I'm no chemist or engineer, I don't know what potential carbon nanotubes have or don't have but whenever I read an article that seems to promise everything, I figure it is about 95% hyperbole and wishful thinking.
I'm pleased to see that these things are getting ready to move into a sort of production phase but really wonder what applications they will find themseves in? If some conventional prduction method produces a product of acceptable quality, I don't see carbon nanotubes making much of a dent in these products. The reason is simple, new technologies are always expensive in comparison to existing technology. Where I'd expect to see them shine is where some feature of the nanotube makes something that was previously difficult, expensive, or impossible to become affordable and easy to produce.
Since I like to play with composites, I hope that they will come out with some fabrics that can be used in conjunction with epoxy to produce exceptionally strong, light weight structures.
I am not a huge privacy advocate nor am I a conspiracy theorist. Having said that I have concerns about embedding chips in me to identify me. I don't want to walk near a proximity sensor and have the department store (or worse yet governmental agency) know who I am when I walk in the door. It seems like a true loss of privacy and independence.
Imagine being in the wrong place at the wrong time (say a bank) that scans you when you enter the building. Now say it is robbed seconds after you leave. Your business done you return to work. A few minutes later the police show up and question you. You are automatically a suspect. What will your boss think?
It is not a feeling I want to feel.
The argument could be made that it will allow police to narrow the field faster and catch more criminals - but I for one think the price is way too high.
Ever notice how rare it is for an upstanding member of the community to be murdered? It happens and it happens more than we would like but when you compare it to the percentage of scum-bags (like drug dealers) the percentages are pretty slim.
I don't know if it was the result of his spamming or his ties with the mafia (did he have any?) or if it was something else but, I'd guess his odds of getting killed were greater, much greater than yours or mine.
A part of me figures he got what was coming to him.
I know very little about "Creative Commons" but I do know that Dvoak is kind of the tecnical version of Andy Rooney. He is sort of a loud-mouth, curmudgeion who likes to make his opinions heard. In some ways, like Rooney, he is a reasonable man, his thought process seems a little narrow though (if he didn't think about it it must not be imporatant).
How many of his predictions have come to fruition? Does he do any better than the rest of us? I doubt it.
A jounalist like him has a pretty good gig. He has an audience that reads his every word and I am sure that he makes a pretty good living and, he has a kind of respect.
I do like his "personal portal" on his website and used it very frequently in my previous job. I've read may things that he has written that I have enjoyed (and taken with a grain of salt). I'm not willing to discount everything he says, but I sure as hell won't take what he says as gosiple either.
I did read that he sent emails to Creative Commons and that he did not recieve a reply. Hell, this is not a good idea to do to a person in his position. Any one should know that. So I guess in a very minor sense - on that one point, Creative Commons got what they deserved....
Still, my gut says he has as much wrong as he has right when it comes to Creative Commons. I don't know enough about it to know but that is what my gut says.
I'll wait and see. It should be interesting to see what things look like when the dust settles.
Why is it that people think that congress, or some sort of govenment needs to be involved in every little aspect of your life? Aren't the laws that we have that regulate theft, fraud, criminal conduct (sexual or not) enough? Can't they be interpeted to pertain to the internet? Even juristictional questions aren't really all that thorny are they - if the victim is in the US then the crime happened in the US. Extradition agreements take care of the rest of it.
I'm a liberal (I guess) but I don't think we need to be a country with detailed laws for everything! The laws that we have should be written to be broad enough to cover whatever. Do we really need laws that regulate the amount of water a toilet uses to flush itself? We actually have a law that dictates that!
Do we need protection from the scumbags on the internet? Absolutly. Do they need to be internet laws? Absolutly not, existing criminal laws should cover it.
I hate to see a DWI defendant get off the hook based on what is really a technicality but I think that there is a point here. Why should a criminal defendat "trust" the manufacturer of a device used against him?
The manufacturer sells to police departments and the like, they have an incentive to skew their product's test results in the direction of law enforcement. The defendant obviously has a right to know how the machine works. He has the right for his own expert witnesses to evaluate the product and determine if there are any flaws or bugs in the hardware or the software.
Unfortunately, I'd imagine that all of this would apply to almost any forensic test. Using this exact same process, a murder defendant could ask for the source code and engineering documents for a machine used to perform DNA analysis. If the company is unwilling to release, a murder defendant could walk away a free man.
All of this could make prosicution problematic for even the most serious of crimes.
Way back when, I used to represent a company on CompuServe. As a corporate representitive I took heat from customers and from bosses. I had to hold the company line at all costs and frequently caught heat from one boss because of something another boss told me to say. It was nerve-racking and carried a great deal of exposure. I loved it.
I used the flames that the customers sent me as a sort of moral guidepost. If I had enough complaints, I'd print off pages of them and use them to show the bosses how loud the customers were yelling about some practice that they found unfair. Not that it did a lot of good. I did occasionally win a battle though.
All too frequently customers asked for way too much. My computer went out of warranty just six months ago and then the video card fried so I want a replacement computer. Ahhh, no. If you had asked nicely, I may have been able to arrange a replacement video card for you to install but since you are a jerk, go to hell...
Sometimes people would go into our forum and outright lie about the company. I had the power to delete the posts and get them banned from the forum. I didn't use this power much, but when I did they had it comming.
I wonder if this (or some other) extortion attempt is why my bank recently sent it's customers a warning about a new scam that asks you if you would be willing to become a "money agent" for someone in another country. Supposedly, you would allow money to be deposited in your account and then you would send 90% of it along to a Western Union account. According to the scam, this is supposed to be faster, safer, and cheaper for people in forigen countries.
Seems like a great way of breaking the money trail and it only costs 10%!
A couple of years ago my interest in boating caused me to start looking into composites. Eventually I settled on pretty pedestrian epoxy and fiberglass cloth due to it's reasonable cost, strength, and overall characteristics. I built my first boat and found it more than rewarding.
Learning about composites and their characteristics was far more interesting and rewarding that I would have ever imagined. How and why they do what they do is just cool - and trying to understand what the best composite for the best application is can sometimes involve a lot of research (and even then you will here different opinions from different experts - who are all naturally trying to sell you something).
Fero-cement boats are actually kind of common and have been in use for many years. While heavier than a comparible fiberglass or steel boat, they have some advantages (easier to make complex curves than steel for instance). Over years a "concrete" boat (and all cement based products are in their own right composites) wear out and require more and more maintenence to keep them seaworthy. One of the hardest things to engineer is the fact that you have to deal with expansion and contraction (this is why roadways and sidewalks have seams in them).
Flexible concrete that only contains a small percentage of interlinking fibers could revolutionize concrete for boat building purposes. While I am allowing myself to dream here a little bit, I think it is possible that in time concrete could become the matterial of choice to build large ships!
In larger ships the added weight of concrete would not add so much mass that it would really reduce the effiency of the ship much at all and construction could be a whole lost faster (especially if mass produced in molds).
I am a United States citizen. As a citizen of this country I enjoy several freedoms that I may occasionally take forgranted, and at other times I may even feel go too far. These freedoms are what I value most about my country and what I would like to export to the rest of the world. These freedoms include the Freedom of Speech, the Freedom of the Press, and Freedom of Religion.
It bothers me that our country would in any way shape or form interfere with these rights no matter where the people are from - regardless of the position their own country has on these issues our country should never - ever interfer with anything that approaches free expression of these values!
I know war is "different." That sometimes we need to interfere with the enemy's communication to their people in the field. That today this may mean that the military requires "hackers" to work the internet - or that the NSA may need to have supercomputers that "read" the traffic on the internet. But that does not give us carte blanch to hack or DOS websites that say even hateful things about the United States.
When we interfere with these things we are attacking the very things that we stand for. That is wrong.
I have a serious problem with orginizations like the KKK - but even they still have the right to express their views - even if it is venom! The same really has to go for Al-Queda if we are going to "practice what we preach."
I've served my country. I did so precisely because I believe in the freedoms that we have. In all honesty, I want the world to share these freedoms. If I didn't, I would have never served.
Say what you want, but we have to tread lightly when we interfere with freedom anywhere on the globe (and in cyberspace too). If we don't, we are not the people we think we are.
I live in Minneapolis and have to say that I believe that they will find a way to royally mess this up.
On one hand, I see the benefits of it - I even think it may have far reaching benefits (like raising property values). On the other hand, we are Murderopolis and the money should go to fighting crime.
In a strange way, wireless may actually help with things like crime rates. No, I am not kidding! The city needs to attract business and people back into the city. Offering this inexpensive, quality service is one way of doing just that. More jobs = less despair = less crime.
I live in the North side of Minneapolis which is where much of the crime exists. It is in parts very bad, the gangs have control. When the gas company goes on service calls into these areas, they frequently hire off-duty police officers for security! There are quite a few empty or underutilized commercial buildings and several large areas where commercial businesses were tore down and are now just empty lots. Still businesses would be crazy to relocate here. They would be robbed, their employees harrassed and their property vandalized.
If wireless comes to Minneapolis, I would hope that it would hit the North side first. It would be an incentive to bring people and business in.
But the city won't work that way. North will be last.
Meanwhile, the cable company will slowly quit providing amazing broadband service since the few remaining subscribers won't justify the cost of upgrading equipment. Here, North Minneapolis will be the first to be cut back.
Most home users have jobs. Many of these jobs require computers. These same users bring their ignorance into the workplace where people like me have to support them.
I try my best to educate them on the theory that an informed person is less likely to repeat the mistake. This is supposed to make my job easier. But they don't care, they find some slightly different way of making the same mistake over and over again.
It doesn't stop with spyware, trojans, and viruses either. I've had laptops come in so filthy that they hade to be taken apart and cleaned out before they would boot. Coffee on the keyboard is common. So are cracked LCD displays (although they aren't often repeated).
The most dangerous user isn't the uninformed one though. The most dangerous user is the one who knows just enough to be dangerous. They will give themselves Admin rights using a disk freely available on the internet and then try to change things that they shouldn't. By the time I get the computer it is a real mess and they know enough to plead ignorance. Those ones really torque me.
When I think about that sub-set, I think I'll take the ignorant user thank you very much.
Last summer we crossed in to Canada from the U.S. and back again at the Grand Portage MN crossing. Getting into Canada and back into the U.S. was a "piece of cake." The Canadian authority was a young man - maybe 21 or 22 if he was looking young for his age. He simply asked a series of questions (a couple of which were unexpected and I assume were part of the security screening process) and welcomed us to Canada and let us go.
What was interesting about that crossing was what any geek is likely to notice. As you approach the station there are cameras and lights - I'm sure that they use some recognition software and run you license plate before you ever even get close to the guard shack. Then as you pick your lane there are these posts that have a couple of convenient slots that I'm sure are also hiding cameras. The driver and the undersides of the vehicle are photographed as you slowly approach the shack.
On the return trip, the US Customs agent steps out of the shack, writes down your license plate and requests ID from you. He talks to you briefly asking a few simple questions. Didn't take more than a few seconds. But it was all manual! Clearly, at this crossing at least, the Canadians have out-spent us and out-classed us security-wise.
You are absolutly right. At least with OSS you have something to work with if your support provider goes away. This is one of the better selling points that favor OSS. On the other side of the coin, business has a right to ask how a company expects to stay in business when the product that they offer is litterally given away. The answer to that of course is that they are adding value to the free product and that added value is really what they are selling; not the product itself.
Since it is a nice spring day here, I'll comare it to getting free seeds and planting them yourself compared to going to a nursery and buying starter plants. You aren't really paying for the seed and the dirt, you are buying the added value that you get in an already started plant.
Unfortunately, in some sectors, this concept is hard for upper-level managers to grasp. When outside vendors come in with a proprietary product they spew FUD that makes it seem like OSS business models are doomed to failure. They aren't and I know that. If I made it sound that way, I am sorry.
Still, I think that in many ways enterprize level OSS support will come from larger service providers (contract firms) or from in-house talent. It is hard for smaller providers to get in the door at a large business. Because of the risk, these companies want and are willing to pay for "the name" and the assurance that comes with it.
Damn straight - Open source software can be and should be strategic. When an enterprize selects strategic software they need to know that it will be around (and supported) for the long-haul. Millions of dollars could be riding on the issue.
So, in a large sense, I agree with the author and will even say that in some cases, there is justifiable concern for an enterprize to avoid open software solutions.
Having said all that, I'm far from opposing open source software in the enterprize, quite to opposite in fact. Products like MySQL and Apache prove that there is a lot of room and potential in big business for OSS.
Anyone -- including big business needs to do a sort of risk evaluation before settling on anything that has the ability to affect the bottom line. For a public company it is more than business sense, it is the law. They need to know that the people they bring in on a project can do what they say they can do and just as importantly, that they will be around tomorrow to fix anything that is broken or needs changing.
For this reason, the enterprize level open source market will probably grow through pretty conventional methods. Either there will be in-house expertiese or they will hire consulting firms with the skill, knowlege, and expertise to deliver. Those firms will in many cases be old, established, familiar names that recognize the need and make the right moves to get in the market.
Yes. See my post "Something I've noticed" (next to your post).
This shit is nasty. I can't take the time necessary to kill it so I end up re-imaging the machines and "simply" reinstalling all of the original software.
My worst fear is that this stuff is worse than "just" being a part of a bot-net. I'm more concerned that they are engaged in the wholesale harvesting of identity information (like passwords, bank account information, and credit card numbers).
Clean your parents machine by wiping everything then have them deal with changing any of the sensitive information they have on their computers.
I deal with several spy-ware comprimised machines every day. They account for perhaps fifty percent of my workday each and every day.
About a month ago things started getting worse again, for a while before that things had gotten better for a while. Part of it was because I was getting better at dealing with the crap but another part of it seemed like I was actually seeing fewer comprimised machines. The metrics seemed to bear this out too.
In the past few weeks, the machines have been more grossly effected - many having multiple installs of spyware and virtually every one of them containing a trojan back-door of some sort. On top of that, either I'm getting dumber or the crap is getting much harder to remove. In some cases, the computers wouldn't let me run the more common tools that I use - they would launch and be closed immediately.
In one case in particular, I had a machine that worked fine one day and the very next the machine litterally took hours to come up to the desktop! All the while it was doing *something* with the remote user's network connection. When I brought that machine in I booted using a bootable CD ROM and discovered a number of.exe files in the root and in the temp directory that were obviously spyware. The machine would NOT let me delete the files even though I booted with a known good "Bart's PE CD" I was unable to find what was preventing me from deleting them (attributes all seemed okay).
After reimaging the computer, I put the data back down and reinstalled the programs and the machine was flawless - so it wasn't hardware. Unfortunately, time is money and I can not afford to take all the time in the world to do forensics.
What I guess I am trying to convey here is that in my opinion, there has been in the very recent past a fundimental change in the way this stuff is working. I suspect that these efforts are more than just an effort to make the spyware harder to removed. I suspect that there is now more happening in the background of these machines. I'm sure many of them are "bot-net" machines but even worse, I think some of the machines that I've seen are very busy "harvesting" data from the owner's machines!
If my hunch is correct, I'm willing to bet the in the very near future, we will see identity theft on a scale we had never imagined before. Frankly, I'm quite concerned about that and am suggesting that people who have been victims of this "nasty spyware" take the time to change all of the passwords and credit card numbers while their computer is still "fresh" or better yet, change the information in person at their bank or over the phone.
The internet does not easily recognize national boundaries. If someone wants something that they can't legally get in their country, they'll just go to a domain hosted in a country where they can get it.
To some degree, this is bad. It means that things like kiddie porn get made available. It also means that there are loopholes around copyrights and so on.
But, on another level, the internet is the bastion of freedom! It allows people in places where opinions are regulated to see that there are people in other places who can actually think and express themselves. Totalitarianisim can't really last for long because of this. Although many of us, myself included, think that kiddie porn is an inimaginable crime, I think that the benefits of a free internet outweigh the drawbacks.
The internet is today a sort of wild-West environment. Not much regulation and lots of hiding places for bad guys. I'm sure that will change with time, just like the wild-West did.
It will probably take some sort of I-Gov to bring the 'net into line with laws and regulations. I don't know if I am ready for that yet (or should I say the net is ready for that). This will be the result of a maturing process that will take time.
Working from home interferes with work-life balance. There is nothing about my job that would keep me from working out of the house but I do believe that I would greatly miss the social interaction that I have at work. I am also afraid that is I was a work-at-home person it would be too easy for my family to assume it would be okat for me to do this and that around the house. In my book that would not be okay!
Finally, there would be no easy to enforce "quitting time" - I'd find myself working much too late into the evening.
No, If you want me to work from home, I better get a good raise!
I am absolutly no expert in DNA or medicine - I probably know less about this subject than most lay people even.
When DNA is damaged and the cell replicates, I assume that the damaged DNA is carried into the new cell (or at least could be). Is that correct? Does this always cause cancer? I assume that it does not. Do other healthy cells always attack and kill the cell with damaged DNA? Again, I assume not (but that it can happen that way).
So let this reproduction happen a few generations and let the body do it's thing and you have damaged DNA working its way into a person here, there and everywhere.
On occasion, the damaged DNA manages to replicate itself in to another human being the old fashioned way. If the DNA is strong enough, then it stands a chance of becomming a new line, it will have resulted in a kind of evolution. Right? I assume that the odds of this are really quite remote, that it would take a pretty potent bit of DNA to pull this off and to acutally make a change that would be locked into a percentage of the human race. But could it happen?
The one thing we humans seem to keep underestimating is nature's ability to adapt, to deal with adversity and change to meet it head on. If we use cel phones, maybe the genetic changes they cause will be adapted to and "harden" us against that damage?
I am not a gun owner and have no stake in the gun control issue other than as I suppose an interested observer. But I take exception that a gun, even an AK-47 is only designed to kill people!
An AK-47 is only one model of thousands. It is to a degree a specialized version of a gun and it's designers probably considered lethiality when they designed it. But even an AK-47 can be used for sporting purposes as a rifle to shoot targets. It can be used to kill "varments" and can probably be used to hunt some game in some states. In short, it has uses that do not involve killing people!
The 30-06 (thirty ought six) was originally designed as an army rifle, so was the.308 - yet these two rifles are commonly used as big game hunting rifles.
Pistols seem to be more designed to be killers. They can easily be concieled and can be better used in close quarters. Yet I've found them fun to shoot at targets, I've never used one in anger and while I don't own one, I can see why some people want them in their homes for self defense.
As a tool, it is how you use it that matters. It is not always morally or legally wrong to take a life. Self defense is probably the best example of this, war is possibly another example (although I'd quibble about that in certain instances). Police officers carry side-arms knowing that they may some day be called on to use them, for self defense or to save another person's life. It is the person who makes the judgment call to use the tool, not the weapon.
The Napster1 decision questioned the business model - and it was found defective. The current issue is not attacking just the business model but the actual protocol. When you think of the scope of what P2P involves, it goes beyond simple file sharing. It is the very bedrock of how computers talk to one another. In some respects, attacking the protocol is a little bit like trying to outlaw a language! At the very base level P2P of some sort is required any time two computers talk to each other. Web pages, IM, FTP, and email all use peer-protocols to get the job done.
One of my biggest concerns is that a court won't quite grasp this detail or perhaps a luddite judge will understand it and decide to derail the net because of his personal fears. Stuff like this happens and it takes years to fix.
Still all in all, this issue is a lawsuit filed by a business asking the court to protec their business. That part is understandable. But rather than finding and pursuing individual entities and proving their cause, which is their responsibility they are trying a short-cut. They want to outlaw the technology that makes so many good things. This makes them luddites, afraid of progress and change. They need to adjust to changes or be left in the dust. They don't need the courts to do this, they need a good, solid business plan.
P2P is a tool. It can be used for good or bad, it can be used for serious work or entertainment. But at the end of the day, P2P is a tool, just like a screwdriver, hammer, knife, or gun. The hands that you put tools in decide how the tool is going to be used. There is nothing enharently evil about a gun, it is how it gets used that makes the difference.
I don't really want gang-bangers to have guns, but I think that having a police officer with a gun is usually a good thing.
P2P should not be illegal, the act of piracy is already illegal. We do not need new laws, or even need the old laws "fleshed out" - they are perfectly adequate and can address the issue of piracy.
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I'm no chemist or engineer, I don't know what potential carbon nanotubes have or don't have but whenever I read an article that seems to promise everything, I figure it is about 95% hyperbole and wishful thinking.
I'm pleased to see that these things are getting ready to move into a sort of production phase but really wonder what applications they will find themseves in? If some conventional prduction method produces a product of acceptable quality, I don't see carbon nanotubes making much of a dent in these products. The reason is simple, new technologies are always expensive in comparison to existing technology. Where I'd expect to see them shine is where some feature of the nanotube makes something that was previously difficult, expensive, or impossible to become affordable and easy to produce.
Since I like to play with composites, I hope that they will come out with some fabrics that can be used in conjunction with epoxy to produce exceptionally strong, light weight structures.
What happened to H,I,J,K,L,& M?
Seems like a waste of alphabet to me. And what happens when we get to Z? Will there then be Aa Ab,Ac and so on through Zz?
I am not a huge privacy advocate nor am I a conspiracy theorist. Having said that I have concerns about embedding chips in me to identify me. I don't want to walk near a proximity sensor and have the department store (or worse yet governmental agency) know who I am when I walk in the door. It seems like a true loss of privacy and independence.
Imagine being in the wrong place at the wrong time (say a bank) that scans you when you enter the building. Now say it is robbed seconds after you leave. Your business done you return to work. A few minutes later the police show up and question you. You are automatically a suspect. What will your boss think?
It is not a feeling I want to feel.
The argument could be made that it will allow police to narrow the field faster and catch more criminals - but I for one think the price is way too high.
Ever notice how rare it is for an upstanding member of the community to be murdered? It happens and it happens more than we would like but when you compare it to the percentage of scum-bags (like drug dealers) the percentages are pretty slim.
I don't know if it was the result of his spamming or his ties with the mafia (did he have any?) or if it was something else but, I'd guess his odds of getting killed were greater, much greater than yours or mine.
A part of me figures he got what was coming to him.
I know very little about "Creative Commons" but I do know that Dvoak is kind of the tecnical version of Andy Rooney. He is sort of a loud-mouth, curmudgeion who likes to make his opinions heard. In some ways, like Rooney, he is a reasonable man, his thought process seems a little narrow though (if he didn't think about it it must not be imporatant).
How many of his predictions have come to fruition? Does he do any better than the rest of us? I doubt it.
A jounalist like him has a pretty good gig. He has an audience that reads his every word and I am sure that he makes a pretty good living and, he has a kind of respect.
I do like his "personal portal" on his website and used it very frequently in my previous job. I've read may things that he has written that I have enjoyed (and taken with a grain of salt). I'm not willing to discount everything he says, but I sure as hell won't take what he says as gosiple either.
I did read that he sent emails to Creative Commons and that he did not recieve a reply. Hell, this is not a good idea to do to a person in his position. Any one should know that. So I guess in a very minor sense - on that one point, Creative Commons got what they deserved....
Still, my gut says he has as much wrong as he has right when it comes to Creative Commons. I don't know enough about it to know but that is what my gut says.
I'll wait and see. It should be interesting to see what things look like when the dust settles.
Besides the fishing license issue, how can I get my boat shipped over there? I think it is too big to check as luggage on the airplane.
What kind of bait did they use? What test line? Apparently the story was slashdotted so I couldn't read it.
I wanna go fishing now!
Why is it that people think that congress, or some sort of govenment needs to be involved in every little aspect of your life? Aren't the laws that we have that regulate theft, fraud, criminal conduct (sexual or not) enough? Can't they be interpeted to pertain to the internet? Even juristictional questions aren't really all that thorny are they - if the victim is in the US then the crime happened in the US. Extradition agreements take care of the rest of it.
I'm a liberal (I guess) but I don't think we need to be a country with detailed laws for everything! The laws that we have should be written to be broad enough to cover whatever. Do we really need laws that regulate the amount of water a toilet uses to flush itself? We actually have a law that dictates that!
Do we need protection from the scumbags on the internet? Absolutly. Do they need to be internet laws? Absolutly not, existing criminal laws should cover it.
I hate to see a DWI defendant get off the hook based on what is really a technicality but I think that there is a point here. Why should a criminal defendat "trust" the manufacturer of a device used against him?
The manufacturer sells to police departments and the like, they have an incentive to skew their product's test results in the direction of law enforcement. The defendant obviously has a right to know how the machine works. He has the right for his own expert witnesses to evaluate the product and determine if there are any flaws or bugs in the hardware or the software.
Unfortunately, I'd imagine that all of this would apply to almost any forensic test. Using this exact same process, a murder defendant could ask for the source code and engineering documents for a machine used to perform DNA analysis. If the company is unwilling to release, a murder defendant could walk away a free man.
All of this could make prosicution problematic for even the most serious of crimes.
Way back when, I used to represent a company on CompuServe. As a corporate representitive I took heat from customers and from bosses. I had to hold the company line at all costs and frequently caught heat from one boss because of something another boss told me to say. It was nerve-racking and carried a great deal of exposure. I loved it.
I used the flames that the customers sent me as a sort of moral guidepost. If I had enough complaints, I'd print off pages of them and use them to show the bosses how loud the customers were yelling about some practice that they found unfair. Not that it did a lot of good. I did occasionally win a battle though.
All too frequently customers asked for way too much. My computer went out of warranty just six months ago and then the video card fried so I want a replacement computer. Ahhh, no. If you had asked nicely, I may have been able to arrange a replacement video card for you to install but since you are a jerk, go to hell...
Sometimes people would go into our forum and outright lie about the company. I had the power to delete the posts and get them banned from the forum. I didn't use this power much, but when I did they had it comming.
I wonder if this (or some other) extortion attempt is why my bank recently sent it's customers a warning about a new scam that asks you if you would be willing to become a "money agent" for someone in another country. Supposedly, you would allow money to be deposited in your account and then you would send 90% of it along to a Western Union account. According to the scam, this is supposed to be faster, safer, and cheaper for people in forigen countries.
Seems like a great way of breaking the money trail and it only costs 10%!
Crooks are pretty inventive.
A couple of years ago my interest in boating caused me to start looking into composites. Eventually I settled on pretty pedestrian epoxy and fiberglass cloth due to it's reasonable cost, strength, and overall characteristics. I built my first boat and found it more than rewarding.
Learning about composites and their characteristics was far more interesting and rewarding that I would have ever imagined. How and why they do what they do is just cool - and trying to understand what the best composite for the best application is can sometimes involve a lot of research (and even then you will here different opinions from different experts - who are all naturally trying to sell you something).
Fero-cement boats are actually kind of common and have been in use for many years. While heavier than a comparible fiberglass or steel boat, they have some advantages (easier to make complex curves than steel for instance). Over years a "concrete" boat (and all cement based products are in their own right composites) wear out and require more and more maintenence to keep them seaworthy. One of the hardest things to engineer is the fact that you have to deal with expansion and contraction (this is why roadways and sidewalks have seams in them).
Flexible concrete that only contains a small percentage of interlinking fibers could revolutionize concrete for boat building purposes. While I am allowing myself to dream here a little bit, I think it is possible that in time concrete could become the matterial of choice to build large ships!
In larger ships the added weight of concrete would not add so much mass that it would really reduce the effiency of the ship much at all and construction could be a whole lost faster (especially if mass produced in molds).
I am a United States citizen. As a citizen of this country I enjoy several freedoms that I may occasionally take forgranted, and at other times I may even feel go too far. These freedoms are what I value most about my country and what I would like to export to the rest of the world. These freedoms include the Freedom of Speech, the Freedom of the Press, and Freedom of Religion.
It bothers me that our country would in any way shape or form interfere with these rights no matter where the people are from - regardless of the position their own country has on these issues our country should never - ever interfer with anything that approaches free expression of these values!
I know war is "different." That sometimes we need to interfere with the enemy's communication to their people in the field. That today this may mean that the military requires "hackers" to work the internet - or that the NSA may need to have supercomputers that "read" the traffic on the internet. But that does not give us carte blanch to hack or DOS websites that say even hateful things about the United States.
When we interfere with these things we are attacking the very things that we stand for. That is wrong.
I have a serious problem with orginizations like the KKK - but even they still have the right to express their views - even if it is venom! The same really has to go for Al-Queda if we are going to "practice what we preach."
I've served my country. I did so precisely because I believe in the freedoms that we have. In all honesty, I want the world to share these freedoms. If I didn't, I would have never served.
Say what you want, but we have to tread lightly when we interfere with freedom anywhere on the globe (and in cyberspace too). If we don't, we are not the people we think we are.
I live in Minneapolis and have to say that I believe that they will find a way to royally mess this up.
On one hand, I see the benefits of it - I even think it may have far reaching benefits (like raising property values). On the other hand, we are Murderopolis and the money should go to fighting crime.
In a strange way, wireless may actually help with things like crime rates. No, I am not kidding! The city needs to attract business and people back into the city. Offering this inexpensive, quality service is one way of doing just that. More jobs = less despair = less crime.
I live in the North side of Minneapolis which is where much of the crime exists. It is in parts very bad, the gangs have control. When the gas company goes on service calls into these areas, they frequently hire off-duty police officers for security! There are quite a few empty or underutilized commercial buildings and several large areas where commercial businesses were tore down and are now just empty lots. Still businesses would be crazy to relocate here. They would be robbed, their employees harrassed and their property vandalized.
If wireless comes to Minneapolis, I would hope that it would hit the North side first. It would be an incentive to bring people and business in.
But the city won't work that way. North will be last.
Meanwhile, the cable company will slowly quit providing amazing broadband service since the few remaining subscribers won't justify the cost of upgrading equipment. Here, North Minneapolis will be the first to be cut back.
I'm screwed.
Most home users have jobs. Many of these jobs require computers. These same users bring their ignorance into the workplace where people like me have to support them.
I try my best to educate them on the theory that an informed person is less likely to repeat the mistake. This is supposed to make my job easier. But they don't care, they find some slightly different way of making the same mistake over and over again.
It doesn't stop with spyware, trojans, and viruses either. I've had laptops come in so filthy that they hade to be taken apart and cleaned out before they would boot. Coffee on the keyboard is common. So are cracked LCD displays (although they aren't often repeated).
The most dangerous user isn't the uninformed one though. The most dangerous user is the one who knows just enough to be dangerous. They will give themselves Admin rights using a disk freely available on the internet and then try to change things that they shouldn't. By the time I get the computer it is a real mess and they know enough to plead ignorance. Those ones really torque me.
When I think about that sub-set, I think I'll take the ignorant user thank you very much.
Last summer we crossed in to Canada from the U.S. and back again at the Grand Portage MN crossing. Getting into Canada and back into the U.S. was a "piece of cake." The Canadian authority was a young man - maybe 21 or 22 if he was looking young for his age. He simply asked a series of questions (a couple of which were unexpected and I assume were part of the security screening process) and welcomed us to Canada and let us go.
What was interesting about that crossing was what any geek is likely to notice. As you approach the station there are cameras and lights - I'm sure that they use some recognition software and run you license plate before you ever even get close to the guard shack. Then as you pick your lane there are these posts that have a couple of convenient slots that I'm sure are also hiding cameras. The driver and the undersides of the vehicle are photographed as you slowly approach the shack.
On the return trip, the US Customs agent steps out of the shack, writes down your license plate and requests ID from you. He talks to you briefly asking a few simple questions. Didn't take more than a few seconds. But it was all manual! Clearly, at this crossing at least, the Canadians have out-spent us and out-classed us security-wise.
You are absolutly right. At least with OSS you have something to work with if your support provider goes away. This is one of the better selling points that favor OSS. On the other side of the coin, business has a right to ask how a company expects to stay in business when the product that they offer is litterally given away. The answer to that of course is that they are adding value to the free product and that added value is really what they are selling; not the product itself.
Since it is a nice spring day here, I'll comare it to getting free seeds and planting them yourself compared to going to a nursery and buying starter plants. You aren't really paying for the seed and the dirt, you are buying the added value that you get in an already started plant.
Unfortunately, in some sectors, this concept is hard for upper-level managers to grasp. When outside vendors come in with a proprietary product they spew FUD that makes it seem like OSS business models are doomed to failure. They aren't and I know that. If I made it sound that way, I am sorry.
Still, I think that in many ways enterprize level OSS support will come from larger service providers (contract firms) or from in-house talent. It is hard for smaller providers to get in the door at a large business. Because of the risk, these companies want and are willing to pay for "the name" and the assurance that comes with it.
Damn straight - Open source software can be and should be strategic. When an enterprize selects strategic software they need to know that it will be around (and supported) for the long-haul. Millions of dollars could be riding on the issue.
So, in a large sense, I agree with the author and will even say that in some cases, there is justifiable concern for an enterprize to avoid open software solutions.
Having said all that, I'm far from opposing open source software in the enterprize, quite to opposite in fact. Products like MySQL and Apache prove that there is a lot of room and potential in big business for OSS.
Anyone -- including big business needs to do a sort of risk evaluation before settling on anything that has the ability to affect the bottom line. For a public company it is more than business sense, it is the law. They need to know that the people they bring in on a project can do what they say they can do and just as importantly, that they will be around tomorrow to fix anything that is broken or needs changing.
For this reason, the enterprize level open source market will probably grow through pretty conventional methods. Either there will be in-house expertiese or they will hire consulting firms with the skill, knowlege, and expertise to deliver. Those firms will in many cases be old, established, familiar names that recognize the need and make the right moves to get in the market.
This isn't bad at all. It brings OSS legitamacy.
Yes. See my post "Something I've noticed" (next to your post).
This shit is nasty. I can't take the time necessary to kill it so I end up re-imaging the machines and "simply" reinstalling all of the original software.
My worst fear is that this stuff is worse than "just" being a part of a bot-net. I'm more concerned that they are engaged in the wholesale harvesting of identity information (like passwords, bank account information, and credit card numbers).
Clean your parents machine by wiping everything then have them deal with changing any of the sensitive information they have on their computers.
I deal with several spy-ware comprimised machines every day. They account for perhaps fifty percent of my workday each and every day.
.exe files in the root and in the temp directory that were obviously spyware. The machine would NOT let me delete the files even though I booted with a known good "Bart's PE CD" I was unable to find what was preventing me from deleting them (attributes all seemed okay).
About a month ago things started getting worse again, for a while before that things had gotten better for a while. Part of it was because I was getting better at dealing with the crap but another part of it seemed like I was actually seeing fewer comprimised machines. The metrics seemed to bear this out too.
In the past few weeks, the machines have been more grossly effected - many having multiple installs of spyware and virtually every one of them containing a trojan back-door of some sort. On top of that, either I'm getting dumber or the crap is getting much harder to remove. In some cases, the computers wouldn't let me run the more common tools that I use - they would launch and be closed immediately.
In one case in particular, I had a machine that worked fine one day and the very next the machine litterally took hours to come up to the desktop! All the while it was doing *something* with the remote user's network connection. When I brought that machine in I booted using a bootable CD ROM and discovered a number of
After reimaging the computer, I put the data back down and reinstalled the programs and the machine was flawless - so it wasn't hardware. Unfortunately, time is money and I can not afford to take all the time in the world to do forensics.
What I guess I am trying to convey here is that in my opinion, there has been in the very recent past a fundimental change in the way this stuff is working. I suspect that these efforts are more than just an effort to make the spyware harder to removed. I suspect that there is now more happening in the background of these machines. I'm sure many of them are "bot-net" machines but even worse, I think some of the machines that I've seen are very busy "harvesting" data from the owner's machines!
If my hunch is correct, I'm willing to bet the in the very near future, we will see identity theft on a scale we had never imagined before. Frankly, I'm quite concerned about that and am suggesting that people who have been victims of this "nasty spyware" take the time to change all of the passwords and credit card numbers while their computer is still "fresh" or better yet, change the information in person at their bank or over the phone.
Does anyone else see the same things happening?
Will this mod void the warranty?
(it's funny, laugh)
The internet does not easily recognize national boundaries. If someone wants something that they can't legally get in their country, they'll just go to a domain hosted in a country where they can get it.
To some degree, this is bad. It means that things like kiddie porn get made available. It also means that there are loopholes around copyrights and so on.
But, on another level, the internet is the bastion of freedom! It allows people in places where opinions are regulated to see that there are people in other places who can actually think and express themselves. Totalitarianisim can't really last for long because of this. Although many of us, myself included, think that kiddie porn is an inimaginable crime, I think that the benefits of a free internet outweigh the drawbacks.
The internet is today a sort of wild-West environment. Not much regulation and lots of hiding places for bad guys. I'm sure that will change with time, just like the wild-West did.
It will probably take some sort of I-Gov to bring the 'net into line with laws and regulations. I don't know if I am ready for that yet (or should I say the net is ready for that). This will be the result of a maturing process that will take time.
Working from home interferes with work-life balance. There is nothing about my job that would keep me from working out of the house but I do believe that I would greatly miss the social interaction that I have at work. I am also afraid that is I was a work-at-home person it would be too easy for my family to assume it would be okat for me to do this and that around the house. In my book that would not be okay!
Finally, there would be no easy to enforce "quitting time" - I'd find myself working much too late into the evening.
No, If you want me to work from home, I better get a good raise!
I am absolutly no expert in DNA or medicine - I probably know less about this subject than most lay people even.
When DNA is damaged and the cell replicates, I assume that the damaged DNA is carried into the new cell (or at least could be). Is that correct?
Does this always cause cancer? I assume that it does not. Do other healthy cells always attack and kill the cell with damaged DNA? Again, I assume not (but that it can happen that way).
So let this reproduction happen a few generations and let the body do it's thing and you have damaged DNA working its way into a person here, there and everywhere.
On occasion, the damaged DNA manages to replicate itself in to another human being the old fashioned way. If the DNA is strong enough, then it stands a chance of becomming a new line, it will have resulted in a kind of evolution. Right? I assume that the odds of this are really quite remote, that it would take a pretty potent bit of DNA to pull this off and to acutally make a change that would be locked into a percentage of the human race. But could it happen?
The one thing we humans seem to keep underestimating is nature's ability to adapt, to deal with adversity and change to meet it head on. If we use cel phones, maybe the genetic changes they cause will be adapted to and "harden" us against that damage?
I am not a gun owner and have no stake in the gun control issue other than as I suppose an interested observer. But I take exception that a gun, even an AK-47 is only designed to kill people!
.308 - yet these two rifles are commonly used as big game hunting rifles.
An AK-47 is only one model of thousands. It is to a degree a specialized version of a gun and it's designers probably considered lethiality when they designed it. But even an AK-47 can be used for sporting purposes as a rifle to shoot targets. It can be used to kill "varments" and can probably be used to hunt some game in some states. In short, it has uses that do not involve killing people!
The 30-06 (thirty ought six) was originally designed as an army rifle, so was the
Pistols seem to be more designed to be killers. They can easily be concieled and can be better used in close quarters. Yet I've found them fun to shoot at targets, I've never used one in anger and while I don't own one, I can see why some people want them in their homes for self defense.
As a tool, it is how you use it that matters. It is not always morally or legally wrong to take a life. Self defense is probably the best example of this, war is possibly another example (although I'd quibble about that in certain instances). Police officers carry side-arms knowing that they may some day be called on to use them, for self defense or to save another person's life. It is the person who makes the judgment call to use the tool, not the weapon.
The Napster1 decision questioned the business model - and it was found defective. The current issue is not attacking just the business model but the actual protocol. When you think of the scope of what P2P involves, it goes beyond simple file sharing. It is the very bedrock of how computers talk to one another. In some respects, attacking the protocol is a little bit like trying to outlaw a language! At the very base level P2P of some sort is required any time two computers talk to each other. Web pages, IM, FTP, and email all use peer-protocols to get the job done.
One of my biggest concerns is that a court won't quite grasp this detail or perhaps a luddite judge will understand it and decide to derail the net because of his personal fears. Stuff like this happens and it takes years to fix.
Still all in all, this issue is a lawsuit filed by a business asking the court to protec their business. That part is understandable. But rather than finding and pursuing individual entities and proving their cause, which is their responsibility they are trying a short-cut. They want to outlaw the technology that makes so many good things. This makes them luddites, afraid of progress and change. They need to adjust to changes or be left in the dust. They don't need the courts to do this, they need a good, solid business plan.
P2P is a tool. It can be used for good or bad, it can be used for serious work or entertainment. But at the end of the day, P2P is a tool, just like a screwdriver, hammer, knife, or gun. The hands that you put tools in decide how the tool is going to be used. There is nothing enharently evil about a gun, it is how it gets used that makes the difference.
I don't really want gang-bangers to have guns, but I think that having a police officer with a gun is usually a good thing.
P2P should not be illegal, the act of piracy is already illegal. We do not need new laws, or even need the old laws "fleshed out" - they are perfectly adequate and can address the issue of piracy.