Bought used parts at Eli Heffron & Sons in Cambridge. Loaded RT-11 F/B. Dual 8 inch floppies for unlimited storage! Electricity was much cheaper back then. (ca 1982). Ran for about 3 years before I broke down and bought one of those Charlie Chaplin computers.
First of all, 100% agree that there should never ever be any blocking of a WiFi signal.
What should Marriott do if they find that there is a WiFi broadcasting as "Marriott Guest" inside their building that is not one of their connections (i.e. imitating the service they provide to their guests but presumably set up that way to facilitate some nefarious purpose?) - Are they permitted to take action? - If not, who can?
It's not all Pennsylvania. Jim Carville once very accurately described the electorate of Pennsylvania... as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between.
Because I have a secret ID that I can't show anyway. And the authorization to carry it is secret, too.
OK... we'll compromise. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
The theory may be good, but remember that the implementation is by goons who didn't get much beyond the third or fourth grade developmentally. Working the McDonald's behind the checkpoint pays better... and provides more training.
It's already pretty common practice to limit the size of corporate email to about 3 months worth of emails... anything beyond that is deleted. Ostensibly, this is a disk quota, but the push is from legal departments that are slammed with hundreds of fishing expeditions into corporate emails every month. The time and effort required to pull and organize all of the data from a request to search all electronic records for any mention of "Product Frobozz" is not trivial. Doing it several times per day for different requests is costing millions. Policies are put in place to prevent people from maintaining their own archives, off the corporate servers, so that everything can be searched using automated tools. Every document, electronic or paper, has an "expiration date". After that, it's to be destroyed. Only a very few records that need to be kept for legal or regulatory compliance are kept in a secure, indexed corporate archive.
This is not about being "confronted with old memos". It's about containing the costs of complying with legal fishing expeditions. Just be a business with money in the bank, and the lawyers will file papers to see what they can shake loose. The cost of complying with all the requests is often enough to push small businesses to settle because they don't have the resources to run all the queries.
Deposit it in the bin marked "In case of electronic system failure or challenge, open this bin and count by hand."
99.8% of the time we'll agree to use the electronic count... same as ATMs. However, there's always a good thing to have that little bit of backup just in case...
Require a deposit to do the hand count. If it's within... whatever... 0.5% of the electronic count, the government keeps your deposit, if the count is off by more than a small margin like that (or the recount changes the result of the election being contested), you get your deposit refunded from a grateful public.
I've learned one rule over the years... "No bucks, no Buck Rogers." Funding makes the technology happen. While the salaries of the scientists and technicians are significant, equipment, space, supplies, overhead all cost significant money and that investment won't pay off for years, if at all, so the cost of the financing and the risk premiums are also large. A couple of fields are supported by government largesse or charity, but most technology is developed for commercial benefit, so at some level money is THE reason for doing the work.
I did 2 bachelors and my masters at MIT in 4 years and luckily enough, took some time working in the world before going any further. I discovered that if you really wanted to change something, the decision to do it was going to be made at a management level, not just because the technology said we could. [For the results of something that contains all the technologically possible without doing management trade-offs, c.f. Microsoft Office] I worked at a biotech startup, employee #55, as the computer department (my degree was biochemical engineering). I saw enough silly decisions from a technical standpoint (CEO at the time was a former Pepsi Marketing manager!), that I determined that learning how to integrate a real technical evaluation with the financial decisions was the only way to get the right things done. I went on and did the MBA , and it's been a great ride helping bring a scientific perspective to the decision making around technology. Progress is being made in getting the decision process improved, but we still have a long way to go.
Note the fine print. Politicians can still call you to solicit votes, funds, or do polling. Newspapers are exempted too, as are many media outlets that give Politicians free publicity.
Eventually more telemarketing businesses will figure out a legal bribery system and water down this type of law further. It's still the best law money can buy.
It's a technical problem, use a technical solution. Legal remedies will be temporary and incomplete.
As usual with media companies and politics, there are the public pronouncements and then there are the real reasons that "something needs to be done." It's all about protecting incumbents. Incumbents need to be assured that they can get their ads and news coverage to the target population. This is done by: - Ensuring that the target audience does not switch to watching a different feed, and gets local advertising. - Ensuring that local media outlets have their sources of funding protected by their local incumbent legislators... and that everyone knows who's back to scratch and when. - Ensuring that debates on issues contain local spin to the advantage of the local incumbent.... the extreme example being that showing California's anti smoking ads to North Carolina tobacco farmers might provoke a similar reaction to the English Midlands' textile workers to the pleas of Mohandas Ghandi. There's too much money to be made by keeping the differences between people.
You know, this reminds me that the minister at church gets my name and my father's name mixed up all the time. As my father is head of the church council and signs his paycheck, you'd think he'd be able to keep things straight, but he's got alot of people to keep track of... and I know the computer system at church is inadequate... I set it up almost 20 years ago and I think there's been about one hardware upgrade since then.
But I digress. There are two issues in your note that are very interesting: scope of "public" and errors.
On scope... what do I care about what other people think? What I think of myself is important, then my family, then my various communities (civic, congregation, professional) and then the world in general. These groups are not aligned in what is considered "good" or "normal". It is up to me to decide and take a stand for what I think is right. I may change my mind as I learn and grow, and I may change my mind as the world changes. There are lots of things that go on in my neighborhood that the big world doesn't consider normal [hence the tourists that come to look at the buggies]. I've seen lots of ways of living around the world that I wouldn't want to participate in either.
The information about me could be wrong. There's an old homily about "Live your life so that when someone says something bad about you, no one will believe it." That's not a statement about conformance. It's a statement that the best way to deal with wrong information is to supply lots of right information. Some people will still misunderstand, but do I really have to care about the thoughts an idiot has about me?
Use of information to abuse and humiliate... well, you don't need information to do that. Any prejudice will do. We need to limit the power of government generally so this becomes less of an issue. We also need to promote a culture of reason, balance, and tolerance that will defend all from the attacks of the ignorant and ill-spirited.
Let's answer a basic and ancient question. What transactions are public, and what transactions are private?
As for Senator McCain's query... anything done in the public square, such as running for office, or funding someone running for office, is public and available. Anyone thinking that computers are a new threat to spread this information further and faster has never lived in a small town.
Taking that free public information and putting it into a more usable format (XML for example) or combining information from multiple sources adds value to that information and there is no problem compensating someone for adding this value. In effect, you're not paying for the data, but for making the data more useful.
Consider the town market... still not extinct. I still go to one run by Amish and Mennonite farmers who are as jealous of their privacy as they are uninterested in computers.
When I buy a slice of ham, I appreciate the convenience when the butcher knows I want the maple cure and low salt. He's told me when he's out of what I usually get, and will suggest other things I might be interested in. Yes, he remembers me from week to week, along with thousands of other people. I don't consider my taste in meat to be terribly private.
I'm sure he has a hand signal to his brother to indicate that I've just bought ham, because I can usually barely turn around before his niece is there to guide me over to pick up some eggs. Now once in awhile I'd like to skip the eggs to cut down on my cholesterol, but this young lady is so polite and demure when she greets me and asks how I am, and could she show me over to the eggs... The only way my cholesterol will go down is when she gets married and starts working somewhere else.
Is my privacy on these transactions compromised? Of course. If I found this to be a problem I wouldn't shop there. In exchange for giving up this privacy I receive high quality goods and low prices, along with a sense of community (I've been going to markets like this since I was in a stroller).
What I have to accept is that what I do in the town market is public. Any or all of the merchants there can exchange information about me (Gerry... Der Englisher mit the red jacket and golden beaver ring) and there's nothing I can do about it. They could even sell that information to the local gym or cardiologist and collect money on the referral, and there's nothing for me to say about it.
in the middle category, we'd have to include an Expresso maker.
http://www.cooking.com/products/shprodde.asp?SKU=1 18313
We both knew a biotech type fellow who we would watch in fascination each morning as he would carefully adjust the controls for flow and temperature until it was perfect. I think he was actually trying to crystalize the pure caffeine on the lip of the cup. A techie toy that's also recursive... the more you play with it, the more caffeine you have, inspiring you to play with it even more!
The credit industry is owed a few by congress. They've been stuck with a rather bad situation the past few years. One of the few debts you can't get out of paying in bankruptcy is your taxes. The government always gets its money. Did you know you can now pay your income tax via credit card? And if you can't pay your bill, the card company gets stuck... not the feds? And therefore you CAN get your tax debt forgiven in a bankruptcy? Not that any of the million or so bankruptcies every year actually used this loophole... nope... there's probably still one or two bankruptcy lawyers out there somewhere who don't recommend this strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for it if I get 62 additional frequent flyer miles in the deal.
Bought used parts at Eli Heffron & Sons in Cambridge. Loaded RT-11 F/B. Dual 8 inch floppies for unlimited storage!
Electricity was much cheaper back then. (ca 1982). Ran for about 3 years before I broke down and bought one of those Charlie Chaplin computers.
First of all, 100% agree that there should never ever be any blocking of a WiFi signal.
What should Marriott do if they find that there is a WiFi broadcasting as "Marriott Guest" inside their building that is not one of their connections (i.e. imitating the service they provide to their guests but presumably set up that way to facilitate some nefarious purpose?)
- Are they permitted to take action?
- If not, who can?
It's not all Pennsylvania. Jim Carville once very accurately described the electorate of Pennsylvania... as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between.
Because I have a secret ID that I can't show anyway. And the authorization to carry it is secret, too.
OK... we'll compromise. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
The theory may be good, but remember that the implementation is by goons who didn't get much beyond the third or fourth grade developmentally. Working the McDonald's behind the checkpoint pays better... and provides more training.
It's already pretty common practice to limit the size of corporate email to about 3 months worth of emails... anything beyond that is deleted. Ostensibly, this is a disk quota, but the push is from legal departments that are slammed with hundreds of fishing expeditions into corporate emails every month.
The time and effort required to pull and organize all of the data from a request to search all electronic records for any mention of "Product Frobozz" is not trivial. Doing it several times per day for different requests is costing millions.
Policies are put in place to prevent people from maintaining their own archives, off the corporate servers, so that everything can be searched using automated tools.
Every document, electronic or paper, has an "expiration date". After that, it's to be destroyed. Only a very few records that need to be kept for legal or regulatory compliance are kept in a secure, indexed corporate archive.
This is not about being "confronted with old memos". It's about containing the costs of complying with legal fishing expeditions. Just be a business with money in the bank, and the lawyers will file papers to see what they can shake loose. The cost of complying with all the requests is often enough to push small businesses to settle because they don't have the resources to run all the queries.
Deposit it in the bin marked "In case of electronic system failure or challenge, open this bin and count by hand."
... whatever... 0.5% of the electronic count, the government keeps your deposit, if the count is off by more than a small margin like that (or the recount changes the result of the election being contested), you get your deposit refunded from a grateful public.
99.8% of the time we'll agree to use the electronic count... same as ATMs. However, there's always a good thing to have that little bit of backup just in case...
Require a deposit to do the hand count. If it's within
It reflects what we value as a society.
Write a catchy tune, and you can collect royalties for life plus 70 years.
Invent the cure for cancer, and your patent is good for 20 years, 12 of which are eaten up during the time it takes to do regulatory compliance work.
Shoulda' learned to play guitar, Shoulda' learned to bang them drums.....
I've learned one rule over the years... "No bucks, no Buck Rogers." Funding makes the technology happen. While the salaries of the scientists and technicians are significant, equipment, space, supplies, overhead all cost significant money and that investment won't pay off for years, if at all, so the cost of the financing and the risk premiums are also large. A couple of fields are supported by government largesse or charity, but most technology is developed for commercial benefit, so at some level money is THE reason for doing the work.
I did 2 bachelors and my masters at MIT in 4 years and luckily enough, took some time working in the world before going any further. I discovered that if you really wanted to change something, the decision to do it was going to be made at a management level, not just because the technology said we could. [For the results of something that contains all the technologically possible without doing management trade-offs, c.f. Microsoft Office]
I worked at a biotech startup, employee #55, as the computer department (my degree was biochemical engineering). I saw enough silly decisions from a technical standpoint (CEO at the time was a former Pepsi Marketing manager!), that I determined that learning how to integrate a real technical evaluation with the financial decisions was the only way to get the right things done.
I went on and did the MBA , and it's been a great ride helping bring a scientific perspective to the decision making around technology.
Progress is being made in getting the decision process improved, but we still have a long way to go.
I asked the master, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
He handed me a disk.
I could not read it in my machine.
Note the fine print.
Politicians can still call you to solicit votes, funds, or do polling.
Newspapers are exempted too, as are many media outlets that give Politicians free publicity.
Eventually more telemarketing businesses will figure out a legal bribery system and water down this type of law further. It's still the best law money can buy.
It's a technical problem, use a technical solution. Legal remedies will be temporary and incomplete.
As usual with media companies and politics, there are the public pronouncements and then there are the real reasons that "something needs to be done."
It's all about protecting incumbents. Incumbents need to be assured that they can get their ads and news coverage to the target population. This is done by:
- Ensuring that the target audience does not switch to watching a different feed, and gets local advertising.
- Ensuring that local media outlets have their sources of funding protected by their local incumbent legislators... and that everyone knows who's back to scratch and when.
- Ensuring that debates on issues contain local spin to the advantage of the local incumbent.... the extreme example being that showing California's anti smoking ads to North Carolina tobacco farmers might provoke a similar reaction to the English Midlands' textile workers to the pleas of Mohandas Ghandi. There's too much money to be made by keeping the differences between people.
End of today's Dennis Miller impression.
You know, this reminds me that the minister at church gets my name and my father's name mixed up all the time. As my father is head of the church council and signs his paycheck, you'd think he'd be able to keep things straight, but he's got alot of people to keep track of... and I know the computer system at church is inadequate... I set it up almost 20 years ago and I think there's been about one hardware upgrade since then. But I digress. There are two issues in your note that are very interesting: scope of "public" and errors. On scope... what do I care about what other people think? What I think of myself is important, then my family, then my various communities (civic, congregation, professional) and then the world in general. These groups are not aligned in what is considered "good" or "normal". It is up to me to decide and take a stand for what I think is right. I may change my mind as I learn and grow, and I may change my mind as the world changes. There are lots of things that go on in my neighborhood that the big world doesn't consider normal [hence the tourists that come to look at the buggies]. I've seen lots of ways of living around the world that I wouldn't want to participate in either. The information about me could be wrong. There's an old homily about "Live your life so that when someone says something bad about you, no one will believe it." That's not a statement about conformance. It's a statement that the best way to deal with wrong information is to supply lots of right information. Some people will still misunderstand, but do I really have to care about the thoughts an idiot has about me? Use of information to abuse and humiliate... well, you don't need information to do that. Any prejudice will do. We need to limit the power of government generally so this becomes less of an issue. We also need to promote a culture of reason, balance, and tolerance that will defend all from the attacks of the ignorant and ill-spirited.
Let's answer a basic and ancient question. What transactions are public, and what transactions are private? As for Senator McCain's query... anything done in the public square, such as running for office, or funding someone running for office, is public and available. Anyone thinking that computers are a new threat to spread this information further and faster has never lived in a small town. Taking that free public information and putting it into a more usable format (XML for example) or combining information from multiple sources adds value to that information and there is no problem compensating someone for adding this value. In effect, you're not paying for the data, but for making the data more useful. Consider the town market... still not extinct. I still go to one run by Amish and Mennonite farmers who are as jealous of their privacy as they are uninterested in computers. When I buy a slice of ham, I appreciate the convenience when the butcher knows I want the maple cure and low salt. He's told me when he's out of what I usually get, and will suggest other things I might be interested in. Yes, he remembers me from week to week, along with thousands of other people. I don't consider my taste in meat to be terribly private. I'm sure he has a hand signal to his brother to indicate that I've just bought ham, because I can usually barely turn around before his niece is there to guide me over to pick up some eggs. Now once in awhile I'd like to skip the eggs to cut down on my cholesterol, but this young lady is so polite and demure when she greets me and asks how I am, and could she show me over to the eggs... The only way my cholesterol will go down is when she gets married and starts working somewhere else. Is my privacy on these transactions compromised? Of course. If I found this to be a problem I wouldn't shop there. In exchange for giving up this privacy I receive high quality goods and low prices, along with a sense of community (I've been going to markets like this since I was in a stroller). What I have to accept is that what I do in the town market is public. Any or all of the merchants there can exchange information about me (Gerry... Der Englisher mit the red jacket and golden beaver ring) and there's nothing I can do about it. They could even sell that information to the local gym or cardiologist and collect money on the referral, and there's nothing for me to say about it.
in the middle category, we'd have to include an Expresso maker. http://www.cooking.com/products/shprodde.asp?SKU=1 18313
We both knew a biotech type fellow who we would watch in fascination each morning as he would carefully adjust the controls for flow and temperature until it was perfect. I think he was actually trying to crystalize the pure caffeine on the lip of the cup. A techie toy that's also recursive... the more you play with it, the more caffeine you have, inspiring you to play with it even more!
The credit industry is owed a few by congress. They've been stuck with a rather bad situation the past few years.
One of the few debts you can't get out of paying in bankruptcy is your taxes. The government always gets its money.
Did you know you can now pay your income tax via credit card? And if you can't pay your bill, the card company gets stuck... not the feds? And therefore you CAN get your tax debt forgiven in a bankruptcy?
Not that any of the million or so bankruptcies every year actually used this loophole... nope... there's probably still one or two bankruptcy lawyers out there somewhere who don't recommend this strategy.