Alternately, they could just pick an unused FM frequency in their area; it's not like it's terribly hard to do. With the exception of a few saturated markets, almost any major area is probably going to have some free spots on the dial where, if you wanted to set up shop as a pirate station without interfering with anyone, you could.
Or heck, why use FM? Practically any radio these days that can get FM also can receive AM, even if people rarely use it; consequently most places have vast regions of the AM broadcast band unused. (Although, you'd need to watch your power levels at night...)
Then the complaint-driven nature of the FCC would work for you: no harm, no foul. As long as you don't step on the toes of somebody who actually has a license, they're probably not going to give a crap.
Having dealt with the FCC before, I can tell you it's hard enough getting them to do anything when there's clear interference to an established, licensed radio service; if there wasn't any interference it would probably take them a long time to send out one of their investigators and track you down.
With that said, I don't advocate unlicensed radio in the FM band; there are better mediums to disseminate your message if you really have one to communicate, than FM radio. The "pirate radio" of the 60s in today's world would probably be on the Internet, where you don't have to worry about the FCC.
(shrug) Kudos, I guess. Everyone has different experiences; I suspect these are influenced heavily by the socio-economic and age sector where you work and of the people you interact with.
The only retail boxes I've personally ever seen of Windows that didn't say "95" on them, were WinXP Pro boxes, seemingly used mostly as an upsell at big-box stores, for the salespeople to push to people who were buying systems that only came with Home on them.
I'm not making a moral judgment one way or the other, it's just that in my personal experience, I'd say that the overwhelming number of Windows systems are ones that were pre-installed. After that, I'd say that a majority of the remaining installs are pirate copies, or are at least installed from pirated media.
The situation might be different among older people, but in the college and post-college crowd, finding a pirated Windows ISO is about as challenging as finding change for a $20, and carries about as much social stigma. Add to this the fact that most computer don't come with real OS install CDs, and some don't come with CDs at all, and you have a huge demand. People's computers get messed up, they want to do a reformat-and-reinstall...what are you going to do when you don't have the CDs anymore? You find somebody who does have them. (I question whether this is actually all that illegal; if it's the same version of the OS and the computer had a license to use it already...you're just using alternate media to re-install it. At any rate, I digress, because most people don't give a damn.)
Now, this is only my experience, YMMV and all that; it's quite consistent with other people that I've talked to in other areas, however. Perhaps when you get into age groups where there's less social interaction or it's less socially acceptable to walk around and ask your neighbors if they can burn you a copy of Office XP, the situation is different.
You can call me a Ballmer/MS shill (I've been called a lot of things, but that is definitely a new one), but I'm just giving the truth as I've seen it. If Windows isn't the most-often pirated piece of software in the world, it must be in the top 5;* or it's prevented from being there only because it's so widely pre-installed. On a personal standpoint, I would love to see Microsoft implement all sorts of draconian anti-piracy measures. All those pirated installs that I mentioned are all MS marketshare, and more importantly mindshare, at the end of the day. They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot by making it harder to do. But by all means, Mr. Ballmer: turn them all off, if you possibly can and dare to.
I think the computer ecosystem would be healthier in general if pirated copies of Windows weren't so widely available; it does nothing but artificially deflate the price of Windows and make it harder for legitimate alternatives to exist.
* An interesting side-note: taking the top 1 and 2 place on the Pirate Bay's list of top torrents in the Windows category are Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows XP SP3, respectively. http://thepiratebay.org/top/301
Not quite the same. They cancelled his speaking engagement. I guess we can say that's a form of censorship, if it's defined broadly, but it's more a denial of venue. It's somebody saying, "I'm not going to let you use my pulpit."
I would argue that their action is justified, since what they're saying is that they're not going to hand him a captive audience. If he wants to publish his theories, or disseminate them in any other public forum where people can choose whether to listen to him or not, he's more than welcome to.
The public schools are inherently subject to stricter rules on what gets taught there, than what a person can shout from a streetcorner -- as they should be. Unlike a person standing on the street, who can presumably just walk away from the speech they disagree with or find offensive, a student in a public school doesn't have a choice of whether to listen or not. They're required by law to show up (and private and home-schooling aren't alternatives for most people), and therefore get whatever's on the curriculum force-fed to them. Thus, something which might be perfectly acceptable in a library (where you have to take the book off the shelf and read it: an opt-in process) would be totally out of place in a lesson plan or curriculum (where there's no choice, or it is at best an opt-out process to avoid the material).
In other words, what you're allowed to put out into the commons and allow people to choose to read/listen-to, is different than what you're going to be allowed to say in a school, to a totally captive audience. McCalden got taken from him the latter, but not the former.
Now, if you want to see some real censorship, look at what happened to the Holocaust "revisionist" in Austria sometime last year -- he went to jail and was basically forced to recant his statements in order to avoid serious (on par with murder, IIRC) prison time. Now, I don't agree with what he was saying in the slightest, but I think it's rather disturbingly hypocritical to use such decidedly fascist tactics to prevent the spread of Nazism.
The "price" of Win2k, to most home users, was the same price as virtually every version of Windows since (but not including) Windows 95: $0.
I say zero dollars, because in my experience, people either acquire Windows "free" with a computer, or they pirate it. Seriously, those two modes of acquisition have to be the largest two. Very few folks actually buy a retail box of Windows. They either use what comes on the computer, or they get somebody to 'upgrade' it for them, more than likely with a downloaded ISO.
The only version of Windows that I ever saw 'Joe User' run out and purchase was Win95, and I think that was more due to the media attention than anything else; that level of attention/media-circus has basically never happened again.
They certainly can ignore robots.txt, but I don't think that any major search engine does; Google obeys both no-spider and no-cache restrictions, as does the Internet Archive.
When you get right down to it, a court order is basically a request too, it just has some more weight behind it, if you happen to live in that court's jurisdiction.
I think that a robots.txt file would be something like a "No Trespassing" sign; if you had one, and then you were cached or spidered and went to court, it would give you a big advantage because it would show that the search engine / database willfully ignored the standard request not to be included in their system.
Anyway; you're right that any system can ignore robots.txt -- you can test this yourself if you want just by using curl. Last time I checked it had an optional flag to ignore it, and would further do lots of other fun things like insert random pauses between page requests, to make its robotic nature a little less obvious to the webserver. This in and of itself isn't illegal, but depending on how you used it, it might be.
The US wouldn't had a rocket program if it hadn't "stolen" some Nazi scientists.
Yeah, because I'm sure they just had to be kidnapped and dragged over here; the alternative of ending up in some Soviet gulag, breaking big rocks into small rocks, being as enticing as it is.
Von Braun probably just stole a train and hauled ass towards the Western Front for a shits and giggles.
Huh? So aside from just uttering some non sequitur insults, care to elaborate?
I never said that there weren't problems with the electoral process, just that these problems weren't specific to paper balloting.
I.e., there has always been and probably always will be various levels of voter fraud, double voting, disenfranchisement, vote buying, gerrymandering, etc.; but exactly none of that is attributable intrinsically to paper ballots, and none of it would really be reduced or eliminated by the introduction of electronic systems.
E-voting adds additional layers of complexity on to the voting process that don't exist with paper, makes auditing nearly impossible, and leaves almost all of the same vulnerabilities that have worked for centuries with paper still open to exploitation. In that way, I stand by my statement that it is a problem in the guise of a solution, looking for a problem.
Well, just thinking about something: if the path of the waves isn't exactly parallel to the axis of the waveguide, so that the waves/particles are bouncing off of the walls every so often on their way down, then although the particle may have a velocity equal to c, the component of its velocity in the direction parallel to the waveguide will be slightly less than c.
So it might be a true statement from that perspective. Only if the wave is going directly down the waveguide's axis, so that all of its velocity is in that direction, would the speed "at which it is moving down the waveguide" be equal to the speed of light. In most cases, the speed in that direction would be slightly less.
So far as I know, there has never been an issue using this method.
That's sort of the crux of the whole matter. There was never really any problem with either paper or mechanical systems (with paper backups) in the past, except for the punchcard systems in Florida and the whole hanging chad business. But that was specific to a certain class of systems, and could have been remedied separately, or through better user training.
Really, all this e-voting stuff is a solution in search of a problem. A problem which it will probably create itself.
I feel like that was some sort of very subtle post-modern troll. Like, it was so blatant, it forced you to contemplate the whole phenomenon of trolling in general. Truly a masterpiece.
Based on my experience working closely with people in the USG, it's people like you that really keep the whole thing afloat... however, for every one person like you, there are probably 3 to 5 people just sitting around, sucking down salary dollars and filling out mindless paperwork until they can retire.
I don't think anyone would say that all government employees are total idiots; that's obviously untrue -- if it was, nothing would get done. And no matter how little you like the government, it does get stuff done occasionally. So there are people working hard for the USG, but I think they're really getting the shaft.
There are some exceptions to this... in the areas where the government is the only entity doing a particular kind of work (like, say CIA or NGIS stuff), people tend to be really good, because they're there because of the subject matter. But for just general administrative/paperpusher stuff, anyone with half a brain could earn more money in the private sector, meaning that the people left in government service are, in my experience, mostly there because it's safe and comfortable and they can't be fired. People who really couldn't survive in the real world, in other words.
I think that you're very likely one of the 20% or so of USG employees who do 90% of the work.
Just because you're the first person I've heard who's familiar with it in a long time... do you know if there's a HOWTO or any kind of documentation on how to set up the client software on Linux? I tried to do it a while back, and it seemed like everything was geared to somebody who wanted to set up a relay server...the client software to send messages is buried somewhere in the same package, but damned if I could figure out how to get it working.
Has it gotten any easier, or is there any documentation on how to do it?
The only time I've ever successfully used Mixmaster was via a MacOS classic client program back around 1999 or 2000, but that software is now defunct. Too bad, because it was a fairly neat GUI thing, but the author got on the wrong side of the OS9/OSX war, I guess, and decided not to rewrite it.
I think that a big part of the problem is that Federal employees can't really be punished, unless they're grossly negligent.
In terms of job security, it's just below being a pedophile priest; most of the time if you fuck up, you might get demoted or shuffled around ("I see there's a warehouse in Sioux Falls that needs a manager...") but probably not actually thrown out on your ass by Security.
IMO, this leads to all sort of laziness and a general lackadaisical attitude on the part of a great many USG employees -- not all of them, to be sure, but it seems like there are usually 4 bags of useless skin for every one person who's pulling the weight of 5 people. It's about the only place I've ever seen that could honestly look to gigantic multinational corporations for advice on how to be more efficient. Total sausage factory, in other words.
The laptop losses don't really surprise me, because I doubt these people get more than some sort of administrative demerit -- if that -- for losing one. I'm sure there's some sort of procedure that they go through, but I'm willing to bet that in the long run they just get a new machine issued and they go on, grinding their way towards retirement.
If you want to stop these losses, I have a plan: tell people that they get one laptop. If they lose it, they can try to do their job without one, and if they can't do it, then they can find a new job somewhere else. Like the private sector. Maybe McDonalds. Or if you can't tolerate being that extreme, just make any loss of a laptop come with an automatic demotion of one Government Service grade. There's nothing like the fear of demotion to strike fear into the hearts of bureaucrats.
Seems like that would be pretty trivial to do; you could just establish a SSH tunnel and then pipe/dev/random to it, and route it to/dev/null on the receiving end.
A more intelligent thing to do -- and perhaps this is already done, I've never investigated it -- would be to configure a VLAN or VPN so that it sends a certain amount of traffic at all times. If there's not enough 'real' traffic to meet a certain minimum, then it just pads with random garbage that gets discarded at the remote end.
Such a thing would be the bandwidth equivalent of a leaky faucet, though; I'd imagine that if you weren't careful and you pay per GB, you could be in for a shock when you get your bill at the end of the month.
There are systems which are designed to defeat traffic analysis by padding and sending dummy messages -- the mixmaster mail-relay system, for instance, does this. I'm not sure if mixmaster is still alive or not, but now might be a really good time to resuscitate it, if it has died.
That all depends on whether you have the iTunes MiniStore enabled or not. If it's turned on, then it definitely does upload your playing statistics to Apple.
I experienced P2P token ring back in college. Here's how it worked: a group of peers arranged in a circular manner would pass around a named pipe. Each peer would hit the pipe, a process known as token. After a while, the pipe would be cached, and a designated peer reloaded the pipe.
Okay, so it's not really a 'feature' of Firefox per se. But it's one of those things that even relatively ignorant users can grasp and realize the value of, and once you start using, there's really no going back. And it's so easy to install on FF, you can kind of sell it as a package deal.
Set your mom/dad/grandmother/coworker up with Firefox+AdBlock+Filterset.G, and between the tabs and the lack of advertising, you'll probably have gotten a convert for life.
The only problem is that in many cases it's not quite practical to throw away IE completely; there are too many online banks and other systems which count on it's braindead idiosyncrasies.
I think your points are all correct; however when I was lamenting its lack of a DVI port, I meant as an input, not an output. Many HD sources have either a DVI port, or an HDMI port that can be converted to DVI (it's not using HDCP, in other words), so it would make a logical input on a device made to record HD content. The other logical digital input would be FireWire, since many HD STB's have a compressed output on that. Between those two inputs you would probably have all digital TV source devices covered, either compressed or uncompressed.
You're completely correct that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put a DVI output on a device that records from an S-Video (meaning 480i) input, and which probably only has the capability of playing back SD content. (Actually, if it doesn't need the HD capability, it's better that it not use a DVI output, since most HD sets only have one DVI input, meaning that if you wanted to use the monitor with anything else, you'd need a switchbox: and DVI switches cost a heck of a lot more than composite, S-Video, or even analog-component ones do.) I should have been more clear that I was talking inputs and not outputs.
Anyway, like I said in the other comment, I hope that this is successful enough that they'll go on to produce more-advanced models for recording digital television. My impatience for that capability is driven more by the gut fear that we won't be able to hold off the broadcast lobby and Broadcast Legislation for many more years, and I think it could really shape the debate if there were significant numbers of non-flag-compliant DTV recorders in American homes.
Wouldn't "4x4" imply four processors with four logical cores each, for a total 16-way system? Somehow I don't think that's what you meant. Or was it?
A dual-core per processor, dual-processor system would be, I would think, a 2x2, and if you had a processor with four cores, and then two of them, it would be a 2x4 or 4x2.
The only way I can think of to make a 4x4 would be with a specialized high-end mobo; I can't see anyone making a quad proc board for consumer use anytime soon. Most low-end tasks just aren't that parallelizable.
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Alternately, they could just pick an unused FM frequency in their area; it's not like it's terribly hard to do. With the exception of a few saturated markets, almost any major area is probably going to have some free spots on the dial where, if you wanted to set up shop as a pirate station without interfering with anyone, you could.
Or heck, why use FM? Practically any radio these days that can get FM also can receive AM, even if people rarely use it; consequently most places have vast regions of the AM broadcast band unused. (Although, you'd need to watch your power levels at night...)
Then the complaint-driven nature of the FCC would work for you: no harm, no foul. As long as you don't step on the toes of somebody who actually has a license, they're probably not going to give a crap.
Having dealt with the FCC before, I can tell you it's hard enough getting them to do anything when there's clear interference to an established, licensed radio service; if there wasn't any interference it would probably take them a long time to send out one of their investigators and track you down.
With that said, I don't advocate unlicensed radio in the FM band; there are better mediums to disseminate your message if you really have one to communicate, than FM radio. The "pirate radio" of the 60s in today's world would probably be on the Internet, where you don't have to worry about the FCC.
(shrug) Kudos, I guess. Everyone has different experiences; I suspect these are influenced heavily by the socio-economic and age sector where you work and of the people you interact with.
The only retail boxes I've personally ever seen of Windows that didn't say "95" on them, were WinXP Pro boxes, seemingly used mostly as an upsell at big-box stores, for the salespeople to push to people who were buying systems that only came with Home on them.
I'm not making a moral judgment one way or the other, it's just that in my personal experience, I'd say that the overwhelming number of Windows systems are ones that were pre-installed. After that, I'd say that a majority of the remaining installs are pirate copies, or are at least installed from pirated media.
The situation might be different among older people, but in the college and post-college crowd, finding a pirated Windows ISO is about as challenging as finding change for a $20, and carries about as much social stigma. Add to this the fact that most computer don't come with real OS install CDs, and some don't come with CDs at all, and you have a huge demand. People's computers get messed up, they want to do a reformat-and-reinstall...what are you going to do when you don't have the CDs anymore? You find somebody who does have them. (I question whether this is actually all that illegal; if it's the same version of the OS and the computer had a license to use it already...you're just using alternate media to re-install it. At any rate, I digress, because most people don't give a damn.)
Now, this is only my experience, YMMV and all that; it's quite consistent with other people that I've talked to in other areas, however. Perhaps when you get into age groups where there's less social interaction or it's less socially acceptable to walk around and ask your neighbors if they can burn you a copy of Office XP, the situation is different.
You can call me a Ballmer/MS shill (I've been called a lot of things, but that is definitely a new one), but I'm just giving the truth as I've seen it. If Windows isn't the most-often pirated piece of software in the world, it must be in the top 5;* or it's prevented from being there only because it's so widely pre-installed. On a personal standpoint, I would love to see Microsoft implement all sorts of draconian anti-piracy measures. All those pirated installs that I mentioned are all MS marketshare, and more importantly mindshare, at the end of the day. They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot by making it harder to do. But by all means, Mr. Ballmer: turn them all off, if you possibly can and dare to.
I think the computer ecosystem would be healthier in general if pirated copies of Windows weren't so widely available; it does nothing but artificially deflate the price of Windows and make it harder for legitimate alternatives to exist.
* An interesting side-note: taking the top 1 and 2 place on the Pirate Bay's list of top torrents in the Windows category are Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows XP SP3, respectively. http://thepiratebay.org/top/301
Not quite the same. They cancelled his speaking engagement. I guess we can say that's a form of censorship, if it's defined broadly, but it's more a denial of venue. It's somebody saying, "I'm not going to let you use my pulpit."
I would argue that their action is justified, since what they're saying is that they're not going to hand him a captive audience. If he wants to publish his theories, or disseminate them in any other public forum where people can choose whether to listen to him or not, he's more than welcome to.
The public schools are inherently subject to stricter rules on what gets taught there, than what a person can shout from a streetcorner -- as they should be. Unlike a person standing on the street, who can presumably just walk away from the speech they disagree with or find offensive, a student in a public school doesn't have a choice of whether to listen or not. They're required by law to show up (and private and home-schooling aren't alternatives for most people), and therefore get whatever's on the curriculum force-fed to them. Thus, something which might be perfectly acceptable in a library (where you have to take the book off the shelf and read it: an opt-in process) would be totally out of place in a lesson plan or curriculum (where there's no choice, or it is at best an opt-out process to avoid the material).
In other words, what you're allowed to put out into the commons and allow people to choose to read/listen-to, is different than what you're going to be allowed to say in a school, to a totally captive audience. McCalden got taken from him the latter, but not the former.
Now, if you want to see some real censorship, look at what happened to the Holocaust "revisionist" in Austria sometime last year -- he went to jail and was basically forced to recant his statements in order to avoid serious (on par with murder, IIRC) prison time. Now, I don't agree with what he was saying in the slightest, but I think it's rather disturbingly hypocritical to use such decidedly fascist tactics to prevent the spread of Nazism.
Oh, come on! You should have at least gotten a +1 Funny for that.
Since the result was achieved through selective breading
Funny, I figured they'd be available down at the local Chinese restaurant...
The "price" of Win2k, to most home users, was the same price as virtually every version of Windows since (but not including) Windows 95: $0.
I say zero dollars, because in my experience, people either acquire Windows "free" with a computer, or they pirate it. Seriously, those two modes of acquisition have to be the largest two. Very few folks actually buy a retail box of Windows. They either use what comes on the computer, or they get somebody to 'upgrade' it for them, more than likely with a downloaded ISO.
The only version of Windows that I ever saw 'Joe User' run out and purchase was Win95, and I think that was more due to the media attention than anything else; that level of attention/media-circus has basically never happened again.
And it could have been provided as a plug-in for OS/2 Warp. It wasn't. It won't be.
Oh, NOW you tell me....
They certainly can ignore robots.txt, but I don't think that any major search engine does; Google obeys both no-spider and no-cache restrictions, as does the Internet Archive.
When you get right down to it, a court order is basically a request too, it just has some more weight behind it, if you happen to live in that court's jurisdiction.
I think that a robots.txt file would be something like a "No Trespassing" sign; if you had one, and then you were cached or spidered and went to court, it would give you a big advantage because it would show that the search engine / database willfully ignored the standard request not to be included in their system.
Anyway; you're right that any system can ignore robots.txt -- you can test this yourself if you want just by using curl. Last time I checked it had an optional flag to ignore it, and would further do lots of other fun things like insert random pauses between page requests, to make its robotic nature a little less obvious to the webserver. This in and of itself isn't illegal, but depending on how you used it, it might be.
The US wouldn't had a rocket program if it hadn't "stolen" some Nazi scientists.
Yeah, because I'm sure they just had to be kidnapped and dragged over here; the alternative of ending up in some Soviet gulag, breaking big rocks into small rocks, being as enticing as it is.
Von Braun probably just stole a train and hauled ass towards the Western Front for a shits and giggles.
Huh? So aside from just uttering some non sequitur insults, care to elaborate?
I never said that there weren't problems with the electoral process, just that these problems weren't specific to paper balloting.
I.e., there has always been and probably always will be various levels of voter fraud, double voting, disenfranchisement, vote buying, gerrymandering, etc.; but exactly none of that is attributable intrinsically to paper ballots, and none of it would really be reduced or eliminated by the introduction of electronic systems.
E-voting adds additional layers of complexity on to the voting process that don't exist with paper, makes auditing nearly impossible, and leaves almost all of the same vulnerabilities that have worked for centuries with paper still open to exploitation. In that way, I stand by my statement that it is a problem in the guise of a solution, looking for a problem.
Well, just thinking about something: if the path of the waves isn't exactly parallel to the axis of the waveguide, so that the waves/particles are bouncing off of the walls every so often on their way down, then although the particle may have a velocity equal to c, the component of its velocity in the direction parallel to the waveguide will be slightly less than c.
So it might be a true statement from that perspective. Only if the wave is going directly down the waveguide's axis, so that all of its velocity is in that direction, would the speed "at which it is moving down the waveguide" be equal to the speed of light. In most cases, the speed in that direction would be slightly less.
So far as I know, there has never been an issue using this method.
That's sort of the crux of the whole matter. There was never really any problem with either paper or mechanical systems (with paper backups) in the past, except for the punchcard systems in Florida and the whole hanging chad business. But that was specific to a certain class of systems, and could have been remedied separately, or through better user training.
Really, all this e-voting stuff is a solution in search of a problem. A problem which it will probably create itself.
I feel like that was some sort of very subtle post-modern troll. Like, it was so blatant, it forced you to contemplate the whole phenomenon of trolling in general. Truly a masterpiece.
Or yeah, maybe it was just terrible.
Based on my experience working closely with people in the USG, it's people like you that really keep the whole thing afloat ... however, for every one person like you, there are probably 3 to 5 people just sitting around, sucking down salary dollars and filling out mindless paperwork until they can retire.
... in the areas where the government is the only entity doing a particular kind of work (like, say CIA or NGIS stuff), people tend to be really good, because they're there because of the subject matter. But for just general administrative/paperpusher stuff, anyone with half a brain could earn more money in the private sector, meaning that the people left in government service are, in my experience, mostly there because it's safe and comfortable and they can't be fired. People who really couldn't survive in the real world, in other words.
I don't think anyone would say that all government employees are total idiots; that's obviously untrue -- if it was, nothing would get done. And no matter how little you like the government, it does get stuff done occasionally. So there are people working hard for the USG, but I think they're really getting the shaft.
There are some exceptions to this
I think that you're very likely one of the 20% or so of USG employees who do 90% of the work.
Just because you're the first person I've heard who's familiar with it in a long time ... do you know if there's a HOWTO or any kind of documentation on how to set up the client software on Linux? I tried to do it a while back, and it seemed like everything was geared to somebody who wanted to set up a relay server...the client software to send messages is buried somewhere in the same package, but damned if I could figure out how to get it working.
Has it gotten any easier, or is there any documentation on how to do it?
The only time I've ever successfully used Mixmaster was via a MacOS classic client program back around 1999 or 2000, but that software is now defunct. Too bad, because it was a fairly neat GUI thing, but the author got on the wrong side of the OS9/OSX war, I guess, and decided not to rewrite it.
I think that a big part of the problem is that Federal employees can't really be punished, unless they're grossly negligent.
In terms of job security, it's just below being a pedophile priest; most of the time if you fuck up, you might get demoted or shuffled around ("I see there's a warehouse in Sioux Falls that needs a manager...") but probably not actually thrown out on your ass by Security.
IMO, this leads to all sort of laziness and a general lackadaisical attitude on the part of a great many USG employees -- not all of them, to be sure, but it seems like there are usually 4 bags of useless skin for every one person who's pulling the weight of 5 people. It's about the only place I've ever seen that could honestly look to gigantic multinational corporations for advice on how to be more efficient. Total sausage factory, in other words.
The laptop losses don't really surprise me, because I doubt these people get more than some sort of administrative demerit -- if that -- for losing one. I'm sure there's some sort of procedure that they go through, but I'm willing to bet that in the long run they just get a new machine issued and they go on, grinding their way towards retirement.
If you want to stop these losses, I have a plan: tell people that they get one laptop. If they lose it, they can try to do their job without one, and if they can't do it, then they can find a new job somewhere else. Like the private sector. Maybe McDonalds. Or if you can't tolerate being that extreme, just make any loss of a laptop come with an automatic demotion of one Government Service grade. There's nothing like the fear of demotion to strike fear into the hearts of bureaucrats.
Seems like that would be pretty trivial to do; you could just establish a SSH tunnel and then pipe /dev/random to it, and route it to /dev/null on the receiving end.
A more intelligent thing to do -- and perhaps this is already done, I've never investigated it -- would be to configure a VLAN or VPN so that it sends a certain amount of traffic at all times. If there's not enough 'real' traffic to meet a certain minimum, then it just pads with random garbage that gets discarded at the remote end.
Such a thing would be the bandwidth equivalent of a leaky faucet, though; I'd imagine that if you weren't careful and you pay per GB, you could be in for a shock when you get your bill at the end of the month.
There are systems which are designed to defeat traffic analysis by padding and sending dummy messages -- the mixmaster mail-relay system, for instance, does this. I'm not sure if mixmaster is still alive or not, but now might be a really good time to resuscitate it, if it has died.
Actually, if he's a patent lawyer he might have to actually be able to understand the patents
So, how are you liking America? Is it a big change from wherever you just recently moved here from?
That all depends on whether you have the iTunes MiniStore enabled or not. If it's turned on, then it definitely does upload your playing statistics to Apple.
Granted, after people freaked out about it initially, they changed it to be opt-in:
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1473
I've also found a "killer feature" to be AdBlock.
Okay, so it's not really a 'feature' of Firefox per se. But it's one of those things that even relatively ignorant users can grasp and realize the value of, and once you start using, there's really no going back. And it's so easy to install on FF, you can kind of sell it as a package deal.
Set your mom/dad/grandmother/coworker up with Firefox+AdBlock+Filterset.G, and between the tabs and the lack of advertising, you'll probably have gotten a convert for life.
The only problem is that in many cases it's not quite practical to throw away IE completely; there are too many online banks and other systems which count on it's braindead idiosyncrasies.
I've got it!
We'll give all the volunteers $5 off their next purchase of Debian.
He's working on that, too.
By the time he retires from office, we'll be able to attack any country in the world, and it's guaranteed to be an enemy of America.
Brilliant, no?
I think your points are all correct; however when I was lamenting its lack of a DVI port, I meant as an input, not an output. Many HD sources have either a DVI port, or an HDMI port that can be converted to DVI (it's not using HDCP, in other words), so it would make a logical input on a device made to record HD content. The other logical digital input would be FireWire, since many HD STB's have a compressed output on that. Between those two inputs you would probably have all digital TV source devices covered, either compressed or uncompressed.
You're completely correct that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put a DVI output on a device that records from an S-Video (meaning 480i) input, and which probably only has the capability of playing back SD content. (Actually, if it doesn't need the HD capability, it's better that it not use a DVI output, since most HD sets only have one DVI input, meaning that if you wanted to use the monitor with anything else, you'd need a switchbox: and DVI switches cost a heck of a lot more than composite, S-Video, or even analog-component ones do.) I should have been more clear that I was talking inputs and not outputs.
Anyway, like I said in the other comment, I hope that this is successful enough that they'll go on to produce more-advanced models for recording digital television. My impatience for that capability is driven more by the gut fear that we won't be able to hold off the broadcast lobby and Broadcast Legislation for many more years, and I think it could really shape the debate if there were significant numbers of non-flag-compliant DTV recorders in American homes.
consumer level dual CPUs (4X4)
Wouldn't "4x4" imply four processors with four logical cores each, for a total 16-way system? Somehow I don't think that's what you meant. Or was it?
A dual-core per processor, dual-processor system would be, I would think, a 2x2, and if you had a processor with four cores, and then two of them, it would be a 2x4 or 4x2.
The only way I can think of to make a 4x4 would be with a specialized high-end mobo; I can't see anyone making a quad proc board for consumer use anytime soon. Most low-end tasks just aren't that parallelizable.