On the other hand, we should certainly commit resources to the fights we are fighting now. While spy satellites could spot Soviet tank divisions and missile silos, they can't pinpoint terrorists in caves. It may well be that spysats will be useful in the future, but right now it could be argued that the CIA and other American intelligence agencies need to move resources from electronic to human intelligence.
While it's not ever a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, it can be a bad idea to give all projects equal weight. Spysats have served well, and will continue to serve well, in large-scale conflicts. They may even be useful on a limited scale in guerrila wars. However, spies are useful in all conflicts. It therefore makes sense to concentrate more resources in human intelligence. While abandoning spysats entirely would be folly, we can't always implement every idea we want to; it would be wise to balance our methods' means with their effectiveness in a variety of situations.
While the information in your post holds true in the audio world, things start getting a little different when networking comes into the picture. While Monster Cable is quite possibly the single greatest scam perpetrated on consumers of the last 10 years, things change when you move from nice, low-frequency audio into the world of computing.
As you probably know, standard twisted pair cable comes in several grades, or categories. Cat 3 is the minimum acceptable for 10baseT, Cat 5 for 100baseT, and Cat 5e for 1000baseT. Cables are sorted into categories depending on the highest signal frequency they can pass reliably - 16 MHz for Cat 3, for example. Unfortunately, this means if you were to wire a cluster with Cat 3 wiring and try to run a 100baseT network (at 100 MHz), you would probably get errors in the datastream, resulting in lost frames; this can cause subtle errors that will spawn many headaches down the road.
The bottom line is, don't skimp on your cables. While Ethernet can be quite resilient (I've seen 10 meg go over a barbed wire fence, albiet slowly and with about 80% dropped packets), skimping on cable to save a few bucks can really cause serious problems down the road. The money you "saved" by installing cables that aren't up to spec will be obliterated tenfold when you factor in the cost of ripping out all the old cable and running new stuff that's up to spec.
That's an interesting website. Unfortunately, while it presents itself as independent blog, digging deeper reveals a strong Republican bias. Really, is it that suprising to have the loony right come out and accuse the Democrats of vote fraud when the Republican candidate loses? The same cries of vote fraud came from the far left after Kerry lost; the claims turned out to be groundless (full disclosure: I voted Kerry).
If the allegations of that site are true, however, and the Democrats did commit some sort of subtle, large-scale conspiracy across the state (without any whistleblowers going to the media), Gregoire would be shooting herself in the foot by calling for an election contest. The whole purpose of bringing this to the courts is to determine which ballots are valid and which are invalid; if there really is election fraud going on here, then the best thing for Gregoire to do would be to call for a revote, which would allow her to gracefully lose. Instead, she closed off her "escape route" by publicly asking for the courts to scrutinize disputed ballots.
Regarding Vioxx... It was never named "deadly," but it has been taken off the market recently by its manufacturer, Merck. Apparently, certain side effects potentially harmful to people with heart condidtions were overlooked during testing; the FDA got quite angry about this and would probably have demanded a recall if Merck didn't do it voluntarily.
Of course, there are many people for whom Vioxx worked quite well who have no heart problems; it's not surprising that spammers would step into a major potential market for "Vioxx" made from sugar pills. Also, I've seen a few law firms send out spams offering to represent me in the class action against Merck. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to also see people investing in the lawsuit by buying out others' share of the class; in this way, they could get in on the lawsuit despite never having Vioxx pass their lips.
I find it interesting that they single out Vioxx as the number one prescription spam, though. For what it's worth, all the drug spam I get offers not only for \/10XX but also cia1is, |_e\/1TRA, \/1C0D1N and of course the indomitable \/1A6RA. While the specific category of Vioxx spam may have just won out over porn spam, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that drug spam has been bigger than porn for a long time.
DIVX was a purchase/rent hybrid model. It didn't have anything to do with DRM.
Hardly. First, DIVX coudn't have worked without DRM. How do you think they controlled when a disc expired? The honor system?
It might be helpful to look at this from the point of view of a consumer buying a DIVX DVD. This person, call him Joe, bought a disc, took it home, and it only worked for 2 or 3 days. Then, Joe had the opportunity to "really" purchase it and unlock it forever. Joe doesn't like this; didn't he already pay for the movie in the store? Why does the player want him to pay more money?
The point is this: people like to own things. They most certainly don't like to have things they own stop working, and they won't support a system that doesn't allow them to do what they want with the things they own. People may pay $20 for a book they only read once; it would obviously be more rational to check it out of the library, but people still shell out money for the version they can keep and read or watch whenever they want; whether they ever will read that particular book or watch that particular DVD more than once is largely irrelevant among many middle- and upper-class Americans. Considering that middle- and upper-class Americans are the primary target market among systems like DIVX and most movie and music distribution systems, it's not suprising that DIVX failed. I would expect that most products laden with DRM that prevents people from doing what they want with things they own would fail in the same fashion.
Remember DIVX? No, not the codec, but the failed DVD format. That was a form of DRM that consumers rejected overwhemlingly; they didn't want to buy a DVD that imposed restrictions on how they watched it.
Also, you forget that "geeks" who care about DRM are the people who the less technically talented will go to for reccomendations on what consumer electronics to buy. Thus, 1 geek may influence the purchasing decisions of 5 or 10 different people considering something like Microsoft MCE; those people are Microsoft's target buyers and their choice to go with an MCE competitor like Tivo hurts MS's bottom line. When you consider that they're the ones everyone comes to for advice, geeks may have more power over purchasing habits than you thought.
Not quite. As referenced in the Laser FAQ (linked from the article), laser classifications are as follows:
Class I. Totally enclosed within some other device, with safety interlocks to prevent the laser from powering up when safety covers are off. Interestingly, even a really dangerous Class IV laser falls into this category if it is completely contained within an OEM device with the apppropriate safety interlocks.
Class II. Reasonably safe to look directly into the beam. I think that the threshold is 1000 seconds continious exposure without permanant eye damage, although I could be wrong.
Class IIIa. Lasers which would cause near-immediate damage to eye tissue, but which are blocked in time to prevent damage by the blink reflex. This is the category of most laser pointers, although probably not the monster which is sold at the linked site.
Class IIIb. These are lasers which can cause permanant eye damage before the blink reflex kicks in. This is where lasers start getting Dangerous with a capital D.
Class IV. Dangerous to look at the reflection of the beam, even from matte surfaces. Can cause damage to flesh or other objects in the beam path. Eye exposure will probably cause immediate and permanant blindness with lasers in this class. Very dangerous stuff.
The reason it's battery powered is so that it can be independent of a host PC. As far as I can tell from the comments (the article is slashdotted), the idea here is to use the enclosure as a host for a camera. Connect the camera, hit a button, and the enclosure looks for any mass storage devices and copies the data found there to its internal hard drive. It then acts as a normal USB mass storage device itself when connected to a host computer, so you can suck the data off of it.
Thus, when it's connected to a camera, it would not only have to power its internal hard drive but also perhaps provide 500 mA to its own port for the camera (although it might not conform to that particular part of the USB specification). The whole idea of this gadget is that it replaces a laptop as a "data vault" for a digital camera - you don't have to have a host PC to grab files off your camera and clear your flash card for more pictures.
As I recall, 3dfx used multi-GPU chips for its Voodoo 4 and 5 lines, and didn't do so well. Is there anything to indicate that this card will do better? After all, sticking with SLI and multicore technology after its prime was what killed 3dfx and allowed Nvidia to take its place; it'd be rather ironic to see Nvidia go down the same path.
Remember, while it's the amps that do kill you, you need enough voltage to push the amps across the heart. After all, you can easily hold onto the terminals of a car battery (12 volts, can deliver several hundred amps easily) with no ill effects.
It's all about Ohm's law: I=E/R (current equals voltage over resistance). Thus, to get 1 amp through a human body with a resistance of just 1000 ohms (which is a very low figure; the human body usually has more resistance fingertip to fingertip), you would need 1000 volts.
Even 110/220 volt house wiring isn't too dangerous when it comes to direct electrocution (although safety is always a good idea). The real reason you need wiring that's up to code is generally not electrocution as much as it is fire risks - short circuts can get hot. However, the current PoE specs are low voltage, low current - something that shouldn't cause any trouble if amateur wiring goes wrong, assuming that there is overcurrent protection in whatever provides power to the network.
First, I'm not quite sure what this Sollog fellow was referring to in the original article by the "Fibonacci algorithm" (under "Sollog's most famous math discoveries"). However, one might assume that something with Fibonacci's name attached to it was discovered by, say, Fibonacci.
Why didn't anyone say we could just take dead people's math discoveries as our own? In that case, I'm going to go "discover" Newton's method, Boolean logic, and the Pythagorean theorem! I'll be rich!
I don't think it's accurate to say that any arbitrary amount of code defines the line between code grinders and real programmers. After all, there's a world of difference between 1200 verbose, well-commented lines and 1200 highly optimized lines full of obscure tricks to squeeze every bit of performance possible out of the hardware. The first could be cranked out in a few hours by almost anyone with some programming knowledge, and the second might take weeks or even months to get right.
Looking at the Google code, we can see that while it appears to be machine generated, it definately tends towards the latter; Google has obviously tuned the code to save bytes and run as quickly as possible. Bandwidth and processor power aren't so important in a corporate environment where everyone has a LAN connection to the server and decent machines to work on, but when you have to deal with customers on dialup links and using old machines, every bit and every instruction counts. In that scenario, 1200 lines can be an enormous amount of code.
How many web sites do you visit on a regular basis that make use of Flash for navigation?
That question assumes that Flash isn't a consideration in choosing which sites I go to. If a site uses Flash for navigation, then that's a big reason for me to avoid it unless I have no other choice.
There are of course exceptions; sites like Homestar Runner can use Flash in a way that dovetails with their content. However, there are still sites that persist in trying to use Flash to present things like text and raster graphics that are better suited to other formats for a variety of reasons already stated by other posters. These I avoid unless I have absolutely no other choice.
First, I'd like to say that it's excellent you can keep your sanity in your job; lots of sysadmins deal with these problems by simply going hyper-cynical or homicidal.
However, an idea might be to ask your boss about the possibility of hiring a minimum-wage intern. When I was in college, I would have cheerfully killed to get a job working in IT that provided real-world experience, rather than cleaning greasetraps or restocking warehouses. You'd have to be careful about trustworthiness, but a minion to answer phones, deal with users who habitually leave caps lock on, and make coffee could significantly decrease your workload while not costing your company too much money.
Your boss might well go for it, especially if you explain that there's just too much work for one person, and that you can either get an intern or hire another full-time IT worker. This way, your plan actually saves money (at least compared to the alternatives you present). Even if the boss doesn't go for it, there's very little to lose by trying it. Good luck!
A wild guess: by "credibility" they mean something more akin to "street cred." Here in the US, it used to be that free online access to your bank accounts was something special; now, most banks offer it. Similarly, it may well be that in Korea, email services are seen as ordinary, while a company that provides services via SMS or IM may attract a clientele which cares about these things - and people who care about always having the latest, best things tend to be rather well-to-do.
Daily? Wall Street Journal. Weekly? US News & World Report.
The problem is that many intelligent conservatives have been pushed out by loud, annoying talk-show types like Limbaugh, Savage and Coulter; sadly, antagonism tends to sell better than well-reasoned, intelligent debate. While I'm a liberal myself, I lament the lack of real debate in this country. Despite my political views, I always read George Will's column; he challenges my views and makes me think.
Listening to an echo chamber was a good part of what brought Kerry down in the recent election, and may well bring Bush and the Republican party down as well, if they start believing that 51 percent of votes means a "mandate." Just shouting abuse at the other side does nothing and only leads to anger, but the country's leaders seem only too willing to leave the arts of debate and compromise behind in their efforts to divide into two fortified camps with no room for internal dissent.
Who said anything about MAME? Many museums these days have custom-built interactive exhibits; there needs to be some way to control them. As you can probably imagine, regular PC keyboards and mice won't last a day in a high-traffic environment, particularly one involving excited kids pounding the heck out of them. Arcade controls tend to be built to survive just that, and will last for a good long time against whatever combination of excited and even malicious kids you might wish to throw at them.
The problem, as far as I can tell, is that vendors want root to the boxes supporting theirs - the database servers, mailservers, and backup servers that are controlled by the customer. Obviously, it's not an issue if you have root on a box that you're renting to a customer; the customer's sysadmins should simply firewall you off like they would any other untrusted box, then pierce the firewall as necessary to let you access what you need.
I just can't see where a black-box app vendor would ever need continuing access to root on customer boxes. As many others have pointed out, if the vendor needs root access for a specific task, then it's fairly easy to set up sudo for their needs; however, giving someone the keys to the kingdom just because they might need them at some point in the future is foolish at best.
Thankfully, the First Amendment is entirely beside the point in this situation - while the government can't stop someone from saying whatever they wish, there is no obligation on the part of private citizens to listen to what the speaker has to say. There would be no free speech issue with a device such as the original poster put forth; while the telemarketing industry may have some small claim upon the right to phone you, they most certainly don't have the right to force you to listen.
Of course, one major difference is that software projects tend to release stable versions, in addition to the bleeding-edge CVS code. The real problem with Wikipedia, as I see it, is that it's possible for a researcher to access it when someone has intentionally or unintentionally sabotaged the information contained therein by giving false or biased information. While it may be corrected fairly quickly, that's little consolation to little Johnny who turned in a report on the "Holocaust hoax" because some neo-Nazi nutjob replaced the Wikipedia writeup with something that accommodated his views better.
The problem could probably be solved in several ways; one that comes to mind immediately is similar to what software projects do: have a trusted source sign off on the code before it makes it into the final version. Of course, there are problems with this as well: while most software projects are fairly limited in scope, Wikipedia may not have an expert on symbolism in medieval tapestries or early Gnostic sects.
Wikipedia is a great resource for a quick, informal summary of a subject, but it still has a long way to go before it can be a trusted authority like the Encylopaedia Brittanica. While doubtless it will evolve ways of dealing with the problems inherent in making everything world-editable, the road ahead is a long and difficult one.
This program is not for the l33t kiddies on IRC with the corporate edition. Rather, it's for more mainstream customers - like people who bought a whitebox computer from a less-than-honest retailer. While I haven't run the tool, I'd bet almost anything that if it detects a pirated copy, it tells you to call the Microsoft piracy hotline and inform them where you got your copy of Windows.
After all, the legal costs are probably about the same to go after a pirate no matter what their offense is. It's good business sense for MS to go after big pirate operations and shut down people who are churning out and selling thousands of copies of Windows to willing customers; spending thousands on a case to shut down one kid with a cracked copy of Windows probably wouldn't be worth the cost. The target of this operation is almost certainly shops selling counterfeit copies of Windows; it probably wouldn't be worth the cost or privacy issues to go after everyone with a warez copy of Windows.
Aside from the fact that XP Home doesn't have remote desktop, there's a good reason why you might not want to use it. If you're using a Linux box as server, there's no way for X to serve a Windows remote desktop. That's a big problem in a mixed environment; it creates problems in support and deployment to run two protocols at once.
Also, since the Windows VNC clients these days have hooks into the video system, they run almost as well as MS's remote desktop on Windows - and almost all are cross-platform and Free as well. Windows' remote desktop capabilities are decent for simple administration across a LAN, but they aren't as useful in a large mixed environment. After all, you can run VNC with a Linux server and a Palm OS client; I challenge you to do that with a Windows remote desktop.
Well, first of all, Firefox probably does have some holes. However, since it's not dominant in the market like IE, there aren't legions of crackers, trojan authors and spyware pushers probing its vulnerabilities. Still, Firefox/Win32 has some major security advantages over IE:
First, it's not integrated into the OS. IE is used in Windows for a lot of different tasks: web browser, file browser, help browser, anything that can be made to involve browsing. It needs to have deeper access to system internals than a simple web browser like Firefox. Thus, if IE is compromised, it's much easier to get malware into the system.
Firefox is a lot stricter about installing plugins. IE's user interface is biased towards installing whatever plugins the site's designer wishes, including malware - it takes one click to install an IE plugin. Firefox's default configuration, on the other hand, requires you to add the site to a whitelist, then enforces a wait period before presenting the option to install a plugin; the UI is biased against installing plugins. It requires active thought to install a plugin; you can't just click "install" to make an annoying dialog box go away.
Firefox is Open Source. While this certainly doesn't mean that it's magically better than a closed source product, it does mean that if a vulnerability is found, a large number of developers can move quickly to plug the hole. Also, it's more possible for the community as a whole to take the initiative regarding security; while a kludged security risk may be left in a commercial product to make a ship date, it is likely to be replaced fairly quickly in an Open Source environment by a volunteer. Open Source isn't a magical security enhancer, but it does tend to promote better security practice and allow quick response in the event of a security breach.
Well, I'm not the OP, but the answer seems simple enough. He/she needs someone to write data extraction scripts. Phone numbers, email addresses and zip codes are simple data that have well-defined formatting requirements; any decent coder would be able to hack up a quick script to find and extract that information.
As far as I can see, it's simply a test to ensure that potential applicants can write scripts to find and extract data, as they would presumably have to do in the job being offered. It could be some sort of spamming front, but there are many perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting someone who can write code to mine data.
How is Google "assaulting" the purpose of the Web? They are simply trying to make searching easier. To address your claims one by one:
The gargantuan server farm? You try indexing most of the Web and a good portion of other databases without some heavy iron. You need lots of fast servers to store and search a database that indexes 4 billion web pages.
The email policy? First, nobody is forcing you to use gmail. In fact, it seems to still be an invitation-only affair. As far as storing every email recieved, they think that people want to have a method of searching their past mail. If you don't want to have a copy of your email floating around somewhere, I suggest you don't use email. If you don't want Google to have your email, don't use gmail.
Censorship? The only two episodes of censorship I've observed with Google were the Scientology "secrets," which they were compelled to censor by US law, and the government-compelled censorship of pages accessed within China. The only morally troublesome issue here is the censorship of Chinese-accessed pages. Still, there was very little Google could do. Either they could offer a limited search accessible within the Great Firewall, or be blocked by said firewall. While this could be interpreted as a failure of principles, it's certainly not a serious one.
Finally, there's this. An "assault" on browser functionality? Hardly. They're using some tricks to obfuscate copyrighted information which they wouldn't have been able to index in the first place without being able to show copyright holders that protection exists. It's certainly not impossible to retrieve the information, as posts here attest. Google is simply trying to appease both geeks and the copyright holders. I think they're doing a decent job. Are there problems? Sure. Have they been mostly resolved in a decent manner? Almost all of them have.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's not ever a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, it can be a bad idea to give all projects equal weight. Spysats have served well, and will continue to serve well, in large-scale conflicts. They may even be useful on a limited scale in guerrila wars. However, spies are useful in all conflicts. It therefore makes sense to concentrate more resources in human intelligence. While abandoning spysats entirely would be folly, we can't always implement every idea we want to; it would be wise to balance our methods' means with their effectiveness in a variety of situations.
As you probably know, standard twisted pair cable comes in several grades, or categories. Cat 3 is the minimum acceptable for 10baseT, Cat 5 for 100baseT, and Cat 5e for 1000baseT. Cables are sorted into categories depending on the highest signal frequency they can pass reliably - 16 MHz for Cat 3, for example. Unfortunately, this means if you were to wire a cluster with Cat 3 wiring and try to run a 100baseT network (at 100 MHz), you would probably get errors in the datastream, resulting in lost frames; this can cause subtle errors that will spawn many headaches down the road.
The bottom line is, don't skimp on your cables. While Ethernet can be quite resilient (I've seen 10 meg go over a barbed wire fence, albiet slowly and with about 80% dropped packets), skimping on cable to save a few bucks can really cause serious problems down the road. The money you "saved" by installing cables that aren't up to spec will be obliterated tenfold when you factor in the cost of ripping out all the old cable and running new stuff that's up to spec.
If the allegations of that site are true, however, and the Democrats did commit some sort of subtle, large-scale conspiracy across the state (without any whistleblowers going to the media), Gregoire would be shooting herself in the foot by calling for an election contest. The whole purpose of bringing this to the courts is to determine which ballots are valid and which are invalid; if there really is election fraud going on here, then the best thing for Gregoire to do would be to call for a revote, which would allow her to gracefully lose. Instead, she closed off her "escape route" by publicly asking for the courts to scrutinize disputed ballots.
It was never named "deadly," but it has been taken off the market recently by its manufacturer, Merck. Apparently, certain side effects potentially harmful to people with heart condidtions were overlooked during testing; the FDA got quite angry about this and would probably have demanded a recall if Merck didn't do it voluntarily.
Of course, there are many people for whom Vioxx worked quite well who have no heart problems; it's not surprising that spammers would step into a major potential market for "Vioxx" made from sugar pills. Also, I've seen a few law firms send out spams offering to represent me in the class action against Merck. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to also see people investing in the lawsuit by buying out others' share of the class; in this way, they could get in on the lawsuit despite never having Vioxx pass their lips.
I find it interesting that they single out Vioxx as the number one prescription spam, though. For what it's worth, all the drug spam I get offers not only for \/10XX but also cia1is, |_e\/1TRA, \/1C0D1N and of course the indomitable \/1A6RA. While the specific category of Vioxx spam may have just won out over porn spam, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that drug spam has been bigger than porn for a long time.
It might be helpful to look at this from the point of view of a consumer buying a DIVX DVD. This person, call him Joe, bought a disc, took it home, and it only worked for 2 or 3 days. Then, Joe had the opportunity to "really" purchase it and unlock it forever. Joe doesn't like this; didn't he already pay for the movie in the store? Why does the player want him to pay more money?
The point is this: people like to own things. They most certainly don't like to have things they own stop working, and they won't support a system that doesn't allow them to do what they want with the things they own. People may pay $20 for a book they only read once; it would obviously be more rational to check it out of the library, but people still shell out money for the version they can keep and read or watch whenever they want; whether they ever will read that particular book or watch that particular DVD more than once is largely irrelevant among many middle- and upper-class Americans. Considering that middle- and upper-class Americans are the primary target market among systems like DIVX and most movie and music distribution systems, it's not suprising that DIVX failed. I would expect that most products laden with DRM that prevents people from doing what they want with things they own would fail in the same fashion.
Also, you forget that "geeks" who care about DRM are the people who the less technically talented will go to for reccomendations on what consumer electronics to buy. Thus, 1 geek may influence the purchasing decisions of 5 or 10 different people considering something like Microsoft MCE; those people are Microsoft's target buyers and their choice to go with an MCE competitor like Tivo hurts MS's bottom line. When you consider that they're the ones everyone comes to for advice, geeks may have more power over purchasing habits than you thought.
Thus, when it's connected to a camera, it would not only have to power its internal hard drive but also perhaps provide 500 mA to its own port for the camera (although it might not conform to that particular part of the USB specification). The whole idea of this gadget is that it replaces a laptop as a "data vault" for a digital camera - you don't have to have a host PC to grab files off your camera and clear your flash card for more pictures.
As I recall, 3dfx used multi-GPU chips for its Voodoo 4 and 5 lines, and didn't do so well. Is there anything to indicate that this card will do better? After all, sticking with SLI and multicore technology after its prime was what killed 3dfx and allowed Nvidia to take its place; it'd be rather ironic to see Nvidia go down the same path.
It's all about Ohm's law: I=E/R (current equals voltage over resistance). Thus, to get 1 amp through a human body with a resistance of just 1000 ohms (which is a very low figure; the human body usually has more resistance fingertip to fingertip), you would need 1000 volts.
Even 110/220 volt house wiring isn't too dangerous when it comes to direct electrocution (although safety is always a good idea). The real reason you need wiring that's up to code is generally not electrocution as much as it is fire risks - short circuts can get hot. However, the current PoE specs are low voltage, low current - something that shouldn't cause any trouble if amateur wiring goes wrong, assuming that there is overcurrent protection in whatever provides power to the network.
Why didn't anyone say we could just take dead people's math discoveries as our own? In that case, I'm going to go "discover" Newton's method, Boolean logic, and the Pythagorean theorem! I'll be rich!
Looking at the Google code, we can see that while it appears to be machine generated, it definately tends towards the latter; Google has obviously tuned the code to save bytes and run as quickly as possible. Bandwidth and processor power aren't so important in a corporate environment where everyone has a LAN connection to the server and decent machines to work on, but when you have to deal with customers on dialup links and using old machines, every bit and every instruction counts. In that scenario, 1200 lines can be an enormous amount of code.
There are of course exceptions; sites like Homestar Runner can use Flash in a way that dovetails with their content. However, there are still sites that persist in trying to use Flash to present things like text and raster graphics that are better suited to other formats for a variety of reasons already stated by other posters. These I avoid unless I have absolutely no other choice.
However, an idea might be to ask your boss about the possibility of hiring a minimum-wage intern. When I was in college, I would have cheerfully killed to get a job working in IT that provided real-world experience, rather than cleaning greasetraps or restocking warehouses. You'd have to be careful about trustworthiness, but a minion to answer phones, deal with users who habitually leave caps lock on, and make coffee could significantly decrease your workload while not costing your company too much money.
Your boss might well go for it, especially if you explain that there's just too much work for one person, and that you can either get an intern or hire another full-time IT worker. This way, your plan actually saves money (at least compared to the alternatives you present). Even if the boss doesn't go for it, there's very little to lose by trying it. Good luck!
A wild guess: by "credibility" they mean something more akin to "street cred." Here in the US, it used to be that free online access to your bank accounts was something special; now, most banks offer it. Similarly, it may well be that in Korea, email services are seen as ordinary, while a company that provides services via SMS or IM may attract a clientele which cares about these things - and people who care about always having the latest, best things tend to be rather well-to-do.
Weekly? US News & World Report.
The problem is that many intelligent conservatives have been pushed out by loud, annoying talk-show types like Limbaugh, Savage and Coulter; sadly, antagonism tends to sell better than well-reasoned, intelligent debate. While I'm a liberal myself, I lament the lack of real debate in this country. Despite my political views, I always read George Will's column; he challenges my views and makes me think.
Listening to an echo chamber was a good part of what brought Kerry down in the recent election, and may well bring Bush and the Republican party down as well, if they start believing that 51 percent of votes means a "mandate." Just shouting abuse at the other side does nothing and only leads to anger, but the country's leaders seem only too willing to leave the arts of debate and compromise behind in their efforts to divide into two fortified camps with no room for internal dissent.
Who said anything about MAME? Many museums these days have custom-built interactive exhibits; there needs to be some way to control them. As you can probably imagine, regular PC keyboards and mice won't last a day in a high-traffic environment, particularly one involving excited kids pounding the heck out of them. Arcade controls tend to be built to survive just that, and will last for a good long time against whatever combination of excited and even malicious kids you might wish to throw at them.
I just can't see where a black-box app vendor would ever need continuing access to root on customer boxes. As many others have pointed out, if the vendor needs root access for a specific task, then it's fairly easy to set up sudo for their needs; however, giving someone the keys to the kingdom just because they might need them at some point in the future is foolish at best.
Thankfully, the First Amendment is entirely beside the point in this situation - while the government can't stop someone from saying whatever they wish, there is no obligation on the part of private citizens to listen to what the speaker has to say. There would be no free speech issue with a device such as the original poster put forth; while the telemarketing industry may have some small claim upon the right to phone you, they most certainly don't have the right to force you to listen.
The problem could probably be solved in several ways; one that comes to mind immediately is similar to what software projects do: have a trusted source sign off on the code before it makes it into the final version. Of course, there are problems with this as well: while most software projects are fairly limited in scope, Wikipedia may not have an expert on symbolism in medieval tapestries or early Gnostic sects.
Wikipedia is a great resource for a quick, informal summary of a subject, but it still has a long way to go before it can be a trusted authority like the Encylopaedia Brittanica. While doubtless it will evolve ways of dealing with the problems inherent in making everything world-editable, the road ahead is a long and difficult one.
After all, the legal costs are probably about the same to go after a pirate no matter what their offense is. It's good business sense for MS to go after big pirate operations and shut down people who are churning out and selling thousands of copies of Windows to willing customers; spending thousands on a case to shut down one kid with a cracked copy of Windows probably wouldn't be worth the cost. The target of this operation is almost certainly shops selling counterfeit copies of Windows; it probably wouldn't be worth the cost or privacy issues to go after everyone with a warez copy of Windows.
Also, since the Windows VNC clients these days have hooks into the video system, they run almost as well as MS's remote desktop on Windows - and almost all are cross-platform and Free as well. Windows' remote desktop capabilities are decent for simple administration across a LAN, but they aren't as useful in a large mixed environment. After all, you can run VNC with a Linux server and a Palm OS client; I challenge you to do that with a Windows remote desktop.
As far as I can see, it's simply a test to ensure that potential applicants can write scripts to find and extract data, as they would presumably have to do in the job being offered. It could be some sort of spamming front, but there are many perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting someone who can write code to mine data.