Actually, the tethering ability is controlled by the provider. Sprint and Boost block the native ability to tether. Tether (previously known as TetherBerry) does work around that, but all of your internet traffic is relayed through their server in California. He hasn't opened it up to allow you to use the relay server of your choice.
I've used it for a while with my Windows laptop and Blackberry on Boost. it works very well. The speed is usually very good. I only use it when I really need it though, so they won't cut me for 20 minutes a month of tethering.:)
I picked up a Barnes & Noble Nook Color the other day, and of course converted it to be a full fledged Android system. It works great at the house, but I couldn't find a way to tether it to my Blackberry. It looks like I'll be switching over to an Android phone soon, so I can tether it. The Nook makes a pretty nice little tablet, which will be nice to travel with. I hate trying to use my laptop on an airplane. Even in first class (I'm the king of upgrades), it's a bit tight for a big laptop.
Well, it's reasonable in that these guys work day in and day out to protect the nation against the boogie man... err... terrorist ({BOO}). Day in and day out, they're searching the same bags, with the same crap in them. Seizing 5 oz of lip balm, and half empty drink bottles. Once in a great while they get someone who forgot they were carrying a weapon, or forgot to move it to their checked luggage.
Then the day comes! A terrorist has picked *THEIR* airport! Finally a bad guy to fight against. The public will be safe. They'll be on the front of every newspaper in the country saying "This TSA agent saved hundreds!" The whole reason they've been doing this job, to defend their nation against the terrorist threat!
Unfortunately, it turns out to be some little homemade toy, that had absolutely no dangerous qualities. Well, unless you count sending angry text messages after their phone is charged. They may twitter "TSA Sux! They broke my toyz"
One again, the nation is safe from the boogie man... err.. terrorists.
Their target demographic is businesses, not residential users. But, what business wants to rely on using a cell phone for managing the enterprise? If it's so important that you need it at your fingertips 24/7, you'll have an operations department watching for pesky things like the power going out.
And the next bit.. If you go to buy something. You can buy T-shirts, tote bags, and exactly ONE piece of equipment. It's their developer board. You can't even buy the outlet strips that they show on the rest of the site.
But you *CAN* Buy their music or have their band come out to perform for you (for a fee, of course).
These guys must have some nice offices, right? There's a whole manufacturing and distributation pipeline that they'd require.
Bejing, China? Nope not that one, that looks like a residential area.
Tokyo, Japan This isn't residential, but it looks more like a business area, not a manufacturing area. I could be mistaken. If anything, I'd bet there's a mail drop in one of the surrounding buildings. Since I don't read or speak a word of Japanese, I can't guess on which building in the area is the correct one.
I did find some press releases from 2009, where they had a picture of a guy in Japan, and all kinds of talk about saving billions of dollars.
I do wonder, now that they're trying hard to market themselves, how is AT&T (now owner of Cingular) going to feel about their logo being stolen. I can't imagine AT&T let the trademark lapse. They have entire departments dedicated to keeping their patents, copyrights, and trademarks up to date, *AND* suing the pants off of anyone trying to play with their toys.
So we're left with a company, with no real product other than their band and self-published CD, with offices in 3 countries, a bunch of forward looking statements, and not much else.
I think you were pretty close, except they don't even have the outlet strips to sell.
I think the key part of that was the first line of his statement on his site. "I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for for about 5 years."
So, he says right there, that he worked for the company day in and day out. There was no segregated personal time.
He appears to freely admit that he worked on company time. The project was made available during company time. It's also quite likely that he used company resources to develop, advertise, and distribute the project.
The first reply on his own site, dated two days ago, gives the correct answer. Contact a lawyer. They were kind enough to guide him in a helpful direction. I'm sure his employers already discussed the matter with their attorneys.
It basically comes down to this. If you worked on it while you were employed for a company, the project belongs to them. If you worked on it in your free time, with absolutely no company assets or backing, *AND* you have documentation to prove that, you have a chance.
I was told by the COO at one employer that he ran into exactly that. His previous employer sued on the grounds that the project was done on company time, even though it was while he was off the clock. Those fuzzy gray areas don't matter much when it's a project that isn't going anywhere, and it's not interfering with company time or assets. The moment you sent an email from work, logged in to write some code, or even mentioned it on work time, they have grounds to say it belongs to them.
I had one employer who was very much confused by this though. I did send an email up to the Apache group years ago, and my change was reflected in the code. I don't know if it was because of me, or someone else. It was a pretty trivial change to help in high load environments. My bosses thought that since I had written part of Apache, they owned it in some sort of way. It took me a while to get them to understand that they only "owned" my couple lines of code, and it wasn't clear if they used my code or someone else's.
Needless to say, since you haven't heard of me or the company I worked for, suing the Apache group, I managed to get them to understand. It took a while though. They also thought we owned part of Sendmail, because I was always tweeking our configuration.
What they did get me on was an internet mapping project that I was working on. I wasn't trying to find every branch out to every backwater nowhere, it only looked at the important nodes where traffic was funneled through. I worked on it after-hours, but I did the preliminary demonstration on their web servers. I didn't personally have web servers in 4 different states, but they did. This was before the average Joe was hosting his site for cheap, and most of us were still on dialup unless we were working out of the office. Their lawyer was kind enough to offer me a percentage of the profits. When he spelled out the terms of that, it was clear that they had absolutely no intention of paying me anything ever. Beyond that, if the project were not to be profitable, I would be responsible for my percentage of the losses, which would come out of my paycheck.
I ran into a "technical problem" a few days later, which was never resolved. Eventually the domain (which I had paid for) expired, and later on we pruned the site as a dead hosting site. Since there were no costs incurred by the company, they couldn't take anything from me. They did try to get the "hosting fee", which I calculated out based on the usage by all the sites over a period. Those pesky sites with over 1 million hits/day really overwhelmed the little site with just 3 IP's ever looking at it. I offered to write them a check for $0.35. I was feeling generous. They weren't really very entertained.
The moral of my story? Don't work on it during work time. Don't involve it with work at all. Work under a pseudonym, or under the name of a trusted friend. If it becomes something, cool. If not, it can die quietly without involving lawyers.:)
I just had the luxury of doing that on one of the networks I run. We block all countries but the handful that are the customers. The product is very US-centric, and has some pretty serious security concerns. It's not TS/SCI level, but it's higher than a bank.
When we blocked all but a dozen "good" countries (countries where customers have been known to access from legitimately and/or have branch offices), brute force attempts dropped down to almost nothing. Spam dropped down to minimal levels. Attempted attacks became just about non-existent. It sucks that we had to do it, but it really solved a lot of problems.
Well, it sounds similar to the steam pipe system in New York City. That's been in place since the 1800's.
For cooling, most residential areas already have most of the infrastructure in place for cooling. Tap water is usually around 60-some degrees. This varies by the depth of the water pipes, and the ground temperature. It could be circulated through residential A/C systems instead of the freon system, and passed back to the city. The problem there would be that tap water is also assumed to be clean. By introducing so many unknown factors (places people could access the system for injection), you'd run into trouble.
Imagine every home in a neighborhood using it, and a sizable percentage of the homes using water softeners. You'd end up with lovely salt water coming out of the pipes rather quickly, due to multiple passes through an unknown number of water softeners.
I recommend water filters with carbon in them, to take out impurities and remove the chlorine. That works very well for a single residence, but if you're passing the water back to the city, you're reducing the amount of chlorine present, which could lead to bacterial contamination of the water supply. That and the pesky risk of some lunatic injecting their own chemicals into the municipal water supply.
If a parallel water system were implemented, it would work very well though. The temperature stabilization system could be a relatively closed loop (assuming no leaks). For good temperature stabilization, the pipes would need to be fairly deep, and the above ground pipes insulated very well. Even still, you'd run the risk of unwanted temperature changes in large communities, as the temperature changes as it runs through individual houses. Obviously, NYC has addressed that over a century ago, which I'm sure is related to proper routing of the steam pipes.
There are people using ground water temperature stabilization, either with recirculated water in a closed system, or fresh water replenishment. There's a university (I'm too lazy to search for it right now), that uses lake water. It goes to a pump house, where it meets a heat exchanger to keep a closed loop system at a stable temperature. Deep water usually has a constant temperature, unchanged by surface conditions. I've seen other small scale systems, which use underground pipes, usually buried 15 to 30 feet below ground level. The can use water, or even just air, to stabilize their home temperature. Those systems are rare though. It wouldn't be unreasonable to have a heat sink farm, where heat exchanging pipes are buried 15 to 30 feet deep. The surface can still be used normally, for things like farm land. The problem comes when a pipe needs to be repaired. It would require digging up that section. For that reason, installing a system like that under a residential area would not work.
Ya, I've been told that by people who don't know me. Once you get to know me, you'll realize I don't follow partisan politics. I'm a believer that the rights as outlined in the constitution are immutable. As far as that goes, I'm exercising my 1st amendment right to say this, and you are exercising your 5th amendment right by posting AC.
The right to bear arms, and your personal safety and security (2nd and 4th amendments) were written to ensure that no government would hold an insurmountable power over the people.
Most people have long since forgotten about these. We now see a police state as being normal, and waive our rights for whatever the current reason is. (Communists, Terrorists, etc).
In reality, I don't see the citizens of the US as being willing to support a revolution. Even if greater than 50% were willing, it would be a massacre. The military is simply too well armed. During Bush's administration, I wondered if he would finally push the people to their breaking point. He had laid the groundwork for martial law for whatever reason he deemed necessary, and to have the full resources of the military behind him.
So what good are my guns? They're good for target shooting. They're available if I ever need one for personal defense (i.e., home invasion). And once people know that not only do I have firearms, but I am well trained and very accurate, they tend to feel safer knowing I'm around. I'm very proud of the fact that in my 30-some years, I have never needed a weapon. Every incident I've been involved in, I was able to talk the person down without the threat of physical violence. A well armed pacifist, you could say.
You know, I raised that point one day at a datacenter we were moving into. There was a small hole by the front door, which was probably made by a bit of mishandled equipment (i.e., dropped server). The salesman was bragging about the security, how the guard's window had 4" bullet proof glass in front of it. How the doors were electronically controlled and magnetically sealed.
I tapped the wall under the guard's window with my foot. It sounded like a normal gypsum board wall. I then pointed at the hole by the door. A small hand sledge would knock a hole in the wall very gracefully, allowing the person outside to reach in and open the door. I then said "The glass is nice. But would the wall under it take a blast from a 12 gauge?"
His response was something to the effect that the guard has my drivers license, which they required to go past the room we were standing in. That's nice and all, but if I were a thief, doing a frontal assault on the suite, the fact the guard has my drivers license means very little.
We were introduced to the only other person that was in the suite. So in the middle of the day, there was one security guard, and one tech on shift. How quaint.
He pointed out the heavy gauge chain link fencing for the cages. Mmm, very impressive. Except I pointed out they don't reach the ceiling (they almost never do), and that the cage gate can be released from inside without a key or code.
He just gave up at that point. We installed our equipment and left. We ended up pulling out of that location a year later, at the end of our contract. It wasn't the security. They're all the same. Their bandwidth absolutely sucked though. We only kept that equipment up as a last resort in case of multiple-site outages, rather than using it in our load balancing. We'd test it for a couple hours once a month, see that it was horrible, and removed those nodes.
And what happens when a drive goes bad at 3 am? I understand these are mostly mirroring content to be closer to the user, so all you'd get is increased latency when the data isn't more closely available, but who is going to want to have some maintenance tech over to their basement a couple times a year to replace a dead hard drive or blade server?
I was staying with a friend for a while, who runs a datacenter at home. The "spare" bedroom was the server room. Those 3am emergencies usually involved waking me up to fix it. There's really something to be said for a datacenter, where the resident expert is literally sleeping 10 feet from the servers. And I didn't mind. It was a little loud, but the supplemental A/C was very nice during the summer.:) The house may have been 80 degrees, but the server room was constantly 72. Winters were just as nice. It may be 30 degrees out, but the A/C rarely kicked on, and it was still 72 all winter.
You really need to look into an A/C system that can draw in outside air. If the outside temperature is closer to the desired temperature, it should draw in the outside air. Such systems do exist, and if your bill is that high, you'll recoup the costs in just a few months.
We just got done shutting down an in-house (err, in-office) datacenter. There were 4 5-ton air conditioners, and a dozen racks full of equipment. When we were done, the power bill dropped by about $7,000/mo. The really sad part is, we replaced most of that equipment with one rack in a colo facility, and a couple gaming-style desktops to run VMs that were necessary in the office.
Microsoft Research thinks that... lack of physical security won't be an issue.
I think they've overlooked the way some households run. At my house, there's always someone awake. There's always someone within 100 feet of my computers. And, the private arsenal is stocked better than any datacenter I've seen. Well, it's better than some police stations I've seen. And as for police response, it's 3 minutes. That's not including the two households on the block with law enforcement officers living in them.
I've seen in-office "professional" server rooms, where from 7pm to 8am the only security is a handful of video cameras recording, and a key-locked glass front door. Even datacenters aren't all that secure. I've shown up in the wee hours of the morning, to find the one person on duty sleeping in the security office. In most datacenters, I've found ways to subvert their physical security. Sure, the front door may have biometric scanners and man traps. The back door or freight entrance may have a single key lock, and no one on that side of the building during the off hours. One of those buildings happened to house one of Microsoft's datacenters.:) Tell me about physical security concerns again...
How many people have been touched under duress for the sake of "security" in airports?
How many people have had their throats cut by terrorists on aircraft?
And finally, how many people have honestly been stopped from committing or attempting to commit such actions?
I'll fill in some numbers for you, since you won't attempt to research it.
Approximately 620 million people fly per year. That could be extrapolated from 2001 to today as 6,200,000,000. If 1 in 10 of them received patdowns or other invasive searches, that still leaves us with 620,000,000..
The number of throats cut by terrorists on aircraft? 0.
The total of potential terrorists caught and charged in the same 10 years? Less than 100.
Those odds are not a reason to force any security measures on citizens, especially where it invades their constitutionally protected rights.
As for the "I'm so lazy I need targeted adverts to choose what I want.": I use Adblock so I don't see those ads anyways, targeted or not.
You know, I was completely thrown when I sat down at someone elses computer, and went to a few sites I frequently visit. I was surprised by all the ads. I just wasn't used to seeing them. Too bad there isn't a better way to monetize a web site.
Nope, that's worthless. We should have taken from the small subset of the federal budget that is NASA, and given to the larger subset of the budget which is education, while ignoring the vast bottomless pits that money is thrown towards now.
Education isn't purely funded by the federal government either. Schools have the luxury of being funded by states and local government also.
How about this. In FY2010...
$18 billion went to NASA. $150 billion went to education. $685 billion went to the DoD.
The DoD plans on spending $382 billion on the F-35 program, so we'll have the bigger badder fighter aircraft than anyone. Since we already hold air superiority and that's not being challenged, that could easily be deemed an unnecessary expense.
So, why don't you show us where you would make budget cuts from, and not just preach from the "think of the children" handbook.
Yup. There was someone ranting one day about how much NASA spends, so I took the time to go through the federal budget numbers, break it down, put it back together, and showed how insignificant the NASA budget was compared to other things that we really don't need and shouldn't be doing.
Consider how much money has been put into new fighter aircraft, when there isn't an enemy with the capability of deploying aircraft to even get to CONUS. Some of the projects are dropped after spending billions, and not a single aircraft has made it to production. I could go on for hours about the DoD spending, and how it's not helpful in the least to the people of the United States. The government claims these wars we're fighting now are to help Americans, but there hasn't been a legitimate threat of war by any country against CONUS since WWII.
Even during the cold war, the threats were inflated by both sides, and the military buildup existed as more of a show of force to their own citizens, than to scare the enemy. Instead of this huge wartime budget that we've been burying ourselves with, this could easily be peace time. That's only the financial side of it. The discussion of the lives of our soldiers, both in deaths and life changing effects could be nil, *AND* we could have had sizable research stations on the moon, Mars, and other objects in this solar system. Instead, we're looking at the last launch of the only American spacecraft capable of carrying humans on Friday morning. Our only fallback plan is the rough equivalent of selling your car, and hitching rides with your neighbors to get anywhere. That's particularly odd that we're now to depend on our cold war enemies to furnish our only way to space. We've forgiven them, but still have harsh sanctions against Cuba for housing a few Russian missiles decades ago, and sending them back to Russia years before most people reading this were ever born. That's November 1962, for those who may be wondering.
How much is wasted continuing the nonsense against an enemy who hasn't done anything against us in almost 50 years?
Ya... Trust me, I agree totally, and my comments were along the lines of "What kind of idiot wouldn't check to see if the session ID was already in use", and "how can you trust *that* as your validation.
For me, validation is positive validation. It may be browser based (like.htaccess style), a cookie with a hash of some known data (user:pass:timestamp), or a big encrypted cookie with user, pass, IP, user agent, etc. I'm a firm believer, if I need to block someone from an authenticated area, the very next click should fail. It shouldn't trust that "oh his session was good for 6 hours", and then wait patiently for the cookie to expire before re-authenticating him again.
As I recall, the site I mentioned was a hand-me-down. Someone else did it and disappeared. When they went live with it, that's when all hell broke loose. Of course, I was the 3rd level of hand-me-down, where I was trying to fix problems based on the 2nd person, regarding stupid errors the 1st person made.
Session cookies may have legitimate uses, and I've used them once or twice in the past, but..... They generally aren't scalable across multiple servers in multiple datacenters, and that's what my programming target is. It may be on one server right now, but if it becomes something big, it'd damned well better be able to scale out to it. I'm a big fan of redundant hosting across multiple geographic locations on multiple providers. You never know where the outage is going to be, so it's best (for the end user) that it doesn't matter, even if there's a regional blackout. And yes, one of my server farms was in that, so we ran happily off of 2 other ones. We could the impact in sales and bandwidth, where a good number of users simply couldn't get online. There isn't much you can do about that though.:)
I had a friend who had a problem just like that. What had happened in that case was this... Each user was given a session cookie, using functionality included with the language (an older version of ColdFusion). The cookies were a pseudo random number. It was all fine and dandy with just a few users on, there was very little chance of collision.
When it was introduced to the real world, you didn't just have one or two people on, you had thousands of simultaneous users. Beyond that, the sessions had a relatively long TTL (a few hours, if I remember right).
Well, User A logs in, does their stuff, and then leaves. No problem. They could have even hit the logout button, but CF didn't properly ditch the session. When User X (someone down the line) came in, they were issued the *same* session cookie. It didn't validate anything. It didn't care what your IP, username, or anything were. So when they reached part of the site dependent on the session cookies, their credentials tied in with User A's session, not theirs.
Needless to say, the users were not entertained.
Beyond that, I demonstrated that with a little bit of cookie manipulation, you could access any account that was recently active. I did it with just changing a few things to arbitrary values, and accessed someone else's account. I then had *them* go to the site and log in. They then read me off their cookie information, and I modified my cookie to match. Voila, I'm them.
They weren't very happy. There was a period of about 10 minutes, where there was some colorful language used. They finally went to work writing their own cookie routine, so they wouldn't have the risk of these collisions any more.
With the load that Facebook can throw at a site, I'm sure there's a huge risk of collisions. Not ever user would have the luxury, but enough would to make it an issue. Someone should have seen it coming and dealt with it, but obviously it wasn't handled properly.
Ya, you have to realize that the United States is roughly the size of Europe. Europe has about 2.8 times the population. That's mainly because the US has vast areas of sparse population, and the population is primarily on the East coast, East of the Mississippi river, and the West coast, relatively close to the ocean.
The greater Houston area's population is pretty close to that of the greater London area.
American TV, unfortunately, has a tendency to sensationalize its news. Here, virtually all television is ratings driven. Blood, guts, and mayhem will always make the top stories. Getting or keeping viewers is far more important than portraying the truth.
From what I understand, the BBC is financed through taxes. It doesn't matter if the news can rival the sex and gore ridden shows before and after it. And I'm not talking badly about either, I like sex and gore, but not usually together.:)
That's exactly what I was asking.:) People don't *need* a cell phone, home phone, cable TV. Most cities require that you do have electricity and running water, but in some rural areas you can even do without that.
Your food can all be dry/canned goods, so you don't need a refrigerator. Air conditioning is a luxury, so you don't really need it. Heat can come from alternative means (wood burning stoves, or even just better clothing). So electricity is all but gone, since you probably want a computer (since we're here, we're obviously Internet junkies). You can set up enough solar panels with a few deep cycle batteries to keep the laptop running all the time (but you shouldn't).
"running" water can be filtered and treated in-house. Where I grew up, there was no "city" water supply, because we were 20 miles from the nearest city. Absolutely everyone used well water. Even in the city I'm in now, you can find older homes that had wells. The city required that they were capped when they offered water service. Ya. Tell me that wasn't in the financial interest of the city. Most people with well water did no treatment. Some did basic filtering. A few have advanced filtering. As I've found, advanced filtering is required for city supplied water too. At my mom's house, the filter pulls about 2.5 pounds of brown sludge out of the municipal supply, and removes the chlorine. Her clear dishes have all gone from being a milky white, to being perfectly clear again.
So you have sewage and trash services to contend with. There are perfectly good ways to deal with that, which have withstood the test of time. And no, dumping your chamber pot out the window isn't it.
But in today's society, when you move into a residence, you turn on power, water, phone, cable, before you move your first belonging in the door.
Our necessities are luxuries, but most people under 30 have never known life without all of them.
Food and water can be acquired. The more important thing we've lost is our hunter/gatherer survival instinct. If there were a serious ELE, the first waves of heavy deaths (assuming no traumatic ELE cause like the sun exploding), would be at the 1 to 2 week mark, as people died of starvation and dehydration. Water is abundant, if you know where to look, and are willing to consider drainage retention ponds, canals, and other bodies of fresh water. Of course, there would be plenty of human inflected deaths too, fighting over canned goods and bottled water. Don't believe it? Consider what people will do to each other on "Black Friday", and that's for a fucking discount on unnecessary material possessions. Along the same lines, watch your local news. Murders, rapes, theft for the sake of theft. Realize that your local news is covering a small area, and then multiply it by the number of metro areas world wide.
People will lie, cheat, steal, and murder for that last can of spam, or bottle of water, but won't eat their own dog, or drink from the swimming pool. Ya, if it gets bad enough, Fido will make some nice BBQ.
Back to the topic though...
Vendors will sell at prices that the market will pay. They're not raping you. You've bent over, handed them the lube, and said "Here's $200/Mb. I'll be back in a month for more."
When people stop paying the outrageous prices, the price will come down. Only that, or fair competition will keep it in check. Fair competition, unfortunately, will only bring it down to a point where all parties profit margins are satisfied. They have to keep the share holders happy, after all. No company does anything out of the goodness of their own hearts. They're in business to make a profit, and you, the consumer, have shown them what you're willing to pay.
Just like our survival instincts, we've forgotten that we, the customer, are in control of the companies. If they don't service us the way we want, we have the choice to go elsewhere. If there is no other option, we have the choice to not use their damned service. Do you really need a cell phone that plays movies, music, gives GPS directions, and (for the ladies) have the extended vibrate feature? No. You got one to make calls on. You've all been swindled by the vendors into paying more for the prettier newer phones, the add-on services, etc, etc.... and that's how I feel every time someone complains that prices are too high, as they cut the check for the bill. "This costs too much, but oh well, I'll pay anyways."
Ya,.. I grew up on a farm. I haven't been back to one since.:) I may put up with a lot of shit at work, but it definitely doesn't smell anywhere near as bad.:) Pretty much, anywhere the animals are kept will have a distinctive aroma that you'd wish you had never smelled.
There's a possibility of learning a lot of things. That's why I can fix just about anything mechanical. You don't have a lot of choices. It's not really cheap to have your car towed 20 miles to town to get fixed. The same goes for your 40 year old diesel tractor that has more improvised parts than original equipment on it, home electrical, plumbing, and various other things. City dwellers had TV antennas, usually consisting of rabbit ears. Ours was a yagi up on a 50' tower. It's good way to learn about gravity too. Luckily it was only ever the tools.
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Actually, the tethering ability is controlled by the provider. Sprint and Boost block the native ability to tether. Tether (previously known as TetherBerry) does work around that, but all of your internet traffic is relayed through their server in California. He hasn't opened it up to allow you to use the relay server of your choice.
I've used it for a while with my Windows laptop and Blackberry on Boost. it works very well. The speed is usually very good. I only use it when I really need it though, so they won't cut me for 20 minutes a month of tethering. :)
I picked up a Barnes & Noble Nook Color the other day, and of course converted it to be a full fledged Android system. It works great at the house, but I couldn't find a way to tether it to my Blackberry. It looks like I'll be switching over to an Android phone soon, so I can tether it. The Nook makes a pretty nice little tablet, which will be nice to travel with. I hate trying to use my laptop on an airplane. Even in first class (I'm the king of upgrades), it's a bit tight for a big laptop.
Well, it's reasonable in that these guys work day in and day out to protect the nation against the boogie man ... err ... terrorist ({BOO}). Day in and day out, they're searching the same bags, with the same crap in them. Seizing 5 oz of lip balm, and half empty drink bottles. Once in a great while they get someone who forgot they were carrying a weapon, or forgot to move it to their checked luggage.
Then the day comes! A terrorist has picked *THEIR* airport! Finally a bad guy to fight against. The public will be safe. They'll be on the front of every newspaper in the country saying "This TSA agent saved hundreds!" The whole reason they've been doing this job, to defend their nation against the terrorist threat!
Unfortunately, it turns out to be some little homemade toy, that had absolutely no dangerous qualities. Well, unless you count sending angry text messages after their phone is charged. They may twitter "TSA Sux! They broke my toyz"
One again, the nation is safe from the boogie man ... err.. terrorists.
You didn't look over their whole site.
Their target demographic is businesses, not residential users. But, what business wants to rely on using a cell phone for managing the enterprise? If it's so important that you need it at your fingertips 24/7, you'll have an operations department watching for pesky things like the power going out.
And the next bit.. If you go to buy something. You can buy T-shirts, tote bags, and exactly ONE piece of equipment. It's their developer board. You can't even buy the outlet strips that they show on the rest of the site.
But you *CAN* Buy their music or have their band come out to perform for you (for a fee, of course).
These guys must have some nice offices, right? There's a whole manufacturing and distributation pipeline that they'd require.
Palo Alto. That's no industrial office.
Bejing, China? Nope not that one, that looks like a residential area.
Tokyo, Japan
This isn't residential, but it looks more like a business area, not a manufacturing area. I could be mistaken. If anything, I'd bet there's a mail drop in one of the surrounding buildings. Since I don't read or speak a word of Japanese, I can't guess on which building in the area is the correct one.
I did find some press releases from 2009, where they had a picture of a guy in Japan, and all kinds of talk about saving billions of dollars.
I do wonder, now that they're trying hard to market themselves, how is AT&T (now owner of Cingular) going to feel about their logo being stolen. I can't imagine AT&T let the trademark lapse. They have entire departments dedicated to keeping their patents, copyrights, and trademarks up to date, *AND* suing the pants off of anyone trying to play with their toys.
So we're left with a company, with no real product other than their band and self-published CD, with offices in 3 countries, a bunch of forward looking statements, and not much else.
I think you were pretty close, except they don't even have the outlet strips to sell.
I thought that was obvious, but you're right, people are generally dumb.
If you're going to protect something under a false identity, there can be no interactions or similarities between the real you, and the fake you.
I think the key part of that was the first line of his statement on his site. "I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for for about 5 years."
So, he says right there, that he worked for the company day in and day out. There was no segregated personal time.
He appears to freely admit that he worked on company time. The project was made available during company time. It's also quite likely that he used company resources to develop, advertise, and distribute the project.
The first reply on his own site, dated two days ago, gives the correct answer. Contact a lawyer. They were kind enough to guide him in a helpful direction. I'm sure his employers already discussed the matter with their attorneys.
It basically comes down to this. If you worked on it while you were employed for a company, the project belongs to them. If you worked on it in your free time, with absolutely no company assets or backing, *AND* you have documentation to prove that, you have a chance.
I was told by the COO at one employer that he ran into exactly that. His previous employer sued on the grounds that the project was done on company time, even though it was while he was off the clock. Those fuzzy gray areas don't matter much when it's a project that isn't going anywhere, and it's not interfering with company time or assets. The moment you sent an email from work, logged in to write some code, or even mentioned it on work time, they have grounds to say it belongs to them.
I had one employer who was very much confused by this though. I did send an email up to the Apache group years ago, and my change was reflected in the code. I don't know if it was because of me, or someone else. It was a pretty trivial change to help in high load environments. My bosses thought that since I had written part of Apache, they owned it in some sort of way. It took me a while to get them to understand that they only "owned" my couple lines of code, and it wasn't clear if they used my code or someone else's.
Needless to say, since you haven't heard of me or the company I worked for, suing the Apache group, I managed to get them to understand. It took a while though. They also thought we owned part of Sendmail, because I was always tweeking our configuration.
What they did get me on was an internet mapping project that I was working on. I wasn't trying to find every branch out to every backwater nowhere, it only looked at the important nodes where traffic was funneled through. I worked on it after-hours, but I did the preliminary demonstration on their web servers. I didn't personally have web servers in 4 different states, but they did. This was before the average Joe was hosting his site for cheap, and most of us were still on dialup unless we were working out of the office. Their lawyer was kind enough to offer me a percentage of the profits. When he spelled out the terms of that, it was clear that they had absolutely no intention of paying me anything ever. Beyond that, if the project were not to be profitable, I would be responsible for my percentage of the losses, which would come out of my paycheck.
I ran into a "technical problem" a few days later, which was never resolved. Eventually the domain (which I had paid for) expired, and later on we pruned the site as a dead hosting site. Since there were no costs incurred by the company, they couldn't take anything from me. They did try to get the "hosting fee", which I calculated out based on the usage by all the sites over a period. Those pesky sites with over 1 million hits/day really overwhelmed the little site with just 3 IP's ever looking at it. I offered to write them a check for $0.35. I was feeling generous. They weren't really very entertained.
The moral of my story? Don't work on it during work time. Don't involve it with work at all. Work under a pseudonym, or under the name of a trusted friend. If it becomes something, cool. If not, it can die quietly without involving lawyers. :)
I just had the luxury of doing that on one of the networks I run. We block all countries but the handful that are the customers. The product is very US-centric, and has some pretty serious security concerns. It's not TS/SCI level, but it's higher than a bank.
When we blocked all but a dozen "good" countries (countries where customers have been known to access from legitimately and/or have branch offices), brute force attempts dropped down to almost nothing. Spam dropped down to minimal levels. Attempted attacks became just about non-existent. It sucks that we had to do it, but it really solved a lot of problems.
Well, it sounds similar to the steam pipe system in New York City. That's been in place since the 1800's.
For cooling, most residential areas already have most of the infrastructure in place for cooling. Tap water is usually around 60-some degrees. This varies by the depth of the water pipes, and the ground temperature. It could be circulated through residential A/C systems instead of the freon system, and passed back to the city. The problem there would be that tap water is also assumed to be clean. By introducing so many unknown factors (places people could access the system for injection), you'd run into trouble.
Imagine every home in a neighborhood using it, and a sizable percentage of the homes using water softeners. You'd end up with lovely salt water coming out of the pipes rather quickly, due to multiple passes through an unknown number of water softeners.
I recommend water filters with carbon in them, to take out impurities and remove the chlorine. That works very well for a single residence, but if you're passing the water back to the city, you're reducing the amount of chlorine present, which could lead to bacterial contamination of the water supply. That and the pesky risk of some lunatic injecting their own chemicals into the municipal water supply.
If a parallel water system were implemented, it would work very well though. The temperature stabilization system could be a relatively closed loop (assuming no leaks). For good temperature stabilization, the pipes would need to be fairly deep, and the above ground pipes insulated very well. Even still, you'd run the risk of unwanted temperature changes in large communities, as the temperature changes as it runs through individual houses. Obviously, NYC has addressed that over a century ago, which I'm sure is related to proper routing of the steam pipes.
There are people using ground water temperature stabilization, either with recirculated water in a closed system, or fresh water replenishment. There's a university (I'm too lazy to search for it right now), that uses lake water. It goes to a pump house, where it meets a heat exchanger to keep a closed loop system at a stable temperature. Deep water usually has a constant temperature, unchanged by surface conditions. I've seen other small scale systems, which use underground pipes, usually buried 15 to 30 feet below ground level. The can use water, or even just air, to stabilize their home temperature. Those systems are rare though. It wouldn't be unreasonable to have a heat sink farm, where heat exchanging pipes are buried 15 to 30 feet deep. The surface can still be used normally, for things like farm land. The problem comes when a pipe needs to be repaired. It would require digging up that section. For that reason, installing a system like that under a residential area would not work.
Ya, I've been told that by people who don't know me. Once you get to know me, you'll realize I don't follow partisan politics. I'm a believer that the rights as outlined in the constitution are immutable. As far as that goes, I'm exercising my 1st amendment right to say this, and you are exercising your 5th amendment right by posting AC.
The right to bear arms, and your personal safety and security (2nd and 4th amendments) were written to ensure that no government would hold an insurmountable power over the people.
Most people have long since forgotten about these. We now see a police state as being normal, and waive our rights for whatever the current reason is. (Communists, Terrorists, etc).
In reality, I don't see the citizens of the US as being willing to support a revolution. Even if greater than 50% were willing, it would be a massacre. The military is simply too well armed. During Bush's administration, I wondered if he would finally push the people to their breaking point. He had laid the groundwork for martial law for whatever reason he deemed necessary, and to have the full resources of the military behind him.
So what good are my guns? They're good for target shooting. They're available if I ever need one for personal defense (i.e., home invasion). And once people know that not only do I have firearms, but I am well trained and very accurate, they tend to feel safer knowing I'm around. I'm very proud of the fact that in my 30-some years, I have never needed a weapon. Every incident I've been involved in, I was able to talk the person down without the threat of physical violence. A well armed pacifist, you could say.
You know, I raised that point one day at a datacenter we were moving into. There was a small hole by the front door, which was probably made by a bit of mishandled equipment (i.e., dropped server). The salesman was bragging about the security, how the guard's window had 4" bullet proof glass in front of it. How the doors were electronically controlled and magnetically sealed.
I tapped the wall under the guard's window with my foot. It sounded like a normal gypsum board wall. I then pointed at the hole by the door. A small hand sledge would knock a hole in the wall very gracefully, allowing the person outside to reach in and open the door. I then said "The glass is nice. But would the wall under it take a blast from a 12 gauge?"
His response was something to the effect that the guard has my drivers license, which they required to go past the room we were standing in. That's nice and all, but if I were a thief, doing a frontal assault on the suite, the fact the guard has my drivers license means very little.
We were introduced to the only other person that was in the suite. So in the middle of the day, there was one security guard, and one tech on shift. How quaint.
He pointed out the heavy gauge chain link fencing for the cages. Mmm, very impressive. Except I pointed out they don't reach the ceiling (they almost never do), and that the cage gate can be released from inside without a key or code.
He just gave up at that point. We installed our equipment and left. We ended up pulling out of that location a year later, at the end of our contract. It wasn't the security. They're all the same. Their bandwidth absolutely sucked though. We only kept that equipment up as a last resort in case of multiple-site outages, rather than using it in our load balancing. We'd test it for a couple hours once a month, see that it was horrible, and removed those nodes.
I was staying with a friend for a while, who runs a datacenter at home. The "spare" bedroom was the server room. Those 3am emergencies usually involved waking me up to fix it. There's really something to be said for a datacenter, where the resident expert is literally sleeping 10 feet from the servers. And I didn't mind. It was a little loud, but the supplemental A/C was very nice during the summer. :) The house may have been 80 degrees, but the server room was constantly 72. Winters were just as nice. It may be 30 degrees out, but the A/C rarely kicked on, and it was still 72 all winter.
You really need to look into an A/C system that can draw in outside air. If the outside temperature is closer to the desired temperature, it should draw in the outside air. Such systems do exist, and if your bill is that high, you'll recoup the costs in just a few months.
We just got done shutting down an in-house (err, in-office) datacenter. There were 4 5-ton air conditioners, and a dozen racks full of equipment. When we were done, the power bill dropped by about $7,000/mo. The really sad part is, we replaced most of that equipment with one rack in a colo facility, and a couple gaming-style desktops to run VMs that were necessary in the office.
I think they've overlooked the way some households run. At my house, there's always someone awake. There's always someone within 100 feet of my computers. And, the private arsenal is stocked better than any datacenter I've seen. Well, it's better than some police stations I've seen. And as for police response, it's 3 minutes. That's not including the two households on the block with law enforcement officers living in them.
I've seen in-office "professional" server rooms, where from 7pm to 8am the only security is a handful of video cameras recording, and a key-locked glass front door. Even datacenters aren't all that secure. I've shown up in the wee hours of the morning, to find the one person on duty sleeping in the security office. In most datacenters, I've found ways to subvert their physical security. Sure, the front door may have biometric scanners and man traps. The back door or freight entrance may have a single key lock, and no one on that side of the building during the off hours. One of those buildings happened to house one of Microsoft's datacenters. :) Tell me about physical security concerns again...
hehe. I like that one.
That is a horribly unfair comparison.
How many people have been touched under duress for the sake of "security" in airports?
How many people have had their throats cut by terrorists on aircraft?
And finally, how many people have honestly been stopped from committing or attempting to commit such actions?
I'll fill in some numbers for you, since you won't attempt to research it.
Approximately 620 million people fly per year. That could be extrapolated from 2001 to today as 6,200,000,000. If 1 in 10 of them received patdowns or other invasive searches, that still leaves us with 620,000,000..
The number of throats cut by terrorists on aircraft? 0.
The total of potential terrorists caught and charged in the same 10 years? Less than 100.
Those odds are not a reason to force any security measures on citizens, especially where it invades their constitutionally protected rights.
You know, I was completely thrown when I sat down at someone elses computer, and went to a few sites I frequently visit. I was surprised by all the ads. I just wasn't used to seeing them. Too bad there isn't a better way to monetize a web site.
I see you saw Google Buzz. :)
It seems more of my friends are trying out Google+ than Google Buzz, but for the most part it's had a "ok, so what now" reaction.
It may have, but with no wind (or atmosphere), and very little gravity, it probably wouldn't fall apart until something touched it.
Nope, that's worthless. We should have taken from the small subset of the federal budget that is NASA, and given to the larger subset of the budget which is education, while ignoring the vast bottomless pits that money is thrown towards now.
Education isn't purely funded by the federal government either. Schools have the luxury of being funded by states and local government also.
How about this. In FY2010...
$18 billion went to NASA.
$150 billion went to education.
$685 billion went to the DoD.
The DoD plans on spending $382 billion on the F-35 program, so we'll have the bigger badder fighter aircraft than anyone. Since we already hold air superiority and that's not being challenged, that could easily be deemed an unnecessary expense.
So, why don't you show us where you would make budget cuts from, and not just preach from the "think of the children" handbook.
Yup. There was someone ranting one day about how much NASA spends, so I took the time to go through the federal budget numbers, break it down, put it back together, and showed how insignificant the NASA budget was compared to other things that we really don't need and shouldn't be doing.
Consider how much money has been put into new fighter aircraft, when there isn't an enemy with the capability of deploying aircraft to even get to CONUS. Some of the projects are dropped after spending billions, and not a single aircraft has made it to production. I could go on for hours about the DoD spending, and how it's not helpful in the least to the people of the United States. The government claims these wars we're fighting now are to help Americans, but there hasn't been a legitimate threat of war by any country against CONUS since WWII.
Even during the cold war, the threats were inflated by both sides, and the military buildup existed as more of a show of force to their own citizens, than to scare the enemy. Instead of this huge wartime budget that we've been burying ourselves with, this could easily be peace time. That's only the financial side of it. The discussion of the lives of our soldiers, both in deaths and life changing effects could be nil, *AND* we could have had sizable research stations on the moon, Mars, and other objects in this solar system. Instead, we're looking at the last launch of the only American spacecraft capable of carrying humans on Friday morning. Our only fallback plan is the rough equivalent of selling your car, and hitching rides with your neighbors to get anywhere. That's particularly odd that we're now to depend on our cold war enemies to furnish our only way to space. We've forgiven them, but still have harsh sanctions against Cuba for housing a few Russian missiles decades ago, and sending them back to Russia years before most people reading this were ever born. That's November 1962, for those who may be wondering.
How much is wasted continuing the nonsense against an enemy who hasn't done anything against us in almost 50 years?
Ya... Trust me, I agree totally, and my comments were along the lines of "What kind of idiot wouldn't check to see if the session ID was already in use", and "how can you trust *that* as your validation.
For me, validation is positive validation. It may be browser based (like .htaccess style), a cookie with a hash of some known data (user:pass:timestamp), or a big encrypted cookie with user, pass, IP, user agent, etc. I'm a firm believer, if I need to block someone from an authenticated area, the very next click should fail. It shouldn't trust that "oh his session was good for 6 hours", and then wait patiently for the cookie to expire before re-authenticating him again.
As I recall, the site I mentioned was a hand-me-down. Someone else did it and disappeared. When they went live with it, that's when all hell broke loose. Of course, I was the 3rd level of hand-me-down, where I was trying to fix problems based on the 2nd person, regarding stupid errors the 1st person made.
Session cookies may have legitimate uses, and I've used them once or twice in the past, but..... They generally aren't scalable across multiple servers in multiple datacenters, and that's what my programming target is. It may be on one server right now, but if it becomes something big, it'd damned well better be able to scale out to it. I'm a big fan of redundant hosting across multiple geographic locations on multiple providers. You never know where the outage is going to be, so it's best (for the end user) that it doesn't matter, even if there's a regional blackout. And yes, one of my server farms was in that, so we ran happily off of 2 other ones. We could the impact in sales and bandwidth, where a good number of users simply couldn't get online. There isn't much you can do about that though. :)
I had a friend who had a problem just like that. What had happened in that case was this... Each user was given a session cookie, using functionality included with the language (an older version of ColdFusion). The cookies were a pseudo random number. It was all fine and dandy with just a few users on, there was very little chance of collision.
When it was introduced to the real world, you didn't just have one or two people on, you had thousands of simultaneous users. Beyond that, the sessions had a relatively long TTL (a few hours, if I remember right).
Well, User A logs in, does their stuff, and then leaves. No problem. They could have even hit the logout button, but CF didn't properly ditch the session. When User X (someone down the line) came in, they were issued the *same* session cookie. It didn't validate anything. It didn't care what your IP, username, or anything were. So when they reached part of the site dependent on the session cookies, their credentials tied in with User A's session, not theirs.
Needless to say, the users were not entertained.
Beyond that, I demonstrated that with a little bit of cookie manipulation, you could access any account that was recently active. I did it with just changing a few things to arbitrary values, and accessed someone else's account. I then had *them* go to the site and log in. They then read me off their cookie information, and I modified my cookie to match. Voila, I'm them.
They weren't very happy. There was a period of about 10 minutes, where there was some colorful language used. They finally went to work writing their own cookie routine, so they wouldn't have the risk of these collisions any more.
With the load that Facebook can throw at a site, I'm sure there's a huge risk of collisions. Not ever user would have the luxury, but enough would to make it an issue. Someone should have seen it coming and dealt with it, but obviously it wasn't handled properly.
Ya, you have to realize that the United States is roughly the size of Europe. Europe has about 2.8 times the population. That's mainly because the US has vast areas of sparse population, and the population is primarily on the East coast, East of the Mississippi river, and the West coast, relatively close to the ocean.
The greater Houston area's population is pretty close to that of the greater London area.
American TV, unfortunately, has a tendency to sensationalize its news. Here, virtually all television is ratings driven. Blood, guts, and mayhem will always make the top stories. Getting or keeping viewers is far more important than portraying the truth.
From what I understand, the BBC is financed through taxes. It doesn't matter if the news can rival the sex and gore ridden shows before and after it. And I'm not talking badly about either, I like sex and gore, but not usually together. :)
That's exactly what I was asking. :) People don't *need* a cell phone, home phone, cable TV. Most cities require that you do have electricity and running water, but in some rural areas you can even do without that.
Your food can all be dry/canned goods, so you don't need a refrigerator. Air conditioning is a luxury, so you don't really need it. Heat can come from alternative means (wood burning stoves, or even just better clothing). So electricity is all but gone, since you probably want a computer (since we're here, we're obviously Internet junkies). You can set up enough solar panels with a few deep cycle batteries to keep the laptop running all the time (but you shouldn't).
"running" water can be filtered and treated in-house. Where I grew up, there was no "city" water supply, because we were 20 miles from the nearest city. Absolutely everyone used well water. Even in the city I'm in now, you can find older homes that had wells. The city required that they were capped when they offered water service. Ya. Tell me that wasn't in the financial interest of the city. Most people with well water did no treatment. Some did basic filtering. A few have advanced filtering. As I've found, advanced filtering is required for city supplied water too. At my mom's house, the filter pulls about 2.5 pounds of brown sludge out of the municipal supply, and removes the chlorine. Her clear dishes have all gone from being a milky white, to being perfectly clear again.
So you have sewage and trash services to contend with. There are perfectly good ways to deal with that, which have withstood the test of time. And no, dumping your chamber pot out the window isn't it.
But in today's society, when you move into a residence, you turn on power, water, phone, cable, before you move your first belonging in the door.
Our necessities are luxuries, but most people under 30 have never known life without all of them.
Food and water can be acquired. The more important thing we've lost is our hunter/gatherer survival instinct. If there were a serious ELE, the first waves of heavy deaths (assuming no traumatic ELE cause like the sun exploding), would be at the 1 to 2 week mark, as people died of starvation and dehydration. Water is abundant, if you know where to look, and are willing to consider drainage retention ponds, canals, and other bodies of fresh water. Of course, there would be plenty of human inflected deaths too, fighting over canned goods and bottled water. Don't believe it? Consider what people will do to each other on "Black Friday", and that's for a fucking discount on unnecessary material possessions. Along the same lines, watch your local news. Murders, rapes, theft for the sake of theft. Realize that your local news is covering a small area, and then multiply it by the number of metro areas world wide.
People will lie, cheat, steal, and murder for that last can of spam, or bottle of water, but won't eat their own dog, or drink from the swimming pool. Ya, if it gets bad enough, Fido will make some nice BBQ.
Back to the topic though...
Vendors will sell at prices that the market will pay. They're not raping you. You've bent over, handed them the lube, and said "Here's $200/Mb. I'll be back in a month for more."
When people stop paying the outrageous prices, the price will come down. Only that, or fair competition will keep it in check. Fair competition, unfortunately, will only bring it down to a point where all parties profit margins are satisfied. They have to keep the share holders happy, after all. No company does anything out of the goodness of their own hearts. They're in business to make a profit, and you, the consumer, have shown them what you're willing to pay.
Just like our survival instincts, we've forgotten that we, the customer, are in control of the companies. If they don't service us the way we want, we have the choice to go elsewhere. If there is no other option, we have the choice to not use their damned service. Do you really need a cell phone that plays movies, music, gives GPS directions, and (for the ladies) have the extended vibrate feature? No. You got one to make calls on. You've all been swindled by the vendors into paying more for the prettier newer phones, the add-on services, etc, etc. ... and that's how I feel every time someone complains that prices are too high, as they cut the check for the bill. "This costs too much, but oh well, I'll pay anyways."
Ya,.. I grew up on a farm. I haven't been back to one since. :) I may put up with a lot of shit at work, but it definitely doesn't smell anywhere near as bad. :) Pretty much, anywhere the animals are kept will have a distinctive aroma that you'd wish you had never smelled.
There's a possibility of learning a lot of things. That's why I can fix just about anything mechanical. You don't have a lot of choices. It's not really cheap to have your car towed 20 miles to town to get fixed. The same goes for your 40 year old diesel tractor that has more improvised parts than original equipment on it, home electrical, plumbing, and various other things. City dwellers had TV antennas, usually consisting of rabbit ears. Ours was a yagi up on a 50' tower. It's good way to learn about gravity too. Luckily it was only ever the tools.