'm trying to find instructions for modifying the security in Outlook 2000 as well, so it doesn't do anything automatically without a) my approval at the very least, or b) me asking it to run an attachment.
The following is a way to do this in Outlook '97, but there should be something similar in 2000.
Go to Tools - Options
Click the Security tab
In the Secure Content Setting box put Restricted Zone
Now, Hit the Zone Settings button
Hit the Customize button
And crank up all of the security settings to the desired level (mine are pretty much disable everything)
Its amazing, despite our company having been hit by plenty of viruses in the past, I have never been infected with one, and I have Outlook open constantly, and I use the preview pane. Up until our IS department finally started getting things in hand, I usually saw the results of a virus (email flood) before I had a chance to read about it. Thank goodness they finally have it under control, no matter how many emails I got to the contrary, I know that no one at the corporate office loves me.
Lets please try to keep things in perspective here.
More than willing to, but it would seem that in the case at hand, that the RIAA is filing suit against the Morpheus people for:
Streamcast bought thousands of CDs with thousands of songs and then transferred the music onto a digital database on computer hard drives and other memory devices without the permission of the copyright owners.
Basically, the RIAA is sueing Streamcast for doing something that has been repeatedly held as legal fair use. They didn't ever make the songs available, in fact they didn't because they couldn't get the necessary license to do so. It would seem that they were at least trying to do things the right way, but the RIAA wouldn't play ball, so they stopped. Remembe, if you buy a CD, you are allowed to format shift the contents of that CD. This is just a frivilious lawsuit designed to bleed Streamcast dry of money.
So, there's the perspective for you, its the RIAA with a very clearly frivilious lawsuit. Now please, before you rant off next time RTFA.
Actually, I was wondering about this sort of thing. If all it takes is a fax to your local ISP to request the information of some person, could people organize a sort of DDOS style attack on an ISP? Basically, we get enough people from/. to start sending requests to one ISP and see if we can bury that ISP in so many requests that it will be unable to service any new requests in a realistic amount of time. This would also have the added benefit of pissing that ISP off about this particular law, and maybe after enough such attacks there would be enough money behind getting this sillyness killed off to actually accomplish it.
Actually, I think it would be interesting to keep some of the scale up, though they may have to shorten some of the drop offs. Personally, I'm not much for speedball (yes, I actually do paintball). I've always found it more intersting to actually have to hunt down your opponents, not just lay down as much paint as possible. Sadly, the only field I knew that was like this, in my area, closed down a while back.
Hmm, do you have an older version, I went to the site and didn't get the pop-up at all. I did see the bit in the page source you are refering to, but it didn't affect me at all.
If I claim that I saw a mouse in your bedroom, you wouldn't require much evidence to believe me.
If I claim that I saw a fully-grown African elephant in your bedroom, you would require significantly more evidence before you would believe me.
If both claims would require the same amount of proof before they would be accepted, we would either be accepting virtually nothing or virtually everything.
The reason science works is that the proof is never 100% final.
Not really, technically they should both require the same amount of evidence, simply that I see the animal in my bedroom. While I would tend to expect one situation to be more likely, and thus may base my hypothesis on that assumption, there is still the same burden of proof, show me the mouse or elephant. Blindly accepting something as true or false based solely upon the likelyhood of it happening is not good science.
I have to agree with the poster above, extrodinary claim or not, its still the same amount of proof needed. Some things are just eaiser to prove.
I work with this technology daily, I happen to work for a company that makes physical security systems, and probably have worked with the type of reader you are talking about. While I have seen readers that can hit a foot, or even a couple of feet range, none of these have been smart-card readers. There is a major difference between your standard wiegand type cards and smart cards, and a lot of this is the amount of data transmitted. So far, the best Mifare card readers I have seen (type of smart card mentioned in article) have about a 4 inch range and have to be held there for a couple seconds. Plus, the security of this stuff can be incresed greatly by also requiring a fingerprint ID from the card holder. In the case of the readers I have worked with, the fingerprint can be stored either on the card itself (encrypted) or in a database. When the card is presented you simply place your index finger (not the thumb, it doesn't scan as well) on a pad and wait a second. If they want to impliment contactless credit cards, I would see this sort of thing as a requirement.
BTW, if you still have access to that reader, get a card or two from your co-workers, stack them together, then present them to the reader. You'll find that they don't read very well, or at all. Now, considering this, if you happen to have 2 or three of these contactless cards in your wallet, it'd make it a real pain for someone to simply bump into you and read your cards.
That's a good point, though I would still wonder if the up front costs are also keeping people from even trying the game. As it is, I personally refuse to get involved in any MMOG due to this type of pricing. I see it as absolutly ridiculous, that I should pay $50 for a game, and then pay $10-$20 a month to continue playing. If it was more like $25 up front and then the $10-$20 a month I might be more inclined to give it a go. So, like most things in business, its a balancing act, somewhere between infinite cost and zero cost is a point at which you will get a lot of customers and maximize your profits. I personally tend to think that $50 is above the right price point, but maybe I am just a minority.
Re:Too bad it's only a case-mod
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And if you played the games:
"We put all of the bugs it it to start with, that way if someone says it has a bug, we can say no, its not a bug its an undocumented creature."
Are you kidding? Cops face more scrutiny in these situations. If a cop lets his emotions get the better of him (during the course of an extremely emotional job) for even an instant, he faces the loss of his job, or even faces jail time. See the case of Julie Cayer in Ottawa. A cop arrests a belligerent, abusive, resisting suspect, and in one brief moment while subduing her, bangs her head onto his car, and bang, he's guilty of assault.
And this is the way it should be. While I will agree that most of the police officers are fine people who are really trying to protect and serve, the position of authority that has been granted them is ripe for abuse. One bad cop can ruin the lives of many people very quickly. History provides us with enough evidence of officers who misued their authority to the detriment of the people they were supposed to be protecting. As such, we have learned that the police must be watched constantly, and if one shows any sign of becoming a problem, they must be removed. Its the same thing that has to be true in any free society, the more power a person is granted the greater the scrutiny that person must be put under. Sadly, this is not always the case here in the US, but this is really a necessity if a country is to remain free and open. As soon as those with power can start hiding their indiscretions, you can bet that they will start to be corrupted by their power.
So while, yes, there is sometimes a bit of over-zeliotness in protecting the rights of the person being arrested (mind you, they are still innocent until proven guilty no matter how belligerent, abusive, resisting they might be, maybe they really are innocent and have a bit of a right to be pissed), the police, due to their granted powers, must be held to a higher standard of conduct than the average person. And, I would tend to agree, due to the nature of their, job a few more protections should exist for their well being.
You're probably technically right, but my question is, does it matter? How many people here do you really think got it wrong? Considering that the whole point of language is to convey ideas, if the point is understood, why quibble with the details?
Or, to put it more bluntly, get the stick out of your ass and get a life.
To everyone else: I apologize for my rant, its still early and I haven't have my tea yet.
Well, since you were willing to sign you name to that drivel, I'll take the time to respond.
California cecede from the Union? And we get to take the plains states as well? Damn, yes, thank you very much, where do I sign up? You do, of course, realize that California is, by itself, something like the 5th largest economy in the world? And with the addition of Texas and the plains states we should be able to edge out the remaining US. On top of that, it looks like we have most of the major food producing states (hungry, no problem, but it'll cost ya.) Let's see, Silicon Valley, home of much of the computer industry in the US. Long Beach, primary location of Oil refinement in the US, and hey we have Texas as well, so we also get to drill for it too, want some gas? And what about military and research, ok you have MIT, we've got LANL LLNL, and many of the factories.
So, everything West of the Appliachian mountains should just cecede from the Union and do it ourselves, I agree, let's.
There's nothing constraining car companies from introducing hybrid SUV's or even electric ones.
Actually Ford is about to do this.
The Ford Escape is a hybrid SUV. They are estimating between 35-40 miles per gallon, not bad for a vehicle that size, though the 4WD version will get a bit less. Its due out in '04, and from what they say on their site, it'll probably price in the low to mid $30k range. With any luck I'll be in the market for a new vehicle about thar time, and this could be a really good option.
BTW, not all of us are Dwarves.
Amen, most of the econo-boxes are designed for midgets. I remember seeing commercials claim that you could get "4 full sized adults" in one of those little boxes. My response is, umm, no, at least not what my friends and I consider full size. I'm 6'3", 265 lbs (just a bit overweight), and I'm about the average size of the people I hang out with. Right now the only way to get 4 of us in a vehicle is to take my sedan sized vehicle. And even then we have to be creative in the seating arragements to make sure that everyone has enough leg room. I'd love to be more helpful to the environment, but I really hate it when my legs fall asleep from being cramped too long.
Also, to think the issue is simply a matter of "feeling elitist" is to completely miss the point. It's not about being 31337; it's about taking back our privacy, and taking control over our *own* net experience, instead of being passively spoon-fed by the major corporations.
Relax, install Mozilla, turn on pop-up blocking. Any ads you do see, right click, block images from this server. Next, open up your hosts file and start editing.
Personally, I surf nearly ad free at this point, I don't block the ones here at slashdot, some of them are actually interesting. And I usually see the banners on any site I haven't been to before, but if I plan to come back and don't like the ads I am seeing, I blackhole them. Its really not that hard, sure, its sucks that I have to try at all, but its simply another game between me and the marketing weasles, and IMO I'm winning.
I don't think the internet is "dying" per se. It is slowly evolving. Its like anything else, if people can make a buck using it, they are going to try. Eventually it will probably find an equalibrium between content and ads. On the plus side, with things such as blogs, there will probably be a good amount of content (not necessarilly good) compared to the ads. Part of that is spam, its is here to stay, it is profitable, no matter how dubious. Much like viruses it will likely become an arms race between the spammers and the ISP and mail clients. (Side note, I like the idea of baysian filtering, and have it via Mozilla 1.3, though because I protect my email address I don't get spam). I think anybody who says that the internet is dying really isn't paying attention.
Must just be the company you dealt with. Personally, I own a Swiss Army knife, they provide a lifetime warranty, and will replace it for just about any reason. For example, mine went up Kelso Dune with me 3 times, was kept in my pocket constantly, went on numerous camping trips with me, and got the hell beaten out of it in general. And, of course, I was really bad about oiling and cleaning it. So, unsuprisingly, the blades became harder and harder to open, and eventually I just couldn't get them open anymore. So, I boxed it up with a letter and sent it back to Victorinox, about a week later a brand new copy of my knife arrived, which I have treated a little better and have been very happy with. On the same strain, my Father managed to snap the small blade on his knife (Swiss Army again), by using it to pry something open, when he called them about getting it repaired they offered to replace the knife. Mind you, it was given to him when he was about 10 (nearly 50 years ago at this point). Sometimes, lifetime warranty actually means damn near forever.
Since I've been looking at getting one of these, I have to ask, how good of job does it do? Is it really a fire and forget type thing, or do you have to go back and touch up afterwards?
And if you believe that doing eight hours worth of work for eight hours worth of pay is a "fast food" mentality, then look around at the economic prosperity that your mindset has gotten us.
Oh, wait, what's that? we're in a recession? Could it be because people didn't want to do the work they were paid for? [sarcasm]Nawwww.... [/sarcasm]
Funny, I seemt to recall that the recession is linked to over-exuberience on the part of venture capitalists who were willing to throw money at any thing with a.com on the end without really verifying that the.com had a valid business model. This was, unsuprisingly, followed by a huge crash when it was realized that 90% of these companies did not have a good business model, and that their stocks were so far over-valued as to be ridiculious. Natually, the VC's stopped supporting companies, twho couldn't pay their bills and got liquidataed, anyone who still held investments in that company took it in the shorts. There was a sudden glut of workers available, who had too high of pay expectations, and everyone got scared and stopped investing. And for the icing on the cake the media has been screaming gloom and doom non-stop and people are beliveing it, which means no one is investing. And now, we have a war on (or just ending), which has affected gas prices, and kept the entire market jittery. What we need is a year or two of peace and certainty, and for the VC's to start putting money into new businesses again. Once the investments start happening again things will get better.
So, is any of this the fault of the employees playing nerf wars? Nope, its the fault of a lot of faulty business plans, and the VC's who bought into it.
As for the idea of having breaks in the day for your employees, you might find that they are more productive if they are allowed to breath every now and again. I don't feel like looking it up at the moment, but I do recall that several studies have been done which show that a more relaxed atmosphere leads to higher morale, which improves the quality of the work done. So, unless all you care about is quantity (say, a fast food resturant) and don't care about quality (say, running a network), then by all means do every thing you can to make your employees miserable. And also, good luck on your turnover rate, cause unless you pay really damn well, once someone is decently trained they are gonna leave.
I'm definetly a techno-geek, but I'm also a pragmatist. Electronic voting isn't going to solve any more problems than it creates.
While I agree that there will be problems, I do think that a move to electronic voting will help reduce the number of problems in voting. And the the problems you put forth, while valid concerns, are easily solved:
* The hardware and software are proprietary and not open to public review. My paper has a full page copy of the ballots before every election so the public can review it.
I would expect that the interface would be public knowledge, it would require a bit more space in your paper, but could be covered sufficiently. As for the source code being closed, I don't think this is really an issue as long as there is a paper trail to double check the results against. Also, I would expect that it could be required, by law, that the source code is reviewable by independent parties (with applicable NDA's of course). And, of course, keep in mind that even if the code is open source, it would be trivial for the company to compile from a modified code base which is not known about. If we're going to assume that there would be a big conspiracy to disenfranchise the voters, why stop with just the basic idea, let's give the Men in Black a bit of intellegence.
* Not accessible. How do people missing vision or limbs use them?
How do they currently vote with punch cards? For the blind, braile I would assume, this could be implimented on a special braile station. just create a dynamic braile interface to allow them to vote. The technology exists, remember the handshake over the internet story a few months back? As for the parapaligic, it would be a case of using the same type of mouth pusher that they use for many applications, could still use the touch screen.
* How are the results audited? Do the electronic logs go into the public domain?
The paper trail is treated just like it is today, its kept in locked boxes and audited according to the same practices. And, I like your idea, post the electronic results to a web site, whoever wishes to see them may.
* Is the incredible expense and TCO of these machines justified? Paper ballots are practically free by comparison.
This is, of course, a matter of opinion. I personally feel that the wrangling over Florida, and the long delay in having the election decided cost a lot of money, and created uncertainty in the financial markets. So I see the costs of a more reliable system as acceptable.
* What about absentee voting? What wacky "voting method of the future" can we come for that?
Until better comes along, this will probably have to be handled as it currently is, by mail in paper ballots (ScanTron), which would be counted by hand and read into the computer based system for tallying.
I will agree, we need to be careful in how this done, but I don't think that an electronic based system could be any worse, or even as bad as the punch card systems used now.
I've got the same thing on my cell, and its really useful for me. Very rarely do I ever have to change the word it comes up with (unless of course, I mispelled it to begin with). Really useful feature as far as I am concerned, but hey, to each their own.
Actually, just add in an ORDER BY statement and we have this exact same thing as they have patented:
select top 1 toy_name from tbltoys where toy_name like 'PO%' order by number_purchased desc
Just drop that in a stored procedure, and have the program call that procedure, then use the output to fill in a text field, ala autocomplete. This is not exactly revolutionary, its a damn ORDER BY clause in a SELECT statement. If you want to get fancy, you'd probably go ahead and index both the toy_name and number_purchased columns.
Actually, I kind of like VB for certain purposes. I am not, nor do I have any wish to be a programmer, but sometimes there are things you just can't do in a batch file, and dammit if VB isn't a nice way to get around this limitation. Not to mention that it looks a bit cleaner, and certainly less scary, to the average end user, than a command prompt. Plus the ability to send windows messages (logoff and the like) can be really damn useful.
So yes, VB is another MS product, but it can still be a very useful tool if you live in a windows world, and don't want to bother with becomming a programmer.
The question I have now, as I did the last time the US Treasury decided to do this sort of thing is, why would a forger bother with trying to forge one of the newer looking bills? The old $20's are still accepted everywhere, and have not become harder to forge. Seriously, if I was going to do something like this I would just make up a batch of older style $20's, put them in a wallet and run them through a few washer/dryer cycles to make them look a bit beat up. Then trek down to my local Wal-Mart and pass a few of them off to buy stuff. Wash-Rinse-Repeat (literally).
If anything this is just another example of our tax dollars being wasted in a futile attempt to stop a crime which, I believe, is not very rampant. This money could be better spent keeping the govenment out of debt and keeping inflation down. Sure the counterfeit bills increse inflation, but probably less so than the government printing more money everytime it feels the need. If anything, I think we would be better off if the govenment would only print as much money as it destroys, and then turn the presses off.
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'm trying to find instructions for modifying the security in Outlook 2000 as well, so it doesn't do anything automatically without a) my approval at the very least, or b) me asking it to run an attachment.
The following is a way to do this in Outlook '97, but there should be something similar in 2000.
Go to Tools - Options
Click the Security tab
In the Secure Content Setting box put Restricted Zone
Now, Hit the Zone Settings button
Hit the Customize button
And crank up all of the security settings to the desired level (mine are pretty much disable everything)
Its amazing, despite our company having been hit by plenty of viruses in the past, I have never been infected with one, and I have Outlook open constantly, and I use the preview pane. Up until our IS department finally started getting things in hand, I usually saw the results of a virus (email flood) before I had a chance to read about it. Thank goodness they finally have it under control, no matter how many emails I got to the contrary, I know that no one at the corporate office loves me.
Lets please try to keep things in perspective here.
More than willing to, but it would seem that in the case at hand, that the RIAA is filing suit against the Morpheus people for:
Streamcast bought thousands of CDs with thousands of songs and then transferred the music onto a digital database on computer hard drives and other memory devices without the permission of the copyright owners.
Basically, the RIAA is sueing Streamcast for doing something that has been repeatedly held as legal fair use. They didn't ever make the songs available, in fact they didn't because they couldn't get the necessary license to do so. It would seem that they were at least trying to do things the right way, but the RIAA wouldn't play ball, so they stopped. Remembe, if you buy a CD, you are allowed to format shift the contents of that CD. This is just a frivilious lawsuit designed to bleed Streamcast dry of money.
So, there's the perspective for you, its the RIAA with a very clearly frivilious lawsuit. Now please, before you rant off next time RTFA.
Actually, I was wondering about this sort of thing. If all it takes is a fax to your local ISP to request the information of some person, could people organize a sort of DDOS style attack on an ISP? Basically, we get enough people from /. to start sending requests to one ISP and see if we can bury that ISP in so many requests that it will be unable to service any new requests in a realistic amount of time. This would also have the added benefit of pissing that ISP off about this particular law, and maybe after enough such attacks there would be enough money behind getting this sillyness killed off to actually accomplish it.
Actually, I think it would be interesting to keep some of the scale up, though they may have to shorten some of the drop offs. Personally, I'm not much for speedball (yes, I actually do paintball). I've always found it more intersting to actually have to hunt down your opponents, not just lay down as much paint as possible. Sadly, the only field I knew that was like this, in my area, closed down a while back.
I stand corrected, I did a quick read and apparently missed that detail. Thank goodness I own the same type of drive you do, damn good drive so far.
Hmm, do you have an older version, I went to the site and didn't get the pop-up at all. I did see the bit in the page source you are refering to, but it didn't affect me at all.
That you see the elephant in the bedroom in the first place should make that evidence quite extraordinary.
Naw, just the situation and the mess I'm gonna have to clean up. I don't even want to think about what was done to my door to get it in there.
Actually, any of their drives from their Caviar line have a three year warranty.
source
Personally I swear by Western Digital already, I don't need an article of dubious validity to convince me of that.
If I claim that I saw a mouse in your bedroom, you wouldn't require much evidence to believe me.
If I claim that I saw a fully-grown African elephant in your bedroom, you would require significantly more evidence before you would believe me.
If both claims would require the same amount of proof before they would be accepted, we would either be accepting virtually nothing or virtually everything.
The reason science works is that the proof is never 100% final.
Not really, technically they should both require the same amount of evidence, simply that I see the animal in my bedroom. While I would tend to expect one situation to be more likely, and thus may base my hypothesis on that assumption, there is still the same burden of proof, show me the mouse or elephant. Blindly accepting something as true or false based solely upon the likelyhood of it happening is not good science.
I have to agree with the poster above, extrodinary claim or not, its still the same amount of proof needed. Some things are just eaiser to prove.
I work with this technology daily, I happen to work for a company that makes physical security systems, and probably have worked with the type of reader you are talking about. While I have seen readers that can hit a foot, or even a couple of feet range, none of these have been smart-card readers. There is a major difference between your standard wiegand type cards and smart cards, and a lot of this is the amount of data transmitted. So far, the best Mifare card readers I have seen (type of smart card mentioned in article) have about a 4 inch range and have to be held there for a couple seconds. Plus, the security of this stuff can be incresed greatly by also requiring a fingerprint ID from the card holder. In the case of the readers I have worked with, the fingerprint can be stored either on the card itself (encrypted) or in a database. When the card is presented you simply place your index finger (not the thumb, it doesn't scan as well) on a pad and wait a second. If they want to impliment contactless credit cards, I would see this sort of thing as a requirement.
BTW, if you still have access to that reader, get a card or two from your co-workers, stack them together, then present them to the reader. You'll find that they don't read very well, or at all. Now, considering this, if you happen to have 2 or three of these contactless cards in your wallet, it'd make it a real pain for someone to simply bump into you and read your cards.
That's a good point, though I would still wonder if the up front costs are also keeping people from even trying the game. As it is, I personally refuse to get involved in any MMOG due to this type of pricing. I see it as absolutly ridiculous, that I should pay $50 for a game, and then pay $10-$20 a month to continue playing. If it was more like $25 up front and then the $10-$20 a month I might be more inclined to give it a go. So, like most things in business, its a balancing act, somewhere between infinite cost and zero cost is a point at which you will get a lot of customers and maximize your profits. I personally tend to think that $50 is above the right price point, but maybe I am just a minority.
And if you played the games:
"We put all of the bugs it it to start with, that way if someone says it has a bug, we can say no, its not a bug its an undocumented creature."
Are you kidding? Cops face more scrutiny in these situations. If a cop lets his emotions get the better of him (during the course of an extremely emotional job) for even an instant, he faces the loss of his job, or even faces jail time. See the case of Julie Cayer in Ottawa. A cop arrests a belligerent, abusive, resisting suspect, and in one brief moment while subduing her, bangs her head onto his car, and bang, he's guilty of assault.
And this is the way it should be. While I will agree that most of the police officers are fine people who are really trying to protect and serve, the position of authority that has been granted them is ripe for abuse. One bad cop can ruin the lives of many people very quickly. History provides us with enough evidence of officers who misued their authority to the detriment of the people they were supposed to be protecting. As such, we have learned that the police must be watched constantly, and if one shows any sign of becoming a problem, they must be removed. Its the same thing that has to be true in any free society, the more power a person is granted the greater the scrutiny that person must be put under. Sadly, this is not always the case here in the US, but this is really a necessity if a country is to remain free and open. As soon as those with power can start hiding their indiscretions, you can bet that they will start to be corrupted by their power.
So while, yes, there is sometimes a bit of over-zeliotness in protecting the rights of the person being arrested (mind you, they are still innocent until proven guilty no matter how belligerent, abusive, resisting they might be, maybe they really are innocent and have a bit of a right to be pissed), the police, due to their granted powers, must be held to a higher standard of conduct than the average person. And, I would tend to agree, due to the nature of their, job a few more protections should exist for their well being.
You're probably technically right, but my question is, does it matter? How many people here do you really think got it wrong? Considering that the whole point of language is to convey ideas, if the point is understood, why quibble with the details?
Or, to put it more bluntly, get the stick out of your ass and get a life.
To everyone else: I apologize for my rant, its still early and I haven't have my tea yet.
Well, since you were willing to sign you name to that drivel, I'll take the time to respond.
California cecede from the Union? And we get to take the plains states as well? Damn, yes, thank you very much, where do I sign up? You do, of course, realize that California is, by itself, something like the 5th largest economy in the world? And with the addition of Texas and the plains states we should be able to edge out the remaining US. On top of that, it looks like we have most of the major food producing states (hungry, no problem, but it'll cost ya.) Let's see, Silicon Valley, home of much of the computer industry in the US. Long Beach, primary location of Oil refinement in the US, and hey we have Texas as well, so we also get to drill for it too, want some gas? And what about military and research, ok you have MIT, we've got LANL LLNL, and many of the factories.
So, everything West of the Appliachian mountains should just cecede from the Union and do it ourselves, I agree, let's.
There's nothing constraining car companies from introducing hybrid SUV's or even electric ones.
Actually Ford is about to do this. The Ford Escape is a hybrid SUV. They are estimating between 35-40 miles per gallon, not bad for a vehicle that size, though the 4WD version will get a bit less. Its due out in '04, and from what they say on their site, it'll probably price in the low to mid $30k range. With any luck I'll be in the market for a new vehicle about thar time, and this could be a really good option.
BTW, not all of us are Dwarves.
Amen, most of the econo-boxes are designed for midgets. I remember seeing commercials claim that you could get "4 full sized adults" in one of those little boxes. My response is, umm, no, at least not what my friends and I consider full size. I'm 6'3", 265 lbs (just a bit overweight), and I'm about the average size of the people I hang out with. Right now the only way to get 4 of us in a vehicle is to take my sedan sized vehicle. And even then we have to be creative in the seating arragements to make sure that everyone has enough leg room. I'd love to be more helpful to the environment, but I really hate it when my legs fall asleep from being cramped too long.
Also, to think the issue is simply a matter of "feeling elitist" is to completely miss the point. It's not about being 31337; it's about taking back our privacy, and taking control over our *own* net experience, instead of being passively spoon-fed by the major corporations.
Relax, install Mozilla, turn on pop-up blocking. Any ads you do see, right click, block images from this server. Next, open up your hosts file and start editing.
Personally, I surf nearly ad free at this point, I don't block the ones here at slashdot, some of them are actually interesting. And I usually see the banners on any site I haven't been to before, but if I plan to come back and don't like the ads I am seeing, I blackhole them. Its really not that hard, sure, its sucks that I have to try at all, but its simply another game between me and the marketing weasles, and IMO I'm winning.
I don't think the internet is "dying" per se. It is slowly evolving. Its like anything else, if people can make a buck using it, they are going to try. Eventually it will probably find an equalibrium between content and ads. On the plus side, with things such as blogs, there will probably be a good amount of content (not necessarilly good) compared to the ads. Part of that is spam, its is here to stay, it is profitable, no matter how dubious. Much like viruses it will likely become an arms race between the spammers and the ISP and mail clients. (Side note, I like the idea of baysian filtering, and have it via Mozilla 1.3, though because I protect my email address I don't get spam). I think anybody who says that the internet is dying really isn't paying attention.
Must just be the company you dealt with. Personally, I own a Swiss Army knife, they provide a lifetime warranty, and will replace it for just about any reason. For example, mine went up Kelso Dune with me 3 times, was kept in my pocket constantly, went on numerous camping trips with me, and got the hell beaten out of it in general. And, of course, I was really bad about oiling and cleaning it. So, unsuprisingly, the blades became harder and harder to open, and eventually I just couldn't get them open anymore. So, I boxed it up with a letter and sent it back to Victorinox, about a week later a brand new copy of my knife arrived, which I have treated a little better and have been very happy with. On the same strain, my Father managed to snap the small blade on his knife (Swiss Army again), by using it to pry something open, when he called them about getting it repaired they offered to replace the knife. Mind you, it was given to him when he was about 10 (nearly 50 years ago at this point). Sometimes, lifetime warranty actually means damn near forever.
Since I've been looking at getting one of these, I have to ask, how good of job does it do? Is it really a fire and forget type thing, or do you have to go back and touch up afterwards?
And if you believe that doing eight hours worth of work for eight hours worth of pay is a "fast food" mentality, then look around at the economic prosperity that your mindset has gotten us.
.com on the end without really verifying that the .com had a valid business model. This was, unsuprisingly, followed by a huge crash when it was realized that 90% of these companies did not have a good business model, and that their stocks were so far over-valued as to be ridiculious. Natually, the VC's stopped supporting companies, twho couldn't pay their bills and got liquidataed, anyone who still held investments in that company took it in the shorts. There was a sudden glut of workers available, who had too high of pay expectations, and everyone got scared and stopped investing. And for the icing on the cake the media has been screaming gloom and doom non-stop and people are beliveing it, which means no one is investing. And now, we have a war on (or just ending), which has affected gas prices, and kept the entire market jittery. What we need is a year or two of peace and certainty, and for the VC's to start putting money into new businesses again. Once the investments start happening again things will get better.
Oh, wait, what's that? we're in a recession? Could it be because people didn't want to do the work they were paid for? [sarcasm]Nawwww.... [/sarcasm]
Funny, I seemt to recall that the recession is linked to over-exuberience on the part of venture capitalists who were willing to throw money at any thing with a
So, is any of this the fault of the employees playing nerf wars? Nope, its the fault of a lot of faulty business plans, and the VC's who bought into it.
As for the idea of having breaks in the day for your employees, you might find that they are more productive if they are allowed to breath every now and again. I don't feel like looking it up at the moment, but I do recall that several studies have been done which show that a more relaxed atmosphere leads to higher morale, which improves the quality of the work done. So, unless all you care about is quantity (say, a fast food resturant) and don't care about quality (say, running a network), then by all means do every thing you can to make your employees miserable. And also, good luck on your turnover rate, cause unless you pay really damn well, once someone is decently trained they are gonna leave.
I'm definetly a techno-geek, but I'm also a pragmatist. Electronic voting isn't going to solve any more problems than it creates.
While I agree that there will be problems, I do think that a move to electronic voting will help reduce the number of problems in voting. And the the problems you put forth, while valid concerns, are easily solved:
* The hardware and software are proprietary and not open to public review. My paper has a full page copy of the ballots before every election so the public can review it.
I would expect that the interface would be public knowledge, it would require a bit more space in your paper, but could be covered sufficiently. As for the source code being closed, I don't think this is really an issue as long as there is a paper trail to double check the results against. Also, I would expect that it could be required, by law, that the source code is reviewable by independent parties (with applicable NDA's of course). And, of course, keep in mind that even if the code is open source, it would be trivial for the company to compile from a modified code base which is not known about. If we're going to assume that there would be a big conspiracy to disenfranchise the voters, why stop with just the basic idea, let's give the Men in Black a bit of intellegence.
* Not accessible. How do people missing vision or limbs use them?
How do they currently vote with punch cards? For the blind, braile I would assume, this could be implimented on a special braile station. just create a dynamic braile interface to allow them to vote. The technology exists, remember the handshake over the internet story a few months back? As for the parapaligic, it would be a case of using the same type of mouth pusher that they use for many applications, could still use the touch screen.
* How are the results audited? Do the electronic logs go into the public domain?
The paper trail is treated just like it is today, its kept in locked boxes and audited according to the same practices. And, I like your idea, post the electronic results to a web site, whoever wishes to see them may.
* Is the incredible expense and TCO of these machines justified? Paper ballots are practically free by comparison.
This is, of course, a matter of opinion. I personally feel that the wrangling over Florida, and the long delay in having the election decided cost a lot of money, and created uncertainty in the financial markets. So I see the costs of a more reliable system as acceptable.
* What about absentee voting? What wacky "voting method of the future" can we come for that?
Until better comes along, this will probably have to be handled as it currently is, by mail in paper ballots (ScanTron), which would be counted by hand and read into the computer based system for tallying.
I will agree, we need to be careful in how this done, but I don't think that an electronic based system could be any worse, or even as bad as the punch card systems used now.
I've got the same thing on my cell, and its really useful for me. Very rarely do I ever have to change the word it comes up with (unless of course, I mispelled it to begin with). Really useful feature as far as I am concerned, but hey, to each their own.
Actually, just add in an ORDER BY statement and we have this exact same thing as they have patented:
select top 1 toy_name from tbltoys where toy_name like 'PO%' order by number_purchased desc
Just drop that in a stored procedure, and have the program call that procedure, then use the output to fill in a text field, ala autocomplete. This is not exactly revolutionary, its a damn ORDER BY clause in a SELECT statement. If you want to get fancy, you'd probably go ahead and index both the toy_name and number_purchased columns.
Actually, I kind of like VB for certain purposes. I am not, nor do I have any wish to be a programmer, but sometimes there are things you just can't do in a batch file, and dammit if VB isn't a nice way to get around this limitation. Not to mention that it looks a bit cleaner, and certainly less scary, to the average end user, than a command prompt. Plus the ability to send windows messages (logoff and the like) can be really damn useful.
So yes, VB is another MS product, but it can still be a very useful tool if you live in a windows world, and don't want to bother with becomming a programmer.
The question I have now, as I did the last time the US Treasury decided to do this sort of thing is, why would a forger bother with trying to forge one of the newer looking bills? The old $20's are still accepted everywhere, and have not become harder to forge. Seriously, if I was going to do something like this I would just make up a batch of older style $20's, put them in a wallet and run them through a few washer/dryer cycles to make them look a bit beat up. Then trek down to my local Wal-Mart and pass a few of them off to buy stuff. Wash-Rinse-Repeat (literally).
If anything this is just another example of our tax dollars being wasted in a futile attempt to stop a crime which, I believe, is not very rampant. This money could be better spent keeping the govenment out of debt and keeping inflation down. Sure the counterfeit bills increse inflation, but probably less so than the government printing more money everytime it feels the need. If anything, I think we would be better off if the govenment would only print as much money as it destroys, and then turn the presses off.