Other potential tactics for laughs include encouraging self-expression, encouraging 'serious play', and asking potential hires their favorite funny movies or comedians.
So how long before "Monty Python" is added to the Comp.Sci. curriculum at the local university? I'm all for having a fun and enjoyable workplace, but I'm not sure I want my professional qualifications trumped by whether or not the interviewer agrees with my sense of humour.
Congress approved it by a margin of about 3:1. The Senate overturned it following a filibuster. The Senate Republicans thought it would be smooth sailing because nobody would want to stand in the way of Hurricane Katrina relief funding and "protect our troops" money. They were wrong. You'll hear *all* about it in the 2007 federal election campaign....
We should be glad that it is so ridiculous that it has no chance of passing
All it takes is for someone to attach it to an omnibus funding bill, as happened this week with the bill to open the Arctic Wildlife Reserve to the oil companies by sticking it into an arms appropriation bill at the last second. Someone basically said "the military uses imported oil, so drilling in the arctic could be considered a military neccessity!" In this case, of course the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of allowing big business to polute the arctic in search of what is estimated to be about a 16-month supply of oil.
I don't know why you guys (Americans) don't make this kind of legislative foolishness illegal. It's usually used for pork-barreling by attaching an obvious waste of money (in the form of directed bids for expensive purchases) to a bill that, oh, maybe funds school lunches or something. If the politicians don't vote in favour of the pork-barrel then they get a big "he voted against school lunches" attack in the next election. I'm sure it will happen one way or another with this "analog hole" proposal. Someone will find a way to roll it into a bigger block of regulations that nobody will have the guts to vote down....
I would love to travel to the far reaches of the universe, just to see what's out there. But I would get lonely eventually. And not being able to return? I feel people need interaction with others as much as sleep and food. OK, well maybe not AS much, you certainly wouldn't die from lack of human contact. But it'd mess you up. It'd mess me up.
Maybe someone autistic would volunteer to go. There are benefits to having a reduced desire/need for social contact...
"For all we know, maybe the phone was cloned after it was stolen, in which case some of those calls would be happening in parallel"
a phone company should notice a phone making multiple calls at the same time
True. They should notice a lot of things. TFA said that they *do* notice a lot of things, but choose to ignore obvious fraud if they think the customer can afford to pay the bill.
The main point of my post was that it IS possible for the cell company to be aware of fraud before the customer is (the same way banks are), and they have the means to do something about it. Allowing a 10,000% increase in usage to go un-checked and then claiming that the customer failed to mitigate damages because she was out of the country at the time is corporate bullying at its worse.
Incidentally, Rogers has been in trouble with the Canadian government over shady business practises in the past. The most notable incident was around 1993 when they tried to stick thousands of cable TV customers with large bills through "negative option billing". That means they sent out an advertisement saying "unless you tell us otherwise, we are going to automatically add a bunch of Pay TV channels to your account". Of course, most people toss the advertising that comes with the monthly bills without even reading it. Eventually the government forced Rogers to reverse the charges.
Ok, suppose it was stolen. Now how long does it take to figure out that it is stolen? An average person uses their phone several times a day, I assume.
I went on a 4-week trip to southeast Asia this year. It was a *vacation* and I didn't want people calling me overseas to ask me work-related questions. In any case, my phone (at the time) was a cheap non-SIM P.O.S. that only worked on one frequency and would cost about $3/minute when roaming overseas, assuming it worked at all. So I left it at home. Had it been stolen, I wouldn't have known about it until I got home.
So, where could you possibly call to produce $12000 bill? Even if it were $5/minute, that's still 2400 minutes = 40 hours OF NON-STOP TALKING!!!
For all we know, maybe the phone was cloned after it was stolen, in which case some of those calls would be happening in parallel.
Stolen/cloned phones and calling cards have no practical purpose other than to make a whole bunch of international calls. The thieves use them as "payphones" and sell air-time to immigrants or tourists for cash. They will use as much of the air-time as they possibly can before the phone is cut-off, and once the phone stops working they toss it away. They never make domestic calls because those can easily be investigated, and with the right leverage someone will eventually name the thief.
I love my HP h6315, PDA phone, GPRS, WiFi, Bluetooth. Great apps, great screen, great battery life.
Unfortunately HP & Tmobile discontinued it.
Probably because HP released the i6325 to replace it. The i6325 is a nice piece of hardware, but Pocket Windows 2003 is just as flaky as Win95 ever was.
there is no deduction for morgtage interest for non-investment property in Canada
There's also no taxes owing for capital gains when you sell that non-investment property. My house in Vancouver, BC has gone up in value by more than $125,000 in the last 3 years. Given a choice between a 17% deduction on the interest portion of my mortgage versus $125,000 in tax-free cash I think I'll take the latter....
Red Hat is not the way to go. Mac OS X, especially free, would have been the best possible choice.
It depends on the goals of the project. If it's to provide "electronic typewriters" then yes, a "it just works" system with lots of eye-candy would be the best solution. If they want to actually teach kids about computers then they have to provide them with an environment where they can learn.
The best computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack CoCo. It had a simple architecture, a well-engineered and flexible CPU, and a simple ROM. I learned BASIC on it. Then I learned C. Then I learned Assembly. Unlike today's behemoth operating systems, that beast was so simple you could sit down with a 6809 reference manual and enter working code one byte at a time if you wanted to (and I often did). With so little RAM, programs were small enough that you could study them (and dissassemble them, if needed) and actually learn something. If you were so inclined, you could take the cover off and actually follow the circuitry from one chip to the next...
Sitting a kid in front of OS X or Win XP and expecting him to learn long-term skills (ie: how to think, not what to write) is like buying him a camera with the expectation he'll learn how to draw.
In theory, there is nothing stopping them from deciding that France should have backed them in the Iraq war, pointing the.fr SOA record at their own server, and redirecting all traffic for.gov.fr IPs via their own service.
Which is yet another reason why each country should control their own domain. If the government of the USA wants to prevent people from accessing servers in France they already have that technology whether or not they host the.fr SOA. China didn't need to hack the root DNS servers to block access to objectionable content outside their borders.
The problem here is that the USA can keep people in Canada or Europe or Asia from connecting to France's servers if they have a 3-letter TLD simply by de-listing them. That would probably be considered an act of espionage/war and is therefore unlikely, but it's easy to understand why France would rather not be in that position.
Hence my original suggestion: convert all ".com" domains to ".com.us" and host the ".us" domain on a DNS root inside the USA. Foreign companies will have no choice but to reregister in their own country if they want to have guaranteed access from citizens of countries not currently favoured by the USA government.
That was my point. There *is* a 2-letter TLD for every country. This fight is over 3-letter "vanity plate" TLDs that are not directly associated with a country. There is no reason for a (hypothetical) family-owned diner in the middle of the desert to engage in an international dispute over "eatatjoes.com" when "joesdiner.desertville.az.us" is more relevant in terms of geography and significance.
I can see an argument for multinationals to want a generic TLD, but as I said in the grandparent post, they usually have country-specific sites anyway and can always forward to a parent server.
Because the US is still in control, we do not have the.xxx TLD, nor will we for many years.
Nor should we. Every country in the world has been assigned a 2-letter top domain, and we should be using them. Rather than creating new 3-letter TLDs we should be adding ".us" to the current ones. Those ".com"s that are not in the USA probably already have a matching address in their own country's TLD anyway. Sometimes it redirects to the.com (microsoft.ca redirects to microsoft.com/canada) and sometimes the redirection works the other way (google.com redirects to google.ca if you try to connect from Canada).
Once the whole world isn't fighting over the same TLD there won't be any call for the USA to give up control because it would only control the ".us" domain anyway.
This fight is about who gets to profit from issuing and owning "vanity plates".
The carriers will then have a choice: let the encrypted traffic through, or restrict their customer's Internet use to only approved (and monitored) traffic.
Even though the content is encrypted, it's still possible to figure out the end points. The https protocol uses TCP port 443. VoIP doesn't. It would be trivial to allow one and block the other. Once that happens, the only way to make a VoIP call is to have an SSL-enabled web server at the receiving end. The telcos have already got out the knives to go after VoIP-PSTN bridges. VoIP won't sell if grandma can't accept incoming calls from the VoIP-enabled grandchildren....
in the mainstream market they do a great job at filling the gap between not having an organizer system at all and carrying around a second device
Bingo.
I've been needing a PDA for a long time for my personal life as well as for work (my short-term memory is useless thanks to ADHD). I looked at what my coworkers were using, and realized that most of them left their PDA in the filing cabinet, thereby completely negating the "instant on" ability. As it turns out, I was also fed up with my cell company (both the equipment and the customer service were poor) and wanted to switch to GSM so I'd be able to get my phone unlocked and take it with me when I travel and use prepaid SIM cards to avoid paying international roaming charges. I started looking at the Treo 650 but ended up getting an iPAQ 6325.
I could have bought a small cell phone, but it would have been so difficult to use the PIM features I'd still want a PDA, and the PDA would be so bulky I'd never have it with me when I needed it.
Having the cell phone built into the PDA is both the carrot and the stick - I'm forced to carry the PDA around in order to have a telephone, and that means I get more value from the PDA because I actually have it when I need to use it.
If I went to a pshrink, I'd likely be diagnosed with ADD and Tourette's Syndrome. Big deal. I just consider myself the type who likes to multi-task and happens to have some facial tics...
Multi-tasking is when you switch your attention back and forth between concurrent tasks so that you maximize your efficiency by minimizing the amount of time spent waiting for things to happen.
ADHD is an inability to regulate your attention. In some cases that means you can't maintain a single stream of thought long enough to accomplish anything at all (hyperactivity sub-type), while in other cases it means your attention is so narrow that you lack awareness of your surroundings (inattentive sub-type).
Being able to multi-task is about as far away from ADHD as you can get.
Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net."
You say this like it's a good thing....
I think it's entirely reasonable for other countries to want to control their own top-level domains and know that the root server's won't suddenly "forget" them at the request of the Pentagon.
The 3-letter domains should have been abandoned a long time ago, or at least placed below ".us" in the domain hierarchy. Organizations outside of the US would migrate to their own country's domain quickly enough.
Although many people point to release dates and argue that regions were to prevent someone from importing a movie that was still in local theatres, I think a much larger factor was the general standard of living. Region coding allowed the studios to charge higher prices in regions that had higher standards of living without pricing themselves out of the market in economically depressed regions.
I dont really trust mapquest for best routes. Me and some buddies used mapquest to get directions to the Verizon Wireless Amphetheter for a concert some number of years ago, we followed the directions exactly and ended up on the south side of houston, being led to an empty lot next to an abandon store building.
My employer pays mileage for overtime shifts. When we recently relocated to a new building, they used MapQuest to determine the distance from home to work for all 200+ employees, without once noticing that MapQuest had misplaced the new building by several miles. When I got my email stating my new distance I knew it was way off (because I had already measured it in my car) and did some research. It turns out that if you include both the street address and the postal/zip code, MapQuest ignores the street address entirely and uses the stored (approximately central) location for the postal/zip code. If your postal area is large enough and the address you want is on the fringe, it can make a huge difference. When we dropped the postal code and used only the street address, MapQuest's location and driving instructions were just about perfect.
My sister-in-law STRONGLY feels that it's a parent's reponsibility to maximize their childrens inheritance, and vocally enough that her children are fully aware of it, and now expect it.
My ex-partner once asked me how much my life insurance was worth, and then complained that there wouldn't be very much left over after I was buried and the mortgage on the house was paid off. Had we been a one-income family with kids then it would make sense to have enough insurance to replace my income for a reasonable period of time (ie: until the kids were 25), but in our case (both in our 30's, both professionally employed, no kids) I didn't see why I should pay huge premiums so that my partner could retire to a life of idle luxury....
Is "homebrew software development" the new euphemism for "piracy"? You know, how 99.99% of everyone who got mod chips for their ps2 and xbox was just so they could "run linux" ?
By the time I resolved to installing MythTV on my XBox the soft-hackable versions had pretty much all dissappeared. I managed to get a used one from a friend and now I use it for watching time-delayed cable TV. The soft-hack doesn't allow me to play copied game disks, and that's fine with me because I'm not a full-time gamer and the half-dozen legitimate disks I own are enough to satisfy my trigger finger.
When M$ decided to patch the later XBox firmwares so that they couldn't be soft-hacked, that meant the only way to install Linux was to buy a mod chip. Once you've done that, you're faced with a machine that CAN run pirated games, and for which you've paid extra money for that option. If I had been forced to mod-chip a later XBox I would almost certainly be playing pirated games by now, whether to justify the expense or simply because I could.
Microsoft's decision to banish soft-hack installations probably had a negative impact on their profits by turning away marginal customers and motivating the marginal pirates.
The point was that it's now possible to encrypt data so that other people can't read it unless they have appropriate credentials.
True story:
One of my coworkers thought NT4+NTFS was an incredibly secure platform. So I put a Knoppix CD in the drive, rebooted, mounted the NTFS partition, went to his profile directory and showed him the contents of his cookies. I then explained to him that NTFS security was cooperative, meaning that the security was based on the idea that a security flag in the filesystem would say "please don't read this file" and the operating system would respect that request. As soon as you find a way to ignore that flag then anything resembling security is out the window (pardon the pun).
I think a lot of people are assuming that it shows up as a single USB device. A far more likely scenario is that it has an internal USB hub and several separate USB devices that all communicate with the PC over the same connection. That would allow it to appear to be both a network connection and a storage device at the same time. The site says that it can be configured to automatically install software on the host computer, so autorun is probably involved. It would have to emulate a CD-Rom as Windows does not support autorun on RAM devices.
I have long wanted to ban Telus mail servers from sending mail to us, but unfortunately, Telus is some peoples ONLY option for service. Speak with your dollars my Northern friends.
The problem isn't that the ISP forces us to use their server for outbound email as much as the fact that if we don't use their server the message will probably be bounced by the recipient as most ISPs now refuse inbound email from DHCP-leased addresses.
The long-term solution is to drop SMTP and move to a protocol that includes sender verification of some sort.
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They'd have to change their name to Nutbuster...
Seriously, though, I haven't been inside a Blockbuster since the "No More Late Fees" fiasco.
So how long before "Monty Python" is added to the Comp.Sci. curriculum at the local university? I'm all for having a fun and enjoyable workplace, but I'm not sure I want my professional qualifications trumped by whether or not the interviewer agrees with my sense of humour.
Congress approved it by a margin of about 3:1. The Senate overturned it following a filibuster. The Senate Republicans thought it would be smooth sailing because nobody would want to stand in the way of Hurricane Katrina relief funding and "protect our troops" money. They were wrong. You'll hear *all* about it in the 2007 federal election campaign....
All it takes is for someone to attach it to an omnibus funding bill, as happened this week with the bill to open the Arctic Wildlife Reserve to the oil companies by sticking it into an arms appropriation bill at the last second. Someone basically said "the military uses imported oil, so drilling in the arctic could be considered a military neccessity!" In this case, of course the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of allowing big business to polute the arctic in search of what is estimated to be about a 16-month supply of oil.
I don't know why you guys (Americans) don't make this kind of legislative foolishness illegal. It's usually used for pork-barreling by attaching an obvious waste of money (in the form of directed bids for expensive purchases) to a bill that, oh, maybe funds school lunches or something. If the politicians don't vote in favour of the pork-barrel then they get a big "he voted against school lunches" attack in the next election. I'm sure it will happen one way or another with this "analog hole" proposal. Someone will find a way to roll it into a bigger block of regulations that nobody will have the guts to vote down....
Maybe someone autistic would volunteer to go. There are benefits to having a reduced desire/need for social contact...
Mother Theresa said "I ask you one thing: do not tire of giving, but do not give your leftovers. Give until it hurts, until you feel the pain."
a phone company should notice a phone making multiple calls at the same time
True. They should notice a lot of things. TFA said that they *do* notice a lot of things, but choose to ignore obvious fraud if they think the customer can afford to pay the bill.
The main point of my post was that it IS possible for the cell company to be aware of fraud before the customer is (the same way banks are), and they have the means to do something about it. Allowing a 10,000% increase in usage to go un-checked and then claiming that the customer failed to mitigate damages because she was out of the country at the time is corporate bullying at its worse.
Incidentally, Rogers has been in trouble with the Canadian government over shady business practises in the past. The most notable incident was around 1993 when they tried to stick thousands of cable TV customers with large bills through "negative option billing". That means they sent out an advertisement saying "unless you tell us otherwise, we are going to automatically add a bunch of Pay TV channels to your account". Of course, most people toss the advertising that comes with the monthly bills without even reading it. Eventually the government forced Rogers to reverse the charges.
I went on a 4-week trip to southeast Asia this year. It was a *vacation* and I didn't want people calling me overseas to ask me work-related questions. In any case, my phone (at the time) was a cheap non-SIM P.O.S. that only worked on one frequency and would cost about $3/minute when roaming overseas, assuming it worked at all. So I left it at home. Had it been stolen, I wouldn't have known about it until I got home.
So, where could you possibly call to produce $12000 bill? Even if it were $5/minute, that's still 2400 minutes = 40 hours OF NON-STOP TALKING!!!
For all we know, maybe the phone was cloned after it was stolen, in which case some of those calls would be happening in parallel.
Stolen/cloned phones and calling cards have no practical purpose other than to make a whole bunch of international calls. The thieves use them as "payphones" and sell air-time to immigrants or tourists for cash. They will use as much of the air-time as they possibly can before the phone is cut-off, and once the phone stops working they toss it away. They never make domestic calls because those can easily be investigated, and with the right leverage someone will eventually name the thief.
Probably because HP released the i6325 to replace it. The i6325 is a nice piece of hardware, but Pocket Windows 2003 is just as flaky as Win95 ever was.
There's also no taxes owing for capital gains when you sell that non-investment property. My house in Vancouver, BC has gone up in value by more than $125,000 in the last 3 years. Given a choice between a 17% deduction on the interest portion of my mortgage versus $125,000 in tax-free cash I think I'll take the latter....
It depends on the goals of the project. If it's to provide "electronic typewriters" then yes, a "it just works" system with lots of eye-candy would be the best solution. If they want to actually teach kids about computers then they have to provide them with an environment where they can learn.
The best computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack CoCo. It had a simple architecture, a well-engineered and flexible CPU, and a simple ROM. I learned BASIC on it. Then I learned C. Then I learned Assembly. Unlike today's behemoth operating systems, that beast was so simple you could sit down with a 6809 reference manual and enter working code one byte at a time if you wanted to (and I often did). With so little RAM, programs were small enough that you could study them (and dissassemble them, if needed) and actually learn something. If you were so inclined, you could take the cover off and actually follow the circuitry from one chip to the next...
Sitting a kid in front of OS X or Win XP and expecting him to learn long-term skills (ie: how to think, not what to write) is like buying him a camera with the expectation he'll learn how to draw.
Which is yet another reason why each country should control their own domain. If the government of the USA wants to prevent people from accessing servers in France they already have that technology whether or not they host the .fr SOA. China didn't need to hack the root DNS servers to block access to objectionable content outside their borders.
The problem here is that the USA can keep people in Canada or Europe or Asia from connecting to France's servers if they have a 3-letter TLD simply by de-listing them. That would probably be considered an act of espionage/war and is therefore unlikely, but it's easy to understand why France would rather not be in that position.
Hence my original suggestion: convert all ".com" domains to ".com.us" and host the ".us" domain on a DNS root inside the USA. Foreign companies will have no choice but to reregister in their own country if they want to have guaranteed access from citizens of countries not currently favoured by the USA government.
That was my point. There *is* a 2-letter TLD for every country. This fight is over 3-letter "vanity plate" TLDs that are not directly associated with a country. There is no reason for a (hypothetical) family-owned diner in the middle of the desert to engage in an international dispute over "eatatjoes.com" when "joesdiner.desertville.az.us" is more relevant in terms of geography and significance.
I can see an argument for multinationals to want a generic TLD, but as I said in the grandparent post, they usually have country-specific sites anyway and can always forward to a parent server.
Nor should we. Every country in the world has been assigned a 2-letter top domain, and we should be using them. Rather than creating new 3-letter TLDs we should be adding ".us" to the current ones. Those ".com"s that are not in the USA probably already have a matching address in their own country's TLD anyway. Sometimes it redirects to the .com (microsoft.ca redirects to microsoft.com/canada) and sometimes the redirection works the other way (google.com redirects to google.ca if you try to connect from Canada).
Once the whole world isn't fighting over the same TLD there won't be any call for the USA to give up control because it would only control the ".us" domain anyway.
This fight is about who gets to profit from issuing and owning "vanity plates".
Even though the content is encrypted, it's still possible to figure out the end points. The https protocol uses TCP port 443. VoIP doesn't. It would be trivial to allow one and block the other. Once that happens, the only way to make a VoIP call is to have an SSL-enabled web server at the receiving end. The telcos have already got out the knives to go after VoIP-PSTN bridges. VoIP won't sell if grandma can't accept incoming calls from the VoIP-enabled grandchildren....
Bingo.
I've been needing a PDA for a long time for my personal life as well as for work (my short-term memory is useless thanks to ADHD). I looked at what my coworkers were using, and realized that most of them left their PDA in the filing cabinet, thereby completely negating the "instant on" ability. As it turns out, I was also fed up with my cell company (both the equipment and the customer service were poor) and wanted to switch to GSM so I'd be able to get my phone unlocked and take it with me when I travel and use prepaid SIM cards to avoid paying international roaming charges. I started looking at the Treo 650 but ended up getting an iPAQ 6325.
I could have bought a small cell phone, but it would have been so difficult to use the PIM features I'd still want a PDA, and the PDA would be so bulky I'd never have it with me when I needed it.
Having the cell phone built into the PDA is both the carrot and the stick - I'm forced to carry the PDA around in order to have a telephone, and that means I get more value from the PDA because I actually have it when I need to use it.
Multi-tasking is when you switch your attention back and forth between concurrent tasks so that you maximize your efficiency by minimizing the amount of time spent waiting for things to happen.
ADHD is an inability to regulate your attention. In some cases that means you can't maintain a single stream of thought long enough to accomplish anything at all (hyperactivity sub-type), while in other cases it means your attention is so narrow that you lack awareness of your surroundings (inattentive sub-type).
Being able to multi-task is about as far away from ADHD as you can get.
Tourette's is more than just a facial tic, too.
You say this like it's a good thing....
I think it's entirely reasonable for other countries to want to control their own top-level domains and know that the root server's won't suddenly "forget" them at the request of the Pentagon.
The 3-letter domains should have been abandoned a long time ago, or at least placed below ".us" in the domain hierarchy. Organizations outside of the US would migrate to their own country's domain quickly enough.
Although many people point to release dates and argue that regions were to prevent someone from importing a movie that was still in local theatres, I think a much larger factor was the general standard of living. Region coding allowed the studios to charge higher prices in regions that had higher standards of living without pricing themselves out of the market in economically depressed regions.
My employer pays mileage for overtime shifts. When we recently relocated to a new building, they used MapQuest to determine the distance from home to work for all 200+ employees, without once noticing that MapQuest had misplaced the new building by several miles. When I got my email stating my new distance I knew it was way off (because I had already measured it in my car) and did some research. It turns out that if you include both the street address and the postal/zip code, MapQuest ignores the street address entirely and uses the stored (approximately central) location for the postal/zip code. If your postal area is large enough and the address you want is on the fringe, it can make a huge difference. When we dropped the postal code and used only the street address, MapQuest's location and driving instructions were just about perfect.
My ex-partner once asked me how much my life insurance was worth, and then complained that there wouldn't be very much left over after I was buried and the mortgage on the house was paid off. Had we been a one-income family with kids then it would make sense to have enough insurance to replace my income for a reasonable period of time (ie: until the kids were 25), but in our case (both in our 30's, both professionally employed, no kids) I didn't see why I should pay huge premiums so that my partner could retire to a life of idle luxury....
By the time I resolved to installing MythTV on my XBox the soft-hackable versions had pretty much all dissappeared. I managed to get a used one from a friend and now I use it for watching time-delayed cable TV. The soft-hack doesn't allow me to play copied game disks, and that's fine with me because I'm not a full-time gamer and the half-dozen legitimate disks I own are enough to satisfy my trigger finger.
When M$ decided to patch the later XBox firmwares so that they couldn't be soft-hacked, that meant the only way to install Linux was to buy a mod chip. Once you've done that, you're faced with a machine that CAN run pirated games, and for which you've paid extra money for that option. If I had been forced to mod-chip a later XBox I would almost certainly be playing pirated games by now, whether to justify the expense or simply because I could.
Microsoft's decision to banish soft-hack installations probably had a negative impact on their profits by turning away marginal customers and motivating the marginal pirates.
The point was that it's now possible to encrypt data so that other people can't read it unless they have appropriate credentials.
True story:
One of my coworkers thought NT4+NTFS was an incredibly secure platform. So I put a Knoppix CD in the drive, rebooted, mounted the NTFS partition, went to his profile directory and showed him the contents of his cookies. I then explained to him that NTFS security was cooperative, meaning that the security was based on the idea that a security flag in the filesystem would say "please don't read this file" and the operating system would respect that request. As soon as you find a way to ignore that flag then anything resembling security is out the window (pardon the pun).
I think a lot of people are assuming that it shows up as a single USB device. A far more likely scenario is that it has an internal USB hub and several separate USB devices that all communicate with the PC over the same connection. That would allow it to appear to be both a network connection and a storage device at the same time. The site says that it can be configured to automatically install software on the host computer, so autorun is probably involved. It would have to emulate a CD-Rom as Windows does not support autorun on RAM devices.
The problem isn't that the ISP forces us to use their server for outbound email as much as the fact that if we don't use their server the message will probably be bounced by the recipient as most ISPs now refuse inbound email from DHCP-leased addresses.
The long-term solution is to drop SMTP and move to a protocol that includes sender verification of some sort.