...a cigar humidor, except for the cheesy brass bits on the corners. In fact, if it ever goes balls up, rip out the guts and give it to me. I've got a handful of La Gloria Cubanas and a few Camacho El-Legendarios that would fit in there very nicely.
and of course corporations being the engines of greed they are will have not qualms about relocating the 'er' router, to the location where the least sales tax is charged.
Let's see...the "corporation" moves its "'er' router" to another location in order to shield its customers from having to pay a sales tax. The result is that the customer saves money twice...they're probably getting the item cheaper on line that in a brick-and-mortar. And they have the advantage of not having to pay that nasty state sales tax.
And this makes this business-savvy corporation an "engine of greed" how?
Oh, wait, that's right...they're an "engine of greed" because they're not simply giving the item to you for free. Right?
What makes the entire story laughable is the fact that the Cuban people are far too busy trying to simply survive in Castro's "worker's paradise." The idea that using Linux on the few available computers on the island is some kind of advancement means nothing when eating is your primary daily goal.
You also mentioned their "health care." All one has to do is spend five minutes here to see what the average Cuban's medical care consists of.
There isn't a single person posting here would would find this life acceptable. Yet people continue to worship Castro and Che as visionaries except for the murderers and thugs that they are.
Make all the arguments you like: the fact of the matter is the more you tax things, or the higher the rate of taxes you charge, the lower the revenue you will receive. I continue to be incredulous over the fact that politicians, especially those of a more "progressive" bent, fail to understand this basic concept.
Take cigarettes. The state of New York is pulling both ends on the smoking issue. They pay billions of dollars for programs to get people to quit smoking, including advertising and free stop-smoking aids (at taxpayer expense). Yet they look at raising taxes on cigarettes as a way to raise revenue. So what's it going to be? Do you want people to smoke or not? And do you really expect your tax revenue to rise by an increase in cigarette taxes?
The city and the state would be better off doing two things: shut down the useless anti-smoking campaign and cut the taxes on cigarettes. People are going to smoke, no matter what the nanny state does to stop it. The only way to stop smoking is to force quitting on the public by making tobacco possession and use illegal -- and we all know how well prohibition worked. They would be better off killing a useless program and allowing people to buy more cigarettes at a lower tax rate, because this would have the immediate effect of increasing tax revenues. That money could then be redirected to health and education.
This is the same situation that occurs with the transit system when ridership drops. The MTA gives in to union demands for high wages and benefits, even though there's less revenue coming in. Services have to be cut, which means you're paying people to sit around and do nothing. The only solution is to raise fares. Raise fares and riders will leave the system and find another way to get to work. And other than the "discounts" the MTA offered people for using the electronic Metrocards, I don't recall a time when they actually lowered the fare. Maybe trying this as an experiment would be interesting. Lower the fare - more people ride - more revenue comes in - as ridership increases, demand for services increase -- add back the services you cut -- more people ride -- revenue increases. What a vicious cycle.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who will argue that this doesn't work, but since it never gets tried, I suppose we'll never know, will we? Instead, all other aspects of the lives of New Yorkers are going to be burdened with higher costs.
Which is why I'm glad I abandoned that place 30 years ago.
Actually, it's believed that the G1 and Android actually are capable of multi-touch, and it's demonstrated in the video found here. This site raises the exact same question you did, and my uneducated guess is that this is just a development issue that will be resolved in a future Android update.
I can live without it for now. At my age, I'm lucky I can touch anything with one finger, let along two.
I'm very happy with my G1 and expect interesting things to develop for it over the next year.
Wait a minute...Dell (and HP, and Lenovo, and Toshiba, ad infinitum) already tell me what software I can run on my new computer. And that's always Windows. I don't even get a choice of which Windows...I must take Vista or nothing. Or if I do convince one of them to give me XP, I must pay more money...or buy a model I might not want.
And my "choices" are limited even more by the fact that I must take when they give me but I cannot take "nothing." I can't ask them to sell me the computer without an operating system, because then they wouldn't be able to "support it." (As though they can support it if it goes tits up and does have Windows installed one it).
So, what's worse? Getting stuck with (and paying for) an operating system I don't want, and not having the choice of which version of the operating system I don't want? Or being unable to have no operating system so I can run the software I want?
Playing what I want on the guitar sounds like a good alternative. And though I think Stallman is a marxist nut, I'll invite him over for free sandwiches. He can even bring a homeless guy.
No, I'm not criticizing Microsoft for patching anything, or not patching anything (hard to say without a double negative). I don't care what Microsoft does.
I use Windows at work. I'm not a sysadmin or network admin (not anymore; I was for 10+ years). I don't work in security (I did, as part of the above). I'm a developer on a very large, distributed and secure network. I don't concern myself with bugs, security, malware, Trojans, etc. etc. because I don't need to. My work is secure and replicated, and if something evil gets on the network and screws up my machine, I can go home early. Tomorrow is another day.
At home, I don't use Windows. At all. Server, desktop, laptop. Not a byte of anything controlled by Microsoft. So, again, their inability to correct their problems before releasing doesn't concern me.
And while I know there are bugs in Linux, fifteen years of experience with it has demonstrated to me that it's a shorter problem, a faster fix, it's out in the open, and there's no one keeping a tally of how long it takes for a bug to get exploited. And none of my boxes have ever been compromised.
Microsoft is now bragging about the fact that they predicted 40% of their bugs would be turned into exploits?
I realize that Windows is a complex hunk of crap...errr...operating system, but wouldn't they be better served trying to find and correct these issues rather then just releasing them into the wild and keeping their fingers crossed?
Their attitude is sort of like pointing the gun at your foot and firing five times, and bragging that you only hit two of your toes.
This is why, every day when I arrive at work, I log into this XP box and ask myself why my organization continues to put up with this garbage.
A couple of days ago, there was a very passionate supporter at a McCain rally, who wanted Senator McCain to go after Obama harder on character issues.
"Senator, I'm begging you..." he pleaded, backed up by the cheers of a very partisan crowd..
Allow me to take a cue from that fellow...
I'm begging you to get your people to reconsider any of those three companies. I like Gmail and use it myself, but I would never allow those three companies to have any measure of control over the mail systems of a university.
Please consider for a moment that the student body at a large university is the primary demographic target for many companies and their mail (or their entire mail experience) will likely be inundated with tons of advertising. Other than Gmail, I can't imagine what kind of spam prevention the other two have in place, since Yahoo!'s mail servers are living, breathing pits of junk mail. Don't think for a moment that any of these companies wouldn't sell ad space and mail lists to the highest bidders.
I would strongly urge you to keep in in house, using one of the very fine FOSS solutions already mentioned in other posts.
I agree with you in principal on the privacy issues, but admittedly, I've gone the other way in a couple of ways. Let's get the Facebook thing out of the way: I have an active account that I set up out of curiosity. I'm a developer and wanted to at least see some things they were doing on the site. As it turns out, the only people who have "friended" me (the ex-English teacher in me is cringing) are one sister-in-law, my college-student daughter and a group of her friends. My photo is not too revealing, they don't have a lot of information about me. I generally only visit there when I need to contact my child, or frequently forgets to call her parents. By the way, that very fact that I have a presence on the site seemed to bother my daughter for a while (like I was invading some secret sanctuary), until all her pals "friended" (ugh) me and told her how cool they thought it was that I had an account.
I have two Google mail accounts. One is all personal stuff, and one was established for professional use, back when I was seeking my first contract position. I try not to be too paranoid about just what Google keeps on me in this regard, because if it weren't them, it would be my ISP, or my hosting company or someone else storing my mail. I'm a contractor for the DOD, with a security clearance, so I probably have a better understanding of how to protect myself in email comms than the average bear. But, I also don't worry about it too much; I'm a glass half-full person and I believe that Google makes a reasonable effort to protect the stuff of mine that they do have.
There's one other aspect of this that I keep in mind: having been a sysadmin for a number of years, I know how easily any individual admin working in any IT department could log into any server and poke around in my mail. That's the human element that will always be the single point-of-failure in keeping completely secret. But like a lot of other things over which I have no control (the economy, gas prices, my Jaguars being 2-3), I try to remain vigilant and hope that the best happens. Maybe this is an unreasonable approach for others, but it keeps me from going insane.
Trust me, having worked in some very secure, classified situations, I can tell you that most of the people with whom I have worked are decent folks who value privacy even more strongly than you, and they have little interest in seeing what the average person has in their inbox. The rest of them are too technically inept, ignorant or stupid to do anyone any harm. Trust me on this...
So for me, the convenience of Gmail is the key. I keep all my personal correspondence there, and I can access it anywhere, including my phone, anytime I want. I need to be able to do that. For that reason alone, the other risks are mitigated.
In order for it to be socialism, we have to actually get something out of it.
I'm sorry, maybe I missed something during the past 53 years...you actually get something out of socialism? Can you tell me what that might be? I'm running a list of socialist-based political governments, past and present, through my head, and I'm damned if I can come up with one where the citizens genuinely got something. That is, other than a controlling centralized government, restrictions an all economic activity and commerce, and "government services" that frequently fail to meet even minimum standards.
Yes, socialist systems always appear to work well at the outset, but they eventually collapse under their own weight, often under the hidden corruption of the leadership that's supposed to be providing everything for the "people."
I suppose I'll be accused of being a piggish capitalist, but no need for the socialists to get all riled up. You can get free health care in Cuba, the Socialist Worker's Paradise.
Well, I don't know where you're located on the SIPR, but here in that big, oddly-shaped building near the river alongside the city with the big pointy tower and the big white-domed place, we call that "a major pain in my ass."
I was working for the Navy in 1999 during the leadup to the Y2K fiasco. Like most other organizations, mine was freaking out over the possibility of half of their old 486 and early Pentium desktops screwing the pooch. One guy up the chain (my counterpart that the next highest command) literally forced us to spend about a grand on these useless clock-correction cards, half of which didn't work in many of the machines we had.
I went to the command CO and suggested simply upgrading the existing boxes with new motherboards, RAM and hard disks, which for about $300 could extend the life of the machines another year or so (we were NOT getting any money for new machines anytime soon).
Having worked with Mwave for personal needs and onesy-twosy items at the job, I called them and asked what they could do. They eventually put together about 40 kits with MBs, RAM and hard disk, shipped to us in Florida from California in two days, followed up with a call to make sure we were satisfied, and gave us a great price to boot. Of all the "kits," we had one issue, a single dead motherboard, which they immediately replaced and overnight shipped before we returned the bad on.
This was nine years ago. That they are still going strong and earning praises from the geeks in here says something about them.
Yes, you're right...but you show me someone who will give her an 11-week lease.
If she were staying longer, say, than three months, it would have been worth looking into a sublet or sharing arrangement. But, she was on a schedule and had to return home to begin school next week.
I work away from my Florida home in the DC area, so I have to fight the rent-and-share wars. I'm quite aware of how this works, and I have NEVER seen anyone in this city willing to rent to someone for less than six months.
However, I'll keep your comment in mind...she may wind up back there next year if they offer her a job. What parts of Brooklyn are "un-hip"? I always thought all of Brooklyn was hip. Didn't ed Norton use to call it the "Garden Spot of the World?";-)
What about the pay? Where I come from it is common to pay only a fraction of what your work is actually worth if it's called an 'internship.' Does this apply to the US as well?
Let me give you an example of the "pay." My daughter is entering her senior year at a large university in the South. She just completed an 11-week internship in New York with a large entertainment conglomerate's subsidiary.
We (her mother and I) paid for her plane fare up there from Florida. We helped her get a loan to pay for the housing in Brooklyn (about $3500 for the session, for a tiny room in a converted hotel that she shared with one other girl...that looked a lot different from the photos they posed on their web site). We made sure she had some money to start out with and a Metrocard to get back and forth to lower Manhattan.
When the whole thing was over, I made arrangements to pick her up, bring her back to where I work in Virginia to fly home, and shipped three boxes of stuff back at a cost of about $100. This was much cheaper than putting the boxes on the plane with her, since the new luggage fees would have cost me $300 for the boxes, in addition to the $40 we had to pay for her two suitcases.
Oh, yeah, forgot to mention...her flight to Florida was canceled due to weather, and she got stuck here in Virginia with me for another day. Not an easy trip home, by any regard.
Now you wanted to know about pay: none. She left the company with about 75 CDs and a couple of rolls of posters for the bands she worked with. She received glowing evaluations and the possibility of landing a permanent, paying position after graduation next spring. Other than that, no pay. Just a pile of CDs, nice words and a grade for school.
Did she enjoy it? Hell, yes, she loved every minute being in New York, working in the music biz, making friends, seeing family (my wife and I grew up in the area), and all the other great things that went along with it. She was very unhappy to have to leave there this weekend.
Any other recommendations?
Just consider the peripheral costs before you make the decision to come here. I just wanted to give you a small taste of what someone in the States had to lay out to intern in the States.
There were ways she could have saved some money, like on the housing. She could have stayed out in the suburbs with family, but that savings would have been offset by the cost of commuting and the long hours on trains every day. The company's business was centered in New York, so it made sense for her to have the convenience of being close by and not having to make those long commutes late at night. (She's nearly 22 and can take care of herself, but I'm still her Dad, she's still my baby, and I still worry).
Just remember to conside the total cost of your decision. Any internship payment will likely not offset the other expenses you'll need to consider. If getting the working experience and contacts is worth that expense (it certainly was for my kid), then you might just want to plunge in.
Your information security is one of our top priorities. We have a wide array of security features to protect your privacy, confidentiality, and data-security rights. For instance, we purge Social Security Numbers once we transmit them to the Transportation Security Administration as part of the security screening process.
Although airport personnel are responsible for viewing the Clear cards, TSA runs the background checks needed to issue the cards. It's worth noting that, according to Clear's privacy policy, the TSA holds onto the client's security information, performing continuous reviews. And because the TSA operates under the Department of Homeland Security, other federal agencies will have the same access to your information, a consideration many Big Brother-wary fliers may want to take.
So, unless something has changed since January (when the second quote was published), the TSA is still conducting those checks.
The loss of the laptop (now found, based on a story here this morning) doesn't make me feel that comfortable, especially based on Clear's claims of security in the first quote.
And, of course, you have they typical "BB is watching" complaints in the second quote.
But, as someone who's been required to have all this stuff checked and rechecked far deeper than anyone getting a Clear card, the idea that "other federal agencies will have the same access" to my personal information isn't really a big deal for me. Whatever the TSA has, it's probably nothing compared to what the DOD found for my security clearance. Hell, I got a couple of phone calls from people I hadn't seen in 20+ years who got a call from an investigator.
Then again, I'm one of those "nothing to hide" types. I don't enjoy the fact that this kind of things is necessary, but it is what it is. I hold back against things like this from other areas of my life, because I might see them as a true threat to my privacy. But I'm not losing any sleep over what the government knows about me, or anyone else. The fact is, no matter what you do, if your government wants to find out stuff about you, there ain't much you can do to stop it short of dying, if you even ever knew they were looking at you in the first place.
The key thing to remember is that there are LOT of people in this country. Since the federal government isn't very adept at doing enything (I've worked for/with them for 25+ years), I doubt they'd do a very good job of keeping a big database of dossiers on every citizen in the country. Any attempt at doing that would eventually be destroyed by agency infighting, lack of funding, crap work by contractors, and just a general lack of movement due to the size of the bureaucracy that would emerge from such a plan. That's not counting the political and legislative in-fighting over the idea, or the endless string of lawsuits that would follow such an announcement.
I don't see the need to worry. This would eventually collapse under it's own weight.
But I still jump the line at the airport. Suckers!
The TSA doesn't get the fee. The cards are not a government-issued product.
You pay a $28 enrollment fee one time, which is paid the the TSA for the background check. The $100 goes to Clear.
By the way, the best $100 I ever spent on travel. You have no idea.
I enrolled in the Clear program back in March. My reasons were very specific: I got tired of fighting long security lines at the airport, and since I work away from home and travel back and forth a lot, the convenience of this system is more than worth the $100.
I work in DC, and live in Jacksonville, FL, and I normally travel back to the District on Monday mornings. i was stunned to see how long the security lines were at Jax International, even at 6:15 in the morning, and with a full slate of TSA scanners and personnel on the job.
There is nothing like being able to walk past a line of three or four hundred flyers, skip right to the head of the line and be at the gate with enough time to hit the head and grab a coffee. I have zero stress when flying now.
That being said, I'm certainly upset about the laptop theft, and the "inside job" theories might have some truth to them, considering this was supposed to be in a locked office. I don't necessarily buy the "stolen to order' conspiracies, but it is worrisome. I'll continue to do what I always have - monitor all my accounts, credit reports, etc. and hope this gets solved in a quick and reasonable fashion.
As for the necessity to hand over a lot of private information, let me explain what the procedure is:
When you apply for a Clear card on line, you provide the same information, initially, that would would ordering a product: name, address, phone, and a credit card for the screening fee only ($28 which goes to the TSA). Part of the on-line application process is providing your SSN. In this care, it's a necessary evil, since Clear has to access information only you would know. I would assume they're getting this off credit reports or public records. You answer three or four questions, and if the answers are satisfactory, you move on to the next step. You print out a document with a registration number.
That step requires an appearance, in person, at the local airport with the Clear service counters. They check your registration, and you have to provide two forms of identification. One can be any government-issued picture ID. The other, however, must be a government-issued birth certificate or a valid passport. I tried to use a birth certificate issued by the hospital where I was born in 1955, but they refused to accept it. This required me to order a new BC from the state where I lived, and finsish the process another day.
Once that's finished, you stand at a kiosk and have all your fingerprints and one iris scanned. They save two or three of the fingerprints and the iris, and the data from both are eventually encoded into the chip on the smart card they issue you.
The wait for the card can be nearly a month.
As protective as I am of my privacy, I really didn't have a lot of issues with what I had to do to get this. I am an IT contractor and former federal employee, and I have a high security clearance. I had to give up a lot more during that investigation, including having family, friends and neighbors interviewed about my character. Since this is a requirement of the job, I have nothing in my past to hide, and it means a much higher salary, I'm not going to raise too much of a stink.
Clear, on the other hand, didn't get anything from me that isn't easily available (or steal-able) to anyone with a few dollars and a couple of private detectives on the Rolodex. Go to one of these "free credit report" sites and request to see what's on that thing. You have to answer some of those questions I mentioned before, and what they have is pretty interesting, and deep.
I'd be lying if I said this laptop theft doesn't worry me. I have the feeling that the idiot who stole it probably won't even look on the damn thing, and it will turn up, drive slicked, in some pawn shop.
In the meantime, I'll keep a close eye on everything sensitive (I get lots of practice at work).
And I'll still be jumping the line at the airport.
This isn't likely, unless the terrorist figure out a way to duplicate my iris and fingerprint. Clear was supposed to be issuing new cards this summer with photos attached, as well. I guess that might be sped up to some degree.
And where did you read that TSA/DHS didn't certify their procedure? TSA and DHS are the ones doing the background checks on all the applicants. I doubt very highly that this program would be used in as many airports as it has if there was no approval.
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...a cigar humidor, except for the cheesy brass bits on the corners. In fact, if it ever goes balls up, rip out the guts and give it to me. I've got a handful of La Gloria Cubanas and a few Camacho El-Legendarios that would fit in there very nicely.
Hey, I thought all the spying on citizens would end once the Bush Administration and their minions of fascism were chucked out of office?
Did I miss a memo from the new bunch, or what?
and of course corporations being the engines of greed they are will have not qualms about relocating the 'er' router, to the location where the least sales tax is charged.
Let's see...the "corporation" moves its "'er' router" to another location in order to shield its customers from having to pay a sales tax. The result is that the customer saves money twice...they're probably getting the item cheaper on line that in a brick-and-mortar. And they have the advantage of not having to pay that nasty state sales tax.
And this makes this business-savvy corporation an "engine of greed" how?
Oh, wait, that's right...they're an "engine of greed" because they're not simply giving the item to you for free. Right?
What makes the entire story laughable is the fact that the Cuban people are far too busy trying to simply survive in Castro's "worker's paradise." The idea that using Linux on the few available computers on the island is some kind of advancement means nothing when eating is your primary daily goal.
You also mentioned their "health care." All one has to do is spend five minutes here to see what the average Cuban's medical care consists of.
There isn't a single person posting here would would find this life acceptable. Yet people continue to worship Castro and Che as visionaries except for the murderers and thugs that they are.
Make all the arguments you like: the fact of the matter is the more you tax things, or the higher the rate of taxes you charge, the lower the revenue you will receive. I continue to be incredulous over the fact that politicians, especially those of a more "progressive" bent, fail to understand this basic concept.
Take cigarettes. The state of New York is pulling both ends on the smoking issue. They pay billions of dollars for programs to get people to quit smoking, including advertising and free stop-smoking aids (at taxpayer expense). Yet they look at raising taxes on cigarettes as a way to raise revenue. So what's it going to be? Do you want people to smoke or not? And do you really expect your tax revenue to rise by an increase in cigarette taxes?
The city and the state would be better off doing two things: shut down the useless anti-smoking campaign and cut the taxes on cigarettes. People are going to smoke, no matter what the nanny state does to stop it. The only way to stop smoking is to force quitting on the public by making tobacco possession and use illegal -- and we all know how well prohibition worked. They would be better off killing a useless program and allowing people to buy more cigarettes at a lower tax rate, because this would have the immediate effect of increasing tax revenues. That money could then be redirected to health and education.
This is the same situation that occurs with the transit system when ridership drops. The MTA gives in to union demands for high wages and benefits, even though there's less revenue coming in. Services have to be cut, which means you're paying people to sit around and do nothing. The only solution is to raise fares. Raise fares and riders will leave the system and find another way to get to work. And other than the "discounts" the MTA offered people for using the electronic Metrocards, I don't recall a time when they actually lowered the fare. Maybe trying this as an experiment would be interesting. Lower the fare - more people ride - more revenue comes in - as ridership increases, demand for services increase -- add back the services you cut -- more people ride -- revenue increases. What a vicious cycle.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who will argue that this doesn't work, but since it never gets tried, I suppose we'll never know, will we? Instead, all other aspects of the lives of New Yorkers are going to be burdened with higher costs.
Which is why I'm glad I abandoned that place 30 years ago.
Actually, it's believed that the G1 and Android actually are capable of multi-touch, and it's demonstrated in the video found here. This site raises the exact same question you did, and my uneducated guess is that this is just a development issue that will be resolved in a future Android update.
I can live without it for now. At my age, I'm lucky I can touch anything with one finger, let along two.
I'm very happy with my G1 and expect interesting things to develop for it over the next year.
I guess that means someone, somewhere is going to try to sue this guy.
...who rides out to the middle of Doak Campbell Stadium in the spotted horse and throws the flaming spear into...
Oh, wait, sorry...that's Chief Osceola.
Like anyone on this site would know anything about college football...
Wait a minute...Dell (and HP, and Lenovo, and Toshiba, ad infinitum) already tell me what software I can run on my new computer. And that's always Windows. I don't even get a choice of which Windows...I must take Vista or nothing. Or if I do convince one of them to give me XP, I must pay more money...or buy a model I might not want.
And my "choices" are limited even more by the fact that I must take when they give me but I cannot take "nothing." I can't ask them to sell me the computer without an operating system, because then they wouldn't be able to "support it." (As though they can support it if it goes tits up and does have Windows installed one it).
So, what's worse? Getting stuck with (and paying for) an operating system I don't want, and not having the choice of which version of the operating system I don't want? Or being unable to have no operating system so I can run the software I want?
Playing what I want on the guitar sounds like a good alternative. And though I think Stallman is a marxist nut, I'll invite him over for free sandwiches. He can even bring a homeless guy.
No, I'm not criticizing Microsoft for patching anything, or not patching anything (hard to say without a double negative). I don't care what Microsoft does.
I use Windows at work. I'm not a sysadmin or network admin (not anymore; I was for 10+ years). I don't work in security (I did, as part of the above). I'm a developer on a very large, distributed and secure network. I don't concern myself with bugs, security, malware, Trojans, etc. etc. because I don't need to. My work is secure and replicated, and if something evil gets on the network and screws up my machine, I can go home early. Tomorrow is another day.
At home, I don't use Windows. At all. Server, desktop, laptop. Not a byte of anything controlled by Microsoft. So, again, their inability to correct their problems before releasing doesn't concern me.
And while I know there are bugs in Linux, fifteen years of experience with it has demonstrated to me that it's a shorter problem, a faster fix, it's out in the open, and there's no one keeping a tally of how long it takes for a bug to get exploited. And none of my boxes have ever been compromised.
And that came out of the middle of my mouth.
Microsoft is now bragging about the fact that they predicted 40% of their bugs would be turned into exploits?
I realize that Windows is a complex hunk of crap...errr...operating system, but wouldn't they be better served trying to find and correct these issues rather then just releasing them into the wild and keeping their fingers crossed?
Their attitude is sort of like pointing the gun at your foot and firing five times, and bragging that you only hit two of your toes.
This is why, every day when I arrive at work, I log into this XP box and ask myself why my organization continues to put up with this garbage.
I'm sure this one feels legitimized. Finally.
A couple of days ago, there was a very passionate supporter at a McCain rally, who wanted Senator McCain to go after Obama harder on character issues.
"Senator, I'm begging you..." he pleaded, backed up by the cheers of a very partisan crowd..
Allow me to take a cue from that fellow...
I'm begging you to get your people to reconsider any of those three companies. I like Gmail and use it myself, but I would never allow those three companies to have any measure of control over the mail systems of a university.
Please consider for a moment that the student body at a large university is the primary demographic target for many companies and their mail (or their entire mail experience) will likely be inundated with tons of advertising. Other than Gmail, I can't imagine what kind of spam prevention the other two have in place, since Yahoo!'s mail servers are living, breathing pits of junk mail. Don't think for a moment that any of these companies wouldn't sell ad space and mail lists to the highest bidders.
I would strongly urge you to keep in in house, using one of the very fine FOSS solutions already mentioned in other posts.
I agree with you in principal on the privacy issues, but admittedly, I've gone the other way in a couple of ways. Let's get the Facebook thing out of the way: I have an active account that I set up out of curiosity. I'm a developer and wanted to at least see some things they were doing on the site. As it turns out, the only people who have "friended" me (the ex-English teacher in me is cringing) are one sister-in-law, my college-student daughter and a group of her friends. My photo is not too revealing, they don't have a lot of information about me. I generally only visit there when I need to contact my child, or frequently forgets to call her parents. By the way, that very fact that I have a presence on the site seemed to bother my daughter for a while (like I was invading some secret sanctuary), until all her pals "friended" (ugh) me and told her how cool they thought it was that I had an account.
I have two Google mail accounts. One is all personal stuff, and one was established for professional use, back when I was seeking my first contract position. I try not to be too paranoid about just what Google keeps on me in this regard, because if it weren't them, it would be my ISP, or my hosting company or someone else storing my mail. I'm a contractor for the DOD, with a security clearance, so I probably have a better understanding of how to protect myself in email comms than the average bear. But, I also don't worry about it too much; I'm a glass half-full person and I believe that Google makes a reasonable effort to protect the stuff of mine that they do have.
There's one other aspect of this that I keep in mind: having been a sysadmin for a number of years, I know how easily any individual admin working in any IT department could log into any server and poke around in my mail. That's the human element that will always be the single point-of-failure in keeping completely secret. But like a lot of other things over which I have no control (the economy, gas prices, my Jaguars being 2-3), I try to remain vigilant and hope that the best happens. Maybe this is an unreasonable approach for others, but it keeps me from going insane.
Trust me, having worked in some very secure, classified situations, I can tell you that most of the people with whom I have worked are decent folks who value privacy even more strongly than you, and they have little interest in seeing what the average person has in their inbox. The rest of them are too technically inept, ignorant or stupid to do anyone any harm. Trust me on this...
So for me, the convenience of Gmail is the key. I keep all my personal correspondence there, and I can access it anywhere, including my phone, anytime I want. I need to be able to do that. For that reason alone, the other risks are mitigated.
In order for it to be socialism, we have to actually get something out of it.
I'm sorry, maybe I missed something during the past 53 years...you actually get something out of socialism? Can you tell me what that might be? I'm running a list of socialist-based political governments, past and present, through my head, and I'm damned if I can come up with one where the citizens genuinely got something. That is, other than a controlling centralized government, restrictions an all economic activity and commerce, and "government services" that frequently fail to meet even minimum standards.
Yes, socialist systems always appear to work well at the outset, but they eventually collapse under their own weight, often under the hidden corruption of the leadership that's supposed to be providing everything for the "people."
I suppose I'll be accused of being a piggish capitalist, but no need for the socialists to get all riled up. You can get free health care in Cuba, the Socialist Worker's Paradise.
Well, I don't know where you're located on the SIPR, but here in that big, oddly-shaped building near the river alongside the city with the big pointy tower and the big white-domed place, we call that "a major pain in my ass."
I was working for the Navy in 1999 during the leadup to the Y2K fiasco. Like most other organizations, mine was freaking out over the possibility of half of their old 486 and early Pentium desktops screwing the pooch. One guy up the chain (my counterpart that the next highest command) literally forced us to spend about a grand on these useless clock-correction cards, half of which didn't work in many of the machines we had.
I went to the command CO and suggested simply upgrading the existing boxes with new motherboards, RAM and hard disks, which for about $300 could extend the life of the machines another year or so (we were NOT getting any money for new machines anytime soon).
Having worked with Mwave for personal needs and onesy-twosy items at the job, I called them and asked what they could do. They eventually put together about 40 kits with MBs, RAM and hard disk, shipped to us in Florida from California in two days, followed up with a call to make sure we were satisfied, and gave us a great price to boot. Of all the "kits," we had one issue, a single dead motherboard, which they immediately replaced and overnight shipped before we returned the bad on.
This was nine years ago. That they are still going strong and earning praises from the geeks in here says something about them.
Strongly recommended.
Well, the article wants you to consider really, really large values of 3.
Yes, you're right...but you show me someone who will give her an 11-week lease.
;-)
If she were staying longer, say, than three months, it would have been worth looking into a sublet or sharing arrangement. But, she was on a schedule and had to return home to begin school next week.
I work away from my Florida home in the DC area, so I have to fight the rent-and-share wars. I'm quite aware of how this works, and I have NEVER seen anyone in this city willing to rent to someone for less than six months.
However, I'll keep your comment in mind...she may wind up back there next year if they offer her a job. What parts of Brooklyn are "un-hip"? I always thought all of Brooklyn was hip. Didn't ed Norton use to call it the "Garden Spot of the World?"
What about the pay? Where I come from it is common to pay only a fraction of what your work is actually worth if it's called an 'internship.' Does this apply to the US as well?
Let me give you an example of the "pay." My daughter is entering her senior year at a large university in the South. She just completed an 11-week internship in New York with a large entertainment conglomerate's subsidiary.
We (her mother and I) paid for her plane fare up there from Florida. We helped her get a loan to pay for the housing in Brooklyn (about $3500 for the session, for a tiny room in a converted hotel that she shared with one other girl...that looked a lot different from the photos they posed on their web site). We made sure she had some money to start out with and a Metrocard to get back and forth to lower Manhattan.
When the whole thing was over, I made arrangements to pick her up, bring her back to where I work in Virginia to fly home, and shipped three boxes of stuff back at a cost of about $100. This was much cheaper than putting the boxes on the plane with her, since the new luggage fees would have cost me $300 for the boxes, in addition to the $40 we had to pay for her two suitcases.
Oh, yeah, forgot to mention...her flight to Florida was canceled due to weather, and she got stuck here in Virginia with me for another day. Not an easy trip home, by any regard.
Now you wanted to know about pay: none. She left the company with about 75 CDs and a couple of rolls of posters for the bands she worked with. She received glowing evaluations and the possibility of landing a permanent, paying position after graduation next spring. Other than that, no pay. Just a pile of CDs, nice words and a grade for school.
Did she enjoy it? Hell, yes, she loved every minute being in New York, working in the music biz, making friends, seeing family (my wife and I grew up in the area), and all the other great things that went along with it. She was very unhappy to have to leave there this weekend.
Any other recommendations?
Just consider the peripheral costs before you make the decision to come here. I just wanted to give you a small taste of what someone in the States had to lay out to intern in the States.
There were ways she could have saved some money, like on the housing. She could have stayed out in the suburbs with family, but that savings would have been offset by the cost of commuting and the long hours on trains every day. The company's business was centered in New York, so it made sense for her to have the convenience of being close by and not having to make those long commutes late at night. (She's nearly 22 and can take care of herself, but I'm still her Dad, she's still my baby, and I still worry).
Just remember to conside the total cost of your decision. Any internship payment will likely not offset the other expenses you'll need to consider. If getting the working experience and contacts is worth that expense (it certainly was for my kid), then you might just want to plunge in.
No, we conservatives wouldn't do that.
No, we'd figure out a way to make cannibalism a new way of implementing the death penalty. Just to piss off the libs.
Now, excuse me, I'm in the middle of a GTA session here.
From the Clear website:
and, from this site:
So, unless something has changed since January (when the second quote was published), the TSA is still conducting those checks.
The loss of the laptop (now found, based on a story here this morning) doesn't make me feel that comfortable, especially based on Clear's claims of security in the first quote.
And, of course, you have they typical "BB is watching" complaints in the second quote.
But, as someone who's been required to have all this stuff checked and rechecked far deeper than anyone getting a Clear card, the idea that "other federal agencies will have the same access" to my personal information isn't really a big deal for me. Whatever the TSA has, it's probably nothing compared to what the DOD found for my security clearance. Hell, I got a couple of phone calls from people I hadn't seen in 20+ years who got a call from an investigator.
Then again, I'm one of those "nothing to hide" types. I don't enjoy the fact that this kind of things is necessary, but it is what it is. I hold back against things like this from other areas of my life, because I might see them as a true threat to my privacy. But I'm not losing any sleep over what the government knows about me, or anyone else. The fact is, no matter what you do, if your government wants to find out stuff about you, there ain't much you can do to stop it short of dying, if you even ever knew they were looking at you in the first place.
The key thing to remember is that there are LOT of people in this country. Since the federal government isn't very adept at doing enything (I've worked for/with them for 25+ years), I doubt they'd do a very good job of keeping a big database of dossiers on every citizen in the country. Any attempt at doing that would eventually be destroyed by agency infighting, lack of funding, crap work by contractors, and just a general lack of movement due to the size of the bureaucracy that would emerge from such a plan. That's not counting the political and legislative in-fighting over the idea, or the endless string of lawsuits that would follow such an announcement.
I don't see the need to worry. This would eventually collapse under it's own weight.
But I still jump the line at the airport. Suckers!
The TSA doesn't get the fee. The cards are not a government-issued product. You pay a $28 enrollment fee one time, which is paid the the TSA for the background check. The $100 goes to Clear. By the way, the best $100 I ever spent on travel. You have no idea.
I enrolled in the Clear program back in March. My reasons were very specific: I got tired of fighting long security lines at the airport, and since I work away from home and travel back and forth a lot, the convenience of this system is more than worth the $100.
I work in DC, and live in Jacksonville, FL, and I normally travel back to the District on Monday mornings. i was stunned to see how long the security lines were at Jax International, even at 6:15 in the morning, and with a full slate of TSA scanners and personnel on the job.
There is nothing like being able to walk past a line of three or four hundred flyers, skip right to the head of the line and be at the gate with enough time to hit the head and grab a coffee. I have zero stress when flying now.
That being said, I'm certainly upset about the laptop theft, and the "inside job" theories might have some truth to them, considering this was supposed to be in a locked office. I don't necessarily buy the "stolen to order' conspiracies, but it is worrisome. I'll continue to do what I always have - monitor all my accounts, credit reports, etc. and hope this gets solved in a quick and reasonable fashion.
As for the necessity to hand over a lot of private information, let me explain what the procedure is:
When you apply for a Clear card on line, you provide the same information, initially, that would would ordering a product: name, address, phone, and a credit card for the screening fee only ($28 which goes to the TSA). Part of the on-line application process is providing your SSN. In this care, it's a necessary evil, since Clear has to access information only you would know. I would assume they're getting this off credit reports or public records. You answer three or four questions, and if the answers are satisfactory, you move on to the next step. You print out a document with a registration number.
That step requires an appearance, in person, at the local airport with the Clear service counters. They check your registration, and you have to provide two forms of identification. One can be any government-issued picture ID. The other, however, must be a government-issued birth certificate or a valid passport. I tried to use a birth certificate issued by the hospital where I was born in 1955, but they refused to accept it. This required me to order a new BC from the state where I lived, and finsish the process another day.
Once that's finished, you stand at a kiosk and have all your fingerprints and one iris scanned. They save two or three of the fingerprints and the iris, and the data from both are eventually encoded into the chip on the smart card they issue you.
The wait for the card can be nearly a month.
As protective as I am of my privacy, I really didn't have a lot of issues with what I had to do to get this. I am an IT contractor and former federal employee, and I have a high security clearance. I had to give up a lot more during that investigation, including having family, friends and neighbors interviewed about my character. Since this is a requirement of the job, I have nothing in my past to hide, and it means a much higher salary, I'm not going to raise too much of a stink.
Clear, on the other hand, didn't get anything from me that isn't easily available (or steal-able) to anyone with a few dollars and a couple of private detectives on the Rolodex. Go to one of these "free credit report" sites and request to see what's on that thing. You have to answer some of those questions I mentioned before, and what they have is pretty interesting, and deep.
I'd be lying if I said this laptop theft doesn't worry me. I have the feeling that the idiot who stole it probably won't even look on the damn thing, and it will turn up, drive slicked, in some pawn shop.
In the meantime, I'll keep a close eye on everything sensitive (I get lots of practice at work).
And I'll still be jumping the line at the airport.
This isn't likely, unless the terrorist figure out a way to duplicate my iris and fingerprint. Clear was supposed to be issuing new cards this summer with photos attached, as well. I guess that might be sped up to some degree.
And where did you read that TSA/DHS didn't certify their procedure? TSA and DHS are the ones doing the background checks on all the applicants. I doubt very highly that this program would be used in as many airports as it has if there was no approval.