Write "fecal sample" on the outside of a brown bag, and put your lunch in it. It helps to have a biohazard logo and a medical cross or snake & staff logo on it, too.
I make and sell the catapult projects that helped me
Nice toys!
at least give them some rope and sticks to play with
Since city kids don't seem get enough of that at home these days, we call it the Pioneering Merit Badge and get them to do it in Boy Scouts. One of the highlights of being involved in scouting is going to a scout fair and seeing the lashing projects. I've seen kids lash up a pair of 12 foot towers and hang an Indiana Jones style log bridge between them. I've seen kids lash together a working drawbridge, and a crane. And we've organized contests where the kids have to lash together catapults and launch water balloons at each other. Someone even had a project to lash up a "pirate ship" at camp one year (playground equipment sized), and every single 11 year old boy who saw it had to go play on it.
Privately, I've heard some mortified parents' reactions: "How could they let the kids climb that thing?" In reality, the worst injury I've seen from anything like that has been a bruise or a sprain from a fall, never even a broken bone from any of this stuff. (The only broken bones I was ever around for were from the tag- or tackle- based group games.)
Someone please organize a pro-bono heist of Russiniovich's soul from Seattle & give it back to him.
Case is on his way with his Ono-Sendai, and has the extraction planned for tonight. Maas-Biolabs can't keep him protected forever.
Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?
on
Re-Inventing Hotwheels
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why in the world can't I buy my 3 year old a decent quality hot wheels/matchbox sized Dump truck? Or bull dozer? Or car that actually looks like a car that actually exists on this planet? Why do they all have to be "pimped out"? Or have crazy high tech styling?
Context: I was born in 1962. (Yes, people really are that old.) When I was playing with Hot Wheels in the 1960s and 1970s, the cars were all "futuristic". Nobody wanted to play with a navy blue Chevy Impala when you could have a purple metallic-flake paint "Scorpion" or a "Stinger" with a plexiglas dome for the driver, looking more like a UFO than a car. Even the models of the current cars were "tricked out" with giant chrome air intakes poking out of the hood, and flame decals burning down the sides. They were indeed the "pimpmobiles" of their era. None of them looked like cars anybody I knew would ever own, or anything I'd seen anywhere but the Popular Mechanics photos of the Detroit Auto Show.
Matchbox, on the other hand, made the "realistic" vehicles. I had a dump truck that was obviously of British origin, which I always thought was kind of cool. And I played with those, too.
I suggest you get your kid some Hot Wheels anyway. When you sit down to play with him/her, the only person who cares if they're real or not will be you. You'll both be making "brrrm-brrm" noises soon enough, making little roads in the dirt, and the realism will not matter in the least.
Well, my phone really is 99.5% hands free -- it's a bluetooth kit hooked into the stereo. I press a single button on the dash to answer it. Even with all that, I find the distraction of an ordinary conversation draws some focus from the primary job of driving the vehicle.
It's a bit worse than talking to an adult passenger, because a passenger is usually aware of the road conditions and will shut up at the appropriate time, and will understand when your concentration needs to be fully on the road. People on the other end of the cell call usually don't recognize that I'm driving and certainly aren't aware of my traffic situation. Occasionally I have to butt in with a "Sorry, I'm driving and there's a problem, could you hang on a moment?" The other party is almost universally accepting of this -- if you bother to tell them. But I remember at least one occasion where traffic was tight, and my boss just wouldn't shut up, so I hung up on him. Yeah, that's why I hung up.
The best method would be a standardized docking cradle with a digital interface.
There is a standardized digital interface (but not a cradle/dock.) It's called a USB mass stoarge device. And this Kenwood can play from it. Since mine was a retrofit, the installer filled the gap above it with a small in-dash pocket that's perfect for holding the USB device. (I'm using a Palm Lifedrive, but I've used a memory stick with good results, too.) It's a very generic solution that works for iPods, iRivers and Zens, too.
Of course, it's not without its shortcomings; the car stereo has to read the entire directory structure (every time it boots) before playing a note; it doesn't recognize existing playlists or remember to save new ones; and the tiny buttons have even tinier unreadable labels. But I think the choice of USB-B connectors as a "universal" interface was a good one, and works with most equipment that's out there today. The only thing that would have been better would have been Bluetooth's A2DP, but that hasn't been widely adopted yet.
The placement of the controls isn't the problem. The visibility of the controls isn't the problem. The driver who thinks he can drive the radio and the car at the same time is the problem.
Driver distractions in general are the problem. "Eyeballs off the road" or "fishing around in the footwell for my stray iPod" are extreme (and extremely stupid) cases. But just the thought process of "hmm...which CD has my Led Zeppelin and which CD has my Devo?" is enough distraction to take my focus off the road.
Another example is thinking I'm "safer" with my handsfree car phone than I am fumbling about with a handheld. Sure, that's a bit safer than not fumbling with it, but I guarantee that if you're on a hands-free phone call and get into a heated argument with your spouse (or any other emotionally upsetting phone call) that your concentration isn't going to remain fully on the road.
If car stereos were locked down while the cars are in motion, the temptation to change tracks would be gone, and so would the distraction.
a driver who nearly killed us recently by reaching into the footwell of his car to retrieve an iPod nano at around 90mph.
You can kill someone by just focusing on the stereo display instead of the road, too. This guy was just more Darwinian than most.
Perhaps car stereos need to be rubber-padded to accomodate the lowest common denominator, like so many other consumer products. Something to prevent you from changing discs, tracks or stations unless the transmission is in park.
With that said, who is he to 'determine' the 'timeline' for the fix? What if the bug or exploit affects a vast amount of code and third party applications? Does he get to hold the industry hostage becuase he didn't get the 'timeline' response or fix from Microsoft 'he' expects, when he knows nothing of what the bug or exploit might entail?
The hackers and the software firms wrestled with this throughout the last half of the 1990s. They came to an uneasy truce somewhere around 2000 and decided that 30 days should be enough time to elapse between reporting to the vendor and public disclosure.
The hackers don't have to give them any notice at all. There is no legal obligation or responsibility to keep quiet. What they did was to agree to delay in exchange for some respectability; basically for the l33tness of seeing their names in the Microsoft technical bulletins. Microsoft was opposed to such a short timeframe, but acknowledged they needed to act quickly. Microsoft was (and still is, basically) opposed to any public disclosure, of course, but learned that the hackers can get themselves plenty of attention by simply exploiting the bugs. It was better to come to an arrangement than to be embarrassed on a daily basis.
The 30 days isn't an absolute. Microsoft has been known to ask the "more legitimate" security researchers to sit on a critical bug for many months while they work up a fix. And plenty of grey-hat hackers have simply announced their exploits publically.
Unfortunatley, I don't see this "did I turn the oven off" problem being solved any time soon. There's always going to be SOMETHING plugged in for you to worry about, be it air condition, alarm clock or automatic can opener.
Ahh, but I don't worry about my computer starting the house on fire nearly as much as I worry about a crusted-over dryer lint trap, grease covered oven or stovetop, or forgotten iron. Perhaps I should, it does draw over 200W, but it also has fans and the ability to panic power-off should the core CPU temperature spiral upward. No, I worry more about the devices that are intended to generate lots of heat.
I've been thinking about a web-cam solution to the washer/dryer problem. If I mount a crappy $20 camera, I could probably configure a program like ZoneMinder to watch the machines' displays and detect the various states (washing, rinsing, spinning, finished, etc) and probably even the time remaining. What I ultimately want is to have the computer trigger a message (IM or SMS or whatever) to let me know when both machines have finished their cycles so I can make one trip downstairs to put the next load in, and get the clothes out of the dryer before they wrinkle. Right now I set a kitchen timer, and hope I'm in range when it goes 'ding'.
There's a huge problem with AdBlock, and it just got worse with 0.7.
It accepts subscriptions.
Advertisers have been able to safely ignore ad blocking software, for the most part. The proverbial Joe Sixpack doesn't have the wherewithal to install AdBlock by himself. Even if he did, he might not have noticed the extra extension required to automatically download configuration files. It was too much work for the "mundanes."
Along comes AdBlock 0.7. When you install it, it now boots up with a big "check here to subscribe to these AdBlock lists." Now, anyone with Firefox that knows how to install extensions will automatically make doubleclick.net, 2o7.net, kontera, and hundreds of other advertisers lose business.
Subscriptions are effectively an "intelligence multiplier." One smart person who spends the time to wipe out annoying ads wipes them out for many thousands of subscribers.
Doubleclick could afford to ignore AdBlock as long as not too many people could use it. Doubleclick can not afford to ignore AdBlock when it lowers the bar down to Joe Sixpack's level. They may begin to offer web sites technical advice on how to *require* people to view their ads. There's a lot of crap that could happen if they get worried some big ISP is going to install an ad-filtering proxy. There could be lawsuits against the providers of the lists, or of AdBlock itself.
I'm afraid that with 0.7 AdBlock just fired the return salvo in a banner-advertising war.
The same page also says we import only 15% of our natural gas. It's interesting, it looks like we're already generating almost as much electricity by wind power as we are from oil.
If the price of oil rises high enough, I don't see why we wouldn't see some pooled investments like that be possible as well.
I think you made a great point in favor of the subsidies. They help get some of the infrastructure in place before the fuel prices cripple the oil burning plants and pass the prices on to us consumers.
Markets are reactionary -- that's one of the basics learned in Econ 101. Sure, we could wait until oil hits $200/barrel, but even then nobody can build a wind turbine in a day. It takes a long time to manufacture the parts, acquire the land and permits, and then get it erected, and even then our transmission grid capacity simply isn't there today to deliver all the potential energy from the wind-rich parts of the country.
Subsidies can help move things along now in an orderly fashion, before the country reaches crisis stage. Waiting for market forces is not a good short-term plan, unless you like years of rolling brownouts during the conversion.
You do realize that the majority of US electric power is generated by burning domestically-mined coal, right?
Well, I'd like to think I'm not so naive as to believe that wind power alone will ever suffice for electric production. The wind isn't nearly reliable enough to be our only source of energy. We'll still have to burn coal (and operate nuclear plants) to make up the difference. But this could mean a shift from coal as our primary source of electricty to a backup role for when the wind isn't blowing, just as we use expensive natural gas today to fuel peak power plants.
It would be cheaper to pay farmers not to farm than to come
up with kooky schemes like this that pay them twice
The point of subsidies such as this is that it may provide incentive to other "green" energy producers to hook up to the grid. My electric co-op offers a similar sort of deal: I can pay a premium for blocks of 100kWh of wind-generated power per month.
Most of these schemes that I'm familiar with are for otherwise "free" energy: solar or wind power (or now reclaimed methane.) They are trying to offer these producers a limited time subsidy to help offset the startup costs. A 1mW wind generator costs about one million U.S. dollars to get up and running. Unless you get help with the interest up front, it will take quite a while to get that ROI back.
The radio recently reported that my state, Minnesota, published a paper showing that if windmills were erected at all the economically feasible points in the state, our generating capacity would exceed our current consumption by a factor of fourteen. That would mean total independence from fossil fuels for electric production for a long time to come. Just think what that would do towards stabilizing the price of energy, especially when compared to OPEC's cartel.
Remember, the "energy industry" isn't a single entity. The electric power companies have no particular love for the oil or coal companies. (Certainly mine doesn't, as it's a member-owned non-profit co-op.) They're business partners, and nothing more. Being forced to constantly raise their rates to compensate for the costs of fuel and seeing no profit from the increased prices has not instilled friendship. If they can do anything to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, it lowers their costs as much as anybody else's.
Sure, it's "extra" profit for the small energy producers. But it helps reduce dependence on foreign energy, and could eventually replace it at a much more stable price.
Except you need to keep it secret if you want it to work long-term. Look at the example of Google's Page Rank system, and how once it became commercially successful it also became the target of "gaming the system".
The other thing to keep in mind is a lot of us come to/. for the comments, not just the stories. There's not much of a "community feel" to digg, but there's plenty here at/. So regardless of whether a story is a dupe, boring, a slow news day, or whatever, there are always hundreds of people to chat with about it.
I work for a large retailer, and I had a call once from a user who was at the store server closing the system for the night. She said "I heard a pop and now there's a lot of smoke coming out of the monitor." I quickly said "Turn it off! Turn it off!" to which she replied, "but there's a sign here that says 'NEVER TURN OFF THE COMPUTERS'."
I actually had to convince her that it was OK to turn them off if they catch fire.
In an unrelated incident, we had a different call from someone on the sales floor complaining that there was water coming out of her cash register! Turns out the cable for the register ran down a support column that had some water leaking in the ceiling above it, and it dripped down the cable and out the machine's face.
If they're at the point where they're doing page by page scans, they've already gone through the easy part of determining how some of this information is handled by the code written by the IT staff.
You know this? Wow, you've got pretty good between-the-lines vision, because he sure didn't say that in TFQ.
What I read from TFQ is "help me scan for bad data" and replied with "you can scan for bad data until the cows come home, but until you have a big stick to smack future violators you will have accomplished jack."
I just thought such simple language wasn't much help without some examples and context.
Unfortunately, the right answer is probably a big stick attached to the end of the policy. "Our policy is one of zero tolerance. If you violate these rules you will be fired, tenure notwithstanding. We have to protect our students first and our reputation second, and nothing else, including your convenience, your research, your history, your prominence in your field, your title, or your budget is justification for violation of this policy."
As much as I hate personally 'zero-tolerance' policies like that, it's the kind of thing that gets attention. And this problem can only be solved by getting everyone's attention. The real question is "would a university have the balls to fire the Dean of Engineering for violating it?" What if that prof is world-renowned? I'm thinking "what if this meant they had to fire someone like Vincent Cerf?"
I believe the original requestor is asking about software to help automate/speed-up monitoring and scanning of content that's being put up on web sites by staff and/or students.
I know what he's asking for, and I answered with what it takes to make it happen for real. The answer is the various teams that are storing the data need to be held accountable for storing it securely. Just grepping for and deleting a database holding SSNs isn't enough -- his university has to make sure that all the teams are educated to not ask for nor store SSNs. They'll also benefit from a cohesive policy that gives specifics, such as "replace SSNs with student ID numbers."
If this is just some security manager saying "go find SSNs and wipe 'em out" then they're up the creek. For every database they clean up, someone else will have created a new one. They'll be ignored and stonewalled by teams who have neither the time nor the budget to comply. This sort of thing has to come down from the board of regents, and they have to put the responsibility on everyone, otherwise they're just pissing in the wind.
As a large merchant that handles Visa card numbers, we have to undergo an annual Visa PCI CISP audit. The questions are pretty thorough, and if you can fully pass the audit you can tell management that you've reduced your risk of exposure. The link to the pages are here: CISP.
Of course, you're probably not interested specifically in protecting "Visa's track data" but in whatever data you consider sensitive. Applying the listed policies and practices would go a long way towards securing your resources, whatever it is you want to secure.
As a large corporation, failure to comply would mean the penalties would be severe (and most likely business-damaging.) If you're not handling card data, you won't have the same consequences, of course. What the penalties meant to us, though, is that top management made a decree: 'fix the problems and pass the audit -- we can't afford not to.' Having top-down pressure means that if we have sensitive data that we're passing to another team, we're both inclined to work together to solve the issues. If one team balks, a phone call up the pyramid gets things back on track. If your university is serious about this, a similar edict will go a long way towards cleanup.
Another boost in the direction of securing our data was hiring an external consultant to perform the audit. Our auditor is very knowledgeable about ways to follow the data: where does it enter the system, where does it go from there, who writes it to disc, why do they save it, and do they have a business need to save it? Can the data be eliminated? Can a token be substituted for the data? Can the data be truncated? If not, can it at least be masked on reports where the details aren't needed?
As far as specifics go, each development and maintenance director's pyramid was required to assign a manager to own the PCI process. Each team had to go through their code, identify sensitive data, and take steps to protect it. They also had to go to the data owners, and have them redact their archives.
It's huge. But given the security breaches that are almost a daily occurrance, we can't afford not to.
Slashdot Mirror
And it'll probably have a damn thick accent, too. *breep*-*breep*
Write "fecal sample" on the outside of a brown bag, and put your lunch in it. It helps to have a biohazard logo and a medical cross or snake & staff logo on it, too.
Nice toys!
Since city kids don't seem get enough of that at home these days, we call it the Pioneering Merit Badge and get them to do it in Boy Scouts. One of the highlights of being involved in scouting is going to a scout fair and seeing the lashing projects. I've seen kids lash up a pair of 12 foot towers and hang an Indiana Jones style log bridge between them. I've seen kids lash together a working drawbridge, and a crane. And we've organized contests where the kids have to lash together catapults and launch water balloons at each other. Someone even had a project to lash up a "pirate ship" at camp one year (playground equipment sized), and every single 11 year old boy who saw it had to go play on it.
Privately, I've heard some mortified parents' reactions: "How could they let the kids climb that thing?" In reality, the worst injury I've seen from anything like that has been a bruise or a sprain from a fall, never even a broken bone from any of this stuff. (The only broken bones I was ever around for were from the tag- or tackle- based group games.)
Case is on his way with his Ono-Sendai, and has the extraction planned for tonight. Maas-Biolabs can't keep him protected forever.
Context: I was born in 1962. (Yes, people really are that old.) When I was playing with Hot Wheels in the 1960s and 1970s, the cars were all "futuristic". Nobody wanted to play with a navy blue Chevy Impala when you could have a purple metallic-flake paint "Scorpion" or a "Stinger" with a plexiglas dome for the driver, looking more like a UFO than a car. Even the models of the current cars were "tricked out" with giant chrome air intakes poking out of the hood, and flame decals burning down the sides. They were indeed the "pimpmobiles" of their era. None of them looked like cars anybody I knew would ever own, or anything I'd seen anywhere but the Popular Mechanics photos of the Detroit Auto Show.
Matchbox, on the other hand, made the "realistic" vehicles. I had a dump truck that was obviously of British origin, which I always thought was kind of cool. And I played with those, too.
I suggest you get your kid some Hot Wheels anyway. When you sit down to play with him/her, the only person who cares if they're real or not will be you. You'll both be making "brrrm-brrm" noises soon enough, making little roads in the dirt, and the realism will not matter in the least.
It's a bit worse than talking to an adult passenger, because a passenger is usually aware of the road conditions and will shut up at the appropriate time, and will understand when your concentration needs to be fully on the road. People on the other end of the cell call usually don't recognize that I'm driving and certainly aren't aware of my traffic situation. Occasionally I have to butt in with a "Sorry, I'm driving and there's a problem, could you hang on a moment?" The other party is almost universally accepting of this -- if you bother to tell them. But I remember at least one occasion where traffic was tight, and my boss just wouldn't shut up, so I hung up on him. Yeah, that's why I hung up.
There is a standardized digital interface (but not a cradle/dock.) It's called a USB mass stoarge device. And this Kenwood can play from it. Since mine was a retrofit, the installer filled the gap above it with a small in-dash pocket that's perfect for holding the USB device. (I'm using a Palm Lifedrive, but I've used a memory stick with good results, too.) It's a very generic solution that works for iPods, iRivers and Zens, too.
Of course, it's not without its shortcomings; the car stereo has to read the entire directory structure (every time it boots) before playing a note; it doesn't recognize existing playlists or remember to save new ones; and the tiny buttons have even tinier unreadable labels. But I think the choice of USB-B connectors as a "universal" interface was a good one, and works with most equipment that's out there today. The only thing that would have been better would have been Bluetooth's A2DP, but that hasn't been widely adopted yet.
Driver distractions in general are the problem. "Eyeballs off the road" or "fishing around in the footwell for my stray iPod" are extreme (and extremely stupid) cases. But just the thought process of "hmm...which CD has my Led Zeppelin and which CD has my Devo?" is enough distraction to take my focus off the road.
Another example is thinking I'm "safer" with my handsfree car phone than I am fumbling about with a handheld. Sure, that's a bit safer than not fumbling with it, but I guarantee that if you're on a hands-free phone call and get into a heated argument with your spouse (or any other emotionally upsetting phone call) that your concentration isn't going to remain fully on the road.
If car stereos were locked down while the cars are in motion, the temptation to change tracks would be gone, and so would the distraction.
You can kill someone by just focusing on the stereo display instead of the road, too. This guy was just more Darwinian than most.
Perhaps car stereos need to be rubber-padded to accomodate the lowest common denominator, like so many other consumer products. Something to prevent you from changing discs, tracks or stations unless the transmission is in park.
With that said, who is he to 'determine' the 'timeline' for the fix? What if the bug or exploit affects a vast amount of code and third party applications? Does he get to hold the industry hostage becuase he didn't get the 'timeline' response or fix from Microsoft 'he' expects, when he knows nothing of what the bug or exploit might entail?
The hackers and the software firms wrestled with this throughout the last half of the 1990s. They came to an uneasy truce somewhere around 2000 and decided that 30 days should be enough time to elapse between reporting to the vendor and public disclosure.
The hackers don't have to give them any notice at all. There is no legal obligation or responsibility to keep quiet. What they did was to agree to delay in exchange for some respectability; basically for the l33tness of seeing their names in the Microsoft technical bulletins. Microsoft was opposed to such a short timeframe, but acknowledged they needed to act quickly. Microsoft was (and still is, basically) opposed to any public disclosure, of course, but learned that the hackers can get themselves plenty of attention by simply exploiting the bugs. It was better to come to an arrangement than to be embarrassed on a daily basis.
The 30 days isn't an absolute. Microsoft has been known to ask the "more legitimate" security researchers to sit on a critical bug for many months while they work up a fix. And plenty of grey-hat hackers have simply announced their exploits publically.
Unfortunatley, I don't see this "did I turn the oven off" problem being solved any time soon. There's always going to be SOMETHING plugged in for you to worry about, be it air condition, alarm clock or automatic can opener.
Ahh, but I don't worry about my computer starting the house on fire nearly as much as I worry about a crusted-over dryer lint trap, grease covered oven or stovetop, or forgotten iron. Perhaps I should, it does draw over 200W, but it also has fans and the ability to panic power-off should the core CPU temperature spiral upward. No, I worry more about the devices that are intended to generate lots of heat.
I've been thinking about a web-cam solution to the washer/dryer problem. If I mount a crappy $20 camera, I could probably configure a program like ZoneMinder to watch the machines' displays and detect the various states (washing, rinsing, spinning, finished, etc) and probably even the time remaining. What I ultimately want is to have the computer trigger a message (IM or SMS or whatever) to let me know when both machines have finished their cycles so I can make one trip downstairs to put the next load in, and get the clothes out of the dryer before they wrinkle. Right now I set a kitchen timer, and hope I'm in range when it goes 'ding'.
There's a huge problem with AdBlock, and it just got worse with 0.7.
It accepts subscriptions.
Advertisers have been able to safely ignore ad blocking software, for the most part. The proverbial Joe Sixpack doesn't have the wherewithal to install AdBlock by himself. Even if he did, he might not have noticed the extra extension required to automatically download configuration files. It was too much work for the "mundanes."
Along comes AdBlock 0.7. When you install it, it now boots up with a big "check here to subscribe to these AdBlock lists." Now, anyone with Firefox that knows how to install extensions will automatically make doubleclick.net, 2o7.net, kontera, and hundreds of other advertisers lose business.
Subscriptions are effectively an "intelligence multiplier." One smart person who spends the time to wipe out annoying ads wipes them out for many thousands of subscribers.
Doubleclick could afford to ignore AdBlock as long as not too many people could use it. Doubleclick can not afford to ignore AdBlock when it lowers the bar down to Joe Sixpack's level. They may begin to offer web sites technical advice on how to *require* people to view their ads. There's a lot of crap that could happen if they get worried some big ISP is going to install an ad-filtering proxy. There could be lawsuits against the providers of the lists, or of AdBlock itself.
I'm afraid that with 0.7 AdBlock just fired the return salvo in a banner-advertising war.
I think we've got nothing, sir. The report is only a fragment from a probe droid in the Gulf states, but it's the best lead we've had.
Donald RUMSFELD
[ irritated ]
We have thousands of probe droids searching Iraq. I want justification, not proof!
POWELL
The visuals indicate oil, but no terrorists.
RUMSFELD
We could make it mean anything. As long as we ignored every other lead...
POWELL
But, sir, Iraq is supposed to be devoid of terrorists.
Lord BUSH
You found something?
RUMSFELD
Yes, my lord.
[ He points to a blurry image of an oil well on a monitor ]
BUSH
That's it. The terrarists are there.
POWELL
My lord, there are so many uncharted settlements. It could be smugglers, it could be...
BUSH
That is the system. And I'm sure bin Laden is with them. Set your course for Baghdad. General POWELL, prepare your men.
-
Coal 50%
-
Nuclear 20%
-
Natural Gas 18%
-
Hydro 7%
-
Oil 3%
-
Non-hydro Renewable 2%
The same page also says we import only 15% of our natural gas. It's interesting, it looks like we're already generating almost as much electricity by wind power as we are from oil.I think you made a great point in favor of the subsidies. They help get some of the infrastructure in place before the fuel prices cripple the oil burning plants and pass the prices on to us consumers.
Markets are reactionary -- that's one of the basics learned in Econ 101. Sure, we could wait until oil hits $200/barrel, but even then nobody can build a wind turbine in a day. It takes a long time to manufacture the parts, acquire the land and permits, and then get it erected, and even then our transmission grid capacity simply isn't there today to deliver all the potential energy from the wind-rich parts of the country.
Subsidies can help move things along now in an orderly fashion, before the country reaches crisis stage. Waiting for market forces is not a good short-term plan, unless you like years of rolling brownouts during the conversion.
Well, I'd like to think I'm not so naive as to believe that wind power alone will ever suffice for electric production. The wind isn't nearly reliable enough to be our only source of energy. We'll still have to burn coal (and operate nuclear plants) to make up the difference. But this could mean a shift from coal as our primary source of electricty to a backup role for when the wind isn't blowing, just as we use expensive natural gas today to fuel peak power plants.
The point of subsidies such as this is that it may provide incentive to other "green" energy producers to hook up to the grid. My electric co-op offers a similar sort of deal: I can pay a premium for blocks of 100kWh of wind-generated power per month.
Most of these schemes that I'm familiar with are for otherwise "free" energy: solar or wind power (or now reclaimed methane.) They are trying to offer these producers a limited time subsidy to help offset the startup costs. A 1mW wind generator costs about one million U.S. dollars to get up and running. Unless you get help with the interest up front, it will take quite a while to get that ROI back.
The radio recently reported that my state, Minnesota, published a paper showing that if windmills were erected at all the economically feasible points in the state, our generating capacity would exceed our current consumption by a factor of fourteen. That would mean total independence from fossil fuels for electric production for a long time to come. Just think what that would do towards stabilizing the price of energy, especially when compared to OPEC's cartel.
Remember, the "energy industry" isn't a single entity. The electric power companies have no particular love for the oil or coal companies. (Certainly mine doesn't, as it's a member-owned non-profit co-op.) They're business partners, and nothing more. Being forced to constantly raise their rates to compensate for the costs of fuel and seeing no profit from the increased prices has not instilled friendship. If they can do anything to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, it lowers their costs as much as anybody else's.
Sure, it's "extra" profit for the small energy producers. But it helps reduce dependence on foreign energy, and could eventually replace it at a much more stable price.
Except you need to keep it secret if you want it to work long-term. Look at the example of Google's Page Rank system, and how once it became commercially successful it also became the target of "gaming the system".
The other thing to keep in mind is a lot of us come to /. for the comments, not just the stories. There's not much of a "community feel" to digg, but there's plenty here at /. So regardless of whether a story is a dupe, boring, a slow news day, or whatever, there are always hundreds of people to chat with about it.
I actually had to convince her that it was OK to turn them off if they catch fire.
In an unrelated incident, we had a different call from someone on the sales floor complaining that there was water coming out of her cash register! Turns out the cable for the register ran down a support column that had some water leaking in the ceiling above it, and it dripped down the cable and out the machine's face.
That picture of the rescue tool looks exactly like the 'lower-human-horn harvester' from Futurama!
You know this? Wow, you've got pretty good between-the-lines vision, because he sure didn't say that in TFQ.
What I read from TFQ is "help me scan for bad data" and replied with "you can scan for bad data until the cows come home, but until you have a big stick to smack future violators you will have accomplished jack."
I just thought such simple language wasn't much help without some examples and context.
Yeah, I know, and that's the problem.
Unfortunately, the right answer is probably a big stick attached to the end of the policy. "Our policy is one of zero tolerance. If you violate these rules you will be fired, tenure notwithstanding. We have to protect our students first and our reputation second, and nothing else, including your convenience, your research, your history, your prominence in your field, your title, or your budget is justification for violation of this policy."
As much as I hate personally 'zero-tolerance' policies like that, it's the kind of thing that gets attention. And this problem can only be solved by getting everyone's attention. The real question is "would a university have the balls to fire the Dean of Engineering for violating it?" What if that prof is world-renowned? I'm thinking "what if this meant they had to fire someone like Vincent Cerf?"
And I don't know how to answer that.
I know what he's asking for, and I answered with what it takes to make it happen for real. The answer is the various teams that are storing the data need to be held accountable for storing it securely. Just grepping for and deleting a database holding SSNs isn't enough -- his university has to make sure that all the teams are educated to not ask for nor store SSNs. They'll also benefit from a cohesive policy that gives specifics, such as "replace SSNs with student ID numbers."
If this is just some security manager saying "go find SSNs and wipe 'em out" then they're up the creek. For every database they clean up, someone else will have created a new one. They'll be ignored and stonewalled by teams who have neither the time nor the budget to comply. This sort of thing has to come down from the board of regents, and they have to put the responsibility on everyone, otherwise they're just pissing in the wind.
Of course, you're probably not interested specifically in protecting "Visa's track data" but in whatever data you consider sensitive. Applying the listed policies and practices would go a long way towards securing your resources, whatever it is you want to secure.
As a large corporation, failure to comply would mean the penalties would be severe (and most likely business-damaging.) If you're not handling card data, you won't have the same consequences, of course. What the penalties meant to us, though, is that top management made a decree: 'fix the problems and pass the audit -- we can't afford not to.' Having top-down pressure means that if we have sensitive data that we're passing to another team, we're both inclined to work together to solve the issues. If one team balks, a phone call up the pyramid gets things back on track. If your university is serious about this, a similar edict will go a long way towards cleanup.
Another boost in the direction of securing our data was hiring an external consultant to perform the audit. Our auditor is very knowledgeable about ways to follow the data: where does it enter the system, where does it go from there, who writes it to disc, why do they save it, and do they have a business need to save it? Can the data be eliminated? Can a token be substituted for the data? Can the data be truncated? If not, can it at least be masked on reports where the details aren't needed?
As far as specifics go, each development and maintenance director's pyramid was required to assign a manager to own the PCI process. Each team had to go through their code, identify sensitive data, and take steps to protect it. They also had to go to the data owners, and have them redact their archives.
It's huge. But given the security breaches that are almost a daily occurrance, we can't afford not to.
Well, you certainly *write* like a systems analyst. :-)