselves from claims by associates/customers that they "were told abc by xyz working for you"; especially in a lawsuit-happy environment like the US, this is admissible as evidence under certain circumstances. And yes, legally the line between hard concrete evidence (a signed, witnessed contract, for example) and a cut-and-pasted supposed MSN conversation is pretty fuzzy.
That's ok, you just need one of these, also controlled by the dashboard PC.
Although to be honest, that's where I see it pushing the PII-266 envelope a bit. "Flamethrower32.exe has developed a serious error. Click here to send feedback to Microsoft support."
No, only on how badly you retch after 5 miles and 5 pints.
Seriously though, I found a HHH on Vanuatu's Efate island (look it up.) They're everywhere. And don't let the 'no nerds' thing distract you--the ones I've encountered are usually a really easy-going bunch of people (not just guys.)
Check out the architecture (probably irrelevant if you're stuck in the midwest)
Learn the language (or any language)
Read a book
Get in shape
Pick a relevant exam, and study for it
Ask through your network of friends if there's anyone around there you should meet
Work on some personal projects on a laptop (takes discipline)
Find a cafe, buy a newspaper, light a cigarette, and relax. It's summer. Enjoy it.
Write letters
The best thing about working somewhere else on a project is that you don't have to worry about all the mundane crap that normally takes up all your time at home. Commuting, dealing with bills and cleaning, cooking, all fall by the wayside.
Unfortunately, this is usually offset by the longer hours; also, on most remote projects, I've been on teams; the focus was on getting the work done as quickly as possible, which results in long hours; if we did get some free time for meals and so, it was usually spent grabbing a quick bite with the team.
If you have the opportunity, don't waste the time futzing around the hotel.
Awesome. Now I can finally play Grand Theft Auto while cruising through the Ghetto.
The "kid" in the article was 22.
I don't remember when I bought my last CD, but that's exactly what it was.
Things I've found useful include
Start-of-day calisthenics
Singing the company song
Dressing up as your favorite animals
I agree with you. 'Weasels' is good.
However, I can't help but hope (against hope) that the 'B' amount will be awarded, and will get Microsoft thinking twice about pushing the DRM agenda.
All I want are fricken mice with fricken laser beams attached to their heads, is that so much to ask?
Because publishing a book takes a certain amount of effort, and it's thus likely that someone with at least half a brain cell at least skimmed through the contents once, unlike most of the crap you find on the net
For your web filter, you might want to have a look at SquidGuard or Dan's Guardian. I implemented both test-wise at a school, and they liked it.
I used to work for a corporation called Bull, a French computer manufacturer and consulting outfit.
One of that company's core products at the time was smartcard-based . The project they were really proud of consisted of a massive rollout for a chain of hospitals in France, where doctors and other staff, just by inserting a chip card into a reader on a kiosk PC, could almost instantaneously call up their user profile, including rights to patients' dossiers and user-specific access to applications. The GINA mask would even display the doctor's photo while he/she typed in the PIN code.
This was based on Windows (forget which version), but the actual functionality was developed in-house. And I'm pretty sure we weren't the first to do anything of the sort.
Good luck, Mr. Jobs.
The geek-factor aside, as this seems like a pretty cool technical idea, I recently read a very well-put article in a Swiss paper about the rights of government.
The basic idea was that in a democracy, everything not specifically prohibited is permitted, both for citizens and "the government". This means that unless the boss, i.e. the voting public, specifically trusts and allows the government to do something, such as use information in a certain way, they are FORBIDDEN FROM DOING IT.
How to enforce this is probably academic, and I can hear the cynics already ramping up their arguments (which I probably agree with) but until this idea becomes a bit more pervasive, I wouldn't trust John Ashcroft and his counterparts around the world with this sort of power any further than I could throw DARPA.
You're so close to the truth it hurts (from laughing)
Or mimes. It could be worse. You could be followed around the park by a bunch of mimes.
As for the "raciest street videos", there was an affair in (Michigan? Minnesota? Wisconsin?) a few years back where highway patrolmen were using the drivers license database to help each other stalk girls they liked.
And where do you think the recorded material for all the COPS clone TV shows comes from? World's stupidest drivers, crooked employees, whatever. The material is already all over TV-land (especially here in Europe, the land of data protection).
I am a straight guy with a girlfriend and a life and I like to play girl characters.
Why?
I mainly play games that involve blowing things up, and I think girls with guns are sexy. Same with girls who drive fast cars, girls who can swordfight (q.v. Emma Peel, Uma Thurman in 'Kill Bill', Charlie's Angels, yada yada yada.) And I know a lot of other guys who think the same.
Also, look at how popular Tomb Raider was. So it doesn't make a lot of sense that sword-chicks on Everquest would sell for less. Maybe the magic and fantasy geeks have a stronger desire to be CONAN THE BIG UGLY MUSCULAR BARBARIAN than those of us who already look that way.
But I suppose what it all comes down to is that I wish I'd been able to spend my college years 'researching' this kind of paper.
Or maybe I just like looking at girls' butts, offscreen or on...