So why don't companies use contractors for everything?
Most states have labor laws that prevent it. Contractors are supposed to be for specific tasks/projects. If you keep them on for years and years, then they're employees, regardless of what you call them.
I wouldn't be adverse to new technology that replaces the mouse, as long as it was better. Touch screens, wii like motion detectors etc. are not better.
.. for managing current desktop computer interfaces.
For playing tennis video games, the Wii controller is way better than a mouse. Touch screens are awesome for limited-function kiosks (for example, the machine to make photo prints from your memory card).
Touch pads are a compromise between functionality and space-saving on a laptop. Making them larger and multi-touch make them nicer, but they're still a compromise given the current computer user interfaces.
Yes, they stink for clicking on title bars and menus and min/max/close buttons. It might be interesting to see what a gesture-driven multi-touch desktop computer interface would look like, and whether or not that would be more productive than using a mouse with the current interfaces.
Ummm... Lets see would I rather A) Plug in a MicroSD adapter to my computer and copy and paste my songs with whatever file manager I choose and then copy and paste them from that to my phone or B) Plug in a cable, and deal with the headaches... I mean "excellent user interface" of iTunes to recognize my songs confining me to new Macs and Windows machines only. If the iPhone would be just a USB storage device it wouldn't matter, but just using iTunes is almost enough to stop me from getting one.
Personally I was happy to abandon managing folders of files in exchange to being able to find songs by artist, album, rating, etc. and make playlists in the interface instead of managing.m3u files.
I know someone who just drags and drops files from his hard drive into his iPod though, leaving it in manual mode. You can do the same with the iPhone. (Of course, all his music is pirated and the tags are all completely wrong or non-existant, so files and folders it is)
Twice you've mentioned not having a computer capable of running iTunes. Software-wise, iTunes will run under Wine or a Virtual Machine; hardware-wise I'm not sure there's many people in the category of having old hardware unable to run iTunes and yet willing to pay for an iPhone and associated phone plan.
This would be illegal in several jurisdictions. Just hope you never get caught doing that.
While it may be illegal (fraud?) to claim an address where you don't receive mail, it's certainly not illegal to have an out-of-state billing address.
Sort of off-topic.. I replaced my local-to-my-town USPS post office box with http://www.earthclassmail.com/ - they scan all your mail and you download it as PDFs. They're based out of Beaverton, Oregon - but they can also give you a Portland address (among other cities across the US). I'm very happy with them BTW, costs about $100 a year and I don't have to scan my bills myself, go the the post office, or worry about missing important mail while I'm traveling. Did I mention I'm very happy with them?:)
Anyways, AT&T was happy to change my (non-Oregon) billing address to Oregon, since that was actually my new billing address. I don't remember if it changed my taxes; I don't recall any drop in my bill, but then again I wasn't looking for any.
Given that I entered a zip code, the federal, state, and local governments in question are all known.
They could easily calculate the state and federal taxes, but ZIP codes sometimes cover more than one city (possibly also county?), which can set their own rates. City and county are required to determine your local taxes.
Can't you just generate your own root certificate, use it to sign all the web-app certs and then distribute your own root certificate to all the employees?
Of course he can, and I've done this. Distributing and maintaining your own certificates requires a level of control and communication in your company that many businesses do not have. Most companies do not have security experts; they have sysadmins or developers who might or might not know anything about practicing security.
no no no, really you don't understand. Since the login page is not encrypted, it may have been changed during transfer to your browser. You'll be sending your user credentials to the evil MITM.
Any attacker that can modify your site can change your site to point to a non-encrypted login page, or an encrypted page off-site that the attacker controls. Making the login page encrypted (but not the whole site) isn't much more secure, since the attacker can change the link to the login page to go elsewhere. If the user has bookmarked the correct login page, the attacker can throw them an error (or just close the connection) and the user will most likely start over at the site's home page, thinking that the site has moved their login page.
One can make an argument that the entire site needs to be encrypted if any part is (PayPal does this). Encryption slows things down and requires more hardware though, so it's a cost vs. risk assessment.
Interstates are of course pretty unpleasant for bikes
Illegal too, at least in NC.
And no, there is really no way a 10-mile commute on a bike can take 2 hours.
If it's all twisty roads on hills, sure. 5 mph on a steep uphill for an unfit person is not unreasonable, and if the downhill side is sufficiently twisty, you won't be able to get any kind of speed. Throw in some time to rest (again, unfit person), and some stoplights, and you're there.
I love biking, and I commuted to work via bike for two years (almost entirely uphill to work, and coasting downhill on the way home). My workplace had showers and the ride was along pleasant 35 mph roads. Then I got a different job, and my choices were biking 7 miles over some steep hills on a 45 mph road that everyone went 70 mph on, or drive. I drove.
Are you going to be part of the solution, or part of the precipitate?
Neither, I telecommute now, and just bike around the neighborhood for fun.:)
I have no problems with naked children running around the beach like is common in Europe. There is nothing sexual there, and the paranoia about that in north america is ridiculous.
This cover is not innocent nakedness. It's obviously meant to be a suggestive pose, and I don't think that's ok.
It's a child swimming. That's how they swim. At the beach, even. It's not "obviously meant to be a suggestive pose" since it's not, in fact, obvious.
If it's suggestive of anything, it's of flying. That's what I thought of when I first saw it - a flying toddler chasing a buck, which is a wonderful metaphor for the ridiculousness of life.
I don't want to discuss, you're full of shit and I want to tell you so.
I understand you have no reason to believe my personal anecdotes; I believe I've corrected that by providing video links to substitute for my personal history as evidence of police behavior.
What you think on the subject doesn't mean a damned thing to me.
Ideas can't stand on their own merit, regardless of speaker?
So, if I didn't think you were lying, you'd have one example, which isn't supported by anything more than your word, which is useless.
So yes, as I said worthless.
Googling "video cop" provides a number of interesting links of videos of both police abuse and professional behavior.. these two sites have days of material to get you started. A good number of these videos are from the police cruiser's camera.
Taking a job as a police officer does not magically make someone a good person. There are good, bad, and just average people. The good ones need to be commended and rewarded, and the bad ones weeded out.
Your opinion about it is irrelevant.
Well, I thought that providing my point of view would help people understand why I'm not excited about giving police new powers. Also, I thought this was a discussion site and we could debate positions and philosophies, at least as they relate to the article at hand.
Can ideas not stand on their own merit? Is it impossible to debate "new powers must be weighed against new abuses" without providing detailed evidence of each possible need for the new power or possible abuse of it?
As a side note, you sure seem angry. Words like "worthless" and "useless" aren't great words to use if you want to discuss. If you just want to go around insulting people, they're perfectly fine, but that's not very enlightening to either party. I'm happy to be proven wrong, because that means I've learned something; but being insulted without learning anything new is not something I enjoy.
So.. providing an example of what I described actually happening is "worthless", even though it shows that the scenario isn't "ridiculous hyperbole", but that it has already happened to at least one person. Hmmm.
Perhaps I gave you the impression that I think every police officer acts that way? That's not the case; I intended to show one way it could be abused, not that it would always be abused that way. I feel that cops are necessary, and for the most part police do their job correctly and professionally. We do need to take in to account possible abuse scenarios when granting new powers, because they do happen.
You could have also used a virtual machine, such as VMWare ($$$) or MS Virtual PC (free). In a testing environment, these have advantages over Wine such as system snapshots.
Sorry, I should have reversed the owner/driver. When I had long hair as a teenager, I was pulled over more than once for being a long-haired young guy in a nice car (belonging to my parents). All the paperwork has always been in order, so after 20-30 minutes I was free to go - no ticket since I hadn't done anything wrong. The reason for the stop was always seatbelt or something else equally unprovable. Same car but having cut my hair, no problems.
As someone else mentioned, these days I should have used "taser" instead of "gun", so you're right, that is a bit of hyperbole now (most of the time). Being stopped and handcuffed while interrogated and patted down, is not. Fairly scary at 16; I was used to it by college.
Every power will be abused. The trick is to put in checks so that the abuses are caught and corrected (and thus minimized) - and then making sure those checks remain in place and work. As a country we've been failing on that last part, so I'm loathe to grant any new powers (and thus new abuses).
I'm not saying it would put up a big "pull over and detain!" notice, but it could pop up the plate, the vehicle it should be on, the owner, and why it's of interest, then the officer would decide what to do. I.e., if a car pops up as belonging to a wanted 22-year-old male but it's obviously someone else in the car (too old, wrong gender, etc.) then they would ignore it.
The car belongs to a 22 year old male, a 50 year old woman is driving it, obviously stolen. Pull over and handcuff the driver with my gun drawn and ready to shoot if she gives me any lip./cop thinking
Of course, like anything, there is the potential for abuse, but before you freak out about privacy, remember that driving, by definition, is a very public act. We're not talking about millimeter-wave radio or looking behind closed curtains with an infrared camera, we're talking about reading the required-by-law several-inch-high unique identifier on a hunk of steel with unobstructed windows on the public roads. If you're wanted and don't want to get caught, it's your responsibility to not go out in public with a visible unique identifier.
Nobody's worried about criminals getting caught. We are worried about installing a system that would only take a policy decision (possibly secret, possibly illegal) to turn an acceptable system into a full-time surveillance tool for persecuting political enemies of the state or even of the individual cops. History has shown us that if something can be abused, it will be, regardless of political party or system of government.
As an admin for some -very- high availability systems, load balancers are not a silver bullet. This solution would most apply for running one-node clusters who are using a single machine as a perimeter network device. (ex. firewall) I see lots of these in the racks at our NOC provider.
1. We connect to several load balanced systems and the complexity introduced by load balancers translates to inexplicable down time. No load balancers means a pretty steady diet of the latest and greatest server hardware, but no down time. The a few minutes of down time costs more than the server hardware.
I spent a decade in perimeter networking at a Fortune 50 US bank. My group didn't do the internal network, just the perimiter, and we still had dozens of network sites and thousands of pieces of equipment. The bank itself has hundreds of thousands of employees, millions of users. Online banking and brokerage are about as high availability as you can get save utilities (power, water, telephony, etc) or military. Seconds of online brokerage downtime equated to millions of dollars lost.
The idea that load balancing introduces inexplicable down time is completely unsupported by my experience.
"One-node clusters" seems like marketing speak for "single point of failure". A cluster by definition is two or more nodes.
Redundant routers, switches, firewalls, the works or you're not high-availability in my opinion. The fact that you're talking about Postgresql instead of Oracle or DB2 on mainframes makes me think that your idea of high availability is different than mine.
A standard RAID 5 array with 4 x 1 TB drives would hold 3 TB of user data, and 1 TB of parity. Still.. we don't count the ECC codes on regular drives as "storing data" despite the fact that it is in fact data; likewise the RAID array should be advertised as holding 3 TB of data if RAID 5.
No, that's against every major ISP's terms-of-service that I've ever read. They don't want people acting as mini-ISPs. I mean, suppose you have a bunch of people in an apartment building who only want email and some Web browsing. A single 6 Mb/sec connection on a WAP could service all of them at considerable loss to the ISP. There are some people who do that: one of them buys access, shares it wirelessly with a couple of neighbors, and they split the bill.
There are some ISPs that support this, and will even handle billing for you.
So, you can vote for your mom, your mom can pass your vote and her vote to the town doctor, the town doctor can pass half the towns votes to a clever responsible guy he knows in the big city, and that guys opinion carries a lot of weight because a lot of people trust him.
You should be able to revoke your attribution at any time, instantly. Therefore, there is no possibility of corruption.
1. Town doctor passes votes to whomever pays him the most. Townspeople trust the doctor, but the doctor is corrupt. 2. Religious leader tells his congregation to pass their votes to him, their deity said so. Some congregations number in the tens of thousands. 3. Random thug goes around telling people "Pass me your vote and don't revoke it, or I punch you in the face/kill your child/release this videotape/get you fired/plant evidence on you and get you arrested". Once he has everyone's votes, he votes the way his boss tells him to. If random thug is captured, the boss replaces him with another random thug. Even better, have a bunch of thugs, and each thug gathers up 100 votes. That way if any one thug is caught, no big deal.
Business hours should be from noon to 8:00. They way I could get up and go enjoy some of the daylight hours even though it's a work day.
I've worked those hours before, at a large corporate bank no less. You really don't miss anything from 5pm-8pm except rush hour, and the difference in the drive home is often enormous (1 hour drive at 5pm turns into a 20 minute drive at 8pm). The extra time in the morning is very nice, especially for dealing with 9-5 shops like government, banks, or whatever. An alternative, if you have kids or a spouse with an earlier schedule, is 7am - 3pm, something else fairly common and still gives you time to hit up 9-5 shops.. but I've found from experience that it's much easier to arrive late than to leave early if you're in any kind of problem-solving role. If you're not there yet, they'll deal without you till you get there.. but if you're already there and try to leave, you'll catch grief.
Regarding plasma vs LCD - I bought LCD not because its cheaper (at 42"+, it's wasn't at the time) but because it doesn't burn in. Sure, every salesman tried to convince me it wasnt a big problem anymore, but none would let me return it if burnin did occur. Yes, I do keep static images on my screen for hours at a time - its called video games.
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Most states have labor laws that prevent it. Contractors are supposed to be for specific tasks/projects. If you keep them on for years and years, then they're employees, regardless of what you call them.
Microsoft (among others) got in trouble for having "permatemp" employees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp
For playing tennis video games, the Wii controller is way better than a mouse. Touch screens are awesome for limited-function kiosks (for example, the machine to make photo prints from your memory card).
Touch pads are a compromise between functionality and space-saving on a laptop. Making them larger and multi-touch make them nicer, but they're still a compromise given the current computer user interfaces.
Yes, they stink for clicking on title bars and menus and min/max/close buttons. It might be interesting to see what a gesture-driven multi-touch desktop computer interface would look like, and whether or not that would be more productive than using a mouse with the current interfaces.
Personally I was happy to abandon managing folders of files in exchange to being able to find songs by artist, album, rating, etc. and make playlists in the interface instead of managing .m3u files.
I know someone who just drags and drops files from his hard drive into his iPod though, leaving it in manual mode. You can do the same with the iPhone. (Of course, all his music is pirated and the tags are all completely wrong or non-existant, so files and folders it is)
Twice you've mentioned not having a computer capable of running iTunes. Software-wise, iTunes will run under Wine or a Virtual Machine; hardware-wise I'm not sure there's many people in the category of having old hardware unable to run iTunes and yet willing to pay for an iPhone and associated phone plan.
While it may be illegal (fraud?) to claim an address where you don't receive mail, it's certainly not illegal to have an out-of-state billing address.
Sort of off-topic.. I replaced my local-to-my-town USPS post office box with http://www.earthclassmail.com/ - they scan all your mail and you download it as PDFs. They're based out of Beaverton, Oregon - but they can also give you a Portland address (among other cities across the US). I'm very happy with them BTW, costs about $100 a year and I don't have to scan my bills myself, go the the post office, or worry about missing important mail while I'm traveling. Did I mention I'm very happy with them? :)
Anyways, AT&T was happy to change my (non-Oregon) billing address to Oregon, since that was actually my new billing address. I don't remember if it changed my taxes; I don't recall any drop in my bill, but then again I wasn't looking for any.
They could easily calculate the state and federal taxes, but ZIP codes sometimes cover more than one city (possibly also county?), which can set their own rates. City and county are required to determine your local taxes.
Of course he can, and I've done this. Distributing and maintaining your own certificates requires a level of control and communication in your company that many businesses do not have. Most companies do not have security experts; they have sysadmins or developers who might or might not know anything about practicing security.
Any attacker that can modify your site can change your site to point to a non-encrypted login page, or an encrypted page off-site that the attacker controls. Making the login page encrypted (but not the whole site) isn't much more secure, since the attacker can change the link to the login page to go elsewhere. If the user has bookmarked the correct login page, the attacker can throw them an error (or just close the connection) and the user will most likely start over at the site's home page, thinking that the site has moved their login page.
One can make an argument that the entire site needs to be encrypted if any part is (PayPal does this). Encryption slows things down and requires more hardware though, so it's a cost vs. risk assessment.
It's common on new construction in the US to have one light switch per room tied to an outlet. It's not common to have every outlet be switched.
Illegal too, at least in NC.
If it's all twisty roads on hills, sure. 5 mph on a steep uphill for an unfit person is not unreasonable, and if the downhill side is sufficiently twisty, you won't be able to get any kind of speed. Throw in some time to rest (again, unfit person), and some stoplights, and you're there.
I love biking, and I commuted to work via bike for two years (almost entirely uphill to work, and coasting downhill on the way home). My workplace had showers and the ride was along pleasant 35 mph roads. Then I got a different job, and my choices were biking 7 miles over some steep hills on a 45 mph road that everyone went 70 mph on, or drive. I drove.
Neither, I telecommute now, and just bike around the neighborhood for fun.
It's a child swimming. That's how they swim. At the beach, even. It's not "obviously meant to be a suggestive pose" since it's not, in fact, obvious.
If it's suggestive of anything, it's of flying. That's what I thought of when I first saw it - a flying toddler chasing a buck, which is a wonderful metaphor for the ridiculousness of life.
I understand you have no reason to believe my personal anecdotes; I believe I've corrected that by providing video links to substitute for my personal history as evidence of police behavior.
Ideas can't stand on their own merit, regardless of speaker?
Googling "video cop" provides a number of interesting links of videos of both police abuse and professional behavior.. these two sites have days of material to get you started. A good number of these videos are from the police cruiser's camera.
http://www.copsonline.com/amazing_videos.htm
http://www.policeabuse.com/
Heck, go watch COPS sometime and listen as they narrate what they're thinking in their own words: http://www.cops.com/
Finally, some DWB (driving while black): http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/dwb01.htm
So that it's not all serious, here's some police silliness:
http://crimesift.com/2006/12/09/traffic-stop-video-the-cops-should-have-erased/
Taking a job as a police officer does not magically make someone a good person. There are good, bad, and just average people. The good ones need to be commended and rewarded, and the bad ones weeded out.
Well, I thought that providing my point of view would help people understand why I'm not excited about giving police new powers. Also, I thought this was a discussion site and we could debate positions and philosophies, at least as they relate to the article at hand.
Can ideas not stand on their own merit? Is it impossible to debate "new powers must be weighed against new abuses" without providing detailed evidence of each possible need for the new power or possible abuse of it?
As a side note, you sure seem angry. Words like "worthless" and "useless" aren't great words to use if you want to discuss. If you just want to go around insulting people, they're perfectly fine, but that's not very enlightening to either party. I'm happy to be proven wrong, because that means I've learned something; but being insulted without learning anything new is not something I enjoy.
So.. providing an example of what I described actually happening is "worthless", even though it shows that the scenario isn't "ridiculous hyperbole", but that it has already happened to at least one person. Hmmm.
Perhaps I gave you the impression that I think every police officer acts that way? That's not the case; I intended to show one way it could be abused, not that it would always be abused that way. I feel that cops are necessary, and for the most part police do their job correctly and professionally. We do need to take in to account possible abuse scenarios when granting new powers, because they do happen.
You could have also used a virtual machine, such as VMWare ($$$) or MS Virtual PC (free). In a testing environment, these have advantages over Wine such as system snapshots.
I was about to make almost exactly this comment (except add 2 years of using Linux in-between Windows and OS X), so instead I'll just say "me too".
Sorry, I should have reversed the owner/driver. When I had long hair as a teenager, I was pulled over more than once for being a long-haired young guy in a nice car (belonging to my parents). All the paperwork has always been in order, so after 20-30 minutes I was free to go - no ticket since I hadn't done anything wrong. The reason for the stop was always seatbelt or something else equally unprovable. Same car but having cut my hair, no problems.
As someone else mentioned, these days I should have used "taser" instead of "gun", so you're right, that is a bit of hyperbole now (most of the time). Being stopped and handcuffed while interrogated and patted down, is not. Fairly scary at 16; I was used to it by college.
Every power will be abused. The trick is to put in checks so that the abuses are caught and corrected (and thus minimized) - and then making sure those checks remain in place and work. As a country we've been failing on that last part, so I'm loathe to grant any new powers (and thus new abuses).
The car belongs to a 22 year old male, a 50 year old woman is driving it, obviously stolen. Pull over and handcuff the driver with my gun drawn and ready to shoot if she gives me any lip.
Nobody's worried about criminals getting caught. We are worried about installing a system that would only take a policy decision (possibly secret, possibly illegal) to turn an acceptable system into a full-time surveillance tool for persecuting political enemies of the state or even of the individual cops. History has shown us that if something can be abused, it will be, regardless of political party or system of government.
I spent a decade in perimeter networking at a Fortune 50 US bank. My group didn't do the internal network, just the perimiter, and we still had dozens of network sites and thousands of pieces of equipment. The bank itself has hundreds of thousands of employees, millions of users. Online banking and brokerage are about as high availability as you can get save utilities (power, water, telephony, etc) or military. Seconds of online brokerage downtime equated to millions of dollars lost.
The idea that load balancing introduces inexplicable down time is completely unsupported by my experience.
"One-node clusters" seems like marketing speak for "single point of failure". A cluster by definition is two or more nodes.
Redundant routers, switches, firewalls, the works or you're not high-availability in my opinion. The fact that you're talking about Postgresql instead of Oracle or DB2 on mainframes makes me think that your idea of high availability is different than mine.
A standard RAID 5 array with 4 x 1 TB drives would hold 3 TB of user data, and 1 TB of parity. Still.. we don't count the ECC codes on regular drives as "storing data" despite the fact that it is in fact data; likewise the RAID array should be advertised as holding 3 TB of data if RAID 5.
There are some ISPs that support this, and will even handle billing for you.
http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/learnmore/
Then again Speakeasy always had good service terms (although at higher prices). Disclaimer: former satisfied customer
1. Town doctor passes votes to whomever pays him the most. Townspeople trust the doctor, but the doctor is corrupt.
2. Religious leader tells his congregation to pass their votes to him, their deity said so. Some congregations number in the tens of thousands.
3. Random thug goes around telling people "Pass me your vote and don't revoke it, or I punch you in the face/kill your child/release this videotape/get you fired/plant evidence on you and get you arrested". Once he has everyone's votes, he votes the way his boss tells him to. If random thug is captured, the boss replaces him with another random thug. Even better, have a bunch of thugs, and each thug gathers up 100 votes. That way if any one thug is caught, no big deal.
Nope, no possibility of corruption at all.
I've worked those hours before, at a large corporate bank no less. You really don't miss anything from 5pm-8pm except rush hour, and the difference in the drive home is often enormous (1 hour drive at 5pm turns into a 20 minute drive at 8pm). The extra time in the morning is very nice, especially for dealing with 9-5 shops like government, banks, or whatever. An alternative, if you have kids or a spouse with an earlier schedule, is 7am - 3pm, something else fairly common and still gives you time to hit up 9-5 shops.. but I've found from experience that it's much easier to arrive late than to leave early if you're in any kind of problem-solving role. If you're not there yet, they'll deal without you till you get there.. but if you're already there and try to leave, you'll catch grief.
A check digit would help with data entry errors. It would do nothing for identity theft, since the identity thief would steal the check digit too.
Care to elaborate?
Regarding plasma vs LCD - I bought LCD not because its cheaper (at 42"+, it's wasn't at the time) but because it doesn't burn in. Sure, every salesman tried to convince me it wasnt a big problem anymore, but none would let me return it if burnin did occur. Yes, I do keep static images on my screen for hours at a time - its called video games.