And as another poster has implied, since the decline of the logging industry over the past few decades, Eureka's biggest industry is a form of, ahem, agriculture, intended to greatly enhance the level of happiness of the human race. This is a worthy goal that I support whole heartedly, and the kind of scientific research that has already shown great success.
Uh, RTFA. Keen is not an economist. He's a historian and professor of political science (as well as a frustrated and failed Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose every attempt at success in the "New Economy" met with absolute failure, e.g., audiocafe.com). I'll bet that I'm a more qualified economist than Keen, simply because I can balance my checkbook with GnuCash.
Well, give/. some credit for attempting to be "fair and balanced." FUD or not, I read this headline as a response to yesterday's article promoting exactly the opposite prediction from Red Hat's CEO http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221 that the financial crisis will be a major boon for open source software. You may recall that Keen is the same fellow who was pimping his book on The Colbert Report a few months ago claiming that anything given away as free is worth absolutely nothing and that the internet will collapse from all the amateurs who are creating content. Check out his biography and you'll learn that, as an entrepreneur at the turn of the last century, he was a victim of the collapse of the tech bubble in 2000. I taste some very bitter grapes in his opinions about the web.
Sounds a lot like astroturfing, but both of these techniques seem ridiculously easy to spot, and I suspect that's why we've already come up with a new name for them. Only the most gullible will be taken in by such scams. It's just a shame that there are so many gullible people using the internet these days.
I guess I'm showing my own age here, but I went to college with Berke at the University of Texas in Austin, way back in the ancient history of the 1980s. We'd often bump into each other at the College of Communication. I was a film major (Radio-TV-Film, to be exact) and he was a photojournalism major. At that time, he was drawing a strip for the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, entitled "The Academia Waltz." It featured a self-centered frat boy named Steve Dallas (whom you'll all remember later moved to Bloom County), his unnamed but eloquent dog and his girlfriend, who started out as an airheaded sorority girl who awakened one day with a political conscience and became a wildly left-wing liberal arts major who decided that sleeping with her professor to pass a class was a lot easier than studying.
Berke could make a lot more money just by taking those old strips and putting together a new anthology, as the biting wit of Bloom County was in its early stages back then. But like you say, he changed and moved on, and probably doesn't even like those old strips that I recall so fondly.
The difference is that using a credit card rarely requires the invocation of additional security steps; when I use a debit card, I am always prompted for my PIN. Granted, a 4-digit code isn't particularly strong, and if it is ever compromised, you're screwed, but my bank lets me change my PIN whenever I wish to do so, and if I'm careful about using it, there isn't much risk. My card has both functions, so when I choose Debit, I am prompted for the PIN and the charge is deducted immediately from my checking account; if I ever choose the Credit option (rare), the charge is assigned to my Visa account, which I can dispute if my card is ever lost or stolen, and I'm only liable for up to $50 for fraudulent use.
I agree with the original poster, however, that using cash is a good disciplinary step if you have struggled with credit card debt issues in the past. I went through a long period of paying down my debts (snowball method) and now I can whip out my credit cards whenever necessary without giving a second thought to the exhorbitant interest rates they may carry, since I pay off the balance every month, and never pay extra finance charges.
Reminds me of a trick a friend of mine explained to me. Whenever she subscribed to a magazine, she would misspell her name on the order form. Then, when she began receiving junk mail addressed to that name, she would know exactly which publisher had sold her information to a marketing firm. She would then cancel her subscription (or fail to renew it if she wanted to receive the thing) and explain to the publisher why she did so. I've been doing this myself for a few years, and found it to be very informative.
She'd use different names for each of her subscriptions until she was able to determine which publishers kept her information private, and which ones would routinely sell their mailing lists to other firms. She found that this also worked for other services, and ended up having credit cards issued to her alternate identities, and was even able to nail a bank that had violated the terms of their own security policies by selling her account information to a direct marketing firm against her explicit instructions. She also used to transpose digits in her SSN#, not only to protect her privacy but also to determine which companies checked SSNs for validity and which ones did not; most of them, of coures, didn't bother.
Sorry. I thought you were referring to some kind of breaking incident. The Bill Ayers story is old news, and as I understand, Obama has never denied meeting with Ayers and Dohrn back in his early Chicago days. Hell, if you're going to accuse all radical college professors of being terrorists, you could prosecute a dozen or more of my old teachers at the University of Texas and send the whole lot of them to Guantanamo. They weren't Weathermen, but enough of them were idealistic and unapologetic communists. As far as I can tell, they're still walking among us and about as dangerous now as they were then.
No, they only have about 5 minutes. Two-hour flight includes ascent and descent. Only 5 minutes of actual Zero gravity. Plenty of time for some people...
"What did the emails say? Why were they not released? Come on! If you had hacked into Palin's email, what would you release screenshots of first? Would you release a friend saying, "you have my prayers" or one that said "Draft letter to Governor Schwarzenegger / Container Tax?"
Look, the "hacker" didn't even have the sense to scrub out the URL of the proxy server he used to get into the account before taking that screenshot, and he didn't even bother using easily available anonymizer tools like TOR to avoid detection. And then you suggest this asshat could have manipulated the screen capture to display only the incriminating emails instead of the boring shit? Jeezus Christ, he even used a handle connected to his own email account to brag about his exploit on 4chan, where anyone can post anonymously without risk of being identified. Some computer genius he turned out to be.
This was just a script kiddie exploit, not a hacker mastermind, yet for all his idiocy, he managed to do our country a tremendous favor: he exposed how a candidate for one of our nation's highest offices who is campaigning as a reformer of corruption is herself just as corrupt as any of the rest of them. Yeah, stop the presses, this is something no one else has ever thought about before.
John McCain claims he doesn't use email, which insulates him from this kind of exposure, but he chose a running mate who uses email (and very poorly, at that) to bypass government sunshine laws. Sounds to me like both of them have exercised extremely poor judgment, which pretty much disqualifies them from representing my best interests in Washington.
Oh, FYI: The emails were released. RTFA. If you want to know what the emails say, they're all available on wikileaks, or any one of its many mirrors. That toothpaste isn't going back into the tube any time soon.
What this shows is that Scott McNealy was correct. Privacy is dead. The government is spying on you from all directions and your email is no more private than your phone conversations, which the NSA has been listening in on for the last five years.
But I kind of giggle when I see government officials getting all pissed off and outraged about their own email accounts being examined by the public, when they had no qualms about doing that to their constituents.
Well, if the Federal Elections Commission and the Fair Political Practices Commission and and the Attorney General of Alaska and all the other government oversight bodies we have in place were doing their jobs effectively, we wouldn't need entities like Anonymous doing the investigative work to uncover the blatantly illegal activities of these politicians.
Face it: "Government oversight" is an oxymoron. They obviously can't be trusted to police themselves, so the public has to be vigilant in keeping them honest. Hmmmm... I guess the public hasn't been doing a particularly good job either....
I don't call what you describe a "free market" at all. In a truly "Free Market," all of these companies would be permitted to fail, and the well-managed competitors who survive would pick up the pieces and the customers would move their assets (or what is left of them) to the more stable invesement vehicles. In a Free Market, no company is "too big to fail" and a poorly-run company should fail. The CEO and principals of the company should lose their shirts on their failed scheme and plunge to earth without benefit of any golden parachute.
In a Free Market, the government would not be permitted to bail out any of these companies, as doing so would extend their power far beyond their constitutional authority.
Of course, what we have here is in no way a Free Market, and the government has abused its authority many times over the past century.
Don't blame me. I didn't vote for any of them. I'm one of those crazy Libertarians who votes for the principled loser with the great ideas as opposed to the paid-off politicians who tend to win elections.
Lots of what is happening today was predicted years ago by people like Congressman Ron Paul and former Comptroller of the United States David Walker, and former Secretary of Commerce Pete Peterson and even George W. Bush's former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill and many other "hard money" economists. They were all derided by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve bankers as Chicken Littles predicting the imminent collapse of the clear blue sky. And yes, this is just the first financial earthquake we'll have to endure before the shaking stops. The economic aftershocks can be seen pretty clearly a little ways down the road.
I strongly recommend going out of your way to see the new documentary I.O.U.S.A (http://www.iousathemovie.com/), which addresses this problem in a clear, straightforward manner. It is a horror movie the likes of which you've never seen before. But the horror is real.
And if you're dissatisfied with the sf currently being written, go ahead and take a chance to do something about it. Let your imagination soar. Take the initiative and write your own adventure, a story that moves you in the same way Trek inspired you. It may be completely unoriginal or derivative of all the sf that inspired you that no one would ever publish, but it will be your own story. And who knows? If it turns out that you have a blindingly original idea and can tell a good page-turning yarn that captures a reader's attention, perhaps someone would publish it.
Remember that J.K. Rowling was an unemployed single mother facing poverty and homelessness when her no-good layabout husband abandoned the family. With no job and no prospects, she had nothing better to do with her time than sit down and write a story to read to her young daughter. Now millions of children all over the world enjoy Harry Potter stories because she did that (and she's also the wealthiest author in the U.K.).
Please go check the Sunrise-EV.com website (use the link from the wikipedia article you cited). The Solectria got 320 kilometers on a charge (not miles). That's still quite impressive, but not jaw-dropping:
"range with nickel metal hydride batteries: 200 miles (320 km) at 45 mph (72 km/h)" "range with lead-acid batteries: 100 miles (160 km) at 45 mph (72 km/h)"
I replaced the battery in my 2005 Honda a few weeks ago, and the "discount" I received from AutoZone for returning the old battery was only $12. Perhaps I should have gone to your auto parts store, wherever that is.
Yes, he is still in jail, but they could have killed him and made it look like an accident. If he does have them by the balls, and if the information he has really is super sensitive, I'm surprised they didn't just do a Tony Soprano on him to resolve the problem.
Lots of HR departments do a routine Google search on all applicants these days. All you need to do right now is Google "Terry Childs" and you can see the net filling up with stories about this. I think they even use Google in Georgia (both the U.S. State and the East European country with the same name).
In the private sector, you can fire employees for incompetence without too much trouble, provided you have documented their shortcomings. In the public sector (city, county, state, federal government offices), you have public employee unions to deal with, and it takes an enormous effort to fire someone. I speak from experience, having worked as a contractor in state government for over 12 years. Usually, you just work extra hard to have them transferred to a different department, so they won't be your problem anymore. The only time I have ever seen a state civil service worker fired was when she threatened to come back from her lunchbreak with a gun and shoot her boss. When she came back to the office, she was met by security guards and escorted out of the building (and no, she did not have a gun). She later filed a grievance with the state for the personnel action, because if she lost her job and her medical benefits, she would lose access to the anti-psychotic prescription medications that she required to stay sane. Guess what? She won. She took early retirement so the taxpayers continued to support her even when she could no longer work.
That's why I'm not at all surprised that the City of San Francisco had such a hard time trying to fire Mr. Childs. His union will probably defend him and get his job back, regardless of the outcome of the case.
Slashdot Mirror
And as another poster has implied, since the decline of the logging industry over the past few decades, Eureka's biggest industry is a form of, ahem, agriculture, intended to greatly enhance the level of happiness of the human race. This is a worthy goal that I support whole heartedly, and the kind of scientific research that has already shown great success.
Uh, RTFA. Keen is not an economist. He's a historian and professor of political science (as well as a frustrated and failed Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose every attempt at success in the "New Economy" met with absolute failure, e.g., audiocafe.com). I'll bet that I'm a more qualified economist than Keen, simply because I can balance my checkbook with GnuCash.
Well, give /. some credit for attempting to be "fair and balanced." FUD or not, I read this headline as a response to yesterday's article promoting exactly the opposite prediction from Red Hat's CEO http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221 that the financial crisis will be a major boon for open source software. You may recall that Keen is the same fellow who was pimping his book on The Colbert Report a few months ago claiming that anything given away as free is worth absolutely nothing and that the internet will collapse from all the amateurs who are creating content. Check out his biography and you'll learn that, as an entrepreneur at the turn of the last century, he was a victim of the collapse of the tech bubble in 2000. I taste some very bitter grapes in his opinions about the web.
Sounds a lot like astroturfing, but both of these techniques seem ridiculously easy to spot, and I suspect that's why we've already come up with a new name for them. Only the most gullible will be taken in by such scams. It's just a shame that there are so many gullible people using the internet these days.
Just about all of your issues are fully addressed in the WIRED Magazine article about Chrome.
See http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-10/mf_chrome
I guess I'm showing my own age here, but I went to college with Berke at the University of Texas in Austin, way back in the ancient history of the 1980s. We'd often bump into each other at the College of Communication. I was a film major (Radio-TV-Film, to be exact) and he was a photojournalism major. At that time, he was drawing a strip for the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, entitled "The Academia Waltz." It featured a self-centered frat boy named Steve Dallas (whom you'll all remember later moved to Bloom County), his unnamed but eloquent dog and his girlfriend, who started out as an airheaded sorority girl who awakened one day with a political conscience and became a wildly left-wing liberal arts major who decided that sleeping with her professor to pass a class was a lot easier than studying.
Berke could make a lot more money just by taking those old strips and putting together a new anthology, as the biting wit of Bloom County was in its early stages back then. But like you say, he changed and moved on, and probably doesn't even like those old strips that I recall so fondly.
This sounds very reminiscent of science fiction writer Terry Carr's infamous Claude Degler hoax in the 1950s or the George Burdell hoax at Georgia Tech (see http://www.popsci.com/entertainment-%2526-gaming/gallery/2008-08/great-college-pranks) which has continued for decades.
The difference is that using a credit card rarely requires the invocation of additional security steps; when I use a debit card, I am always prompted for my PIN. Granted, a 4-digit code isn't particularly strong, and if it is ever compromised, you're screwed, but my bank lets me change my PIN whenever I wish to do so, and if I'm careful about using it, there isn't much risk. My card has both functions, so when I choose Debit, I am prompted for the PIN and the charge is deducted immediately from my checking account; if I ever choose the Credit option (rare), the charge is assigned to my Visa account, which I can dispute if my card is ever lost or stolen, and I'm only liable for up to $50 for fraudulent use.
I agree with the original poster, however, that using cash is a good disciplinary step if you have struggled with credit card debt issues in the past. I went through a long period of paying down my debts (snowball method) and now I can whip out my credit cards whenever necessary without giving a second thought to the exhorbitant interest rates they may carry, since I pay off the balance every month, and never pay extra finance charges.
Reminds me of a trick a friend of mine explained to me. Whenever she subscribed to a magazine, she would misspell her name on the order form. Then, when she began receiving junk mail addressed to that name, she would know exactly which publisher had sold her information to a marketing firm. She would then cancel her subscription (or fail to renew it if she wanted to receive the thing) and explain to the publisher why she did so. I've been doing this myself for a few years, and found it to be very informative.
She'd use different names for each of her subscriptions until she was able to determine which publishers kept her information private, and which ones would routinely sell their mailing lists to other firms. She found that this also worked for other services, and ended up having credit cards issued to her alternate identities, and was even able to nail a bank that had violated the terms of their own security policies by selling her account information to a direct marketing firm against her explicit instructions. She also used to transpose digits in her SSN#, not only to protect her privacy but also to determine which companies checked SSNs for validity and which ones did not; most of them, of coures, didn't bother.
Great idea! Disinformation can be more useful in this case than the truth. Muddy the waters all you want.
Sorry. I thought you were referring to some kind of breaking incident. The Bill Ayers story is old news, and as I understand, Obama has never denied meeting with Ayers and Dohrn back in his early Chicago days. Hell, if you're going to accuse all radical college professors of being terrorists, you could prosecute a dozen or more of my old teachers at the University of Texas and send the whole lot of them to Guantanamo. They weren't Weathermen, but enough of them were idealistic and unapologetic communists. As far as I can tell, they're still walking among us and about as dangerous now as they were then.
No, they only have about 5 minutes. Two-hour flight includes ascent and descent. Only 5 minutes of actual Zero gravity. Plenty of time for some people...
Now, consider the FACT that Obama lied about having ties to a known terrorist.
Err... [Citation needed]
Please.
"What did the emails say? Why were they not released? Come on! If you had hacked into Palin's email, what would you release screenshots of first? Would you release a friend saying, "you have my prayers" or one that said "Draft letter to Governor Schwarzenegger / Container Tax?"
Look, the "hacker" didn't even have the sense to scrub out the URL of the proxy server he used to get into the account before taking that screenshot, and he didn't even bother using easily available anonymizer tools like TOR to avoid detection. And then you suggest this asshat could have manipulated the screen capture to display only the incriminating emails instead of the boring shit? Jeezus Christ, he even used a handle connected to his own email account to brag about his exploit on 4chan, where anyone can post anonymously without risk of being identified. Some computer genius he turned out to be.
This was just a script kiddie exploit, not a hacker mastermind, yet for all his idiocy, he managed to do our country a tremendous favor: he exposed how a candidate for one of our nation's highest offices who is campaigning as a reformer of corruption is herself just as corrupt as any of the rest of them. Yeah, stop the presses, this is something no one else has ever thought about before.
John McCain claims he doesn't use email, which insulates him from this kind of exposure, but he chose a running mate who uses email (and very poorly, at that) to bypass government sunshine laws. Sounds to me like both of them have exercised extremely poor judgment, which pretty much disqualifies them from representing my best interests in Washington.
Oh, FYI: The emails were released. RTFA. If you want to know what the emails say, they're all available on wikileaks, or any one of its many mirrors. That toothpaste isn't going back into the tube any time soon.
What this shows is that Scott McNealy was correct. Privacy is dead. The government is spying on you from all directions and your email is no more private than your phone conversations, which the NSA has been listening in on for the last five years.
But I kind of giggle when I see government officials getting all pissed off and outraged about their own email accounts being examined by the public, when they had no qualms about doing that to their constituents.
Well, if the Federal Elections Commission and the Fair Political Practices Commission and and the Attorney General of Alaska and all the other government oversight bodies we have in place were doing their jobs effectively, we wouldn't need entities like Anonymous doing the investigative work to uncover the blatantly illegal activities of these politicians.
Face it: "Government oversight" is an oxymoron. They obviously can't be trusted to police themselves, so the public has to be vigilant in keeping them honest. Hmmmm... I guess the public hasn't been doing a particularly good job either....
I don't call what you describe a "free market" at all. In a truly "Free Market," all of these companies would be permitted to fail, and the well-managed competitors who survive would pick up the pieces and the customers would move their assets (or what is left of them) to the more stable invesement vehicles. In a Free Market, no company is "too big to fail" and a poorly-run company should fail. The CEO and principals of the company should lose their shirts on their failed scheme and plunge to earth without benefit of any golden parachute.
In a Free Market, the government would not be permitted to bail out any of these companies, as doing so would extend their power far beyond their constitutional authority.
Of course, what we have here is in no way a Free Market, and the government has abused its authority many times over the past century.
Don't blame me. I didn't vote for any of them. I'm one of those crazy Libertarians who votes for the principled loser with the great ideas as opposed to the paid-off politicians who tend to win elections.
Lots of what is happening today was predicted years ago by people like Congressman Ron Paul and former Comptroller of the United States David Walker, and former Secretary of Commerce Pete Peterson and even George W. Bush's former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill and many other "hard money" economists. They were all derided by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve bankers as Chicken Littles predicting the imminent collapse of the clear blue sky. And yes, this is just the first financial earthquake we'll have to endure before the shaking stops. The economic aftershocks can be seen pretty clearly a little ways down the road.
I strongly recommend going out of your way to see the new documentary I.O.U.S.A (http://www.iousathemovie.com/), which addresses this problem in a clear, straightforward manner. It is a horror movie the likes of which you've never seen before. But the horror is real.
Does anyone here remember that the topic of the original article was Osama bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein? RTFA, folks. Stick to the topic.
And if you're dissatisfied with the sf currently being written, go ahead and take a chance to do something about it. Let your imagination soar. Take the initiative and write your own adventure, a story that moves you in the same way Trek inspired you. It may be completely unoriginal or derivative of all the sf that inspired you that no one would ever publish, but it will be your own story. And who knows? If it turns out that you have a blindingly original idea and can tell a good page-turning yarn that captures a reader's attention, perhaps someone would publish it.
Remember that J.K. Rowling was an unemployed single mother facing poverty and homelessness when her no-good layabout husband abandoned the family. With no job and no prospects, she had nothing better to do with her time than sit down and write a story to read to her young daughter. Now millions of children all over the world enjoy Harry Potter stories because she did that (and she's also the wealthiest author in the U.K.).
Please go check the Sunrise-EV.com website (use the link from the wikipedia article you cited). The Solectria got 320 kilometers on a charge (not miles). That's still quite impressive, but not jaw-dropping:
"range with nickel metal hydride batteries: 200 miles (320 km) at 45 mph (72 km/h)"
"range with lead-acid batteries: 100 miles (160 km) at 45 mph (72 km/h)"
I replaced the battery in my 2005 Honda a few weeks ago, and the "discount" I received from AutoZone for returning the old battery was only $12. Perhaps I should have gone to your auto parts store, wherever that is.
Yes, he is still in jail, but they could have killed him and made it look like an accident. If he does have them by the balls, and if the information he has really is super sensitive, I'm surprised they didn't just do a Tony Soprano on him to resolve the problem.
Lots of HR departments do a routine Google search on all applicants these days. All you need to do right now is Google "Terry Childs" and you can see the net filling up with stories about this. I think they even use Google in Georgia (both the U.S. State and the East European country with the same name).
In the private sector, you can fire employees for incompetence without too much trouble, provided you have documented their shortcomings. In the public sector (city, county, state, federal government offices), you have public employee unions to deal with, and it takes an enormous effort to fire someone. I speak from experience, having worked as a contractor in state government for over 12 years. Usually, you just work extra hard to have them transferred to a different department, so they won't be your problem anymore. The only time I have ever seen a state civil service worker fired was when she threatened to come back from her lunchbreak with a gun and shoot her boss. When she came back to the office, she was met by security guards and escorted out of the building (and no, she did not have a gun). She later filed a grievance with the state for the personnel action, because if she lost her job and her medical benefits, she would lose access to the anti-psychotic prescription medications that she required to stay sane. Guess what? She won. She took early retirement so the taxpayers continued to support her even when she could no longer work.
That's why I'm not at all surprised that the City of San Francisco had such a hard time trying to fire Mr. Childs. His union will probably defend him and get his job back, regardless of the outcome of the case.