If that were true, while it would have no practical use
in the near future
Not necessarily - Merely opening that particular conceptual door would
lead to a massive influx of funding and revisited anomalous past results.
Interesting thing about experimentation, even the most honest of
researchers tends to throw away "bad" results (in the sense of not
publishing them, not in the academically-dishonest sense of omitting
them from the data). If the scientific community suddenly accepted
the possibility of spooky-effect-X, you can bet that dozens or
even hundreds of research groups would dredge up their past efforts
to see if effect-X explains their results.
Case in point, l'Acedemie des Sciences and meteorites. Up to the turn
of the 19th century, only idiots would dare claim that rocks could fall
from space... Until the scientific community decided they could, at
which point a huge body of past evidence appeared practically overnight
supporting the existance of such falling objects.
Why? Netflix costs far less per movie (if you watch promptly and return them);
Even many of the Brick-n'-Mortar chains have ways to get better deals (Movie Gallery's
one-night-one-dollar Wednesdays, for example). Borrowing from a friend costs nothing.
If you only care about getting a rip, you have plenty of cheaper alternatives.
So $5 for a rental? That doesn't compete on price... Convenience? Well, I
can accept that most people can't help but grab useless trinkets while waiting at the
register, but movies don't have quite the same primary-reinforcement draw as candy.
They'll almost certainly only stock perhaps half a dozen top hits, with a good chance
people will already have seen the ones they wanted to. Also, families tend to take
forever to pick movies to watch together, a minute and a half waiting in line
doesn't even come close to long enough to pick (and the gender most likely
to do the shopping also usually causes the most trouble over what to watch, IMO as
a chauvanist male pig-dog).
combining the shoddy packaging of a pirated copy with the transience of a rental is pretty much a prescription for failure.
Agreed. For your reason, my reason, and so many more - These won't last long (by which I don't refer to their spooky magic adhesive).
With this kept in mind, what advice should I give her?
Before the modern era of easy bit-exact digital copies, people copied
songs and movies from friends and off the TV/Radio.
With that in mind, if you can get her to grasp just one basic
concept, convince her that P2P doesn't equate to piracy, it
just makes the transfer of files (legal or otherwise) considerably
more efficient.
A complete ban (even if effective, an unlikely possibility) on P2P
would have very nearly no effect on actual piracy. It would simply
drive people to other methods of copying media, whether online or
off.
Shooting for a more rose-tinted view of what you might accomplish,
I consider it critical for politicians to eventually understand
what "piracy" actual entails; namely, that we have four basic categories
of "pirates" - Samplers, collectors, casual users, and cheapskates.
"Samplers" should count as Mass Media's best friend, because they
tend to buy a lot, and just want to see what they'll get before
spending their money.
"Collectors" may or may not buy a lot, but as
they have the impossible goal of possessing a copy of everything,
they will not ever buy as much as they want. Whether or not to consider
them pirates in the negative sense depends on whether they collect to
replace buying, or merely to supplement what they can
afford.
"Casual users", the majority of people IMO, don't care one
way or the other about piracy, and may not even realize what crosses
the line. They buy most of their content, but if a friend offers them
a copy of a new CD, they won't turn it down.
"Cheapskates" alone I would consider the "bad" kind of pirate.
They pirate for the simple reason that they can get something for
free, rather than out of either love for the content, obsession to
"catch 'em all", or mere ignorance.
Of these, only the last category (and perhaps some of the collectors,
who may well also count as cheapskates) represent actual lost sales.
Until politicians understand that, we'll keep fighting this
same battle. We'll keep winning, because they can't win, but
we'll see more and more peripheral rights stripped away in the attempt.
Q. Are digital signatures legally binding?
Yes. In 1999, the EU passed the "EU Directive for Electronic Signatures"
and on June 30, 2000, President Clinton signed into law the Electronic
Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act ("ESIGN"), which made
signed electronic contracts and documents as legally binding as a
paper-based contract.
So, yes, properly signed email carries the same legal weight as a
regular (or faxed) signature.
I find it amazing that CC companies want customer
sigs on the back of the card
My newest card actually doesn't have a spot on the back
to sign. Perhaps they finally got the hint that people don't
really want to play Security Theater with signatures and ID and
all that.
Really, what does it accomplish? No one ever rejects a
card (as long as the card goes through). I regularly give mine
to my SO to do grocery shopping, and on the rare occasions
when they check the card, they don't even blink that she has a
different gender and last name from that on the card (I have a
very obviously male first name).
Just try to buy alcohol, though, and it doesn't matter if you
look sixty and get a cashier that has served you out a hundred times
before - They'll card you, study the picture, ask "trivia" questions
from your license if your hair looks even a bit different (no, I don't
look all that young, and I buy "good" liquor rather than the sort of
cheap swill kids tend to favor). Didn't we fight our first civil war
over alcohol, and they still pull that sort of BS?
All-in-all this doesn't seem particular complicated.
Offhand, I don't think the hardware shown could even work as an
EMG, much less an EEG. I would thus presume they
must have some form of differential amplification with a
high CMRR in the visor itself.
And without knowing that, we can really only make wild
guesses as to exactly what this really measures.
your argument is pretty weak. because MRI's require a certain level of training and tools to understand
and / or use, it's essentially the same as an MRI not existing?
Yes. Languages (graphical or otherwise) exist for the purpose of communication. If your
target audience doesn't know the "words" you use, you may as well babble incoherently to
yourself.
continuing education is a pretty standard part of any profession.
My doctor can't optimally treat me without knowing the latest and greatest drugs. My accountant can't
get me the most on my tax refund without learning the new IRS rules. But I can code just as well
without even having heard of UML, as I could knowing it.
the short answer to your question is: both.
I have a finite amount of time. You can study dead languages if you want; I'll spend the
time learning/improving "real" skills, thankyouverymuch.
IT workers will have to think about how they can make the business operate more efficiently, and be creative and get it implemented.
Puh-lease. Today's IT workers can't get our users to access network file shares rather than
filling the mail spool with the same attachments (And a million revisions thereof) over and
over and over... And in the few cases I've seen where people (always at least "engineers",
not just your typical office staff) do use a NAS, they constantly come asking for help when
they try to send outside contacts links to internal files. It seems that people have some
sort of mental wall around the ideas of "local" and "not local", with no middle-ground possible. And
god forbid you actually make such access secure - Users will actually burn CDs and pass them
back and forth rather than even attempt to navigate the simplest of login prompts.
So no, I don't worry about finding myself unneeded any time soon - Regardless of how easy the
technology gets to use, the actual users still won't get it. And they'll need us
to help them get that 10.1MB file (that the email system keeps rejecting) to Fred in Accounting - Who
will then need our help opening the file.
an install of this fixture capable of lighting a 10x10 room (on
a bright day) costs on the order of $5,000.
This involves very low tech... No fiber-optics, no nanoscale
materials, no sun-tracking servos. Just a giant fish-eye lens on the
roof, shiny tubes for light distribution, and prisms (an optional,
and IMO silly, "feature" for those fixated on the "window" look - you
can get good illumination a lot easier by using a ceiling-mounted
diffuser box).
If not a total flop, you can expect to see clones at a tenth the price
within a few months.
Obviously this is pathetic. I happen to have three realtors on my doorstep, and they sing the same song,
claiming colleagues will do the same. You cannot break this kind of cartel when grassroots will practice it regardless.
While I have a problem with their shunning of DIY listings, I don't really see the problem with online
agents... When you want a real estate agent (Realtor(tm)(c)(r)(^_^) or not), you want a physically present human to
help you navigate the maze of regulations and fees and common mistakes people make. This applies both to buying
and selling.
I can do property searches online by myself. I don't need some moron with a mail-order license and a copy of
FrontPage to do them for me. I never would have known, however, that a particular local town
has lower property taxes than anywhere nearby because of a rich weirdo who died there 50 years ago and left
a fortune to the town itself. And perhaps more to the point of physical presence, I would never have known
that you can get a huge old farmhouse with a bit of sag and rotting first-floor joists for a song, and it
costs under $10k to jack it a bit and sister every joist.
I don't care about brand name agents, but c'mon, "online" agents amount to the real-estate equivalent of
drop-shipping discount camera stores. They may save you a few bucks, but you get nothing from them
but delivery of product.
how many other things in the universe are naturally doughnut shaped?
How many cells in your body have a bipedal shape? How many things in your car look like
your car itself? How many 2x4 lego bricks look like a castle or death-star or robot?
Seriously, what did he expect, that a lazy corporation was going
to reform its security policies because a 23-year-old hourly employee
complained anonymously on a blog?
If they had any integrity - Yes, that sounds like the best possible
outcome of this.
Think about it - The CIO didn't say "okay, after a major data breach,
go ahead and keep using pathetic passwords". The order came down from
On High to use secure passwords. This proved inconvenient to hundreds of
piddling middle-managers, who ordered "their" IT guys to find a way around
all that nasty security. The local IT guys complied, by allowing blank
passwords (Corporate probably never expected anything that stupid,
and so didn't have a policy stating otherwise).
So, sometime later, Corporate discovers what has happened, and it enrages
them. They meet, discuss, take aim, and fire...
...At their own foot.
And what did he think they were going to do when they caught him,
give him a raise and a promise to change their cheap lazy ways?
They could have addressed the problem and rewarded the child who dared to
laugh at the naked emperor. By chosing not to, they have very
effectively told me they care more about appearances than the security
of my credit card data. As a result, I will no longer shop there.
You do not have a right to what you did not create.
Okay, let's follow through with that initial statement...
It's my land
Really? Did you pull the baryonic matter from the void, shape it
into a neat rectangular plot of land, and paste it onto the surface of the
Earth? Of course, I hope you pay for the right to use all that "free"
gravity on "your" land, unless you made the entire 3d solid of "your" land
going all the way to the core, right? Same goes for the air and water,
naturally, unless you live in a habitat bubble.
my property
Did you create your TV? Your microwave oven? Your washing machine,
refridgerator, computer, couch, even your house itself?
and you can go find your own. Your laziness and lack of creativity does not give you a right to steal.
Thanks, but I like yours, and you don't sound like you could put up much
of a fight, so I think I'll take yours. Your naivete and belief in fictional "laws" over
the reality of a cold hard monkey-eats-monkey world does not give you the right to hoarde
the best bananas just because you found them first.
but, if they are so important than shouldn't you be willing to work for them?
You forget that throughout most of history, "taking yours" did count as the "work"
needed to obtain such things.
Do we have it better today? Well, we certainly live longer... Of course, while pre-agricultural-revolution
humans worked roughly 10-15 hours per day to obtain their necessities, we work 40-50 hours per week. Does
living longer matter, when doing so just means slaving away for the gain of those who's ancestors, as the
GP put it, first stuck their flag into the land we still need today?
FTA: Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones.
"I get chest pain and it doesn't go away right away," he said
Well then, looks like you'd better move to the middle of nowhere, rather than trying to live in a fairly
large city.
Even If:
1) A physiological basis existed for having an autoimmune response to RF,
2) Only the 2.4GHz range of frequencies triggers it (since we literally live in a sea of RF, including from natural sources),
3) The 9th circuit accepts "electrosensitivity" as a valid "disability", and
4) The city backs down on this...
Well, given all that - What do you plan to do about the 50,000 nonmunicipal WAPs in your area? The FAA, NOAA, and military radar
installations scattered around the country? Or for that matter, the microwave ovens found in every home and restauraunt
in the country?
And even if you have a legitimate complaint - Welcome to the real world, where no one cares about your
pitiful psychosomatic response to spoooooooky radio waves. Get a shrink, get used to chest pain, or move to Afghanistan.
You forgot get permits and right of way access
to even begin doing this.
From the fact that his father lives somewhere that cable doesn't
go, I would guess that his father's property abuts the target
neighbor's, thus making things like right-of-way irrelevant.
As for permits... The sort of places where half a kilometer would
only cross one property boundary also tend not to have insane
zoning/building ordinances.
Not to mention the cost (includes labor x your_time) of
doing this
Not a bad point - This will cost around $700 just for the conduit.
Additionally, he can't just use ethernet at 500m, it has no
shot of working that far (5x the spec'd max), so he'll also need
to buy an ethernet extender (in the $300 range). And cable... Another
$50-$100, oddly enough the cheapest part of this project.
That all depends on what you want from your email... If you
don't mind text-only email, you can find quite a few (nearly) 100%
secure readers.
If, however, you want it to spawn off the appropriate helper
app to open various content embedded in emails, then your reader
will never count as any more secure than the worst of those
helper apps.
I can click on anything and everything with wild abandon and
never have any trouble on both my Windows and Linux systems.
Why stop at securing the email program?
Why not just say that the OS should absolutely
never let malware run?
Simple - Because the job of an OS centers
around running programs the user wants to run, and the OS can't
second-guess whether it has Joe Sixpack at the keyboard, or a security
researcher investigating a new virus. Similarly, an email program
exists to let the user send and receive email for the user,
which can include anything from whitelisted plaintext email, to
embedded (potentially malicious) multimedia content, to deliberately
sending a worm to yourself or a friend to test your AV software.
First, to every other respondant so far - Know your audience. Non-geeks do not use PGP (hell, only a small fraction of
geeks even use it), and most people only use SSL when/if their browser makes it 100% transparent. Don't even mention those, you'll
just confuse the intended recipient and get nothing accomplished.
For the "real" answer - Using WinZip, pick 256-bit AES encryption and zip your file. Then send it via
regular email, and call the recipient with the password (and although you don't need to pick an
easy password, prepare to have to repeat it a few dozen times if you choose anything even remotely secure).
That satisfies any privacy/data security laws applicable to the situation, including HIPAA (presuming the
recipient actually has the right to access the requested data) if this happens to involve sending medical
records. No, not a glamorous solution, but it works.
However, I realized in the e-mail that my supervisor took credit for
the development of this content.
Piece of cake - Just ask the higher-up for clarification on a few
points. You could even argue (humbly, if you like your job)
one point by clarifying why you chose to implement it the way
you did as opposed to the requested change.
In the bigger picture, though - Does it really matter? If not a major
project for the company as a whole, the gratitude of your immediate boss
(and the fact that you got paid) most likely matters far more
(in the "good for your career" sense) than making sure you get credit.
The corporate food-chain taking credit for their underlings' work pretty
much just counts as a fact of life, which you need to either accept, or
prepare for a rather turbulent career.
Perhaps you don't understand anything about neutrinos.
Perhaps not. Or, perhaps I did my dissertation on flavour changing
transformations while studying under Glashow at BU while you still
wore diapers[*]. Amazing thing about the internet, you never to whom
you might find yourself talking - only what they have to say.
They don't respond to electromagnetism, gravity, or the strong force.
That means it's really hard to get a hold of them, like impossible.
...And yet, neutrons still decay to protons via emission of a W-boson.
Funny, that.
Big problem, you can't aim, focus, or do anything other
with neutrinos than create them.
...Yet. Since they do interact with ordinary matter to some
degree, we can reasonably expect to some day have the ability to
make/use/detect them in a controlled and predictable manner.
Now there are several noise-reduction strategies, like narrow
filters (which don't work well when the endpoints are moving). But
still, it's hard to make a signal make a dent with all that
background noise.
Now apply the same reasoning to photons... Have you any idea just
how many of them come at us from every direction, constantly,
even during the night in a "dark" room? Fortunately, we can select
them based on direction, frequency, amplitude, phase, polarization,
and probably a few more properties that I can't think of at the
moment. Why would we expect neutrinos to have any fewer selectable
properties on which to filter? In fact, they would likely have
more aspects to select for, as they periodically convert
between several different flavors.
Seriously, people bash UAC, but it's pretty much identical to sudo.
Key difference - Using sudo represents an active request by the user for
privilege escalation. Telling UAC to continue approves apassive request
that the user might not actually have made (or known they made). When enough of
them pop up at random times, it conditions the user to just say okay to make it go
away - By comparison, no one would ever just randomly sudo a command for the
hell of it.
Come again? Does anyone but Microsoft actually believe Vista has an "image" of better
security?
Vista has one and only one major security-impacting feature - The "Train users to always
click yes" interface to privilege escalation. And I feel confident saying that very, very few
of us consider that a "good" thing.
945G northbridges are rated somewhere around a dozen watts as they're made on the old 130 nm process node.
Well then, perhaps they should have used a nice efficient AMD 580 or 690 series chipset, at 7 and 8 watts, respectively.;)
Of course, that *still* draws more than this CPU, but the market for boards like this tend to strongly favor fanless. Having a fan, not to support a slightly better CPU but for a mere northbridge, just seems like adding insult to injury, IMO.
Many arguments about offshore development often are nothing more than xenophobic rants [...] most of the people complaining about
quality of offshore work is done by the same people sitting around on IM and surfing the web for 7 out of 8 hours a day.
From the middle-America stereotype of xenophobia, to the mid-management paranoia about lazy programmers. Well done, old chap! Well
done indeed!
Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why
No. This counts as a peeve of mine, which you appear to have bought into whole-heartedly, and it all centers around your comment
that: This is especially hazy in the enterprise software realm, where you have to build something that "just works",
not "works great".
I take pride in my work - The quality of my work, not the speed with which I can satisfy the spec (a document I consider myself lucky
when I have a halfway decent one first place). The problem comes about when you consider the specificity of the task - You have apples and
oranges trying to compare in-house coders to outsourced ones, because they don't do the same job. Yes, I do want my programs
to "work great", not "just work".
Put simply, outsourcing can work, as long as you have someone in-house who understands, at both a business and technical
level, what the company needs - And can document that in painstaking detail for an outsourced dev team to implement. In the real world,
that doesn't happen, because "software engineer" doesn't mean "code monkey". My job involves about half coding, half badgering management
to make up their damned minds about feature-X... And then re-writing feature X when management changes its mind a week later.
Put another way: Most halfway-decent American coders, given a sufficiently detailed spec and only the thinnest of contractual
obligations to implement it to the letter (exactly what offshore coding houses work to), could do any given take in a tenth
the time/budget as well. And when that "working" app crashes at 2am resutling in the loss of millions of transactions, because
your MBA-wielding Head of Outsourcing doesn't understand the difference between "RAID" and "backup", just take comfort in in how
much you saved by not going with lazy in-house programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
If that were true, while it would have no practical use in the near future
Not necessarily - Merely opening that particular conceptual door would lead to a massive influx of funding and revisited anomalous past results.
Interesting thing about experimentation, even the most honest of researchers tends to throw away "bad" results (in the sense of not publishing them, not in the academically-dishonest sense of omitting them from the data). If the scientific community suddenly accepted the possibility of spooky-effect-X, you can bet that dozens or even hundreds of research groups would dredge up their past efforts to see if effect-X explains their results.
Case in point, l'Acedemie des Sciences and meteorites. Up to the turn of the 19th century, only idiots would dare claim that rocks could fall from space... Until the scientific community decided they could, at which point a huge body of past evidence appeared practically overnight supporting the existance of such falling objects.
These things positively scream "rip me! rip me!"
Why? Netflix costs far less per movie (if you watch promptly and return them); Even many of the Brick-n'-Mortar chains have ways to get better deals (Movie Gallery's one-night-one-dollar Wednesdays, for example). Borrowing from a friend costs nothing. If you only care about getting a rip, you have plenty of cheaper alternatives.
So $5 for a rental? That doesn't compete on price... Convenience? Well, I can accept that most people can't help but grab useless trinkets while waiting at the register, but movies don't have quite the same primary-reinforcement draw as candy. They'll almost certainly only stock perhaps half a dozen top hits, with a good chance people will already have seen the ones they wanted to. Also, families tend to take forever to pick movies to watch together, a minute and a half waiting in line doesn't even come close to long enough to pick (and the gender most likely to do the shopping also usually causes the most trouble over what to watch, IMO as a chauvanist male pig-dog).
combining the shoddy packaging of a pirated copy with the transience of a rental is pretty much a prescription for failure.
Agreed. For your reason, my reason, and so many more - These won't last long (by which I don't refer to their spooky magic adhesive).
Before the modern era of easy bit-exact digital copies, people copied songs and movies from friends and off the TV/Radio.
With that in mind, if you can get her to grasp just one basic concept, convince her that P2P doesn't equate to piracy, it just makes the transfer of files (legal or otherwise) considerably more efficient.
A complete ban (even if effective, an unlikely possibility) on P2P would have very nearly no effect on actual piracy. It would simply drive people to other methods of copying media, whether online or off.
Shooting for a more rose-tinted view of what you might accomplish, I consider it critical for politicians to eventually understand what "piracy" actual entails; namely, that we have four basic categories of "pirates" - Samplers, collectors, casual users, and cheapskates.
- "Samplers" should count as Mass Media's best friend, because they
tend to buy a lot, and just want to see what they'll get before
spending their money.
- "Collectors" may or may not buy a lot, but as
they have the impossible goal of possessing a copy of everything,
they will not ever buy as much as they want. Whether or not to consider
them pirates in the negative sense depends on whether they collect to
replace buying, or merely to supplement what they can
afford.
- "Casual users", the majority of people IMO, don't care one
way or the other about piracy, and may not even realize what crosses
the line. They buy most of their content, but if a friend offers them
a copy of a new CD, they won't turn it down.
- "Cheapskates" alone I would consider the "bad" kind of pirate.
They pirate for the simple reason that they can get something for
free, rather than out of either love for the content, obsession to
"catch 'em all", or mere ignorance.
Of these, only the last category (and perhaps some of the collectors, who may well also count as cheapskates) represent actual lost sales.Until politicians understand that, we'll keep fighting this same battle. We'll keep winning, because they can't win, but we'll see more and more peripheral rights stripped away in the attempt.
At least three posts have claimed that so far. You got modded the highest, so I'll respond to you.
From Arx:
So, yes, properly signed email carries the same legal weight as a regular (or faxed) signature.
I find it amazing that CC companies want customer sigs on the back of the card
My newest card actually doesn't have a spot on the back to sign. Perhaps they finally got the hint that people don't really want to play Security Theater with signatures and ID and all that.
Really, what does it accomplish? No one ever rejects a card (as long as the card goes through). I regularly give mine to my SO to do grocery shopping, and on the rare occasions when they check the card, they don't even blink that she has a different gender and last name from that on the card (I have a very obviously male first name).
Just try to buy alcohol, though, and it doesn't matter if you look sixty and get a cashier that has served you out a hundred times before - They'll card you, study the picture, ask "trivia" questions from your license if your hair looks even a bit different (no, I don't look all that young, and I buy "good" liquor rather than the sort of cheap swill kids tend to favor). Didn't we fight our first civil war over alcohol, and they still pull that sort of BS?
All-in-all this doesn't seem particular complicated.
Offhand, I don't think the hardware shown could even work as an EMG, much less an EEG. I would thus presume they must have some form of differential amplification with a high CMRR in the visor itself.
And without knowing that, we can really only make wild guesses as to exactly what this really measures.
your argument is pretty weak. because MRI's require a certain level of training and tools to understand and / or use, it's essentially the same as an MRI not existing?
Yes. Languages (graphical or otherwise) exist for the purpose of communication. If your target audience doesn't know the "words" you use, you may as well babble incoherently to yourself.
continuing education is a pretty standard part of any profession.
My doctor can't optimally treat me without knowing the latest and greatest drugs. My accountant can't get me the most on my tax refund without learning the new IRS rules. But I can code just as well without even having heard of UML, as I could knowing it.
the short answer to your question is: both.
I have a finite amount of time. You can study dead languages if you want; I'll spend the time learning/improving "real" skills, thankyouverymuch.
IT workers will have to think about how they can make the business operate more efficiently, and be creative and get it implemented.
Puh-lease. Today's IT workers can't get our users to access network file shares rather than filling the mail spool with the same attachments (And a million revisions thereof) over and over and over... And in the few cases I've seen where people (always at least "engineers", not just your typical office staff) do use a NAS, they constantly come asking for help when they try to send outside contacts links to internal files. It seems that people have some sort of mental wall around the ideas of "local" and "not local", with no middle-ground possible. And god forbid you actually make such access secure - Users will actually burn CDs and pass them back and forth rather than even attempt to navigate the simplest of login prompts.
So no, I don't worry about finding myself unneeded any time soon - Regardless of how easy the technology gets to use, the actual users still won't get it. And they'll need us to help them get that 10.1MB file (that the email system keeps rejecting) to Fred in Accounting - Who will then need our help opening the file.
an install of this fixture capable of lighting a 10x10 room (on a bright day) costs on the order of $5,000.
This involves very low tech... No fiber-optics, no nanoscale materials, no sun-tracking servos. Just a giant fish-eye lens on the roof, shiny tubes for light distribution, and prisms (an optional, and IMO silly, "feature" for those fixated on the "window" look - you can get good illumination a lot easier by using a ceiling-mounted diffuser box).
If not a total flop, you can expect to see clones at a tenth the price within a few months.
new streamlined technology licenses;
Engineer: Faster, cheaper, more reliable, more efficient.
Businessman: Slightly less annoying, but still entirely arbitrary, restrictions on how you can what you already paid for.
Next time you wonder "what the hell has gone wrong us as a species", ask yourself which of those two run the world.
Obviously this is pathetic. I happen to have three realtors on my doorstep, and they sing the same song, claiming colleagues will do the same. You cannot break this kind of cartel when grassroots will practice it regardless.
While I have a problem with their shunning of DIY listings, I don't really see the problem with online agents... When you want a real estate agent (Realtor(tm)(c)(r)(^_^) or not), you want a physically present human to help you navigate the maze of regulations and fees and common mistakes people make. This applies both to buying and selling.
I can do property searches online by myself. I don't need some moron with a mail-order license and a copy of FrontPage to do them for me. I never would have known, however, that a particular local town has lower property taxes than anywhere nearby because of a rich weirdo who died there 50 years ago and left a fortune to the town itself. And perhaps more to the point of physical presence, I would never have known that you can get a huge old farmhouse with a bit of sag and rotting first-floor joists for a song, and it costs under $10k to jack it a bit and sister every joist.
I don't care about brand name agents, but c'mon, "online" agents amount to the real-estate equivalent of drop-shipping discount camera stores. They may save you a few bucks, but you get nothing from them but delivery of product.
how many other things in the universe are naturally doughnut shaped?
How many cells in your body have a bipedal shape? How many things in your car look like your car itself? How many 2x4 lego bricks look like a castle or death-star or robot?
"Greenness dissolves" applies outward as well.
Seriously, what did he expect, that a lazy corporation was going to reform its security policies because a 23-year-old hourly employee complained anonymously on a blog?
...At their own foot.
If they had any integrity - Yes, that sounds like the best possible outcome of this.
Think about it - The CIO didn't say "okay, after a major data breach, go ahead and keep using pathetic passwords". The order came down from On High to use secure passwords. This proved inconvenient to hundreds of piddling middle-managers, who ordered "their" IT guys to find a way around all that nasty security. The local IT guys complied, by allowing blank passwords (Corporate probably never expected anything that stupid, and so didn't have a policy stating otherwise).
So, sometime later, Corporate discovers what has happened, and it enrages them. They meet, discuss, take aim, and fire...
And what did he think they were going to do when they caught him, give him a raise and a promise to change their cheap lazy ways?
They could have addressed the problem and rewarded the child who dared to laugh at the naked emperor. By chosing not to, they have very effectively told me they care more about appearances than the security of my credit card data. As a result, I will no longer shop there.
You do not have a right to what you did not create.
Okay, let's follow through with that initial statement...
It's my land
Really? Did you pull the baryonic matter from the void, shape it into a neat rectangular plot of land, and paste it onto the surface of the Earth? Of course, I hope you pay for the right to use all that "free" gravity on "your" land, unless you made the entire 3d solid of "your" land going all the way to the core, right? Same goes for the air and water, naturally, unless you live in a habitat bubble.
my property
Did you create your TV? Your microwave oven? Your washing machine, refridgerator, computer, couch, even your house itself?
and you can go find your own. Your laziness and lack of creativity does not give you a right to steal.
Thanks, but I like yours, and you don't sound like you could put up much of a fight, so I think I'll take yours. Your naivete and belief in fictional "laws" over the reality of a cold hard monkey-eats-monkey world does not give you the right to hoarde the best bananas just because you found them first.
but, if they are so important than shouldn't you be willing to work for them?
You forget that throughout most of history, "taking yours" did count as the "work" needed to obtain such things.
Do we have it better today? Well, we certainly live longer... Of course, while pre-agricultural-revolution humans worked roughly 10-15 hours per day to obtain their necessities, we work 40-50 hours per week. Does living longer matter, when doing so just means slaving away for the gain of those who's ancestors, as the GP put it, first stuck their flag into the land we still need today?
FTA: Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones. "I get chest pain and it doesn't go away right away," he said
Well then, looks like you'd better move to the middle of nowhere, rather than trying to live in a fairly large city.
Even If:
1) A physiological basis existed for having an autoimmune response to RF,
2) Only the 2.4GHz range of frequencies triggers it (since we literally live in a sea of RF, including from natural sources),
3) The 9th circuit accepts "electrosensitivity" as a valid "disability", and
4) The city backs down on this...
Well, given all that - What do you plan to do about the 50,000 nonmunicipal WAPs in your area? The FAA, NOAA, and military radar installations scattered around the country? Or for that matter, the microwave ovens found in every home and restauraunt in the country?
And even if you have a legitimate complaint - Welcome to the real world, where no one cares about your pitiful psychosomatic response to spoooooooky radio waves. Get a shrink, get used to chest pain, or move to Afghanistan.
You forgot get permits and right of way access to even begin doing this.
From the fact that his father lives somewhere that cable doesn't go, I would guess that his father's property abuts the target neighbor's, thus making things like right-of-way irrelevant.
As for permits... The sort of places where half a kilometer would only cross one property boundary also tend not to have insane zoning/building ordinances.
Not to mention the cost (includes labor x your_time) of doing this
Not a bad point - This will cost around $700 just for the conduit. Additionally, he can't just use ethernet at 500m, it has no shot of working that far (5x the spec'd max), so he'll also need to buy an ethernet extender (in the $300 range). And cable... Another $50-$100, oddly enough the cheapest part of this project.
The email program should be secure
That all depends on what you want from your email... If you don't mind text-only email, you can find quite a few (nearly) 100% secure readers.
If, however, you want it to spawn off the appropriate helper app to open various content embedded in emails, then your reader will never count as any more secure than the worst of those helper apps.
I can click on anything and everything with wild abandon and never have any trouble on both my Windows and Linux systems.
Why stop at securing the email program? Why not just say that the OS should absolutely never let malware run?
Simple - Because the job of an OS centers around running programs the user wants to run, and the OS can't second-guess whether it has Joe Sixpack at the keyboard, or a security researcher investigating a new virus. Similarly, an email program exists to let the user send and receive email for the user, which can include anything from whitelisted plaintext email, to embedded (potentially malicious) multimedia content, to deliberately sending a worm to yourself or a friend to test your AV software.
First, to every other respondant so far - Know your audience. Non-geeks do not use PGP (hell, only a small fraction of geeks even use it), and most people only use SSL when/if their browser makes it 100% transparent. Don't even mention those, you'll just confuse the intended recipient and get nothing accomplished.
For the "real" answer - Using WinZip, pick 256-bit AES encryption and zip your file. Then send it via regular email, and call the recipient with the password (and although you don't need to pick an easy password, prepare to have to repeat it a few dozen times if you choose anything even remotely secure).
That satisfies any privacy/data security laws applicable to the situation, including HIPAA (presuming the recipient actually has the right to access the requested data) if this happens to involve sending medical records. No, not a glamorous solution, but it works.
However, I realized in the e-mail that my supervisor took credit for the development of this content.
Piece of cake - Just ask the higher-up for clarification on a few points. You could even argue (humbly, if you like your job) one point by clarifying why you chose to implement it the way you did as opposed to the requested change.
In the bigger picture, though - Does it really matter? If not a major project for the company as a whole, the gratitude of your immediate boss (and the fact that you got paid) most likely matters far more (in the "good for your career" sense) than making sure you get credit. The corporate food-chain taking credit for their underlings' work pretty much just counts as a fact of life, which you need to either accept, or prepare for a rather turbulent career.
Perhaps you don't understand anything about neutrinos.
...And yet, neutrons still decay to protons via emission of a W-boson.
Funny, that.
Perhaps not. Or, perhaps I did my dissertation on flavour changing transformations while studying under Glashow at BU while you still wore diapers[*]. Amazing thing about the internet, you never to whom you might find yourself talking - only what they have to say.
They don't respond to electromagnetism, gravity, or the strong force. That means it's really hard to get a hold of them, like impossible.
* I didn't. Just sayin'.
Big problem, you can't aim, focus, or do anything other with neutrinos than create them.
...Yet. Since they do interact with ordinary matter to some
degree, we can reasonably expect to some day have the ability to
make/use/detect them in a controlled and predictable manner.
Now there are several noise-reduction strategies, like narrow filters (which don't work well when the endpoints are moving). But still, it's hard to make a signal make a dent with all that background noise.
Now apply the same reasoning to photons... Have you any idea just how many of them come at us from every direction, constantly, even during the night in a "dark" room? Fortunately, we can select them based on direction, frequency, amplitude, phase, polarization, and probably a few more properties that I can't think of at the moment. Why would we expect neutrinos to have any fewer selectable properties on which to filter? In fact, they would likely have more aspects to select for, as they periodically convert between several different flavors.
Seriously, people bash UAC, but it's pretty much identical to sudo.
Key difference - Using sudo represents an active request by the user for privilege escalation. Telling UAC to continue approves apassive request that the user might not actually have made (or known they made). When enough of them pop up at random times, it conditions the user to just say okay to make it go away - By comparison, no one would ever just randomly sudo a command for the hell of it.
New Malware Report Hits Vista's Security Image
Come again? Does anyone but Microsoft actually believe Vista has an "image" of better security?
Vista has one and only one major security-impacting feature - The "Train users to always click yes" interface to privilege escalation. And I feel confident saying that very, very few of us consider that a "good" thing.
945G northbridges are rated somewhere around a dozen watts as they're made on the old 130 nm process node.
;)
Well then, perhaps they should have used a nice efficient AMD 580 or 690 series chipset, at 7 and 8 watts, respectively.
Of course, that *still* draws more than this CPU, but the market for boards like this tend to strongly favor fanless. Having a fan, not to support a slightly better CPU but for a mere northbridge, just seems like adding insult to injury, IMO.
Many arguments about offshore development often are nothing more than xenophobic rants [...] most of the people complaining about quality of offshore work is done by the same people sitting around on IM and surfing the web for 7 out of 8 hours a day.
From the middle-America stereotype of xenophobia, to the mid-management paranoia about lazy programmers. Well done, old chap! Well done indeed!
Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why
No. This counts as a peeve of mine, which you appear to have bought into whole-heartedly, and it all centers around your comment that:
This is especially hazy in the enterprise software realm, where you have to build something that "just works", not "works great".
I take pride in my work - The quality of my work, not the speed with which I can satisfy the spec (a document I consider myself lucky when I have a halfway decent one first place). The problem comes about when you consider the specificity of the task - You have apples and oranges trying to compare in-house coders to outsourced ones, because they don't do the same job. Yes, I do want my programs to "work great", not "just work".
Put simply, outsourcing can work, as long as you have someone in-house who understands, at both a business and technical level, what the company needs - And can document that in painstaking detail for an outsourced dev team to implement. In the real world, that doesn't happen, because "software engineer" doesn't mean "code monkey". My job involves about half coding, half badgering management to make up their damned minds about feature-X... And then re-writing feature X when management changes its mind a week later.
Put another way: Most halfway-decent American coders, given a sufficiently detailed spec and only the thinnest of contractual obligations to implement it to the letter (exactly what offshore coding houses work to), could do any given take in a tenth the time/budget as well. And when that "working" app crashes at 2am resutling in the loss of millions of transactions, because your MBA-wielding Head of Outsourcing doesn't understand the difference between "RAID" and "backup", just take comfort in in how much you saved by not going with lazy in-house programmers.