For at least 20 years, I have had a full beard. Since I am mostly (not entirely) bald on top, I do not get a haircut more than once in two months. When I get a haircut, I also get my beard trimmed somewhat short. Will facial recognition allow me to drive home from the barber shop?
I do not have a mobile phone, smart or dumb. When I leave my house, I want to leave my phone, computer, garden, etc behind me. Where would this feature send the photo?
I never got E-mails from Micro$oft about updates, vulnerabilities, etc. Instead, I have an RSS feed from US-CERT (computer emergency response team), an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (Yes, they do have a few useful functions.) US-CERT not only notifies me about Micro$oft's alerts and provides links to them, but that agency also notifies me of alerts from other companies.
I bought a new Hamilton Railway Special conductor's pocket watch with the first paycheck I earned as a computer programmer in 1962. Since then, I have never worn a wrist watch and do not plan to wear one.
I retired the Hamilton when I got a pocket Casio with a calculator, alarm, and count-down timer. I now have an electronic pocket watch with a round dial and hour, minute, and second hands; it also shows the date (but not the month or year). I have to reset the date when a 30-day month ends. When that happens, I recheck the time against a global array of atomic clocks that are tied to the Internet; I find it keeps excellent time.
Yes, I was a computer geek in the early days of geekdom and remained so until I retired. I do not own a smart phone or even a dumb cell phone. When I leave the house, I prefer to leave it entirely -- phones, computers, etc. But I do carry a watch in my pocket on the end of a chain attached to my belt.
By the way, during much of my career, I was the go-to person for issues relating to time-keeping and the rotation of the earth on which time-keeping is based. This was for various projects involving earth-orbiting, military space satellites.
There are no falsehoods involved in what I said (other than perhaps using hair dye to hide the gray). Omitting information such as the date of a college degree is not lying if you really received the degree.
In any case, a prospective employer is lying if they say you are not qualified for the job when they really mean you are too old.
When seeking employment, there are strategies that can be used to help defeat age discrimination.
Remove the gray before an interview. Clairol and Clairol for Men (and other such products) can be your friend; alternatively, visit a good barber or hair salon. Pick a natural-looking color. Men should remember to color their beards and mustaches. This should be done several days in advance so that accidental coloring of adjacent skin can be washed away. DO NOT persist in coloring hair, however; this is suspected of increasing the risk of cancer. Do not wear false hair; it is too easily detected.
When describing education, do not mention in what years your degrees were granted.
When describing employment history, only go back 10 years.
Do not mention spouse, children, and especially grand-children.
Do not mention expertise in obsolete computer languages or hardware.
If you are a victim of age discrimination, however, think very carefully about legal remedies even if you have solid proof. There is a U.S. Supreme Court justice who previously was the head of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). While in that earlier post, he deliberately sat on over 20,000 age-discrimination complaints until the statute of limitations expired and prevented action. (Anita Hill was merely a side distraction.)
First of all, I assume you are serious and not trolling (as some others who replied have asserted).
My son died in April of 2013. He lived with cancer for four years and then took four months to die. During that time, he ignored my pleas to create an estate plan with an attorney. I am still trying to unravel his estate. Divorced and without a will, his son (my grandson) is his sole heir. My grandson is 6 years old. After my son died, it was too late to create a trust for my grandson. Instead, I had to go to court (several hundreds of dollars in court fees, legal fees, and even appraisal fees) to be appointed the guardian of my grandson's inherited estate. (His mother is the guardian of his person.) I will then have to return to court every two years to report on the status of the guardianship. In the meantime, NO ONE had authority to pay my son's final bills. It took seven months after my son died before I had legal authority to collect his credit union accounts, IRA, Roth IRA, and multiple 401(k) accounts, by which time several bills had already been sent to collection. All the legitimate bills have now been paid, and all known assets have been collected (the last, just a week ago). In July, I will transfer the balance of my son's estate into my grandson's guardianship. That will not end the hassle as I will have to report the status to the court for the next 12 years.
I am thus on a campaign that every adult needs an estate plan. Even if you have no heirs, even if your estate is small, you need to provide binding instructions on how to handle your assets after you die.
Before my son started actually dying of cancer, my wife and I started a complete overhaul of our own estate plans. With the exception of our IRAs and Roth IRAs, all our assets are in trusts. We each are the other's beneficiary of the IRAs and Roth IRAs, with the trusts the contingent beneficiary. The trusts require two trustees, currently my wife and me. If one of us dies or becomes incapacitated, the replacement trustee is already identified in the trusts. When we are both dead, the replacement trustee must appoint another trustee to have two. CONTINUITY IS VERY IMPORTANT. Our credit unions, bank, and mutual fund group all have copies of the relevant portion of the trust documents to ensure they accept this continuity.
Now for the original question: In California, where my wife and I live, a bank safe deposit box is NOT sealed if one of us dies. The box remains available to the other persons who are listed at the bank -- with their signatures -- as having access to it, which includes our daughter and will eventually include our replacement trustee. The complete original documents for our estate plan are in the safe deposit box. Right now, I can see a ring binder with a copy. The replacement trustee has a copy. A list of all our accounts is in the safe deposit box. An inventory of our mutual funds (IRAs and Roth IRAs) is in the safe deposit box.
In a sealed envelope in the safe deposit box are a floppy disc, a compact disc, and a printout of my OpenPGP public and private keys and my OpenPGP passphrase (the latter otherwise exists only in my brain). (I chose three media since I have no way to predict what formats might become obsolete before I die.) That envelope also contains a list of all my important Internet passwords, which are encrypted on my PC.
I have an unencrypted list on my PC titled "Where Is It?" that describes where everything should be found: checkbooks, bank statements, insurance policies, durable powers of attorney for health care, mutual fund statements, deed to our house, etc. When I update this list, I E-mail a copy to our daughter; another copy is in the ring binder with our estate plan. Also in the ring binder is the paperwork for our purchase of burial plots.
I have accounts at four different financial institutions. To serve a search warrant, they would have to know which branch of which institution houses the particular safe deposit box containing the "magic" envelope. If such a search warrant were successfully served, they would still have to find my external hard drive or serve another search warrant on my house to access my files. Since none of my files contain evidence of a crime, such warrants could easily be challenged.
As for keeping my master pass-phrase in my head, the 5th Amendment protects me in the U.S. I understand that in the U.K., however, failure to give the police your master OpenPGP pass-phrase can result in a lengthy prison term.
I never use cloud resources. Too many users have been severely inconvenienced if not outright burned by cloud services that have been hacked, suppressed by some government, gone out of business, or gone down for several hours. I keep all my data where I can access it, either on my PC or on a removable hard drive that I store remotely from my PC but easily reached.
I encrypt my most sensitive data. No, I do not rely on some corporation's declaration: "Trust us. We are good. We will protect you." Instead, I use an OpenPGP application that has been reviewed by outside experts and that I have installed on my PC. The data on my removable hard drive are encrypted. Some of my PC files are also encrypted. My pass-phrase, without which my private key is useless for decryption, exists only in my head and in an envelope in my safe deposit box at a bank. My private key is on my PC in a non-standard location. If somehow someone else were to access my private key, I have a much greater problem than the compromise of my sensitive data.
If the earths magnetic field moves (and it does), then won't this system also be affected?
I was going to ask the same question. It's bad enough that the earth's poles of rotation describe circles, loops, and spirals some meters across over a year. The earth's magnetic field is even more dynamic. Responding to solar storms, the magnetic field lines can shift many meters in a few hours.
In my lifetime, the north magnetic pole has shifted several kilometers, from an island in the Arctic Ocean to a peninsula in Canada. Furthermore, shifts by the south magnetic pole are not synchronized with shifts by the north magnetic pole.
From the description, the device would say that you are moving while you are actually standing still.
In the end, the administrator organization for Webster's pension plan was fined by the Australian government for not having proper security for its data, for not properly testing its system, and for not detecting Webster's intrusions (even though the intrusions were very visible in the system logs). Criminal charges against Webster were never pursued.
Historically, so-called "responsible disclosure" has resulted in delayed fixes. As long as the flaw is not public and causing a drum-beat of demands for a fix and a possible loss of customers, the developer organization too often treats security vulnerabilities the same as any other bug.
Worse, those who report security vulnerabilities responsibly and later go public because the fixes are excessively delayed often find themselves branded as villains instead of heroes. Consider the case of Michael Lynn and Cisco in 2005. Lynn informed Cisco of a vulnerability in Cisco's routers. When Cisco failed to fully inform its customers of the significance of the security patch, Lynn decided to go public at the 2005 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Cisco pressured Lynn's employer to fire him and also filed a lawsuit against Lynn.
Then there was the 2011 case of Patrick Webster, who notified the Pillar Administration (major administrator of retirement plans in Australia) of a security vulnerability in their server. When the Pillar Administration ignored Webster, he used the vulnerability to extract personal data from about 500 accounts from his own pension plan (a client of the Pillar Administration). Webster made no use of the extracted personal data, did not disseminate the data, and did not go public. He merely sent the data to the Pillar Administration to prove the existence of the vulnerability. As a result, the Pillar Administration notified Webster's own pension plan, which in turn filed a criminal complaint against Webster. Further, his pension plan then demanded that Webster reimburse them for the cost of fixing the vulnerability and sent letters to other account holders, implying that Webster caused the security vulnerability.
I have a degree in mathematics. Tax returns and their computations are merely a simple mathematical puzzle, which I easily solve.
I created two spreadsheets, one for federal income taxes and one for state income taxes. The latter is linked to the former because much of the California computations require inputs from the federal forms. Each year, I copy the prior year's spreadsheets into a new folder. I download the fill-in PDF forms for both governments and update the spreadsheets accordingly. I mark in yellow the spreadsheet cells that require new inputs; as I input those data, I remove the yellow.
California provides a Web site where I input my taxable income and filing status. The Web site tells me how much tax to pay. I wish the IRS would do the same. However, it is much easier to input into the IRS PDF files than into the California PDF files.
Since I have a large investment in a mutual fund, I can also get Turbotax for free. I download it and use it to check my spreadsheet results. I don't really like Turbotax because it requires too much irrelevant input and because it does not provide adequate capability to include explanatory attachments.
I print the PDFs and mail them via U.S. Postal Service. I never request certified or registered mail. I mailed my first tax returns when I was 16 years old. I am now 72. I have never had a mailed return go astray.
Don't change the phones. Don't change the cars. Instead, change the liability laws.
In an accident, a driver who was using a phone or other electronic communication device should be presumed to be grossly negligent. The presumption could be rebutable, but that would require the driver to prove he or she was not using any such device. With gross negligence, the law should require the automobile insurance company to cancel the driver's policy. The law should also prohibit a grossly negligent driver from collecting any insurance benefit but not prohibit the driver's victims from being compensated.
Yes, there are uninsured drivers. Where I live, the police will often confiscate their cars if they are stopped for even a minor traffic violation. Thus, there is serious incentive to be insured or else not drive.
By the way, the reason we have so many, many laws is that not enough people will do the right thing. Laws set the minimum standard for behavior. When too many individuals treat that as the maximum standard, they are inviting new laws to be passed to raise the standard.
Wrong! A good QA process prohibits the QA team from changing anything. QA can either approve the product or else send it back to the developers. In the end, QA is paid the same. Thus, QA has no vested interest in either approving or rejecting the product.
I very much like the old design. It "scans" very easily. (By "scans", I mean by the human eye and mind, not by an electronic device.)
One thing that needs to be fixed is your use of non-standard HTML and CSS. Your home page has 140 HTML errors. Your CSS has 28 errors.
Also, the yellow box that led me to this page (http://meta.slashdot.org/story/14/02/06/2329227/slashdot-tries-something-new-audience-responds) and is repeated to the top of this page says:
WE HEAR YOU We did tell you we wanted feedback. Hereâ€(TM)s our response. Note the strange characters that appear in place of a simple apostrophe in "Here's".
Before you embark on a new design, make sure you are not propagating your errors.
In the University of California system 50+ years ago, a PhD candidate had to pass proficiency tests in TWO foreign languages. In the 1960s, that requirement was modified to allow the candidate to substitute a computer language for one of the foreign languages.
The more I read about dark matter and dark energy pervading the universe, the more I think about ether (also spelled "aether" or "æther"), which also was supposed to fill the universe. Dark matter and dark energy will never be found because they are as real as ether. See the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A....
When I receive misdirected E-mail, it almost always results from someone selecting the wrong David or wrong Ross from their address book. That is, both the intended recipient and I are both known to the sender. The sender's address book is organized by names, not by E-mail addresses.
I used to get phone calls in the middle of the night for a David Ross who was an attorney, either in private practice or in the District Attorney's office. The caller would be drunk and picked out the wrong David Ross from the phone book. Again, this was a problem with my name, not with my phone number.
There are apparently many, many David Rosses. I have met two others face-to-face, both times in doctors' offices. I have exchanged E-mail with several others. I even created a Web page about this situation at http://www.rossde.com/Ross.html.
How do I handle misdirected E-mail? On the first occasion, I reply quoting the original message. I tell the sender they have the wrong David Ross. If there is one of those caveats about condfendiality and deleting misdirected messages, I also inform the sender that such warnings are unenforceable, that the sender must bear full responsibility for ensuring correct addressing of such messages.
On subsequent instances from the same sender, I use a small application that returns the message in a format that indicates the stated E-mail address is invalid. That is, the message will appear as if bounced. If that does not work, I finally threaten to make any subsequent messages public by posting them on a newsgroup.
I listen to streaming broadcasts sent over the Internet directly by radio stations. Most of these stations are non-profit, many of them part of National Public Radio. They seem not only to be surviving but even thriving. Three of the stations are sufficiently close that I can listen to them over the "airwaves". The rest of them are available only via Internet streaming.
Of course my taste in music is mostly classical, music that is still entertaining and appreciated more than a month after it is first released. In many cases, the recordings are no longer available commercially. If the cited trend in this article is true, perhaps young listeners might learn of the majesty of Beethoven, the emotion of Tchaikovsky, the joy of Gershwin.
If you are using Firefox or SeaMonkey as your browser (both Mozilla-based), get the SecretAgent extension from https://www.dephormation.org.uk/SecretAgent/. Since I installed it in SeaMonkey, not only do many sites have trouble locating where I am, some sites cannot even determine on which continent I am located.
For Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey, the SecretAgent extension conflicts with the PrefBar User Agent menulist.
Because some Web sites I visit are sensitive to what user agent they see, I unchecked (disabled) the "Rotate User Agent" checkbox in SecretAgent. Then, if I used the PrefBar User Agent menulist to spoof some other browser, it kept resetting to my actual user agent. Since I consider the PrefBar capability to be very important, I removed SecretAgent. The PrefBar capability was then restored.
Install the PrefBar extension in Firefox or SeaMonkey. Enable the Restore Tab button.
By the way, accidentally closing a tab in SeaMonkey should be rare since the X to close is at the far right of the tab bar, not on the tab. Putting the X on the tab itself has proven dangerous because it is then too easy to close a tab when trying to select the adjacent tab on the right.
I worked for Unisys and one of its predecessors for 24 years. At the time Unisys was created -- Burroughs did a hostile takeover of Univac -- the combined company had some 130,000 employees; and about half of its business was with the U.S. military. Now the company has about 22,800 employees and seems to have no military business. I stuck with the company even when they started treating salaried software professionals as if they were hourly assembly-line workers. I stuck with them when they imposed an 18-month salary freeze that did not apply to executive bonuses. I left when it was obvious that any manager who brought new work to our site would be fired.
Slashdot Mirror
I see the the following problems --
For at least 20 years, I have had a full beard. Since I am mostly (not entirely) bald on top, I do not get a haircut more than once in two months. When I get a haircut, I also get my beard trimmed somewhat short. Will facial recognition allow me to drive home from the barber shop?
I do not have a mobile phone, smart or dumb. When I leave my house, I want to leave my phone, computer, garden, etc behind me. Where would this feature send the photo?
I never got E-mails from Micro$oft about updates, vulnerabilities, etc. Instead, I have an RSS feed from US-CERT (computer emergency response team), an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (Yes, they do have a few useful functions.) US-CERT not only notifies me about Micro$oft's alerts and provides links to them, but that agency also notifies me of alerts from other companies.
The link to subscribe to the RSS feed is http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/cu....
I bought a new Hamilton Railway Special conductor's pocket watch with the first paycheck I earned as a computer programmer in 1962. Since then, I have never worn a wrist watch and do not plan to wear one.
I retired the Hamilton when I got a pocket Casio with a calculator, alarm, and count-down timer. I now have an electronic pocket watch with a round dial and hour, minute, and second hands; it also shows the date (but not the month or year). I have to reset the date when a 30-day month ends. When that happens, I recheck the time against a global array of atomic clocks that are tied to the Internet; I find it keeps excellent time.
Yes, I was a computer geek in the early days of geekdom and remained so until I retired. I do not own a smart phone or even a dumb cell phone. When I leave the house, I prefer to leave it entirely -- phones, computers, etc. But I do carry a watch in my pocket on the end of a chain attached to my belt.
By the way, during much of my career, I was the go-to person for issues relating to time-keeping and the rotation of the earth on which time-keeping is based. This was for various projects involving earth-orbiting, military space satellites.
How about a fine and prison for making a false complaint or warning about a copyright violation?
There are no falsehoods involved in what I said (other than perhaps using hair dye to hide the gray). Omitting information such as the date of a college degree is not lying if you really received the degree.
In any case, a prospective employer is lying if they say you are not qualified for the job when they really mean you are too old.
When seeking employment, there are strategies that can be used to help defeat age discrimination.
Remove the gray before an interview. Clairol and Clairol for Men (and other such products) can be your friend; alternatively, visit a good barber or hair salon. Pick a natural-looking color. Men should remember to color their beards and mustaches. This should be done several days in advance so that accidental coloring of adjacent skin can be washed away. DO NOT persist in coloring hair, however; this is suspected of increasing the risk of cancer. Do not wear false hair; it is too easily detected.
When describing education, do not mention in what years your degrees were granted.
When describing employment history, only go back 10 years.
Do not mention spouse, children, and especially grand-children.
Do not mention expertise in obsolete computer languages or hardware.
If you are a victim of age discrimination, however, think very carefully about legal remedies even if you have solid proof. There is a U.S. Supreme Court justice who previously was the head of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). While in that earlier post, he deliberately sat on over 20,000 age-discrimination complaints until the statute of limitations expired and prevented action. (Anita Hill was merely a side distraction.)
First of all, I assume you are serious and not trolling (as some others who replied have asserted).
My son died in April of 2013. He lived with cancer for four years and then took four months to die. During that time, he ignored my pleas to create an estate plan with an attorney. I am still trying to unravel his estate. Divorced and without a will, his son (my grandson) is his sole heir. My grandson is 6 years old. After my son died, it was too late to create a trust for my grandson. Instead, I had to go to court (several hundreds of dollars in court fees, legal fees, and even appraisal fees) to be appointed the guardian of my grandson's inherited estate. (His mother is the guardian of his person.) I will then have to return to court every two years to report on the status of the guardianship. In the meantime, NO ONE had authority to pay my son's final bills. It took seven months after my son died before I had legal authority to collect his credit union accounts, IRA, Roth IRA, and multiple 401(k) accounts, by which time several bills had already been sent to collection. All the legitimate bills have now been paid, and all known assets have been collected (the last, just a week ago). In July, I will transfer the balance of my son's estate into my grandson's guardianship. That will not end the hassle as I will have to report the status to the court for the next 12 years.
I am thus on a campaign that every adult needs an estate plan. Even if you have no heirs, even if your estate is small, you need to provide binding instructions on how to handle your assets after you die.
Before my son started actually dying of cancer, my wife and I started a complete overhaul of our own estate plans. With the exception of our IRAs and Roth IRAs, all our assets are in trusts. We each are the other's beneficiary of the IRAs and Roth IRAs, with the trusts the contingent beneficiary. The trusts require two trustees, currently my wife and me. If one of us dies or becomes incapacitated, the replacement trustee is already identified in the trusts. When we are both dead, the replacement trustee must appoint another trustee to have two. CONTINUITY IS VERY IMPORTANT. Our credit unions, bank, and mutual fund group all have copies of the relevant portion of the trust documents to ensure they accept this continuity.
Now for the original question: In California, where my wife and I live, a bank safe deposit box is NOT sealed if one of us dies. The box remains available to the other persons who are listed at the bank -- with their signatures -- as having access to it, which includes our daughter and will eventually include our replacement trustee. The complete original documents for our estate plan are in the safe deposit box. Right now, I can see a ring binder with a copy. The replacement trustee has a copy. A list of all our accounts is in the safe deposit box. An inventory of our mutual funds (IRAs and Roth IRAs) is in the safe deposit box.
In a sealed envelope in the safe deposit box are a floppy disc, a compact disc, and a printout of my OpenPGP public and private keys and my OpenPGP passphrase (the latter otherwise exists only in my brain). (I chose three media since I have no way to predict what formats might become obsolete before I die.) That envelope also contains a list of all my important Internet passwords, which are encrypted on my PC.
I have an unencrypted list on my PC titled "Where Is It?" that describes where everything should be found: checkbooks, bank statements, insurance policies, durable powers of attorney for health care, mutual fund statements, deed to our house, etc. When I update this list, I E-mail a copy to our daughter; another copy is in the ring binder with our estate plan. Also in the ring binder is the paperwork for our purchase of burial plots.
I have accounts at four different financial institutions. To serve a search warrant, they would have to know which branch of which institution houses the particular safe deposit box containing the "magic" envelope. If such a search warrant were successfully served, they would still have to find my external hard drive or serve another search warrant on my house to access my files. Since none of my files contain evidence of a crime, such warrants could easily be challenged.
As for keeping my master pass-phrase in my head, the 5th Amendment protects me in the U.S. I understand that in the U.K., however, failure to give the police your master OpenPGP pass-phrase can result in a lengthy prison term.
I never use cloud resources. Too many users have been severely inconvenienced if not outright burned by cloud services that have been hacked, suppressed by some government, gone out of business, or gone down for several hours. I keep all my data where I can access it, either on my PC or on a removable hard drive that I store remotely from my PC but easily reached.
I encrypt my most sensitive data. No, I do not rely on some corporation's declaration: "Trust us. We are good. We will protect you." Instead, I use an OpenPGP application that has been reviewed by outside experts and that I have installed on my PC. The data on my removable hard drive are encrypted. Some of my PC files are also encrypted. My pass-phrase, without which my private key is useless for decryption, exists only in my head and in an envelope in my safe deposit box at a bank. My private key is on my PC in a non-standard location. If somehow someone else were to access my private key, I have a much greater problem than the compromise of my sensitive data.
See my http://www.rossde.com/PGP
If the earths magnetic field moves (and it does), then won't this system also be affected?
I was going to ask the same question. It's bad enough that the earth's poles of rotation describe circles, loops, and spirals some meters across over a year. The earth's magnetic field is even more dynamic. Responding to solar storms, the magnetic field lines can shift many meters in a few hours.
In my lifetime, the north magnetic pole has shifted several kilometers, from an island in the Arctic Ocean to a peninsula in Canada. Furthermore, shifts by the south magnetic pole are not synchronized with shifts by the north magnetic pole.
From the description, the device would say that you are moving while you are actually standing still.
In the end, the administrator organization for Webster's pension plan was fined by the Australian government for not having proper security for its data, for not properly testing its system, and for not detecting Webster's intrusions (even though the intrusions were very visible in the system logs). Criminal charges against Webster were never pursued.
Historically, so-called "responsible disclosure" has resulted in delayed fixes. As long as the flaw is not public and causing a drum-beat of demands for a fix and a possible loss of customers, the developer organization too often treats security vulnerabilities the same as any other bug.
Worse, those who report security vulnerabilities responsibly and later go public because the fixes are excessively delayed often find themselves branded as villains instead of heroes. Consider the case of Michael Lynn and Cisco in 2005. Lynn informed Cisco of a vulnerability in Cisco's routers. When Cisco failed to fully inform its customers of the significance of the security patch, Lynn decided to go public at the 2005 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Cisco pressured Lynn's employer to fire him and also filed a lawsuit against Lynn.
Then there was the 2011 case of Patrick Webster, who notified the Pillar Administration (major administrator of retirement plans in Australia) of a security vulnerability in their server. When the Pillar Administration ignored Webster, he used the vulnerability to extract personal data from about 500 accounts from his own pension plan (a client of the Pillar Administration). Webster made no use of the extracted personal data, did not disseminate the data, and did not go public. He merely sent the data to the Pillar Administration to prove the existence of the vulnerability. As a result, the Pillar Administration notified Webster's own pension plan, which in turn filed a criminal complaint against Webster. Further, his pension plan then demanded that Webster reimburse them for the cost of fixing the vulnerability and sent letters to other account holders, implying that Webster caused the security vulnerability.
For more details, see my "Shoot the Messenger or Why Internet Security Eludes Us" at http://www.rossde.com/editoria....
U.S. and California
I have a degree in mathematics. Tax returns and their computations are merely a simple mathematical puzzle, which I easily solve.
I created two spreadsheets, one for federal income taxes and one for state income taxes. The latter is linked to the former because much of the California computations require inputs from the federal forms. Each year, I copy the prior year's spreadsheets into a new folder. I download the fill-in PDF forms for both governments and update the spreadsheets accordingly. I mark in yellow the spreadsheet cells that require new inputs; as I input those data, I remove the yellow.
California provides a Web site where I input my taxable income and filing status. The Web site tells me how much tax to pay. I wish the IRS would do the same. However, it is much easier to input into the IRS PDF files than into the California PDF files.
Since I have a large investment in a mutual fund, I can also get Turbotax for free. I download it and use it to check my spreadsheet results. I don't really like Turbotax because it requires too much irrelevant input and because it does not provide adequate capability to include explanatory attachments.
I print the PDFs and mail them via U.S. Postal Service. I never request certified or registered mail. I mailed my first tax returns when I was 16 years old. I am now 72. I have never had a mailed return go astray.
The Crimea is Putin's Sudetenland.
The Ukraine will be Putin's Czechoslovakia.
See http://www.rossde.com/editoria....
Don't change the phones. Don't change the cars. Instead, change the liability laws.
In an accident, a driver who was using a phone or other electronic communication device should be presumed to be grossly negligent. The presumption could be rebutable, but that would require the driver to prove he or she was not using any such device. With gross negligence, the law should require the automobile insurance company to cancel the driver's policy. The law should also prohibit a grossly negligent driver from collecting any insurance benefit but not prohibit the driver's victims from being compensated.
Yes, there are uninsured drivers. Where I live, the police will often confiscate their cars if they are stopped for even a minor traffic violation. Thus, there is serious incentive to be insured or else not drive.
By the way, the reason we have so many, many laws is that not enough people will do the right thing. Laws set the minimum standard for behavior. When too many individuals treat that as the maximum standard, they are inviting new laws to be passed to raise the standard.
Wrong! A good QA process prohibits the QA team from changing anything. QA can either approve the product or else send it back to the developers. In the end, QA is paid the same. Thus, QA has no vested interest in either approving or rejecting the product.
I very much like the old design. It "scans" very easily. (By "scans", I mean by the human eye and mind, not by an electronic device.)
One thing that needs to be fixed is your use of non-standard HTML and CSS. Your home page has 140 HTML errors. Your CSS has 28 errors.
Also, the yellow box that led me to this page (http://meta.slashdot.org/story/14/02/06/2329227/slashdot-tries-something-new-audience-responds) and is repeated to the top of this page says:
WE HEAR YOU We did tell you we wanted feedback. Hereâ€(TM)s our response.
Note the strange characters that appear in place of a simple apostrophe in "Here's".
Before you embark on a new design, make sure you are not propagating your errors.
In the University of California system 50+ years ago, a PhD candidate had to pass proficiency tests in TWO foreign languages. In the 1960s, that requirement was modified to allow the candidate to substitute a computer language for one of the foreign languages.
The more I read about dark matter and dark energy pervading the universe, the more I think about ether (also spelled "aether" or "æther"), which also was supposed to fill the universe. Dark matter and dark energy will never be found because they are as real as ether. See the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A....
When I receive misdirected E-mail, it almost always results from someone selecting the wrong David or wrong Ross from their address book. That is, both the intended recipient and I are both known to the sender. The sender's address book is organized by names, not by E-mail addresses.
I used to get phone calls in the middle of the night for a David Ross who was an attorney, either in private practice or in the District Attorney's office. The caller would be drunk and picked out the wrong David Ross from the phone book. Again, this was a problem with my name, not with my phone number.
There are apparently many, many David Rosses. I have met two others face-to-face, both times in doctors' offices. I have exchanged E-mail with several others. I even created a Web page about this situation at http://www.rossde.com/Ross.html.
How do I handle misdirected E-mail? On the first occasion, I reply quoting the original message. I tell the sender they have the wrong David Ross. If there is one of those caveats about condfendiality and deleting misdirected messages, I also inform the sender that such warnings are unenforceable, that the sender must bear full responsibility for ensuring correct addressing of such messages.
On subsequent instances from the same sender, I use a small application that returns the message in a format that indicates the stated E-mail address is invalid. That is, the message will appear as if bounced. If that does not work, I finally threaten to make any subsequent messages public by posting them on a newsgroup.
I listen to streaming broadcasts sent over the Internet directly by radio stations. Most of these stations are non-profit, many of them part of National Public Radio. They seem not only to be surviving but even thriving. Three of the stations are sufficiently close that I can listen to them over the "airwaves". The rest of them are available only via Internet streaming.
Of course my taste in music is mostly classical, music that is still entertaining and appreciated more than a month after it is first released. In many cases, the recordings are no longer available commercially. If the cited trend in this article is true, perhaps young listeners might learn of the majesty of Beethoven, the emotion of Tchaikovsky, the joy of Gershwin.
If you are using Firefox or SeaMonkey as your browser (both Mozilla-based), get the SecretAgent extension from https://www.dephormation.org.uk/SecretAgent/. Since I installed it in SeaMonkey, not only do many sites have trouble locating where I am, some sites cannot even determine on which continent I am located.
For Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey, the SecretAgent extension conflicts with the PrefBar User Agent menulist.
Because some Web sites I visit are sensitive to what user agent they see, I unchecked (disabled) the "Rotate User Agent" checkbox in SecretAgent. Then, if I used the PrefBar User Agent menulist to spoof some other browser, it kept resetting to my actual user agent. Since I consider the PrefBar capability to be very important, I removed SecretAgent. The PrefBar capability was then restored.
Install the PrefBar extension in Firefox or SeaMonkey. Enable the Restore Tab button.
By the way, accidentally closing a tab in SeaMonkey should be rare since the X to close is at the far right of the tab bar, not on the tab. Putting the X on the tab itself has proven dangerous because it is then too easy to close a tab when trying to select the adjacent tab on the right.
I worked for Unisys and one of its predecessors for 24 years. At the time Unisys was created -- Burroughs did a hostile takeover of Univac -- the combined company had some 130,000 employees; and about half of its business was with the U.S. military. Now the company has about 22,800 employees and seems to have no military business. I stuck with the company even when they started treating salaried software professionals as if they were hourly assembly-line workers. I stuck with them when they imposed an 18-month salary freeze that did not apply to executive bonuses. I left when it was obvious that any manager who brought new work to our site would be fired.