but I think the point those of us who have mentioned the "how is this related to anti-terrorism?" idea is that this would represent a sort of scope expansion for what was originally sold to the public as an anti-terrorism tool.
Cameras that were originally installed in order to "combat terrorism" are having their use expanded to fight lesser crimes, and now potentially to levy additional taxes. What we are trying to say is that there is a tendency for a government to use whatever power citizens grant it in, for lack of a better word, "creative" ways. That's why we have to be constantly on our guard against giving the government more power than is absolutely necessary for them to do what we need done for us. This is especially important here in the US after our recent exposure to terrorism.
You had a very good response later in the thread about how there isn't enough infrastructure in place to handle the additional traffic associated with people electing not to drive in, so the proposed fee really becomes an additional tax for those who have no alternative. You mentioned the cross rail project as a potential solution to part of the problem. What bothers me is that because part of the infrastructure for the proposed plan to levy fees has been paid for under different pretenses-- the cameras, computers, and people to watch them are already in place, the more reasonable solution of improving the public transportation infrastructure (something we desperately need here, too) is not competing on a level playing field because the other option has been partially funded by our fear of terrorism.
Thanks for staying with me this far if you bothered to read it all-- have a nice day.
The problem with your argument is that what is or is not offensive is determined by an individual's moral beliefs. Freedom of speech is architected specifically to protect people who are in the minority with respect to moral beliefs.
By way of example, pretend I feel like the world is overpopulated and it is irresponsible to have more than one child. Now pretend that most people feel the same way. Given that, we may find a web site where a father and mother proudly display pictures of their seven children repugnant and distasteful. Should they be allowed to deliberately flaunt their irresponsible squandering of the planet's resources, even though they KNOW it is going to irritate the rest of us? Of course they should!
Protect the minority opinion from persecution as vigorously as you can. You just might be in the minority one day.
It's the documentation (or lack thereof)
on
Version Fatigue
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· Score: 1
One of the problems with "learning" about new software and appliances these days is that the documentation usually sucks.
When the market was smaller and consisted mainly of technically astute people, documentation tended to summarize ALL of the menu items and shortcut keys, and then describe in complete detail any automation or scripting capabilities.
And this documentation would be provided in the form of a printed manual no less, one that you could actually take with you and read at your leisure instead of when you are sitting in front of the machine trying to get your work done.
Now we get giant pictograms which are targeted at a technically illiterate audience and which describe only the most surface level tasks. The deeper level documentation is usually provided only in electronic format, and often hidden behind some kind of inane help browser system geared more towards "Ask me a question and I'll answer it for you" than it is towards reading from beginning to end.
I don't believe that software has grown so complex that it is impractical to completely document its function, as long as we bring the target level of the audience up. Honestly, since most users aren't bothering to read the documentation anyway, target it towards the ones who will read it and make tech support money off the rest.
Things were better when it was assumed (and could be reasonably expected) that the end user had fairly high level of familiarity with their systems and how they operated. While I would acknowledge that today the end user doesn't possess these traits, the person providing systems support for them does (or should). Please give us our documentation back.
Operating system reinstalls, software that needs to be periodically uninstalled and reinstalled, uninstall routines that fail to complete the uninstall process, biannual hard drive reformats.
Even if it were still necessary to occasionally clean the slate on a given unix, at least it would only be a matter of erasing some files and copying them back over.
I bet the windows registry (and undocumented keys therein) costs us thousands of dollars in IT time a year.
Right now I am installing operating system software on sixty desktops here. It would be so much easier if I could just do a simple "copy" of the relevant files from the network. Installation routines for Windows are a nightmare, and mystery errors requiring reinstalls are all too common.
I think about how nice it would be for AutoCAD to be available for linux almost daily. (It remains our only obstacle to a complete change over.) I think the major stumbling block at this point is that AutoDesk appears to be married to the visual basic development environment. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the AutoCAD extensions out there are coded in visual basic, and AutoCAD has supported visual basic for applications ala Office, et al for quite some time now. It doesn't get less portable than that.
I am assuming that the initial buy in was "look at all these nifty developer's tools we can offer you and your users". It would be very difficult to reverse that course now, but since we do all our customizations in LISP I wouldn't miss visual basic at all. I just can't GetPastTheGoofySyntax for VBA, and the first book I bought on it was peppered with lots of "for some reason, this doesn't always work" and "be careful calling this routine after that routine or your program may hang for a few minutes" so I put it down and never picked it back up.
I just wish someone at AutoDesk would pay attention. Some video production shops are going linux, though, so maybe 3D Studio will be the first hole in the dam over there.
This would be an interesting approach, except that the documentation license terms appear to specifically prohibit any "free" implementations.
Here is the relevant section:
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Notice that the above applies to "other software" distributed with software subject to the (supposed) "IPR Impairing License". In other words, if your product is open source, you can't use Microsoft's docs to build it, and they are not granting the specified patent licenses.
Allison and the SAMBA team are taking the only safe approach, which is to claim that these docs are not used to build their implementation, and that their implementation is done in such a way as not to infringe on the patents.
In the mean time, we can all hope this comes back to bite MS in the antitrust proceedings. As I see it, clearly they are acting in bad faith with this first step towards a "remedy".
A Win32 environment provides a much more limited range of choices with respect to GUI managers, printing solutions, etc. There are services provided by the OS that you can more or less rely on being present and functional- print preview code, windows and buttons, et al. This consistency allows for the dynamic linking of a lot of stuff.
Flip to Linux-- there is a huge array of choices for window managers, printing, etc. So the developers have to choose between putting out several diffeent dynamically linked versions that use external library code, or one larger statically linked version.
I believe, in the interst of ease of support, maintnenance, and installation for the newbies, the binary is statically linked. Even if it weren't, there is a lot of code provided at the OS level in Win32 that you can't necessarily rely on in a Unix environment.
People who want the most efficient use of resources (disk space. et al) always have the option of compiling from source-- at least with Open Office they do.
Is the storage solid state? (I can't get the article right now). If not, it seems like they could double the storage without impacting the price. Maybe these are "old" specs?
I wouldn't focus on the need to replace the proprietary OS in embedded systems as my main point.
It is too easy for a non-technical person to see this as using the hardware design of some manufacturer in a way they did not intend for it to be used, and there may not be much support for your right to "do the same thing, in a different way, with someone else's hardware design."
Instead, I might focus on the fact that computing platforms with smaller market shares, both open source and proprietary, may be blocked from using certain content. In the case of open source, it may be illegal to develop DVD and CD content players.
This will have the opposite effect of speeding adoption, and instead will cause the industry to collapse into a hodge podge of competing implementations targeted at different market segments.
Also, do check out the fair use material at the digital consumer site mentioned above-- good stuff from a legal slant.
if you look at it from the standpoint of asking our government to protect us from corporations who are trying to take unfair advantage of us.
Here at our firm we submit recorded CD's to our clients of almost every engineering project we do.
CAD files have gotten so large there is no other reasonable way to transmit them. Why does the RIAA get to levy a tax against our engineering firm? What service are they providing us that we must compensate them for? I would like my government to protect us from the RIAA.
Similarly, Microsoft has abused its monopoly position to maintain a stranglehold on the software market. This has a lot of ramifications for us, including what software we use and how much we have to pay for it. I would like my government to protect us from Microsoft as well.
The lawyers are not saying, "Blame these other parties too."
What they are saying is, "Blaming our clients for this is just as ridiculous as blamiong all these other parties would be."
Because there is substantial, non-infringing use of P2P file sharing, it is just as silly to sue the writer of the software as it would be to sue ISP's.
If you read the article, the EFF is involved in helping architect that defense. Everyone who reads Slashdot should know about the Electronic Frontier Foundation and what their role as "our lobbyist" is, just like everyone should read the article before posting a comment.
Thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to answer my request for information.
Roadmaster-- I ordered my Seiko 5 (with nylon band) this morning. It had been a while since I looked, and the less expensive watches definitely don't seem to get the billing that the other watches do.
The plan is to wear this one for a while, and if it turns out to be as neat and wonderful as I think it will then possibly buy an heirloom quality watch "down the road". Of course, this assumes I end up having kids at some point...
There is something beautiful about a well designed mechanism, and in the electronic age it seems like this is becoming a lost art. Maybe this is an ironic comment from a mechanical engineer turned system administrator, but I call them like I see them.
Anyway, thanks again! I'm sure I will enjoy the watch.
While this sounds great, it glosses over the hard part.
Alice and Bob need a shared secret, and they need some way to transmit that secret from Alice to Bob (or vice versa) without it being intercepted. If the secret is compromised, it is trivial to determine who said what.
So assuming that the government is monitoring all communications, in the absence of some out-of-band means of secure communication, Alice and Bob are still going to jail. It will be easy to determine who was responsible for the actual message, and the other party(ies) will likely be persecuted for attempting to facilitate the comunication.
The link you posted claims that the secret would be exchanged via the usual public key cryptographic means, but I am not sure that the average Chinese citizen can vouch for the security of his or her private keys. (Can most people?)
It's a great concept, but it seems like it would only be useful if there were outside participants (i.e. people who would never give their private keys up to the government). For intra-China communication, I wouldn't bet my life on it, unless what I had to say was important enough to me to risk the consequences of being caught saying it. Furthermore, I think the likelihood that the government might seed the network with cheater nodes that disclose their secrets is high.
I have been looking for an automatic watch in this price range (in the US)-- everything I have found seems to be in the $400 range, which is more than I can spend.
Any pointers you might have as to manufacturers/places to purchase would be appreciated.
A simple, functional automatic would make me very happy...
when you have 100 or so employees milling about, you would be amazed what kind of stuff they will drag in and install when you aren't looking.
And yes, I know all about policy editors and drive imaging and a lot of other things you can do to try to keep them from messing around with the systems or clean up after them when they leave for the day.
The bottom line is, like a lot of other companies, we spend a measurable amount of time and money on compliance issues every year even though we have never pirated software. If it weren't for the BSA, or more precisely our ties to products made by their member companies (thanks AutoDesk), this would be much less of an issue for us.
Flushed with a sense of accomplishment from landing a cushy job getting cussed at, spit on, and occasionally having to duck bullets for the princely sum of $18,000/year, these guys really get off on standing in the rain writing tickets.
More likely it is because ticket revenue makes up a large portion of most department's annual budget, so it's more like, "If you want a new bullet proof vest you better get out there and write daddy some tickets like a good little bitch." It is inconceivable to me that these guys actually have ticket quotas. Does that mean we aren't doing our job as a citizen if we don't occasionally get caught speeding so we can pay our "supplemental taxes"?
Don't hate the cops-- hate the administration that wastes all your tax money and police resources on the "war on drugs", and forces officers to whore in the streets for money to shore up budget holes that are left behind as a result.
Hate the "police state" if you want, but try to remember that cops are people too, and a lot of them hate their jobs and bosses as much as you hate yours, only they are hating theirs for less money with a much greater risk of injury or death in most cases.
My dad was a police officer for a while, and he used to tell me, "Cops are people, just like everyone else. The problem is that for what they are paying, you tend to get two kinds of candidates: starry-eyed idealists naieve enough to think they can "make a difference", and people who couldn't find a job doing anything else." Unfortunately there is a shortage of the first kind. Feel free to sign up if you would like to offer your intelligence and talents to serving the community for little or no compensation.
When I told him I was thinking about becoming a police officer he told me, "Son, if you have any involvement with law enforcement it better be from the other side. You will make a hell of a lot more money, and people will respect you more. If that doesn't help you make up your mind know that I would rather shoot you myself than hear someone else shot you."
I think most of what is wrong with police services today comes from the top down more than the bottom up. Even granted that you aren't working with the best and brightest most of the time, if the administration pointed them in the right direction and focused on the right things we would al be happier, officers included.
Not necessarily. The email headers will get you all the way back to the gateway the machine is mailing from, and if someone were to give us a call and say they had reason to believe that stolen equipment was in use on our network I would be interested enough to track that IP on our internal network.
Unless the network admin *is* your computer thief, but then it is much more likely the machine has been wiped prior to use and your mailer program is gone.
The reason these "cowardly" artists have typically signed adverse contracts is generally because there has never been an alternative. A bad contract is better than no contract if those are the only two options.
Record companies have traditionally controlled both the production and distribution channels. Without the help of a major label, the odds of an artist creating his or her own content and seeing widespread distribution have until very recently been essentially nil.
While the recent technology developments and widespread internet access are changing that rapidly, I think it's a little early to consider anyone who has signed a record deal with a major label a whore. Even now, recording and distributing your own music would require a non-trivial amount of cash and some insider knowledge that is beyond the reach of the "average" starving artist. Everybody needs to eat, and the record labels have a long history of catching an artist at a time when they are negotiating from a weak position and bullying them into signing an unfavorable contract.
It's interesting that you compare a record deal to a software development contract, because I believe there is a much greater market and reward potential for an average programmer than there is for an average musician.
You have to remember that it hasn't been that long since people in the Ukraine could be locked up, beaten, exiled, or even killed for things they said or wrote.
It's hard to imagine life under those conditions when you grew up somewhere where you can say practically anything you want without repercussions. But don't let your naivete cause you to disregard the opinions of those who have been there and back, because they can help us make sure we never go there with our government. Erosion of your civil rights is a slow, piecemeal process. It doesn't happen overnight, and that's why it has to be fought every step of the way. Otherwise you look up one day wondering how we fell so far without anyone doing anything to stop it.
Maybe I have a limited imagination, but I have trouble seeing how exactly the average citizen can "use" these cameras. It is likely that if we did find a way to use cameras which don't belong to us that we would be prosecuted for it.
What I can imagine, though, is a scenario where once the system is in place, the scope of its use is gradually increased until it is being used not only in ways that are unacceptable, but also in ways we were specifically told it wouldn't be in the beginning.
An example of this would be the "anti-terrorist" cameras installed all over London. These are now being used to detect and prosecute all sorts of lesser crimes. Of course, many people don't have a problem with that, but you have to be extremely careful where the lower bound gets set. Is that a nudie magazine in your pocket, visible in frames 237-512 when you crossed Market Street?
Maybe you can't imagine any activites/liberties you presently indulge in which the government might eventually decide are nonsat, but my paranoia meter jumps a couple of clicks every time this stuff makes the news.
This would be a good first step, because I could set up that box, get it configured, and leave the Exchange server in the DMZ until I get ready to switch. This would also have the added benefit of insulating my shiny new mail server from all the local network "business" traffic.
I believe that for a given mail address, bob@foo.com, the infected machine attempts to connect directly to the foo.com mailhost on port 25. This is what similar viruses have done in the past.
I block and log outgoing connections to that port (among others) from our local network, so if something like this does get loose, we can at least be saved the embarrassment of having it go back out to our clients.
So, for the inbound side, does anyone know of a free procmail-esque mail filtering solution for Exchange? I would LOVE to throw the Exchange server in the river, but it seems to have grown roots here what with the gee-whiz outlook integration, global address book and Schedule+ stuff.
I don't like the "deny all of them" approach taken by the last security patch and we don't have the cash for one of the commercial filtering solutions.
I hope to move us to IMAP + LDAP + CGI (for the calendar and scheduling stuff) in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
but I think the point those of us who have mentioned the "how is this related to anti-terrorism?" idea is that this would represent a sort of scope expansion for what was originally sold to the public as an anti-terrorism tool.
Cameras that were originally installed in order to "combat terrorism" are having their use expanded to fight lesser crimes, and now potentially to levy additional taxes. What we are trying to say is that there is a tendency for a government to use whatever power citizens grant it in, for lack of a better word, "creative" ways. That's why we have to be constantly on our guard against giving the government more power than is absolutely necessary for them to do what we need done for us. This is especially important here in the US after our recent exposure to terrorism.
You had a very good response later in the thread about how there isn't enough infrastructure in place to handle the additional traffic associated with people electing not to drive in, so the proposed fee really becomes an additional tax for those who have no alternative. You mentioned the cross rail project as a potential solution to part of the problem. What bothers me is that because part of the infrastructure for the proposed plan to levy fees has been paid for under different pretenses-- the cameras, computers, and people to watch them are already in place, the more reasonable solution of improving the public transportation infrastructure (something we desperately need here, too) is not competing on a level playing field because the other option has been partially funded by our fear of terrorism.
Thanks for staying with me this far if you bothered to read it all-- have a nice day.
The problem with your argument is that what is or is not offensive is determined by an individual's moral beliefs. Freedom of speech is architected specifically to protect people who are in the minority with respect to moral beliefs.
By way of example, pretend I feel like the world is overpopulated and it is irresponsible to have more than one child. Now pretend that most people feel the same way. Given that, we may find a web site where a father and mother proudly display pictures of their seven children repugnant and distasteful. Should they be allowed to deliberately flaunt their irresponsible squandering of the planet's resources, even though they KNOW it is going to irritate the rest of us? Of course they should!
Protect the minority opinion from persecution as vigorously as you can. You just might be in the minority one day.
One of the problems with "learning" about new software and appliances these days is that the documentation usually sucks.
When the market was smaller and consisted mainly of technically astute people, documentation tended to summarize ALL of the menu items and shortcut keys, and then describe in complete detail any automation or scripting capabilities.
And this documentation would be provided in the form of a printed manual no less, one that you could actually take with you and read at your leisure instead of when you are sitting in front of the machine trying to get your work done.
Now we get giant pictograms which are targeted at a technically illiterate audience and which describe only the most surface level tasks. The deeper level documentation is usually provided only in electronic format, and often hidden behind some kind of inane help browser system geared more towards "Ask me a question and I'll answer it for you" than it is towards reading from beginning to end.
I don't believe that software has grown so complex that it is impractical to completely document its function, as long as we bring the target level of the audience up. Honestly, since most users aren't bothering to read the documentation anyway, target it towards the ones who will read it and make tech support money off the rest.
Things were better when it was assumed (and could be reasonably expected) that the end user had fairly high level of familiarity with their systems and how they operated. While I would acknowledge that today the end user doesn't possess these traits, the person providing systems support for them does (or should). Please give us our documentation back.
Operating system reinstalls, software that needs to be periodically uninstalled and reinstalled, uninstall routines that fail to complete the uninstall process, biannual hard drive reformats.
Even if it were still necessary to occasionally clean the slate on a given unix, at least it would only be a matter of erasing some files and copying them back over.
I bet the windows registry (and undocumented keys therein) costs us thousands of dollars in IT time a year.
Right now I am installing operating system software on sixty desktops here. It would be so much easier if I could just do a simple "copy" of the relevant files from the network. Installation routines for Windows are a nightmare, and mystery errors requiring reinstalls are all too common.
I think about how nice it would be for AutoCAD to be available for linux almost daily. (It remains our only obstacle to a complete change over.) I think the major stumbling block at this point is that AutoDesk appears to be married to the visual basic development environment. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the AutoCAD extensions out there are coded in visual basic, and AutoCAD has supported visual basic for applications ala Office, et al for quite some time now. It doesn't get less portable than that.
I am assuming that the initial buy in was "look at all these nifty developer's tools we can offer you and your users". It would be very difficult to reverse that course now, but since we do all our customizations in LISP I wouldn't miss visual basic at all. I just can't GetPastTheGoofySyntax for VBA, and the first book I bought on it was peppered with lots of "for some reason, this doesn't always work" and "be careful calling this routine after that routine or your program may hang for a few minutes" so I put it down and never picked it back up.
I just wish someone at AutoDesk would pay attention. Some video production shops are going linux, though, so maybe 3D Studio will be the first hole in the dam over there.
This would be an interesting approach, except that the documentation license terms appear to specifically prohibit any "free" implementations.
Here is the relevant section:
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Notice that the above applies to "other software" distributed with software subject to the (supposed) "IPR Impairing License". In other words, if your product is open source, you can't use Microsoft's docs to build it, and they are not granting the specified patent licenses.
Allison and the SAMBA team are taking the only safe approach, which is to claim that these docs are not used to build their implementation, and that their implementation is done in such a way as not to infringe on the patents.
In the mean time, we can all hope this comes back to bite MS in the antitrust proceedings. As I see it, clearly they are acting in bad faith with this first step towards a "remedy".
A Win32 environment provides a much more limited range of choices with respect to GUI managers, printing solutions, etc. There are services provided by the OS that you can more or less rely on being present and functional- print preview code, windows and buttons, et al. This consistency allows for the dynamic linking of a lot of stuff.
Flip to Linux-- there is a huge array of choices for window managers, printing, etc. So the developers have to choose between putting out several diffeent dynamically linked versions that use external library code, or one larger statically linked version.
I believe, in the interst of ease of support, maintnenance, and installation for the newbies, the binary is statically linked. Even if it weren't, there is a lot of code provided at the OS level in Win32 that you can't necessarily rely on in a Unix environment.
People who want the most efficient use of resources (disk space. et al) always have the option of compiling from source-- at least with Open Office they do.
OK, so it doesn't really *need* it, but why not?
Is the storage solid state? (I can't get the article right now). If not, it seems like they could double the storage without impacting the price. Maybe these are "old" specs?
I wouldn't focus on the need to replace the proprietary OS in embedded systems as my main point.
It is too easy for a non-technical person to see this as using the hardware design of some manufacturer in a way they did not intend for it to be used, and there may not be much support for your right to "do the same thing, in a different way, with someone else's hardware design."
Instead, I might focus on the fact that computing platforms with smaller market shares, both open source and proprietary, may be blocked from using certain content. In the case of open source, it may be illegal to develop DVD and CD content players.
This will have the opposite effect of speeding adoption, and instead will cause the industry to collapse into a hodge podge of competing implementations targeted at different market segments.
Also, do check out the fair use material at the digital consumer site mentioned above-- good stuff from a legal slant.
if you look at it from the standpoint of asking our government to protect us from corporations who are trying to take unfair advantage of us.
Here at our firm we submit recorded CD's to our clients of almost every engineering project we do.
CAD files have gotten so large there is no other reasonable way to transmit them. Why does the RIAA get to levy a tax against our engineering firm? What service are they providing us that we must compensate them for? I would like my government to protect us from the RIAA.
Similarly, Microsoft has abused its monopoly position to maintain a stranglehold on the software market. This has a lot of ramifications for us, including what software we use and how much we have to pay for it. I would like my government to protect us from Microsoft as well.
The two views are completely consistent IMHO.
The lawyers are not saying, "Blame these other parties too."
What they are saying is, "Blaming our clients for this is just as ridiculous as blamiong all these other parties would be."
Because there is substantial, non-infringing use of P2P file sharing, it is just as silly to sue the writer of the software as it would be to sue ISP's.
If you read the article, the EFF is involved in helping architect that defense. Everyone who reads Slashdot should know about the Electronic Frontier Foundation and what their role as "our lobbyist" is, just like everyone should read the article before posting a comment.
Thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to answer my request for information.
Roadmaster-- I ordered my Seiko 5 (with nylon band) this morning. It had been a while since I looked, and the less expensive watches definitely don't seem to get the billing that the other watches do.
The plan is to wear this one for a while, and if it turns out to be as neat and wonderful as I think it will then possibly buy an heirloom quality watch "down the road". Of course, this assumes I end up having kids at some point...
There is something beautiful about a well designed mechanism, and in the electronic age it seems like this is becoming a lost art. Maybe this is an ironic comment from a mechanical engineer turned system administrator, but I call them like I see them.
Anyway, thanks again! I'm sure I will enjoy the watch.
While this sounds great, it glosses over the hard part.
Alice and Bob need a shared secret, and they need some way to transmit that secret from Alice to Bob (or vice versa) without it being intercepted. If the secret is compromised, it is trivial to determine who said what.
So assuming that the government is monitoring all communications, in the absence of some out-of-band means of secure communication, Alice and Bob are still going to jail. It will be easy to determine who was responsible for the actual message, and the other party(ies) will likely be persecuted for attempting to facilitate the comunication.
The link you posted claims that the secret would be exchanged via the usual public key cryptographic means, but I am not sure that the average Chinese citizen can vouch for the security of his or her private keys. (Can most people?)
It's a great concept, but it seems like it would only be useful if there were outside participants (i.e. people who would never give their private keys up to the government). For intra-China communication, I wouldn't bet my life on it, unless what I had to say was important enough to me to risk the consequences of being caught saying it. Furthermore, I think the likelihood that the government might seed the network with cheater nodes that disclose their secrets is high.
I have been looking for an automatic watch in this price range (in the US)-- everything I have found seems to be in the $400 range, which is more than I can spend.
Any pointers you might have as to manufacturers/places to purchase would be appreciated.
A simple, functional automatic would make me very happy...
This will spur P2P development like nothing else can.
In the meantime, there might never be a better time to get into the anonymizing proxy business.
Even offering proxy purchasing services from low tax zones might be atractive to someone out there.
OK, maybe there isn't a bright side. Once one government tries it, everyone is going to want to play.
when you have 100 or so employees milling about, you would be amazed what kind of stuff they will drag in and install when you aren't looking.
And yes, I know all about policy editors and drive imaging and a lot of other things you can do to try to keep them from messing around with the systems or clean up after them when they leave for the day.
The bottom line is, like a lot of other companies, we spend a measurable amount of time and money on compliance issues every year even though we have never pirated software. If it weren't for the BSA, or more precisely our ties to products made by their member companies (thanks AutoDesk), this would be much less of an issue for us.
You're kidding!
$50K and I get to carry a GUN?
Screw system administration. I never get to wave a gun at anyone here...
I'm going to sign up.
I wonder what my odds of passing the psych eval are...
Flushed with a sense of accomplishment from landing a cushy job getting cussed at, spit on, and occasionally having to duck bullets for the princely sum of $18,000/year, these guys really get off on standing in the rain writing tickets.
More likely it is because ticket revenue makes up a large portion of most department's annual budget, so it's more like, "If you want a new bullet proof vest you better get out there and write daddy some tickets like a good little bitch." It is inconceivable to me that these guys actually have ticket quotas. Does that mean we aren't doing our job as a citizen if we don't occasionally get caught speeding so we can pay our "supplemental taxes"?
Don't hate the cops-- hate the administration that wastes all your tax money and police resources on the "war on drugs", and forces officers to whore in the streets for money to shore up budget holes that are left behind as a result.
Hate the "police state" if you want, but try to remember that cops are people too, and a lot of them hate their jobs and bosses as much as you hate yours, only they are hating theirs for less money with a much greater risk of injury or death in most cases.
My dad was a police officer for a while, and he used to tell me, "Cops are people, just like everyone else. The problem is that for what they are paying, you tend to get two kinds of candidates: starry-eyed idealists naieve enough to think they can "make a difference", and people who couldn't find a job doing anything else." Unfortunately there is a shortage of the first kind. Feel free to sign up if you would like to offer your intelligence and talents to serving the community for little or no compensation.
When I told him I was thinking about becoming a police officer he told me, "Son, if you have any involvement with law enforcement it better be from the other side. You will make a hell of a lot more money, and people will respect you more. If that doesn't help you make up your mind know that I would rather shoot you myself than hear someone else shot you."
I think most of what is wrong with police services today comes from the top down more than the bottom up. Even granted that you aren't working with the best and brightest most of the time, if the administration pointed them in the right direction and focused on the right things we would al be happier, officers included.
Not necessarily. The email headers will get you all the way back to the gateway the machine is mailing from, and if someone were to give us a call and say they had reason to believe that stolen equipment was in use on our network I would be interested enough to track that IP on our internal network.
Unless the network admin *is* your computer thief, but then it is much more likely the machine has been wiped prior to use and your mailer program is gone.
The reason these "cowardly" artists have typically signed adverse contracts is generally because there has never been an alternative. A bad contract is better than no contract if those are the only two options.
Record companies have traditionally controlled both the production and distribution channels. Without the help of a major label, the odds of an artist creating his or her own content and seeing widespread distribution have until very recently been essentially nil.
While the recent technology developments and widespread internet access are changing that rapidly, I think it's a little early to consider anyone who has signed a record deal with a major label a whore. Even now, recording and distributing your own music would require a non-trivial amount of cash and some insider knowledge that is beyond the reach of the "average" starving artist. Everybody needs to eat, and the record labels have a long history of catching an artist at a time when they are negotiating from a weak position and bullying them into signing an unfavorable contract.
It's interesting that you compare a record deal to a software development contract, because I believe there is a much greater market and reward potential for an average programmer than there is for an average musician.
You have to remember that it hasn't been that long since people in the Ukraine could be locked up, beaten, exiled, or even killed for things they said or wrote.
It's hard to imagine life under those conditions when you grew up somewhere where you can say practically anything you want without repercussions. But don't let your naivete cause you to disregard the opinions of those who have been there and back, because they can help us make sure we never go there with our government. Erosion of your civil rights is a slow, piecemeal process. It doesn't happen overnight, and that's why it has to be fought every step of the way. Otherwise you look up one day wondering how we fell so far without anyone doing anything to stop it.
Maybe I have a limited imagination, but I have trouble seeing how exactly the average citizen can "use" these cameras. It is likely that if we did find a way to use cameras which don't belong to us that we would be prosecuted for it.
What I can imagine, though, is a scenario where once the system is in place, the scope of its use is gradually increased until it is being used not only in ways that are unacceptable, but also in ways we were specifically told it wouldn't be in the beginning.
An example of this would be the "anti-terrorist" cameras installed all over London. These are now being used to detect and prosecute all sorts of lesser crimes. Of course, many people don't have a problem with that, but you have to be extremely careful where the lower bound gets set. Is that a nudie magazine in your pocket, visible in frames 237-512 when you crossed Market Street?
Maybe you can't imagine any activites/liberties you presently indulge in which the government might eventually decide are nonsat, but my paranoia meter jumps a couple of clicks every time this stuff makes the news.
Very true, and part of "the plan".
This would be a good first step, because I could set up that box, get it configured, and leave the Exchange server in the DMZ until I get ready to switch. This would also have the added benefit of insulating my shiny new mail server from all the local network "business" traffic.
I haven't seen the source, but I'll take a stab:
I believe that for a given mail address, bob@foo.com, the infected machine attempts to connect directly to the foo.com mailhost on port 25. This is what similar viruses have done in the past.
I block and log outgoing connections to that port (among others) from our local network, so if something like this does get loose, we can at least be saved the embarrassment of having it go back out to our clients.
So, for the inbound side, does anyone know of a free procmail-esque mail filtering solution for Exchange? I would LOVE to throw the Exchange server in the river, but it seems to have grown roots here what with the gee-whiz outlook integration, global address book and Schedule+ stuff.
I don't like the "deny all of them" approach taken by the last security patch and we don't have the cash for one of the commercial filtering solutions.
I hope to move us to IMAP + LDAP + CGI (for the calendar and scheduling stuff) in the near future.
Are there any BIOS's out there that support a "boot from USB device" option?
The "Linux on Keychain" distribution is just around the corner!
It would be great to be able to carry around a small distro for testing and/or security audit purposes. Consultants should snap these up.