Have you tried noise cancelling headphones? I had a pair of Sony headphones that were supposed to do this, and tried the $300 Bose, and they both sucked at "cancelling" noise. They both rendered things a little quieter, and conversations tinny but still very audible. In short, they're worthless if you're trying to get a distraction-free environment. I bought the cheapest Shure in-ear buds and fell in love with them to the point that I bought the top of the line. Pro-tip: the top of the line are 5x more expensive, but IMO aren't really 5x better. You can definitely tell the difference, but if you're not a crazy audiophile, which I'm not, mid-range is probably just fine. With these in and music even low, you can't hear people talking to you, let alone in the next cube or across the room.
Not trying to be a Shure commercial. Anything that puts a very good speaker next to your eardrum and a very good ear plug between your music and the outside world is probably going to work great. My personal experience is just with the Shure line. When they break or wear out, I'm getting the 535s.
Eh, it's neutral. It's a good thing if you're Facebook. People really thought FB was worth $38/share, so FB raked in a ton of cash. It's a long overdue wake up call for people who naively assume all IPOs go up, or should go up. Nope. You're exactly right that a smart company will set their price to what the market thinks they're worth. If they do that, prices should be flat until something happens to change the market's perception of the company's value.
Eh, the counter argument is that if cities (aka taxpayers) are forking over money for things like this, they're going to be forced to tell their police forces to knock it off.
Actually, I do agree. If a police officer takes your camera from you and doesn't return it, they should be prosecuted for theft. If they take it and destroy it, that's destruction of property. We have a bizarre way of dealing with authority in this country. Peons who do bad things get hammered for it sometimes. Law enforcement often gets to break the law with impunity. Witness the recent story where a bunch of police beat a homeless man to death. They ARE being prosecuted, which is good. What's sad is that it's newsworthy. Of COURSE they should be prosecuted. The weight with which the law falls on you should be proportional to your power to abuse the law.
When you put it that way, it's less impressive. I used to have (ok, have access to) a 300 ton press that weighed less than 5 tons. This thing is only capable of putting out ~6.5x it's own weight? Hrmph.
On another note, we don't remotely lack the ability to make another one. I expect they're just rather expensive, and we don't need two. If this one ever goes out of service and we really need one, we WILL make another one.
What kind of sad, boring person would you have to be to sit in front of a computer, just passively using the electricity from the wall outlet rather than generating your own?
I wouldn't do free work in my car. I might work on things I care about. Right now, I'd be reading a novel I'm into. Other days, I might grab an extra 30 minute nap on the way to work. If I can trade 30 minutes doing a mundane, boring activity for a choice to do something else, I'm going to do it.
Right now, you're supposed to maintain sufficient distance from the cars around you that if something happens to them, you have time to react. Cars should never be moving at 180 KPH within centimeters of each other for exactly the reason you state. If the car in front has a mechanical failure and starts decelerating rapidly, the cars around need time to react whether they're driven by people or computers.
I think this will be mostly the end of private cars for the majority of us.
Eh, I'm not so sure. People are used to their cars being their personal space. I have a set of folding chairs in my trunk all the time because I need them a few times a week. I don't want to lug them out to the taxi every time I'm going to need them. I have a couple of books. I have the debris of everyday life, which I don't necessarily -need-, but what I don't want is to get into a taxi and have to live with the debris of YOUR everyday life. Your discarded coffee cups, newspapers, bits of food you were eating, the spot where your baby spit up on the seat, etc.
For some people, not owning your car will be a great option, just like it is now. For others, it won't be.
I'm going to patent the method and process of applying this technique through haberdashery to prevent control or surveillance of private contemplations.
I just saw this and wanted to say thanks for the encouragement. There's a place in the area that's supposed to be great, but it's a little farther from home than I'd like. I'm actually avoiding trying it out in part because I'm pretty sure I'll love it and don't really have time to take on a new hobby right now. =]
So, it's actually a bad thing because consumers have fewer options?
I don't have a problem with companies offering me the use of their money for a period of time and charging me something for it. If the charge is unreasonable, I decline. Why exactly do we need laws to force everyone to decline an offer that some might find acceptable?
Actually, there's a guy I went to elementary school with that I reconnected with on Facebook. Our conversation only exists there. It's kind of valuable to me because we stopped being friends when I did something incredibly thoughtless because, as a 9-year-old, I just didn't know any better. We became friends of a sort again, talked about life and how it's gone, and then he died a few months later.
So, valuable? Well, I can't sell it for money, but yeah, something of value would be lost.
No, really. Stop uploading everything to a third-party company so they can data-mine it and make it hard for you to get any of it back if their business plan fails.
What do you mean, "get it back"? That reminds me of the joke where $GROUP_WE_BASH_TODAY faxes something, and asks to have it faxed back because they still need it. If you upload things, you still have them. If you upload and delete them, well, stop that. People who think that Facebook is Facebook AND their personal backup service should also stop that. It isn't.
And I'm sorry, but sites like Facebook make it trivial to interact with a large-ish set of people who are at least somewhat interesting to me. It removes the tremendous frictional costs of going around and subscribing to a couple hundred blogs, or maintaining giant email lists of people who maybe I'm not best friends with, but I'd like to keep in touch with.
*Sigh* And finally, yes, all this stuff is fluff, but that doesn't mean it's fluff without value. I watched Avengers this weekend. My life would not have been diminished one bit if I'd skipped it, but I and those I took with me found it well worth the ~$60 I spent on the movie. The same is true of Facebook. I wouldn't die if I didn't hear about my old classmate's adventures in mommy-hood, but I some kind of minor joy from it, and even the occasional smile.
You see, all of us say at lot of nothing really all the time. It's all fluff, but it's also the fabric of who we are. We are not computers to distill down everything we do to the minimal necessary interaction.
Seriously, call them and tell them to knock this off or they're never seeing a dime from you. I just checked the universities I've attended. Not a word on their web sites that they do this.
The difference is your HS claimed you owed THEM money. In this case, the universities withholding the transcripts aren't owed anything. They got their money before you were allowed to attend classes. They are holding transcripts hostage over someone else's loans not being paid.
But you build missile defense because missiles are hard to shoot down since they go really, really fast. Unlike bombers and helicopters which are comparatively easy to shoot down.
My question is that, how dare someone at a top position tell such a big lie?
Seriously. It's appalling. He should be fired. Every company I've worked for has had a policy that falsifying your employment application information is grounds for termination. That should be even more so for high ranking positions. Who can do more harm to you by lying, the guy in the mail room, or the guy who runs the company?
Aren't people supposed to provide a copy of their degrees when they get a job in USA?
You mean like a copy of your diploma or something? No. I've never been asked to, anyway. I've never been asked to submit anything I'd call proof, but I assume companies can check on it. Actually, if I were the company doing the vetting, I don't want the employee providing the evidence. I'd just want you to sign a form that lets me request proof from your university directly. You might fake something up. They probably won't, unless you know someone in the academic records office.
Is it ethical to provide an incentive to other human beings to engage in an activity that might lead to serious mental problems so you can get a few hours enjoyment?
I'd say yes, it's fine, as long as the participants understand the risk and feel like they're being fairly compensated for it. I think MMA, for example, looks awesomely fun. Doing it professionally carries a chance of serious harm coming to you. Is it worth it? Eh, not for me. I get paid for my brain working well. Letting someone bash it around an octagon is probably unwise. That, and I'm out of shape and...not 20. But am I going to impose MY value judgement on that on everyone? Nope.
I cut my teeth on articles about "hacking". I've used "hacking" tools going back to the one that got Dan Farmer fired, and before. My interest in security was sparked by downloading an exploit for the Solaris eject command. Download, compile, omg! Root prompt!
The catch? I did all those things on boxes I was paid to secure. I've never broken into anyone's systems but my own, and I have legitimate rights to do that. Information is information. It's not "good" or "bad". I have a bookshelf full of books, mostly bought in your stores, that could teach you how to "hack" or how to secure systems and networks. Guess what I've been paid to do for going on 20 years?
It kind of sucks to need to talk with someone who is the sole holder of some technical data to find out they had announced their retirement the week before and are now gone.
This is something many companies do badly, and one reason they may feel they have too many people on the payroll. They have no depth. They're a collection of single points of failure where every single one of them is guaranteed to fail, many in the next decade or so.
If your company has experienced employees who are the only holders of technical (or other) knowledge that is worth keeping, the time to worry about it is before they leave. It's before they get near retirement age. It's before your formerly gruntled employees become dis-. Really, the time to preserve it is not too long after it's become valuable.
If you leave your house unlocked, no, that doesn't allow me to go in and take whatever I want, because the DOOR IS CLOSED. Now, if you opened your door, and put a sign on the porch saying "Hey, I have stuff in here", then yes, it is your fault.
No, it's not OK even then. Only if I put up a sign saying "Hey, I have stuff in here AND YOU CAN HAVE IT."
I would argue that's exactly what you're doing if you broadcast unencrypted WiFi across your neighborhood. You cannot scream across the EM spectrum at the top of your lungs and demand the world not listen. People are not going into the public's house to get their wifi traffic. Ignorant members of the public are blasting it across an area greater than a football field with their house in the center.
Under American Common Law, your likeness - as well as your signature - is your private property. People can no more snap you without your consent without being liable for violating your property rights than they can take an image of your signature and print it onto whatever they like.
Cite, please. It's my understanding that if you're in public, people absolutely can take your picture and do not need your consent. If you're correct, I'd like an explanation how paparazzi aren't all in jail.
American Common Law remains in effect, but has been forgotten amid a heap of baseless legislation that lacks the authority to actually be law.
Perhaps we're getting to the core of the issue. You're arguing from a base where law isn't actually law. I can't follow you there.
And they now have lasers that can be pointed at windows and pick up conversations based on how the glass vibrates,
Yes, and infrared cameras that see through your walls. I suppose that's what muddies the waters. It comes down to the "reasonable person" test. IIRC, it's been decided (in court) that reasonable people do get protection from being spied on via IR cameras. I think it's reasonable to assume there's not a laser microphone pointed at your windows, too. I just don't feel that unencrypted wifi streaming out of your house deserves the same protection when it's trivial to encrypt it. I don't think we should have to IR shield our houses. I don't think we should have noise generators on our windows. I do think we should encrypt our wifi.
I understand your point. And if the data on those papers requires certain software to read and decode, that is a form of encryption
No, it's a form of encoding. If you're going to claim that as encryption, I can as reasonably claim that this is a private conversation between me and you, and that anyone else reading it has violated my rights because I encrypted it in ASCII or Unicode, or whatever prior to uploading it. It's not MY fault everyone else's computer is capable of decrypting it.
...packet sniffing, as deliberate as it usually has to be, is just as easy to do and probably as someone glancing in your window. And that is wrong.
How easy it is to do depends very much on who you are. My problem with things like this is it actually encourages bad security. If we go around telling people that it's ok to just demand the world turn around when they do the digital equivalent of walking down the street naked, are they really better off than if we tell them "Hey, there's this check box you can set on your router that makes it all but impossible for people to snoop on you. If you don't check it, ANYBODY who bothers to try will see everything you do."?
It's all well and good to have laws about this stuff. We COULD enact a law making sniffing unencrypted WiFi illegal. IMO, it's far far better to just encrypt the damn thing and be done with it than hope when someone does capture your traffic, that you'll find out. Realistically, unless it's a high profile case like this, you'll never know.
Consider what you're saying. It's like condoning someone who breaks and enters into peoples' houses and goes reading through their papers and personal effects, and saying the problem is that they didn't have a secure enough vault in their home.
No, that's not remotely what I'm saying, and your Matthew Shepard comparison is wildly off base.
If you have unencrypted WiFi, you are broadcasting, quite literally, whatever you're doing. All I'm saying is if you're out in public, people can take your picture. You might not like it, but they can. If you yell at your wife on the front porch or in the house if you're loud enough, the neighbors can hear you. I'm not saying you need to encrypt everything, or that you need a vault. I'm saying don't broadcast to the world if you don't want the world to hear you.
I'm very much pro-privacy, but if you want your privacy (as I do), you can't put the burden on the entire rest of the world to preserve it for you. We railed against the DMCA because it criminalized circumventing even useless protection measures, but somehow when they're OUR useless protection measures, it's different? No, it's not. What I'm saying is that if you don't want your papers and personal effects gone through, don't leave them lying in the street for people to pick up and read.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried noise cancelling headphones? I had a pair of Sony headphones that were supposed to do this, and tried the $300 Bose, and they both sucked at "cancelling" noise. They both rendered things a little quieter, and conversations tinny but still very audible. In short, they're worthless if you're trying to get a distraction-free environment. I bought the cheapest Shure in-ear buds and fell in love with them to the point that I bought the top of the line. Pro-tip: the top of the line are 5x more expensive, but IMO aren't really 5x better. You can definitely tell the difference, but if you're not a crazy audiophile, which I'm not, mid-range is probably just fine. With these in and music even low, you can't hear people talking to you, let alone in the next cube or across the room.
Not trying to be a Shure commercial. Anything that puts a very good speaker next to your eardrum and a very good ear plug between your music and the outside world is probably going to work great. My personal experience is just with the Shure line. When they break or wear out, I'm getting the 535s.
Wow. Well, I hope someone treats me so unfairly as to name me VP of a large company. I promise not to crack under the strain.
Eh, it's neutral. It's a good thing if you're Facebook. People really thought FB was worth $38/share, so FB raked in a ton of cash. It's a long overdue wake up call for people who naively assume all IPOs go up, or should go up. Nope. You're exactly right that a smart company will set their price to what the market thinks they're worth. If they do that, prices should be flat until something happens to change the market's perception of the company's value.
In short, well done Zuck.
Eh, the counter argument is that if cities (aka taxpayers) are forking over money for things like this, they're going to be forced to tell their police forces to knock it off.
Actually, I do agree. If a police officer takes your camera from you and doesn't return it, they should be prosecuted for theft. If they take it and destroy it, that's destruction of property. We have a bizarre way of dealing with authority in this country. Peons who do bad things get hammered for it sometimes. Law enforcement often gets to break the law with impunity. Witness the recent story where a bunch of police beat a homeless man to death. They ARE being prosecuted, which is good. What's sad is that it's newsworthy. Of COURSE they should be prosecuted. The weight with which the law falls on you should be proportional to your power to abuse the law.
When you put it that way, it's less impressive. I used to have (ok, have access to) a 300 ton press that weighed less than 5 tons. This thing is only capable of putting out ~6.5x it's own weight? Hrmph.
On another note, we don't remotely lack the ability to make another one. I expect they're just rather expensive, and we don't need two. If this one ever goes out of service and we really need one, we WILL make another one.
What kind of sad, boring person would you have to be to sit in front of a computer, just passively using the electricity from the wall outlet rather than generating your own?
I wouldn't do free work in my car. I might work on things I care about. Right now, I'd be reading a novel I'm into. Other days, I might grab an extra 30 minute nap on the way to work. If I can trade 30 minutes doing a mundane, boring activity for a choice to do something else, I'm going to do it.
Right now, you're supposed to maintain sufficient distance from the cars around you that if something happens to them, you have time to react. Cars should never be moving at 180 KPH within centimeters of each other for exactly the reason you state. If the car in front has a mechanical failure and starts decelerating rapidly, the cars around need time to react whether they're driven by people or computers.
Eh, I'm not so sure. People are used to their cars being their personal space. I have a set of folding chairs in my trunk all the time because I need them a few times a week. I don't want to lug them out to the taxi every time I'm going to need them. I have a couple of books. I have the debris of everyday life, which I don't necessarily -need-, but what I don't want is to get into a taxi and have to live with the debris of YOUR everyday life. Your discarded coffee cups, newspapers, bits of food you were eating, the spot where your baby spit up on the seat, etc.
For some people, not owning your car will be a great option, just like it is now. For others, it won't be.
I'm going to patent the method and process of applying this technique through haberdashery to prevent control or surveillance of private contemplations.
Oh, right, that's the cheap beer that people with no taste drank when I was a kid in the poor part of town, right? You can have it. :-)
I just saw this and wanted to say thanks for the encouragement. There's a place in the area that's supposed to be great, but it's a little farther from home than I'd like. I'm actually avoiding trying it out in part because I'm pretty sure I'll love it and don't really have time to take on a new hobby right now. =]
So, it's actually a bad thing because consumers have fewer options?
I don't have a problem with companies offering me the use of their money for a period of time and charging me something for it. If the charge is unreasonable, I decline. Why exactly do we need laws to force everyone to decline an offer that some might find acceptable?
Actually, there's a guy I went to elementary school with that I reconnected with on Facebook. Our conversation only exists there. It's kind of valuable to me because we stopped being friends when I did something incredibly thoughtless because, as a 9-year-old, I just didn't know any better. We became friends of a sort again, talked about life and how it's gone, and then he died a few months later.
So, valuable? Well, I can't sell it for money, but yeah, something of value would be lost.
What do you mean, "get it back"? That reminds me of the joke where $GROUP_WE_BASH_TODAY faxes something, and asks to have it faxed back because they still need it. If you upload things, you still have them. If you upload and delete them, well, stop that. People who think that Facebook is Facebook AND their personal backup service should also stop that. It isn't.
And I'm sorry, but sites like Facebook make it trivial to interact with a large-ish set of people who are at least somewhat interesting to me. It removes the tremendous frictional costs of going around and subscribing to a couple hundred blogs, or maintaining giant email lists of people who maybe I'm not best friends with, but I'd like to keep in touch with.
*Sigh* And finally, yes, all this stuff is fluff, but that doesn't mean it's fluff without value. I watched Avengers this weekend. My life would not have been diminished one bit if I'd skipped it, but I and those I took with me found it well worth the ~$60 I spent on the movie. The same is true of Facebook. I wouldn't die if I didn't hear about my old classmate's adventures in mommy-hood, but I some kind of minor joy from it, and even the occasional smile.
You see, all of us say at lot of nothing really all the time. It's all fluff, but it's also the fabric of who we are. We are not computers to distill down everything we do to the minimal necessary interaction.
Seriously, call them and tell them to knock this off or they're never seeing a dime from you. I just checked the universities I've attended. Not a word on their web sites that they do this.
The difference is your HS claimed you owed THEM money. In this case, the universities withholding the transcripts aren't owed anything. They got their money before you were allowed to attend classes. They are holding transcripts hostage over someone else's loans not being paid.
But you build missile defense because missiles are hard to shoot down since they go really, really fast. Unlike bombers and helicopters which are comparatively easy to shoot down.
Seriously. It's appalling. He should be fired. Every company I've worked for has had a policy that falsifying your employment application information is grounds for termination. That should be even more so for high ranking positions. Who can do more harm to you by lying, the guy in the mail room, or the guy who runs the company?
You mean like a copy of your diploma or something? No. I've never been asked to, anyway. I've never been asked to submit anything I'd call proof, but I assume companies can check on it. Actually, if I were the company doing the vetting, I don't want the employee providing the evidence. I'd just want you to sign a form that lets me request proof from your university directly. You might fake something up. They probably won't, unless you know someone in the academic records office.
Oh, I'll give it a shot.
Is it ethical to provide an incentive to other human beings to engage in an activity that might lead to serious mental problems so you can get a few hours enjoyment?
I'd say yes, it's fine, as long as the participants understand the risk and feel like they're being fairly compensated for it. I think MMA, for example, looks awesomely fun. Doing it professionally carries a chance of serious harm coming to you. Is it worth it? Eh, not for me. I get paid for my brain working well. Letting someone bash it around an octagon is probably unwise. That, and I'm out of shape and...not 20. But am I going to impose MY value judgement on that on everyone? Nope.
Stop being stupid.
I cut my teeth on articles about "hacking". I've used "hacking" tools going back to the one that got Dan Farmer fired, and before. My interest in security was sparked by downloading an exploit for the Solaris eject command. Download, compile, omg! Root prompt!
The catch? I did all those things on boxes I was paid to secure. I've never broken into anyone's systems but my own, and I have legitimate rights to do that. Information is information. It's not "good" or "bad". I have a bookshelf full of books, mostly bought in your stores, that could teach you how to "hack" or how to secure systems and networks. Guess what I've been paid to do for going on 20 years?
This is something many companies do badly, and one reason they may feel they have too many people on the payroll. They have no depth. They're a collection of single points of failure where every single one of them is guaranteed to fail, many in the next decade or so.
If your company has experienced employees who are the only holders of technical (or other) knowledge that is worth keeping, the time to worry about it is before they leave. It's before they get near retirement age. It's before your formerly gruntled employees become dis-. Really, the time to preserve it is not too long after it's become valuable.
No, it's not OK even then. Only if I put up a sign saying "Hey, I have stuff in here AND YOU CAN HAVE IT."
I would argue that's exactly what you're doing if you broadcast unencrypted WiFi across your neighborhood. You cannot scream across the EM spectrum at the top of your lungs and demand the world not listen. People are not going into the public's house to get their wifi traffic. Ignorant members of the public are blasting it across an area greater than a football field with their house in the center.
Cite, please. It's my understanding that if you're in public, people absolutely can take your picture and do not need your consent. If you're correct, I'd like an explanation how paparazzi aren't all in jail.
Perhaps we're getting to the core of the issue. You're arguing from a base where law isn't actually law. I can't follow you there.
Yes, and infrared cameras that see through your walls. I suppose that's what muddies the waters. It comes down to the "reasonable person" test. IIRC, it's been decided (in court) that reasonable people do get protection from being spied on via IR cameras. I think it's reasonable to assume there's not a laser microphone pointed at your windows, too. I just don't feel that unencrypted wifi streaming out of your house deserves the same protection when it's trivial to encrypt it. I don't think we should have to IR shield our houses. I don't think we should have noise generators on our windows. I do think we should encrypt our wifi.
No, it's a form of encoding. If you're going to claim that as encryption, I can as reasonably claim that this is a private conversation between me and you, and that anyone else reading it has violated my rights because I encrypted it in ASCII or Unicode, or whatever prior to uploading it. It's not MY fault everyone else's computer is capable of decrypting it.
How easy it is to do depends very much on who you are. My problem with things like this is it actually encourages bad security. If we go around telling people that it's ok to just demand the world turn around when they do the digital equivalent of walking down the street naked, are they really better off than if we tell them "Hey, there's this check box you can set on your router that makes it all but impossible for people to snoop on you. If you don't check it, ANYBODY who bothers to try will see everything you do."?
It's all well and good to have laws about this stuff. We COULD enact a law making sniffing unencrypted WiFi illegal. IMO, it's far far better to just encrypt the damn thing and be done with it than hope when someone does capture your traffic, that you'll find out. Realistically, unless it's a high profile case like this, you'll never know.
No, that's not remotely what I'm saying, and your Matthew Shepard comparison is wildly off base.
If you have unencrypted WiFi, you are broadcasting, quite literally, whatever you're doing. All I'm saying is if you're out in public, people can take your picture. You might not like it, but they can. If you yell at your wife on the front porch or in the house if you're loud enough, the neighbors can hear you. I'm not saying you need to encrypt everything, or that you need a vault. I'm saying don't broadcast to the world if you don't want the world to hear you.
I'm very much pro-privacy, but if you want your privacy (as I do), you can't put the burden on the entire rest of the world to preserve it for you. We railed against the DMCA because it criminalized circumventing even useless protection measures, but somehow when they're OUR useless protection measures, it's different? No, it's not. What I'm saying is that if you don't want your papers and personal effects gone through, don't leave them lying in the street for people to pick up and read.