When the very first Blue & White PowerMacs came out, the print studio at the ad agency I worked for was totally pumped for their machines -- they had been sucking it up using beige G3s and even older PPC Macs.
Since my job was prepping the machines for install in the studio, I decided to pimp the studio people by putting an "Intel Inside" logo over the Apple logo; of course the machine was for the Mac zealot in the group who was super pissed that the logo was there and that he couldn't figure out how to remove it.
I caught hell for doing it, primarily because it took major surgery and a ton of time to put the stupid thing in there and I didn't get some other tasks accomplished.
This is what I love about Slashdot. Highly educated and experienced researchers at a global technology powerhouse make a discovery and its instantly shot down by dilettantes who claim their sting-and-can solution does exactly what the redesign does already.
Somebody get these researches 4-digit Slashdot logins so they can catch up.
North Dakota has pretty good internet right now. My mother-in-law lives in Devil's Lake and I think she has a choice of cable or DSL. I'm pretty sure I've heard that the relatives in Minto have at least one option, too.
May not do you any good if you're farming 20 miles out of town, but that's a tough last mile for anyone.
NDTC even offers fiber to the premises in Devils Lake.
THEY should be the ones getting fined, since they enable this highway robbery in the first place. And what do you bet that the telcos collect some kind of third-party billing fee up front from *anyone* wanting to bill to a phone number, whether the money gets collected or not?
The whole notion of billing people through the phone bills was a scam from the word go, and IMHO the FTC should ban it *all* or require that consumers setup a separate billing account for non-telco related charges unlinked to their phone account or phone service. Make the telcos eat the cost of maintaining a more elaborate billing system instead of just profiting off of it and passing off the fraud to us.
While I'm glad these thieving scumbags are paying the price for their thieving scumbaggery, why aren't they going to jail? Yes, I'm aware of all the pedantic arguments about their "real danger" to society and how they "only stole $1" from any one person, etc etc, but shouldn't this kind of what collar crime be actually *punished*? And if they do fine them, they should fine them an amount equal to whatever they stole AND the interest on it had it been invested at a rate of return equal to the S&P 500, with no credit for negative investments.
they are, as the farmers say, eating their seed corn.
This is the core of the problem and it has been rotting the American economy for a couple of decades.
Ever since the B-schools and their legions of MBA drones started figuring out how to "optimize underperforming assets" and all the other nonsense euphemisms for wringing the short-term profit out of our infrastructure, assets and people we have been doing just that -- eating our own seedcorn.
CEOs and senior executives long ago figure out the game was about getting personally rich as fast as possible -- all that bullshit about growing assets, long-term success, etc was just bullshit when you could borrow money, buy a business, sell off its assets give the money to yourself as a consulting fee and then walk away from the train wreck among many other technical manipulations.
Outsourcing is just a *symptom* of this broader problem. Why care about your company's labor force in the future, it's all about driving costs down for short term profit NOW.
And of course, don't think the leeches have any concern for, say, national interests -- I mean, they can't be expected to care what this might do to their own city/state/country.
You're making my point -- the "crime" isn't defined by the monetary loss, which means white collar crimes like this should not be treated simply as someone stealing some almost-negligible amount of money.
So when I kick down your door and wave a pistol in your face but walk away with only money, "all I took was money"? And I get off with just a fine?
I think the pass that's given to white collar crooks in the U.S. is just sad; all it does is promote the bullshit technical legalism that passes for morality as well as furthering the business philosophy that technical manipulation of markets and the financial system is the same as real business, let alone industry.
"Employed by" in a serious and meaningful key engineer/executive, or in a name-on-a-empty-office emeritus employee status? My guess is they like to keep him around from a brand perspective and some people like him sort of a way, but I seriously doubt he's a key contributer on any Apple product.
Unless you are actually willing to *own* the private plane, employ the pilots directly and run your own private airplane, I suspect that even the wealthy have to fly commercial occasionally, both for reasons of cost, availability of jets/pilots or bureaucracy (eg, contractual obligations that will not pay for private jet transit).
But -- I doubt that Brad Pitt or Lindsay Lohan take off their shoes at the security checkpoint or hunt for laptop outlets among the vinyl chairs at the gate like you and I do. I'm sure they get super special treatment from the airlines and security and show up right as the plane is about to leave, no waiting or sitting like peons, and then get whisked away on a golf cart to their waiting limo while some flunky delivers their luggage straight from the cargo hold.
The thing I find most painful about the short-term profit drive is that there isn't any way I can think of to break it
Its got a bit of the tragedy of the commons to it -- the only way it will end is when the commons is overgrazed and everyone's flock starves.
The big problem is that as business has become international, business leaders kind of stopped belonging to anywhere -- their loyalty is to the transnational meta-nation of "corporate executives" so they don't feel any sense of responsibility to any "place".
It doesn't help that this isn't just a philosophical mindset of the modern, global executive but a physical manifestation of the very wealthy executive who lives in several different houses, sometimes in different countries. And even when he does live in a single home for the most part, he sends his kids to private schools (no need to care about the local schools, even if his rich suburb has good ones), plays golf in private clubs (no need to worry about public facilities), flies on private planes (who cares about the airport, terminal, airline). None of it matters -- the world is where he is.
It's all about making a bet that the short term reward is big enough and in a short enough term, and that the long term consequences are far enough off.
There's some rationality to it, but I think this kind of mindset is what drives executive salaries stratospheric -- *they* know what they're doing is long-term negative, so they need to be paid "up front".
That's funny, but what would be interesting would be something that would ordinarily be absorbing some small amount of the generated power (eg, hydrogen electrolysis) but which could quickly be scaled up to increased power input and would still produce the output for later use.
Do you have any idea exactly what a classic Ferrari goes for, a car with no ABS, no traction control, no airbags, no radio etc etc etc? Yes it probably does have windshield wipers, I give you that.
In fact for these kind of car nuts the LACK of these features is the attraction.
No, the attraction is that there were only hundreds and in some rare cases maybe single-digit thousands built. Scarcity, not simplicity.
I think its less hassle to buy an academic copy of creative suite than to pirate it. All the apps work, take updates and the licensing snoop doesn't deactivate them.
I kind of wish Adobe and/or other app vendors would sell the same app for cheaper but lock out the number of hours per month or something you could use it; unlocked for business would cost the usual outrageous prices, but time-locked to 10 hours a month or something would cost much less.
I worry that we (collective we) are losing touch with the "entry level" technology which got us to the 20th century and that if we faced a significant enough "situation" we would have to go through a very long time re-learning how to do things that were considered basic mass production skills in the 1800s or basic farmstead skills.
Hell, it may actually be worse -- we may not know how to do things in ways that were considered technologically trivial in the 1930s -- the example that comes to mind is making metal parts without a 6-axis CNC machine fed with a design from a 3D CAD program.
If we get too "advanced" and lose touch with more simple technologies, we may find our society struggling through a long dark ages simply because nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
I went trolling Mozilla.Com for Thunderbird development info (roadmaps, release date projections) recently and found it startlingly bare in terms of Thunderbird related material.
Basic functionality works pretty well, but the editor is braindead, especially when it comes to switching back and forth between HTML/Plain Text edits.
And there needs to be some more options/tuning of the IMAP engine. First off, 5 connections as the default is broken, and I'd like to see IMAP locks get broken and stay broken by other IMAP client access. Thunderbird tends to hang on to them which makes other client access (eg, remote) go read-only, which sucks when your pocket vibrates with "new" mail Thunderbird has conveniently re-marked "unread". Outlook Express does this better.
I'd also like to see the reading pane status selectable per account (eg, on for news, off for email).
I'd guess that the vendors don't want to put in either faster CPUs or crypto codecs to keep performance from falling apart. But you'd think that's exactly what they would do, embed SSL encryption into the layer 2 transport, or at least make it a (default) option. Most 802.11 implementations are more likely for "convenience" wireless and not for high performance anyway, so I would imagine that some kind of default good cypto wouldn't be noticed by the 99% of WAP users.
In many, many situations I would not go to prison. The odds that a state's attorney would even charge me if I killed a pedophile in the act of molesting my child are near zero, and should they try, what jury would EVER convict me for defending my offspring against sexual abuse?
I'd probably have a problem if I killed you execution style as revenge and not in the act, but if you HAD molested my child -- with the aide of a good lawyer, some well-fanned public outrage and the right trial I might end up pleading to lesser charge and getting short time in jail.
The horror that pedophilia brings out isn't so much about pedophilia or sexual morality, its about defending vulnerable children from harm. I'd kill someone to defend my child over a whole hell of lot less harm than pedophilia. If you don't understand this biological imperative, its because you don't have kids.
The other guy that replied says you can basically use self-signed (ie, no hierarchy of trust) but I agree 100% that we have to watch out for "security" initiatives that suddenly require formal organization verification and/or high dollar SSL certs. I'm sure the corporate entities would love this to force small-time email server users into the arms of the corporations.
We need more people like you, but we also need the media to quit creating the personal insult politics that allows, say, Romney and McCain to play he-said-she-said like they did at the Reagan Library debate. Even though Paul called them all on it, polite discourse required us to sit and listen to it far too long.
I would think that it would be possible to work within subscription models almost more flexibly than non-subscription models since you don't have any ownership interest. Of course the devil is in the details.
Are there any standalone encryption systems that don't require software install on the host environment but can "mount" an encrypted disk file on a USB drive?
I find it surprising that on the strength of a possibly anonymous tip I can get both the cooperation of a court in the form of a court order allowing a search of private property AND the police to execute the tip without ever informing the private property owner in advance. By this logic, I should be able to search pretty much any private property I like with the full backing of law enforcement without showing almost any evidence.
I can't help but call BS on the entire premise (which has been circulating since at least '93 when I first heard of the BSA).
I can see a very, very tiny subset of situations where a *civil* court would allow a preemptive search without a trial or hearing involving the defendant. The plaintiff would have to show overwhelming proof of both the defendant being in breech of contract as well as showing serious damage to the plaintiff should the breech of contract continue. My guess is that a licensing dispute involving Microsoft software based on an anonymous tip wouldn't reach that level, since the evidence is weak and a multi-billion dollar business cannot show harm from even the loss of even a few million in licensing revenue.
My guess is that where there was even good proof (signed affidavit by *current* employee), the BSA would still have to file a lawsuit and the defendant would be notified and a hearing would be called to address the issue of discovery. It might just be that the BSA has killer arguments and in some courts with the right evidence they can get a discovery motion and law enforcement support that day, but even that sounds specious. Surely a plaintiff could challenge the credibility of the evidence presented at hearing (employee was fired for stealing/insubordination or is on probation, etc).
It just doesn't make ANY sense that a private party can arbitrarily gain a court order to enter private property against the will of the property owner or without their disputing the claim. "I know you're stealing from me and I demand the power to search you so that I can prove you're stealing from me."
Slashdot Mirror
When the very first Blue & White PowerMacs came out, the print studio at the ad agency I worked for was totally pumped for their machines -- they had been sucking it up using beige G3s and even older PPC Macs.
Since my job was prepping the machines for install in the studio, I decided to pimp the studio people by putting an "Intel Inside" logo over the Apple logo; of course the machine was for the Mac zealot in the group who was super pissed that the logo was there and that he couldn't figure out how to remove it.
I caught hell for doing it, primarily because it took major surgery and a ton of time to put the stupid thing in there and I didn't get some other tasks accomplished.
This is what I love about Slashdot. Highly educated and experienced researchers at a global technology powerhouse make a discovery and its instantly shot down by dilettantes who claim their sting-and-can solution does exactly what the redesign does already.
Somebody get these researches 4-digit Slashdot logins so they can catch up.
North Dakota has pretty good internet right now. My mother-in-law lives in Devil's Lake and I think she has a choice of cable or DSL. I'm pretty sure I've heard that the relatives in Minto have at least one option, too.
May not do you any good if you're farming 20 miles out of town, but that's a tough last mile for anyone.
NDTC even offers fiber to the premises in Devils Lake.
THEY should be the ones getting fined, since they enable this highway robbery in the first place. And what do you bet that the telcos collect some kind of third-party billing fee up front from *anyone* wanting to bill to a phone number, whether the money gets collected or not?
The whole notion of billing people through the phone bills was a scam from the word go, and IMHO the FTC should ban it *all* or require that consumers setup a separate billing account for non-telco related charges unlinked to their phone account or phone service. Make the telcos eat the cost of maintaining a more elaborate billing system instead of just profiting off of it and passing off the fraud to us.
While I'm glad these thieving scumbags are paying the price for their thieving scumbaggery, why aren't they going to jail? Yes, I'm aware of all the pedantic arguments about their "real danger" to society and how they "only stole $1" from any one person, etc etc, but shouldn't this kind of what collar crime be actually *punished*? And if they do fine them, they should fine them an amount equal to whatever they stole AND the interest on it had it been invested at a rate of return equal to the S&P 500, with no credit for negative investments.
they are, as the farmers say, eating their seed corn.
This is the core of the problem and it has been rotting the American economy for a couple of decades.
Ever since the B-schools and their legions of MBA drones started figuring out how to "optimize underperforming assets" and all the other nonsense euphemisms for wringing the short-term profit out of our infrastructure, assets and people we have been doing just that -- eating our own seedcorn.
CEOs and senior executives long ago figure out the game was about getting personally rich as fast as possible -- all that bullshit about growing assets, long-term success, etc was just bullshit when you could borrow money, buy a business, sell off its assets give the money to yourself as a consulting fee and then walk away from the train wreck among many other technical manipulations.
Outsourcing is just a *symptom* of this broader problem. Why care about your company's labor force in the future, it's all about driving costs down for short term profit NOW.
And of course, don't think the leeches have any concern for, say, national interests -- I mean, they can't be expected to care what this might do to their own city/state/country.
You're making my point -- the "crime" isn't defined by the monetary loss, which means white collar crimes like this should not be treated simply as someone stealing some almost-negligible amount of money.
So when I kick down your door and wave a pistol in your face but walk away with only money, "all I took was money"? And I get off with just a fine?
I think the pass that's given to white collar crooks in the U.S. is just sad; all it does is promote the bullshit technical legalism that passes for morality as well as furthering the business philosophy that technical manipulation of markets and the financial system is the same as real business, let alone industry.
"Employed by" in a serious and meaningful key engineer/executive, or in a name-on-a-empty-office emeritus employee status? My guess is they like to keep him around from a brand perspective and some people like him sort of a way, but I seriously doubt he's a key contributer on any Apple product.
"Still invested in" really means nothing.
Unless you are actually willing to *own* the private plane, employ the pilots directly and run your own private airplane, I suspect that even the wealthy have to fly commercial occasionally, both for reasons of cost, availability of jets/pilots or bureaucracy (eg, contractual obligations that will not pay for private jet transit).
But -- I doubt that Brad Pitt or Lindsay Lohan take off their shoes at the security checkpoint or hunt for laptop outlets among the vinyl chairs at the gate like you and I do. I'm sure they get super special treatment from the airlines and security and show up right as the plane is about to leave, no waiting or sitting like peons, and then get whisked away on a golf cart to their waiting limo while some flunky delivers their luggage straight from the cargo hold.
The thing I find most painful about the short-term profit drive is that there isn't any way I can think of to break it
Its got a bit of the tragedy of the commons to it -- the only way it will end is when the commons is overgrazed and everyone's flock starves.
The big problem is that as business has become international, business leaders kind of stopped belonging to anywhere -- their loyalty is to the transnational meta-nation of "corporate executives" so they don't feel any sense of responsibility to any "place".
It doesn't help that this isn't just a philosophical mindset of the modern, global executive but a physical manifestation of the very wealthy executive who lives in several different houses, sometimes in different countries. And even when he does live in a single home for the most part, he sends his kids to private schools (no need to care about the local schools, even if his rich suburb has good ones), plays golf in private clubs (no need to worry about public facilities), flies on private planes (who cares about the airport, terminal, airline). None of it matters -- the world is where he is.
It's all about making a bet that the short term reward is big enough and in a short enough term, and that the long term consequences are far enough off.
There's some rationality to it, but I think this kind of mindset is what drives executive salaries stratospheric -- *they* know what they're doing is long-term negative, so they need to be paid "up front".
That's funny, but what would be interesting would be something that would ordinarily be absorbing some small amount of the generated power (eg, hydrogen electrolysis) but which could quickly be scaled up to increased power input and would still produce the output for later use.
Do you have any idea exactly what a classic Ferrari goes for, a car with no ABS, no traction control, no airbags, no radio etc etc etc? Yes it probably does have windshield wipers, I give you that.
In fact for these kind of car nuts the LACK of these features is the attraction.
No, the attraction is that there were only hundreds and in some rare cases maybe single-digit thousands built. Scarcity, not simplicity.
I think its less hassle to buy an academic copy of creative suite than to pirate it. All the apps work, take updates and the licensing snoop doesn't deactivate them.
I kind of wish Adobe and/or other app vendors would sell the same app for cheaper but lock out the number of hours per month or something you could use it; unlocked for business would cost the usual outrageous prices, but time-locked to 10 hours a month or something would cost much less.
I worry that we (collective we) are losing touch with the "entry level" technology which got us to the 20th century and that if we faced a significant enough "situation" we would have to go through a very long time re-learning how to do things that were considered basic mass production skills in the 1800s or basic farmstead skills.
Hell, it may actually be worse -- we may not know how to do things in ways that were considered technologically trivial in the 1930s -- the example that comes to mind is making metal parts without a 6-axis CNC machine fed with a design from a 3D CAD program.
If we get too "advanced" and lose touch with more simple technologies, we may find our society struggling through a long dark ages simply because nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
I went trolling Mozilla.Com for Thunderbird development info (roadmaps, release date projections) recently and found it startlingly bare in terms of Thunderbird related material.
Basic functionality works pretty well, but the editor is braindead, especially when it comes to switching back and forth between HTML/Plain Text edits.
And there needs to be some more options/tuning of the IMAP engine. First off, 5 connections as the default is broken, and I'd like to see IMAP locks get broken and stay broken by other IMAP client access. Thunderbird tends to hang on to them which makes other client access (eg, remote) go read-only, which sucks when your pocket vibrates with "new" mail Thunderbird has conveniently re-marked "unread". Outlook Express does this better.
I'd also like to see the reading pane status selectable per account (eg, on for news, off for email).
But development seems pretty bare.
I'd guess that the vendors don't want to put in either faster CPUs or crypto codecs to keep performance from falling apart. But you'd think that's exactly what they would do, embed SSL encryption into the layer 2 transport, or at least make it a (default) option. Most 802.11 implementations are more likely for "convenience" wireless and not for high performance anyway, so I would imagine that some kind of default good cypto wouldn't be noticed by the 99% of WAP users.
In many, many situations I would not go to prison. The odds that a state's attorney would even charge me if I killed a pedophile in the act of molesting my child are near zero, and should they try, what jury would EVER convict me for defending my offspring against sexual abuse?
I'd probably have a problem if I killed you execution style as revenge and not in the act, but if you HAD molested my child -- with the aide of a good lawyer, some well-fanned public outrage and the right trial I might end up pleading to lesser charge and getting short time in jail.
The horror that pedophilia brings out isn't so much about pedophilia or sexual morality, its about defending vulnerable children from harm. I'd kill someone to defend my child over a whole hell of lot less harm than pedophilia. If you don't understand this biological imperative, its because you don't have kids.
Is this the kind of rationalization gymnastics you perform after taking sexual advantage of children?
Of course, if I ever caught you having sex with MY child, I'd execute you like a dog.
The other guy that replied says you can basically use self-signed (ie, no hierarchy of trust) but I agree 100% that we have to watch out for "security" initiatives that suddenly require formal organization verification and/or high dollar SSL certs. I'm sure the corporate entities would love this to force small-time email server users into the arms of the corporations.
We need more people like you, but we also need the media to quit creating the personal insult politics that allows, say, Romney and McCain to play he-said-she-said like they did at the Reagan Library debate. Even though Paul called them all on it, polite discourse required us to sit and listen to it far too long.
I would think that it would be possible to work within subscription models almost more flexibly than non-subscription models since you don't have any ownership interest. Of course the devil is in the details.
Like for USB drives?
Are there any standalone encryption systems that don't require software install on the host environment but can "mount" an encrypted disk file on a USB drive?
I find it surprising that on the strength of a possibly anonymous tip I can get both the cooperation of a court in the form of a court order allowing a search of private property AND the police to execute the tip without ever informing the private property owner in advance. By this logic, I should be able to search pretty much any private property I like with the full backing of law enforcement without showing almost any evidence.
I can't help but call BS on the entire premise (which has been circulating since at least '93 when I first heard of the BSA).
I can see a very, very tiny subset of situations where a *civil* court would allow a preemptive search without a trial or hearing involving the defendant. The plaintiff would have to show overwhelming proof of both the defendant being in breech of contract as well as showing serious damage to the plaintiff should the breech of contract continue. My guess is that a licensing dispute involving Microsoft software based on an anonymous tip wouldn't reach that level, since the evidence is weak and a multi-billion dollar business cannot show harm from even the loss of even a few million in licensing revenue.
My guess is that where there was even good proof (signed affidavit by *current* employee), the BSA would still have to file a lawsuit and the defendant would be notified and a hearing would be called to address the issue of discovery. It might just be that the BSA has killer arguments and in some courts with the right evidence they can get a discovery motion and law enforcement support that day, but even that sounds specious. Surely a plaintiff could challenge the credibility of the evidence presented at hearing (employee was fired for stealing/insubordination or is on probation, etc).
It just doesn't make ANY sense that a private party can arbitrarily gain a court order to enter private property against the will of the property owner or without their disputing the claim. "I know you're stealing from me and I demand the power to search you so that I can prove you're stealing from me."
There you go being an engineer. It's not an "equivalence", its an approximation which is generally more true than not (IMHO).