Sounds like you are on a good path, I wish you the best.
A couple quick pieces of advice for you:
- Read up on the Glycemic Index. It will give you a much more comprehensive understanding of your diet and how different foods will affect you. Note, it is not just sugar, it is most carbs. On that note, once you figure it out, you can open up your diet while still maintaining your glucose levels.
- Exercise is almost as important as your diet. In many ways, more important. 30-60 minutes of fast walking or medium biking 5-7 days a week will do miraculous things to your glucose levels, overall health, and maybe even save a little gas.
- If you cheat, get some exercise immediately afterwards. Even just walking home from the restaurant is a great practice that will help keep your glucose levels from spiking.
- Avoid going too low on your carbs, especially before being active or drinking alcohol. Hypoglycemia (too low) is very common with low carb diets (especially in diabetics for some reason). It is scary, and can kill you (either directly, or by passing out while driving, etc.). Always have some carbs in your breakfast and lunch (and dinner if you are drinking).
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
"We do have a cure fror diabetes. It's called a pancreas & kidney transplant."
I assume you were just kidding (organ transplants are very risky business), but in all seriousness, I don't see how this would work.
Type 1 Diabetes is an auto-immune disease. The immune system thinks the Pancreas' beta cells (the part of the pancreas that produce insulin) are evil and it destroys them. Not sure why they think the same won't happen to the new pancreas and it's beta cells destroyed.
I am definitely not a doctor, so maybe I am missing something.
"Then, it wouldn't be free (as in beer) anymore, would it?! What's so great about this spreadsheet web-service again?!:)"
Perhaps not free, but cheaper:
- Lower Total Cost of Ownership. Nothing extra to install, get corrupted, etc. There is a lot of cost to maintaining applications in an enterprise. The PC could even be something super-simple like a Knoppix PC with a browser.
- Could be (depending on pricing) much cheaper than purchasing MS Office for every PC. Especially those that do not use the app often, but still need it occasionally.
"It is simply that in my particular experience mapquest worked better. Well, it may be a New Jersey thing."
NJ is perhaps one of the worst places to try to drive and find your way around for a visitor. No surprise the mapping programs have mistakes. From the similar town names, multiple post office town names for the same physical town (local names vs. township names I think), goofy traffic mechanisms (jughandles, etc.).
Though I appreciate the thought that went behind them (interesting from an engineering perspective), many seem to be an experiment gone wrong and no one thought to stop and cut their losses. I have driven cars in pretty much every state and province in US/Canada, and much of western Europe. I find few places more foreign, frustrating and confusing to drive in than NJ. I can only imagine why that would cause mapping programs to screw up.
After having been there for work maybe 30 times, I am just getting slightly comfortable.
"No business is going to trust google to store it documents and spreadsheets."
No argument. But for those folks, don't forget they can always package it up and put it into a "server appliance" that is under the control of the business; on their Intranet.
I have one of their "Google Mini" appliances. It is a $2000 (and up) server that crawls our Intranet and provides local (and secure) search functions of our Bugzilla, internal wiki, mailman archives, etc. It took me about an hour to unpack it, RTFM, rack it and get it booted up. Another hour to get to the point it was serving search data. It has gotten rave reviews from our users, and I think I have spent less than 1-man day total setting it up and maintaining it (mostly customizing the interface, etc.).
I think it is highly likely they will extend this model to deal with this issue. Not sure what they would charge, but it would not be hard to price it in a way that makes them a lot of money, and makes it very easy for my company to justify buying it. I am hoping the next step (probably before all the Office apps) is to get Gmail available in a server like this.
"Surely while under immunity you'd want to admit to everything because double-jeopardy laws (or something to that general effect) would prevent them from going after you on any of it. Of course, being under proper immunity and none of that fake crap that I'm assuming you're talking about."
On the face of it, that seems logical. BUT, that does not prevent folks from using that information you provide under immunity against you in a civil action.
Bottom line, you might be able to avoid jail, but you might lose your shirt in a lawsuit.
"I think that would be a very good solution - it doesn't require any modifications to client software, it's transparent to the users and it's many times more efficient. The only difficult variable would be how long you keep the attachment available on the web server."
Good point, and that could vary depending on the org's needs.
- Simple solution is a default. Configurable by the sysadmin, and noted in the email. Not perfect, but simple. If someone does not want to lose it, they can make the effort to download it and save it locally.
- Complex solution is a default, but the server sends the sender and email notifying them of the fact the attachment was stripped, giving them a URL to go in and change the "time to live" setting for that file. If it is something very short-lived (a "draft" version of a doc for example), you might actually lower the default. If it is something that might have a longer useful life, then allow them to extend it (with some max). 99% would probably keep the default (say 90 days or so).
"For many people email is the only way they know of transferring files. How else is some low-level secretary going to send a file - SFTP it to a web server and email a link?"
No argument to either the point that email is not the right way to send large files, or the fact that getting users to do it any other way is not likely to occur on any wide-scale.
Personally, I think the best solution is for the outbound email servers (SMTP) to identify and remove large attachments, replacing them with a URL to obtain the file via http(s).
This solution would solve the problems at hand:
- Sender can send using email like they are used to and comfortable with. Nothing new to learn. - Recipients do not have their email download (POP or whatever) take forever - Recipients can choose to not download the file, or download it when it is convenient for them - The file is only stored once, not once for every recipient. Yeah, some mail stores handle this already, but most do not, and when this does work it is only when all recipients are on the same server. - Recipients do not have to learn something new (pretty much everyone understands how to download from a URL). - It would be completely automatic, no special procedure necessary.
The only downside I can think of is that this circumvents virus scanning to some degree. A well implemented solution would virus-scan the attachments at the point of stripping it and solve this. Also, a reasonably well protected PC will scan http downloads for viri.
Not a perfect solution, and there are probably some edge-cases that would annoy a few, but this is the best solution I can think of.
"If you were to implement some sort of ftp server they can exchange large files on (and promote it), that would most likely take care of the biggest files."
Exactly. I am looking at exactly that kind of solution, just a little simpler.
In addition to space concerns, email can get very unreliable as the attachments get big. Depends on the SMTP servers in the path, but many still restrict size to 5-25 meg, and will chop off anything over that (causing frustration, wasted time and corrupt files).
There is a free service called yousendit.com that allows one to post a file using a web form, then it sends an email with just the URL. The recipient can then download it at their convenience from the URL. I often send it to myself, then forward the URL in an email I compose myself.
As a test, some of my coworkers have been using that for sending large files the last couple weeks. It is very simple, I have had zero questions on how to use it. No ftp clients, just a browser needed.
My CEO loves it as he often travels in non-high tech places and often uses a modem to get email. He really hates it when he is cc'd on some email with 8 MB of code, or some.ppt file and it takes forever to download his email. Having the CEO on your side is always a good thing to get compliance!
I am a little leary of a free hosted service (could use this to build spam lists, or eavesdrop on your files, etc.). I am now looking at phpsendit (a yousendit clone) to host myself. The install is a little buggy, but it is new and will probably get cleaned up. There are some reasonably priced payware clones on hotscripts (just search for "yousendit"), but I have not tried any of them.
I highly recommend this concept. It is not as simple as email, but it is close. Even the sales mopes "get it" as they have experienced the frustration of corrupted files many times.
"People are just trying to steal money from the author."
Not quite sure what they are whining about. I imagine sales of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" sky-rocketed after "The DaVinci code" got big. It has brought a lot of free publicity to their book and theories. My mother bought me a copy after I raved about Dan's book (and I really did not like some of his earlier stuff).
Yeah, I can see their desire to be acknowledged as a key source for ego purposes, but both monetarily and publicity wise they have benefitted immensely from Dan Brown's success.
They should continue to milk it, and maybe send Dan a thank you note.
"This bring up an interesting point on ITAR and the US. Some encryption technologies could violate ITAR if they are done in the US and then exported to other countries."
For an odd sidenote to all this. Back in 1995/1996 when we were developing 56K modems, the issue came up that we could not ship that to any rogue country as the technology technically was restricted by ITAR. IIRC, anything over 34K was considered a munition at the time. I ran the field testing (beta, etc.) for USR at the time, and was specifically prohibited from any testing in those countries.
In a rare showing of government competence, the problem was cleared up rather rapidly. I think the change got slipped in when they were changing the SSL regs in late 1996, before 56K was unleashed to the public.
If I understand the process correctly, the list of restricted technologies is actually maintained by the Commerce Department. The specific list is not in the law itself, just the authority, and guidelines for them to use to determine what is restricted. So, all it took was an adminstrative action to modify it (Congress did not need to get involved or anything like that).
I'd tell you more, but then I would have to ask Dick Cheney to pepper you with his birdshot.
"Too bad the politicos pushing for it aren't pushing it for the reasons you give, as I could support yours."
I doubt it is as simple as you suspect. Politicians generally do whatever it takes to get re-elected. Society drives these things, and I believe many in society are thinking along the same lines as I am. I hope so at least.
I cannot argue it is a slippery-slope. Justice in the US (or anywhere) is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But, though I agree prosecutions can be very politically influenced, deciding whether to apply aggravations is usually, mostly, apolitical. It is usually done by a judge and/or jury, and they are going to be less influenced by political motivations than legislators or prosecutors.
Again, I hope and pray the laws are used correctly most of the time. I am sure you will be able to find even more exceptions (hypothetical or real). The question is, can we leave this area untouched considering the assumption those will not be the rule, but just exceptions. We have plenty of checks and balances in the justice system, and they usually work just fine, preventing the kinds of abominations you mentioned.
"And why is a murder committed out of hate worse than a "regular" murder? The victim is equally dead either way."
Good question, perhaps this will put it into perspective.
First, let's make this battery instead of murder. Murder is so heinous it is indeed hard to consider a major difference between one derived from "hate" vs. other reasons (being cheated in some way, result of a robbery, etc.). They are both "high crimes" no matter how you measure it, serious punishment will likely occur regardless of the hate component. Battery might be a better crime to illustrate the point, and probably one of the more common uses of hate aggravation (along with vandalism).
A non-hate battery crime usually is an event with some guilt on the part of the victim. Not saying they deserve it, but they probably did something to instigate it (insulted your friend, smashed into your car, etc.). The escalation was likely avoidable by apologizing, running away, or just keeping a cool head about you.
Take a hate-crime battery, and the victim was probably completely innocent, just being black, gay, muslim, etc. and at the wrong place at the wrong time was enough.
The perpetrator in the non-hate battery is likely regretful later, and is probably not an inherently evil person. They may need drug/alcohol treatment and/or anger management classes, etc. They are likely to learn a lesson, and will likely avoid repeating the offense in the future. There likely was no premeditation to it either.
The hate-based batterer is generally not regretful, perhaps even proud and satisfied. They will highly likely repeat it, and there is very little a victim can do to avoid it. This is a MUCH more dangerous person, and the punishment (and/or rehabilitation) needs to be much stronger (IMNSHO).
Another situation is a gay neighbor of mine that got burglarized. He came home to find his home burglarized, and "die fags" spray painted on his wall. I have been burglarized, and it was painful and scary, but I did not take it personally and I was not traumatized. I took it as a random, unfortunate, event not directed at me personally. Some druggy looking to finance his next fix. I could definitely see a difference in these situations, my neighbor was totally traumatized, as would I be. I definitely see the crime perpetrated against my neighbor as a far more serious crime than the simple burglary I endured, even though, at their core, they were otherwise similar.
Also be cognizant of other factors that can aggravate criminal sentences, such as recidivism, no remorse, etc. These are along the same lines as hate crime aggravations. They are all an attempt by society to allow for differentiation between one-time mistakes by the offender, and the much more dangerous criminals that will likely repeat and perhaps escalate their crimes. It is just codifying "hate" as an aggravation at the same level as some of the other factors.
I am not sure how well I am making my point, but I guess the bottom line is if you look at the victim impact, the impact of a hate crime on the victim (including their family and community) is far greater than than a non-hate crime. There is little a victim of a hate crime can do to prevent it. As well as the perpetrator of a hate crime is much more likely to repeat it.
I agree with earlier points, it can be difficult to determine when a crime is hate-based, or not. But in many cases, it is not all that hard. I do agree that assigning "hate crime" status to a crime should not be taken lightly or capricously, and if there is any reasonable doubt, should not be applied. I think (I hope) it is applied very carefully, and sparingly, in real life.
"They even have the Canadian army and airforce deployed presumably to keep an enemy airforce or army from flooding over the northern border."
I don't know, I might be more worried about some of the radical right-wingers in rural Michigan. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing crowd were from Michigan. There are a lot of whacko folks within a few hundred mile radius of Detroit, and already on this side of the border, and very well armed. As they mostly vote Republican, the current administration is not focusing on them (other than for donations of course).
"So does MS owe nothing for years of infringement? Does this patch remove any obligation they may have had for selling infringing products?"
From the article:
"Microsoft was ordered to pay $8.9 million in damages for infringing Amado's 1994 patent. That award covered sales of Office between March 1997 and July 2003."
From what I gather, the US$8.9 mil is compensation for the actual infringement. It appears they chose not to (why is unclear) actually license the patent, so have to issue a patch to remove the infringing code. Had they licensed it, they would almost certainly not need to issue any patch.
So, to answer your question, they got punished, and the patent holder got compensated, for the patent infringement. The patch stops the infringement (at least if people apply it).
"I applaud Microsoft for not doing what I would have done in this situation: pull a Google and ignore the court's demand. They are actually providing patches & updates to solve the problem. I wouldn't be so accomidating."
I do not applaud them at all. The "correct" thing to do here would be to license the patent and spare their customers from having to patch their code.
Maybe they tried and the patent holder was not reasonable, but I imagine had they thrown the guy a few more bucks (perhaps a nice round US$10 million) they could have just solved the problem and spared their customers a lot of stress and expense.
'When my wife asked if it had mercury, the doctor said, "Yes, we're trying to get rid of our old stock." We declined.'
Rather odd (and probably wrong), as flu vaccines are changed every year to address whatever strain is predicted to be prevalent that year. They should not have "old stock" that has mercury. "old" would be measured in months, rather than years, so would not contain mercury that was banned several years ago. If they have stock that old (extremely unlikely after last year's shortages) someone needs to report the situation to the proper authorities.
I HIGHLY doubt this is the case. Even if they did do something that unethical, they would have definitely dumped it last year when it was a hot commodity.
"It would also be nice if ISPs would set up their own pools (and advertise them) so clients wouldn't have to go off network"
Agreed. Most do, but as you mention, don't advertise them. I am not sure how many people would actually know what to do with them if they were advertised though.
It would be quite slick if they advertised them via DHCP, and clients used that info to auto-configure their ntp client. All quite possible and very easy to do by the ISP. NTP servers can be advertised via dhcp.
"I would agree. We are talking about someone who got fired, and THEN decided to "whistle blow" If he reported this first and THEN got fired, then I would be more inclined to believe him. But the fact that he was fired first and afterward decided that he "needed" to report this to a newspaper (as opposed to filing a wrongful dismissal dispute via the legal system) does not speak well to his motives."
The NYT held the story for a year at the request of the government. That is well known. The whistle was blown (presumably by Tice) at least 6 months before he was determined to be loony and fired. I am sure they figured that out, started the smear campaign to discredit him before this became public.
As I can put together from the relatively vague information being provided, the timeline is as such:
- Blew whistle in late 2004 - Clearance revoked and fired mid-2005
So, you should should be more inclined to believe him than you are. You are falling into exactly the trap they want you to fall into.
"I just wish I had that option. I live in Chicago. I can't see the stars even if I want to. Which I do."
Interesting you mention Chicago. I also live in Chicago, and have lived in the same neighborhood on the NW side for 22 years. Though it is far from an astronomer's dream, the city has made an effort to reduce light pollution over the past decade, and the improvement is very noticeable. 20 years ago, you could see almost no stars, occasionally some bright one would be visible. Now, many are visible on any non-cloudy night, especially if you go for a walk in a large park or along the lakefront.
The city did not spend any serious amount of money on a retrofit, but instead put in fairly strict requirements on any new lights both on public property, as well as in the building codes for new private construction (especially parking lots). They need to light the street/lot well, but must limit the upword radiation directly from the light (within reason). Usually it is using pretty simple technology (reflective hoods, etc.). I think this stuff costs a little more initially, but pays itself off pretty quickly with reduced energy requirements.
I do walk a lot around the city, often at night. I do appreciate the well lit streets and walks from a security standpoint. I appreciate the effort the city has made to balance the two opposing needs.
Bottom line, I can't argue with your general point. If astronomy was my hobby, I would not find Chicago to be a good place to do it. But, it is a good example of how a common sense approach can not only save energy, but make it a better place to live. The light pollution problem has gone from pathetic, to mediocre. At least it is moving in the right direction, slowly. I hope the situation continues to improve over the next decade. I hope more cities go down the same road.
"Silicon valley garage? I know the image of a tech company starting in a Silicon Valley garage may be somewhat romantic, but didn't Google start in a Stanford lab?"
Good observation. Not sure of the history, but my recollection is the same.
It is much like the term you will often see in newspapers describing some drug bust. It often is a "pre-dawn raid", even if the raid was actually at 3pm on a sunny August afternoon. Reporters just seem to like the imagery a "pre-dawn raid" invokes.
Watch for it now, you will see what I mean, it is often hysterical. I will now watch for "Silicon Valley garage" and laugh.
Interesting. I'll be interested to see if they survive. They could easily get taken to the cleaners. There are a lot of very unscrupulous people in the VoIP termination business that will gladly take advantage of them if they can.
I see they have all kinds of fines for abuses in their terms of service, maybe that will save them if they watch it like a hawk and are successful in enforcing them. They also have to be careful as they might piss off legit customers if they get too hawkish.
As you say they already had business issues, it seems like they are at risk.
Again, I don't blame Vonage for taking the safe road, and primarily going after the mass market.
"Skype and Vonage are both crap in my perspective, because they are closed systems that insist on controlling all ends of the transaction. Vonage is OK for clueless Aunt Sadie, but any added functionality or interoperability is completely in their hands. If these guys would allow any SIP or IAX connection in, or out, then they'd be useful."
Vonage is smart to do that. It keeps their support costs down. Trying to walk even a somewhat competent geek through all the nuances of NAT negotiation, dialplans and other voip gook would be overwhelming for their tech support. The market for people not capable of understanding all that is much larger than the market for those who do (or have the tolerance to figure it all out). Their canned package is actually quite easy to install and get running.
IAX is interesting though, as it makes at least the NAT part less complicated. If there is one thing that disappoints me about SIP is it does not address the NAT issue. They did not learn this lesson from H.323. IAX is brilliant in that regard, using a single udp port for everything, initiated outbound. As opposed to SIP that uses a signaling port, and a boatload of RTP ports, which can be painful to figure out how to open a firewall and/or NAT for.
Dialplan issues (mainly, in what format to send the number to call) is still an issue, but much more easily solved.
It will be interesting to see if IAX catches on. It is starting to get noticed, that's for sure.
The other issue Vonage has to deal with is their product offering and fraud. If you had full control of your end you could resell your "unlimited" vonage access using something like Asterisk. Vonage does have a service that gives you full control of your end (they give your ID and PW, with SIP access info), but it is a per-minute charge, not an unlimited plan. For this reason, you may never see an unlimited plan like Vonage with full control of your end.
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Sounds like you are on a good path, I wish you the best.
A couple quick pieces of advice for you:
- Read up on the Glycemic Index. It will give you a much more comprehensive understanding of your diet and how different foods will affect you. Note, it is not just sugar, it is most carbs. On that note, once you figure it out, you can open up your diet while still maintaining your glucose levels.
- Exercise is almost as important as your diet. In many ways, more important. 30-60 minutes of fast walking or medium biking 5-7 days a week will do miraculous things to your glucose levels, overall health, and maybe even save a little gas.
- If you cheat, get some exercise immediately afterwards. Even just walking home from the restaurant is a great practice that will help keep your glucose levels from spiking.
- Avoid going too low on your carbs, especially before being active or drinking alcohol. Hypoglycemia (too low) is very common with low carb diets (especially in diabetics for some reason). It is scary, and can kill you (either directly, or by passing out while driving, etc.). Always have some carbs in your breakfast and lunch (and dinner if you are drinking).
"We do have a cure fror diabetes. It's called a pancreas & kidney transplant."
I assume you were just kidding (organ transplants are very risky business), but in all seriousness, I don't see how this would work.
Type 1 Diabetes is an auto-immune disease. The immune system thinks the Pancreas' beta cells (the part of the pancreas that produce insulin) are evil and it destroys them. Not sure why they think the same won't happen to the new pancreas and it's beta cells destroyed.
I am definitely not a doctor, so maybe I am missing something.
"do you mean tres drôle? (not ha ha funny, peculiar funny) this is starting to hurt my head."
Or, for us simpler, cruder folks, NOT "Funny like a clown"
"Then, it wouldn't be free (as in beer) anymore, would it?! What's so great about this spreadsheet web-service again?! :)"
Perhaps not free, but cheaper:
- Lower Total Cost of Ownership. Nothing extra to install, get corrupted, etc. There is a lot of cost to maintaining applications in an enterprise. The PC could even be something super-simple like a Knoppix PC with a browser.
- Could be (depending on pricing) much cheaper than purchasing MS Office for every PC. Especially those that do not use the app often, but still need it occasionally.
- Backup is simpler, just backup the server.
"It is simply that in my particular experience mapquest worked better. Well, it may be a New Jersey thing."
NJ is perhaps one of the worst places to try to drive and find your way around for a visitor. No surprise the mapping programs have mistakes. From the similar town names, multiple post office town names for the same physical town (local names vs. township names I think), goofy traffic mechanisms (jughandles, etc.).
Though I appreciate the thought that went behind them (interesting from an engineering perspective), many seem to be an experiment gone wrong and no one thought to stop and cut their losses. I have driven cars in pretty much every state and province in US/Canada, and much of western Europe. I find few places more foreign, frustrating and confusing to drive in than NJ. I can only imagine why that would cause mapping programs to screw up.
After having been there for work maybe 30 times, I am just getting slightly comfortable.
"No business is going to trust google to store it documents and spreadsheets."
No argument. But for those folks, don't forget they can always package it up and put it into a "server appliance" that is under the control of the business; on their Intranet.
I have one of their "Google Mini" appliances. It is a $2000 (and up) server that crawls our Intranet and provides local (and secure) search functions of our Bugzilla, internal wiki, mailman archives, etc. It took me about an hour to unpack it, RTFM, rack it and get it booted up. Another hour to get to the point it was serving search data. It has gotten rave reviews from our users, and I think I have spent less than 1-man day total setting it up and maintaining it (mostly customizing the interface, etc.).
http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/
I think it is highly likely they will extend this model to deal with this issue. Not sure what they would charge, but it would not be hard to price it in a way that makes them a lot of money, and makes it very easy for my company to justify buying it. I am hoping the next step (probably before all the Office apps) is to get Gmail available in a server like this.
"Surely while under immunity you'd want to admit to everything because double-jeopardy laws (or something to that general effect) would prevent them from going after you on any of it. Of course, being under proper immunity and none of that fake crap that I'm assuming you're talking about."
On the face of it, that seems logical. BUT, that does not prevent folks from using that information you provide under immunity against you in a civil action.
Bottom line, you might be able to avoid jail, but you might lose your shirt in a lawsuit.
"I think that would be a very good solution - it doesn't require any modifications to client software, it's transparent to the users and it's many times more efficient. The only difficult variable would be how long you keep the attachment available on the web server."
Good point, and that could vary depending on the org's needs.
- Simple solution is a default. Configurable by the sysadmin, and noted in the email. Not perfect, but simple. If someone does not want to lose it, they can make the effort to download it and save it locally.
- Complex solution is a default, but the server sends the sender and email notifying them of the fact the attachment was stripped, giving them a URL to go in and change the "time to live" setting for that file. If it is something very short-lived (a "draft" version of a doc for example), you might actually lower the default. If it is something that might have a longer useful life, then allow them to extend it (with some max). 99% would probably keep the default (say 90 days or so).
"For many people email is the only way they know of transferring files. How else is some low-level secretary going to send a file - SFTP it to a web server and email a link?"
No argument to either the point that email is not the right way to send large files, or the fact that getting users to do it any other way is not likely to occur on any wide-scale.
Personally, I think the best solution is for the outbound email servers (SMTP) to identify and remove large attachments, replacing them with a URL to obtain the file via http(s).
This solution would solve the problems at hand:
- Sender can send using email like they are used to and comfortable with. Nothing new to learn.
- Recipients do not have their email download (POP or whatever) take forever
- Recipients can choose to not download the file, or download it when it is convenient for them
- The file is only stored once, not once for every recipient. Yeah, some mail stores handle this already, but most do not, and when this does work it is only when all recipients are on the same server.
- Recipients do not have to learn something new (pretty much everyone understands how to download from a URL).
- It would be completely automatic, no special procedure necessary.
The only downside I can think of is that this circumvents virus scanning to some degree. A well implemented solution would virus-scan the attachments at the point of stripping it and solve this. Also, a reasonably well protected PC will scan http downloads for viri.
Not a perfect solution, and there are probably some edge-cases that would annoy a few, but this is the best solution I can think of.
Just my 2 cents.
"The red lucent symbol will always remind me of ..."
I believe that is properly referred to as "The coffee stain of quality".
"If you were to implement some sort of ftp server they can exchange large files on (and promote it), that would most likely take care of the biggest files."
.ppt file and it takes forever to download his email. Having the CEO on your side is always a good thing to get compliance!
Exactly. I am looking at exactly that kind of solution, just a little simpler.
In addition to space concerns, email can get very unreliable as the attachments get big. Depends on the SMTP servers in the path, but many still restrict size to 5-25 meg, and will chop off anything over that (causing frustration, wasted time and corrupt files).
There is a free service called yousendit.com that allows one to post a file using a web form, then it sends an email with just the URL. The recipient can then download it at their convenience from the URL. I often send it to myself, then forward the URL in an email I compose myself.
As a test, some of my coworkers have been using that for sending large files the last couple weeks. It is very simple, I have had zero questions on how to use it. No ftp clients, just a browser needed.
My CEO loves it as he often travels in non-high tech places and often uses a modem to get email. He really hates it when he is cc'd on some email with 8 MB of code, or some
I am a little leary of a free hosted service (could use this to build spam lists, or eavesdrop on your files, etc.). I am now looking at phpsendit (a yousendit clone) to host myself. The install is a little buggy, but it is new and will probably get cleaned up. There are some reasonably priced payware clones on hotscripts (just search for "yousendit"), but I have not tried any of them.
I highly recommend this concept. It is not as simple as email, but it is close. Even the sales mopes "get it" as they have experienced the frustration of corrupted files many times.
"People are just trying to steal money from the author."
Not quite sure what they are whining about. I imagine sales of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" sky-rocketed after "The DaVinci code" got big. It has brought a lot of free publicity to their book and theories. My mother bought me a copy after I raved about Dan's book (and I really did not like some of his earlier stuff).
Yeah, I can see their desire to be acknowledged as a key source for ego purposes, but both monetarily and publicity wise they have benefitted immensely from Dan Brown's success.
They should continue to milk it, and maybe send Dan a thank you note.
"This bring up an interesting point on ITAR and the US. Some encryption technologies could violate ITAR if they are done in the US and then exported to other countries."
For an odd sidenote to all this. Back in 1995/1996 when we were developing 56K modems, the issue came up that we could not ship that to any rogue country as the technology technically was restricted by ITAR. IIRC, anything over 34K was considered a munition at the time. I ran the field testing (beta, etc.) for USR at the time, and was specifically prohibited from any testing in those countries.
In a rare showing of government competence, the problem was cleared up rather rapidly. I think the change got slipped in when they were changing the SSL regs in late 1996, before 56K was unleashed to the public.
If I understand the process correctly, the list of restricted technologies is actually maintained by the Commerce Department. The specific list is not in the law itself, just the authority, and guidelines for them to use to determine what is restricted. So, all it took was an adminstrative action to modify it (Congress did not need to get involved or anything like that).
I'd tell you more, but then I would have to ask Dick Cheney to pepper you with his birdshot.
"Too bad the politicos pushing for it aren't pushing it for the reasons you give, as I could support yours."
I doubt it is as simple as you suspect. Politicians generally do whatever it takes to get re-elected. Society drives these things, and I believe many in society are thinking along the same lines as I am. I hope so at least.
I cannot argue it is a slippery-slope. Justice in the US (or anywhere) is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But, though I agree prosecutions can be very politically influenced, deciding whether to apply aggravations is usually, mostly, apolitical. It is usually done by a judge and/or jury, and they are going to be less influenced by political motivations than legislators or prosecutors.
Again, I hope and pray the laws are used correctly most of the time. I am sure you will be able to find even more exceptions (hypothetical or real). The question is, can we leave this area untouched considering the assumption those will not be the rule, but just exceptions. We have plenty of checks and balances in the justice system, and they usually work just fine, preventing the kinds of abominations you mentioned.
"And why is a murder committed out of hate worse than a "regular" murder? The victim is equally dead either way."
Good question, perhaps this will put it into perspective.
First, let's make this battery instead of murder. Murder is so heinous it is indeed hard to consider a major difference between one derived from "hate" vs. other reasons (being cheated in some way, result of a robbery, etc.). They are both "high crimes" no matter how you measure it, serious punishment will likely occur regardless of the hate component. Battery might be a better crime to illustrate the point, and probably one of the more common uses of hate aggravation (along with vandalism).
A non-hate battery crime usually is an event with some guilt on the part of the victim. Not saying they deserve it, but they probably did something to instigate it (insulted your friend, smashed into your car, etc.). The escalation was likely avoidable by apologizing, running away, or just keeping a cool head about you.
Take a hate-crime battery, and the victim was probably completely innocent, just being black, gay, muslim, etc. and at the wrong place at the wrong time was enough.
The perpetrator in the non-hate battery is likely regretful later, and is probably not an inherently evil person. They may need drug/alcohol treatment and/or anger management classes, etc. They are likely to learn a lesson, and will likely avoid repeating the offense in the future. There likely was no premeditation to it either.
The hate-based batterer is generally not regretful, perhaps even proud and satisfied. They will highly likely repeat it, and there is very little a victim can do to avoid it. This is a MUCH more dangerous person, and the punishment (and/or rehabilitation) needs to be much stronger (IMNSHO).
Another situation is a gay neighbor of mine that got burglarized. He came home to find his home burglarized, and "die fags" spray painted on his wall. I have been burglarized, and it was painful and scary, but I did not take it personally and I was not traumatized. I took it as a random, unfortunate, event not directed at me personally. Some druggy looking to finance his next fix. I could definitely see a difference in these situations, my neighbor was totally traumatized, as would I be. I definitely see the crime perpetrated against my neighbor as a far more serious crime than the simple burglary I endured, even though, at their core, they were otherwise similar.
Also be cognizant of other factors that can aggravate criminal sentences, such as recidivism, no remorse, etc. These are along the same lines as hate crime aggravations. They are all an attempt by society to allow for differentiation between one-time mistakes by the offender, and the much more dangerous criminals that will likely repeat and perhaps escalate their crimes. It is just codifying "hate" as an aggravation at the same level as some of the other factors.
I am not sure how well I am making my point, but I guess the bottom line is if you look at the victim impact, the impact of a hate crime on the victim (including their family and community) is far greater than than a non-hate crime. There is little a victim of a hate crime can do to prevent it. As well as the perpetrator of a hate crime is much more likely to repeat it.
I agree with earlier points, it can be difficult to determine when a crime is hate-based, or not. But in many cases, it is not all that hard. I do agree that assigning "hate crime" status to a crime should not be taken lightly or capricously, and if there is any reasonable doubt, should not be applied. I think (I hope) it is applied very carefully, and sparingly, in real life.
"They even have the Canadian army and airforce deployed presumably to keep an enemy airforce or army from flooding over the northern border."
I don't know, I might be more worried about some of the radical right-wingers in rural Michigan. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing crowd were from Michigan. There are a lot of whacko folks within a few hundred mile radius of Detroit, and already on this side of the border, and very well armed. As they mostly vote Republican, the current administration is not focusing on them (other than for donations of course).
"So does MS owe nothing for years of infringement? Does this patch remove any obligation they may have had for selling infringing products?"
From the article:
"Microsoft was ordered to pay $8.9 million in damages for infringing Amado's 1994 patent. That award covered sales of Office between March 1997 and July 2003."
From what I gather, the US$8.9 mil is compensation for the actual infringement. It appears they chose not to (why is unclear) actually license the patent, so have to issue a patch to remove the infringing code. Had they licensed it, they would almost certainly not need to issue any patch.
So, to answer your question, they got punished, and the patent holder got compensated, for the patent infringement. The patch stops the infringement (at least if people apply it).
"I applaud Microsoft for not doing what I would have done in this situation: pull a Google and ignore the court's demand. They are actually providing patches & updates to solve the problem. I wouldn't be so accomidating."
I do not applaud them at all. The "correct" thing to do here would be to license the patent and spare their customers from having to patch their code.
Maybe they tried and the patent holder was not reasonable, but I imagine had they thrown the guy a few more bucks (perhaps a nice round US$10 million) they could have just solved the problem and spared their customers a lot of stress and expense.
'When my wife asked if it had mercury, the doctor said, "Yes, we're trying to get rid of our old stock." We declined.'
Rather odd (and probably wrong), as flu vaccines are changed every year to address whatever strain is predicted to be prevalent that year. They should not have "old stock" that has mercury. "old" would be measured in months, rather than years, so would not contain mercury that was banned several years ago. If they have stock that old (extremely unlikely after last year's shortages) someone needs to report the situation to the proper authorities.
I HIGHLY doubt this is the case. Even if they did do something that unethical, they would have definitely dumped it last year when it was a hot commodity.
"It would also be nice if ISPs would set up their own pools (and advertise them) so clients wouldn't have to go off network"
i cal/architecture/dhcp.asp
Agreed. Most do, but as you mention, don't advertise them. I am not sure how many people would actually know what to do with them if they were advertised though.
It would be quite slick if they advertised them via DHCP, and clients used that info to auto-configure their ntp client. All quite possible and very easy to do by the ISP. NTP servers can be advertised via dhcp.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_NTP
http://www.greyware.com/software/domaintime/techn
"I would agree. We are talking about someone who got fired, and THEN decided to "whistle blow" If he reported this first and THEN got fired, then I would be more inclined to believe him. But the fact that he was fired first and afterward decided that he "needed" to report this to a newspaper (as opposed to filing a wrongful dismissal dispute via the legal system) does not speak well to his motives."
The NYT held the story for a year at the request of the government. That is well known. The whistle was blown (presumably by Tice) at least 6 months before he was determined to be loony and fired. I am sure they figured that out, started the smear campaign to discredit him before this became public.
As I can put together from the relatively vague information being provided, the timeline is as such:
- Blew whistle in late 2004
- Clearance revoked and fired mid-2005
So, you should should be more inclined to believe him than you are. You are falling into exactly the trap they want you to fall into.
"I just wish I had that option. I live in Chicago. I can't see the stars even if I want to. Which I do."
Interesting you mention Chicago. I also live in Chicago, and have lived in the same neighborhood on the NW side for 22 years. Though it is far from an astronomer's dream, the city has made an effort to reduce light pollution over the past decade, and the improvement is very noticeable. 20 years ago, you could see almost no stars, occasionally some bright one would be visible. Now, many are visible on any non-cloudy night, especially if you go for a walk in a large park or along the lakefront.
The city did not spend any serious amount of money on a retrofit, but instead put in fairly strict requirements on any new lights both on public property, as well as in the building codes for new private construction (especially parking lots). They need to light the street/lot well, but must limit the upword radiation directly from the light (within reason). Usually it is using pretty simple technology (reflective hoods, etc.). I think this stuff costs a little more initially, but pays itself off pretty quickly with reduced energy requirements.
I do walk a lot around the city, often at night. I do appreciate the well lit streets and walks from a security standpoint. I appreciate the effort the city has made to balance the two opposing needs.
Bottom line, I can't argue with your general point. If astronomy was my hobby, I would not find Chicago to be a good place to do it. But, it is a good example of how a common sense approach can not only save energy, but make it a better place to live. The light pollution problem has gone from pathetic, to mediocre. At least it is moving in the right direction, slowly. I hope the situation continues to improve over the next decade. I hope more cities go down the same road.
"Silicon valley garage? I know the image of a tech company starting in a Silicon Valley garage may be somewhat romantic, but didn't Google start in a Stanford lab?"
Good observation. Not sure of the history, but my recollection is the same.
It is much like the term you will often see in newspapers describing some drug bust. It often is a "pre-dawn raid", even if the raid was actually at 3pm on a sunny August afternoon. Reporters just seem to like the imagery a "pre-dawn raid" invokes.
Watch for it now, you will see what I mean, it is often hysterical. I will now watch for "Silicon Valley garage" and laugh.
Interesting. I'll be interested to see if they survive. They could easily get taken to the cleaners. There are a lot of very unscrupulous people in the VoIP termination business that will gladly take advantage of them if they can.
I see they have all kinds of fines for abuses in their terms of service, maybe that will save them if they watch it like a hawk and are successful in enforcing them. They also have to be careful as they might piss off legit customers if they get too hawkish.
As you say they already had business issues, it seems like they are at risk.
Again, I don't blame Vonage for taking the safe road, and primarily going after the mass market.
"Skype and Vonage are both crap in my perspective, because they are closed systems that insist on controlling all ends of the transaction. Vonage is OK for clueless Aunt Sadie, but any added functionality or interoperability is completely in their hands. If these guys would allow any SIP or IAX connection in, or out, then they'd be useful."
Vonage is smart to do that. It keeps their support costs down. Trying to walk even a somewhat competent geek through all the nuances of NAT negotiation, dialplans and other voip gook would be overwhelming for their tech support. The market for people not capable of understanding all that is much larger than the market for those who do (or have the tolerance to figure it all out). Their canned package is actually quite easy to install and get running.
IAX is interesting though, as it makes at least the NAT part less complicated. If there is one thing that disappoints me about SIP is it does not address the NAT issue. They did not learn this lesson from H.323. IAX is brilliant in that regard, using a single udp port for everything, initiated outbound. As opposed to SIP that uses a signaling port, and a boatload of RTP ports, which can be painful to figure out how to open a firewall and/or NAT for.
Dialplan issues (mainly, in what format to send the number to call) is still an issue, but much more easily solved.
It will be interesting to see if IAX catches on. It is starting to get noticed, that's for sure.
The other issue Vonage has to deal with is their product offering and fraud. If you had full control of your end you could resell your "unlimited" vonage access using something like Asterisk. Vonage does have a service that gives you full control of your end (they give your ID and PW, with SIP access info), but it is a per-minute charge, not an unlimited plan. For this reason, you may never see an unlimited plan like Vonage with full control of your end.