Over the summer I wrote my state's senator, 'Fritz' Hollings (South Carolina, of SSSCA 'infame'). The letter included two distinct topics, the first regarding my opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the second a plea for intervention on behalf of Dmitry Sklyarov, jailed at the time.
Weeks later, I received a form reply about the ANWR, but nothing regarding Dmitry.
So the lesson I learned: stick to one topic in your message, that way they can't respond to one part and ignore another.
BTW, 'Fritz' will be getting a letter about the SSSCA soon.
If that's the way it was designed, then it should work both ways. I seriously doubt that my fellow South Carolinians asked Fritz Hollings to come up with the SSSCA, but he did anyway.
I'm a resident of South Carolina, and it makes me cringe to see a senator from my state proposing this bill.
I've lived here 3 years, and South Carolina, while a beautiful place to live, is hardly a technological mecca. Yet our senator has put himself at the forefront of the pro-internet taxation group more than once. And now he's proposing this crazy bill.
I can guarantee you his constituents in South Carolina didn't write him and ask him for this bill.
So who is he really representing? Hmm, the media industry has given him a quarter million dollars!
I figure that this will work like most other technology these days.
The camera-glasses and associated computer equipment will be expensive. Companies will offset these expenses just like in the early days of the internet...with ads. Don't expect to see that pretty waterfall while you're in the john, what you'll be seeing is an animated ad for condoms, maybe with sound..arranged by the company that got you the glasses for cheap!
And once the companies decide that ads are being ignored, they'll go to a pay-per-view model. Just make sure your subscription doesn't run out while you're driving.
And come to think of it, what a great platform for subliminal advertising! You can insist to no visual ads, but paragraph 85(s) of the licensing agreement will subject you to ads beamed directly to your brain!
Makes you wonder what they'll do to the Simpsons episode where Homer's car is parked between the WTC towers. They may never play that in syndication again.
Why bother with TLDs anyway? These days the big companies just register them all.
If Microsoft registers microsoft.com, microsoft.biz, and microsoft.info, how is that any better than if we had just one TLD called microsoft.com? The more TLDs you add, the more they'll buy. Only the registrars win.
One thing I haven't found explained much is the Linux directory structure. The IBM document had a brief paragraph, but didn't say much. I've yet to figure out why software is scattered about so much.
Can anyone point me to a document which explains the logic of/usr,/usr/share,/usr/local, etc.?
I've been considering porting some code to Linux, but at this point, I have no idea where my files are supposed to go!
"However you'd be an idiot to go across at a formal crossing without the suitcase surrounded by some lead."
The U.S.-Canada border is huge. My uncle has a cabin in the Great Lakes area where you can get to Canada in a boat in like 5 minutes. I doubt that traffic is monitored very much. It would be really easy to bring a suitcase over in a small boat to a private dock in the U.S. I doubt anyone would notice.
I read this book back in January. I found it interesting how the Soviet program was started and detailed, but everything in the book is just described matter-of-factly. Besides sheer quantities of bioweapons described, there's not much in this book to scare you. You have to sit back and scare yourself using the data provided. The one exception is an interesting description of how some workers got an accidental taste of their own product.
Sealand needs to add a couple more of those sexy concrete cylinders to house the people conducting illegal business with their servers, freeing them from being prosecuted in their home country.
If they couldn't get permanent residents soon, they could advertise as a tourist destination. "Come to Sealand...it's just as good as Seaworld." Or they could rename themselves "EuroSeaworld!"
"Texas figures to be an extremely interesting battleground. Signatories of an open letter to the Texas legislature requesting that UCITA not be introduced in the state this year included Boeing, Conoco, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, Lockheed, and Phillips Petroleum. With that kind of opposing lineup, particularly one featuring the petroleum industry, you might think UCITA would have no chance in Texas. But it was introduced anyway.
A pro-UCITA letter signed by Compaq, Dell, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments gives you some idea of how the battle lines are drawn."
So it's basically software companies (and the hardware companies that are co-dependent) vs. the rest of the corporate world.
I bought my wife a DVD for Christmas. This was to play from the DVD player in my new laptop into the TV. My TV is old and only has a coax cable input. So I routed the RCA line from my laptop into the VCR's inputs. Simple enough, eh?
Doing this caused the brightness of the movie to change randomly. It took me forever to figure out what was wrong. Macrovision was the problem! I had to go buy a $30 box ar Radio Shack to route the line direct to my TV. I had to spend more money even though I was just trying to watch a DVD I had legally obtained, using legal equipment.
Makes me want to sink my movie buying dollars back into VHS.
Re:Use encryption needlessly, constantly! [MUCH MO
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 1
User interfaces seem to be the problem. Microsoft and others put a lot of effort into making encryption keys work with their Media Player and Reader software, but they don't do much for those running Outlook (Express). I'm trying right now to get a friend setup to use the built-in S/MIME functions and it's a pain in the ass. First you have to spend 1/2 hour at Verisign or Thawte and finally you get a key.
I'm now digging into GPG and PGP but they seem rather cryptic.
Bottom line is, if it's moderately difficult for a computer knowledgable person, my mom and grandma will never ever use it.
I almost did this with my domain. Since I got the domain, I moved and changed email accounts. And through 2 attempts, I have been unsucessful in trying to get them to update my info.
So I figured I could just let it expire and then re-register it at one of NSI's competitors. I'm not sure what stopped me, but I'm glad I didn't.
At least they'll let you continue your domain registration without updating your info. They don't seem to care who pays the bills!
Hardly anyone wants to sell you a simple net connection anymore. What's with all the useless addons? ISPs are always trying to be their own portal when they can't top Yahoo. Best Buy tries to get you on MSN when you buy a refrigerator.
Now to get satellite net access you have to buy a whole new PC, and it's still $60 a month?
Dammit, give me some hardware and tell me what I should set the IP and DNS to, and charge me less!
My problem with this foreign worker visa thing is that we are basically training a pool of foreign workers in one of the few industries where the US is tops. And then, since these visas are temporary, these freshly trained programmers go back home and fill a pool of talent that will do the same work for cheap.
This is what has happened with most of the US industries over time, using cheap overseas labor. It's inevitable that it'll occur to the software industry, but do we have to help it along? Big companies say yes but I say no!
Maybe I should start learning genetic engineering now!:)
I guess you just need to balance the price you have to pay for the 1-click service against the legal fees you would have to pay to develop and use it yourself. And Amazon would have to be charging a heckuva lot of cash for the license to make it outweigh what the lawyers would cost you.:(
It's just that we pay them at repair time. Any time I have my oil changed, I pay a disposal fee. Same thing goes for tires. As long as this money is actually going to dispose of these things in an enviromentally sound way, I'm happy to pay it. So let me pay to dispose of my PC parts at the time when I'm finished with them, not at the beginning.
Europeans seem to "get" the clean-earth idea more than we Americans do. Probably because they don't have thousands of acres of desert to dump stuff in. This country needs to make it easy to dispose of things the right way. Until then, PC parts, batteries, paint, etc. will simply go in the trash.:(
If they will always refund the differences of these "tests", then why do them? They must still think that eventually they will arrive at a point where they will be able to implement it for good.
But I think that someone will always be watching and will always notice now. About the only way I think they'll be able to get away with it is to have some kind of "frequent buyer" club like my local grocery store. Basically they raise the prices of everything and then give you "discounts" on most stuff for being a member. It's a scam but they make it look like you're getting a deal. Amazon might do it that way but I don't think they'll ever get away with doing it in secret again.
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Over the summer I wrote my state's senator, 'Fritz' Hollings (South Carolina, of SSSCA 'infame'). The letter included two distinct topics, the first regarding my opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the second a plea for intervention on behalf of Dmitry Sklyarov, jailed at the time.
Weeks later, I received a form reply about the ANWR, but nothing regarding Dmitry.
So the lesson I learned: stick to one topic in your message, that way they can't respond to one part and ignore another.
BTW, 'Fritz' will be getting a letter about the SSSCA soon.
If that's the way it was designed, then it should work both ways. I seriously doubt that my fellow South Carolinians asked Fritz Hollings to come up with the SSSCA, but he did anyway.
I'm a resident of South Carolina, and it makes me cringe to see a senator from my state proposing this bill.
I've lived here 3 years, and South Carolina, while a beautiful place to live, is hardly a technological mecca. Yet our senator has put himself at the forefront of the pro-internet taxation group more than once. And now he's proposing this crazy bill.
I can guarantee you his constituents in South Carolina didn't write him and ask him for this bill.
So who is he really representing? Hmm, the media industry has given him a quarter million dollars!
I figure that this will work like most other technology these days.
The camera-glasses and associated computer equipment will be expensive. Companies will offset these expenses just like in the early days of the internet...with ads. Don't expect to see that pretty waterfall while you're in the john, what you'll be seeing is an animated ad for condoms, maybe with sound..arranged by the company that got you the glasses for cheap!
And once the companies decide that ads are being ignored, they'll go to a pay-per-view model. Just make sure your subscription doesn't run out while you're driving.
And come to think of it, what a great platform for subliminal advertising! You can insist to no visual ads, but paragraph 85(s) of the licensing agreement will subject you to ads beamed directly to your brain!
Makes you wonder what they'll do to the Simpsons episode where Homer's car is parked between the WTC towers. They may never play that in syndication again.
Why bother with TLDs anyway? These days the big companies just register them all.
If Microsoft registers microsoft.com, microsoft.biz, and microsoft.info, how is that any better than if we had just one TLD called microsoft.com? The more TLDs you add, the more they'll buy. Only the registrars win.
One thing I haven't found explained much is the Linux directory structure. The IBM document had a brief paragraph, but didn't say much. I've yet to figure out why software is scattered about so much.
Can anyone point me to a document which explains the logic of /usr, /usr/share, /usr/local, etc.?
I've been considering porting some code to Linux, but at this point, I have no idea where my files are supposed to go!
Aside from that quibble I like Linux.
The U.S.-Canada border is huge. My uncle has a cabin in the Great Lakes area where you can get to Canada in a boat in like 5 minutes. I doubt that traffic is monitored very much. It would be really easy to bring a suitcase over in a small boat to a private dock in the U.S. I doubt anyone would notice.
I read this book back in January. I found it interesting how the Soviet program was started and detailed, but everything in the book is just described matter-of-factly. Besides sheer quantities of bioweapons described, there's not much in this book to scare you. You have to sit back and scare yourself using the data provided. The one exception is an interesting description of how some workers got an accidental taste of their own product.
Let's see a cost comparison with the USAF's Global Hawk (which flew to Australia a week ago).
:)
Sealand needs to add a couple more of those sexy concrete cylinders to house the people conducting illegal business with their servers, freeing them from being prosecuted in their home country.
If they couldn't get permanent residents soon, they could advertise as a tourist destination. "Come to Sealand...it's just as good as Seaworld." Or they could rename themselves "EuroSeaworld!"
From InfoWorld's Gripe Line a couple weeks ago:
So it's basically software companies (and the hardware companies that are co-dependent) vs. the rest of the corporate world.
I bought my wife a DVD for Christmas. This was to play from the DVD player in my new laptop into the TV. My TV is old and only has a coax cable input. So I routed the RCA line from my laptop into the VCR's inputs. Simple enough, eh?
Doing this caused the brightness of the movie to change randomly. It took me forever to figure out what was wrong. Macrovision was the problem! I had to go buy a $30 box ar Radio Shack to route the line direct to my TV. I had to spend more money even though I was just trying to watch a DVD I had legally obtained, using legal equipment.
Makes me want to sink my movie buying dollars back into VHS.
User interfaces seem to be the problem. Microsoft and others put a lot of effort into making encryption keys work with their Media Player and Reader software, but they don't do much for those running Outlook (Express). I'm trying right now to get a friend setup to use the built-in S/MIME functions and it's a pain in the ass. First you have to spend 1/2 hour at Verisign or Thawte and finally you get a key.
I'm now digging into GPG and PGP but they seem rather cryptic.
Bottom line is, if it's moderately difficult for a computer knowledgable person, my mom and grandma will never ever use it.
I almost did this with my domain. Since I got the domain, I moved and changed email accounts. And through 2 attempts, I have been unsucessful in trying to get them to update my info.
So I figured I could just let it expire and then re-register it at one of NSI's competitors. I'm not sure what stopped me, but I'm glad I didn't.
At least they'll let you continue your domain registration without updating your info. They don't seem to care who pays the bills!
Hardly anyone wants to sell you a simple net connection anymore. What's with all the useless addons? ISPs are always trying to be their own portal when they can't top Yahoo. Best Buy tries to get you on MSN when you buy a refrigerator.
Now to get satellite net access you have to buy a whole new PC, and it's still $60 a month?
Dammit, give me some hardware and tell me what I should set the IP and DNS to, and charge me less!
My problem with this foreign worker visa thing is that we are basically training a pool of foreign workers in one of the few industries where the US is tops. And then, since these visas are temporary, these freshly trained programmers go back home and fill a pool of talent that will do the same work for cheap.
:)
This is what has happened with most of the US industries over time, using cheap overseas labor. It's inevitable that it'll occur to the software industry, but do we have to help it along? Big companies say yes but I say no!
Maybe I should start learning genetic engineering now!
I guess you just need to balance the price you have to pay for the 1-click service against the legal fees you would have to pay to develop and use it yourself. And Amazon would have to be charging a heckuva lot of cash for the license to make it outweigh what the lawyers would cost you. :(
It's just that we pay them at repair time. Any time I have my oil changed, I pay a disposal fee. Same thing goes for tires. As long as this money is actually going to dispose of these things in an enviromentally sound way, I'm happy to pay it. So let me pay to dispose of my PC parts at the time when I'm finished with them, not at the beginning.
:(
Europeans seem to "get" the clean-earth idea more than we Americans do. Probably because they don't have thousands of acres of desert to dump stuff in. This country needs to make it easy to dispose of things the right way. Until then, PC parts, batteries, paint, etc. will simply go in the trash.
If they will always refund the differences of these "tests", then why do them? They must still think that eventually they will arrive at a point where they will be able to implement it for good.
But I think that someone will always be watching and will always notice now. About the only way I think they'll be able to get away with it is to have some kind of "frequent buyer" club like my local grocery store. Basically they raise the prices of everything and then give you "discounts" on most stuff for being a member. It's a scam but they make it look like you're getting a deal. Amazon might do it that way but I don't think they'll ever get away with doing it in secret again.
Gee, I can't wait to see the "in-orbit advertising" gracing my night skies!
Which recently funded