Personally, I'd go with the "This Laptop is GPS enabled and filled with C4 explosives set to go off when reported stolen. Enjoy life with your three out of ten fingers."
I'll bet that would create a really impressive scene when you tried to take it on a plane.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the risks of having a chunk of the administrative capability of a city dependent on the availability of remote servers running proprietary protocols and software. This isn't just that the data is unavailable... if I'm reading this right then if SimDesk goes offline (say due to the Backhoe of Death) then you wouldn't even be able to write and print a memo. Web services are cool but they're dependent on the network Always Being There but that can't be taken for granted.
Would it be possible to hack into those servers and pick through tax records, etc? What measures does SimDesk have in place to guarantee availability? Have they been through a security audit that shows they're in compliance with appropriate rules/laws on information security?
Not to mention the issues with having municipal data stored in a proprietary format with proprietary software.
This seems to dovetail with a story that I heard on NPR on July 16th (story link) about a man in Guatemala who had a real moon rock that he wanted to sell - a wafer of rock about the size of a fingernail brought back by an Apollo mission (17?) that had been given, mounted on a plaque, by the Nixon administration to the Guatemalan government in gratitude for something or other and eventually came, through a route that is still unclear, into the hands of this individual.
Meanwhile (and this is where the dovetail comes in) the FBI had set up in Florida and posted advertisements in magazines in order to lure people who were selling fake moon rocks over the net and in other places. When the Guatemalan man attempted to contact them and sell his (real) rock (for a seven-figure sum) the FBI was stunned to find that there was actually a real moon rock out there because they hadn't expected to find any.
The whole thing is now tied up in litigation because the US claims that the rock doesn't properly belong to its current owner because it was given to the Guatemalan government/people.
I wonder of the students saw the same ad and figured they could make some big bucks.
It's interesting to note that SETI@Home maintained a >39 TeraFLOP rate over the last 24 hours according to their web page. The earth simulator is aiming for 40.
I know this isn't strictly an apples-to-apples comparison by a long shot but it's kind of fun to compare the two numbers.
The Sci-Fi Channel's Mini-series adaptation of "Dune" was a lot better than the muddled and incomprehensible 80's movie (which was apparently mostly a vehicle to get Sting on the screen).
The Scifi "Dune" is hardly perfect (mostly because of TV-grade acting) but tries to follow the book relatively closely and it may be as good as it gets for Dune fans for a long time to come. If you didn't see it it's now available on DVD... probably worth renting at least.
Frank Herbert's worlds, like Tolkien's, are already fully developed before the author starts writing. The books are so rich with sub-plots, hidden agendas and cross-interactions between characters that squeezing them down to feature-film length sacrifices many of the sub-plots that show us that the story is about a world (galaxy?) and those in it, not one person and the people they bump into.
I have high hopes for the Lord of the Rings series because they didn't start with the premise that they could wedge three books into one movie.
One of my favorite books, "The Big U" by Neal Stephenson, has as a subplot the battle between one of the university's never-left computer-wizard grad students named Virgil and an insidious program hidden in the university's hyper-powerful mainframe called "The Worm". He spends years in a tiny basement office with a computer terminal chasing the Worm around the system while it does annoying/nasty things like causing dirty words to be printed in student papers and university financial reports, all the time mocking him for his pathetic efforts to find and stop it.
Denouement comes when Virgil pulls together, from stashed directories all over the system, hundreds of what the worm thought were harmless pieces of inept code from lots of kids taking programming classes to create a juggernaut that he uses to finally scour the Worm from the system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet that would create a really impressive scene when you tried to take it on a plane.
"Curses! Foiled again!" muttered the villain as he was swathed in yards and yards of aluminum sheeting...
Sorry wouldn't resist adding a bad pun to another one.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the risks of having a chunk of the administrative capability of a city dependent on the availability of remote servers running proprietary protocols and software. This isn't just that the data is unavailable... if I'm reading this right then if SimDesk goes offline (say due to the Backhoe of Death) then you wouldn't even be able to write and print a memo. Web services are cool but they're dependent on the network Always Being There but that can't be taken for granted.
Would it be possible to hack into those servers and pick through tax records, etc? What measures does SimDesk have in place to guarantee availability? Have they been through a security audit that shows they're in compliance with appropriate rules/laws on information security?
Not to mention the issues with having municipal data stored in a proprietary format with proprietary software.
Meanwhile (and this is where the dovetail comes in) the FBI had set up in Florida and posted advertisements in magazines in order to lure people who were selling fake moon rocks over the net and in other places. When the Guatemalan man attempted to contact them and sell his (real) rock (for a seven-figure sum) the FBI was stunned to find that there was actually a real moon rock out there because they hadn't expected to find any.
The whole thing is now tied up in litigation because the US claims that the rock doesn't properly belong to its current owner because it was given to the Guatemalan government/people.
I wonder of the students saw the same ad and figured they could make some big bucks.
It's interesting to note that SETI@Home maintained a >39 TeraFLOP rate over the last 24 hours according to their web page. The earth simulator is aiming for 40.
I know this isn't strictly an apples-to-apples comparison by a long shot but it's kind of fun to compare the two numbers.
-- Ken
If Microsoft decides to give away their OS and compete solely in the application space, then the war will truly have begun with Linux.
The Sci-Fi Channel's Mini-series adaptation of "Dune" was a lot better than the muddled and incomprehensible 80's movie (which was apparently mostly a vehicle to get Sting on the screen).
The Scifi "Dune" is hardly perfect (mostly because of TV-grade acting) but tries to follow the book relatively closely and it may be as good as it gets for Dune fans for a long time to come. If you didn't see it it's now available on DVD... probably worth renting at least.
Frank Herbert's worlds, like Tolkien's, are already fully developed before the author starts writing. The books are so rich with sub-plots, hidden agendas and cross-interactions between characters that squeezing them down to feature-film length sacrifices many of the sub-plots that show us that the story is about a world (galaxy?) and those in it, not one person and the people they bump into.
I have high hopes for the Lord of the Rings series because they didn't start with the premise that they could wedge three books into one movie.
Denouement comes when Virgil pulls together, from stashed directories all over the system, hundreds of what the worm thought were harmless pieces of inept code from lots of kids taking programming classes to create a juggernaut that he uses to finally scour the Worm from the system.
- Ken