If you're working for rednecks stupid enough to want to do an IE-only site (especially government rednecks), it might not be entirely politic to use Germany and France as an example.
Finland they've probably not heard of.
Say something like "the terrorists use Windows--should you?" Be sure to pronounce it "terry-wrists".
Ditto the postfix bit. I have used it for several small companies, and it runs beautifully. Spam filtering (blacklists, spamassassin, greylisting) works nicely, you can easily view statistics via munin or something similar, and there are a ton of log analysis scripts and proggies out there.
My preferred combo is FreeBSD + Postfix with TLS/SMTP (for "outside" clients) + Dovecot secure imap + OpenSSL + Openwebmail. If you absofuckinglutely must, you can drop this setup in a DMZ or third interface of a PCEngines WRAP box running M0n0wall and have it talk to an exchange server in your "inside" network. That way the monkeys can use MAPI, although you'll probably run into problems with different mail spools and all that.
For added fun, some decent PHP-based groupware like PHProjekt or PHPGroupware is a nice touch.
As for redundancy, do nightly incrementals, use a decent RAID-5 controller (adaptec 2810SA or equivalent) with hot standby and don't forget to use hard drives from different lots, and maybe mirror your drives to another box if you're paranoid (I've never needed to do this but if you're really worried you can do RAID-10. Also don't forget to have a secondary MX that will actually deliver mail (can be a backup hot standby mail server that's just a mirror image of your primary) and a tertiary MX that just queues mail until you're up and running again.
I'm assuming, of course, that you're willing to do this in-house. Get good support contracts (despite what people say, I've had good experiences with Dell) and hardware warranties, make a complete backup of your system once you've installed it and before putting it online.
To conclude, I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with an entirely homebuilt freeware-based solution, assuming you have (a) good backups, (b) redundancy as described above, and (c) hardware support contracts from your vendors. That's the only thing I would not ever skimp on.
What I additionally hate pretty tremendously is people who blanket-block mail from dynamic IPs. Many of us don't _want_ to send mail over our ISP's broken server, and we don't _want_ to pay their obscene IP rental "tax" for a fixed IP. I think this is ridiculous.
A combination of keyword filtering, greylisting, ORBLs and rate limiting is far more effective--we even found that rate limiting APNIC IPs to 2 messages per minute per IP does wonders for our spam loads (and this is at a three letter.net domain with generally common proper English first names as email addresses.)
I've made it clear to people who implement stupid blacklists that, if they don't want to hear from us, we can't talk to them. I've had quite a few people react quite positively when I've politely given them good arguments why dynIP blacklists are stupid.
Companies need _some_ way to track how many hours employees are actually around the office. However, many anagers have taken the additional mental leap of directly associating this with how much their employees actually work.
Hence, the concept of "face time". If you're not in your seat x hours per day, that must mean you're not working and not productive. Take it from there and you'll find a quick explanation for why "studies" such as this one are so widely accepted.
Well, not just "my son", or "my girlfriend", but "me". I have this thing, I dunno, maybe it's unreasonable, but I don't really relish the idea of people shooting at me.
My point, though, is that it's very difficult to really set a threshhold at which the balance between "public order" and "democratic society" really breaks down. Is it a May 1 protest against global hunger or poverty? Something against excessive taxation? A demonstration against the new bypass road, or a million people camping out in Kiev protesting against a corrupt tyrant?
The poor bastards who were killed in Bucharest when Ceaucescu was overthrown, well each one of them is a tragedy, and I'm sure their mothers and fathers would have preferred them to be ray gun-zapped as well, but that's sort of the basic problem in this argument, isn't it:(
Isn't this better than shooting people dead with guns? Tiananmen Square massacre anyone?
No it's not, actually. Allow me to quote Mario Savio:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
What has this got to do with violence against demonstrations? Well, not to sound cynical (yes, I am) but sometimes, demonstrations (and in extreme cases, revolutions) are the only way to deal with odious, repressive regimes, politics, actions, whatever. Would these get the kind of press and sympathy they deserve the moment "the state" (your call how you define it) can simply brush them away with no bad feelings, no guilt?
For all the hypocrisy and naivete they exhibited, I hardly think the Vietnam-era anti war protests would have turned out effective without a couple of nervous itchy-trigger-fingered national guardsmen blowing away a few poor dumb students at Kent state. Tiananmen square? The "West" has been cowardly and inconsistent in its response, but even such awareness and sympathy as it generated in the rest of the world would not have been if the Chinese govt's response had simply been "nothing to see here, move along, *zap*."
Not just that, but at the moment there is a huge threshhold that most governments have to cross before responding to demonstrations with force. Give them a guilt-free way of doing so, and that threshhold goes away.
No, I don't like violence, and yes, it sounds nice, and yes, some of the people demonstrating in Iraq definitely need to be taken care of in a non-harmful manner and just gotten to disperse, but you know what? I am terribly, terribly afraid that, the moment "my" government comes up with something so egregious that I, normally a pretty apolitical person, feel that I have to go out and demonstrate against it, they will have this nice, convenient tool to use against me. Guilt-free, mess-free.
I don't trust those in power, no matter how they got there, to always act in the best interests of those they represent, but at least until now there has always, at the base of things, been the threat of popular, public backlash that you can't just unleash the hounds on. With this toy, that balance of power is gone.
This is great info--unfortunately, where I live (Switzerland) your judicial recourse is a bit more limited in cases like this. We don't have a points system and the speeding tickets for low numbers ( This is great for avoiding many frivolous lawsuits, but is a terrible obstacle for legitimate grievances. A few weeks ago I was clocked doing 27 (km/h) over the limit on a highway in France; I was pulled over by a goon squad (who were very polite, it should be said) and told to pay a 40 Euro (about 45 bucks) ticket. Could have been worse, and the administrative hassle of fighting a ticket in a neighboring country would really have been a PITA.
A few weeks before that, in Switzerland, I may have been clocked doing about the same over (yes, I was speeding, mea culpa) by a rolling patrol, but not pulled over. I still worry that I'll get a ticket, and if this is the case, it'll add up to substantial money. This would be a good situation in which to fight it in court.
What would be really interesting is if you posted a link to the book you mentioned in your post.
Speak for yourself. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1997 and consider myself and many of the people I was fortunate enough to associate with there a good cut above the muppets you describe. That said, a lot of them were self-centered immature slobs too, but the point holds.
Universities may be businesses, but in the case of many of the better ones, they still churn out loads of smart, educated individuals. In the case of Cal, most of us pretty consistently had the feeling of having to fend for themselves, and all I-had-to-walk-to-school-barefoot-in-the-snow-uphil l-both-ways aside, it turned me into an adult. Depending on how on the mark you are with your pretty cynical comment this may have been an unintended side effect, but it was an effect nonetheless.
Yes, spoon-feeding students music downloads is "infantilization", and it doesn't belong there.
That said, I don't consider myself part of that society (I left the country right after graduating) and what I see when going back to visit my folks doesn't make me inclined to dispute your overall assertion.
Sorry, I had to pick j-random-countries, and somebody was bound to get offended.
My point wasn't directed at South Africa (although Libya, well, and to be honest, your President dude isn't doing a whole lot about Mugabe) but rather at the kind of horrid inefficiency that you're bound to get when allowing career diplomats and bureaucrats from 50 different countries, who are more versed in inter-office maneuvering than pragmatic administration of technology, to run something as important to us as the Internet.
I really don't believe that the US as a country is "running the show" so much as preventing others from doing so. As to whether ICANN is structured in a fair and practical manner, well, that's a whole different argument. And of course there remains the whole issue of "fair" vs. "effective"--right now those two are not necessarily one and the same.
It's not so simple as "US vs. rest of world"--it's a balance between "how much do you trust the US to be a fair custodian" vs. "how much do you trust an organization giving weight to what Libya and South Africa and Papua New Guinea want to be a fair custodian".
As far as I'm concerned, having an organization in the US, with some involvement by the US government, "running" things is not a great solution but a lot less worse than, say, whatever the ITU would come up with.
That said, remember that the Internet works on the principle of routing around failure. Neither the UN nor ICANN nor the US government are known as organizations which always work quickly, logically, unbureaucratically and in the best interests of both their constituents and the greater community at large.
The "US", aside from a few fun Internic fuckups in the 1990s, didn't ever "turn off the Internet" or come up with idiotic international requirements. Carnivore? Try enforcing that in France. Nobody's stopping me from using encryption between Ghana and Mongolia. I wouldn't, however, put it past some atechnical third world level 50 career bureaucrat to come up with something stupid wthich might try to do just that.
Not that it'll ever work, but it'll just create more work for everyone. Another thing I'd like to see pro-UN-control folks to ask themselves honestly would be "is this just a pure control question"? I hate to say it, but like Magellan, anyone can always build their own...
You want the Auditor Collection CD and a decent directional antenna, such as a Cantenna or, if you have some cash, something by Huber & Suhner. Auditor is, by a far stretch, the best wireless security tools collection out there--it's a great complement to something like Knoppix-STD.
A Fluke Can help regarding signal strength, but the built-in antennas generally aren't great for spotting directions. They can help you start delimiting a general area without having you look like an idiot walking around with a laptop, though.
Also you may want to consider a Bumblebee -- I've seen one of these in use at PacSecWest, and it did a pretty good job finding transmitters. It's also a lot smaller than either a Fluke or a laptop.
If you're on a budget, try something like a Digital Hotspotter, although I wouldn't recommend this particular company due to delivery problems.
1) Fashion the explosives into artificial limbs (if possible) and have amputee suicide bombers wear them on the plane -- being sure to sit next to a window in the cabin for obvious reasons....
...Which bomb-sniffers, X-Rays and physical inspections can deal with just fine.
3) The simple, elegant solution involving explosives and the use of that small hidden place all women have (for the most part) if you know what I mean....
Yeah, but then they'll just start looking out for women in Burqas who are walking around the airport funny, sweating and with these strained looks on their faces.
You forgot one visible set of countermeasures: USE MORE BOLD FONT. That will TERRIFY the TERRORISTS into UTTER BAWLING SUBMISSION.
However, complaining about playing 10-player LAN games on a 64-player map seems a bit odd
Easy answer--because part of the whole allure of Battlefield {1942,Vietnam,2} is that it's built around large maps and vehicles.
For 10-player maps, I'd rather play CS or a similar small-group head to head game--there are plenty of these around. I like Battlefield because it introduces a greater factor of randomness into the game; 1-2 super '1337 kiddies can't dominate, because there's too much teamplay and coordination required in a good round for a highly skilled lone wolf to significantly affect game outcome. Tanks require infantry support, planes require AA support, battleships need subs, etc. Especially in BF2, which introduces the whole squad concept, this really stands out.
It's an utterly fantastic mod--one of my favorites so far. A lot of effort went into making it very realistic, and the skins/models are superb.
Basically, it's a WWII history enthusiast's dream. My experience with it has also been very good, as I've played mainly on the HSLAN server, which has a generally more mature level of play due to good admins.
I strongly recommend giving it a go--it makes BF1942 looks like a comic book.
Hell, at least Battlefield 2 will let you play on a lan or single player without authenticating back to the mothership.
Yeah but try playing on a 32+ player server without the ridiculous "ranked" unique online ID crap (which won't even let you have spaces in your name--wtf?) For some reason I'm not too keen on 10-player LAN games in a game that's built for what, 64?
In any case, I'm waiting for FH2 to come out; FH already blew BF1942 out of the water, and FH2 promises to do the same for BF2--and according to rumors, even without the online unique ID/ranking nonsense.
The problem with "fine print" is that it is used as a blank check by both sides of many common consumer transactions, much in the way as a shrink-wrap EULA is. There's the "caveat emptor", fuck off if you are too lazy approach, and the "I have a right to be mollycoddled" way of looking at it.
The former leads to fairly egregious and legally unsupportable abuses of the contract model, while the second tends to result in massive restrictions on your freedom to use common sense (because he might not read the fine print, and could sue us later) and, well, laziness on the part of the population at large.
It's probably idealistically naive to preach that companies should act responsibly, and customers ought to use their common sense. Or even have common sense. However, no matter what the fine print says, you should always remember: Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball!
Don't ask questions which the web could answer - you should already know.
Well, duh:-)
Seriously, I think we agree on this--that's what I was trying to get across.
But none of this says an employer is obligated to "sell" to a candidate.
Not in the least, but remember, there's a reason the employment market is called just that, a "market". Standard rules of supply and demand apply. An employer isn't obligated to give you coffee, to have the interviewer show up on time, to offer a signing bonus, whatnot either. Depending on how much they want you, though, that might just be a wise course of action for them to pursue.
And as usual, it's up to you to understand how desirable you are to them, and how much you want the job.
You appear to be mistaking "cherry picking" and "finding out about the company." Generally, a good interview consists of a candidate saying "hi, here I am, now what can I do for you?" being given some preliminary information about the job, spending time answering questions and talking about himself when asked to do so. Then, when asked whether he has any questions, ask about the company, and maybe salary/benefits/whatever.
your first responsiblity is to sell yourself to the company, THEN decide whether or not the company is a good fit for you
You also appear to be confusing "pfft, I = t3h r0xx0r, justify the time I'm taking for this interview" with asking a company to show why they are good, why you should work for them, why they are great, etc. Funny enough, every interview of the many I've been in (I used to do this quite a lot to "keep in practice" before taking up consulting) in has confirmed this. It may surprise a lot of people that there _are_ ways of doing this that don't come across as snotty.
Once you've got the job, it's decidedly too late to find out that the place is junk--there are some pretty basic signals that are easy to spot during an interview. As a qualified candidate, my time is as valuable as an HR person's, but I'm counting on a professional dialogue to let both of us decide whether we're right for each other. That said, if you've found it to be a good approach for you to be entirely submissive and accepting of whatever a company deigns to give you, great. I've done a shitload of interviews for high-impact positions, including for consulting clients of mine (!) and neither I nor any of my colleagues ever gave a thumbs-up to anyone who didn't ask intelligent, penetrating questions about the position and the company.
Ask an HR person experienced with interviewing qualified staff (NOT a recruiter) sometime how much it costs to hire someone, and how much a company loses by having a disgruntled employee quit halfway during their probation period. You may be surprised.
Why does this guy expect to be "sold"? I think it's the candidate's job to learn about the company. Anything a recruiter says is just a sales pitch.
(My mom runs a professional search firm, so I sort of know what I'm talking about):
Nup, it's a two-way process. You ask about them, they ask about two. If you receive an unsolicited invite, there's an implication that they are more interested in you than vice versa, thereby putting the onus on them to sell the job to you. They can still ask you you "confirmation" type questions once you've expressed interest, but it is up to them to bring this up diplomatically.
Naturally, if you apply for the job, or if the market's really down (which usually leads to you being the applicant anyway) they have more leverage; however, there are a lot of subtle nicenesses that recruiters have to engage in. If you're especially bright or high-profile, you have way more leverage to tell an "arrogant" sounding company to sod off; however, even a complete n00b trainee should expect to be "sold" the company somehow.
Sorkin sounds a bit touchy about it, but it's perfectly possible for a company to screw up an interview (and with it their chances of getting someone bright in the door), just as you can duff it by coming across as a demanding, arrogant prick.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're working for rednecks stupid enough to want to do an IE-only site (especially government rednecks), it might not be entirely politic to use Germany and France as an example.
Finland they've probably not heard of.
Say something like "the terrorists use Windows--should you?" Be sure to pronounce it "terry-wrists".
My kingdom for mod points. Hahaha.
I wonder if the Reynolds Wrap people would sue you under the DMCA for misuse of their packaging material?
Ditto the postfix bit. I have used it for several small companies, and it runs beautifully. Spam filtering (blacklists, spamassassin, greylisting) works nicely, you can easily view statistics via munin or something similar, and there are a ton of log analysis scripts and proggies out there.
My preferred combo is FreeBSD + Postfix with TLS/SMTP (for "outside" clients) + Dovecot secure imap + OpenSSL + Openwebmail. If you absofuckinglutely must, you can drop this setup in a DMZ or third interface of a PCEngines WRAP box running M0n0wall and have it talk to an exchange server in your "inside" network. That way the monkeys can use MAPI, although you'll probably run into problems with different mail spools and all that.
For added fun, some decent PHP-based groupware like PHProjekt or PHPGroupware is a nice touch.
As for redundancy, do nightly incrementals, use a decent RAID-5 controller (adaptec 2810SA or equivalent) with hot standby and don't forget to use hard drives from different lots, and maybe mirror your drives to another box if you're paranoid (I've never needed to do this but if you're really worried you can do RAID-10. Also don't forget to have a secondary MX that will actually deliver mail (can be a backup hot standby mail server that's just a mirror image of your primary) and a tertiary MX that just queues mail until you're up and running again.
I'm assuming, of course, that you're willing to do this in-house. Get good support contracts (despite what people say, I've had good experiences with Dell) and hardware warranties, make a complete backup of your system once you've installed it and before putting it online.
To conclude, I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with an entirely homebuilt freeware-based solution, assuming you have (a) good backups, (b) redundancy as described above, and (c) hardware support contracts from your vendors. That's the only thing I would not ever skimp on.
Ditto on this.
.net domain with generally common proper English first names as email addresses.)
What I additionally hate pretty tremendously is people who blanket-block mail from dynamic IPs. Many of us don't _want_ to send mail over our ISP's broken server, and we don't _want_ to pay their obscene IP rental "tax" for a fixed IP. I think this is ridiculous.
A combination of keyword filtering, greylisting, ORBLs and rate limiting is far more effective--we even found that rate limiting APNIC IPs to 2 messages per minute per IP does wonders for our spam loads (and this is at a three letter
I've made it clear to people who implement stupid blacklists that, if they don't want to hear from us, we can't talk to them. I've had quite a few people react quite positively when I've politely given them good arguments why dynIP blacklists are stupid.
As you say, crippling broadband...well.
I haven't bought a game since HL2 and BF2 came out, and then not since BF1942 was released (whoa!).
That said, I might just pick up a copy of GTA-whatever-the-latest-version-is JUST OUT OF FUCKING SPITE.
Jesus, people, not that they're going to be the one reading this, but if you don't like it, DON'T BUY IT.
"Face time". Look it up.
Companies need _some_ way to track how many hours employees are actually around the office. However, many anagers have taken the additional mental leap of directly associating this with how much their employees actually work.
Hence, the concept of "face time". If you're not in your seat x hours per day, that must mean you're not working and not productive. Take it from there and you'll find a quick explanation for why "studies" such as this one are so widely accepted.
Well, not just "my son", or "my girlfriend", but "me". I have this thing, I dunno, maybe it's unreasonable, but I don't really relish the idea of people shooting at me.
:(
My point, though, is that it's very difficult to really set a threshhold at which the balance between "public order" and "democratic society" really breaks down. Is it a May 1 protest against global hunger or poverty? Something against excessive taxation? A demonstration against the new bypass road, or a million people camping out in Kiev protesting against a corrupt tyrant?
The poor bastards who were killed in Bucharest when Ceaucescu was overthrown, well each one of them is a tragedy, and I'm sure their mothers and fathers would have preferred them to be ray gun-zapped as well, but that's sort of the basic problem in this argument, isn't it
Isn't this better than shooting people dead with guns? Tiananmen Square massacre anyone?
No it's not, actually. Allow me to quote Mario Savio:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
What has this got to do with violence against demonstrations? Well, not to sound cynical (yes, I am) but sometimes, demonstrations (and in extreme cases, revolutions) are the only way to deal with odious, repressive regimes, politics, actions, whatever. Would these get the kind of press and sympathy they deserve the moment "the state" (your call how you define it) can simply brush them away with no bad feelings, no guilt?
For all the hypocrisy and naivete they exhibited, I hardly think the Vietnam-era anti war protests would have turned out effective without a couple of nervous itchy-trigger-fingered national guardsmen blowing away a few poor dumb students at Kent state. Tiananmen square? The "West" has been cowardly and inconsistent in its response, but even such awareness and sympathy as it generated in the rest of the world would not have been if the Chinese govt's response had simply been "nothing to see here, move along, *zap*."
Not just that, but at the moment there is a huge threshhold that most governments have to cross before responding to demonstrations with force. Give them a guilt-free way of doing so, and that threshhold goes away.
No, I don't like violence, and yes, it sounds nice, and yes, some of the people demonstrating in Iraq definitely need to be taken care of in a non-harmful manner and just gotten to disperse, but you know what? I am terribly, terribly afraid that, the moment "my" government comes up with something so egregious that I, normally a pretty apolitical person, feel that I have to go out and demonstrate against it, they will have this nice, convenient tool to use against me. Guilt-free, mess-free.
I don't trust those in power, no matter how they got there, to always act in the best interests of those they represent, but at least until now there has always, at the base of things, been the threat of popular, public backlash that you can't just unleash the hounds on. With this toy, that balance of power is gone.
This is great info--unfortunately, where I live (Switzerland) your judicial recourse is a bit more limited in cases like this. We don't have a points system and the speeding tickets for low numbers (
This is great for avoiding many frivolous lawsuits, but is a terrible obstacle for legitimate grievances. A few weeks ago I was clocked doing 27 (km/h) over the limit on a highway in France; I was pulled over by a goon squad (who were very polite, it should be said) and told to pay a 40 Euro (about 45 bucks) ticket. Could have been worse, and the administrative hassle of fighting a ticket in a neighboring country would really have been a PITA.
A few weeks before that, in Switzerland, I may have been clocked doing about the same over (yes, I was speeding, mea culpa) by a rolling patrol, but not pulled over. I still worry that I'll get a ticket, and if this is the case, it'll add up to substantial money. This would be a good situation in which to fight it in court.
What would be really interesting is if you posted a link to the book you mentioned in your post.
Speak for yourself. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1997 and consider myself and many of the people I was fortunate enough to associate with there a good cut above the muppets you describe. That said, a lot of them were self-centered immature slobs too, but the point holds.
l l-both-ways aside, it turned me into an adult. Depending on how on the mark you are with your pretty cynical comment this may have been an unintended side effect, but it was an effect nonetheless.
Universities may be businesses, but in the case of many of the better ones, they still churn out loads of smart, educated individuals. In the case of Cal, most of us pretty consistently had the feeling of having to fend for themselves, and all I-had-to-walk-to-school-barefoot-in-the-snow-uphi
Yes, spoon-feeding students music downloads is "infantilization", and it doesn't belong there.
That said, I don't consider myself part of that society (I left the country right after graduating) and what I see when going back to visit my folks doesn't make me inclined to dispute your overall assertion.
Sorry, I had to pick j-random-countries, and somebody was bound to get offended.
My point wasn't directed at South Africa (although Libya, well, and to be honest, your President dude isn't doing a whole lot about Mugabe) but rather at the kind of horrid inefficiency that you're bound to get when allowing career diplomats and bureaucrats from 50 different countries, who are more versed in inter-office maneuvering than pragmatic administration of technology, to run something as important to us as the Internet.
I really don't believe that the US as a country is "running the show" so much as preventing others from doing so. As to whether ICANN is structured in a fair and practical manner, well, that's a whole different argument. And of course there remains the whole issue of "fair" vs. "effective"--right now those two are not necessarily one and the same.
Define "control".
It's not so simple as "US vs. rest of world"--it's a balance between "how much do you trust the US to be a fair custodian" vs. "how much do you trust an organization giving weight to what Libya and South Africa and Papua New Guinea want to be a fair custodian".
As far as I'm concerned, having an organization in the US, with some involvement by the US government, "running" things is not a great solution but a lot less worse than, say, whatever the ITU would come up with.
That said, remember that the Internet works on the principle of routing around failure. Neither the UN nor ICANN nor the US government are known as organizations which always work quickly, logically, unbureaucratically and in the best interests of both their constituents and the greater community at large.
The "US", aside from a few fun Internic fuckups in the 1990s, didn't ever "turn off the Internet" or come up with idiotic international requirements. Carnivore? Try enforcing that in France. Nobody's stopping me from using encryption between Ghana and Mongolia. I wouldn't, however, put it past some atechnical third world level 50 career bureaucrat to come up with something stupid wthich might try to do just that.
Not that it'll ever work, but it'll just create more work for everyone. Another thing I'd like to see pro-UN-control folks to ask themselves honestly would be "is this just a pure control question"? I hate to say it, but like Magellan, anyone can always build their own...
You want the Auditor Collection CD and a decent directional antenna, such as a Cantenna or, if you have some cash, something by Huber & Suhner. Auditor is, by a far stretch, the best wireless security tools collection out there--it's a great complement to something like Knoppix-STD.
A Fluke Can help regarding signal strength, but the built-in antennas generally aren't great for spotting directions. They can help you start delimiting a general area without having you look like an idiot walking around with a laptop, though.
Also you may want to consider a Bumblebee -- I've seen one of these in use at PacSecWest, and it did a pretty good job finding transmitters. It's also a lot smaller than either a Fluke or a laptop.
If you're on a budget, try something like a Digital Hotspotter, although I wouldn't recommend this particular company due to delivery problems.
1) Fashion the explosives into artificial limbs (if possible) and have amputee suicide bombers wear them on the plane -- being sure to sit next to a window in the cabin for obvious reasons....
...Which bomb-sniffers, X-Rays and physical inspections can deal with just fine.
:-)
3) The simple, elegant solution involving explosives and the use of that small hidden place all women have (for the most part) if you know what I mean....
Yeah, but then they'll just start looking out for women in Burqas who are walking around the airport funny, sweating and with these strained looks on their faces.
You forgot one visible set of countermeasures: USE MORE BOLD FONT. That will TERRIFY the TERRORISTS into UTTER BAWLING SUBMISSION.
That way you'll only be inconvenienced by a libel/slander lawsuit if the bank is so inclined
From TFA (or TF Post, or whatever):
"(the bank is a US bank, I am not a US citizen)"
Last thing I checked, US civil judgments still weren't enforceable abroad. Slander away, Mr. Sulu...
However, complaining about playing 10-player LAN games on a 64-player map seems a bit odd
Easy answer--because part of the whole allure of Battlefield {1942,Vietnam,2} is that it's built around large maps and vehicles.
For 10-player maps, I'd rather play CS or a similar small-group head to head game--there are plenty of these around. I like Battlefield because it introduces a greater factor of randomness into the game; 1-2 super '1337 kiddies can't dominate, because there's too much teamplay and coordination required in a good round for a highly skilled lone wolf to significantly affect game outcome. Tanks require infantry support, planes require AA support, battleships need subs, etc. Especially in BF2, which introduces the whole squad concept, this really stands out.
Sorry, Forgotten Hope.
It's an utterly fantastic mod--one of my favorites so far. A lot of effort went into making it very realistic, and the skins/models are superb.
Basically, it's a WWII history enthusiast's dream. My experience with it has also been very good, as I've played mainly on the HSLAN server, which has a generally more mature level of play due to good admins.
I strongly recommend giving it a go--it makes BF1942 looks like a comic book.
Hell, at least Battlefield 2 will let you play on a lan or single player without authenticating back to the mothership.
Yeah but try playing on a 32+ player server without the ridiculous "ranked" unique online ID crap (which won't even let you have spaces in your name--wtf?) For some reason I'm not too keen on 10-player LAN games in a game that's built for what, 64?
In any case, I'm waiting for FH2 to come out; FH already blew BF1942 out of the water, and FH2 promises to do the same for BF2--and according to rumors, even without the online unique ID/ranking nonsense.
You are both correct, to a degree.
The problem with "fine print" is that it is used as a blank check by both sides of many common consumer transactions, much in the way as a shrink-wrap EULA is. There's the "caveat emptor", fuck off if you are too lazy approach, and the "I have a right to be mollycoddled" way of looking at it.
The former leads to fairly egregious and legally unsupportable abuses of the contract model, while the second tends to result in massive restrictions on your freedom to use common sense (because he might not read the fine print, and could sue us later) and, well, laziness on the part of the population at large.
It's probably idealistically naive to preach that companies should act responsibly, and customers ought to use their common sense. Or even have common sense. However, no matter what the fine print says, you should always remember: Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball!
Don't ask questions which the web could answer - you should already know.
:-)
Well, duh
Seriously, I think we agree on this--that's what I was trying to get across.
But none of this says an employer is obligated to "sell" to a candidate.
Not in the least, but remember, there's a reason the employment market is called just that, a "market". Standard rules of supply and demand apply. An employer isn't obligated to give you coffee, to have the interviewer show up on time, to offer a signing bonus, whatnot either. Depending on how much they want you, though, that might just be a wise course of action for them to pursue.
And as usual, it's up to you to understand how desirable you are to them, and how much you want the job.
You appear to be mistaking "cherry picking" and "finding out about the company." Generally, a good interview consists of a candidate saying "hi, here I am, now what can I do for you?" being given some preliminary information about the job, spending time answering questions and talking about himself when asked to do so. Then, when asked whether he has any questions, ask about the company, and maybe salary/benefits/whatever.
your first responsiblity is to sell yourself to the company, THEN decide whether or not the company is a good fit for you
You also appear to be confusing "pfft, I = t3h r0xx0r, justify the time I'm taking for this interview" with asking a company to show why they are good, why you should work for them, why they are great, etc. Funny enough, every interview of the many I've been in (I used to do this quite a lot to "keep in practice" before taking up consulting) in has confirmed this. It may surprise a lot of people that there _are_ ways of doing this that don't come across as snotty.
Once you've got the job, it's decidedly too late to find out that the place is junk--there are some pretty basic signals that are easy to spot during an interview. As a qualified candidate, my time is as valuable as an HR person's, but I'm counting on a professional dialogue to let both of us decide whether we're right for each other. That said, if you've found it to be a good approach for you to be entirely submissive and accepting of whatever a company deigns to give you, great. I've done a shitload of interviews for high-impact positions, including for consulting clients of mine (!) and neither I nor any of my colleagues ever gave a thumbs-up to anyone who didn't ask intelligent, penetrating questions about the position and the company.
Ask an HR person experienced with interviewing qualified staff (NOT a recruiter) sometime how much it costs to hire someone, and how much a company loses by having a disgruntled employee quit halfway during their probation period. You may be surprised.
Whoa, temporary failure of html fu there. Append one end italics, sorry.
(My mom runs a professional search firm, so I sort of know what I'm talking about):
Nup, it's a two-way process. You ask about them, they ask about two. If you receive an unsolicited invite, there's an implication that they are more interested in you than vice versa, thereby putting the onus on them to sell the job to you. They can still ask you you "confirmation" type questions once you've expressed interest, but it is up to them to bring this up diplomatically.
Naturally, if you apply for the job, or if the market's really down (which usually leads to you being the applicant anyway) they have more leverage; however, there are a lot of subtle nicenesses that recruiters have to engage in. If you're especially bright or high-profile, you have way more leverage to tell an "arrogant" sounding company to sod off; however, even a complete n00b trainee should expect to be "sold" the company somehow.
Sorkin sounds a bit touchy about it, but it's perfectly possible for a company to screw up an interview (and with it their chances of getting someone bright in the door), just as you can duff it by coming across as a demanding, arrogant prick.
Ah right. Here you go then.
(bravely handing GypC a napkin to show I'm not a coward)
What, a napkin?