Cashiers don't even look to see the name on a credit card matches the drivers license. What would make you think that they'd pay attention to a bit of discoloration on the index finger?
Over the years, I've sent girlfriend's out with my credit card to buy things. Only once has one been refused. It's pretty obvious that it's a guy's name on the card, and a girl trying to use it. Even if they checked ID's, they'd see the last names weren't even similar.
Well, on the anonymous scan part, that is pretty obvious. They're providing a box to developers like you and I. We touch it, it returns a fake record. If it works, it'll return the same fake record every time. If it has a false, it'll probably return a different fake record.
I'm not particularly comfortable with it still.
As someone else said, your fingerprints are everywhere.
Say this does become wide spread. Everyone's using it. I go into a high dollar store, and follow someone who looks like they have money. He picks up a smooth surface box, I carefully follow him and buy the box he just inspected.
Now I make myself a nice happy fake fingerprint (wax, latex, whatever), now I go shopping.
It won't take very long for this to become a problem. While zapping up a nice copy of fake prints is stuff for television, it's not impossible to do. As it becomes more profitable, more copies will be made.
What happens when this becomes a problem? Our victim in question will have to close his account with paybytouch.
What happens when someone hacks the paybytouch database, and now has a copy of all the fingerprints, or at least the points they are identifying? For the purpose of this exercise, I can be anyone in their database.
I agree with your 3rd reason more than any others.
I'd prefer 200+ passengers sitting quietly watching the in-flight movie, than 200+ passengers in a small space all chattering on their freakin' cell phones.
Do you believe everything the government feeds you?
I know someone who tried this recently. They forgot to turn off their cell, and remembered mid-flight. They looked at the phone, and had no signal. Since it hadn't caused any problems so far, they left it on. The didn't have a signal again until they had almost landed (like the last minute or so of the flight).
If terrorists were in control of an aircraft, would they be letting people call their family? hell no. If you're controlling a situation, you control everything about it. There's no half ass "ok, call mom and tell her you're ok".
Actually, I had installed some piece of software on my Nextel phone, provided by Nextel (before Nextel started to REALLY suck.)
Using the GPS, it would (obviously) tell me where I was within a few feet.
It also indiciated the name and coordinates (lat & long) of the tower my phone was talking to, as well as signal strength. I believe part of the 'name' of the tower was which array on that particular tower was receiving.
I've read various specs saying cell phones peak power is between 250mw and 600mw. With the crappy little antenna on a cell phone, that's not much good for very far.
Knowing the signal strength, and if the phone happens to switch towers (which happens all the time), you could isolate a user to 2 points (where the two circles indicating your approximate distance from a tower intersect).
This can be further isolated if they can say which antenna array you were being received on. If I recall correctly there are typically three arrays on a cell tower, each covering 120 degrees.
On this particular piece of software that I was using, it would show my history, as long as I had the application running.
In a rather long and nasty call to Sprint once where I was arguing huge roaming charges, they named off dates, times, which towers I used, and what phone numbers I called. This was for an entire month. They *ARE* recording that data.
So, why can't the leader of the free world understand something that us common folks can?
Bush said something like 500,000 jobs would be lost by cleaning up the emissions.
You and I both understand, 500k jobs (ya right) may be lost, but 1 million jobs will spring up in new industries. What would happen if they gave a serious push to taking fossil fuel vehicles off the road. Oh my gosh, every car in America could be replaced. How many factory workers would it take? How many mechanics would it take to work on these new cars. I'd be willing to bet most mechanics would adapt very quickly. I don't know of too many mechanics who retired because cars went computerized. They figured out how to work on the newer cars.
So, they have to shut down coal burning power plants. These workers would start working in cleaner plants.
Textiles, Paper production, and other factories. If they have to shut down, they'll spring back up as a newer cleaner technology, no workers lost. If they continue to operate as-is, they'll have to subcontract out to the new cleanup industries to keep their emissions down.
But, the status quo is a wonderful thing. The big dollar industries keep making their big dollars. The way politics works is, the big dollar industries hire big dollar lobbiests, who slide the politicians big dollars very quietly in untraceable (if they're good) methods. These industries weigh the difference between fixing their respective techologies, or how much they'd have to pay off the politicians. It's usually cheaper to pad pockets than to make changes.
You'd be amazed what I'd do for a few million dollars. I'd probably even stop posting messages like this.:)
Unfortunately for us all, on matter who is right, and who is wrong, the "experts" and the "leaders" will argue it until we're all dead.
It's well past the time that we pick a problem, and all attempt to fix it.
We can all clearly that noxious emissions are a problem. In some parts of the world, they've pushed the oxygen levels in the atmosphere down to almost unsurvivable levels. Producing lethal chemicals and dumping them into the environment is also clearly bad.
Depsite these obvious problems that we continue doing, we'll argue the finer points of theory until we're dead.
Hell, what's the worst that cleaning up would do? Cleaner air and water? I wouldn't complain.
Many countries agree that there's a problem, and want to fix it. Read up on the Kyoto Protocol. The #1 producer in carbon emissions is also one of the two countries who have refused to agree to the protocol.
Token things are done to clean up the air. For example, passenger cars were required to meet stricter requirements. Unfortunately, trucks and SUV's don't fall into the same rules. Marketing went heavy into putting every Joe-Consumer and soccer mom into a SUV. There's bigger money in oil than there is in clean air.
Nope, it hung on the "This will take a while" message.
I left it up for hours. Like, from just after I posted the last message until about 20 minutes ago. I tried to fire it up again, and still nothing interesting.
I saw the article, and got anxious. I told my girlfriend that she can now use the same program that I use for mail. She was anxious too. She has problems with Outlook on occasion, just as any other Outlook user does.
The install went flawlessly, but now Evolution won't start. Her machine is a fairly plain WinXP box, kept up to date fairly regularly (i.e., every night as scheduled)
Too bad it doesn't just work. I'm trying to figure out what it's delima is, but it doesn't make it look like a good thing for an end user. Most people would stop when it doesn't work. I definately can't tell the Windows users "Go download this!", because there may be a number of steps which they may need to do, that are beyond their abilities.
> we've made a mess here on Mother Earth, and > probably don't really deserve to do the same > elsewhere
Well, the chances are, if we send colonists off to many distant places, as they become more seperated from home (Earth), their civilizations will evolve differently.
I don't mean that in the evolutionary sense, although it will apply. I mean, depending on the ideals of the group, each group will do things differently.
The same things happened here, as humanity evolved socially. Some groups were perfectly happy being hunter/gatherers. Some were agrarian. Some were warriors. Unfortunately, as we can clearly see, the warrior societies took hold and conquerored the others.
It's quite likey the colonies will become seperated, and have little to no contact with each other over the centuries following our departure from Earth. It's quite likely some will settle planets without telling the others where they went. In the vastness of space, it's perfectly likely that if a group went to another planet without telling anyone else, they may not be found again for eons.
This would be ideal for the successful protection of humanity.
You still have an external access to your network. If someone drops their smart card, or whatever they're using for security (or it's lifted off them in the garage or elevator), your hacker could have free roam of the network for the night.
Physical access always has it's concerns. Without physical security, you have nothign. Besides finding a free port (you didn't disable all the unused ports?), someone could wander in and find a PC that was left on and logged in.
I've had clients who have misplaced root password for servers that I'd never worked on. Most of the facilities that I have frequented know that I do nothing illegal, so if I say I need access to a customer cabinet, I must already have permission. I've gotten into the box (single user or boot CD), temporarly changed root to [blank], rebooted normally, and logged in.
I had a client who shipped 3 servers to us. He had an admin who set the root passwords, and I needed to change the IP's to put them on the new network. While he was trying to get a hold of his admin, I got root on all three boxes, set the IP's, and got them up on the network. By the time he got back with me with the old root password, I let him know they were all up and running, and gave him the new root password.
I've done the same to Win32 boxes too. It's a little more work, but I'm sure if I did it more I'd have it down to a fine art.
All that means, I've gotten access to the building. Then to the facility suite. Then to their cabinet. 3 levels of security, just to get root in a matter of minutes. Frequently, I can do it before their monitoring alerts them that their machine even went down. It's a good thing I'm a good guy. That is part of what's given me access to do these things. I believe in Karma. I won't do bad things (any more) because bad things will eventually get me. I've been atoning for my sins for quite a while, and hope I'm over on the good side of the scale now. That includes getting root for people who have misplaced their passwords, when it's honestly their equipment, without charging them for the call.
I'm guessing your users have some sort of expectation of security. By going wireless, you should treat every user as if they are working remotely. Every connection should be treated as if it was compromised.
If you are doing anything with security in mind, assume I'm sitting on the next floor down, packet sniffing everything. I'll eventually masquerade as one of your users, and I will get through whatever layers of security you think you have in place. As far as that goes, I may on the next floor up, or in the next building with a high gain antenna pointed at one of your AP's.
For a secure corporate network, wired is the only way to go.
For a home network, where it's your kids chatting with their friends about who's dating who at school, and you browsing porn sites at night, sure wireless fine. Who cares if someone breaks into your network there.
Spend the extra bucks. Hire someone to drop lines to all the desks, and hook everything up to a good switch. Double check their work to make sure there was nothing added to your network.
I've used many different providers in many different areas.
I've had one good provider ever. They were a DSL provider, the only one willing to provide service at the house I was renting. Everyone else, including SpeakEasy said it was to far from the CO.
The sold me 768K/3M, and I actually got it.
Right now, I'm sitting on a line that was advertised as 384K/6M, and with both bandwidth testing, and using SNMP on my own equipment to see the throughput, I can clearly see they aren't providing it.
I'm lucky to see 1Mb/s down, and if I come close to 256K up, I get capped down on my download speed to somewhere in the ballpark of 512K. That seems like the common trend on most providers I've used. It may seem right to them, where they are limiting file traders, but I frequently make ISO's for work use at home, and then upload them back to a server for the rest of the company to use.
I hope they don't come after me. I went through their signup, and stopped when I saw the price and the mininum number of shares to buy. I was willing to throw a few bucks into it, but not anywhere near what they were asking for. Stocks are a gamble, and I have my limits. This time, it looks like I made the right choice.
I work damned hard on the stuff I write. I never expect that I'll sell any of it for what I feel it's worth to me.
There is one project that I've been working on for years now. When it's done and ready for people to see, we're going to be selling it as a service, not as a software. Even then, we'll be charging just over what our bandwidth and server cost will be. I'll enjoy an extra hundred bucks here and there, but I won't be getting rich on it.
If I can't be personally satisfied for writing a good program, then I'll never get satisfaction from it. Sure, I do plenty of work that I don't really "enjoy" doing, but that pays the bills.
... and you don't think Cuba has it's own problems? How about an ongoing blockade since 1962? Having an entire country like Cuba on welfare (not necessarly true) is directly caused by their closest neighboring country, the US.
I'd tell you how life is really life in Cuba, but as an American with no blood relatives in Cuba, I am forbidden by the US Government from traveling there. If I were to travel to Cuba, engage in any trade with Cuba, etc, I will be heavily fined, and possibly sent to prison.
I have talked to people with blood relatives in Cuba, as well as Canadians and Mexicans who are free to travel to Cuba. They say it is a beautiful place, with really nice people. Their largest hardship is the United States government.
So, why is Cuba in a bad state? Because the United States of America has destroyed them.
Is stealing software right? No. I don't necessarly agree with pricing structures. If WinXP cost say 100 million to develop, and it costs $1 per copy to ship (it's cheap to print CD's), the price should have dropped to a very low price by now, as they've already more than covered costs. There's a reason Bill Gates has a personal net worth of over 40 billion dollars.
If *I* wrote a killer app, and marked it at $200 per copy, and *I* made even 1 billion dollars on it (mmmm.. billion...), ya, I'd drop the price to the floor so more people could afford to get their hands on it.
People pirate software because they can't afford to pay the outragous prices. Most of the time, we're not talking about a $20 license. We're talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars.
If *I* was in charge of Microsoft, and *I* was selling copies of WinXP at $3/ea to qualified (i.e., poor) customers, I wouldn't have a problem with pirated copies, licenses, keygens, cracks, etc, etc, floating around.
I've known a lot of people who have a business license for whatever venture of the week they had. They never did anything with the business, and let the license expire.
The BSA will gather the name and address of everyone with a business license (public records, I suspect), and send the nasty note out to them that they are probably in violation and are subject to investigation.
If you've been following the BSA BS for long, you'll be familiar with the letters, and the "grace period" where business owners can install the BSA audit software, and then pay for their violations before prosecution.
Have they sued any individuals? Not that I'm aware of. The BSA is looking for the bigger profit. They stand to make a lot more from businesses than from individuals.
The BSA, while it sounds like it COULD be a 3-letter law enforcement agency, isn't. They'll threaten to kick your door in and audit your company. They have exactly as much right to do it as I do. If I show up at your door and say I want to audit your software, you can tell me to bugger off, exactly as I'll tell the BSA. Well, that would be assuming any BSA guys found where I live, made it past security. Then they'd find that anyone who tries to kick in my door runs the risk of getting shot on the spot.
I'd REALLY upset any BSA guys who may show up. I have a whole stack of old hard drives and old servers. I wouldn't cooperate in the least, but they'd spend days plugging in machines to find that they're old Linux machines. More than half the hard drives in one three moving boxes are either not readable at all, or data drives from old servers. Most have been wiped, so if they try to recover anything, they'll find dirty pictures from hosted sites.
They can be more than happy to look at my main desktop machine. Slamd64.
Laptop? dual boot Slamd64 and Slackware.
Since I won't let anyone touch my equipment without my undivided attention, my standard rates will apply. I hope they can afford my bill. They better not disturb my lunch/smoke/coffee breaks. There's a special charge for those.
Accents change a lot by the way the local accent is spoken.
Even my own voice, I know depending on where I am, my voice changes. There are a few places that I've spent a good bit of time, so I easily slip into the local accents. There are a few bad fake accents I do too.
I will say my nice clear broadcaster voice with a midwestern accent (i.e., plain) is a whole lot different than say my southern drawl. And like when I do my totally bogus 80's valley wannabe, it's like TOTally different.
And lets not forget the voice on my voicemail. A few people have asked why I haven't changed it from the computer synthesized voice. I have to break it to them that it's really my voice.:) It wasn't intentional, it's just a very flat monotone message, because I wasn't very excited about doing a voicemail recording.
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Check my id #. I've been around much longer than you. :) I'm just the odd one in the group, where I actually have a life. :)
Cashiers don't even look to see the name on a credit card matches the drivers license. What would make you think that they'd pay attention to a bit of discoloration on the index finger?
Over the years, I've sent girlfriend's out with my credit card to buy things. Only once has one been refused. It's pretty obvious that it's a guy's name on the card, and a girl trying to use it. Even if they checked ID's, they'd see the last names weren't even similar.
Well, on the anonymous scan part, that is pretty obvious. They're providing a box to developers like you and I. We touch it, it returns a fake record. If it works, it'll return the same fake record every time. If it has a false, it'll probably return a different fake record.
I'm not particularly comfortable with it still.
As someone else said, your fingerprints are everywhere.
Say this does become wide spread. Everyone's using it. I go into a high dollar store, and follow someone who looks like they have money. He picks up a smooth surface box, I carefully follow him and buy the box he just inspected.
Now I make myself a nice happy fake fingerprint (wax, latex, whatever), now I go shopping.
It won't take very long for this to become a problem. While zapping up a nice copy of fake prints is stuff for television, it's not impossible to do. As it becomes more profitable, more copies will be made.
What happens when this becomes a problem? Our victim in question will have to close his account with paybytouch.
What happens when someone hacks the paybytouch database, and now has a copy of all the fingerprints, or at least the points they are identifying? For the purpose of this exercise, I can be anyone in their database.
I agree with your 3rd reason more than any others.
I'd prefer 200+ passengers sitting quietly watching the in-flight movie, than 200+ passengers in a small space all chattering on their freakin' cell phones.
Do you believe everything the government feeds you?
I know someone who tried this recently. They forgot to turn off their cell, and remembered mid-flight. They looked at the phone, and had no signal. Since it hadn't caused any problems so far, they left it on. The didn't have a signal again until they had almost landed (like the last minute or so of the flight).
If terrorists were in control of an aircraft, would they be letting people call their family? hell no. If you're controlling a situation, you control everything about it. There's no half ass "ok, call mom and tell her you're ok".
Actually, I had installed some piece of software on my Nextel phone, provided by Nextel (before Nextel started to REALLY suck.)
Using the GPS, it would (obviously) tell me where I was within a few feet.
It also indiciated the name and coordinates (lat & long) of the tower my phone was talking to, as well as signal strength. I believe part of the 'name' of the tower was which array on that particular tower was receiving.
I've read various specs saying cell phones peak power is between 250mw and 600mw. With the crappy little antenna on a cell phone, that's not much good for very far.
Knowing the signal strength, and if the phone happens to switch towers (which happens all the time), you could isolate a user to 2 points (where the two circles indicating your approximate distance from a tower intersect).
This can be further isolated if they can say which antenna array you were being received on. If I recall correctly there are typically three arrays on a cell tower, each covering 120 degrees.
On this particular piece of software that I was using, it would show my history, as long as I had the application running.
In a rather long and nasty call to Sprint once where I was arguing huge roaming charges, they named off dates, times, which towers I used, and what phone numbers I called. This was for an entire month. They *ARE* recording that data.
There's a huge difference between people exhaling, and the emissions put off by man made devices.
So, why can't the leader of the free world understand something that us common folks can?
Bush said something like 500,000 jobs would be lost by cleaning up the emissions.
You and I both understand, 500k jobs (ya right) may be lost, but 1 million jobs will spring up in new industries. What would happen if they gave a serious push to taking fossil fuel vehicles off the road. Oh my gosh, every car in America could be replaced. How many factory workers would it take? How many mechanics would it take to work on these new cars. I'd be willing to bet most mechanics would adapt very quickly. I don't know of too many mechanics who retired because cars went computerized. They figured out how to work on the newer cars.
So, they have to shut down coal burning power plants. These workers would start working in cleaner plants.
Textiles, Paper production, and other factories. If they have to shut down, they'll spring back up as a newer cleaner technology, no workers lost. If they continue to operate as-is, they'll have to subcontract out to the new cleanup industries to keep their emissions down.
But, the status quo is a wonderful thing. The big dollar industries keep making their big dollars. The way politics works is, the big dollar industries hire big dollar lobbiests, who slide the politicians big dollars very quietly in untraceable (if they're good) methods. These industries weigh the difference between fixing their respective techologies, or how much they'd have to pay off the politicians. It's usually cheaper to pad pockets than to make changes.
You'd be amazed what I'd do for a few million dollars. I'd probably even stop posting messages like this.
Unfortunately for us all, on matter who is right, and who is wrong, the "experts" and the "leaders" will argue it until we're all dead.
It's well past the time that we pick a problem, and all attempt to fix it.
We can all clearly that noxious emissions are a problem. In some parts of the world, they've pushed the oxygen levels in the atmosphere down to almost unsurvivable levels. Producing lethal chemicals and dumping them into the environment is also clearly bad.
Depsite these obvious problems that we continue doing, we'll argue the finer points of theory until we're dead.
Hell, what's the worst that cleaning up would do? Cleaner air and water? I wouldn't complain.
Many countries agree that there's a problem, and want to fix it. Read up on the Kyoto Protocol. The #1 producer in carbon emissions is also one of the two countries who have refused to agree to the protocol.
Token things are done to clean up the air. For example, passenger cars were required to meet stricter requirements. Unfortunately, trucks and SUV's don't fall into the same rules. Marketing went heavy into putting every Joe-Consumer and soccer mom into a SUV. There's bigger money in oil than there is in clean air.
Nope, it hung on the "This will take a while" message.
I left it up for hours. Like, from just after I posted the last message until about 20 minutes ago. I tried to fire it up again, and still nothing interesting.
Too bad it doesn't work.
I saw the article, and got anxious. I told my girlfriend that she can now use the same program that I use for mail. She was anxious too. She has problems with Outlook on occasion, just as any other Outlook user does.
The install went flawlessly, but now Evolution won't start. Her machine is a fairly plain WinXP box, kept up to date fairly regularly (i.e., every night as scheduled)
Too bad it doesn't just work. I'm trying to figure out what it's delima is, but it doesn't make it look like a good thing for an end user. Most people would stop when it doesn't work. I definately can't tell the Windows users "Go download this!", because there may be a number of steps which they may need to do, that are beyond their abilities.
> we've made a mess here on Mother Earth, and
> probably don't really deserve to do the same
> elsewhere
Well, the chances are, if we send colonists off to many distant places, as they become more seperated from home (Earth), their civilizations will evolve differently.
I don't mean that in the evolutionary sense, although it will apply. I mean, depending on the ideals of the group, each group will do things differently.
The same things happened here, as humanity evolved socially. Some groups were perfectly happy being hunter/gatherers. Some were agrarian. Some were warriors. Unfortunately, as we can clearly see, the warrior societies took hold and conquerored the others.
It's quite likey the colonies will become seperated, and have little to no contact with each other over the centuries following our departure from Earth. It's quite likely some will settle planets without telling the others where they went. In the vastness of space, it's perfectly likely that if a group went to another planet without telling anyone else, they may not be found again for eons.
This would be ideal for the successful protection of humanity.
You still have an external access to your network. If someone drops their smart card, or whatever they're using for security (or it's lifted off them in the garage or elevator), your hacker could have free roam of the network for the night.
Physical access always has it's concerns. Without physical security, you have nothign. Besides finding a free port (you didn't disable all the unused ports?), someone could wander in and find a PC that was left on and logged in.
I've had clients who have misplaced root password for servers that I'd never worked on. Most of the facilities that I have frequented know that I do nothing illegal, so if I say I need access to a customer cabinet, I must already have permission. I've gotten into the box (single user or boot CD), temporarly changed root to [blank], rebooted normally, and logged in.
I had a client who shipped 3 servers to us. He had an admin who set the root passwords, and I needed to change the IP's to put them on the new network. While he was trying to get a hold of his admin, I got root on all three boxes, set the IP's, and got them up on the network. By the time he got back with me with the old root password, I let him know they were all up and running, and gave him the new root password.
I've done the same to Win32 boxes too. It's a little more work, but I'm sure if I did it more I'd have it down to a fine art.
All that means, I've gotten access to the building. Then to the facility suite. Then to their cabinet. 3 levels of security, just to get root in a matter of minutes. Frequently, I can do it before their monitoring alerts them that their machine even went down. It's a good thing I'm a good guy. That is part of what's given me access to do these things. I believe in Karma. I won't do bad things (any more) because bad things will eventually get me. I've been atoning for my sins for quite a while, and hope I'm over on the good side of the scale now. That includes getting root for people who have misplaced their passwords, when it's honestly their equipment, without charging them for the call.
I've never had problems with microwave ovens interfering with wireless networks or phones. Then again, I've always had fairly modern ones.
The only microwave that I know of is a friends, which is 15 years old. When he walks past it with his old cordless phone, all I hear is static.
Sure, you can do it.
Should you do it? Probably not.
I'm guessing your users have some sort of expectation of security. By going wireless, you should treat every user as if they are working remotely. Every connection should be treated as if it was compromised.
If you are doing anything with security in mind, assume I'm sitting on the next floor down, packet sniffing everything. I'll eventually masquerade as one of your users, and I will get through whatever layers of security you think you have in place. As far as that goes, I may on the next floor up, or in the next building with a high gain antenna pointed at one of your AP's.
For a secure corporate network, wired is the only way to go.
For a home network, where it's your kids chatting with their friends about who's dating who at school, and you browsing porn sites at night, sure wireless fine. Who cares if someone breaks into your network there.
Spend the extra bucks. Hire someone to drop lines to all the desks, and hook everything up to a good switch. Double check their work to make sure there was nothing added to your network.
You are by far the minority.
I've used many different providers in many different areas.
I've had one good provider ever. They were a DSL provider, the only one willing to provide service at the house I was renting. Everyone else, including SpeakEasy said it was to far from the CO.
The sold me 768K/3M, and I actually got it.
Right now, I'm sitting on a line that was advertised as 384K/6M, and with both bandwidth testing, and using SNMP on my own equipment to see the throughput, I can clearly see they aren't providing it.
I'm lucky to see 1Mb/s down, and if I come close to 256K up, I get capped down on my download speed to somewhere in the ballpark of 512K. That seems like the common trend on most providers I've used. It may seem right to them, where they are limiting file traders, but I frequently make ISO's for work use at home, and then upload them back to a server for the rest of the company to use.
I hope they don't come after me. I went through their signup, and stopped when I saw the price and the mininum number of shares to buy. I was willing to throw a few bucks into it, but not anywhere near what they were asking for. Stocks are a gamble, and I have my limits. This time, it looks like I made the right choice.
So true.
I work damned hard on the stuff I write. I never expect that I'll sell any of it for what I feel it's worth to me.
There is one project that I've been working on for years now. When it's done and ready for people to see, we're going to be selling it as a service, not as a software. Even then, we'll be charging just over what our bandwidth and server cost will be. I'll enjoy an extra hundred bucks here and there, but I won't be getting rich on it.
If I can't be personally satisfied for writing a good program, then I'll never get satisfaction from it. Sure, I do plenty of work that I don't really "enjoy" doing, but that pays the bills.
I'd tell you how life is really life in Cuba, but as an American with no blood relatives in Cuba, I am forbidden by the US Government from traveling there. If I were to travel to Cuba, engage in any trade with Cuba, etc, I will be heavily fined, and possibly sent to prison.
I have talked to people with blood relatives in Cuba, as well as Canadians and Mexicans who are free to travel to Cuba. They say it is a beautiful place, with really nice people. Their largest hardship is the United States government.
So, why is Cuba in a bad state? Because the United States of America has destroyed them.
Is stealing software right? No. I don't necessarly agree with pricing structures. If WinXP cost say 100 million to develop, and it costs $1 per copy to ship (it's cheap to print CD's), the price should have dropped to a very low price by now, as they've already more than covered costs. There's a reason Bill Gates has a personal net worth of over 40 billion dollars.
If *I* wrote a killer app, and marked it at $200 per copy, and *I* made even 1 billion dollars on it (mmmm.. billion...), ya, I'd drop the price to the floor so more people could afford to get their hands on it.
People pirate software because they can't afford to pay the outragous prices. Most of the time, we're not talking about a $20 license. We're talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars.
If *I* was in charge of Microsoft, and *I* was selling copies of WinXP at $3/ea to qualified (i.e., poor) customers, I wouldn't have a problem with pirated copies, licenses, keygens, cracks, etc, etc, floating around.
> Has the BSA ever sued an individual/home user of pirated software?
s html7 33256
They threaten a lot of them.
Look back at this story:
http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/01/07/07/1829241.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/02/0
I've known a lot of people who have a business license for whatever venture of the week they had. They never did anything with the business, and let the license expire.
The BSA will gather the name and address of everyone with a business license (public records, I suspect), and send the nasty note out to them that they are probably in violation and are subject to investigation.
If you've been following the BSA BS for long, you'll be familiar with the letters, and the "grace period" where business owners can install the BSA audit software, and then pay for their violations before prosecution.
Have they sued any individuals? Not that I'm aware of. The BSA is looking for the bigger profit. They stand to make a lot more from businesses than from individuals.
The BSA, while it sounds like it COULD be a 3-letter law enforcement agency, isn't. They'll threaten to kick your door in and audit your company. They have exactly as much right to do it as I do. If I show up at your door and say I want to audit your software, you can tell me to bugger off, exactly as I'll tell the BSA. Well, that would be assuming any BSA guys found where I live, made it past security. Then they'd find that anyone who tries to kick in my door runs the risk of getting shot on the spot.
I'd REALLY upset any BSA guys who may show up. I have a whole stack of old hard drives and old servers. I wouldn't cooperate in the least, but they'd spend days plugging in machines to find that they're old Linux machines. More than half the hard drives in one three moving boxes are either not readable at all, or data drives from old servers. Most have been wiped, so if they try to recover anything, they'll find dirty pictures from hosted sites.
They can be more than happy to look at my main desktop machine. Slamd64.
Laptop? dual boot Slamd64 and Slackware.
Since I won't let anyone touch my equipment without my undivided attention, my standard rates will apply. I hope they can afford my bill. They better not disturb my lunch/smoke/coffee breaks. There's a special charge for those.
I agree.
:) It wasn't intentional, it's just a very flat monotone message, because I wasn't very excited about doing a voicemail recording.
Accents change a lot by the way the local accent is spoken.
Even my own voice, I know depending on where I am, my voice changes. There are a few places that I've spent a good bit of time, so I easily slip into the local accents. There are a few bad fake accents I do too.
I will say my nice clear broadcaster voice with a midwestern accent (i.e., plain) is a whole lot different than say my southern drawl. And like when I do my totally bogus 80's valley wannabe, it's like TOTally different.
And lets not forget the voice on my voicemail. A few people have asked why I haven't changed it from the computer synthesized voice. I have to break it to them that it's really my voice.
patch:
> "Bush administration"
< "Government"
Correction:
1) The trainer said they brought the elephant into your kitchen.
2) There are elephant droppings leading up to your kitchen.
3) The elephant has a huge interest in being in your kitchen.
4) For national security reasons, we will not let you into your kitchen, nor tell you anything about what's happening in your kitchen.
I'd be lead to believe there's a warm cup of coffee in your microwave. Oh no, it would indicate that there's an elephant in your kitchen.
I believe to get your degree, you have to take other classes besides your major, unless you're going to a tech school.
Hehe.. I guess I've already spent too much time looking at codes today. I read ROT13 into your age reference.
Oh look, Drew Carey is on. I'll stop looking at the gibberish that we're assuming is a code.