In Cambodia, I saw that the only useful short-term professional service which you can offer is to stand in as a "foreign" teacher. Just talk about where you're from, what you're doing in their town today, talk about what you know about their geography, ask them about the local ecology, let the kids practice English on you for a bit, and let them know that you're more than a walking bank machine.
Tipping foreigners are so generous that children drop out of school to pester tourists for money. It's more lucrative than any job they can have with an education.
When travelling, unless you're on a tour-bus, dress down, pay the FAIR price for goods. If the local custom is to haggle, you MUST haggle. If they wont haggle with you, they're corrupted by heavy-tipping tourists. You walk away. They'll respect you a lot more if you speak a few words of their language and pay what they would pay for goods, and you'll make life a lot easier for other people who visit the country, and you'll make your fellow tourists less of a target.
I can't emphasize how bad it can get when the locals scrape every penny to get by, and you spend 10x what it is worth for a trip in a taxi.
A DM prepares a campaign setting for the evening, players prepare their characters. You work together towards a common goal. There's politics, infighting, bickering, there are people who bring new ideas into the game, people who shut those ideas down. People show up unprepared, some do not pay attention. Some try to suck up, strike alliegences, break rules, etc.
This is exactly like every meeting I have ever participated in in my adult life. Working as a PM, putting together timelines, assigning goals, creating subteams. A story arc is not much different than a project task. Establishing rules, keeping everyone engaged, while accomplishing your goals and having fun is exactly like a project meeting. Even meeting minutes are much like the notes I would keep about what transpired on any given gaming session. There would be a common goal and a certain amount of time in which we'd have to try to achieve those goals.
Strategies, planning and cooperation... working in a team. The skills just go on and on and on. Even roleplaying is important. You represent the goals of your manager or your department, not your own personal opinions. You have to play the role assigned to you. There are rewards for success and consequences for failure. Sometimes things aren't fair, and you have to argue to your peers or DM while maintaining the freindship and trust that the game is based on.
How again is it not like real life?
(I've been considering rewriting roleplaying as a microcosm of modern business... it sounds dull, but the structure and tools could turn it into a weird kind of "educational" game.)
When the music pays for 100% of your time to work on the music... what are you signing up with a label for?
I know at least one band who does everything on their own. They're happy doing what they're doing, and as long as they're happy together, make enough money to pay for their touring, their rent and their groceries, they consider themselves to have "made it".
If the "product" doesn't have that kind of demand, the only thing a record label could do would be to change your image, change your sound and change your gigs. What if you *like* visiting Bob and Julie up in that little town every year? What if you enjoy hanging out with the musicians in that little town in Ireland? Are you a musician or a business person? Is it about music or profit?
If you need an accountant or sound person, you can always hire one. Ditto for studio time, vocal coaches etc. It's just part of being a "pro" musician.
"...citing as a valid reason that the creator of such platform has special terms forbidding 'open source software' in the contracts forced upon the developer."
What platforms would or could have such a restriction? Does the iPhone do this? XBox? What are we talking about? Is that even legal?
Agreed.. I've been spending too much time thinking about security problems on a mostly unrelated issue.
No offense intended. I would have deleted the reply if I could, it's waay too off on a tangent and a bit soapbox-confrontational, which is bad form. Sorry about that.
I hate to reply to my own post... I just want to add that I don't mean to be hard about it, it sounds like you've got a really good system there... Security comes down to risks, and the stuff I'm talking about here is considered fringe and theoretical by many people.
And maybe there is personal liability in place. If so, I really would like to know about it.
It's a good example. You're depending deeply, very deeply on the underlying technology. You may have no choice and as long as it is well understood, that's probably a much lower risk than depending on humans or other systems... but unless you've done the deeep, deeeep inspection of the system, all you've done is outsource human lives to a company with limited liability.
I'm torn as to what kind of testing and understanding is necessary to adequately trust an electronic security system for that kind of application. Is it possible that simply the existence of corporations make it impossible to trust the security of manufactured goods? Are these systems engineered like bridges, where the "engineer" is held criminally liable for failures in the system, or is it just a lot of passing the buck until everyone makes money and nobody goes to jail?
Do you "certify" it? Is it like many "certification" processes, where only the conformance to a standard is tested, but no real-world intelligence is applied to the system as a whole? Again, just passing the buck because the guys earning six and seven figures can't handle the thought of being responsible for human lives, unlike the guys working the floors at the airports?
Does anyone go to jail if a certified, tested system fails to meet its own requirements in the field? does anyone go to jail if they neglected to include a requirement in the certification and testing of the environment? Does anyone go to jail if they missed an "obvious" requirement?
Are the requirements so complex or dependent on secrecy that you don't feel comfortable commenting on them without a lawyer? If so, is it because you're afraid for the public? Afraid for your job?
Unless you have trained guards at every door, it's very hard to promote a culture of badge-checking. Especially if the person you're challenging was just verified by the card-reader.
If you *do* have a guard at every door, what good is the card-reader except to deter the guards from doing their jobs?
I'd really like to know what else you're depending on really, if photo IDs can be forged, and people come and go from all over the world on an hourly basis, and your procedures can't be assumed secret, what's left?
I've never bought into this "layered" model of security. The trouble is that it promotes purchasing crap from vendors which can just be used to add layers. Security is more like a chain, the whole system fails on its weakest link. The more layers you add, the more likely you are to accidentally depend on something you thought the other guy was taking care of...
E.g., go ask the guards if *they* think the card readers are malfunctioning.
At this point, I wouldn't give that kind of email address a second thought when hiring somebody.
It's better IMHO than the twerps who set up their own domains because they're so elite, then the mail bounces, doesn't resolve in reverse, doesn't pass SPF headers, lose my email in spam assassin rules etc, etc.
An AOL address is pragmatic and it means that you've been that way for a long, long time. Unless you're a complete boob, you probably not only know how to set up a mail server, but you know when to outsource.
I happen to have a copy of PC Magazine from 1991 right behind me.... hmm...
30" display... hmm.... don't see one.
19" Sony costs $2499. A cheap 19" Panasonic can be bought for $1329. Looks like they'll do 1280x1024. Most budget 14" monitors are around $300 and top out at 640x480.
That was 19 years ago. Linus was just pecking away at his new 386, annoyed at the lack of software, a young Richard Stallman was posessed by the spirit of St IGNUscius, brandishing his 8" floppy before young virgins... all male no doubt.
I keep the PC Mag to remember the bad old days. I guess the only upside is that the kernel could be understood.
Arsenic, the lead singer of the unpublished metal band "Lead Poisoning", when told that iTunes will not carry his songs, reportedly exclaimed "GGGAAAAFGGGAWWAGAHHH!"
I was trying to pick up a package in Berlin. I walked into the office and muddled my way through an explanation that I lived next door and the landlord asked me to retrieve the package. Half way through my second sentence, somebody at the back of the office blurted out "SPEAK ENGLISH!!". The girl I was talking to spoke back to him in German "I like it when they try to learn the language"
In Berlin it seemed that every young person wanted to learn English, that English was the language of business and they were annoyed at the inconvenience of not being native speakers. I could barely find an opportunity to speak German.
It's basic chemistry to figure out that if you take a liter of octane and convert it into a gas, it's going to take a lot of atmosphere to dilute it to 20ppm.
If you work out how much gas you burn a year and assume an atmosphere of 60km depth at uniform thickness (the real atmosphere is about 120km non-uniform), it becomes shocking how much atmosphere is needed to dilute the CO2 you're producing.
Now to say that a global increase in CO2 is neither a problem, nor something to be concerned about is, well... incomprehensible to me.
Now to take the word of politicians and the media over the scientific community, that's just... mind boggling. I can understand being skeptical but you should be one hell of a lot more skeptical of industry, politicians and the media than of climate scientists.
Oh, sorry, somebody mentioned Haiti... threading totally lost the parent post.
Cuba's not so bad. This is just a case of doing something which the dictatorship expressly forbids. I'm not sure if you still have to sign papers to bring a notebook or cell phone into the country... this guy must have known that what he was doing was subversive.
We have to be careful about revisionist history. There's an interesting quote about Cuba... it's on the Wiki page for the Cuban revolution:
"I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear." -JFK.
Slashdot Mirror
Running an exit node is very, very, very risky.
On the other hand, putting services like Slashdot or Google on as hidden services, it might reduce the demand for the exit nodes.
Has any major company done this yet?
Agreed.
In Cambodia, I saw that the only useful short-term professional service which you can offer is to stand in as a "foreign" teacher. Just talk about where you're from, what you're doing in their town today, talk about what you know about their geography, ask them about the local ecology, let the kids practice English on you for a bit, and let them know that you're more than a walking bank machine.
Tipping foreigners are so generous that children drop out of school to pester tourists for money. It's more lucrative than any job they can have with an education.
When travelling, unless you're on a tour-bus, dress down, pay the FAIR price for goods. If the local custom is to haggle, you MUST haggle. If they wont haggle with you, they're corrupted by heavy-tipping tourists. You walk away. They'll respect you a lot more if you speak a few words of their language and pay what they would pay for goods, and you'll make life a lot easier for other people who visit the country, and you'll make your fellow tourists less of a target.
I can't emphasize how bad it can get when the locals scrape every penny to get by, and you spend 10x what it is worth for a trip in a taxi.
A DM prepares a campaign setting for the evening, players prepare their characters. You work together towards a common goal. There's politics, infighting, bickering, there are people who bring new ideas into the game, people who shut those ideas down. People show up unprepared, some do not pay attention. Some try to suck up, strike alliegences, break rules, etc.
This is exactly like every meeting I have ever participated in in my adult life. Working as a PM, putting together timelines, assigning goals, creating subteams. A story arc is not much different than a project task. Establishing rules, keeping everyone engaged, while accomplishing your goals and having fun is exactly like a project meeting. Even meeting minutes are much like the notes I would keep about what transpired on any given gaming session. There would be a common goal and a certain amount of time in which we'd have to try to achieve those goals.
Strategies, planning and cooperation... working in a team. The skills just go on and on and on. Even roleplaying is important. You represent the goals of your manager or your department, not your own personal opinions. You have to play the role assigned to you. There are rewards for success and consequences for failure. Sometimes things aren't fair, and you have to argue to your peers or DM while maintaining the freindship and trust that the game is based on.
How again is it not like real life?
(I've been considering rewriting roleplaying as a microcosm of modern business... it sounds dull, but the structure and tools could turn it into a weird kind of "educational" game.)
When the music pays for 100% of your time to work on the music... what are you signing up with a label for?
I know at least one band who does everything on their own. They're happy doing what they're doing, and as long as they're happy together, make enough money to pay for their touring, their rent and their groceries, they consider themselves to have "made it".
If the "product" doesn't have that kind of demand, the only thing a record label could do would be to change your image, change your sound and change your gigs. What if you *like* visiting Bob and Julie up in that little town every year? What if you enjoy hanging out with the musicians in that little town in Ireland? Are you a musician or a business person? Is it about music or profit?
If you need an accountant or sound person, you can always hire one. Ditto for studio time, vocal coaches etc. It's just part of being a "pro" musician.
"...citing as a valid reason that the creator of such platform has special terms forbidding 'open source software' in the contracts forced upon the developer."
What platforms would or could have such a restriction? Does the iPhone do this? XBox? What are we talking about? Is that even legal?
Agreed.. I've been spending too much time thinking about security problems on a mostly unrelated issue.
No offense intended. I would have deleted the reply if I could, it's waay too off on a tangent and a bit soapbox-confrontational, which is bad form. Sorry about that.
I hate to reply to my own post... I just want to add that I don't mean to be hard about it, it sounds like you've got a really good system there... Security comes down to risks, and the stuff I'm talking about here is considered fringe and theoretical by many people.
And maybe there is personal liability in place. If so, I really would like to know about it.
It's a good example. You're depending deeply, very deeply on the underlying technology. You may have no choice and as long as it is well understood, that's probably a much lower risk than depending on humans or other systems... but unless you've done the deeep, deeeep inspection of the system, all you've done is outsource human lives to a company with limited liability.
I'm torn as to what kind of testing and understanding is necessary to adequately trust an electronic security system for that kind of application. Is it possible that simply the existence of corporations make it impossible to trust the security of manufactured goods? Are these systems engineered like bridges, where the "engineer" is held criminally liable for failures in the system, or is it just a lot of passing the buck until everyone makes money and nobody goes to jail?
Do you "certify" it? Is it like many "certification" processes, where only the conformance to a standard is tested, but no real-world intelligence is applied to the system as a whole? Again, just passing the buck because the guys earning six and seven figures can't handle the thought of being responsible for human lives, unlike the guys working the floors at the airports?
Does anyone go to jail if a certified, tested system fails to meet its own requirements in the field? does anyone go to jail if they neglected to include a requirement in the certification and testing of the environment? Does anyone go to jail if they missed an "obvious" requirement?
Are the requirements so complex or dependent on secrecy that you don't feel comfortable commenting on them without a lawyer? If so, is it because you're afraid for the public? Afraid for your job?
I know... I worry too much.
Unless you have trained guards at every door, it's very hard to promote a culture of badge-checking. Especially if the person you're challenging was just verified by the card-reader.
If you *do* have a guard at every door, what good is the card-reader except to deter the guards from doing their jobs?
I'd really like to know what else you're depending on really, if photo IDs can be forged, and people come and go from all over the world on an hourly basis, and your procedures can't be assumed secret, what's left?
I've never bought into this "layered" model of security. The trouble is that it promotes purchasing crap from vendors which can just be used to add layers. Security is more like a chain, the whole system fails on its weakest link. The more layers you add, the more likely you are to accidentally depend on something you thought the other guy was taking care of...
E.g., go ask the guards if *they* think the card readers are malfunctioning.
... the government controls the companies!
The iPhone UI is so robust and responsive that it is *fun* to play with. No other phone I've seen so far comes close to that.
At this point, I wouldn't give that kind of email address a second thought when hiring somebody.
It's better IMHO than the twerps who set up their own domains because they're so elite, then the mail bounces, doesn't resolve in reverse, doesn't pass SPF headers, lose my email in spam assassin rules etc, etc.
An AOL address is pragmatic and it means that you've been that way for a long, long time. Unless you're a complete boob, you probably not only know how to set up a mail server, but you know when to outsource.
I happen to have a copy of PC Magazine from 1991 right behind me.... hmm...
30" display... hmm.... don't see one.
19" Sony costs $2499. A cheap 19" Panasonic can be bought for $1329. Looks like they'll do 1280x1024. Most budget 14" monitors are around $300 and top out at 640x480.
That was 19 years ago. Linus was just pecking away at his new 386, annoyed at the lack of software, a young Richard Stallman was posessed by the spirit of St IGNUscius, brandishing his 8" floppy before young virgins... all male no doubt.
I keep the PC Mag to remember the bad old days. I guess the only upside is that the kernel could be understood.
Good point, but don't call him "her Muslim boyfriend"... everyone's saying stuff like that these days, it sounds awful and I don't think they mean it.
See Demolition man. It's an awesome film.
Those were the days when passengers could depend on their captors not being suicidal.
Arsenic, the lead singer of the unpublished metal band "Lead Poisoning", when told that iTunes will not carry his songs, reportedly exclaimed "GGGAAAAFGGGAWWAGAHHH!"
I was trying to pick up a package in Berlin. I walked into the office and muddled my way through an explanation that I lived next door and the landlord asked me to retrieve the package. Half way through my second sentence, somebody at the back of the office blurted out "SPEAK ENGLISH!!". The girl I was talking to spoke back to him in German "I like it when they try to learn the language"
In Berlin it seemed that every young person wanted to learn English, that English was the language of business and they were annoyed at the inconvenience of not being native speakers. I could barely find an opportunity to speak German.
...they want their meme back.
It's basic chemistry to figure out that if you take a liter of octane and convert it into a gas, it's going to take a lot of atmosphere to dilute it to 20ppm.
If you work out how much gas you burn a year and assume an atmosphere of 60km depth at uniform thickness (the real atmosphere is about 120km non-uniform), it becomes shocking how much atmosphere is needed to dilute the CO2 you're producing.
Now to say that a global increase in CO2 is neither a problem, nor something to be concerned about is, well... incomprehensible to me.
Now to take the word of politicians and the media over the scientific community, that's just... mind boggling. I can understand being skeptical but you should be one hell of a lot more skeptical of industry, politicians and the media than of climate scientists.
That the RIAA world is somehow the polar opposite of some GPL world.
And that it's all about "us" users. The "end user."
The consumer
ugh.
UGH.
I am not merely a consumer, and I'm sure you're not either.
Oh, sorry, somebody mentioned Haiti... threading totally lost the parent post.
Cuba's not so bad. This is just a case of doing something which the dictatorship expressly forbids. I'm not sure if you still have to sign papers to bring a notebook or cell phone into the country... this guy must have known that what he was doing was subversive.
We have to be careful about revisionist history. There's an interesting quote about Cuba... it's on the Wiki page for the Cuban revolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution
Are you talking about Hong Kong?
That'd be a stretch.
Yeah, because if you steal commercial code and hide it in your product, you're sooo much better off.
You don't need the license to *use* the code.