I don't know what it is, but the walls of my house seem to be nearly as effective as steel plating in blocking WiFi. I can't get 30 feet away from my WAP if there's a wall in the way. So I sympathize with this guy. However, I'm not going out and buying hardware that I have to have a Mac to configure. I'll have to wait for the article that deals with practical mass-market hardware.
Stipulating all that to be true, my question still stands. Has the money already collected been spent effectively? Here in my city, the council noticed that the public water district had a big pile of money that had been collected to do infrastructure improvements. They came up with a cute scheme to charge the district a 'fee' for burying the water/sewer pipes under the road bed, arguing that the water district should pay the city for the privilege of 'using' the public rights of way. After some years of this banditry, the water district's infrastructure fund was broke and we started getting dozens of pipe breaks due to the deferred maintenance. THEN they said "hey, our system is falling apart, we need to raise your water bills to fix it!" The point of the story being, just because you have crumbling facilities doesn't mean that you necessarily need more money. It might mean you need better (or honest) management.
I notice that among all the replies that I've read, not one has said, "what do they need the extra money for?" Before raising taxes, let's talk about where the money you're already collecting is going, and whether it's being spent as efficiently as it can be. Here in Californistan, we have big highway funds that are being raided for non-highway expenditures like light rail, buses, and even the general fund. In fact, the governor has promised that there will be no new freeways built in the state (he's backed away from that after his union donors got a mite upset). The point is, if they're just going to pour the new money down non-highway ratholes, screw their 'need' for more taxes.
If you're seriously concerned about it, figure out the format of the data Tivo sends in (some Tivo hacker may have already done it for you), interpose an old computer with Linux between it and the phone line, and filter out the stuff you don't want it to send in. Or if you're really adept, perhaps you could find a way to insert a filter program in the Tivo itself, and save the extra hardware. After seeing what Tivo hackers have done in the past, I have to think either of these approaches is possible.
Felon = "one who has committed a felony", which stealing a motor vehicle is.
As someone's sig reads: The right to bear arms is only slightly less ridiculous than the right to arm bears and your comment "bears" this out:o)
My British father in law was severely beaten by an intruder whom he confronted in his house. He and his wife in their house in the country regularly lie in bed at night and hear vans pull up on the road outside, then listen as people test the doors and windows to see if there's a way in. They know that the constable is a good 25 minutes away and the men will be gone by the time he responds. The danger faced by ordinary citizens is evidenced by the fact that even wealthy and famous celecrities such as Madonna are not safe in their own homes. I'll take the U.S. system to the UK any time.
Since this system suposedly greatly increases the likelihood of a stop targeting an actual felon, I wonder if the cops will be more likely to approach with guns drawn, thus increasing the chances of a shooting of an innocent motorist.
Imagine if everyone would get a ticket each time they exceeded the speed limit. Limits would have to be raised to reasonable levels nationwide, or people would riot in the streets.
Who's burglarizing who? I buy a car, I get the keys. Ford doesn't have the right to tell me where I can drive; I bought the car, and I bought its keys. If they come in and take the keys away from me, am I not the victim of burlary?
The industry's point of view (and backed up by law) is not that they've sold you something, but that you've bought a license. Which means that they get to tell you the terms by which you can use it.
"Lockyer, who's gearing up to run for governor next year, appeared on the side of the DVD Copy Control Association"
Governor Davis was elected last year to a 4-year term, so that means Lockyer won't be running until 2006 at the earliest. Unless someone is anticipating that the petition to recall Davis is going to be successful, in which case the recall election would be anywhere from September 2003 - March 2004, depending on when the last signatures are turned in.
Bill "Nightschool" Lockyer is so set on being governor of California that he'll not only carry the Entertainment industry's water, he'll draw it a warm bath and tuck it in bed. Entertainment makes lots of political donations in California.
There's no point encrypting the links if one end is compromised, or am I missing something?
Correct. Which is why you have a destruction plan in the event of capture, and procedures to change out the keys if compromise is suspected. Too, you take into account the perishability of the info. You don't need to protect, "I'm at position X," as long as you do, "the identities of our agents are...," so that factors in to how you handle potential compromises as well.
I don't mean this as a troll (though somewhat tongue-in-cheek), but seriously, asking for military advice on IRC or AOL strikes me as akin to asking the NIDA for information on the dangers of marijuana - ie, even if you manage to get any factual information, you'll never find it from the BS it comes buried under.
You don't seriously believe that a tank commander is going to go on some AOL or IRC chat and start asking a bunch of random schmucks for advice about a gas attack do you? The military is using off-the-shelf technology to construct their own private networks and chats because that's a convenient structure for what they're trying to accomplish. I work with these guys and they're not quite that stupid (they just might even say the same about me if I'm lucky).
General speaking, you don't encrypt at the software level, you encrypt the comm links themselves, using NSA-approved hardware. That way, you don't have to worry about it at the application level, and there's no opportunity to build in hidden channels to bypass the encryption.
First computer I ever worked on that had a HDD was a Data General Nova 800. Drives then cost @$2000, and held 2.5 MEGA bytes on a thing the diameter of a super-duper extra-large pizza in a drive that required 4U space in a 19" rack. Given my life expectancy and the present rate of growth, I expect I'll see multi-exabyte drives. Amazing, but I nevertheless hope to be bitching about lack of capacity on my deathbed.
I have a high-capacity tape drive that I use for backups, but for long-term storage I'm not going to use it. Tape degrades, snaps, gets mangled by the drive, melts in a hot car, etc. It's just a more fragile and chancy medium as far as I'm concerned. As for IDE, I recognize that standards may evolve, hence my assertion that I'd copy the files to new HD(or equivalent) media over time if I decide to keep the recordings. When I'm dead, I doubt anyone will care to ever access my personal collection of Good Eats videos, so I'm not too concerned what happens after I stop maintaining them as I would be if they were, say, family videos.
I've been archiving my Good Eats episodes from my Tivo to a 250 GB HD I purchased for @$120 (sale+rebate at Fry's). I'm not going to use the drive for other purposes, so it should be a relatively safe storage medium, and within a year or two when HD prices drop even more, I'll probably buy another drive and make a backup copy. If my interest in retaining the episodes persists, I'll move to new media as necessary, but probably always HD(or its future equivalent). My capture card is an All In Wonder Radeon 7500 (don't recall the price) and I edit with Pinnacle Studio 8 ($69 eBay).
Re:employment and advancement
on
Inside SAIC
·
· Score: 1
I almost worked for SAIC a few years ago. I was about to accept their job offer, but then I was turned off when discussing advancement opportunities within the company. Apparently, unlike most of geekdom which is ruled by skills, the only real way to advance in SAIC is to hang a bunch of degrees and certifications on your wall. Regardless of your skill level, degrees and certifications are what count towards promotions and advancement
My experiece having been a consultatnt and now a part-time employee at SAIC is that advancement can be achieved in many ways, not the least of which is the ability to bring in new business. If you develop a good relationship with customers and they keep coming back to you, that's a good way to get promoted. The pressure to keep increasing revenue is intense, however, and I've known a few people who said, "screw this" and went elsewhere. Even as a consultant, I was expected to expend many free hours writing proposals. The employees had it even worse.
Re:SAIC is Employee-Owned - Employee-Ownership Roc
on
Inside SAIC
·
· Score: 1
I start working for SAIC next Monday - I am actually pretty stoked to see what's up inside the company.
Step 1 is an ass-numbing 8-hour indoctrination into the company and how not to harrass people, how to report wrongdoing, yada yada yada. I just went through it a few months ago and boy did it suck. Not to mention that the Human Resources people have the flexibility of a piece of ceramic. Other than that, it's been ok.
If you really watched too much South Park, you would know it actually looked more like: [snip]
I consider any business plan with "???" as an interior step to be derivatives of the Underpants Gnome Master Business Plan (which means that most of the dot coms must have been run by Underpants Gnomes when they were founded).
I've seen at least one case where eBay altered the scoring of comments. It was an account used by Microsoft, and contained commment after comment still smouldering from the fifth circle of Hell, and yet they all had a 'neutral' rating. Tell me eBay wasn't tamperng with those.
I don't understand why Americans are so against government intervention in this area.
I can't speak for all of America, but my reason is that once government starts paying for something, it ineluctably starts to remake it in ways pleasing to it. The attitude is, "we're laying out the dough for this thing, and that makes it ours." An example would be government-paid health care. Because it's picking up the check for some people, government feels it can cajole, nag, and regulate those who smoke, drink, are overweight, or make lifestyle choices that lead to health problems. I prefer to leave government out of the loop on the internet as much as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what it is, but the walls of my house seem to be nearly as effective as steel plating in blocking WiFi. I can't get 30 feet away from my WAP if there's a wall in the way. So I sympathize with this guy. However, I'm not going out and buying hardware that I have to have a Mac to configure. I'll have to wait for the article that deals with practical mass-market hardware.
Stipulating all that to be true, my question still stands. Has the money already collected been spent effectively? Here in my city, the council noticed that the public water district had a big pile of money that had been collected to do infrastructure improvements. They came up with a cute scheme to charge the district a 'fee' for burying the water/sewer pipes under the road bed, arguing that the water district should pay the city for the privilege of 'using' the public rights of way. After some years of this banditry, the water district's infrastructure fund was broke and we started getting dozens of pipe breaks due to the deferred maintenance. THEN they said "hey, our system is falling apart, we need to raise your water bills to fix it!" The point of the story being, just because you have crumbling facilities doesn't mean that you necessarily need more money. It might mean you need better (or honest) management.
I notice that among all the replies that I've read, not one has said, "what do they need the extra money for?" Before raising taxes, let's talk about where the money you're already collecting is going, and whether it's being spent as efficiently as it can be. Here in Californistan, we have big highway funds that are being raided for non-highway expenditures like light rail, buses, and even the general fund. In fact, the governor has promised that there will be no new freeways built in the state (he's backed away from that after his union donors got a mite upset). The point is, if they're just going to pour the new money down non-highway ratholes, screw their 'need' for more taxes.
If you're seriously concerned about it, figure out the format of the data Tivo sends in (some Tivo hacker may have already done it for you), interpose an old computer with Linux between it and the phone line, and filter out the stuff you don't want it to send in. Or if you're really adept, perhaps you could find a way to insert a filter program in the Tivo itself, and save the extra hardware. After seeing what Tivo hackers have done in the past, I have to think either of these approaches is possible.
They're called criminals over here, not felons.
:o)
Felon = "one who has committed a felony", which stealing a motor vehicle is.
As someone's sig reads: The right to bear arms is only slightly less ridiculous than the right to arm bears and your comment "bears" this out
My British father in law was severely beaten by an intruder whom he confronted in his house. He and his wife in their house in the country regularly lie in bed at night and hear vans pull up on the road outside, then listen as people test the doors and windows to see if there's a way in. They know that the constable is a good 25 minutes away and the men will be gone by the time he responds. The danger faced by ordinary citizens is evidenced by the fact that even wealthy and famous celecrities such as Madonna are not safe in their own homes. I'll take the U.S. system to the UK any time.
Since this system suposedly greatly increases the likelihood of a stop targeting an actual felon, I wonder if the cops will be more likely to approach with guns drawn, thus increasing the chances of a shooting of an innocent motorist.
Imagine if everyone would get a ticket each time they exceeded the speed limit. Limits would have to be raised to reasonable levels nationwide, or people would riot in the streets.
...
For which they'd be ticketed
Who's burglarizing who? I buy a car, I get the keys. Ford doesn't have the right to tell me where I can drive; I bought the car, and I bought its keys. If they come in and take the keys away from me, am I not the victim of burlary?
The industry's point of view (and backed up by law) is not that they've sold you something, but that you've bought a license. Which means that they get to tell you the terms by which you can use it.
"Lockyer, who's gearing up to run for governor next year, appeared on the side of the DVD Copy Control Association"
Governor Davis was elected last year to a 4-year term, so that means Lockyer won't be running until 2006 at the earliest. Unless someone is anticipating that the petition to recall Davis is going to be successful, in which case the recall election would be anywhere from September 2003 - March 2004, depending on when the last signatures are turned in.
Bill "Nightschool" Lockyer is so set on being governor of California that he'll not only carry the Entertainment industry's water, he'll draw it a warm bath and tuck it in bed. Entertainment makes lots of political donations in California.
Correct. Which is why you have a destruction plan in the event of capture, and procedures to change out the keys if compromise is suspected. Too, you take into account the perishability of the info. You don't need to protect, "I'm at position X," as long as you do, "the identities of our agents are ...," so that factors in to how you handle potential compromises as well.
I don't mean this as a troll (though somewhat tongue-in-cheek), but seriously, asking for military advice on IRC or AOL strikes me as akin to asking the NIDA for information on the dangers of marijuana - ie, even if you manage to get any factual information, you'll never find it from the BS it comes buried under.
You don't seriously believe that a tank commander is going to go on some AOL or IRC chat and start asking a bunch of random schmucks for advice about a gas attack do you? The military is using off-the-shelf technology to construct their own private networks and chats because that's a convenient structure for what they're trying to accomplish. I work with these guys and they're not quite that stupid (they just might even say the same about me if I'm lucky).
General speaking, you don't encrypt at the software level, you encrypt the comm links themselves, using NSA-approved hardware. That way, you don't have to worry about it at the application level, and there's no opportunity to build in hidden channels to bypass the encryption.
Finally, an article that defines what the thing is instead of assuming that we've all heard of 'Zxzzy Underlayer II.3M'.
First computer I ever worked on that had a HDD was a Data General Nova 800. Drives then cost @$2000, and held 2.5 MEGA bytes on a thing the diameter of a super-duper extra-large pizza in a drive that required 4U space in a 19" rack. Given my life expectancy and the present rate of growth, I expect I'll see multi-exabyte drives. Amazing, but I nevertheless hope to be bitching about lack of capacity on my deathbed.
I have a high-capacity tape drive that I use for backups, but for long-term storage I'm not going to use it. Tape degrades, snaps, gets mangled by the drive, melts in a hot car, etc. It's just a more fragile and chancy medium as far as I'm concerned. As for IDE, I recognize that standards may evolve, hence my assertion that I'd copy the files to new HD(or equivalent) media over time if I decide to keep the recordings. When I'm dead, I doubt anyone will care to ever access my personal collection of Good Eats videos, so I'm not too concerned what happens after I stop maintaining them as I would be if they were, say, family videos.
I've been archiving my Good Eats episodes from my Tivo to a 250 GB HD I purchased for @$120 (sale+rebate at Fry's). I'm not going to use the drive for other purposes, so it should be a relatively safe storage medium, and within a year or two when HD prices drop even more, I'll probably buy another drive and make a backup copy. If my interest in retaining the episodes persists, I'll move to new media as necessary, but probably always HD(or its future equivalent). My capture card is an All In Wonder Radeon 7500 (don't recall the price) and I edit with Pinnacle Studio 8 ($69 eBay).
My experiece having been a consultatnt and now a part-time employee at SAIC is that advancement can be achieved in many ways, not the least of which is the ability to bring in new business. If you develop a good relationship with customers and they keep coming back to you, that's a good way to get promoted. The pressure to keep increasing revenue is intense, however, and I've known a few people who said, "screw this" and went elsewhere. Even as a consultant, I was expected to expend many free hours writing proposals. The employees had it even worse.
Step 1 is an ass-numbing 8-hour indoctrination into the company and how not to harrass people, how to report wrongdoing, yada yada yada. I just went through it a few months ago and boy did it suck. Not to mention that the Human Resources people have the flexibility of a piece of ceramic. Other than that, it's been ok.
If you really watched too much South Park, you would know it actually looked more like:
[snip]
I consider any business plan with "???" as an interior step to be derivatives of the Underpants Gnome Master Business Plan (which means that most of the dot coms must have been run by Underpants Gnomes when they were founded).
Very interesting explanation of what I observed. Thanks for the info.
Somebody's been watching too much South Park. (And that would be me, for instantly recognizing the Underpants Gnome Business Plan).
I've seen at least one case where eBay altered the scoring of comments. It was an account used by Microsoft, and contained commment after comment still smouldering from the fifth circle of Hell, and yet they all had a 'neutral' rating. Tell me eBay wasn't tamperng with those.
I can't speak for all of America, but my reason is that once government starts paying for something, it ineluctably starts to remake it in ways pleasing to it. The attitude is, "we're laying out the dough for this thing, and that makes it ours." An example would be government-paid health care. Because it's picking up the check for some people, government feels it can cajole, nag, and regulate those who smoke, drink, are overweight, or make lifestyle choices that lead to health problems. I prefer to leave government out of the loop on the internet as much as possible.
Baghdad Bob? Is that you over there in North Korea? How's it going, buddy? What a relief, we thought you'd been killed.