If you're really paranoid about identity theft, then go for one of the credit monitoring services run by a credit bureau. The one I've found most useful is truecredit.com, which is run by TransUnion (which, by the way, is by far the easiest credit bureau to deal with in my opinion). It costs a little more than most others ($14.95 per month) but it allows you to update your credit report from all three bureaus as often as you want (daily if you really want to) and offers online dispute filing for all three as well. It works well too, I filed a dispute to Experian through my truecredit.com account and it was resolved within a week.
By the way, I don't work for them or have any connection with any of the credit bureaus other than having to depend on them if I want to get a loan for anything, but I've tried a few credit monitoring services, and that one is by far the best. The only drawback is they often (like every time you log in) try to give you an ad for some "affiliate service" but Adblock Plus has blocked every single one so far, so it just means an extra click on a "continue" button.
Maybe everybody gets their own private PGP key at birth? Sure, and then someone gets access to your private key and then you're boned for life.
Same problem with exclusive use of biometrics: If someone manages to forge your biometric signature, you're completely hosed because you can't change it.
The state's motive to look hard is that the emergency services are taxpayer funded and the taxpayers want to know that if they get in trouble, the emergency services will do their best to help them. If the state is going to be checking your credit before they decide to rescue you, then emergency services are useless. You would be faced with the choice of either not getting rescued or being faced with a bill that for most people would ruin them financially.
Yes, it makes perfect sense to charge non-residents for things like this in a state where the vast majority of the economy is based on tourism. I'd certainly be more likely to take a vacation somewhere if I knew I'd get a huge bill from the government if I got lost.
They could at least give some sort of money back guarantee, or work on contingency like lawyers do.
"Okay, here's the deal. We'll go look for your husband, and you don't have to pay us anything unless we find him. But if do find him, we get one third of his estate."
As far as she knows, they could have just flown some helicopters aimlessly around the desert for a couple of weeks and billed her for it. If the guy wasn't a billionaire, I doubt the idea of charging for the search would have ever entered their greedy little minds.
He presupposes a lot of things that aren't necessarily true, or are pretty improbable.
For example, the whole article (what I read of it before my eyes glazed over and I passed out) seems to revolve around this whole idea of the existence of a "Great Filter" event that makes technologically advanced species highly unlikely. He bases this on the statistical probabilities of such a species existing but not contacting us, but offers no really convincing arguments that such a filter event must exist.
However, I would argue that with the number of planets out there (many millions probably, since we've managed to find some around lots of stars, and we can't even detect the Earth-sized ones yet) and the vast distances involved, the chances of some interstellar-traveling species coming upon our particular little planet is pretty slim, no matter what sci-fi would have you believe. If the civilization lives, say, 200 million light years away, it could have been making a beeline for us since the beginning of mankind and still not be anywhere near reaching us.
Much of our fantasizing about extraterrestrial life has assumed that there is some way to travel faster than light and we just haven't discovered it yet. However, what if there really isn't? What if physics simply won't allow faster than light travel? In that case, unless the advanced civilization was extraordinarily close to us, it's virtually impossible for them to have encountered us by now, even if they had been out landing on other planets for thousands or millions of years.
My theory (hypothesis really, since it's not particularly testable) is that it's impossible to know or even meaningfully speculate on the existence of extraterrestrial life given the limits of our current knowledge of the Universe. We are a flea on an elephant's back trying to understand the entirety of the elephant using nothing but a magnifying glass. It's probably impossible to really get the whole picture, and even if it isn't it will take a really long time.
Is working at Burger King as a teenager a launchpad or a dead end? I guess it depends on your attitude, your ambition, and your ability to learn from experiences.
Any work dealing with customers will prepare you well for working in any kind of environment where you have to deal with people that are sometimes unreasonable or like to treat others like garbage. In other words, it prepares you to deal with real life. Help desk has the added bonus of being somewhat related to tech stuff, so if you combine it with some learning on your own time, maybe you can end up in a more technical role.
Most companies will tend to recruit from within, so if they see that you're highly technically competent and are good at dealing with people, you're likely to get moved up out of help desk if you make it known that your ultimate goal is, say, system administration (and God help you if it is). If you sit around talking shit about the idiot customers all day when you're not on the phone, you're probably not going anywhere except possibly the unemployment line.
In short, any job will give you what you're willing to get from it. Whether any particular job is a dead end or a door leading to bigger and better things is entirely up to the person doing the job.
On a personal note, I was in help desk for 6 months before being promoted to Unix admin. I got there because I saw a very clear need for improvement in the servers at the company (their Windows mail server was crashing constantly) and I presented a plan to improve things with a Unix-based design and showed I had the technical ability to pull it off. So, they gave me the opportunity, I got the job done, and they promoted me. If you have the drive, any position can be a springboard.
Developer A: I think we should implement feature X Developer B: I think we should implement feature Y Manager: I agree with Developer B, let's do that Developer A: Oh come on, that's a load of crap. And your mother is a whore. Manager: Security, please escort Developer A out of the building and rough him up a little in the parking lot before you throw him on the street. Developer A: Crap.
People don't tend to engage in flamewars when the result of which is very likely to be the end of a paying gig.
The, ahem, frank exchange of views is far more likely when the worst consequence would be to lose SVN access to a project you work on for free. Oh, and getting an article posted on Slashdot about what a stubborn jackass you are. Either way, you'll probably still make that next mortgage payment.
The elephant's proper name is not "Elephant". In contrast, the Internet's proper name is "The Internet". It is a proper noun, and most style guides agree that it should properly be capitalized.
Really, my original argument is not correct, since there really is only one Internet, as the term "internet" is not really used anymore to denote a collection of networks other than the Internet that we all know and love. However, the fact remains that the word should properly be capitalized.
An "internet" is a collection of networks. The "Internet" is the particular collection of networks we all surf porn and read Slashdot on, hence the capitalization. Yes, I know the battle is pretty much lost on this one, but what's the point of Slashdot if not pointless pedantry?
First, he didn't invent the Internet (capital 'i' please), he is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. Repeat after me: The World Wide Web is NOT the Internet.
Also, I think the web has clearly passed the infant stage and is deeply entrenched in the awkward adolescent phase: It has been doing a lot of experimenting lately with new looks and new technologies. Sure, it thinks it looks really cool and edgy with all of its new Web 2.0 gear (probably bought it from Hot Topic) and it probably feels real good smoking all that XML, but in the end it just ends up being slower, less reliable, and just looks foolish most of the time.
If this guy was any kind of good person at all, I'm sure he would have wanted to share his porn collection with the world after he was gone. Sure, maybe you shouldn't tell anyone where it came from if it's got porn featuring midgets, grannies, horses, or especially all three at once, but you should still post it on Slashdot^W^W^W^Wgive it to his close friends.
Seriously though, everyone goes through this sort of thing. Since you have responsibilities, you basically just have to decide if the money you make in this field is worth the crap you have to deal with. Keep in mind that a lot of the frustration you're feeling is probably directly related to the fact that you're encumbered with responsibilities, and you aren't free to move around like you were when you were single and childless, so you would likely feel trapped in your job no matter what you were doing at this stage in your life.
If you decide it isn't, you have to come up with a plan that will allow you to pursue something else without making your family live in a box. You may decide to go to school part time at night and work during the day. This means you see less of the family in the short term and it means you have to keep dealing with the crap for a few more years, but it's sacrificing now for a better tomorrow. I've done it, and it kind of sucks, but if you're the sole or major breadwinner in the family, it's probably either that or just deal with the IT crap until the kids graduate from college.
Forcing non-refundable fees would kill the profit margins because these guys would then have to pay for domains that aren't generating any revenue for them. As it is now, they can register thousands of domains essentially for free and get rid of the ones that don't make any money.
I think it's a good plan, but I think the 20 cents is too low. There should be a 1 or even 5 or 10 dollar fee that's non-refundable, and the total cost of a domain should be higher than it is. That would help eliminate domain tasting as well as eliminate domain squatting, wherein legitimate users have to pay inflated prices for domains anyway because squatters are holding them hostage.
The game loaded faster than most Java apps do for me, but once it loaded the controls were laggy and the video was pretty choppy. Most of the time for me, the JVM takes a while to load but at least the app runs fairly smoothly once it does. I'd rather have that then a shorter load time on a laggy application.
No no, they don't have the funds to do global surveillance. They use the drones to fire missiles at competing museums. It's how the Smithsonian has maintained its dominant position in the museum wars for so long: unchecked aggression.
I don't know what you're talking about, there aren't any fiscal conservatives in the halls of power anymore. All that are left these days are borrow-and-spend politicians (Republicans have proven to be experts at this, but the Dems aren't exactly falling all over themselves trying to raise taxes or cut spending either).
But yah, no one in Washington is even remotely interested in spending money putting much of anything into space, so any superiority we may have left in regards to space travel is pretty much doomed.
Oh come on, the only people on the ARPAnet back in 1978 were the nerdiest of the nerds. What were they going to do, throw their pocket protectors at the guy?
For reference, the people complaining about the spam on that page are her, him, and also this guy
Yes, but he still has the same issue with it that countless Usenet posters have had about spam for years: stop making me page through 10 pages of headers just to read your garbage.
It's interesting to note that he was in favor of advertising (dating sites especially!) so long as he didn't have to page through a bunch of headers to read the ad.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're really paranoid about identity theft, then go for one of the credit monitoring services run by a credit bureau. The one I've found most useful is truecredit.com, which is run by TransUnion (which, by the way, is by far the easiest credit bureau to deal with in my opinion). It costs a little more than most others ($14.95 per month) but it allows you to update your credit report from all three bureaus as often as you want (daily if you really want to) and offers online dispute filing for all three as well. It works well too, I filed a dispute to Experian through my truecredit.com account and it was resolved within a week.
By the way, I don't work for them or have any connection with any of the credit bureaus other than having to depend on them if I want to get a loan for anything, but I've tried a few credit monitoring services, and that one is by far the best. The only drawback is they often (like every time you log in) try to give you an ad for some "affiliate service" but Adblock Plus has blocked every single one so far, so it just means an extra click on a "continue" button.
Same problem with exclusive use of biometrics: If someone manages to forge your biometric signature, you're completely hosed because you can't change it.
Don't FOIA regulations already allow for redacting of documents to eliminate classified information prior to release?
I haven't read FOIA in its entirety or anything, but it seems to me it would allow for redacting to comply with HIPAA as well.
The state's motive to look hard is that the emergency services are taxpayer funded and the taxpayers want to know that if they get in trouble, the emergency services will do their best to help them. If the state is going to be checking your credit before they decide to rescue you, then emergency services are useless. You would be faced with the choice of either not getting rescued or being faced with a bill that for most people would ruin them financially.
Yes, it makes perfect sense to charge non-residents for things like this in a state where the vast majority of the economy is based on tourism. I'd certainly be more likely to take a vacation somewhere if I knew I'd get a huge bill from the government if I got lost.
They could at least give some sort of money back guarantee, or work on contingency like lawyers do.
"Okay, here's the deal. We'll go look for your husband, and you don't have to pay us anything unless we find him. But if do find him, we get one third of his estate."
As far as she knows, they could have just flown some helicopters aimlessly around the desert for a couple of weeks and billed her for it. If the guy wasn't a billionaire, I doubt the idea of charging for the search would have ever entered their greedy little minds.
He presupposes a lot of things that aren't necessarily true, or are pretty improbable.
For example, the whole article (what I read of it before my eyes glazed over and I passed out) seems to revolve around this whole idea of the existence of a "Great Filter" event that makes technologically advanced species highly unlikely. He bases this on the statistical probabilities of such a species existing but not contacting us, but offers no really convincing arguments that such a filter event must exist.
However, I would argue that with the number of planets out there (many millions probably, since we've managed to find some around lots of stars, and we can't even detect the Earth-sized ones yet) and the vast distances involved, the chances of some interstellar-traveling species coming upon our particular little planet is pretty slim, no matter what sci-fi would have you believe. If the civilization lives, say, 200 million light years away, it could have been making a beeline for us since the beginning of mankind and still not be anywhere near reaching us.
Much of our fantasizing about extraterrestrial life has assumed that there is some way to travel faster than light and we just haven't discovered it yet. However, what if there really isn't? What if physics simply won't allow faster than light travel? In that case, unless the advanced civilization was extraordinarily close to us, it's virtually impossible for them to have encountered us by now, even if they had been out landing on other planets for thousands or millions of years.
My theory (hypothesis really, since it's not particularly testable) is that it's impossible to know or even meaningfully speculate on the existence of extraterrestrial life given the limits of our current knowledge of the Universe. We are a flea on an elephant's back trying to understand the entirety of the elephant using nothing but a magnifying glass. It's probably impossible to really get the whole picture, and even if it isn't it will take a really long time.
Is working at Burger King as a teenager a launchpad or a dead end? I guess it depends on your attitude, your ambition, and your ability to learn from experiences.
Any work dealing with customers will prepare you well for working in any kind of environment where you have to deal with people that are sometimes unreasonable or like to treat others like garbage. In other words, it prepares you to deal with real life. Help desk has the added bonus of being somewhat related to tech stuff, so if you combine it with some learning on your own time, maybe you can end up in a more technical role.
Most companies will tend to recruit from within, so if they see that you're highly technically competent and are good at dealing with people, you're likely to get moved up out of help desk if you make it known that your ultimate goal is, say, system administration (and God help you if it is). If you sit around talking shit about the idiot customers all day when you're not on the phone, you're probably not going anywhere except possibly the unemployment line.
In short, any job will give you what you're willing to get from it. Whether any particular job is a dead end or a door leading to bigger and better things is entirely up to the person doing the job.
On a personal note, I was in help desk for 6 months before being promoted to Unix admin. I got there because I saw a very clear need for improvement in the servers at the company (their Windows mail server was crashing constantly) and I presented a plan to improve things with a Unix-based design and showed I had the technical ability to pull it off. So, they gave me the opportunity, I got the job done, and they promoted me. If you have the drive, any position can be a springboard.
What flamewars? Like this?
Developer A: I think we should implement feature X
Developer B: I think we should implement feature Y
Manager: I agree with Developer B, let's do that
Developer A: Oh come on, that's a load of crap. And your mother is a whore.
Manager: Security, please escort Developer A out of the building and rough him up a little in the parking lot before you throw him on the street.
Developer A: Crap.
People don't tend to engage in flamewars when the result of which is very likely to be the end of a paying gig.
The, ahem, frank exchange of views is far more likely when the worst consequence would be to lose SVN access to a project you work on for free. Oh, and getting an article posted on Slashdot about what a stubborn jackass you are. Either way, you'll probably still make that next mortgage payment.
The elephant's proper name is not "Elephant". In contrast, the Internet's proper name is "The Internet". It is a proper noun, and most style guides agree that it should properly be capitalized.
Really, my original argument is not correct, since there really is only one Internet, as the term "internet" is not really used anymore to denote a collection of networks other than the Internet that we all know and love. However, the fact remains that the word should properly be capitalized.
An "internet" is a collection of networks. The "Internet" is the particular collection of networks we all surf porn and read Slashdot on, hence the capitalization. Yes, I know the battle is pretty much lost on this one, but what's the point of Slashdot if not pointless pedantry?
First, he didn't invent the Internet (capital 'i' please), he is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. Repeat after me: The World Wide Web is NOT the Internet.
Also, I think the web has clearly passed the infant stage and is deeply entrenched in the awkward adolescent phase: It has been doing a lot of experimenting lately with new looks and new technologies. Sure, it thinks it looks really cool and edgy with all of its new Web 2.0 gear (probably bought it from Hot Topic) and it probably feels real good smoking all that XML, but in the end it just ends up being slower, less reliable, and just looks foolish most of the time.
That would be a disaster. I hear sending out Nigerian scam letters is the administration's new plan to cut the deficit.
If this guy was any kind of good person at all, I'm sure he would have wanted to share his porn collection with the world after he was gone. Sure, maybe you shouldn't tell anyone where it came from if it's got porn featuring midgets, grannies, horses, or especially all three at once, but you should still post it on Slashdot^W^W^W^Wgive it to his close friends.
Get a Porsche and a mistress.
Seriously though, everyone goes through this sort of thing. Since you have responsibilities, you basically just have to decide if the money you make in this field is worth the crap you have to deal with. Keep in mind that a lot of the frustration you're feeling is probably directly related to the fact that you're encumbered with responsibilities, and you aren't free to move around like you were when you were single and childless, so you would likely feel trapped in your job no matter what you were doing at this stage in your life.
If you decide it isn't, you have to come up with a plan that will allow you to pursue something else without making your family live in a box. You may decide to go to school part time at night and work during the day. This means you see less of the family in the short term and it means you have to keep dealing with the crap for a few more years, but it's sacrificing now for a better tomorrow. I've done it, and it kind of sucks, but if you're the sole or major breadwinner in the family, it's probably either that or just deal with the IT crap until the kids graduate from college.
Forcing non-refundable fees would kill the profit margins because these guys would then have to pay for domains that aren't generating any revenue for them. As it is now, they can register thousands of domains essentially for free and get rid of the ones that don't make any money.
I think it's a good plan, but I think the 20 cents is too low. There should be a 1 or even 5 or 10 dollar fee that's non-refundable, and the total cost of a domain should be higher than it is. That would help eliminate domain tasting as well as eliminate domain squatting, wherein legitimate users have to pay inflated prices for domains anyway because squatters are holding them hostage.
You're never going to get any chicks with that sense of humor.
The game loaded faster than most Java apps do for me, but once it loaded the controls were laggy and the video was pretty choppy. Most of the time for me, the JVM takes a while to load but at least the app runs fairly smoothly once it does. I'd rather have that then a shorter load time on a laggy application.
No no, they don't have the funds to do global surveillance. They use the drones to fire missiles at competing museums. It's how the Smithsonian has maintained its dominant position in the museum wars for so long: unchecked aggression.
Finally, a way to combine the feature-rich capabilities of Javascript with the speed of Java!
Are you trying to say we should try launching 10 space shuttles at once?
I don't know what you're talking about, there aren't any fiscal conservatives in the halls of power anymore. All that are left these days are borrow-and-spend politicians (Republicans have proven to be experts at this, but the Dems aren't exactly falling all over themselves trying to raise taxes or cut spending either).
But yah, no one in Washington is even remotely interested in spending money putting much of anything into space, so any superiority we may have left in regards to space travel is pretty much doomed.
Oh come on, the only people on the ARPAnet back in 1978 were the nerdiest of the nerds. What were they going to do, throw their pocket protectors at the guy?
For reference, the people complaining about the spam on that page are her, him, and also this guy
I'm sure the DEC guy was quaking in his boots.
Yes, but he still has the same issue with it that countless Usenet posters have had about spam for years: stop making me page through 10 pages of headers just to read your garbage.
It's interesting to note that he was in favor of advertising (dating sites especially!) so long as he didn't have to page through a bunch of headers to read the ad.
I'm sure they could find a way to finagle this so the interstate commerce clause applies, that's how they do most everything else.