It could very easily be that the Chinese have allowed (if not actively participated) in this latest "upping of the ante" on the part of the North Koreans to try to reclaim the attention of the West. The world's attention has been centered between Cairo and Islamabad and on Arab/Muslim/Western conflicts, and while the Chinese can make diplomatic hay playing nice, buying oil and building industrial facilities, they aren't players and can't leverage political gains that they can get by being seen as the check on Kim.
By allowing Kim to set off a nuke -- or setting one off for him, since they just restarted enrichment a year or so ago, how do we even know this was a local product and not a Chinese placebo? -- they ratchet up the tension to remind the US that they have a situation they would like us to be involved in.
I don't doubt the Chinese military dislike Kim going off reservation -- despite their size, they really don't like the idea of mopping up in North Korea and they especially don't like the idea of a situation requiring them to put themselves between the Koreans and the U.S. Despite our apparent inability to fight effectively against the Iraqi insurgency, the Chinese know that crossing swords with the U.S. militarily would result in heavy losses even without a decisive set-piece ground battle, since much of our military force is designed around the cold war scenerios of numerically superior Soviet armor and infantry. Gulf War I amply demonstrated our ability to turn columns of T-72s and infantry into slag as if by magic.
I think this is annoying, too, although some of the super-enhanced-ultra-editions have enough added footage or other changes to be meaningfully different. A 4:3 Apocalypse Now is different than the full director's cut version in anamorphic widescreen.
They should add a preference setting that says something like "Rate all versions of a title the same" so that they auto-assign whatever rating you give to a movie to every version of it.
It would also help if there was a way to have more complex ratings -- I may actually like some movie X, but hate the DVD production values (bad transfer, mono audio, etc).
I know you're making a joke, but what about a capitalist/communist China wouldn't any US corporation like?
A few select business leaders are allowed to run massive monopolies, labor disputes are settled with an AK-47, and there's no noisy press to berate your crappy products or your business leadership.
Sounds like Bill Gates might actually like the Chinese afterall.
China wants (and probably needs) North Korea as a geopolitical pawn in order to score political points, both in the pacific rim and with the west. Kim does something wacky, the Chinese give him a tug on his leash and foreign governments give China concessions.
The North Koreans, despite Kim's nutty behavior, know that China sets the parameters of what the North can get away with and that deviating too far from their desires will either result in allowing the U.S. to use whatever force it deeems necessary (desirable as it allows them to play 'good guy') or, if need be, with their own army, although this would probably end up being a Chinese-backed coup which kept North Korea communist, although they would probably mass a dozen armored divisions on the border to back their play and keep out the refugees.
The North Korean leadership doesn't really care if they're Chinese lapdogs, as long as they get to stay in power and they know that the worst possible outcome is a Chinese takeover -- an American attack would allow them to run to China as a safe harbor.
The reason we'll never see change on the Korean front is that China and Kim both understand the parameters well and both need each other. In many ways, ignorning Kim, despite how crazy and dangerous he is, is the best policy. China won't allow him to go over the edge and by ignoring him, we also don't play into the Chinese protection racket.
Re:Only things mising: blood, sweat, tears, and $$
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think back 8 years or so ago during the boom years, there was some apprehension about "running out" of IPv4 addresses, which I think drove a lot of the desire for IPv6.
I think it probably solves other weaknesses in IPv4 -- spoofing and some other cracker-ish issues that are difficult to mitigate against in IPv4.
I think, though, that it's a little like alternative fuels -- we know they're good for us, but nobody wants to bother with them until we have to.
My guess is that the claims of inaccuracies are based as you say around either political viewpoints on items subject to a political analysis, or nitpicking by experts over details that are meaingful to other experts but likely lost on non-experts in that particular field. The general information, which is what 99% of the people walk away with, is accurate enough to make the average person feel well informed even if some of technical details or claims might be wrong.
There may be variations on this theme where enough details are wrong to call the article into question, but it seems like an article would have to be really, really wrong for it to fail in the encyclopedia's mission -- to provide a general background on a wide variety of subjects.
Grammar and writing quality is a bigger problem, IMHO, and that really can't be solved without an army of copy editors.
Management is usually ill-informed and tends to approve money spent on name-brand products that are purchased through familiar sales cycles from established VARs. They're getting "something" for their money. Projects involving FOSS tend to have money spent and labor expended, but in a way that feels unfamiliar to management and on products they're likely very unfamiliar with.
Labor flexibility is two-pronged. Proprietary products can be faster to implement than FOSS solutions since the vendors usually sell installation (whole or support) as well. This enables full-time staff to keep doing their jobs without hitting a huge learning curve for a new system. FOSS solutions can have some of this, too, but often don't, requiring a lot of experimentation, testing, and dealing with the learning curve, taking time today's "lean" staffs don't have.
The other side of labor flexibility is that the labor marketplace tends to be filled with people used to the proprietary product sales/install cycle and experienced in its operation. Skilled open source people are harder to find, harder to replace, and tend to be able to demand higher salaries.
The guy who quit should have gotten even instead, and had HER followed/investigated. I'm sure this Dunn woman, like all power-mad people, has some awful habits of her own -- embarassing sex habits, booze/drugs, gambling, whatever.
I'm sure she'd like getting a plain brown envelope at the office with 8x10 glossies of her taking a nose full of coke, blowing her tennis coach, or trying out a new vibrator, along with a note that says "quit spying on people."
Prices vary all over the country anyway, so national ads for pricing are inherently unreliable. And most ads with specific pricing tend to be regional, related to the specific market able to get to specific retail outlets.
If you exclude sales tax from any kind of bill mandating truth/transparency in pricing, you'll end up excluding *any* imposed cost with regional variability, and we'll be back where we are now -- being lied to about prices and fees in sympathy for the poor retailer who simply wants to tell us how cheap his product is.
One of the very first news media reports I read about identity theft was in the largely pre-internet late 90s, and what made it so scary was not that the victims in the story had credit cards opened in their names or even their checking accounts looted, but that the thieves were very close to being able to liquidate the retirement funds (nearly $500k!) of the victims. The only reason the fraud was caught was some random transaction related to a change on their retirement funds didn't reflect their "new" (aka the thieves) address due to some glitch in a computer system that was *supposed* to have used the "new" address for the mailing.
I'm pretty sure that the article mentioned that in other cases titles to properties had been frauduently transferred, enabling thieves to conduct sham sales and collect proceeds from the "new" mortgages associated with the sales.
Some other posters in this thread have mentioned that the properties stolen are rentals, implying that you couldn't get away with a fraudulent title transfer or sale without actually occupying the property. Having refinanced my house 3 times in a single year (two were remodeling related), the property may get visited by an appraisor but I can't think of anyone showing up at the property and saying, "Hey, who lives here?" or the county sending anything in the mail that says "new transactions related to this property" to the current listed owner.
When I think of how do I prove I own the place, it seems so obvious, but what bit of paper in a mountain of mostly worthless paper actually *PROVES* it? Or is it a "preponderance of evidence" think where I show a history of making mortgage payments, my crap all over the house, etc?
An extremely simple regulatory fix is really all that's necessary -- require the advertised or quoted price for any good or service to be inclusive of any and all fees, regardless of origin, including the maximum possible sales tax payable in the region advertised.
Advertised prices would then actually represent what you'd pay (or even less, if for some reason your area had a lower sales tax than the maximum), and businesses wouldn't be able to raise prices without raising prices.
I've tried to replace the conventional bulbs with CFLs where I could, but I've found that even when the other issues aren't a problem, they don't always last as long as they should.
They seem to not last long at all in enclosed fixtures or hung upside down. I've gone through 2 CFL recessed-lighting bulbs in my office (enough to just switch back). The 75-watt equivilent in the 50s era enclosed fixture on the stairwell died within a week. The 150-watt equivilents I use in our outdoor fixtures have died with 9-12 months (but the cheesy yellow bug light models have lasted through 3 winters...).
All-in-all I'd say I've maybe broken even cost-wise (savings vs. lamp purchases). The best luck has been, strangely, in ceiling fan applications (ugly as sin, but no dead bulbs) and as lampshade-type lamp replacements.
IIRC, there are studies indicating guns at home significantly increase the risk of kids shooting themselves.
All gross manipulations of the truth.
Kids are more likely to drown in tubs or pools or get killed on bikes than they are by guns in the homes. In fact, the number of kids dying due to accidental shootings has actually been on the decline, despite an increase in the number of guns.
Few people advocate for civilian access to rocket propelled grenades, and certainly no legitimate organizations like the NRA. I'm not sure where that thought came from.
"Assault rifles" strictly defined means selective-fire weapons (full auto or burst fire) which are only legal to possess after extensive federal background checks, and very expensive -- often approaching $20,000 -- due to the limited number available to the civilian market.
"Assault rifles" as defined by the mass media and gun control advocates is basically any weapon capable of firing a single round with each pull of the trigger and having a magazine capacity greater than 5 rounds. This includes a number of semi-automatic hunting rifles, and in reality is nothing more than a gun control strategy based on cosmetics and features, not reality. A single shot rifle in.458 Win Mag is capable of doing much more damage to a target than a semi-auto rifle in.223.
DRM is like gun control -- it punishes the honest and is ineffective at controlling what it purports to control.
Hey, forcing him to watch that would be a benefit, not a curse, because eventually everyone ends up having floppy, saggy adult sex and it's a lot easier to come to grips with it knowing it will happen vs. just discovering one day it's what you're left with.
They should be cited for contempt, fined some amount that is a multiple of what they billed their client assembling the dishonest materials (ensuring they don't profit from the behavior and in fact lose money), removed from the case and possibly jailed if the behavior was particularly egregious.
Most ethics boards for professions (law, medicine, etc) are just a BS screen to keep their members involved in theiving, drug use, sexual misconduct and other naughty behavior out of jail and not lose their professional certifications. I've known several people with accurate, well-documented complaints (ie, affidavits and materials from other professionals) that have gone before ethics boards that just get swept under the rug.
The legal profession is worse, since they rig the courts and the judicial system so that they can be damned hard to use against them.
The CTO might have some kind of management responsibility for how the data was stored, but it doesn't do anything for the more nefarious problem of corporate greedwhores keeping and warehousing personal information.
To truly deal with the problem, you'd have to sack everyone with an MBA from 1980 onward. Not likely, although probably a reasonable action just the same.
I've always understood that people taking opioids for pain relief may develop a physical dependence, but that it's fairly trivial to taper them off (presuming the medical condition causing the pain has been cured) since they generally haven't developed a psychological addiction -- they basically just get pain relief. I think this is one reason oxycontin became so popular, since its time release formula led to a more consistent level of the drug in the body and fewer up/down variations.
People who abuse heroin/morphine generally do so for the "rush" the drug presents when it is first ingested (thus the preference for injection). They may get physically dependent on the drug, but they get "hooked" on the rush -- which leads to higher and higher doses, a major risk when dealing with street sources of unknown purity.
Largely I think, though, that cancer patients are seldom a risk for addiciton because major doses of painkillers aren't a big deal until the cancer has spread, which usually means death.
While a handfull of businesses have the money to setup VPN networks that block naked access and the management savvy to sell the more complex and restrictive access to business unit leaders and their employees, most don't.
Most businesses can't afford a seperate VPN net or the servers necessary to make it functional, and even if they could they would face the wrath of remote workers and their bosses whose productivity was reduced because they had to jump through a bunch of hoops.
The good news is that in many cases, Remote Desktop or Citrix is a better solution than VPN for 95% of all workers, and with OS lockdown and limited app acccessability, it's a lot more secure, too.
I agree that re-installing is almost always a better bet for clients vs. hours of wasted troubleshooting time, but the biggest problem for me isn't WGA problems but clients that completely lack install media.
I worked for a place that had an unofficial policy encouraging using "other" copies of software if the client had some proof that he was licensed for software -- usually this meant OEM OS stickers on the machine. It's a reasonable argument, but I don't think MS would accept it.
He should charge for it, and why bother making it a seperate line item on the bill? When I've worked consulting, my time is billed by the hour, and validation calls are just part of the process, if necessary, and particularly so if the root cause is the software supplied by the client or *missing*/lost by the client. It's not like your mechanic fixes car problems for free because GM's transmission design sucked or you didn't change the oil.
I did have one employer who took the attitude that we should just use "whatever XP installer we had" (MSDN, Action Pack, VLK) for systems with XP license stickers on it, with the idea that it wouldn't matter which license key was used for the install, as long as the client had some proof they were licensed for XP. It's a compelling argument, but I suspect that MS licensing officials would violently disagree and point to legalese in tear/click-through license agreements.
Why would it bother Apple? At the end of the day you'd still be running on Apple hardware, and anything specifically requiring a call to a TPM device could probably be done on a pass-through basis anyway, which I'd imagine is the secret to a lot of VMWare's relative speed -- much of what seems like emulation is actually processed on a pass-through basis to real hardware in a manner that the VM controls.
And you'd think that Apple would *want* OS X VMs, since it might encourage developers and others to use their systems, since they could use VMs for OS X for testing, etc.
I can see some specific products having a neutral regional pricing, but I can also see other products having a higher regional pricing in an area like the Bay Area, especially items tied closely to fuel costs or transportation or Kalifornia's often more highly regulatory laws. And then there's taxes, which absolutely vary by location and are often lower in states with smaller populations.
My gut instinct is that the market works pretty well to neutralize any easy ability to arbitrage the higher wage regions into a higher net income unless you're young, single and live a more unusual lifestyle. The same is probably true for accomplishing the reverse.
It's called "press credentials" and have existed for some time (remember the newspaperman with a little white card that read PRESS stuck in his hat?). People with press credentials get to snoop around crime scenes, access closed areas, and so on in ways that ordinary citizens can't.
Sometimes these credentials are literal credentials (ie, an ID badge from their employer) and sometimes they're issued credentials (White House, for example). This gives them better access and in some ways better responses from people.
I agree that freedom of speech and the press should be universal and not restricted to the etablished corporate news media, but it seems there needs to be some practical way of differentiating between people honestly pursuing journalism "in the public interest" and the merely curious or aspiring. You can't fit an unlimited number of people in a briefing room or allow anyone who wants it access to crime or disaster scenes.
Even if you don't pass IR into the invisibility field, there's still likely to be detectable elements of the heat signature or other items radiated/expelled from the cloak that it still wouldn't render you undetectable. Ie, if I made a vehicle visually invisible its still likely to emit exhaust or a big EMF field from electric motors, people breathe, exhaling heat and CO2, etc.
"Invisibility" as defined as not providing a reflected-light image is the least significant part of the problem without also providing some way of eliminating other physical detection. It might be useful if you were cloaking a sealed, inanimate object that had no EMF or other signatures detectable, but I'm not sure it'd be cost effective against other low-tech methods for simply hiding something or otherwise camouflaging it.
I agree, and I think half the problem is that the faster processors (and you know they are faster processors) in each succeeding generation of devices get sucked down with all kinds of BS processing of color animation and needless graphics.
Far too many of my cell phone's functions (especially ON and OFF) involve animation effects that slow down processing. I'm not sure why this is, although I suspect its an unintentional conspiracy between marketing people, youth-oriented sales driven by graphics and color, and programmer/designers who simply don't have another metaphor besides the desktop GUI. I wish there was a way to disable it or at least scale it back, but there isn't.
DVDs seem to be the victim of overprocessing -- too many insist on looped video backgrounds and looped video buttons, probably largely driven by marketers and designers that want something as busy as possible. I also suspect that the scripting language behind DVD menuing systems is part of the problem, too.
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It could very easily be that the Chinese have allowed (if not actively participated) in this latest "upping of the ante" on the part of the North Koreans to try to reclaim the attention of the West. The world's attention has been centered between Cairo and Islamabad and on Arab/Muslim/Western conflicts, and while the Chinese can make diplomatic hay playing nice, buying oil and building industrial facilities, they aren't players and can't leverage political gains that they can get by being seen as the check on Kim.
By allowing Kim to set off a nuke -- or setting one off for him, since they just restarted enrichment a year or so ago, how do we even know this was a local product and not a Chinese placebo? -- they ratchet up the tension to remind the US that they have a situation they would like us to be involved in.
I don't doubt the Chinese military dislike Kim going off reservation -- despite their size, they really don't like the idea of mopping up in North Korea and they especially don't like the idea of a situation requiring them to put themselves between the Koreans and the U.S. Despite our apparent inability to fight effectively against the Iraqi insurgency, the Chinese know that crossing swords with the U.S. militarily would result in heavy losses even without a decisive set-piece ground battle, since much of our military force is designed around the cold war scenerios of numerically superior Soviet armor and infantry. Gulf War I amply demonstrated our ability to turn columns of T-72s and infantry into slag as if by magic.
I think this is annoying, too, although some of the super-enhanced-ultra-editions have enough added footage or other changes to be meaningfully different. A 4:3 Apocalypse Now is different than the full director's cut version in anamorphic widescreen.
They should add a preference setting that says something like "Rate all versions of a title the same" so that they auto-assign whatever rating you give to a movie to every version of it.
It would also help if there was a way to have more complex ratings -- I may actually like some movie X, but hate the DVD production values (bad transfer, mono audio, etc).
I know you're making a joke, but what about a capitalist/communist China wouldn't any US corporation like?
A few select business leaders are allowed to run massive monopolies, labor disputes are settled with an AK-47, and there's no noisy press to berate your crappy products or your business leadership.
Sounds like Bill Gates might actually like the Chinese afterall.
China wants (and probably needs) North Korea as a geopolitical pawn in order to score political points, both in the pacific rim and with the west. Kim does something wacky, the Chinese give him a tug on his leash and foreign governments give China concessions.
The North Koreans, despite Kim's nutty behavior, know that China sets the parameters of what the North can get away with and that deviating too far from their desires will either result in allowing the U.S. to use whatever force it deeems necessary (desirable as it allows them to play 'good guy') or, if need be, with their own army, although this would probably end up being a Chinese-backed coup which kept North Korea communist, although they would probably mass a dozen armored divisions on the border to back their play and keep out the refugees.
The North Korean leadership doesn't really care if they're Chinese lapdogs, as long as they get to stay in power and they know that the worst possible outcome is a Chinese takeover -- an American attack would allow them to run to China as a safe harbor.
The reason we'll never see change on the Korean front is that China and Kim both understand the parameters well and both need each other. In many ways, ignorning Kim, despite how crazy and dangerous he is, is the best policy. China won't allow him to go over the edge and by ignoring him, we also don't play into the Chinese protection racket.
I think back 8 years or so ago during the boom years, there was some apprehension about "running out" of IPv4 addresses, which I think drove a lot of the desire for IPv6.
I think it probably solves other weaknesses in IPv4 -- spoofing and some other cracker-ish issues that are difficult to mitigate against in IPv4.
I think, though, that it's a little like alternative fuels -- we know they're good for us, but nobody wants to bother with them until we have to.
My guess is that the claims of inaccuracies are based as you say around either political viewpoints on items subject to a political analysis, or nitpicking by experts over details that are meaingful to other experts but likely lost on non-experts in that particular field. The general information, which is what 99% of the people walk away with, is accurate enough to make the average person feel well informed even if some of technical details or claims might be wrong.
There may be variations on this theme where enough details are wrong to call the article into question, but it seems like an article would have to be really, really wrong for it to fail in the encyclopedia's mission -- to provide a general background on a wide variety of subjects.
Grammar and writing quality is a bigger problem, IMHO, and that really can't be solved without an army of copy editors.
Management is usually ill-informed and tends to approve money spent on name-brand products that are purchased through familiar sales cycles from established VARs. They're getting "something" for their money. Projects involving FOSS tend to have money spent and labor expended, but in a way that feels unfamiliar to management and on products they're likely very unfamiliar with.
Labor flexibility is two-pronged. Proprietary products can be faster to implement than FOSS solutions since the vendors usually sell installation (whole or support) as well. This enables full-time staff to keep doing their jobs without hitting a huge learning curve for a new system. FOSS solutions can have some of this, too, but often don't, requiring a lot of experimentation, testing, and dealing with the learning curve, taking time today's "lean" staffs don't have.
The other side of labor flexibility is that the labor marketplace tends to be filled with people used to the proprietary product sales/install cycle and experienced in its operation. Skilled open source people are harder to find, harder to replace, and tend to be able to demand higher salaries.
The guy who quit should have gotten even instead, and had HER followed/investigated. I'm sure this Dunn woman, like all power-mad people, has some awful habits of her own -- embarassing sex habits, booze/drugs, gambling, whatever.
I'm sure she'd like getting a plain brown envelope at the office with 8x10 glossies of her taking a nose full of coke, blowing her tennis coach, or trying out a new vibrator, along with a note that says "quit spying on people."
Prices vary all over the country anyway, so national ads for pricing are inherently unreliable. And most ads with specific pricing tend to be regional, related to the specific market able to get to specific retail outlets.
If you exclude sales tax from any kind of bill mandating truth/transparency in pricing, you'll end up excluding *any* imposed cost with regional variability, and we'll be back where we are now -- being lied to about prices and fees in sympathy for the poor retailer who simply wants to tell us how cheap his product is.
One of the very first news media reports I read about identity theft was in the largely pre-internet late 90s, and what made it so scary was not that the victims in the story had credit cards opened in their names or even their checking accounts looted, but that the thieves were very close to being able to liquidate the retirement funds (nearly $500k!) of the victims. The only reason the fraud was caught was some random transaction related to a change on their retirement funds didn't reflect their "new" (aka the thieves) address due to some glitch in a computer system that was *supposed* to have used the "new" address for the mailing.
I'm pretty sure that the article mentioned that in other cases titles to properties had been frauduently transferred, enabling thieves to conduct sham sales and collect proceeds from the "new" mortgages associated with the sales.
Some other posters in this thread have mentioned that the properties stolen are rentals, implying that you couldn't get away with a fraudulent title transfer or sale without actually occupying the property. Having refinanced my house 3 times in a single year (two were remodeling related), the property may get visited by an appraisor but I can't think of anyone showing up at the property and saying, "Hey, who lives here?" or the county sending anything in the mail that says "new transactions related to this property" to the current listed owner.
When I think of how do I prove I own the place, it seems so obvious, but what bit of paper in a mountain of mostly worthless paper actually *PROVES* it? Or is it a "preponderance of evidence" think where I show a history of making mortgage payments, my crap all over the house, etc?
An extremely simple regulatory fix is really all that's necessary -- require the advertised or quoted price for any good or service to be inclusive of any and all fees, regardless of origin, including the maximum possible sales tax payable in the region advertised.
Advertised prices would then actually represent what you'd pay (or even less, if for some reason your area had a lower sales tax than the maximum), and businesses wouldn't be able to raise prices without raising prices.
I've tried to replace the conventional bulbs with CFLs where I could, but I've found that even when the other issues aren't a problem, they don't always last as long as they should.
They seem to not last long at all in enclosed fixtures or hung upside down. I've gone through 2 CFL recessed-lighting bulbs in my office (enough to just switch back). The 75-watt equivilent in the 50s era enclosed fixture on the stairwell died within a week. The 150-watt equivilents I use in our outdoor fixtures have died with 9-12 months (but the cheesy yellow bug light models have lasted through 3 winters...).
All-in-all I'd say I've maybe broken even cost-wise (savings vs. lamp purchases). The best luck has been, strangely, in ceiling fan applications (ugly as sin, but no dead bulbs) and as lampshade-type lamp replacements.
IIRC, there are studies indicating guns at home significantly increase the risk of kids shooting themselves.
.458 Win Mag is capable of doing much more damage to a target than a semi-auto rifle in .223.
All gross manipulations of the truth.
Kids are more likely to drown in tubs or pools or get killed on bikes than they are by guns in the homes. In fact, the number of kids dying due to accidental shootings has actually been on the decline, despite an increase in the number of guns.
Few people advocate for civilian access to rocket propelled grenades, and certainly no legitimate organizations like the NRA. I'm not sure where that thought came from.
"Assault rifles" strictly defined means selective-fire weapons (full auto or burst fire) which are only legal to possess after extensive federal background checks, and very expensive -- often approaching $20,000 -- due to the limited number available to the civilian market.
"Assault rifles" as defined by the mass media and gun control advocates is basically any weapon capable of firing a single round with each pull of the trigger and having a magazine capacity greater than 5 rounds. This includes a number of semi-automatic hunting rifles, and in reality is nothing more than a gun control strategy based on cosmetics and features, not reality. A single shot rifle in
DRM is like gun control -- it punishes the honest and is ineffective at controlling what it purports to control.
Hey, forcing him to watch that would be a benefit, not a curse, because eventually everyone ends up having floppy, saggy adult sex and it's a lot easier to come to grips with it knowing it will happen vs. just discovering one day it's what you're left with.
They should be cited for contempt, fined some amount that is a multiple of what they billed their client assembling the dishonest materials (ensuring they don't profit from the behavior and in fact lose money), removed from the case and possibly jailed if the behavior was particularly egregious.
Most ethics boards for professions (law, medicine, etc) are just a BS screen to keep their members involved in theiving, drug use, sexual misconduct and other naughty behavior out of jail and not lose their professional certifications. I've known several people with accurate, well-documented complaints (ie, affidavits and materials from other professionals) that have gone before ethics boards that just get swept under the rug.
The legal profession is worse, since they rig the courts and the judicial system so that they can be damned hard to use against them.
The CTO might have some kind of management responsibility for how the data was stored, but it doesn't do anything for the more nefarious problem of corporate greedwhores keeping and warehousing personal information.
To truly deal with the problem, you'd have to sack everyone with an MBA from 1980 onward. Not likely, although probably a reasonable action just the same.
I've always understood that people taking opioids for pain relief may develop a physical dependence, but that it's fairly trivial to taper them off (presuming the medical condition causing the pain has been cured) since they generally haven't developed a psychological addiction -- they basically just get pain relief. I think this is one reason oxycontin became so popular, since its time release formula led to a more consistent level of the drug in the body and fewer up/down variations.
People who abuse heroin/morphine generally do so for the "rush" the drug presents when it is first ingested (thus the preference for injection). They may get physically dependent on the drug, but they get "hooked" on the rush -- which leads to higher and higher doses, a major risk when dealing with street sources of unknown purity.
Largely I think, though, that cancer patients are seldom a risk for addiciton because major doses of painkillers aren't a big deal until the cancer has spread, which usually means death.
While a handfull of businesses have the money to setup VPN networks that block naked access and the management savvy to sell the more complex and restrictive access to business unit leaders and their employees, most don't.
Most businesses can't afford a seperate VPN net or the servers necessary to make it functional, and even if they could they would face the wrath of remote workers and their bosses whose productivity was reduced because they had to jump through a bunch of hoops.
The good news is that in many cases, Remote Desktop or Citrix is a better solution than VPN for 95% of all workers, and with OS lockdown and limited app acccessability, it's a lot more secure, too.
I agree that re-installing is almost always a better bet for clients vs. hours of wasted troubleshooting time, but the biggest problem for me isn't WGA problems but clients that completely lack install media.
I worked for a place that had an unofficial policy encouraging using "other" copies of software if the client had some proof that he was licensed for software -- usually this meant OEM OS stickers on the machine. It's a reasonable argument, but I don't think MS would accept it.
He should charge for it, and why bother making it a seperate line item on the bill? When I've worked consulting, my time is billed by the hour, and validation calls are just part of the process, if necessary, and particularly so if the root cause is the software supplied by the client or *missing*/lost by the client. It's not like your mechanic fixes car problems for free because GM's transmission design sucked or you didn't change the oil.
I did have one employer who took the attitude that we should just use "whatever XP installer we had" (MSDN, Action Pack, VLK) for systems with XP license stickers on it, with the idea that it wouldn't matter which license key was used for the install, as long as the client had some proof they were licensed for XP. It's a compelling argument, but I suspect that MS licensing officials would violently disagree and point to legalese in tear/click-through license agreements.
Why would it bother Apple? At the end of the day you'd still be running on Apple hardware, and anything specifically requiring a call to a TPM device could probably be done on a pass-through basis anyway, which I'd imagine is the secret to a lot of VMWare's relative speed -- much of what seems like emulation is actually processed on a pass-through basis to real hardware in a manner that the VM controls.
And you'd think that Apple would *want* OS X VMs, since it might encourage developers and others to use their systems, since they could use VMs for OS X for testing, etc.
I can see some specific products having a neutral regional pricing, but I can also see other products having a higher regional pricing in an area like the Bay Area, especially items tied closely to fuel costs or transportation or Kalifornia's often more highly regulatory laws. And then there's taxes, which absolutely vary by location and are often lower in states with smaller populations.
My gut instinct is that the market works pretty well to neutralize any easy ability to arbitrage the higher wage regions into a higher net income unless you're young, single and live a more unusual lifestyle. The same is probably true for accomplishing the reverse.
It's called "press credentials" and have existed for some time (remember the newspaperman with a little white card that read PRESS stuck in his hat?). People with press credentials get to snoop around crime scenes, access closed areas, and so on in ways that ordinary citizens can't.
Sometimes these credentials are literal credentials (ie, an ID badge from their employer) and sometimes they're issued credentials (White House, for example). This gives them better access and in some ways better responses from people.
I agree that freedom of speech and the press should be universal and not restricted to the etablished corporate news media, but it seems there needs to be some practical way of differentiating between people honestly pursuing journalism "in the public interest" and the merely curious or aspiring. You can't fit an unlimited number of people in a briefing room or allow anyone who wants it access to crime or disaster scenes.
Even if you don't pass IR into the invisibility field, there's still likely to be detectable elements of the heat signature or other items radiated/expelled from the cloak that it still wouldn't render you undetectable. Ie, if I made a vehicle visually invisible its still likely to emit exhaust or a big EMF field from electric motors, people breathe, exhaling heat and CO2, etc.
"Invisibility" as defined as not providing a reflected-light image is the least significant part of the problem without also providing some way of eliminating other physical detection. It might be useful if you were cloaking a sealed, inanimate object that had no EMF or other signatures detectable, but I'm not sure it'd be cost effective against other low-tech methods for simply hiding something or otherwise camouflaging it.
I agree, and I think half the problem is that the faster processors (and you know they are faster processors) in each succeeding generation of devices get sucked down with all kinds of BS processing of color animation and needless graphics.
Far too many of my cell phone's functions (especially ON and OFF) involve animation effects that slow down processing. I'm not sure why this is, although I suspect its an unintentional conspiracy between marketing people, youth-oriented sales driven by graphics and color, and programmer/designers who simply don't have another metaphor besides the desktop GUI. I wish there was a way to disable it or at least scale it back, but there isn't.
DVDs seem to be the victim of overprocessing -- too many insist on looped video backgrounds and looped video buttons, probably largely driven by marketers and designers that want something as busy as possible. I also suspect that the scripting language behind DVD menuing systems is part of the problem, too.