Probably it just means corporate and national security outfits will have all sensitive data pass through a nice strong VPN connection. The laptop you carry through customs will be freshly formatted and ready for any amount of probing.
That's exactly the way we do it. We send people to France with some regularity and it's illegal to take an encrypted device into that country. Thus, we wipe the machine and put a base, unencrypted image on it. User flies to France. Once inside, an encypted blob of user data is VPN'd to the local IT guy who puts it on the laptop. User does his job. Before flying out, local IT guy wipes the machine.
If Australia is going to start insisting on poking around in our machines, we'll have to do the same for employees going there.
Of course, if it's optional I imagine our folks won't be subjected to it. Those red passports open a lot of doors.:-)
(Actually, I've never seen one of our "official business only" passports. International travelers have their official passports stored in a safe in Washington D.C. and only get them issued right before departure. So I'm not sure they're red but that's what I've been told.)
That computer takes 8 AAs. I have a camera that takes 8 AAs and I've learned the hard way - that many batteries weighs a lot. I use lithiums just because they're lighter.
No, what I want is a TRS 80 Model 100 with 8 gigs of internal flash, legacy ports replaced by 2 or 3 USB ports, and a text-based Linux distro like INX.
An ethernet port would be required; 802.11x would be optional but nice. Since the only thing I used my M100 for was writing, it's incredibly important that this fantasy machine have exactly the wonderful mechanical feel of the old M100. That thing was an unalloyed joy to type on. And since this is a writer's tool, exclusively, I could even forgo INX as long as I have a file system and VIM.
Seriously, if there were someone out there modding old M100s to these specs by ripping out and replacing the guts while maintaining the form factor and wonderful keyboard mechanicals, I'd buy it in a heartbeat for USD$500. I'd consider paying USD$1000.
I find it hard to believe than an *identifieable* ISP that is making money with legally dodgy stuff (spam) and legal but offputting stuff (bestiality, etc.) would jeopardize its revenue by hosting for-real child porn. That's just stupid.
Could someone who's not blocked from reading the article tell me - Was this *real* child porn? Or was it "under-18 in skimpy clothes" sites? Lots of politicians like to throw around an "entry-level child porn" label when they really mean "about as much skin as you can see at the beach". I'm just wondering what the FTC definition is.
Sleep apnea is one of the best cases for reliable self-diagnosis. Or maybe "partner-diagnosis". If you're sleeping with someone who has a bad case of sleep apnea, you'll know it. You just may not know what to call it.
I had sleep apnea when I was in my mid-20s. I didn't know what it was. This was 30 years ago and doctors weren't aware, either. All I knew was that I was waking up in the middle of the night with my heart trying to pound it's way out of my chest.
My GP sent me to a cardiac specialist of some sort who did a stress test and diagnosed me with "Hyperkinetic heart syndrome". He put me on beta-blockers. Over time, he convinced me the beta-blockers were saving my life, so I kept taking them even after my mother saw an episode of Oprah that talked about sleep apnea. She had heard me sleep and had an immediate epiphany. I went to a sleep lab and got diagnosed. (Wanna know how long ago that was? The sleep lab was the biggest in Houston at the biggest hospital in Houston and it only had two beds. A tech had to monitor and write down readings from analog gauges every few minutes, all nite, for three nites. And the CPAP machine that I received had an external pressure regulator that was set with a really hi-tech tool: a big ol' screwdriver.)
Yet, nobody thought to take me off the beta blockers. Look up the side effects and know that I suffered from the worst of them (at least, the worst of them from the point of view of a generally-healthy, heterosexual male in his mid-20s to late30s) for more than a decade.
I respect doctors. I've seen them do amazing things. But I don't trust them and never will. Everything they tell me, I verify. Back in the day, that meant reading lots of thick, boring books. Now it means Google. And I'll never apologize for it.
Any doctor that tells me not to look up information online or who complains about patients who do so is a doctor that I will only visit once.
The morning drive-time radio DJ I listen to (Rod Ryan in Houston) did a segment yesterday on how people were fleeing Facebook due to privacy concerns. He interviewed his own interns who all said the same thing "I've shut down my Facebook account. I'm not going back there." (or words to that effect).
When it breaks to the mainstream press that Facebook is bleeding subscribers, when even the morning DJ runs a long segment on the problems with Facebook and talking about how to go about leaving Facebook, then I'm prompted to ask - Is Facebook toast?
More down to earth - Was that DJ right? Is Facebook losing huge numbers? Is there any way to know for sure?
One thing I loved about the ThinkNIC I set up for my mom so many years ago was that it was impossible to break. It booted from read-only media (a CD) so I knew that mom could never screw up anything in her computer permanently. The worst possible crash could be fixed by just turning it off and back on.
With so many folks pushing "cloud-based" solutions for, well, everything - Why hasn't something like the ThinkNIC come back?
A little box with any sort of read-only memory could hold all the programs most users will ever want. Make that memory in the form of some sort of plug-in card, and the entire machine would be easy to upgrade. (ThinkNIC used to send out new CDs with the latest versions of their setup.) It would also be easy to fix if a security problem were found; just mail out a new SD card or whatever.
Banks could advertise "Real Security. Because we care." They could give away a small computer to customers with the promise that said little box would enable streamlined access to their accounts, all while doing nearly everything an adult could need from a computer.
There's a kernel of a good idea in there, somewhere. I'm not the entrepeneur to make it into a business but I'm wondering why I don't see anyone trying?
I'm not going to waste most of a workday formulating a beautiful post with specific, cited examples that are exactly on point.
However, it's my impression that the whole "corps with guns" thing has been done on many occasions in the past. Pinkertons shooting union organizers. Pantex forcing a judge to review documents only under armed company guard and then taking the documents away. Those are just the first two to leap to mind.
I doubt it would take much work to research a fairly lengthy article about how, in certain times and places, corporations have acted like they were the law and used forced on the public, all without reprisal.
I'm going to give it to my sister. She's in bed most of the time. 18 heart surgeries, losing a lung, various other things over the last 10 years have left her bedridden for 20 hours a day or so. She has an occasional desire to look up content such as the identity of an actor on TV or the definition of a word. A PC would be fine and I got her a simple setup a while back but using a laptop in bed or using the desktop that's 10 feet away is either awkward or too much physical effort.
We're going to try the iPad.
it seems to target a market that doesn't contain me
Frankly, if my disabled sister didn't live with me I think I'd have a hard time envisioning a use for the device.
The story is about Canada, so none of what I write below is direcly applicable. I've also written enough on this in the past on Slashdot for people to think I'm weird, so I'll keep this short. However, if you're interested in the way things work in the U.S., here's my perspective.
In the U.S., the definition of child porn is very flexible. Very. The definition isn't just in the statutes, it's in the case law. There are tests and ambiguity a-plenty.
Functionally, anything is child porn if the prosecutor says it's child porn. There doesn't have to be nudity. There doesn't have to be sexual acts. There doesn't have to be anything even remotely suggestive in any single particular picture.
When you get down to cases, the U.S. definition of child porn hinges on the state of mind of the person in possession. If the prosecutor can prove (sufficiently well to satisfy a jury) that you think dirty thoughts about little kids while you masturbate to the photos (or even, more controversially and more arguably, the drawings) of kids (or adults that look like kids but are believed by the possessor to be kids), then you're guilty of possessing child porn.
That sounds crazy but let me give you an example that will make it more clear, an example where the state of mind of the person in possession is already clearly established. If you've been convicted of molesting a child, it's a given that your thoughts about children are sexual. Assume you get probation and your probation officer decides to drop by to inspect your domicile. If the P.O. finds a single photo of a child, even if that child is bundled from head to toe in winter clothes, you'll go back to jail. You will have violated your probation for possessing child porn. You'll get a new case filed against you and you'll lose.
That situation, while it may be something that seems over the top, is at least understandable to most people.
The same standard is applied to all child porn cases. You can take naked pictures of children for legitimate medical research and you won't be prosecuted. If you've been previously adjudicated as a perv, owning a kids clothing catalog can get you a whole set of new convictions.
The difference is in what the prosecutor can prove to the jury about the state of mind of the person in possession of the media.
If the prosecutor can prove to a jury that you jerk off to McDonalds commercials featuring kids, then those McDonalds commercials, under U.S. law become child porn, but only if they are in your possession.
If you don't see the potential for abuse in this set-up, you're just not looking. It's a serious problem in the U.S.
About 45,000 boardings per day, on average. Up to over 60,000 during a special event.
And, yes, you're quite right about the system being less than it can be until it connects more things, especially an airport or two. I'd love to see a directlink from IAH to any station downtown. It would be a huge selling point for tourism. For now, though, I think the light rail makes living near a train station attractive enough that I plan to do just that when I retire in 5 years.
Texas understands a simple principle: oil isn't forever.
Houston learned that lesson during the early-1980s oil bust. Until then, the Houston economy was totally dependent on oil. It was a huge percentage of all business done here. After the bust, we had serious problems with abandoned homes, "see-through" office towers, homeless people. It was bad, seriously bad. It was so bad, that one downtown skyscraper actually sold for less than USD$300K in back taxes. (Google for "NoTsuOh" for the story; for quick and best results, limit search to the "houstonpress.com" domain.)
Since then, the city has hugely diversified. Oil/gas/chemical is still a big part of our makeup and it always will be. But we have so much more nowadays that the city no longer lives and dies by the price of oil.
Sidenote - 25+ years ago it was common to hear people say: "For Houston to recover, oil would have to go to $40 a barrel and stay there; we all know that can never happen." My, how times have changed.
Houston has lots of piecemeal regulations that would be called zoning in other places.
However, folks should note that Houston is a great place to live. It's flat, ugly, and polluted and I love it.:-)
The lack of formal zoning works for us. It allows developers to keep prices low so traditional "single-family home on a plot of land" housing is strikingly more affordable here than in most places. For most people, that one advantage outweighs all others.
There are drawbacks, of course. The lack of zoning means that you must own a car unless you're very poor and forced to take the bus or you make a special effort to live within walking distance of a train station. Even then, the car-focused layout of the city strongly discourages walking. Luckily, about half of everything worth seeing in Houston (I know some Houston resident will want to stone me for this) is within walking distance of a train station. That means the city has finally become livable without a car for middle-class folks who make the effort to plan where they live and work. Crazily enough, the city is now a good tourist destination *if* the tourist knows enough to keep within a few hundred yards of a train station for their entire stay. While sidetrips are possible, the ubiquity of cars in Houston means that the taxi service is *terrible* in just about every way. The careful tourist will want to hire a limo, something that's easy and cheap compared to other cities. (There are limo services that are actually just upgraded taxis and cost little more for a *much* improved ride experience.)
Enough about Houston. I could drone on for hours. It's a hugely mixed bag but I love it.
I pay my ISP a few extra bucks for some static IPs. I fool around with server builds. I build 'em, play with 'em, trash 'em. Wash, rinse, repeat. I never bother to register anything with anybody to associate my IPs with any names. I just expect that if I'm sitting anywhere in the world and I want to look at that page I put on my playtoy of a web server at home, I only need to type in http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx./ If I need to fetch the file that I left on that miserable excuse for an ftp server that I have at home, I expect to be able to plop down in any internet cafe in any place in the world, fire up their locked-down, browser-only interface, and type ftp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and grab said file with a couple of mouse clicks.
That's why I pay my ISP for static IPs.
Is there anything about all of this that will break that functionality?
It's a pretty nice place to work if you're in IT. Other parts of the organization vary widely. Generally speaking, if you're willing to work hard at helping people, you can find a place to do it here.
This may be blasphemous, but I actually *like* my job.
I work for a giant TLA. Our AV is Symantec. Our removable media and whole-disk encryption products are in mid-migration to all-GERS (from a combination of GERS and WinMagic).
...there's nothing more credible than the men and women who are out there on the front lines...
During a previous excursion into sandy bloodletting, under Bush The Elder, one of the few completely trustworthy accounts I got from the battlefield was a letter from the son of a co-worker. She was kind enough to share with me.
There had been a friendly-fire incident that made the news. All the news accounts didn't seem to make sense. Everybody was spinning the story every way they could, madly, with little regard for truth. This mom, knowing her son was in the same group as the incident occurred, asked him about it. His letter, recieved well after the media circus had died out, was perfect.
What I mean was, the man was *right there*, 20 yards from the source of the friendly fire. He was *right there* pulling dead Americans who had just been killed by other Americans out of their vehicles. And his story of who was where and when they did what was the only account of that situation that I had ever seen that actually made sense.
Once you get off the front line, stories of war accrete bullshit until they're unrecognizable as even possible, much less the truth.
To my knowledge, when they moved a priest, there was no attempt to conceal that priest's location from authorities. They did not harbor fugitives from justice. They merely did not tell the new church what their new pastor had been accused of (and may not have told the old church where they moved the priest).
This exactly describes what happened in the Catholic church of my hometown when I was 15 years old, 35 years ago. The priest was a photography buff and so was I. Since I was a Baptist, we had no contact with each other except to compare cameras at sporting events and that sort of thing. He made it clear that it was OK for me to come over and use his darkroom anytime I wanted. I never did since I didn't know anything about developing film and I didn't want to appear ignorant. In those days, I was the "camera guy" in my school and I was loathe to admit I didn't know anything.
A couple of older members of his church, separately, approached me at different times and wanted to know if the priest had ever invited me over to use his darkroom. I said he had but that I'd never gone. They both replied with something low-key and non-specific along the lines of "That's good. It probably wouldn't be a good idea for you to ever take him up on his offer, OK?"
I never really thought much about it. Not long after, he got moved out very suddenly and no one knew where he went. There was all sorts of buzz about it but I was just a kid and the adults didn't confide in me.
Looking back, I wonder how close I came?
PS - The new monsignor (absolutely great guy who, over the years, turned out to be above reproach and a credit to his church, everything a priest should be) was saddled with a (I don't know the proper title) priest in training who had been left over from the previous priest. The guy had just reached the stage in his job when he was allowed to hear confessions. A bunch of the girls at the high school would talk openly about this guy and going to confession. They'd confess, in highly circumspect terms, to "doing stuff" with boyfriends. Junior priest would then press, quite hard, for details. Serious details. Every little detail, in chronological order, including verbal re-enactments ("Again! With feeling this time!") of everything that had happened in the back seat of that car last Saturday. No girl ever went to that guy for confession twice. The new monsignor garnered instant respect among the female youth of his church when he stopped the trainee from hearing confession and, shortly thereafter, helped him make the decision to leave the priesthood.
You know, folks, sometimes having a human in control isn't all that bad.
But backups are good, too. I distinctly remember a television interview with the commander of the first shuttle test flight in which he went over all the things that happen during a landing. (I remember the interview but not the program. It was so long ago, I think it was "Donahue".)
One thing he pointed out was that upon landing, if the sensors show imminent touchdown (that is, after the nose has started to drop to the tarmac) and the front gear isn't down, a dynamite charge just "blows it down" without a command from anyone. He may have been wow-ing the rubes with the way the gear is normally deployed but he gave the definite impression that the process was, as a last-ditch backup, automated. If something was stuck, the gear was either coming down or coming apart, whether a pilot did their part or not.
You'll get better lap dances if you offer the stripper that stack of hundred-dollar bills.
Totally unnecessary. I don't go to the NY Scores, just a twice-a-year (or so) visit to a local spot. The girls there vary widely in their offerings and demands, but if you choose the oldest and most worn-out of the lot, you can get pretty much everything possible for $400. Once you move beyond that dollar level (which is ridiculous for the hit-or-miss crapshoot of a strip club), you might as well exchange numbers and meet off-site. I don't do that. Strip clubs are great for an occasional bit of eye-candy fun; by contrast, full-fledged mongering is expensive and dangerous.
(in re strippers and Starbucks clerks) - "Sometimes they're the same person."
I wish.
My local strippers tend to be 30-year-old moms with classic curvy figures, classic-Texas big hair and even bigger classic-Texas implants. They are quite attractive for what they are...but nothing special.
My local Starbucks clerks tend to be teen-to-25 years old, lithe, tattoo'ed post-punks.
As a UFO (ugly, fat, old) man, I find the latter group to be far more exotic and, not to put too fine a point on it, "inspirational". If I could find a strip club that hired girls like that, I'd switch my patronage in a heartbeat.
Slashdot Mirror
Link is in the post you replied to.
That's exactly the way we do it. We send people to France with some regularity and it's illegal to take an encrypted device into that country. Thus, we wipe the machine and put a base, unencrypted image on it. User flies to France. Once inside, an encypted blob of user data is VPN'd to the local IT guy who puts it on the laptop. User does his job. Before flying out, local IT guy wipes the machine.
If Australia is going to start insisting on poking around in our machines, we'll have to do the same for employees going there.
Of course, if it's optional I imagine our folks won't be subjected to it. Those red passports open a lot of doors. :-)
(Actually, I've never seen one of our "official business only" passports. International travelers have their official passports stored in a safe in Washington D.C. and only get them issued right before departure. So I'm not sure they're red but that's what I've been told.)
That computer takes 8 AAs. I have a camera that takes 8 AAs and I've learned the hard way - that many batteries weighs a lot. I use lithiums just because they're lighter.
No, what I want is a TRS 80 Model 100 with 8 gigs of internal flash, legacy ports replaced by 2 or 3 USB ports, and a text-based Linux distro like INX.
An ethernet port would be required; 802.11x would be optional but nice. Since the only thing I used my M100 for was writing, it's incredibly important that this fantasy machine have exactly the wonderful mechanical feel of the old M100. That thing was an unalloyed joy to type on. And since this is a writer's tool, exclusively, I could even forgo INX as long as I have a file system and VIM.
Seriously, if there were someone out there modding old M100s to these specs by ripping out and replacing the guts while maintaining the form factor and wonderful keyboard mechanicals, I'd buy it in a heartbeat for USD$500. I'd consider paying USD$1000.
I find it hard to believe than an *identifieable* ISP that is making money with legally dodgy stuff (spam) and legal but offputting stuff (bestiality, etc.) would jeopardize its revenue by hosting for-real child porn. That's just stupid.
Could someone who's not blocked from reading the article tell me - Was this *real* child porn? Or was it "under-18 in skimpy clothes" sites? Lots of politicians like to throw around an "entry-level child porn" label when they really mean "about as much skin as you can see at the beach". I'm just wondering what the FTC definition is.
Great idea!
Are you there?
Sleep apnea is one of the best cases for reliable self-diagnosis. Or maybe "partner-diagnosis". If you're sleeping with someone who has a bad case of sleep apnea, you'll know it. You just may not know what to call it.
I had sleep apnea when I was in my mid-20s. I didn't know what it was. This was 30 years ago and doctors weren't aware, either. All I knew was that I was waking up in the middle of the night with my heart trying to pound it's way out of my chest.
My GP sent me to a cardiac specialist of some sort who did a stress test and diagnosed me with "Hyperkinetic heart syndrome". He put me on beta-blockers. Over time, he convinced me the beta-blockers were saving my life, so I kept taking them even after my mother saw an episode of Oprah that talked about sleep apnea. She had heard me sleep and had an immediate epiphany. I went to a sleep lab and got diagnosed. (Wanna know how long ago that was? The sleep lab was the biggest in Houston at the biggest hospital in Houston and it only had two beds. A tech had to monitor and write down readings from analog gauges every few minutes, all nite, for three nites. And the CPAP machine that I received had an external pressure regulator that was set with a really hi-tech tool: a big ol' screwdriver.)
Yet, nobody thought to take me off the beta blockers. Look up the side effects and know that I suffered from the worst of them (at least, the worst of them from the point of view of a generally-healthy, heterosexual male in his mid-20s to late30s) for more than a decade.
I respect doctors. I've seen them do amazing things. But I don't trust them and never will. Everything they tell me, I verify. Back in the day, that meant reading lots of thick, boring books. Now it means Google. And I'll never apologize for it.
Any doctor that tells me not to look up information online or who complains about patients who do so is a doctor that I will only visit once.
The morning drive-time radio DJ I listen to (Rod Ryan in Houston) did a segment yesterday on how people were fleeing Facebook due to privacy concerns. He interviewed his own interns who all said the same thing "I've shut down my Facebook account. I'm not going back there." (or words to that effect).
When it breaks to the mainstream press that Facebook is bleeding subscribers, when even the morning DJ runs a long segment on the problems with Facebook and talking about how to go about leaving Facebook, then I'm prompted to ask - Is Facebook toast?
More down to earth - Was that DJ right? Is Facebook losing huge numbers? Is there any way to know for sure?
...as do small ones.
"Nuke it" was the first thing I thought of when I heard about this leak.
Now I'm just trying to figure out if "great" or "small" applies in this case.
One thing I loved about the ThinkNIC I set up for my mom so many years ago was that it was impossible to break. It booted from read-only media (a CD) so I knew that mom could never screw up anything in her computer permanently. The worst possible crash could be fixed by just turning it off and back on.
With so many folks pushing "cloud-based" solutions for, well, everything - Why hasn't something like the ThinkNIC come back?
A little box with any sort of read-only memory could hold all the programs most users will ever want. Make that memory in the form of some sort of plug-in card, and the entire machine would be easy to upgrade. (ThinkNIC used to send out new CDs with the latest versions of their setup.) It would also be easy to fix if a security problem were found; just mail out a new SD card or whatever.
Banks could advertise "Real Security. Because we care." They could give away a small computer to customers with the promise that said little box would enable streamlined access to their accounts, all while doing nearly everything an adult could need from a computer.
There's a kernel of a good idea in there, somewhere. I'm not the entrepeneur to make it into a business but I'm wondering why I don't see anyone trying?
I'm not going to waste most of a workday formulating a beautiful post with specific, cited examples that are exactly on point.
However, it's my impression that the whole "corps with guns" thing has been done on many occasions in the past. Pinkertons shooting union organizers. Pantex forcing a judge to review documents only under armed company guard and then taking the documents away. Those are just the first two to leap to mind.
I doubt it would take much work to research a fairly lengthy article about how, in certain times and places, corporations have acted like they were the law and used forced on the public, all without reprisal.
I'm about to buy an iPad, my first Apple product.
I'm going to give it to my sister. She's in bed most of the time. 18 heart surgeries, losing a lung, various other things over the last 10 years have left her bedridden for 20 hours a day or so. She has an occasional desire to look up content such as the identity of an actor on TV or the definition of a word. A PC would be fine and I got her a simple setup a while back but using a laptop in bed or using the desktop that's 10 feet away is either awkward or too much physical effort.
We're going to try the iPad.
Frankly, if my disabled sister didn't live with me I think I'd have a hard time envisioning a use for the device.
The story is about Canada, so none of what I write below is direcly applicable. I've also written enough on this in the past on Slashdot for people to think I'm weird, so I'll keep this short. However, if you're interested in the way things work in the U.S., here's my perspective.
In the U.S., the definition of child porn is very flexible. Very. The definition isn't just in the statutes, it's in the case law. There are tests and ambiguity a-plenty.
Functionally, anything is child porn if the prosecutor says it's child porn. There doesn't have to be nudity. There doesn't have to be sexual acts. There doesn't have to be anything even remotely suggestive in any single particular picture.
When you get down to cases, the U.S. definition of child porn hinges on the state of mind of the person in possession. If the prosecutor can prove (sufficiently well to satisfy a jury) that you think dirty thoughts about little kids while you masturbate to the photos (or even, more controversially and more arguably, the drawings) of kids (or adults that look like kids but are believed by the possessor to be kids), then you're guilty of possessing child porn.
That sounds crazy but let me give you an example that will make it more clear, an example where the state of mind of the person in possession is already clearly established. If you've been convicted of molesting a child, it's a given that your thoughts about children are sexual. Assume you get probation and your probation officer decides to drop by to inspect your domicile. If the P.O. finds a single photo of a child, even if that child is bundled from head to toe in winter clothes, you'll go back to jail. You will have violated your probation for possessing child porn. You'll get a new case filed against you and you'll lose.
That situation, while it may be something that seems over the top, is at least understandable to most people.
The same standard is applied to all child porn cases. You can take naked pictures of children for legitimate medical research and you won't be prosecuted. If you've been previously adjudicated as a perv, owning a kids clothing catalog can get you a whole set of new convictions.
The difference is in what the prosecutor can prove to the jury about the state of mind of the person in possession of the media.
If the prosecutor can prove to a jury that you jerk off to McDonalds commercials featuring kids, then those McDonalds commercials, under U.S. law become child porn, but only if they are in your possession.
If you don't see the potential for abuse in this set-up, you're just not looking. It's a serious problem in the U.S.
About 45,000 boardings per day, on average. Up to over 60,000 during a special event.
And, yes, you're quite right about the system being less than it can be until it connects more things, especially an airport or two. I'd love to see a directlink from IAH to any station downtown. It would be a huge selling point for tourism. For now, though, I think the light rail makes living near a train station attractive enough that I plan to do just that when I retire in 5 years.
Houston learned that lesson during the early-1980s oil bust. Until then, the Houston economy was totally dependent on oil. It was a huge percentage of all business done here. After the bust, we had serious problems with abandoned homes, "see-through" office towers, homeless people. It was bad, seriously bad. It was so bad, that one downtown skyscraper actually sold for less than USD$300K in back taxes. (Google for "NoTsuOh" for the story; for quick and best results, limit search to the "houstonpress.com" domain.)
Since then, the city has hugely diversified. Oil/gas/chemical is still a big part of our makeup and it always will be. But we have so much more nowadays that the city no longer lives and dies by the price of oil.
Sidenote - 25+ years ago it was common to hear people say: "For Houston to recover, oil would have to go to $40 a barrel and stay there; we all know that can never happen." My, how times have changed.
Thanks. I appreciate the info.
Houston has lots of piecemeal regulations that would be called zoning in other places.
However, folks should note that Houston is a great place to live. It's flat, ugly, and polluted and I love it. :-)
The lack of formal zoning works for us. It allows developers to keep prices low so traditional "single-family home on a plot of land" housing is strikingly more affordable here than in most places. For most people, that one advantage outweighs all others.
There are drawbacks, of course. The lack of zoning means that you must own a car unless you're very poor and forced to take the bus or you make a special effort to live within walking distance of a train station. Even then, the car-focused layout of the city strongly discourages walking. Luckily, about half of everything worth seeing in Houston (I know some Houston resident will want to stone me for this) is within walking distance of a train station. That means the city has finally become livable without a car for middle-class folks who make the effort to plan where they live and work. Crazily enough, the city is now a good tourist destination *if* the tourist knows enough to keep within a few hundred yards of a train station for their entire stay. While sidetrips are possible, the ubiquity of cars in Houston means that the taxi service is *terrible* in just about every way. The careful tourist will want to hire a limo, something that's easy and cheap compared to other cities. (There are limo services that are actually just upgraded taxis and cost little more for a *much* improved ride experience.)
Enough about Houston. I could drone on for hours. It's a hugely mixed bag but I love it.
Well, n00b at some things, not at others.
I pay my ISP a few extra bucks for some static IPs. I fool around with server builds. I build 'em, play with 'em, trash 'em. Wash, rinse, repeat. I never bother to register anything with anybody to associate my IPs with any names. I just expect that if I'm sitting anywhere in the world and I want to look at that page I put on my playtoy of a web server at home, I only need to type in http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx./ If I need to fetch the file that I left on that miserable excuse for an ftp server that I have at home, I expect to be able to plop down in any internet cafe in any place in the world, fire up their locked-down, browser-only interface, and type ftp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and grab said file with a couple of mouse clicks.
That's why I pay my ISP for static IPs.
Is there anything about all of this that will break that functionality?
It's a pretty nice place to work if you're in IT. Other parts of the organization vary widely. Generally speaking, if you're willing to work hard at helping people, you can find a place to do it here.
This may be blasphemous, but I actually *like* my job.
I work for a giant TLA. Our AV is Symantec. Our removable media and whole-disk encryption products are in mid-migration to all-GERS (from a combination of GERS and WinMagic).
We're headed straight to hell, aren't we?
During a previous excursion into sandy bloodletting, under Bush The Elder, one of the few completely trustworthy accounts I got from the battlefield was a letter from the son of a co-worker. She was kind enough to share with me.
There had been a friendly-fire incident that made the news. All the news accounts didn't seem to make sense. Everybody was spinning the story every way they could, madly, with little regard for truth. This mom, knowing her son was in the same group as the incident occurred, asked him about it. His letter, recieved well after the media circus had died out, was perfect.
What I mean was, the man was *right there*, 20 yards from the source of the friendly fire. He was *right there* pulling dead Americans who had just been killed by other Americans out of their vehicles. And his story of who was where and when they did what was the only account of that situation that I had ever seen that actually made sense.
Once you get off the front line, stories of war accrete bullshit until they're unrecognizable as even possible, much less the truth.
This exactly describes what happened in the Catholic church of my hometown when I was 15 years old, 35 years ago. The priest was a photography buff and so was I. Since I was a Baptist, we had no contact with each other except to compare cameras at sporting events and that sort of thing. He made it clear that it was OK for me to come over and use his darkroom anytime I wanted. I never did since I didn't know anything about developing film and I didn't want to appear ignorant. In those days, I was the "camera guy" in my school and I was loathe to admit I didn't know anything.
A couple of older members of his church, separately, approached me at different times and wanted to know if the priest had ever invited me over to use his darkroom. I said he had but that I'd never gone. They both replied with something low-key and non-specific along the lines of "That's good. It probably wouldn't be a good idea for you to ever take him up on his offer, OK?"
I never really thought much about it. Not long after, he got moved out very suddenly and no one knew where he went. There was all sorts of buzz about it but I was just a kid and the adults didn't confide in me.
Looking back, I wonder how close I came?
PS - The new monsignor (absolutely great guy who, over the years, turned out to be above reproach and a credit to his church, everything a priest should be) was saddled with a (I don't know the proper title) priest in training who had been left over from the previous priest. The guy had just reached the stage in his job when he was allowed to hear confessions. A bunch of the girls at the high school would talk openly about this guy and going to confession. They'd confess, in highly circumspect terms, to "doing stuff" with boyfriends. Junior priest would then press, quite hard, for details. Serious details. Every little detail, in chronological order, including verbal re-enactments ("Again! With feeling this time!") of everything that had happened in the back seat of that car last Saturday. No girl ever went to that guy for confession twice. The new monsignor garnered instant respect among the female youth of his church when he stopped the trainee from hearing confession and, shortly thereafter, helped him make the decision to leave the priesthood.
But backups are good, too. I distinctly remember a television interview with the commander of the first shuttle test flight in which he went over all the things that happen during a landing. (I remember the interview but not the program. It was so long ago, I think it was "Donahue".)
One thing he pointed out was that upon landing, if the sensors show imminent touchdown (that is, after the nose has started to drop to the tarmac) and the front gear isn't down, a dynamite charge just "blows it down" without a command from anyone. He may have been wow-ing the rubes with the way the gear is normally deployed but he gave the definite impression that the process was, as a last-ditch backup, automated. If something was stuck, the gear was either coming down or coming apart, whether a pilot did their part or not.
Do I have that wrong?
Totally unnecessary. I don't go to the NY Scores, just a twice-a-year (or so) visit to a local spot. The girls there vary widely in their offerings and demands, but if you choose the oldest and most worn-out of the lot, you can get pretty much everything possible for $400. Once you move beyond that dollar level (which is ridiculous for the hit-or-miss crapshoot of a strip club), you might as well exchange numbers and meet off-site. I don't do that. Strip clubs are great for an occasional bit of eye-candy fun; by contrast, full-fledged mongering is expensive and dangerous.
I wish.
My local strippers tend to be 30-year-old moms with classic curvy figures, classic-Texas big hair and even bigger classic-Texas implants. They are quite attractive for what they are...but nothing special.
My local Starbucks clerks tend to be teen-to-25 years old, lithe, tattoo'ed post-punks.
As a UFO (ugly, fat, old) man, I find the latter group to be far more exotic and, not to put too fine a point on it, "inspirational". If I could find a strip club that hired girls like that, I'd switch my patronage in a heartbeat.