If I understand the way Wikipedia works (and I'm sure I don't, in any breadth), if, while the error was up, Guttenberg himself signed on and corrected the error, justifying his change in the attached discussion with "I should know my own name", the wiki-nuts would come out of the closet to revert him because he's not quoting a source.
You're correct; it's now 256-bit AES. Where I work, we consider it sufficient for data in transit. If you're going to mail someone a CD with data, you encrypt it with a reasonable password via WinZip, send that password via encrypted email, and drop the CD in the post.
I've used these products for a long time. (There are others; look around.) I suggest you phase 'em in over the next three years, by which time you'll have replaced everything. After all, you already have a budget for replacing all hardware over the next few years, right? Beyond that, remote, enterprise-quality tools for managing this hardware can be *very* pricey add-ons, but if you build your work processes right, there may be little or no need for them.
That just leaves writing to CDs/DVDs. There are open-source packages such as TrueCrypt. If you're already running WinZip, it'll do the same for removable media, allowing your users to set a specific password for that write then sneakernet the disk wherever it needs to go. If you want to force all writes to optical media to be encrypted, you'll need to look at something like GuardianEdge Removable for a commercial app or something inventive if you must go open-source.
One last thought: If your data is so important, so valuable, or so legally regulated that you must encrypt *everything*, then you have the money to go open-source, commercial, or whatever works. I see no justification in the submitted question for limiting the choice to open-source software. If you *have* to do this, you *have* to do it right, no matter the cost. If your big guys say they can't afford the cost, then they don't *have* to do it.
That comic has been making the rounds. It's cute, but not applicable.
If the submitter is in an organization with thousands of machines, the notion that any user will be required to keep their password confidential in the face of torture is laughable. That's for specially trained operatives, soldiers, and other assorted heroes. Those of us in the normal world will probably adopt a more rationale perspective. If someone were crazy enough to steal one of our laptops, simultaneously snatch the user, and threaten them with torture, our folks know to give up all passwords, immediately. We're only required to keep data confidential where it is reasonable to do so. When floods sweep away your car, wave goodbye to your laptop in the trunk. When someone threatens you physically, tell 'em what they want to hear.
Our people are more important than our data. Our people are more important than the publics data. If we lose a chunk of data, we have ways to reconstruct what was lost and mitigate damage. If we lose an employee, there is no way to achieve a good outcome.
Other than everyone obeying the law, there are no good solutions. Even that's not good enough.
Example? I used to make classic "jackrabbit" starts when I was at the front of the line at a red light. Yes, I'd glance left and right but I never paid enough attention.
On three separate occasions in the past, I've taken off when a light turned green only to have a cross-traffic car run their red light *behind* me, *after* I cleared the middle of the intersection. One guy was sliding through the intersection sideways, brakes locked up, in a cloud of blue tire smoke.
It eventually dawned on me that my legal right to enter the intersection when the light turned green didn't mean much if I was gonna get creamed by some lawless crosstraffic. Thus, I now hold the opinion that even driving legally just isn't enough. I have to assume everyone out there is trying to kill me.
I don't like having to maintain that attitude all the time. When I was a kid, I just thought that way when I was on my motorcycle. Now, as an oldster, I feel I need to think that way all the time no matter what I'm driving. It's a shame, really.
Yes, I'm old. "Get off my lawn" cracks are unnecessary.
When I learned to drive, it was standard practice for lights to be timed with safety in mind; yellows were long enough. What really tended to make some intersections safer, though, was that at every light change, all traffic got a red light for 2 seconds. According to my driver's ed teacher, showing red in all directions had previously been the law but the law had recently been changed. Thus, such light timings were fast-disappearing, even back then (1970s, Texas). My recollection is that the intersections that still had the old timings felt much safer for a nervous new driver. Boring, yes, but safer.
By contrast, the worst light timings I've ever seen were at a small town in Mississippi that had only one red light. Here's the way that light was timed:
North-South shows red; East-West shows green N-S shows red; E-W shows green AND yellow N-S shows red; E-W shows green AND yellow AND red N-S shows red; E-W shows yellow AND red N-S shows red; E-W shows red N-S shows red AND yellow; E-W shows red N-S shows red AND yellow AND green; E-W shows red N-S shows yellow AND green; E-W shows red N-S shows green; E-W shows red
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I swear, a full light change at that intersection took 30 seconds and I never really knew when to proceed. I mostly just detoured around it.
You can ignore the bag check. I do. I finally decided to stop complying with any of them based on three experiences at two different Walmarts.
First, there's a Walmart in Houston that checks everything on the way out. That's ridiculous. It's a high-volume place with mostly low-dollar goods. I just walked past and stopped complying with any such requests at Fry's, etc.
The second was at another Walmart, one that didn't routinely check bags. I set off the shoplifting alarm because the checker hadn't deactivated the tag on a DVD I bought. The little old door lady came over, I handed her my receipt and showed her the DVD, then stuck out my hand to retrieve the receipt. She didn't hand it back. Instead, she started looking over every single item in my cart, bags, on the bottom rack, everywhere, checking them off against the receipt. I was incensed. When I realized what she was doing, I said "Goodbye" and started to roll on out. She jumped in front of me, did two last checks just so that I could see she was in charge of when she would let me go, and handed me the receipt.
I shoved my face to within two inches of hers and growled, as menacingly as possible through gritted teeth, "DO NOT *EVER* stop me on the way out of this store again!" Then I walked out.
A few weeks later, I'm leaving the same store when the same lady walks over to me as I'm leaving and asks to see my receipt. I was momentarily confused since I hadn't set off the alarm. Then I realized who it was. I realized she just liked screwing with people. And I leaned in, looked directly into her eyes, and simply said "No." She realized who I was and scurried away.
Nowadays, I don't even acknowledge the door workers on my way out. I don't care if they ask me to stop. I don't care if there's a line for the receipt check. I don't care if I set off the alarm. I just walk out.
Works for me.
What does that have to do with the mandatory gathering of DNA? You can refuse to stop for the little old lady at Walmart. Somehow, I don't think my strategy of "Just walk out" will work if I'm under arrest. I'm not sure how to handle or how far to push my objections to having a sample taken when I'm surrounded by men with guns and clubs who are determined to take what they want. Ultimately, these questions deal with the limits we place on governments to use force. Where I come from, in the privacy of a police station, there are *NO* limits. That's a sobering thought.
The big companies are being assholes. They are required by law to post all open positions and take in people for interviews in some countries, but they have really writen some of the positions with specific employees already in mind.
Everybody knows this (or at least I hope they do) but it's sometimes funny when these things are brought to light.
Many years ago, the U.S. government started putting job announcements online. The process was simple. A local office doing a hire would just cc the announcement document to yet another place. They didn't really think about the fact that the documents in their little office, previously seen by just a few local employees, could now be seen by anyone, anywhere. It took some folks a while to adapt and stop using blatantly obvious tactics to deny jobs to certain applicants.
I will never forget, during the transition period, seeing a number of job announcements that opened and closed on the same day (blatantly illegal; there's a mandated open period for announcements). One announcement sidestepped that requirement by staying open for two weeks, but promising "priority consideration" (a real, technical term with specific requirements that translates into "if you're not priority, you can't get the job" in practice) would be given to applicants who pick up an application package in person within 4 hours of the opening of the announcement.
I'll never forget being summonsed to an execs office and asked if I'd be interested in a job that was opening soon. I was chomping at the bit for the job (I knew it would be announced soon) and had been practicing my interview already. The exec asked me what I thought qualified me for the job. I was totally prepared. "I have solid experience in Fields A, B, C, and D. Those will translate directly and immediately into high productivity and solid result in the position." He thanked me and I left. I was pumped. Obviously, for the first time in my life, I was going to be the beneficiary of some of the underhanded hiring tactics that were common around here. It was obvious the guy wanted me even if I didn't know exactly why.
A week later the job announcement was published. It included something I'd never seen before, an addendum (complete with a big, bold box drawn around it) to the qualifications that specifically said "The following types of experience DO NOT qualify for this position: Fields A, B, C and D." The "A, B, C, and D" in the announcement were DIRECT QUOTES from me, exactly duplicating the verbiage I had used with the aforementioned exec the week previous.
intentionally slow construction projects we have in this area. You guys getting that in Houston too?
Are you kidding? I believe the stretch of I-45 south of Houston has been continuously under construction for over 50 years.
Note to the folks who aren't from around Houston: This is NOT a joke. There's a stretch of a few critical miles of highway between Houston and Galveston that has spent, I believe, the entire half century with the traffic at least a little snarled because one construction project or another has been continuously in process. Seriously. I'd be willing to place a sizable wager that if I'm wrong, the time when that stretch has been completely clear of construction has been less than a year out of the last 50.
Don't get me wrong. I think our attitude towards violence is just dandy. I have no problem with enforcing the castle doctrine, i.e. the notion that if someone breaks into my house and I have an even remotely reasonable fear for my safety, I get a free pass to kill him. That's just logical and those euro-locales that would prohibit people from defending themselves and their property with guns and violence are insane to me.
But the sex thing? We're just nuts. We're so squeamish on the subject that useful sex education in this country is considered such a novelty that it's worthy of a feature article in the Boston Globe. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the sort of sex ed discussed in that article fairly common in Europe? It's crazy-rare, here in the U.S.
I swear, take some politician or law enforcement official with responsibility for enforcing laws protecting youth from the U.S., plop him down on a beach in Rio, and watch him die of apoplexy.
I know that wind-powered energy generation is growing in the U.S. because I see it every day (in season; see below). I don't know if they're manufactured near here or just shipping in via our port, but those gi-normous wind turbine blades are a common sight on the freeways of Houston, traveling up I-45 headed for who knows where. There's a small cottage industry in escort vehicles. I've seen every manner of tiny, broken-down car, truck, and minivan festooned with flags and feeler poles, in packs, leading and following each individual blade as it makes its way through town. You don't realize it until you're driving right next to one, but those blades are *HUGE*; I'd estimate as long as 4 or 5 tractor-trailer rigs. I'm sure someone will pop up with an accurate number. Whatever the correct size, it's just amazing to watch something that long and odd-looking moving through midday traffic, dwarfing everything around it. Up until a few months ago (I assume winter brings a slowdown to construction), I'd see at least one every day. Sometimes I'd see three at a time. I expect for the freeways to be lousy with 'em again as soon as the weather gets warm.
What point are you trying to make with that first video?
A bunch of Critical Mass riders block a car, refuse to move, deliberately put their bikes in a position to get them run over, start yelling at the driver that there's a person under the van (prompting the wife, mortified, to get out of the van and check, placing herself in even more danger from these wack-os), and then proceed to get all dramatic about it. Why would the police want to stop video of that? I'd think they'd love to get good documentation of the way those Critical Mass a-holes were criminally detaining that old couple and, without provocation, vandalizing the vehicle.
Damn, I wish Critical Mass would come to Houston. We got enough assault rifles behind the seats and big-ass tube bumpers on the front of our trucks to teach those little bitches a permanent lesson in peaceful co-existence.
Now, I think I'll take a little time out to listen for the whooshing sounds as that last paragraph sails over some heads.
I went to a match later and found a couple of other guys with the same case (tray, actually). One liked it, one felt like I did, and no one was willing to kick up a fuss. Our particular sport is essentially dead (the official discussion forum owned by the national sanctioning body has been down for months) and no one wants to start any drama. I just let it go.
Why would you trust them not to have a back door installed,...
I'm not as worried about that as some. Here's how I look at it - if there's a back door, it doesn't matter as long as it doesn't get used. If it gets used even a few times, word will get out. When some ring of baby-rapers gets caught and prosecuted with evidence that was obtained through said back door, word *will* get out.
So what happens then? A million drive purchasers demand their money back. A million businesses that bought the drives because they were guaranteed unbreakable encryption join in class-action lawsuits against the drive manufacturers and resellers, blasting them into legal oblivion.
If I were a drive manufacturer, I wouldn't risk it. The secret would eventually leak and my company would be toast, overnight.
Want to download stuff with far less risk? Get a usenet account from a premium provider. Tunnel past your ISP. Download what you want. Enjoy.
Want to know what's there? Hit binsearch.info and see. Maybe you'll find what you need and be able to obtain it easily.
Want to help your ISPs avoid bandwidth problems? Download all you can from their usenet servers.
Want to risk all sorts of crappy involvement with the RIAA, the legal system, and potentially lose your internet connection? Just install any old p2p software and have at it.
Questions and answers for ISPs:
Want to help your business avoid bandwidth problems? Make sure you do a good job of running in-house usenet servers.
Want to screw yourself and your customers, impress technically unsophisticated observers with your faux commitment to the rule of law, and make everyone's life more difficult? Outsource or drop all usenet service and cooperate with the RIAA.
Question for Slashdot:
Why, in the lists above, is the last option the one most often exercised?
Amazon is very attractive to scam in this fashion...
If Amazon is so attractive to scamming, how about some counter-examples? Can anyone suggest a site whose reviews they really trust?
I can think of two. First is cpap.com. Sometime after delivery, they send a couple of reminders asking you to rate the products you bought. Since these are durable medical goods whose performance directly and significantly impacts the lives of the users, we tend to want to say what we think, good or bad. I find the reviews on that site very trustworthy, assuming several are posted and you take the time to read them all.
Next up is Newegg.com. For items with a number of reviews, reading all of them is a darn useful thing. I tend to select the option to read all the reviews and then put them in "worst first" order. Often, an item will get a bad review because of a small percentage of DOAs or if it has some particular flaw that may not apply to me. In those cases, I can ignore the bad reviews and purchase with confidence. Generally, lots of reviews == reviews you can trust, but even the products with just a few reviews can, depending on the quality of the reviews, be successfully differentiated. As an added plus, newegg gives me a fun place to watch fanbois rant and rave.
As a postscript, I've been burned in the oddest venues, too. I once watched a conversation develop on a small web site devoted to an arcane shooting sport. Someone said they had specially adapted carrying cases to sell and posted a picture. Someone else chimed in and said they had bought one and loved it. A few were sold and over the course of the next few weeks, a half-dozen people (all known to me, all people I would run into at meatspace gatherings eventually) posted nice comments. So - I ponied up $65 for one. I would have been willing to pay double for high quality. What I got was something I wouldn't have paid $20 for if I had been able to see it in person. The quality of construction was merely passable. The details of the design were sloppy. I finally concluded that in this intimate setting, people were just unwilling to admit they had been (slightly) cheated. They were unwilling to call the maker out in front of his friends. They were unwilling to tell previous posters that their standards were laughably low. Instead, a sort of groupthink/let's not make any waves/we're all friends here vibe took hold and people wound up wasting money. I thought that was weird at first. Then I realized that I was consciously deciding to not post any comments since I didn't want to badmouth an "extended family in the sport" member and start some useless drama.
Funny dynamic, there.
My point, overall, is that reviews and their usefulness are both better and worse than we expect, often at the same time. Generally, the only way to know for sure if the reviews are any good is to have enough subject matter expertise that you don't need to read the reviews in the first place. Damn shame, that.
LBJ and Nixon commissioned a study of pornography. Some vocal people thought porn was causing the collapse of civilization, so academics and various smart folks were tapped to study the issue. They did good, scientifically-valid research and recommended in their final report in 1970 that porn was not a danger and restrictions on it should be loosened.
Reagan would have none of that. By golly, the whole purpose of studying porn is to prove that it's bad and give the government an excuse to crack down on it, right? So the Meese Commission was formed to study the same subject, again. This time, however, the folks controlling the study were a group of intellectually dishonest (or substandard, I can't tell which) political hacks who knew damn well on what side their bread was buttered. They found that porn was TEH EVIL! Like, totally. IOW, they produced exactly the report that had been promised by their bosses to the conservative/religious right to help Reagan get elected. Science be damned.
Since then, the Meese Commission report has been used to justify more liberty-destroying legal and legislative maneuvering than you can possibly imagine. Ever since, it's been a very painful thorn in the side of all reasonable people who believe in free expression.
So our attorneys general have started down the same path. They put together a group of folks who knew what they were doing and had them study the issue. The report comes back. Some of the attorneys general don't like the result.
I predict a Meese Commission ver. 2.0 will be slapped together with orders to do a new report showing that all computers reach directly into the minds of children and destroy their innocence as soon as the kid touches the mouse. We simply can't allow truth and common sense to get in the way of our paranoia, now can we?
I didn't want to comment until I read the report. Now I have.
The report cites some less-than-optimum security practices. To me, it sounds like lots of nitpicky stuff but I realize that a minor vulnerability can be a major problem if exploited by someone sharp and evil.
That said, doing evil via any of the avenues suggested by the report requires an insider to do bad things. So, if security is a process and has lots of layers, is it reasonable to be vulnerable in one area if that area is rendered unimportant by other security processes and layers? At the IRS, doing bad things that would get you admonished or fired from the private sector will result in a stretch in the federal pen. So, yeah, we have admins who could change tax records. They have no reason to do so. Actually having a record important to me placed in a system over which I had some control would be a freaky low-probability situation. And if an admin did make bad changes, they'd almost certainly be found out (you can't change a tax record without generating automatic correspondence or screwing up an ongoing investigation; there are people who would eventually notice) and they'll go to prison in the aftermath.
Under those conditions, closing off every little permission problem is probably more trouble than it's worth and the price in workplace inefficiency is probably too high.
This report left me uneasy. Paragraph after paragraph, I found myself saying "Yeah, I know the system this report is probably talking about. It's right about that not being set up perfectly by the book. But so what?"
I guess I should go re-read it and study harder. There may be something in there worth getting excited about. But after my first read, my opinion is...probably not.
The traditional way of sailors dealing with . . . things, since man first started traversing the waters
Not in every culture. Look up the origin of the phrase "son of a gun." A couple of hundred years ago,some (especially British) warships used to bring pro-hos along for the ride. The gun deck, outside of battle, was usually deserted. You should be able to put the rest together for yourself.
There was a time when I could do everything (or thought I could do everything) with Improv, askSam, WordPerfect, and Harvard Graphics. I'm not sorry to leave HG behind, but I think I could still do everything *worth* doing with the other named tools.
Slashdot Mirror
If I understand the way Wikipedia works (and I'm sure I don't, in any breadth), if, while the error was up, Guttenberg himself signed on and corrected the error, justifying his change in the attached discussion with "I should know my own name", the wiki-nuts would come out of the closet to revert him because he's not quoting a source.
Have I got that right?
You're correct; it's now 256-bit AES. Where I work, we consider it sufficient for data in transit. If you're going to mail someone a CD with data, you encrypt it with a reasonable password via WinZip, send that password via encrypted email, and drop the CD in the post.
I've used these products for a long time. (There are others; look around.) I suggest you phase 'em in over the next three years, by which time you'll have replaced everything. After all, you already have a budget for replacing all hardware over the next few years, right? Beyond that, remote, enterprise-quality tools for managing this hardware can be *very* pricey add-ons, but if you build your work processes right, there may be little or no need for them.
That just leaves writing to CDs/DVDs. There are open-source packages such as TrueCrypt. If you're already running WinZip, it'll do the same for removable media, allowing your users to set a specific password for that write then sneakernet the disk wherever it needs to go. If you want to force all writes to optical media to be encrypted, you'll need to look at something like GuardianEdge Removable for a commercial app or something inventive if you must go open-source.
One last thought: If your data is so important, so valuable, or so legally regulated that you must encrypt *everything*, then you have the money to go open-source, commercial, or whatever works. I see no justification in the submitted question for limiting the choice to open-source software. If you *have* to do this, you *have* to do it right, no matter the cost. If your big guys say they can't afford the cost, then they don't *have* to do it.
That comic has been making the rounds. It's cute, but not applicable.
If the submitter is in an organization with thousands of machines, the notion that any user will be required to keep their password confidential in the face of torture is laughable. That's for specially trained operatives, soldiers, and other assorted heroes. Those of us in the normal world will probably adopt a more rationale perspective. If someone were crazy enough to steal one of our laptops, simultaneously snatch the user, and threaten them with torture, our folks know to give up all passwords, immediately. We're only required to keep data confidential where it is reasonable to do so. When floods sweep away your car, wave goodbye to your laptop in the trunk. When someone threatens you physically, tell 'em what they want to hear.
Our people are more important than our data. Our people are more important than the publics data. If we lose a chunk of data, we have ways to reconstruct what was lost and mitigate damage. If we lose an employee, there is no way to achieve a good outcome.
Reasonable?
Other than everyone obeying the law, there are no good solutions. Even that's not good enough.
Example? I used to make classic "jackrabbit" starts when I was at the front of the line at a red light. Yes, I'd glance left and right but I never paid enough attention.
On three separate occasions in the past, I've taken off when a light turned green only to have a cross-traffic car run their red light *behind* me, *after* I cleared the middle of the intersection. One guy was sliding through the intersection sideways, brakes locked up, in a cloud of blue tire smoke.
It eventually dawned on me that my legal right to enter the intersection when the light turned green didn't mean much if I was gonna get creamed by some lawless crosstraffic. Thus, I now hold the opinion that even driving legally just isn't enough. I have to assume everyone out there is trying to kill me.
I don't like having to maintain that attitude all the time. When I was a kid, I just thought that way when I was on my motorcycle. Now, as an oldster, I feel I need to think that way all the time no matter what I'm driving. It's a shame, really.
Yes, I'm old. "Get off my lawn" cracks are unnecessary.
When I learned to drive, it was standard practice for lights to be timed with safety in mind; yellows were long enough. What really tended to make some intersections safer, though, was that at every light change, all traffic got a red light for 2 seconds. According to my driver's ed teacher, showing red in all directions had previously been the law but the law had recently been changed. Thus, such light timings were fast-disappearing, even back then (1970s, Texas). My recollection is that the intersections that still had the old timings felt much safer for a nervous new driver. Boring, yes, but safer.
By contrast, the worst light timings I've ever seen were at a small town in Mississippi that had only one red light. Here's the way that light was timed:
North-South shows red; East-West shows green
N-S shows red; E-W shows green AND yellow
N-S shows red; E-W shows green AND yellow AND red
N-S shows red; E-W shows yellow AND red
N-S shows red; E-W shows red
N-S shows red AND yellow; E-W shows red
N-S shows red AND yellow AND green; E-W shows red
N-S shows yellow AND green; E-W shows red
N-S shows green; E-W shows red
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I swear, a full light change at that intersection took 30 seconds and I never really knew when to proceed. I mostly just detoured around it.
And, oh, yeah, Get Off My Lawn!
You can ignore the bag check. I do. I finally decided to stop complying with any of them based on three experiences at two different Walmarts.
First, there's a Walmart in Houston that checks everything on the way out. That's ridiculous. It's a high-volume place with mostly low-dollar goods. I just walked past and stopped complying with any such requests at Fry's, etc.
The second was at another Walmart, one that didn't routinely check bags. I set off the shoplifting alarm because the checker hadn't deactivated the tag on a DVD I bought. The little old door lady came over, I handed her my receipt and showed her the DVD, then stuck out my hand to retrieve the receipt. She didn't hand it back. Instead, she started looking over every single item in my cart, bags, on the bottom rack, everywhere, checking them off against the receipt. I was incensed. When I realized what she was doing, I said "Goodbye" and started to roll on out. She jumped in front of me, did two last checks just so that I could see she was in charge of when she would let me go, and handed me the receipt.
I shoved my face to within two inches of hers and growled, as menacingly as possible through gritted teeth, "DO NOT *EVER* stop me on the way out of this store again!" Then I walked out.
A few weeks later, I'm leaving the same store when the same lady walks over to me as I'm leaving and asks to see my receipt. I was momentarily confused since I hadn't set off the alarm. Then I realized who it was. I realized she just liked screwing with people. And I leaned in, looked directly into her eyes, and simply said "No." She realized who I was and scurried away.
Nowadays, I don't even acknowledge the door workers on my way out. I don't care if they ask me to stop. I don't care if there's a line for the receipt check. I don't care if I set off the alarm. I just walk out.
Works for me.
What does that have to do with the mandatory gathering of DNA? You can refuse to stop for the little old lady at Walmart. Somehow, I don't think my strategy of "Just walk out" will work if I'm under arrest. I'm not sure how to handle or how far to push my objections to having a sample taken when I'm surrounded by men with guns and clubs who are determined to take what they want. Ultimately, these questions deal with the limits we place on governments to use force. Where I come from, in the privacy of a police station, there are *NO* limits. That's a sobering thought.
Everybody knows this (or at least I hope they do) but it's sometimes funny when these things are brought to light.
Many years ago, the U.S. government started putting job announcements online. The process was simple. A local office doing a hire would just cc the announcement document to yet another place. They didn't really think about the fact that the documents in their little office, previously seen by just a few local employees, could now be seen by anyone, anywhere. It took some folks a while to adapt and stop using blatantly obvious tactics to deny jobs to certain applicants.
I will never forget, during the transition period, seeing a number of job announcements that opened and closed on the same day (blatantly illegal; there's a mandated open period for announcements). One announcement sidestepped that requirement by staying open for two weeks, but promising "priority consideration" (a real, technical term with specific requirements that translates into "if you're not priority, you can't get the job" in practice) would be given to applicants who pick up an application package in person within 4 hours of the opening of the announcement.
I'll never forget being summonsed to an execs office and asked if I'd be interested in a job that was opening soon. I was chomping at the bit for the job (I knew it would be announced soon) and had been practicing my interview already. The exec asked me what I thought qualified me for the job. I was totally prepared. "I have solid experience in Fields A, B, C, and D. Those will translate directly and immediately into high productivity and solid result in the position." He thanked me and I left. I was pumped. Obviously, for the first time in my life, I was going to be the beneficiary of some of the underhanded hiring tactics that were common around here. It was obvious the guy wanted me even if I didn't know exactly why.
A week later the job announcement was published. It included something I'd never seen before, an addendum (complete with a big, bold box drawn around it) to the qualifications that specifically said "The following types of experience DO NOT qualify for this position: Fields A, B, C and D." The "A, B, C, and D" in the announcement were DIRECT QUOTES from me, exactly duplicating the verbiage I had used with the aforementioned exec the week previous.
Hiring shenanigans - ya gotta love 'em.
Are you kidding? I believe the stretch of I-45 south of Houston has been continuously under construction for over 50 years.
Note to the folks who aren't from around Houston: This is NOT a joke. There's a stretch of a few critical miles of highway between Houston and Galveston that has spent, I believe, the entire half century with the traffic at least a little snarled because one construction project or another has been continuously in process. Seriously. I'd be willing to place a sizable wager that if I'm wrong, the time when that stretch has been completely clear of construction has been less than a year out of the last 50.
Don't get me wrong. I think our attitude towards violence is just dandy. I have no problem with enforcing the castle doctrine, i.e. the notion that if someone breaks into my house and I have an even remotely reasonable fear for my safety, I get a free pass to kill him. That's just logical and those euro-locales that would prohibit people from defending themselves and their property with guns and violence are insane to me.
But the sex thing? We're just nuts. We're so squeamish on the subject that useful sex education in this country is considered such a novelty that it's worthy of a feature article in the Boston Globe. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the sort of sex ed discussed in that article fairly common in Europe? It's crazy-rare, here in the U.S.
I swear, take some politician or law enforcement official with responsibility for enforcing laws protecting youth from the U.S., plop him down on a beach in Rio, and watch him die of apoplexy.
Having spent some time with the guy, I'd suggest it's more accurate to say "RonJeremy never shuts up." Fun guy but too hyper for me.
I know that wind-powered energy generation is growing in the U.S. because I see it every day (in season; see below). I don't know if they're manufactured near here or just shipping in via our port, but those gi-normous wind turbine blades are a common sight on the freeways of Houston, traveling up I-45 headed for who knows where. There's a small cottage industry in escort vehicles. I've seen every manner of tiny, broken-down car, truck, and minivan festooned with flags and feeler poles, in packs, leading and following each individual blade as it makes its way through town. You don't realize it until you're driving right next to one, but those blades are *HUGE*; I'd estimate as long as 4 or 5 tractor-trailer rigs. I'm sure someone will pop up with an accurate number. Whatever the correct size, it's just amazing to watch something that long and odd-looking moving through midday traffic, dwarfing everything around it. Up until a few months ago (I assume winter brings a slowdown to construction), I'd see at least one every day. Sometimes I'd see three at a time. I expect for the freeways to be lousy with 'em again as soon as the weather gets warm.
What point are you trying to make with that first video?
A bunch of Critical Mass riders block a car, refuse to move, deliberately put their bikes in a position to get them run over, start yelling at the driver that there's a person under the van (prompting the wife, mortified, to get out of the van and check, placing herself in even more danger from these wack-os), and then proceed to get all dramatic about it. Why would the police want to stop video of that? I'd think they'd love to get good documentation of the way those Critical Mass a-holes were criminally detaining that old couple and, without provocation, vandalizing the vehicle.
Damn, I wish Critical Mass would come to Houston. We got enough assault rifles behind the seats and big-ass tube bumpers on the front of our trucks to teach those little bitches a permanent lesson in peaceful co-existence.
Now, I think I'll take a little time out to listen for the whooshing sounds as that last paragraph sails over some heads.
The gun case? Never did.
I went to a match later and found a couple of other guys with the same case (tray, actually). One liked it, one felt like I did, and no one was willing to kick up a fuss. Our particular sport is essentially dead (the official discussion forum owned by the national sanctioning body has been down for months) and no one wants to start any drama. I just let it go.
My review of what? My cpap equipment? There's no "fallout" from those reviews, per se, just a wide range of opinion that helps make decisions.
I'm not as worried about that as some. Here's how I look at it - if there's a back door, it doesn't matter as long as it doesn't get used. If it gets used even a few times, word will get out. When some ring of baby-rapers gets caught and prosecuted with evidence that was obtained through said back door, word *will* get out.
So what happens then? A million drive purchasers demand their money back. A million businesses that bought the drives because they were guaranteed unbreakable encryption join in class-action lawsuits against the drive manufacturers and resellers, blasting them into legal oblivion.
If I were a drive manufacturer, I wouldn't risk it. The secret would eventually leak and my company would be toast, overnight.
Questions and answers for just plain folks:
Want to download stuff with far less risk? Get a usenet account from a premium provider. Tunnel past your ISP. Download what you want. Enjoy.
Want to know what's there? Hit binsearch.info and see. Maybe you'll find what you need and be able to obtain it easily.
Want to help your ISPs avoid bandwidth problems? Download all you can from their usenet servers.
Want to risk all sorts of crappy involvement with the RIAA, the legal system, and potentially lose your internet connection? Just install any old p2p software and have at it.
Questions and answers for ISPs:
Want to help your business avoid bandwidth problems? Make sure you do a good job of running in-house usenet servers.
Want to screw yourself and your customers, impress technically unsophisticated observers with your faux commitment to the rule of law, and make everyone's life more difficult? Outsource or drop all usenet service and cooperate with the RIAA.
Question for Slashdot:
Why, in the lists above, is the last option the one most often exercised?
If Amazon is so attractive to scamming, how about some counter-examples? Can anyone suggest a site whose reviews they really trust?
I can think of two. First is cpap.com. Sometime after delivery, they send a couple of reminders asking you to rate the products you bought. Since these are durable medical goods whose performance directly and significantly impacts the lives of the users, we tend to want to say what we think, good or bad. I find the reviews on that site very trustworthy, assuming several are posted and you take the time to read them all.
Next up is Newegg.com. For items with a number of reviews, reading all of them is a darn useful thing. I tend to select the option to read all the reviews and then put them in "worst first" order. Often, an item will get a bad review because of a small percentage of DOAs or if it has some particular flaw that may not apply to me. In those cases, I can ignore the bad reviews and purchase with confidence. Generally, lots of reviews == reviews you can trust, but even the products with just a few reviews can, depending on the quality of the reviews, be successfully differentiated. As an added plus, newegg gives me a fun place to watch fanbois rant and rave.
As a postscript, I've been burned in the oddest venues, too. I once watched a conversation develop on a small web site devoted to an arcane shooting sport. Someone said they had specially adapted carrying cases to sell and posted a picture. Someone else chimed in and said they had bought one and loved it. A few were sold and over the course of the next few weeks, a half-dozen people (all known to me, all people I would run into at meatspace gatherings eventually) posted nice comments. So - I ponied up $65 for one. I would have been willing to pay double for high quality. What I got was something I wouldn't have paid $20 for if I had been able to see it in person. The quality of construction was merely passable. The details of the design were sloppy. I finally concluded that in this intimate setting, people were just unwilling to admit they had been (slightly) cheated. They were unwilling to call the maker out in front of his friends. They were unwilling to tell previous posters that their standards were laughably low. Instead, a sort of groupthink/let's not make any waves/we're all friends here vibe took hold and people wound up wasting money. I thought that was weird at first. Then I realized that I was consciously deciding to not post any comments since I didn't want to badmouth an "extended family in the sport" member and start some useless drama.
Funny dynamic, there.
My point, overall, is that reviews and their usefulness are both better and worse than we expect, often at the same time. Generally, the only way to know for sure if the reviews are any good is to have enough subject matter expertise that you don't need to read the reviews in the first place. Damn shame, that.
Explanation? What explanation?
Has it leaked, yet?
Would make for some interesting reading, ya know.
If anybody knows where to find it, feel free to reply with pertinent details.
Today's history lesson for the youngsters -
LBJ and Nixon commissioned a study of pornography. Some vocal people thought porn was causing the collapse of civilization, so academics and various smart folks were tapped to study the issue. They did good, scientifically-valid research and recommended in their final report in 1970 that porn was not a danger and restrictions on it should be loosened.
Reagan would have none of that. By golly, the whole purpose of studying porn is to prove that it's bad and give the government an excuse to crack down on it, right? So the Meese Commission was formed to study the same subject, again. This time, however, the folks controlling the study were a group of intellectually dishonest (or substandard, I can't tell which) political hacks who knew damn well on what side their bread was buttered. They found that porn was TEH EVIL! Like, totally. IOW, they produced exactly the report that had been promised by their bosses to the conservative/religious right to help Reagan get elected. Science be damned.
Since then, the Meese Commission report has been used to justify more liberty-destroying legal and legislative maneuvering than you can possibly imagine. Ever since, it's been a very painful thorn in the side of all reasonable people who believe in free expression.
So our attorneys general have started down the same path. They put together a group of folks who knew what they were doing and had them study the issue. The report comes back. Some of the attorneys general don't like the result.
I predict a Meese Commission ver. 2.0 will be slapped together with orders to do a new report showing that all computers reach directly into the minds of children and destroy their innocence as soon as the kid touches the mouse. We simply can't allow truth and common sense to get in the way of our paranoia, now can we?
History should repeat itself in 5, 4, 3, ...
I didn't want to comment until I read the report. Now I have.
The report cites some less-than-optimum security practices. To me, it sounds like lots of nitpicky stuff but I realize that a minor vulnerability can be a major problem if exploited by someone sharp and evil.
That said, doing evil via any of the avenues suggested by the report requires an insider to do bad things. So, if security is a process and has lots of layers, is it reasonable to be vulnerable in one area if that area is rendered unimportant by other security processes and layers? At the IRS, doing bad things that would get you admonished or fired from the private sector will result in a stretch in the federal pen. So, yeah, we have admins who could change tax records. They have no reason to do so. Actually having a record important to me placed in a system over which I had some control would be a freaky low-probability situation. And if an admin did make bad changes, they'd almost certainly be found out (you can't change a tax record without generating automatic correspondence or screwing up an ongoing investigation; there are people who would eventually notice) and they'll go to prison in the aftermath.
Under those conditions, closing off every little permission problem is probably more trouble than it's worth and the price in workplace inefficiency is probably too high.
This report left me uneasy. Paragraph after paragraph, I found myself saying "Yeah, I know the system this report is probably talking about. It's right about that not being set up perfectly by the book. But so what?"
I guess I should go re-read it and study harder. There may be something in there worth getting excited about. But after my first read, my opinion is...probably not.
Not in every culture. Look up the origin of the phrase "son of a gun." A couple of hundred years ago,some (especially British) warships used to bring pro-hos along for the ride. The gun deck, outside of battle, was usually deserted. You should be able to put the rest together for yourself.
My God, I miss Improv! Thanks for the reminder.
There was a time when I could do everything (or thought I could do everything) with Improv, askSam, WordPerfect, and Harvard Graphics. I'm not sorry to leave HG behind, but I think I could still do everything *worth* doing with the other named tools.
Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn! :-)
Very interesting, insightful, and informative. I would have never conceived that such a thing was going on where financial records are concerned.