I'm pretty sure this is how it worked at the University I worked for, although I left before even dialup IP was widespread.
But we did have a giant Appletalk internetwork and a friend and I always wondered how much campus infamy we could create by printing smut all over campus through all of the many LaserWriters visible on the the Appletalk network.
The downside was that printing was relatively slow and while waiting to print I think you could see some kind of computername and zone name of the user who was currently printing, making it uncomfortably non-anonymous. We didn't know of any way to schedule or script printing jobs, either on MacOS v6 computers, so doing it off hours when there was less chance of someone wondering who was using their printer wasn't an option, either.
What's surprising is that we don't hear about this happening very often with IP printers. Either most are firewalled or nobody has thought to do it. Although you would think that the same idiots behind fax spamming would have considered this as well.
I've often toyed with the idea of making my printer publicly printable -- toss 5 sheets of paper in the tray, enable it for a few days and see what happens. My general fear has been rather than get someone's screed or porn, I would just get 5 pages of garbage printed due to printer language issues.
Of course it would make sense that someone would evolve the VC strategy beyond the notion of developing a "crazy idea" into a successful business and instead look at it as a way to crank money out in 5 years or less.
I suppose it might be argued that by 5 years if you're not able to be a sustainable business then your idea really wasn't that great anyway, and the capital is better directed at the next idea rather than wasted on the next 5 years of not making it.
Volvos, at least in Minnesota, used to carry a kind of progressive smugness about them. We used to call them the official car of the socialist state because it was hard to spot a 240 without a Carter/Mondale/anti-Nuke sticker on the back.
Yeah, well, you guys are just getting started on mass shootings and we've been doing them for fucking decades. When Charles Whitman was blasting people from the University of Texas tower, you guys couldn't even organize a proper sports riot.
Now we've got so many mass shootings they barely make it above the fold of the paper. You guys have one and you make it seem like it's a big fucking deal. Get over yourselves.
....two weeks ago at the Apple store (iSight camera replacement).
It was like 2-3 hour turnaround, and I left my phone at the store and drove home and then drove back later when it was finished.
I think this is a pretty stupid concept unless it's totally supplementary/optional to having a fob of some sort. My existing Volvo keyless drive fob has an actual key that can be pulled out. I only ever use it to activate the valet lock (locks the glove box and trunk), but if I recall what they told me when I picked it up it can also unlock the driver's door and somehow allow you to start the car, too.
I like the keyless drive setup and can't begin to see how a smartphone app would be more convenient than either a pushbutton fob or even analog keys. The last thing I want to do in -20F is fuck around with my phone and ungloved hand to unlock the damn car.
I always marveled at the ability of VCs to dump metric tons of money into something that usually has no business plan (and no, "get bought by Google!!OMG!!11!!" is not really a practical business plan).
Isn't some of this that they *know* the startup has no business plan? I always thought they were more or less shopping for clever ideas and that part of the VC investment was applying some semblance of business discipline, both to help actually get the clever idea turned into an actual profitable venture and to make sure their money doesn't get spent on bespoke custom Nerf weapons, strippers or otherwise totally flushed down the toilet.
I'm sure a lot of startups are completely worthless ideas, but I would bet that there are some that are actually valuable but die off because the people behind them have absolutely no business sense at all.
I tend to agree that debt as measured by picture fiscal policy isn't a significant risk.
What I find at risk in the economy is any sense of wage growth or the ability of the economy to sustain something like a middle class. My gut instinct is that historically, political economies tend towards plutocracies where significant control is in the hands of a small number of very rich people. A political economy with a viable democracy, a middle class and socioeconomic mobility are unusual byproducts of a set of uncommon historical circumstances and are easily eroded by concentrations of wealth that lead to concentrations of political power.
Sustaining democracy and a middle-class centric political economy requires significant regulation to maintain them, much like the useful work of a machine requires significant regulation to keep it running. Without that regulation, entropy sets in.
What do you bet there's part of this agreement that requires Microsoft to NOT make it commercially available to anyone but PRC government-approved customers.
This would provide whatever nominal security-through-obscurity value not having easy access to it would provide (admittedly small), but it would also give the Chinese government monopoly control over who could develop software for it. For all we know, it could have a built-in whitelist-only capability that only runs applications and drivers with signed with PRC keys.
And it's probably only available in Chinese language editions, too.
Yes, it's the spinning. The first time I rode "Mission to Mars" I picked the "intense" flavor of the ride and the spinning very nearly had me losing my lunch. Fortunately I paid attention to the instructions that said to focus on the display, but for the half-second or so I drifted away from it I nearly puked.
Must have been what turned Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch. He refused to accept having his name truncated and kept entering it despite the abuse he took.
It does make you wonder if you gave the NSA the equivalent of a blank check and said "nuke the spammers" -- if this means taking entire data centers offline, DO IT.
Could they? Between their intelligence on system flaws and no doubt mapping every shady hosting center and possible hacking source, I might expect they could, but maybe not. Maybe too much of it is compromised desktop PCs and legions of residential/business bots for even the NSA to deal with.
I would assume that you wouldn't want to ban burners because the set of burners is smaller than the set of all cell phones. I don't know if this is possible, but I would also assume that in their quiet, money-grubbing and totalitarian-enabling way, the telecommunications companies would be able to provide a list of IMEIs and other identifying features associated with "burners".
Basically, it wouldn't seem to hard for the surveillance state to obtain all the information necessary to scrutinize burner devices, which means they can use fewer resources scanning the larger pool of non-burner devices.
Ban burners, and you've prevented the people you want to monitor from self-sorting themselves into a smaller pool by using burners.
I made "Charles Palentine for President" bumper stickers (magnets), complete with the "_We_ are the people".
Some people asked me who he was. I told them he was a senator running for President, but that he was a long shot not many people had heard of, but if elected he would clean up the city.
A much smaller number of people realized it was the "candidate" shown in the the movie Taxi Driver and an even smaller number got the fact that I used the mis-emphasized slogan that Albert Brooks complains about earlier in the film.
What's creepy is that the "candidate" running against Palentine in the movie has a slogan of "Make America Great" (you can see it in the background in one of the early cafeteria scenes where Travis Bickle meets up with the other cab drivers).
I take my watch off to go through security at the airport and when I have sex. I'm married and I seldom travel.
In my opinion, battery life should be measured against quartz watches -- years. Or compared to my self-winding Tag or my Seiko solar quartz -- never, bounded by my lifetime.
Until then I don't see the utility. I've learned to ignore my smartphone -- I have all but the narrowest list of VIPs set to provide any notifications and keep it muted and on vibrate all the time, so I'm not interested in glancing at my watch to find out what the latest distraction is.
Plus, cost versus obsolescence? My Tag was an expensive gift, but it will also last my lifetime and never stop working because battery or vendor or software. Same with my Seiko. Any "smart watch" will be obsolete in a couple of years, which seems like a lot to spend for something you just know will be unsupported and unusable.
No different at private, for-profit businesses. The same skinflints are in charge, with a mindset that IT products are just like normal durable goods that don't wear out until their moving parts actually break and have no software obsolescence that renders them unusable in spite of their age.
I've found that they will almost paradoxically spend high amounts on labor to maintain old hardware and software environments versus replacing them with cheaper to operate products, but they will still complain.
"The food is terrible, and the portions were too small."
It may have been a paranoid fantasy 15 years ago, but how do you know it wasn't going on then, too?
You would think that the idea of infecting computer hardware, firmware or installed software with built in backdoors would have been thought of and tried years ago, especially as multiuser or timesharing systems grew where terminals were distributed into lower security areas or had remote dialup access.
All of this reminds me of the movie "The Conversation", which is a great study in surveillance paranoia.
Since you seem to know a lot about it and I just finished reading Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul", I'm curious where all these "Celts" came from.
It seems that a lot of the problems the Romans had in Gaul, whether during Caesar's campaign or in the Cimbrian wars involved mass migrations of peoples from Germanic areas. These people seem like they were displaced from somewhere and their movement through fairly well settled areas set off lots of conflict.
I think Caesar himself implied that the Veneti had a lot of contact with the Britons and it seems likely that there was probably some cross-pollination between those "Celts" and the Britons.
They could add a secure lock mode, where if you affirmatively press the lock button on the keyfob, the car will require an affirmative unlock press on the keyfob and not unlock based on the "presence" of the keyfob.
I also wonder why they couldn't have some means of shutting off the radio in the keyfob so it didn't produce a signal that could be relayed to the car. Maybe a motion sensor in the keyfob that when it wasn't moved for a period of time would shut off its radio completely until enough movement woke it up.
If you haven't owned a car with keyless drive like this, you can't imagine how convenient it is to just walk up to locked car, open the door and drive away without digging out a ring of keys.
I can go days without ever taking my keys out of my coat pocket.
How do you handle the culturally/religiously driven self-motivated lack of engagement?
"We want to engage more, but your society is full of things that are forbidden by our religion. Your women are immodest, your media is full of blasphemous imagery, your employers will not change their business practices to allow us unimpeded practice of our religion. We can't live as our religion says we should unless you change your culture to accommodate our beliefs. Therefore we find comfort in our own neighborhoods where we can live in greater accordance with our beliefs."
Basically, there is a lot of self-segregation going on and a certain resentment that the host country won't change to accommodate their religious beliefs. This seems to end up leading to a perception of discrimination and probably harms second and further generation offspring who might otherwise more easily assimilate.
I agree that many of the problems are associated with Islam, but there is the counterfactual argument that holds that states like Indonesia and Malaysia while having large Muslim populations don't seem to have much of a terrorism base and contribute very little to the problem of Islamic terrorism.
It really seems to be a problem associated with the Islam spanning North Africa to the Middle East, so it would seem that there's an Arabic political and cultural element to it that combines with Islam and makes it hard to differentiate whether the problems of terrorism are outgrowths of that region's politics or if there's some theological basis to Islam that motivates the politics.
It does seem that there is kind of war between Islamic sects for "control" over Islam that contributes greatly to the problem, with state sponsorship of all manner of militias and religious movements contributing to the problem, whether materially or even theologically.
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I'm pretty sure this is how it worked at the University I worked for, although I left before even dialup IP was widespread.
But we did have a giant Appletalk internetwork and a friend and I always wondered how much campus infamy we could create by printing smut all over campus through all of the many LaserWriters visible on the the Appletalk network.
The downside was that printing was relatively slow and while waiting to print I think you could see some kind of computername and zone name of the user who was currently printing, making it uncomfortably non-anonymous. We didn't know of any way to schedule or script printing jobs, either on MacOS v6 computers, so doing it off hours when there was less chance of someone wondering who was using their printer wasn't an option, either.
What's surprising is that we don't hear about this happening very often with IP printers. Either most are firewalled or nobody has thought to do it. Although you would think that the same idiots behind fax spamming would have considered this as well.
I've often toyed with the idea of making my printer publicly printable -- toss 5 sheets of paper in the tray, enable it for a few days and see what happens. My general fear has been rather than get someone's screed or porn, I would just get 5 pages of garbage printed due to printer language issues.
Of course it would make sense that someone would evolve the VC strategy beyond the notion of developing a "crazy idea" into a successful business and instead look at it as a way to crank money out in 5 years or less.
I suppose it might be argued that by 5 years if you're not able to be a sustainable business then your idea really wasn't that great anyway, and the capital is better directed at the next idea rather than wasted on the next 5 years of not making it.
Volvos, at least in Minnesota, used to carry a kind of progressive smugness about them. We used to call them the official car of the socialist state because it was hard to spot a 240 without a Carter/Mondale/anti-Nuke sticker on the back.
Yeah, well, you guys are just getting started on mass shootings and we've been doing them for fucking decades. When Charles Whitman was blasting people from the University of Texas tower, you guys couldn't even organize a proper sports riot.
Now we've got so many mass shootings they barely make it above the fold of the paper. You guys have one and you make it seem like it's a big fucking deal. Get over yourselves.
....two weeks ago at the Apple store (iSight camera replacement).
It was like 2-3 hour turnaround, and I left my phone at the store and drove home and then drove back later when it was finished.
I think this is a pretty stupid concept unless it's totally supplementary/optional to having a fob of some sort. My existing Volvo keyless drive fob has an actual key that can be pulled out. I only ever use it to activate the valet lock (locks the glove box and trunk), but if I recall what they told me when I picked it up it can also unlock the driver's door and somehow allow you to start the car, too.
I like the keyless drive setup and can't begin to see how a smartphone app would be more convenient than either a pushbutton fob or even analog keys. The last thing I want to do in -20F is fuck around with my phone and ungloved hand to unlock the damn car.
I always marveled at the ability of VCs to dump metric tons of money into something that usually has no business plan (and no, "get bought by Google!!OMG!!11!!" is not really a practical business plan).
Isn't some of this that they *know* the startup has no business plan? I always thought they were more or less shopping for clever ideas and that part of the VC investment was applying some semblance of business discipline, both to help actually get the clever idea turned into an actual profitable venture and to make sure their money doesn't get spent on bespoke custom Nerf weapons, strippers or otherwise totally flushed down the toilet.
I'm sure a lot of startups are completely worthless ideas, but I would bet that there are some that are actually valuable but die off because the people behind them have absolutely no business sense at all.
I tend to agree that debt as measured by picture fiscal policy isn't a significant risk.
What I find at risk in the economy is any sense of wage growth or the ability of the economy to sustain something like a middle class. My gut instinct is that historically, political economies tend towards plutocracies where significant control is in the hands of a small number of very rich people. A political economy with a viable democracy, a middle class and socioeconomic mobility are unusual byproducts of a set of uncommon historical circumstances and are easily eroded by concentrations of wealth that lead to concentrations of political power.
Sustaining democracy and a middle-class centric political economy requires significant regulation to maintain them, much like the useful work of a machine requires significant regulation to keep it running. Without that regulation, entropy sets in.
What do you bet there's part of this agreement that requires Microsoft to NOT make it commercially available to anyone but PRC government-approved customers.
This would provide whatever nominal security-through-obscurity value not having easy access to it would provide (admittedly small), but it would also give the Chinese government monopoly control over who could develop software for it. For all we know, it could have a built-in whitelist-only capability that only runs applications and drivers with signed with PRC keys.
And it's probably only available in Chinese language editions, too.
Yes, it's the spinning. The first time I rode "Mission to Mars" I picked the "intense" flavor of the ride and the spinning very nearly had me losing my lunch. Fortunately I paid attention to the instructions that said to focus on the display, but for the half-second or so I drifted away from it I nearly puked.
IIRC, the Mac version of Word many years ago would spellcheck "childcare" as "kidnapping".
Must have been what turned Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch. He refused to accept having his name truncated and kept entering it despite the abuse he took.
It does make you wonder if you gave the NSA the equivalent of a blank check and said "nuke the spammers" -- if this means taking entire data centers offline, DO IT.
Could they? Between their intelligence on system flaws and no doubt mapping every shady hosting center and possible hacking source, I might expect they could, but maybe not. Maybe too much of it is compromised desktop PCs and legions of residential/business bots for even the NSA to deal with.
I would assume that you wouldn't want to ban burners because the set of burners is smaller than the set of all cell phones. I don't know if this is possible, but I would also assume that in their quiet, money-grubbing and totalitarian-enabling way, the telecommunications companies would be able to provide a list of IMEIs and other identifying features associated with "burners".
Basically, it wouldn't seem to hard for the surveillance state to obtain all the information necessary to scrutinize burner devices, which means they can use fewer resources scanning the larger pool of non-burner devices.
Ban burners, and you've prevented the people you want to monitor from self-sorting themselves into a smaller pool by using burners.
I made "Charles Palentine for President" bumper stickers (magnets), complete with the "_We_ are the people".
Some people asked me who he was. I told them he was a senator running for President, but that he was a long shot not many people had heard of, but if elected he would clean up the city.
A much smaller number of people realized it was the "candidate" shown in the the movie Taxi Driver and an even smaller number got the fact that I used the mis-emphasized slogan that Albert Brooks complains about earlier in the film.
What's creepy is that the "candidate" running against Palentine in the movie has a slogan of "Make America Great" (you can see it in the background in one of the early cafeteria scenes where Travis Bickle meets up with the other cab drivers).
I take my watch off to go through security at the airport and when I have sex. I'm married and I seldom travel.
In my opinion, battery life should be measured against quartz watches -- years. Or compared to my self-winding Tag or my Seiko solar quartz -- never, bounded by my lifetime.
Until then I don't see the utility. I've learned to ignore my smartphone -- I have all but the narrowest list of VIPs set to provide any notifications and keep it muted and on vibrate all the time, so I'm not interested in glancing at my watch to find out what the latest distraction is.
Plus, cost versus obsolescence? My Tag was an expensive gift, but it will also last my lifetime and never stop working because battery or vendor or software. Same with my Seiko. Any "smart watch" will be obsolete in a couple of years, which seems like a lot to spend for something you just know will be unsupported and unusable.
Heat and power consumption? A customer has a plasma set near in a confined space I have to work and it's like standing by a space heater.
No different at private, for-profit businesses. The same skinflints are in charge, with a mindset that IT products are just like normal durable goods that don't wear out until their moving parts actually break and have no software obsolescence that renders them unusable in spite of their age.
I've found that they will almost paradoxically spend high amounts on labor to maintain old hardware and software environments versus replacing them with cheaper to operate products, but they will still complain.
"The food is terrible, and the portions were too small."
It may have been a paranoid fantasy 15 years ago, but how do you know it wasn't going on then, too?
You would think that the idea of infecting computer hardware, firmware or installed software with built in backdoors would have been thought of and tried years ago, especially as multiuser or timesharing systems grew where terminals were distributed into lower security areas or had remote dialup access.
All of this reminds me of the movie "The Conversation", which is a great study in surveillance paranoia.
Seriously? They'd fly these guys into the US and make them do the work here.
I would doubt these guys get to do anything that isn't overseen by 20 FBI agents at all times.
It wouldn't be at all surprised if they didn't have a diplomat from the Israeli embassy as some kind of observer as well.
Really?
Can someone tell me what the new chocolate ration is?
Since you seem to know a lot about it and I just finished reading Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul", I'm curious where all these "Celts" came from.
It seems that a lot of the problems the Romans had in Gaul, whether during Caesar's campaign or in the Cimbrian wars involved mass migrations of peoples from Germanic areas. These people seem like they were displaced from somewhere and their movement through fairly well settled areas set off lots of conflict.
I think Caesar himself implied that the Veneti had a lot of contact with the Britons and it seems likely that there was probably some cross-pollination between those "Celts" and the Britons.
They could add a secure lock mode, where if you affirmatively press the lock button on the keyfob, the car will require an affirmative unlock press on the keyfob and not unlock based on the "presence" of the keyfob.
I also wonder why they couldn't have some means of shutting off the radio in the keyfob so it didn't produce a signal that could be relayed to the car. Maybe a motion sensor in the keyfob that when it wasn't moved for a period of time would shut off its radio completely until enough movement woke it up.
If you haven't owned a car with keyless drive like this, you can't imagine how convenient it is to just walk up to locked car, open the door and drive away without digging out a ring of keys.
I can go days without ever taking my keys out of my coat pocket.
How do you handle the culturally/religiously driven self-motivated lack of engagement?
"We want to engage more, but your society is full of things that are forbidden by our religion. Your women are immodest, your media is full of blasphemous imagery, your employers will not change their business practices to allow us unimpeded practice of our religion. We can't live as our religion says we should unless you change your culture to accommodate our beliefs. Therefore we find comfort in our own neighborhoods where we can live in greater accordance with our beliefs."
Basically, there is a lot of self-segregation going on and a certain resentment that the host country won't change to accommodate their religious beliefs. This seems to end up leading to a perception of discrimination and probably harms second and further generation offspring who might otherwise more easily assimilate.
I agree that many of the problems are associated with Islam, but there is the counterfactual argument that holds that states like Indonesia and Malaysia while having large Muslim populations don't seem to have much of a terrorism base and contribute very little to the problem of Islamic terrorism.
It really seems to be a problem associated with the Islam spanning North Africa to the Middle East, so it would seem that there's an Arabic political and cultural element to it that combines with Islam and makes it hard to differentiate whether the problems of terrorism are outgrowths of that region's politics or if there's some theological basis to Islam that motivates the politics.
It does seem that there is kind of war between Islamic sects for "control" over Islam that contributes greatly to the problem, with state sponsorship of all manner of militias and religious movements contributing to the problem, whether materially or even theologically.