/* I hate it when people don't properly comment their English. Perhaps this will help. * Note: my marking of "with total download numbers" is debatable; it may go * better as a preposition to "tactics" rather than "under", but there * is a case either way. */
(does)[v] (the community)[d, n; subject] (need)[v]/* note two part verb, 'does need' */ { (to resort) [prep, v] { (to using) [prep, v] { (third-class promotional tactics) [adj, adj, n; object of using] (with total downloads number) [prep, adj, adj, n; object of using]/* missing 'the' */ }/* 'to using' */ }/* to resort */ }/* end of main sentence object */
IANAL, so I don't know if there are legislated standards for data handling practices, but I assume there aren't in this case.
I'm not sure that a legislated security standard is a good idea. Take a look at how the US handles homeland security. With an incompetent standard, people don't even have to keep above the "well, at least you took some reasonable measures" bar. They just implement the standard, and look the other way when it's shown that it's not doing any good.
Then again, if not the fed, who SHOULD be watching over this?
To use your analogy, you patent the idea of using an electric heating element to heat bread; this is the method of making toast. You copyright the blueprints for the toaster; this is the implementation of a toaster.
Software is an implementation of an algorithm. Software is copyrightable. Algorithms are patentable. The two protections do not apply to the same work in software, any more than they did in making a toaster.
I was making the point that what is [not] patentable is completely arbitrary and has no rational basis, just hand waving justifications. Arbitrary law is unjust law and has no ethical basis.
By that standard, most of our laws are unjust.
I happen to agree.
We're getting into semantics here. When patent law is changed sufficiently should it still be called a patent?
I'm talking about "financial incentives for people to contribute their inventions to the public domain by granting a time-limited monopoly on their inventions". I call it a patent. If you want to call it something else, fine.
My point is you're diverting from the original debate. I think that something that achieves that goal is good, and that we should fix the system to cut down the huge collateral damage. The patent system sucks, but without it, for-profit inventors will try to keep all their ideas as trade secrets, never to be released.
If you think patents are inherently evil, how would you do it instead?
you do your cause no good by implicitly claiming they have merit.
Your examples are why not every idea should be patentable, but they're irrelevant for 2 reasons: #1, the current system wouldn't let you do this; #2, I already agree that some things shouldn't get patents. The dispute is if we should have patents at all.
I contend that patents are a good thing, and that we just need to drastically reform the system.
I have been involved in a lot of research that would never have been done in a 100% free market like you're describing. These things would have been promptly copied by competitors, who would then be at an advantage because they didn't have to spend millions of dollars on research. So where's our cut for doing the hard work?
Actually, you're wrong on all points here: PageRank is patented; the algorithm is published, and has been extensively discussed in public forums; It's not hard to implement, and most web search engines out there (including open source ones) use something similar to PageRank. Modern Google uses a lot more than the PageRank algorithm in their scoring, though.
You propose that everyone just keeps everything secret. One of the really good things about patents is they require publishing your work. If I spend $1M researching a new invention and keep it a secret, then you'll have a few other people spend that $1M, and keep it to themselves. If I patent it, I get to rake in profits for a while, and then when the patent expires, *everyone* gets to use it for free, without having to reinvent it. This is good for everyone involved.
We just need to fix the system so that software patents will expire while they're still relevant.
Stop pretending that patents are necessary for your company to make a profit. Most businesses have no patents and get along just fine. Ideas are copied and adapted continuously. That's business.
Sure, our business worked fine before we started changing the way things get done. But we've invented new ways to do things, and so now we do it better. For some of those things, we rely on patents to be able to keep doing things better than the competiton for a few years.
Profit incentive is what makes high risk ventures worthwhile. Patents are often how you make those profits.
The patent system needs to be fixed, but I disagree with your implication that the entire idea is invalid.
Copyrights aren't a substitute for patents. Copyrights protect the effort you spent implementing an algorithm. Patents protect the algorithm itself.
In our case, the implementation of the software isn't that hard once you have the algorithm. Most of our R&D is making that algorithm. That's the hard work we need protected, not the implementaiton.
Patents only serve the purpose of blocking the competition from developing competing products that function in a similar way.
It's worth noting that this is exactly what patents (all patents, not just software patents) are *supposed* to do. They grant a limited monopoly to someone as a reward for the effort spent inventing something. In exchange, the details of the invention are published so that everyone gets to use it after the patent expires. This is very good in principle. It rewards invention, and benefits the public.
As a counterexample, if we didn't have patents, after spending a LOT of time and money researching something, there are several other companies out there that would outright copy what we are doing. We're doing all this R&D so we can do what we do way better than anyone has before us. Aside from altruistic intent, why would we do this if everyone was just going to copy us after we roll out the first prototypes? And in the long run, our patents benefit the public even more - when the patents expire, EVERYONE gets to implement what we do, instead of just a few companies that managed to reverse engineer what we're doing.
There is no particular reason a company should be able to sit back and collect residual income because the competition is artificially impeded from developing a unique implementation in the same market.
I contend that this isn't the black and white issue you make it out to be. Patents can do good. I can say that without them, we would not be doing the work we do. We're doing stuff that really never has been done before, and nobody would be doing it if there wasn't profit to be had.
We just need to fix the implementation of the patents. The time we get them for is crazy in this industry. The flippant way they're granted makes the world a patent minefield.
Exactly what is your objection to software patents based on?
I object to our current implementation of software patents. I think they stifle real innovation more than they promote it. The problem is in the patent system, in two areas: A) you cannot possibly know if what you're doing is already patented without an unreasonable amount of research due to huge numbers of broad, vague patents, which you cannot tell without taking them to court if they'll apply to you or not; B) Many of them last too long for the fast pace of the software world.
Yet I work for a company that generates a lot of software patents. I don't think what we do is evil. We are investing a lot of money in R&D, and inventing things, and I don't think it's bad for us to want to reap our profits from that work. We're making tons of money doing our own legitimate business, not trying to sue other companies. That's exactly what patents *should* do.
So what's your objection? Do you object to the very idea of software patents? Don't quit your job. That won't do anything to end software patents. It'll just cause a minor rearrangement in who ends up patenting what. Instead, get involved in patent reform.
On the other hand, if your company is one of the evil ones generating patents to try to milk money from other companies, quit. Not because they want you to work on patents, but because your company's business is evil.
Choosing between hosting at home and using a hosting account:
Running your own takes effort. You have to install your own software, keep everything patched, fix failing hardware, accept that it's going to break at some inconvenient time so you have to choose to leave your site down or abandon what you're doing to go fix it, etc.
It's a large investment of time. In return you get to have greater control over the software you use, the posession of your data, the ability to just fix things when they break rather than waiting for tech support, etc.
As for using an employeer... Are you sure they want you to? Who owns your data if you do? If you quit, what happens?
That would be wrong. If your giving users root 'to get things done' it's because you have set up their environment badly.
OK, I'll bite.
My developers need to do things like these on their dev boxes:
* test new mod_alias rules for complex redirects we do * create new accounts to experiment with privilege separation between the various processes that live behind our site * Open ports in the default-deny iptables policy I have everywhere, so that other dev boxes can connect to the services they're developing. * Change the display settings on their box when they haul it into a conference room to use with a projector
Giving them root lets them do these things easily. Conceivably I could write some crazy sudo scripts to accomplish these things, but I think it'd be a complete waste of time.
Mind you, this is for developer test boxes, and their personal desktops. When I give them root (Actually, just wide-open sudo), I give them an SLA: You get root, I get to ditch any responsibility for what you do to your box, other than reimaging it if you blow it up. I'd estimate when I do this that they screw one up once per ten sudo-enabled-machine-years. IE, if I have 100 boxes, I'll get to reimage ten of them per year. So, my choices for adminning 100 boxes are: a) spend a long time writing some narrowly-scoped sudo scripts to do these tasks, and explain to each person how to use them, and have to keep doing it every time they want to do something new or b) Less than once a month on average, log into the admin console (dev servers) or walk over to their desk (developer desktops), power cycle it, and type a one-line command at the PXE boot prompt to reimage it, and walk away in less than 60 seconds.
I'd rather give people root on boxes than have them try to cheat the system. They have physical access to their desktops. If they *really* want root to do something bad, they can get it anyway. I prefer to give it to them, and have them just ask me to reimage the box, rather than try to lie to me and pretend like they don't know why it suddenly doesn't boot, and leave me wondering why.
To be clear, this is for people's own dev boxes. I have an entirely set of policies for my internal servers (eg, my mail servers, DNS servers, LDAP servers, etc - users don't get login accounts, let alone root - only IT can log in), and for the production servers that run our site (they have a complex management scheme that's beyond the scope of this post).
So, giving people root on their own boxes has been very successful for me. You say my way is the wrong way, but I don't see a "right" way to set up their environment that wouldn't waste tons of both my time and the users' time, and even still I don't see what the benefit would be. Can you elaborate on what you think the "right" way is?
There are always a decent number of promising looking new strains of scientific research, in every field. The trouble is that all of these have a huge washout rate. Each will be developed into usable products over thirty years, if we can discover how to apply what we've learned today in a practical way. The trouble is that the application will always require a whole host of other discoveries, and plenty of tedious implementation research - and if anything goes wrong along the way, the idea will wash out.
All the past discoveries looked just as promising as anything you see today. They didn't pan out yet. Today's look good today. They're worth following up on. But nobody can just tell you if these things will be workable in the end - that's what the years of research are for.
None of these is a complete solution, but they may help you.
http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html Password safe - This uses strong encryption with a master password to store all your other passwords. You still have to cut'n'paste them everywhere, though. Keep it on a USB key with the encrypted passwords.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?application=firefox&id=670 Password Composer - Takes the md5 of your master password and the hostname of a site to generate a unique password for each site. It's available as a Firefox extension, or as a bookmarklet. The method is simple, so you can get your password back with nothing more than echo and md5sum on the command line, so you're not at the software's mercy. However, there's not a good way to change either your master password or a site password if they're compromised. And it's only good for the web. But it's still a good improvement for handling tons of sites that don't need the very highest security.
http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/ Kerberos - Use a password to log in once, and then you're authenticated for all the services you need. This works great, but it has to be supported by each site that uses it. It's great for intranets, but it doesn't help for random web sites.
It depends on your insurance policy. I have good insurance. I bought a new car, and it was totaled a little more htan a month later when a drunk rear ended me. My insurance paid out not by $new - $depreciation, but by doing a survey of similar condition used vehicles - IE, they found similar model cars (with 1000-2000 miles on them) that dealers had in their used sections, and paid out what it'd cost for one of those.
I'd haggled a good deal on mine when I bought it, and they actually paid out a little more than I paid for it, since 1000-mile fully reconditioned cars were selling used for a little more than I paid. I found it to be an entirely fair result.
You might get a different result from companies that are catering to the bottom dollar crowd rather than ones aiming for good customer service.
Both she and FEMA ought to be able to work out a simple solution to this. Off the top of my head:
1) Borrow a friend's mailbox.
2) If you don't have friends above water, wander the streets, and knock on some random person's door, and ask if they can hold a piece of mail from FEMA for you until you can pick it up. You'll likely be able to find someone sympathetic.
3) Go to a Kinkos and appeal to the manager's mercy to receive the fax from FEMA for you for free. You'll likely find someone sympathetic. Pay a buck if they're mean.
4) There are good free community-operated voice mail services for people in need. Homelessness certainly qualifies.
The guys on the FEMA end ought to have suggested a few of these, but I'm surprised that anyone couldn't have thought of some solution for this.
1) I speculate (And by speculating, I mean blabbing about subjects that I know nothing about) that you can spend US$115k at the very same pool for better safety. For instance, $5k of underwater cameras that lifeguards can watch to get a better view of what's going on down there, plus an extra $5k/year worth of lifeguard coverage during peak hours for ten years, plus $30k of extra lifeguard training, plus $30k of random conventional safety equipment. And I'd guess that you can save more than 0.5 lives/year that way.
2) I agree with this completely. That's why I try to point it out when people do this.
Of course, you would also need to see into the future to see where the lives you save go and how much value they add to society.
No, that's assessing the value of a human life. In my view, you don't have to. If you own a pool and have $115k to invest in safety, what's going to save the most lives?
A) this gadget
B) $5000 to install a simple underwater camera system that the life guards get a better view of what's going on underwater, plus budget (that you get to spend over time!) for more lifeguards during peak hours, plus extra training, plus extra random bits of safety gear
You don't have to care if this girl will grow up to be the next US President. If option B saves her life plus 3 more, isn't it a better option?
Keep in mind, this is 65,000 UKP *per pool*. So, over two years we've saved one life for UKP$ 65,000 * 75 pools (according to their web site).
Food for thought: Regardless of what you think a human life is worth, at some point, the money would be better spent somewhere else where you can save more than 0.5 lives per 2 years per US$ 9,000,000.
And why is image comparision even needed in this case? If an object of person size is on the bottom and not moving for more than X seconds (where X is some small number) then something is wrong.
Actually, you can use raised floors for another purpose - cooling. Your AC pumps tons of cold air under the floor, and then you have vents under each rack. You use racks without vents up and down the sides, and you end up with a cold wind tunnel blowing right through each of your racks.
The cleanest data center I've seen did this, ran the power under the floor, and ran all the data through overhead cable trays.
Have you considered just getting an account with some managed hosting place? VPS servers are cheap. US$30/mo gets you one here: http://www.rapidvps.com/?page=services , and I've been happy with mine. There are other cheaper places as low as US$10/mo that I've seen. You get root on your own virtual system, some disk, some memory, and some CPU cycles, and you don't have to pay for power, or up-front for the hardware, or any ongoing maintenance, and you'll have better net connectivity than you can probably get from home.
ADHD so severe that you can't pay attention to a complicated task no matter how much you want to is a disorder. PTSD so severe that it prevents someone from interacting normally with others is a disorder.
Some people with ADHD don't have it too bad, or can cope effectively with it; others need the drugs. Some people with PTSD can come to terms with what happened to them (or worse, what they had to do), they'll be fine; somewhere, everyone has a limit for how much they were prepared to deal with themselves, and going past that, they'll need help.
Anyway, my point is, don't assume that someone with either ADHD or PTSD is just over-exaggerating just because they're normal things that some people live with just fine. For some, it really is debilitating.
It shows latency, loss, and jitter in a combined easy to read graph. After using it for a while, you can spot many normally invisible network anomolies on these graphs long before they become visible to users. They're also great for post mortem analysis.
They don't have anything to do specifically with VoIP, but I think they're invaluable tools for any network admin.
Slashdot Mirror
/* I hate it when people don't properly comment their English. Perhaps this will help.
/* note two part verb, 'does need' */ /* missing 'the' */ /* 'to using' */ /* to resort */ /* end of main sentence object */
* Note: my marking of "with total download numbers" is debatable; it may go
* better as a preposition to "tactics" rather than "under", but there
* is a case either way.
*/
(does)[v] (the community)[d, n; subject] (need)[v]
{
(to resort) [prep, v]
{
(to using) [prep, v]
{
(third-class promotional tactics) [adj, adj, n; object of using]
(with total downloads number) [prep, adj, adj, n; object of using]
}
}
}
IANAL, so I don't know if there are legislated standards for data handling practices, but I assume there aren't in this case.
I'm not sure that a legislated security standard is a good idea. Take a look at how the US handles homeland security. With an incompetent standard, people don't even have to keep above the "well, at least you took some reasonable measures" bar. They just implement the standard, and look the other way when it's shown that it's not doing any good.
Then again, if not the fed, who SHOULD be watching over this?
Software == abstract mathematics.
However: Algorithms != abstract mathematics.
Therefore, software != algorithms.
To use your analogy, you patent the idea of using an electric heating element to heat bread; this is the method of making toast. You copyright the blueprints for the toaster; this is the implementation of a toaster.
Software is an implementation of an algorithm. Software is copyrightable. Algorithms are patentable. The two protections do not apply to the same work in software, any more than they did in making a toaster.
By that standard, most of our laws are unjust.
I happen to agree.
I'm talking about "financial incentives for people to contribute their inventions to the public domain by granting a time-limited monopoly on their inventions". I call it a patent. If you want to call it something else, fine.
My point is you're diverting from the original debate. I think that something that achieves that goal is good, and that we should fix the system to cut down the huge collateral damage. The patent system sucks, but without it, for-profit inventors will try to keep all their ideas as trade secrets, never to be released.
If you think patents are inherently evil, how would you do it instead?
What do you think my cause is?
Your examples are why not every idea should be patentable, but they're irrelevant for 2 reasons: #1, the current system wouldn't let you do this; #2, I already agree that some things shouldn't get patents. The dispute is if we should have patents at all.
I contend that patents are a good thing, and that we just need to drastically reform the system.
I have been involved in a lot of research that would never have been done in a 100% free market like you're describing. These things would have been promptly copied by competitors, who would then be at an advantage because they didn't have to spend millions of dollars on research. So where's our cut for doing the hard work?
Actually, you're wrong on all points here: PageRank is patented; the algorithm is published, and has been extensively discussed in public forums; It's not hard to implement, and most web search engines out there (including open source ones) use something similar to PageRank. Modern Google uses a lot more than the PageRank algorithm in their scoring, though.
You propose that everyone just keeps everything secret. One of the really good things about patents is they require publishing your work. If I spend $1M researching a new invention and keep it a secret, then you'll have a few other people spend that $1M, and keep it to themselves. If I patent it, I get to rake in profits for a while, and then when the patent expires, *everyone* gets to use it for free, without having to reinvent it. This is good for everyone involved.
We just need to fix the system so that software patents will expire while they're still relevant.
Sure, our business worked fine before we started changing the way things get done. But we've invented new ways to do things, and so now we do it better. For some of those things, we rely on patents to be able to keep doing things better than the competiton for a few years.
Profit incentive is what makes high risk ventures worthwhile. Patents are often how you make those profits.
The patent system needs to be fixed, but I disagree with your implication that the entire idea is invalid.
In our case, the implementation of the software isn't that hard once you have the algorithm. Most of our R&D is making that algorithm. That's the hard work we need protected, not the implementaiton.
It's worth noting that this is exactly what patents (all patents, not just software patents) are *supposed* to do. They grant a limited monopoly to someone as a reward for the effort spent inventing something. In exchange, the details of the invention are published so that everyone gets to use it after the patent expires. This is very good in principle. It rewards invention, and benefits the public.
As a counterexample, if we didn't have patents, after spending a LOT of time and money researching something, there are several other companies out there that would outright copy what we are doing. We're doing all this R&D so we can do what we do way better than anyone has before us. Aside from altruistic intent, why would we do this if everyone was just going to copy us after we roll out the first prototypes? And in the long run, our patents benefit the public even more - when the patents expire, EVERYONE gets to implement what we do, instead of just a few companies that managed to reverse engineer what we're doing.
I contend that this isn't the black and white issue you make it out to be. Patents can do good. I can say that without them, we would not be doing the work we do. We're doing stuff that really never has been done before, and nobody would be doing it if there wasn't profit to be had.
We just need to fix the implementation of the patents. The time we get them for is crazy in this industry. The flippant way they're granted makes the world a patent minefield.
Exactly what is your objection to software patents based on?
I object to our current implementation of software patents. I think they stifle real innovation more than they promote it. The problem is in the patent system, in two areas: A) you cannot possibly know if what you're doing is already patented without an unreasonable amount of research due to huge numbers of broad, vague patents, which you cannot tell without taking them to court if they'll apply to you or not; B) Many of them last too long for the fast pace of the software world.
Yet I work for a company that generates a lot of software patents. I don't think what we do is evil. We are investing a lot of money in R&D, and inventing things, and I don't think it's bad for us to want to reap our profits from that work. We're making tons of money doing our own legitimate business, not trying to sue other companies. That's exactly what patents *should* do.
So what's your objection? Do you object to the very idea of software patents? Don't quit your job. That won't do anything to end software patents. It'll just cause a minor rearrangement in who ends up patenting what. Instead, get involved in patent reform.
On the other hand, if your company is one of the evil ones generating patents to try to milk money from other companies, quit. Not because they want you to work on patents, but because your company's business is evil.
Thanks, MS, for providing a nice refreshing dose of vaporware to make sure any competitor trying to do something innovative gets crushed.
Choosing between hosting at home and using a hosting account:
Running your own takes effort. You have to install your own software, keep everything patched, fix failing hardware, accept that it's going to break at some inconvenient time so you have to choose to leave your site down or abandon what you're doing to go fix it, etc.
It's a large investment of time. In return you get to have greater control over the software you use, the posession of your data, the ability to just fix things when they break rather than waiting for tech support, etc.
As for using an employeer... Are you sure they want you to? Who owns your data if you do? If you quit, what happens?
OK, I'll bite.
My developers need to do things like these on their dev boxes:
* test new mod_alias rules for complex redirects we do
* create new accounts to experiment with privilege separation between the various processes that live behind our site
* Open ports in the default-deny iptables policy I have everywhere, so that other dev boxes can connect to the services they're developing.
* Change the display settings on their box when they haul it into a conference room to use with a projector
Giving them root lets them do these things easily. Conceivably I could write some crazy sudo scripts to accomplish these things, but I think it'd be a complete waste of time.
Mind you, this is for developer test boxes, and their personal desktops. When I give them root (Actually, just wide-open sudo), I give them an SLA: You get root, I get to ditch any responsibility for what you do to your box, other than reimaging it if you blow it up. I'd estimate when I do this that they screw one up once per ten sudo-enabled-machine-years. IE, if I have 100 boxes, I'll get to reimage ten of them per year. So, my choices for adminning 100 boxes are: a) spend a long time writing some narrowly-scoped sudo scripts to do these tasks, and explain to each person how to use them, and have to keep doing it every time they want to do something new or b) Less than once a month on average, log into the admin console (dev servers) or walk over to their desk (developer desktops), power cycle it, and type a one-line command at the PXE boot prompt to reimage it, and walk away in less than 60 seconds.
I'd rather give people root on boxes than have them try to cheat the system. They have physical access to their desktops. If they *really* want root to do something bad, they can get it anyway. I prefer to give it to them, and have them just ask me to reimage the box, rather than try to lie to me and pretend like they don't know why it suddenly doesn't boot, and leave me wondering why.
To be clear, this is for people's own dev boxes. I have an entirely set of policies for my internal servers (eg, my mail servers, DNS servers, LDAP servers, etc - users don't get login accounts, let alone root - only IT can log in), and for the production servers that run our site (they have a complex management scheme that's beyond the scope of this post).
So, giving people root on their own boxes has been very successful for me. You say my way is the wrong way, but I don't see a "right" way to set up their environment that wouldn't waste tons of both my time and the users' time, and even still I don't see what the benefit would be. Can you elaborate on what you think the "right" way is?
There are always a decent number of promising looking new strains of scientific research, in every field. The trouble is that all of these have a huge washout rate. Each will be developed into usable products over thirty years, if we can discover how to apply what we've learned today in a practical way. The trouble is that the application will always require a whole host of other discoveries, and plenty of tedious implementation research - and if anything goes wrong along the way, the idea will wash out.
All the past discoveries looked just as promising as anything you see today. They didn't pan out yet. Today's look good today. They're worth following up on. But nobody can just tell you if these things will be workable in the end - that's what the years of research are for.
None of these is a complete solution, but they may help you.
p ?application=firefox&id=670 Password Composer - Takes the md5 of your master password and the hostname of a site to generate a unique password for each site. It's available as a Firefox extension, or as a bookmarklet. The method is simple, so you can get your password back with nothing more than echo and md5sum on the command line, so you're not at the software's mercy. However, there's not a good way to change either your master password or a site password if they're compromised. And it's only good for the web. But it's still a good improvement for handling tons of sites that don't need the very highest security.
http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html Password safe - This uses strong encryption with a master password to store all your other passwords. You still have to cut'n'paste them everywhere, though. Keep it on a USB key with the encrypted passwords.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/ Kerberos - Use a password to log in once, and then you're authenticated for all the services you need. This works great, but it has to be supported by each site that uses it. It's great for intranets, but it doesn't help for random web sites.
It depends on your insurance policy. I have good insurance. I bought a new car, and it was totaled a little more htan a month later when a drunk rear ended me. My insurance paid out not by $new - $depreciation, but by doing a survey of similar condition used vehicles - IE, they found similar model cars (with 1000-2000 miles on them) that dealers had in their used sections, and paid out what it'd cost for one of those.
I'd haggled a good deal on mine when I bought it, and they actually paid out a little more than I paid for it, since 1000-mile fully reconditioned cars were selling used for a little more than I paid. I found it to be an entirely fair result.
You might get a different result from companies that are catering to the bottom dollar crowd rather than ones aiming for good customer service.
Both she and FEMA ought to be able to work out a simple solution to this. Off the top of my head:
1) Borrow a friend's mailbox.
2) If you don't have friends above water, wander the streets, and knock on some random person's door, and ask if they can hold a piece of mail from FEMA for you until you can pick it up. You'll likely be able to find someone sympathetic.
3) Go to a Kinkos and appeal to the manager's mercy to receive the fax from FEMA for you for free. You'll likely find someone sympathetic. Pay a buck if they're mean.
4) There are good free community-operated voice mail services for people in need. Homelessness certainly qualifies.
The guys on the FEMA end ought to have suggested a few of these, but I'm surprised that anyone couldn't have thought of some solution for this.
1) I speculate (And by speculating, I mean blabbing about subjects that I know nothing about) that you can spend US$115k at the very same pool for better safety. For instance, $5k of underwater cameras that lifeguards can watch to get a better view of what's going on down there, plus an extra $5k/year worth of lifeguard coverage during peak hours for ten years, plus $30k of extra lifeguard training, plus $30k of random conventional safety equipment. And I'd guess that you can save more than 0.5 lives/year that way.
2) I agree with this completely. That's why I try to point it out when people do this.
No, that's assessing the value of a human life. In my view, you don't have to. If you own a pool and have $115k to invest in safety, what's going to save the most lives?
A) this gadget
B) $5000 to install a simple underwater camera system that the life guards get a better view of what's going on underwater, plus budget (that you get to spend over time!) for more lifeguards during peak hours, plus extra training, plus extra random bits of safety gear
You don't have to care if this girl will grow up to be the next US President. If option B saves her life plus 3 more, isn't it a better option?
Keep in mind, this is 65,000 UKP *per pool*. So, over two years we've saved one life for UKP$ 65,000 * 75 pools (according to their web site).
Food for thought: Regardless of what you think a human life is worth, at some point, the money would be better spent somewhere else where you can save more than 0.5 lives per 2 years per US$ 9,000,000.
Actually, you can use raised floors for another purpose - cooling. Your AC pumps tons of cold air under the floor, and then you have vents under each rack. You use racks without vents up and down the sides, and you end up with a cold wind tunnel blowing right through each of your racks.
The cleanest data center I've seen did this, ran the power under the floor, and ran all the data through overhead cable trays.
I'd love to. Where can I find it?
Have you considered just getting an account with some managed hosting place? VPS servers are cheap. US$30/mo gets you one here: http://www.rapidvps.com/?page=services , and I've been happy with mine. There are other cheaper places as low as US$10/mo that I've seen. You get root on your own virtual system, some disk, some memory, and some CPU cycles, and you don't have to pay for power, or up-front for the hardware, or any ongoing maintenance, and you'll have better net connectivity than you can probably get from home.
ADHD so severe that you can't pay attention to a complicated task no matter how much you want to is a disorder. PTSD so severe that it prevents someone from interacting normally with others is a disorder.
Some people with ADHD don't have it too bad, or can cope effectively with it; others need the drugs. Some people with PTSD can come to terms with what happened to them (or worse, what they had to do), they'll be fine; somewhere, everyone has a limit for how much they were prepared to deal with themselves, and going past that, they'll need help.
Anyway, my point is, don't assume that someone with either ADHD or PTSD is just over-exaggerating just because they're normal things that some people live with just fine. For some, it really is debilitating.
Give Smokeping a try. Smokeping:ping::MRTG:bandwidth.
i ng/
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/smokep
It shows latency, loss, and jitter in a combined easy to read graph. After using it for a while, you can spot many normally invisible network anomolies on these graphs long before they become visible to users. They're also great for post mortem analysis.
They don't have anything to do specifically with VoIP, but I think they're invaluable tools for any network admin.