The great part of this plan is that it gives NASA a specific goal for implementing robotic repair/servicing. They get to use the project as a testing ground for new technologies, some of which will surely make their way into other future missions. Costs will go down for "routine" orbital missions that can be automated, allowing us to do more in near space and saving the money for other missions demanding astronauts.
There is such a system right now. They're called prepaid credit cards.
You're right, of course. The prepaid cards exist and provide the anonymous transaction at the end, when they're used to purchase the final product/service, but they don't provide what I'm looking for at the beginning, when you buy the card itself.
An anonymous purchase of a prepaid card means paying cash for it, face-to-face with a merchant. If I'm paying cash for the card, I might as well pay cash for the final product. Plus, unless I add to the prepaid card with more cash somehow, there's a definite low(er) limit on what I can buy with that card. A prepaid card does solve the problem of buying low-ticket items online, however.
Then there's the whole problem of actually going out and buying the thing. I would like a little more convenience than that. But to pay for the convenience of (for example) buying it online, I give up a lot of privacy in that transaction.
I guess I'm looking for something more seamless, and a lot more convenient.
There are several aspects to the privacy issue relating to the purchase of products and services in America. As the article goes to great lengths to point out, information sharing is not necessarily a Bad Thing, particular if it leads to financial and time efficiencies.
Because information sharing is pervasive (and getting more so as time goes by) we, as consumers, are caught in a bind: If we demand more privacy, the cost will go up; if we don't demand that privacy, abuse of the system will cause all sorts of problems, too many to list here. Of course, this is a problem only for people who care.
Personally, I find myself caring about privacy in some cases and not in others. It's a trade off decision. What I want is the ability to protect my privacy when I do care, at the instant of the transaction with the merchant, even if I've dealt with that particular merchant in the past. In face-to-face transactions of low monetary value, I can use cash. But what about online transactions, or the purchase of more expensive items?
What I'd like to have is an anonymous credit card. One that's tied to a "numbered account" somewhere, managed by an institution that cares only about its numbered accounts. Money is transferred into an account, and the institution pays the credit card bills for that account. Period. Given our cryptographic skills now, someone should be able to provide blind transfers that do the job nicely.
Of course, this type of system could be abused. But it's a different kind of abuse, and my privacy is safe.
"The days of engineering-led technology companies are coming to an end," Mr. Dell declared.
When your business is in mass-producing someone else's technology, quotes like this are almost mandatory. After all, the shareholders have to be given reasons for liking your company and you're not allowed to use the word "innovative" anywhere in the press release.
Sure, there's something to be said for running a solid business around commodity products, even if they do cost a lot (compared to say, paper plates). It really is a good business to be in. The printer business, which the article focuses on, fits Dell's ideas pretty well.
But when I look for a new computer to buy, I look to Apple and I look at Dell. There's a big difference there.
Every once in awhile you'll get on a "marketing list" that was lawfully obtained by one reputable company and then sold to reputable partners. In that narrow case -- where everyone really does abide by the rules -- then unsubscribing may work.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of spam lists are run by less-than-reputable companies and/or individuals. Unsubscribing from one of their lists will, at best, get you off that one list but then added to a bzillion more (at a premium, too, since you've now confirmed your address).
A couple of years ago I setup some spamtrap addresses to research this very thing. I followed the unsubscribe links in the spam that flowed in until I found one that asked you to enter your email address (rather than automatically supplying it). I entered a bogus address and promptly created a new spamtrap address to match it. I didn't use that new address for anything else. If I remember correctly, it took only two weeks before the spam started flooding in.
Google has great reputation and is well respected. As far as I can tell, they have followed those rules throughout their corporate life. Many individuals/companies would look to Google and actively try to emulate them. Others, unfortunately, need to have it spelled out.
I think what Google is doing is citing the Good Citizen Rules specifically for those that can't figure it out for themselves.
It should be easy for you to figure out how to disable or delete an application. The process should try to remove sufficient components to disable all functions of the application, visible or not, without messing up your computer. Once an application is disabled or deleted, it should not remain active or be automatically enabled later by itself or another application.
Apple, are you reading this? Can you say "uninstall?"
It looks like these cars are more hype than help in the battle against pollution and foreign fuel reliance.
While the references indicate that the actual mileage is lower than what is claimed, the vehicles do get better gas mileage than standard automobiles. From a conservation standpoint, that's still a good thing. From a Truth In Advertising (ha!) standpoint, it certainly stinks.
Personally, I'm interested in hybrids but not for fuel efficiency reasons. I'd like to see auto makers combine the output from different energy sources into all-wheel acceleration of a normal car. I remember seeing something on the news a few years ago about Ford experimenting with that on an Explorer, trying to jazz up the acceleration of a bigger vehicle. I don't know what became of that testing, if anything. But it would be extremely cool to see that technology in a small, sporty car.
According to SpecOps's technical executives, David used reverse engineering to create a "Windows Subsystem Simulation Environment" to allow Windows applications to run "natively" on the Linux operating system.
Was I the only one to read, "Windows Subsystem Simulation Environment" as "wussy"?
Microsoft initially recommended that BayStar take a look at SCO. But there is nothing unusual about that, Mr. Goldfarb [managing partner of BayStar] said. BayStar often talks to the investment and venture arms of major technology companies like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco. "It was evident that Microsoft had an agenda," Mr. Goldfarb said.
Does anyone remember the leaked memo that pointed to Microsoft's interest in the BayStar investment? Many people in that thread guessed that perhaps Paul Allen arranged the deal on the golf course or over the weekend or something. Apparently, that point is moot. BayStar and SCO both knew who was behind it.
What about the statement from Blake Stowell of SCO that, "Contrary to the speculation of Eric Raymond, Microsoft did not orchestrate or participate in the BayStar transaction."?
This was the 2nd reader post from the original story of PlayFair being pulled. Why is this news?
Sorry. I hadn't been awake long enough to post a completely coherent story.
The point of the submission was that Freshmeat is now listing the project again. As was pointed out in the earlier story, Freshmeat had deactivated the project at Apple's request. Or was it listed again before and I just missed that until my first cup of coffee this morning?
I don't intend to start another religious war over the pros and cons of counterattacks. However, there is one aspect of Symbiot Security's product that is interesting when considered with this topic of government-mandated corporate security.
Symbiot.NET is our central repository of attacker profiles based on the cooperative surveillance and reconnaissance gathered by all network participants.
...
Symbiot.NET was designed for not only use with the Symbiot iSIMS platform, but also as an independent query tool from a web browser. In Q3 of 2004, Symbiot will open access to its Symbiot.NET database for ad-hoc queries and risk score retrievals.
In other words, this could be a method for monitoring a network's "health," either your own or someone else's.
This kind of system, whether implemented by Symbiot or someone else, and if done correctly, could provide a yardstick by which everyone could be measured. Even a partially flawed "risk metric" may be better than none, if the metric was applied systematically.
We do this a little differently, but entirely aware of the copyright/IP laws.
Basically, we also maintain a large code library (some of which is posted as freely-available libraries from our web site) that gets reused for almost every project. We require our customers to sign a contract that specifies the following:
We do strictly Work For Hire work. The final product is owned by the customer.
We will use freely-available source code, libraries, utilities, etc. to complete the project, including our own code, and the customer does not have any ownership of that 'shared code' beyond whatever the license indicates.
Unless expressly prohibited, we opt to include useful functions/libraries written for the project in our own code library and make it freely available. The customer pays extra if this is denied.
In the end, the customer is happy that they now "own" the thing they paid for, they're happy that they can go elsewhere to have it maintained if needed, and they're happy that we're not going to come back and hit them up over IP issues.
And there is another interesting side-effect: Sales tax doesn't apply to Work For Hire work.
See Muckraking, the PC Way, written by Richard Forno (former Chief Security Officer at Network Solutions), which was referenced by Slashdot earlier. Excerpt:
Contrary to his article, the small market segment held by Apple doesn't automatically make the Mac OS less vulnerable to attack or exploitation. Any competent security professional will tell you that "security through obscurity" - what Lance is referring to toward the end of his article - doesn't work. In other words, if, as he suggests, Mac OS was the dominant operating system, its users would still enjoy an inherently more secure and trustworthy computing environment even if the number of attacks against it increased. That's because unlike Windows, Mac OS was designed from the ground up with security in mind. Is it totally secure? Nothing will ever be totally secure. But when compared to Windows, Mac OS is proving to be a significantly more reliable and (exponentially) more secure computing environment for today's users, including this security professional.
Any move against mainstream pornography could affect large telephone companies offering broadband Internet service or the dozens of national credit card companies providing payment services to pornographic Web sites.
While the article doesn't explicitly say if the "affect" would be positive or negative, it implies the negative. From my experience with the credit card companies, however, I would think that they would love to be able to rid themselves of at least some of the porn business. The largest percentage of chargebacks are, I believe, due to porn purchases using stolen or manufactured card numbers. Reducing those chargebacks would be a good thing for them.
I have one as well, lurking in a dust jacket with Larry's signature. I had him sign that and a couple of other extremely low-profile books of his named Niven's Laws and The Time of the Warlock at the same time. After signing them, he told me that I had some seriously rare stuff on my hands now.
As one or two others have pointed out, this research doesn't not attempt to show that frequent TV viewing causes ADHD, only that the two may be linked. Watching too much TV when young may contribute to ADHD, or ADHD-prone children may find TV more fascinating.
However, I live with a 3rd grader that has been diagnosed with ADHD and has been taking a medication for it for two years now. If anything, the kid watches more TV now than before, simply because he can now sit still for longer. I wasn't there when he was a toddler, but his mom says that he hardly ever watched TV because he was too busy bouncing off the walls, going from one activity to the next.
Slashdot Mirror
The great part of this plan is that it gives NASA a specific goal for implementing robotic repair/servicing. They get to use the project as a testing ground for new technologies, some of which will surely make their way into other future missions. Costs will go down for "routine" orbital missions that can be automated, allowing us to do more in near space and saving the money for other missions demanding astronauts.
An anonymous purchase of a prepaid card means paying cash for it, face-to-face with a merchant. If I'm paying cash for the card, I might as well pay cash for the final product. Plus, unless I add to the prepaid card with more cash somehow, there's a definite low(er) limit on what I can buy with that card. A prepaid card does solve the problem of buying low-ticket items online, however.
Then there's the whole problem of actually going out and buying the thing. I would like a little more convenience than that. But to pay for the convenience of (for example) buying it online, I give up a lot of privacy in that transaction.
I guess I'm looking for something more seamless, and a lot more convenient.
Because information sharing is pervasive (and getting more so as time goes by) we, as consumers, are caught in a bind: If we demand more privacy, the cost will go up; if we don't demand that privacy, abuse of the system will cause all sorts of problems, too many to list here. Of course, this is a problem only for people who care.
Personally, I find myself caring about privacy in some cases and not in others. It's a trade off decision. What I want is the ability to protect my privacy when I do care, at the instant of the transaction with the merchant, even if I've dealt with that particular merchant in the past. In face-to-face transactions of low monetary value, I can use cash. But what about online transactions, or the purchase of more expensive items?
What I'd like to have is an anonymous credit card. One that's tied to a "numbered account" somewhere, managed by an institution that cares only about its numbered accounts. Money is transferred into an account, and the institution pays the credit card bills for that account. Period. Given our cryptographic skills now, someone should be able to provide blind transfers that do the job nicely.
Of course, this type of system could be abused. But it's a different kind of abuse, and my privacy is safe.
... will obviously be "forbidden." Yes, I did RTFA.
Sure, there's something to be said for running a solid business around commodity products, even if they do cost a lot (compared to say, paper plates). It really is a good business to be in. The printer business, which the article focuses on, fits Dell's ideas pretty well.
But when I look for a new computer to buy, I look to Apple and I look at Dell. There's a big difference there.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of spam lists are run by less-than-reputable companies and/or individuals. Unsubscribing from one of their lists will, at best, get you off that one list but then added to a bzillion more (at a premium, too, since you've now confirmed your address).
A couple of years ago I setup some spamtrap addresses to research this very thing. I followed the unsubscribe links in the spam that flowed in until I found one that asked you to enter your email address (rather than automatically supplying it). I entered a bogus address and promptly created a new spamtrap address to match it. I didn't use that new address for anything else. If I remember correctly, it took only two weeks before the spam started flooding in.
I think what Google is doing is citing the Good Citizen Rules specifically for those that can't figure it out for themselves.
Apple, are you reading this? Can you say "uninstall?"Personally, I'm interested in hybrids but not for fuel efficiency reasons. I'd like to see auto makers combine the output from different energy sources into all-wheel acceleration of a normal car. I remember seeing something on the news a few years ago about Ford experimenting with that on an Explorer, trying to jazz up the acceleration of a bigger vehicle. I don't know what became of that testing, if anything. But it would be extremely cool to see that technology in a small, sporty car.
Place your orders now....
What about the statement from Blake Stowell of SCO that, "Contrary to the speculation of Eric Raymond, Microsoft did not orchestrate or participate in the BayStar transaction."?
Now, who needs a tin-foil hat?
The point of the submission was that Freshmeat is now listing the project again. As was pointed out in the earlier story, Freshmeat had deactivated the project at Apple's request. Or was it listed again before and I just missed that until my first cup of coffee this morning?
From their Symbiot.NET page:
In other words, this could be a method for monitoring a network's "health," either your own or someone else's.This kind of system, whether implemented by Symbiot or someone else, and if done correctly, could provide a yardstick by which everyone could be measured. Even a partially flawed "risk metric" may be better than none, if the metric was applied systematically.
Basically, we also maintain a large code library (some of which is posted as freely-available libraries from our web site) that gets reused for almost every project. We require our customers to sign a contract that specifies the following:
- We do strictly Work For Hire work. The final product is owned by the customer.
- We will use freely-available source code, libraries, utilities, etc. to complete the project, including our own code, and the customer does not have any ownership of that 'shared code' beyond whatever the license indicates.
- Unless expressly prohibited, we opt to include useful functions/libraries written for the project in our own code library and make it freely available. The customer pays extra if this is denied.
In the end, the customer is happy that they now "own" the thing they paid for, they're happy that they can go elsewhere to have it maintained if needed, and they're happy that we're not going to come back and hit them up over IP issues.And there is another interesting side-effect: Sales tax doesn't apply to Work For Hire work.
I can stand that.
That was a lot of fun.
That, more than anything, tells me a lot about how people feel about Microsoft's operating systems. Past, present, and future.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "It is no accident that there is no single word in any language that means, 'As pretty as the Longhorn OS.'"
However, I live with a 3rd grader that has been diagnosed with ADHD and has been taking a medication for it for two years now. If anything, the kid watches more TV now than before, simply because he can now sit still for longer. I wasn't there when he was a toddler, but his mom says that he hardly ever watched TV because he was too busy bouncing off the walls, going from one activity to the next.
You know this is an April Fool's joke 'cause the product name doesn't begin with an "i".
No.