Not a problem. When you set up Chrome, as you're connecting your account you just configure sync to not sync extensions and apps. That'll prevent the auto-download of them. If you need to clean up sync'd data, it's a dance: get Chrome sync'd up, turn off sync so the local copy is disconnected from the sync'd data, go to your dashboard and clear your sync'd data, then configure what you want sync'd and reenable sync.
That'll be a real problem for the cops, because the first thing the defense attorney would do is have the judge put a Glass on with it randomly operating or not and have the cop while on the witness stand under oath tell the judge which it is, then have the judge confirm whether the cop was correct or not. Do it 4 or 5 times to guard against the cop guessing right and the cop is in the unenviable position of having been caught out lying on the stand in a way the judge can't just ignore. Especially if the defense attorney asks say the court reporter to check the Glass after he's set it and then give it to the judge "just so there's no question whether I'm doing anything with it". The judge isn't going to appreciate the cop having backed him into that position.
Thing is, as the judge noted there wasn't any evidence she was using the Glass at the time. Her argument will continue to work as long as the cops can't produce any evidence to support the charge. And despite the claims, it is not illegal to drive while wearing Glass, any more than it's illegal to drive with one of those in-dash touchscreen entertainment systems installed. It's only illegal to drive with them operating. And unlike the in-dash systems it's virtually impossible to tell whether Glass is operating without putting it on yourself.
She wasn't ticketed for wearing Glass, though. She was ticketed for speeding, and you'll notice that she didn't even try to fight that one because the cops have her dead to rights on it. The Glass charge was a tack-on charge, something they added on because they could and having it there to drop at trial makes it easier to make the speeding charge stick. Likely she got it because she mouthed off to the cop when he was writing her up, and he decided to write her up for everything he could. Her case should be an object lesson: how you respond to the cops has a big effect on how you're written up. Be a jerk, they'll pile on everything they can. Be polite and reasonable and honest, and often they'll write it up for the minimum (or even straight-up let you off with a warning).
No, it wouldn't. Both terms have the negative connotation that the people in question have a negative impact, are undesirable and their numbers should be minimized. But open-source projects are operating under a different model, and users are not undesirable and don't have a negative impact. In fact most open-source projects consider themselves a failure if they don't have a large number of users, because that means people don't want the project's software.
They aren't "freeloaders". They're called "users". Without them, there's no point to creating software except for stuff you personally need. And there's more stuff you need than you have the time or the skill to create, so you will be one of those users a lot more often than you're a contributor. Users aren't a problem, they're the reason software exists in the first place.
It allows people to essentially e-mail you without having to know your e-mail address and without being able to send e-mail to you via SMTP.
Think about this for a minute. Spammers and fraudsters like it when they can use botnet-based bulk-mailing tools, because they can send mail quickly and there's no central place that can filter them without catching a lot of false positives. And the filtering fails because it's being done on the receiving end where it has to deal with a lot of unique senders. If I can only be reached through my G+ profile, that doesn't work. The spammer doesn't know my e-mail address, and G+ doesn't accept SMTP. He has to use Google's Web interface, which is harder to do through a botnet-based bulk-mailing system. And his mail will be intercepted and filtered at the sender, not the recipient. Google can identify a unique sender and spam-file them without affecting other senders. Google has an incentive to do this, too. Yes as an account holder I'm their product, but Google's always grasped one thing to a degree other sites haven't: I'm a product with legs. If they annoy me too much, I can get up and walk away. So Google's always tried to moderate how much their service functionality (as opposed to the UI, that's another matter) annoys people. Spammers and fraudsters don't provide any revenue to Google and they annoy Google's product, so Google's got good reasons to filter and spam-file anyone trying to abuse this system and the system makes it easy to do that without nearly as many false positives (which would also annoy their product) to worry about.
Overall I'd only be bothered by this if I were trying to maintain an e-mail address and online identity with no public presence at all. For that I wouldn't depend on any third-party service at all, I'd set up a server on Linode or AWS running my own e-mail software. Linode is $20/month for a minimum-sized server that'll easily handle the load and it took me an afternoon to completely set up e-mail for IMAP and inbound and outbound (authenticated SSL sessions only) SMTP for my domain including spam filtering.
Yep, but them adding people to their circles does nothing for them. Circle membership is one-way: if I put you in one of my circles it gives you access to me as a member of that circle but gives me no access to you. To be useful for spamming those profiles would have to get you to add them to your circles. As for changing mail settings, I'm not sure I'd need to do it. GMail already filters spam, and this would just be a bit more spam on top of what I already get.
I tend to see it from the residential point-of-view. They need the parking for the people who live there. By pushing parking out into the residential areas the businesses (and the developers behind the business centers) are getting all the benefits of additional parking without having to shoulder any of the costs of providing it. My opinion's always been that if the developer wants to put in business space that'll require parking, let the developer build the required parking and pass the costs on to the businesses that'll lease the space and benefit from the parking.
In part it's a space issue. There's only so much space for buses to stop at each stop. The transit system times buses so that (assuming they're running relatively on-time) there won't be more buses at a stop at any given time than the stop has space for. If other vehicles are using the stop without coordinating timing with the transit system, you can end up with a situation where city buses have to stop to drop off and pick up riders but there's no space for the bus.
It wasn't that Google hired the buses. It was that Google's buses were using the public-transit bus stops, interfering with the regular buses. That's an entirely reasonable objection, if Google wants to run buses then let them arrange all the infrastructure needed themselves or pay the transit system for using public bus stops.
It sounds like Google didnt' co-opt the boat, they just hired it. The company that owns it and hires it out decided to take Google's offer over that of the whale-watching company who apparently didn't have a long-term contract for it's use. That's frankly one of the risks you take when you make your company's operation dependent on someone else without locking it down with an iron-clad air-tight contract: that someone else may change their mind and you're left high and dry.
Literally, I leave a paper trail. My main password vault's on my computer, encrypted. There's backup copies stored several other places. And down in the garage there's a fireproof safe with my important papers in it. I put a sealed envelope in the safe with the master password to my password vault plus a printed listing of critical information like bank and utility accounts, emergency contact information for important people, and crucial passwords and regularly update a flash drive copy of my password vault that goes in the safe as well. Some good friends locally get an encrypted copy of the password vault, and the vault password plus the listing is held in escrow with a lawyer who my friends know to contact if anything happens. As a last-ditch measure my younger brother who's the executor of my estate, lives several states away and doesn't normally have physical access to the safe has a sealed envelope with the combination to the safe plus the printed listing.
In most cases where something happens to me, my friends (who've got a limited power of attorney for this purpose) or family (ditto) can get the safe combination (either from me, my brother or the lawyer), get into the safe, get access to my computer and password list and keep everything on-track. In dire emergency the executor of my estate (my brother, or the lawyer if my brother's not available) has access to the information. Potential for abuse is limited because of the way critical cleartext information is separated from the access needed to make use of it.
Finally a lot of bills are on automatic payment from a credit card. That gives a month to a month and a half buffer before regular bills will start going unpaid for people to sort things out. Critical things like the server bill are pre-paid for 6-month or 1-year periods so crucial backups and lines of contact via e-mail aren't easily lost.
No, I'm not paranoid here. I have been there. Bad case of the flu that just wouldn't go away, or so I thought. Over the course of an afternoon it went from just that to bad enough I called an ambulance to take me to the hospital. 3 hours later I was in ICU on a ventilator because I wasn't breathing on my own, and I spent the next 4 weeks in an induced coma. So my preparations aren't for something that might happen, they're for something that's already happened and may happen again.
Suppose I say publicly that I like product X and think it's a good buy. I'm not under contract with the manufacturer to do ads for them. They aren't paying me to endorse their product. I haven't had any contact with them at all. Is the manufacturer entitled to go and quote me, using my name and my statements in their advertisements, without getting my agreement to let them do so first? As far as I know, they don't. It has nothing to do with anything I said. It has to do with them simply not having a right to use my likeness and my words for their own commercial gain without having my permission to do so first (this being separate from news reporting and the like where fair-use and similar rights would apply). Simply saying I like their product doesn't constitute an agreement to appear in their advertisements. So why should it be any different in a social network? I still haven't agreed to appear in that company's advertising materials. FB/G+ would be entitled to say I'd "liked"/"+1'd" a page if I did so publicly, but that would be covered under my agreement with them which doesn't extend to other companies.
I don't see it as any different from any other endorsement of any other product in any other setting. This shouldn't require looking any further than the already-settled law governing when companies can use your endorsement of their product in their marketing material.
And? We have the minimum wage. We have requirements that employers contribute to unemployment insurance funds to help cover the costs when they lay employees off. All this is is simply setting a minimum acceptable level of health insurance, with employers being require to at least offer that minimum. Employers of course don't like this, it means they can't skimp and save money by offering an inadequate plan. But we don't live in a world where employers are the only people in it, and the standards are set based on employees as well as employers. I see nothing wrong with that.
And yes, it does remove business' ability to choose to not provide adequately for their workers. That choice of theirs imposes costs on society as a whole (those workers are going to need care whether or not their employers provide adequate health insurance). There's no particular reason society has to just accept that, and it isn't. We had a time when companies could do anything they wanted, and I really don't want a return to the era of the Robber Barons. The Robber Barons certainly would like it, but we're not obliged to bow down and accept whatever they want as law.
"If this were a matter of the employers chosing for themselves, plaintiffs would have a valid point. If this were a matter of plans churches were offering to their clergy, plaintiffs would have a valid point. But this is a case where the employers in question are not making personal choices and are not acting as a church, but are acting as ordinary employers offering coverage to employees who don't necessarily follow the same beliefs as their employer. And an employer does not have the right to dictate to their employees based on the employer's religious beliefs. Plaintiffs aren't asking merely to be allowed to follow their own beliefs. They are asking to be allowed, as an ordinary employer, to say that because they don't believe in X that their employees are not allowed access to X either. If plaintiffs arguments are valid, then it would be acceptable for a business run by a Jehova's Witness to offer coverage that forbade treatments involving blood transfusion simply because the business owner followed that belief system. And we don't permit that. We don't allow a business owner to force his employees to follow his beliefs just because they work for him. We don't allow him to say "Profess to follow my beliefs or you won't be allowed access to health insurance.". To allow that wouldn't be freedom of religion, it would be the antithesis of freedom of religion."
I do have one question though - what do OS X and Windows when you save things like WiFi/802.11x passwords that are accessible to every user? To what extent do they try and protect their system "keychains" and wouldn't such protection be obfuscation?
Even if it weren't just obfuscation, it wouldn't matter. If the attacker has access to your machine and your machine automatically authenticates to the network without human intervention, the attacker doesn't need to decrypt your password. He can just access the network as you, since the system's already automatically authenticated and made the network available. Same as if you have shares automatically mounted: anyone who's compromised your machine doesn't need to know the password for them, the system's already taken care of that for them.
The problem is that the system needs to be able to use the password to connect to the network, and it needs to do so without human intervention (because there may not be a human at the keyboard to enter a decryption password). So the password can't be stored encrypted in any meaningful way. If it is encrypted then the key or password to decrypt it must be stored in the clear so the system can use it, which is no different from storing the network password in the clear in the first place (any intruder that could get to the first could get to the second too). Better that the system not fool you into thinking that the password's stored more securely than it is.
The only way to change this is to change the system so that it doesn't connect to the network until after the user's logged in. That though would hose things that run without user intervention, since there's no guarantee that the user would've logged in between the time the system booted and the time the job ran (think automatic reboots, or reboots due to power failure). And since Unix doesn't have the concept of "the" single sole user, there's no guarantee that the user logging in is the one that knows the decryption password. And we won't even discuss systems where directories like/home needed for login are network shares and require the network to be available.
Credit cards are in fact better than a debit card in one way: the money doesn't actually come out of your pocket until you pay your bill. With a debit card the money's gone and you're trying to get it back (and the fact that the bank tends to be cooperative doesn't change this dynamic). And the old adage about possession being 9/10ths of the law does ring true here: it's much easier to keep what you have than to get back what you don't.
The problem is that you're away from home, you don't have access to everything you normally would, and you can't deal with the bank in person. It's easy to get the charge handled when you're in the branch and can fill out the paperwork. It's less easy when you're in a different time zone and can't just fork over a driver's license as proof of identity. I could probably handle it, but that's because I'm paranoid and travel with at least one portable device set up for access to everything. But most people aren't that paranoid.
No, they won't. I've disputed fraudulent charges on my debit card before, and the bank didn't freeze my account. What they did do was invalidate the compromised card and issue me a new one, but that happened right there while I was filling out the paperwork so it didn't really impact me. The only time it impacted me was the one time it came from the bank's end rather than me reporting the charge, and I got a phone call from the security department saying the bank'd been notified and I'd need to stop in ASAP to get the card reissued. Annoying, but I'd rather that than have my account emptied.
That depends. How understanding will your landlord or your bank be when your rent or mortgage check bounces because the day it was deposited somebody ran up charges on your debit card that emptied your bank account? Sure you'll be able to dispute the charge, but that didn't stop the checks from bouncing between the time it happened and the time you got to the bank to fill out the paperwork on the fraudulent charge. Same if you're at the end of a trip and go to pay your hotel bill and your credit card's over limit because of fraudulent charges. Sure you'll be able to dispute them, but that doesn't make the hotel bill magically paid.
Yes, but Hawaii also has a much smaller supply base and a much more compact grid, making it easier to shift load between local areas. The worst that'll happen is that solar output will reduce the need for peaker plants (which is probably what the utility's worried about, those plants are where they can charge the highest rates). It won't actually become a problem until the power being produced by solar's so great that it reduces the base-load demand below the minimum output of the base-load plants serving the grid. Until it reaches that point, it simply means reducing the normal operating output of the base-load plants and running the peaker plants at different times. And I'd note that this is going to be an issue regardless of whether homeowners send power back to the grid or not. The same thing will happen if homeowners run their own local storage instead, their demand will drop off the grid 'round the clock and the utility will still be faced with more supply than they have demand to fulfill and will have to reduce output on the base-load plants. One way or another they're going to have to figure out how to deal with it, so they'd best get on with learning. If they don't... ask any college student how well it works when they put off learning until the night before the big final exam.
You forget that the local grid isn't isolated, it's interconnected with other grids (see http://www.infrastructureusa.org/interactive-map-visualizing-the-us-electric-grid/). If there isn't demand locally, the power will be routed across the interconnects to where there is demand, and the utility will get paid for that power. Since solar, wind and the like tend to have peak production at times when demand's also higher than baseline, any "excess" power wouldn't affect base-load plants but would primarily reduce usage of peaker plants (which is a good thing).
Don't just explain it, give them jobs where the command line works. For instance, automating builds. All developers will need to build the software they write. Give the students the task of automating their builds. Note that this means truly automated: it has to happen with no human interaction, not even to start the build. If it can't be set to automatically check out the latest code and run the build at 2AM without a user being up to trigger it, they haven't completed the assignment. Include jobs like generating necessary Web service support code from service definitions (which will run them up against the problem that there are no GUI tools to do this in the Windows/VisualStudio environment, it's all command-line tools and they aren't integrated into VS). Once they've gotten their heads around that, hand them complex automated maintenance jobs like "Find or create a program to identify images with a specific bit of metadata in them. Now, create a process to automatically scan all newly-uploaded files and move any that contain that metadata to a location under a "bad file" location matching their location under the "new uploads" location.".
Long and short, don't explain to students why the Unix command-line environment's better than a GUI. Give them real-world jobs that're necessary for what they're doing that demonstrate how it's easier to do all this from the command line than via a GUI.
If you truly want to be nasty, give them an assignment to get in and repair and restart a Web server that's broken because of a damaged config file. They must do this from their smartphone or laptop, from a remote connection (hotel WiFi or somesuch, they're out of the office and this is an emergency), with no remote-desktop access directly available (you can have a VPN available which would let them RDC in if it were working, but if their device isn't already set up for it there's nobody in the office who can help them get it set up and turned on so they're on their own). All they have is SSH access if it's Unix servers.
Instead of spending the money buying 5x as many incandescent bulbs as you need at the moment, why not spend that money getting a head start on replacing them with CFLs? I mean, light is light, it mostly doesn't matter how it's produced as long as the bulbs produce enough of it and of an acceptable color. The problem is the cost of a single bulb, and if you have enough money to buy $15 worth of incandescent bulbs per socket you have enough money to buy $15 worth of CFLs per socket (which is more than 1 CFL bulb per socket, so you aren't coming up short anywhere).
Frankly in the whole "Hoard now!" pitch I keep waiting to hear "And I've got a special price just for viewers of this ad, but you have to call and buy in the next 5 minutes!".
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Not a problem. When you set up Chrome, as you're connecting your account you just configure sync to not sync extensions and apps. That'll prevent the auto-download of them. If you need to clean up sync'd data, it's a dance: get Chrome sync'd up, turn off sync so the local copy is disconnected from the sync'd data, go to your dashboard and clear your sync'd data, then configure what you want sync'd and reenable sync.
That'll be a real problem for the cops, because the first thing the defense attorney would do is have the judge put a Glass on with it randomly operating or not and have the cop while on the witness stand under oath tell the judge which it is, then have the judge confirm whether the cop was correct or not. Do it 4 or 5 times to guard against the cop guessing right and the cop is in the unenviable position of having been caught out lying on the stand in a way the judge can't just ignore. Especially if the defense attorney asks say the court reporter to check the Glass after he's set it and then give it to the judge "just so there's no question whether I'm doing anything with it". The judge isn't going to appreciate the cop having backed him into that position.
Thing is, as the judge noted there wasn't any evidence she was using the Glass at the time. Her argument will continue to work as long as the cops can't produce any evidence to support the charge. And despite the claims, it is not illegal to drive while wearing Glass, any more than it's illegal to drive with one of those in-dash touchscreen entertainment systems installed. It's only illegal to drive with them operating. And unlike the in-dash systems it's virtually impossible to tell whether Glass is operating without putting it on yourself.
She wasn't ticketed for wearing Glass, though. She was ticketed for speeding, and you'll notice that she didn't even try to fight that one because the cops have her dead to rights on it. The Glass charge was a tack-on charge, something they added on because they could and having it there to drop at trial makes it easier to make the speeding charge stick. Likely she got it because she mouthed off to the cop when he was writing her up, and he decided to write her up for everything he could. Her case should be an object lesson: how you respond to the cops has a big effect on how you're written up. Be a jerk, they'll pile on everything they can. Be polite and reasonable and honest, and often they'll write it up for the minimum (or even straight-up let you off with a warning).
No, it wouldn't. Both terms have the negative connotation that the people in question have a negative impact, are undesirable and their numbers should be minimized. But open-source projects are operating under a different model, and users are not undesirable and don't have a negative impact. In fact most open-source projects consider themselves a failure if they don't have a large number of users, because that means people don't want the project's software.
They aren't "freeloaders". They're called "users". Without them, there's no point to creating software except for stuff you personally need. And there's more stuff you need than you have the time or the skill to create, so you will be one of those users a lot more often than you're a contributor. Users aren't a problem, they're the reason software exists in the first place.
It allows people to essentially e-mail you without having to know your e-mail address and without being able to send e-mail to you via SMTP.
Think about this for a minute. Spammers and fraudsters like it when they can use botnet-based bulk-mailing tools, because they can send mail quickly and there's no central place that can filter them without catching a lot of false positives. And the filtering fails because it's being done on the receiving end where it has to deal with a lot of unique senders. If I can only be reached through my G+ profile, that doesn't work. The spammer doesn't know my e-mail address, and G+ doesn't accept SMTP. He has to use Google's Web interface, which is harder to do through a botnet-based bulk-mailing system. And his mail will be intercepted and filtered at the sender, not the recipient. Google can identify a unique sender and spam-file them without affecting other senders. Google has an incentive to do this, too. Yes as an account holder I'm their product, but Google's always grasped one thing to a degree other sites haven't: I'm a product with legs. If they annoy me too much, I can get up and walk away. So Google's always tried to moderate how much their service functionality (as opposed to the UI, that's another matter) annoys people. Spammers and fraudsters don't provide any revenue to Google and they annoy Google's product, so Google's got good reasons to filter and spam-file anyone trying to abuse this system and the system makes it easy to do that without nearly as many false positives (which would also annoy their product) to worry about.
Overall I'd only be bothered by this if I were trying to maintain an e-mail address and online identity with no public presence at all. For that I wouldn't depend on any third-party service at all, I'd set up a server on Linode or AWS running my own e-mail software. Linode is $20/month for a minimum-sized server that'll easily handle the load and it took me an afternoon to completely set up e-mail for IMAP and inbound and outbound (authenticated SSL sessions only) SMTP for my domain including spam filtering.
Yep, but them adding people to their circles does nothing for them. Circle membership is one-way: if I put you in one of my circles it gives you access to me as a member of that circle but gives me no access to you. To be useful for spamming those profiles would have to get you to add them to your circles. As for changing mail settings, I'm not sure I'd need to do it. GMail already filters spam, and this would just be a bit more spam on top of what I already get.
I tend to see it from the residential point-of-view. They need the parking for the people who live there. By pushing parking out into the residential areas the businesses (and the developers behind the business centers) are getting all the benefits of additional parking without having to shoulder any of the costs of providing it. My opinion's always been that if the developer wants to put in business space that'll require parking, let the developer build the required parking and pass the costs on to the businesses that'll lease the space and benefit from the parking.
In part it's a space issue. There's only so much space for buses to stop at each stop. The transit system times buses so that (assuming they're running relatively on-time) there won't be more buses at a stop at any given time than the stop has space for. If other vehicles are using the stop without coordinating timing with the transit system, you can end up with a situation where city buses have to stop to drop off and pick up riders but there's no space for the bus.
It wasn't that Google hired the buses. It was that Google's buses were using the public-transit bus stops, interfering with the regular buses. That's an entirely reasonable objection, if Google wants to run buses then let them arrange all the infrastructure needed themselves or pay the transit system for using public bus stops.
It sounds like Google didnt' co-opt the boat, they just hired it. The company that owns it and hires it out decided to take Google's offer over that of the whale-watching company who apparently didn't have a long-term contract for it's use. That's frankly one of the risks you take when you make your company's operation dependent on someone else without locking it down with an iron-clad air-tight contract: that someone else may change their mind and you're left high and dry.
Literally, I leave a paper trail. My main password vault's on my computer, encrypted. There's backup copies stored several other places. And down in the garage there's a fireproof safe with my important papers in it. I put a sealed envelope in the safe with the master password to my password vault plus a printed listing of critical information like bank and utility accounts, emergency contact information for important people, and crucial passwords and regularly update a flash drive copy of my password vault that goes in the safe as well. Some good friends locally get an encrypted copy of the password vault, and the vault password plus the listing is held in escrow with a lawyer who my friends know to contact if anything happens. As a last-ditch measure my younger brother who's the executor of my estate, lives several states away and doesn't normally have physical access to the safe has a sealed envelope with the combination to the safe plus the printed listing.
In most cases where something happens to me, my friends (who've got a limited power of attorney for this purpose) or family (ditto) can get the safe combination (either from me, my brother or the lawyer), get into the safe, get access to my computer and password list and keep everything on-track. In dire emergency the executor of my estate (my brother, or the lawyer if my brother's not available) has access to the information. Potential for abuse is limited because of the way critical cleartext information is separated from the access needed to make use of it.
Finally a lot of bills are on automatic payment from a credit card. That gives a month to a month and a half buffer before regular bills will start going unpaid for people to sort things out. Critical things like the server bill are pre-paid for 6-month or 1-year periods so crucial backups and lines of contact via e-mail aren't easily lost.
No, I'm not paranoid here. I have been there. Bad case of the flu that just wouldn't go away, or so I thought. Over the course of an afternoon it went from just that to bad enough I called an ambulance to take me to the hospital. 3 hours later I was in ICU on a ventilator because I wasn't breathing on my own, and I spent the next 4 weeks in an induced coma. So my preparations aren't for something that might happen, they're for something that's already happened and may happen again.
Suppose I say publicly that I like product X and think it's a good buy. I'm not under contract with the manufacturer to do ads for them. They aren't paying me to endorse their product. I haven't had any contact with them at all. Is the manufacturer entitled to go and quote me, using my name and my statements in their advertisements, without getting my agreement to let them do so first? As far as I know, they don't. It has nothing to do with anything I said. It has to do with them simply not having a right to use my likeness and my words for their own commercial gain without having my permission to do so first (this being separate from news reporting and the like where fair-use and similar rights would apply). Simply saying I like their product doesn't constitute an agreement to appear in their advertisements. So why should it be any different in a social network? I still haven't agreed to appear in that company's advertising materials. FB/G+ would be entitled to say I'd "liked"/"+1'd" a page if I did so publicly, but that would be covered under my agreement with them which doesn't extend to other companies.
I don't see it as any different from any other endorsement of any other product in any other setting. This shouldn't require looking any further than the already-settled law governing when companies can use your endorsement of their product in their marketing material.
And? We have the minimum wage. We have requirements that employers contribute to unemployment insurance funds to help cover the costs when they lay employees off. All this is is simply setting a minimum acceptable level of health insurance, with employers being require to at least offer that minimum. Employers of course don't like this, it means they can't skimp and save money by offering an inadequate plan. But we don't live in a world where employers are the only people in it, and the standards are set based on employees as well as employers. I see nothing wrong with that.
And yes, it does remove business' ability to choose to not provide adequately for their workers. That choice of theirs imposes costs on society as a whole (those workers are going to need care whether or not their employers provide adequate health insurance). There's no particular reason society has to just accept that, and it isn't. We had a time when companies could do anything they wanted, and I really don't want a return to the era of the Robber Barons. The Robber Barons certainly would like it, but we're not obliged to bow down and accept whatever they want as law.
My response to them would be:
"If this were a matter of the employers chosing for themselves, plaintiffs would have a valid point. If this were a matter of plans churches were offering to their clergy, plaintiffs would have a valid point. But this is a case where the employers in question are not making personal choices and are not acting as a church, but are acting as ordinary employers offering coverage to employees who don't necessarily follow the same beliefs as their employer. And an employer does not have the right to dictate to their employees based on the employer's religious beliefs. Plaintiffs aren't asking merely to be allowed to follow their own beliefs. They are asking to be allowed, as an ordinary employer, to say that because they don't believe in X that their employees are not allowed access to X either. If plaintiffs arguments are valid, then it would be acceptable for a business run by a Jehova's Witness to offer coverage that forbade treatments involving blood transfusion simply because the business owner followed that belief system. And we don't permit that. We don't allow a business owner to force his employees to follow his beliefs just because they work for him. We don't allow him to say "Profess to follow my beliefs or you won't be allowed access to health insurance.". To allow that wouldn't be freedom of religion, it would be the antithesis of freedom of religion."
Even if it weren't just obfuscation, it wouldn't matter. If the attacker has access to your machine and your machine automatically authenticates to the network without human intervention, the attacker doesn't need to decrypt your password. He can just access the network as you, since the system's already automatically authenticated and made the network available. Same as if you have shares automatically mounted: anyone who's compromised your machine doesn't need to know the password for them, the system's already taken care of that for them.
The problem is that the system needs to be able to use the password to connect to the network, and it needs to do so without human intervention (because there may not be a human at the keyboard to enter a decryption password). So the password can't be stored encrypted in any meaningful way. If it is encrypted then the key or password to decrypt it must be stored in the clear so the system can use it, which is no different from storing the network password in the clear in the first place (any intruder that could get to the first could get to the second too). Better that the system not fool you into thinking that the password's stored more securely than it is.
The only way to change this is to change the system so that it doesn't connect to the network until after the user's logged in. That though would hose things that run without user intervention, since there's no guarantee that the user would've logged in between the time the system booted and the time the job ran (think automatic reboots, or reboots due to power failure). And since Unix doesn't have the concept of "the" single sole user, there's no guarantee that the user logging in is the one that knows the decryption password. And we won't even discuss systems where directories like /home needed for login are network shares and require the network to be available.
Credit cards are in fact better than a debit card in one way: the money doesn't actually come out of your pocket until you pay your bill. With a debit card the money's gone and you're trying to get it back (and the fact that the bank tends to be cooperative doesn't change this dynamic). And the old adage about possession being 9/10ths of the law does ring true here: it's much easier to keep what you have than to get back what you don't.
The problem is that you're away from home, you don't have access to everything you normally would, and you can't deal with the bank in person. It's easy to get the charge handled when you're in the branch and can fill out the paperwork. It's less easy when you're in a different time zone and can't just fork over a driver's license as proof of identity. I could probably handle it, but that's because I'm paranoid and travel with at least one portable device set up for access to everything. But most people aren't that paranoid.
No, they won't. I've disputed fraudulent charges on my debit card before, and the bank didn't freeze my account. What they did do was invalidate the compromised card and issue me a new one, but that happened right there while I was filling out the paperwork so it didn't really impact me. The only time it impacted me was the one time it came from the bank's end rather than me reporting the charge, and I got a phone call from the security department saying the bank'd been notified and I'd need to stop in ASAP to get the card reissued. Annoying, but I'd rather that than have my account emptied.
That depends. How understanding will your landlord or your bank be when your rent or mortgage check bounces because the day it was deposited somebody ran up charges on your debit card that emptied your bank account? Sure you'll be able to dispute the charge, but that didn't stop the checks from bouncing between the time it happened and the time you got to the bank to fill out the paperwork on the fraudulent charge. Same if you're at the end of a trip and go to pay your hotel bill and your credit card's over limit because of fraudulent charges. Sure you'll be able to dispute them, but that doesn't make the hotel bill magically paid.
Yes, but Hawaii also has a much smaller supply base and a much more compact grid, making it easier to shift load between local areas. The worst that'll happen is that solar output will reduce the need for peaker plants (which is probably what the utility's worried about, those plants are where they can charge the highest rates). It won't actually become a problem until the power being produced by solar's so great that it reduces the base-load demand below the minimum output of the base-load plants serving the grid. Until it reaches that point, it simply means reducing the normal operating output of the base-load plants and running the peaker plants at different times. And I'd note that this is going to be an issue regardless of whether homeowners send power back to the grid or not. The same thing will happen if homeowners run their own local storage instead, their demand will drop off the grid 'round the clock and the utility will still be faced with more supply than they have demand to fulfill and will have to reduce output on the base-load plants. One way or another they're going to have to figure out how to deal with it, so they'd best get on with learning. If they don't... ask any college student how well it works when they put off learning until the night before the big final exam.
You forget that the local grid isn't isolated, it's interconnected with other grids (see http://www.infrastructureusa.org/interactive-map-visualizing-the-us-electric-grid/). If there isn't demand locally, the power will be routed across the interconnects to where there is demand, and the utility will get paid for that power. Since solar, wind and the like tend to have peak production at times when demand's also higher than baseline, any "excess" power wouldn't affect base-load plants but would primarily reduce usage of peaker plants (which is a good thing).
Don't just explain it, give them jobs where the command line works. For instance, automating builds. All developers will need to build the software they write. Give the students the task of automating their builds. Note that this means truly automated: it has to happen with no human interaction, not even to start the build. If it can't be set to automatically check out the latest code and run the build at 2AM without a user being up to trigger it, they haven't completed the assignment. Include jobs like generating necessary Web service support code from service definitions (which will run them up against the problem that there are no GUI tools to do this in the Windows/VisualStudio environment, it's all command-line tools and they aren't integrated into VS). Once they've gotten their heads around that, hand them complex automated maintenance jobs like "Find or create a program to identify images with a specific bit of metadata in them. Now, create a process to automatically scan all newly-uploaded files and move any that contain that metadata to a location under a "bad file" location matching their location under the "new uploads" location.".
Long and short, don't explain to students why the Unix command-line environment's better than a GUI. Give them real-world jobs that're necessary for what they're doing that demonstrate how it's easier to do all this from the command line than via a GUI.
If you truly want to be nasty, give them an assignment to get in and repair and restart a Web server that's broken because of a damaged config file. They must do this from their smartphone or laptop, from a remote connection (hotel WiFi or somesuch, they're out of the office and this is an emergency), with no remote-desktop access directly available (you can have a VPN available which would let them RDC in if it were working, but if their device isn't already set up for it there's nobody in the office who can help them get it set up and turned on so they're on their own). All they have is SSH access if it's Unix servers.
Instead of spending the money buying 5x as many incandescent bulbs as you need at the moment, why not spend that money getting a head start on replacing them with CFLs? I mean, light is light, it mostly doesn't matter how it's produced as long as the bulbs produce enough of it and of an acceptable color. The problem is the cost of a single bulb, and if you have enough money to buy $15 worth of incandescent bulbs per socket you have enough money to buy $15 worth of CFLs per socket (which is more than 1 CFL bulb per socket, so you aren't coming up short anywhere).
Frankly in the whole "Hoard now!" pitch I keep waiting to hear "And I've got a special price just for viewers of this ad, but you have to call and buy in the next 5 minutes!".