This is also being discussed further up in the thread. There seem to be two ways such a system might work (that come to my mind):
1) The file will be transferred unencrypted, and then locked-down on the receiving end by WB's software using a user-specific key. This is stupid, since it's pretty trivial to capture the file in transmission and then you'd have a totally unencrypted copy. Or create a BT client that pretends to be WB's DRM-adding client, but really just writes the file to disk instead. Or, run WB's client inside a virtual machine that actually saves everything that the program writes to memory, to disk, so that you'd get the file before it was encrypted.
2) The file will be encrypted, using a key that doesn't change between users. This is also stupid, since when one user recovers the key, they can then share that key with others, unlocking the file.
I think their strategy has to be something like 1+2+FUD. Their playback software will add user-specific DRM, but the file itself will also be encrypted with a common (per-file) key, and they'll also go out of their way to make the format and software obscure and hard to reverse-engineer.
But anyway, as you, the GP, and others have pointed out, anything using Bittorrent to transfer DRMed content has to be flawed -- even moreso than DRM in general is flawed.
iTunes doesn't use Bittorrent for distribution of it's content. It uses regular HTTP transfers (I think) from a lot of servers placed strategically around the country/world (by Akamai). The Akamai servers have the unencrypted files, and then encrypt them for a particular user when you go to buy/download one. The result is that the file I download with my iTunes userid is different from the file that you download, with your iTunes userid. This would keep us from using Bittorrent to download the files -- they're not the same.
What the GP was referring to is that Bittorrent relies on the files being the same (or at least having a lot of identical chunks) -- and if the files are the same, then they aren't being encrypted/DRMed in transit, like iTunes' are. Thus, it ought to be fairly trivial to intercept the data before it gets DRMed all to hell on your computer and locked down. At least theoretically... it'll be interesting to see how they deal with this.
The other option is to send an encrypted file, for which there is only one key, but then once one person recovers the key, they can share it with everyone else who's downloaded the file and you lose a lot of security.
Basically it just doesn't seem like Bittorrent in general is really conducive to transmitting DRMed content, at least in the way that most companies are implementing DRM right now.
They had a huge booth at the MacWorld conferences for several years; at the time I never quite understood what they were doing or what their purpose was there, but I always went over to pick up the freebies and drool on all the gear I would never, ever be able to afford. (And probably wouldn't know what to do with if I could.)
Maybe I'll buy one used. Slowly, I'm buying all the computers that I couldn't afford when I was in younger on the used market for pennies. Kind of sad in a way; I was at a trade show yesterday and there was a surplus dealer selling old systems literally out of the back of a truck. Sun SPARCStations, and Ultras, old Green-and-white Macs, a rather beat-up Workgroup Server. I probably still have magazines advertising the launches of some of those around somewhere. It was kind of amusing to sit there and realize he probably had a few million dollars worth of gear if you went by MSRP, most of which was now scrap metal. (Seriously: they had a 88-gal. drum of Pentium II and III processors that were being sold for the gold in them to a refiner.)
I'll have to keep a lookout for one of those purple Tezro jobs when they hit eBay in a few years. Two of them would make a nice coffee table, with a piece of Lexan on top maybe.
I was assuming that you wouldn't exactly tell them what you were planning to do with the botnet... i.e. maybe you'd impersonate a spammer or say you were going to use them for a DDoS, then destroy them.
I don't really know how the "botnet trading scene" works so I'm not sure if this would work or not -- maybe they only rent 'nets to people that have been vetted or something.
Because it's widely perceived as offensive and inappropriate for a business environment.
People working from home can browse whatever porn they want to, it's not the porn that's a problem per se, but that it would offend others who might see it, and generally make the office a less pleasant place to work. I think this sort of generally extends to more than just pornography: I'd say that deathpics, and probably extremist political propaganda that would offend other people would also be on the short list of things that would get you a conversation with your manager.
No one (that I know of) is offended by Slashdot/MLB.com/Google News, so there's not really a problem.
It's a 'community standards' thing; you don't look at things when you're surrounded by other people who can see what you're doing and are going to be made uncomfortable or offended by it. That's just common courtesy, which as far as I'm concerned is a pretty critical skill.
Huh? I've upgraded the RAM in the original iMac, and it had a nice little door on the bottom that you opened up to insert more RAM. You didn't need to (and weren't supposed to!) crack the case. It was just a matter of unplugging it, setting it face-down on a towel or something, unscrewing the compartment cover, inserting the memory, and then putting the door back on.
I have stuff that's harder to change the batteries in than that. (Questionably designed stuff, but still.)
I can't remember exactly what "rev" that iMac was, but it was one of the original CRT ones; it might have been a slot-loader.
There are a lot of idiots out there who have zombiefied Windows machines and either don't realize, or don't really care (because it doesn't slow them down enough to make the system totally unusable) that their system might be sending out millions of spam messages per day.
I don't know how much renting a botnet costs, but I wonder if some anti-spam group could go and start renting botnets, and destorying them. Have the captive machines format their own drives or something. It would both remove them from the botnet, but also make the insecurities impossible for idiot owners to ignore anymore.
My feeling that owning a computer and having it sitting on an always-on connection is something of a responsibility. If you can't be bothered with keeping it patched up and secure, then you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, and you certainly don't have a "right" to do it, since it's just going to be used to damage other people's systems.
I'm not sure where you'd get the financial backing to go out and rent the zombie nets, but if you found a backer with money, you could really bring the security of zombiefied machines to the forefront of the discussion overnight.
That thread is great... I wonder about the Oslo university thing (that's where they've now moved their server to). If anyone here speaks Norwegian and wanted to write them a letter, contact info is on the Digg page. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten taken down already, but maybe the sysop there doesn't read English (I assume all the Digg'ers have been writing in English...).
They also read through the forums and found some of the actual spammers' websites: http://www.northworks.biz/ This one is one of the shadiest, they're selling email harvesters.
I don't really have any strong feelings one way or the other; it seems like someone's accessibility (whether they carry a cellphone/pager/Crackberry off-hours) is a function of their job role. I give out my personal cellphone number pretty freely, as do most of my co-workers, but I've never gotten a call that I thought was inappropriate or frivolous. I don't check email most weekends unless there's a reason, either.
It seems like there are definitely jobs out there that you shouldn't get involved with, if you don't like getting panicked phone calls in the middle of the night, or work very strange hours. If I was ever in a position to hire or bring onto a team somebody for a job like that, I'd hope to try and give them full disclosure of what they were getting into. Having someone who hates their job is just bad business all around.
But anyway, I agree with your sentiment; if I was going to ask someone to work a nontraditional schedule, or even just work late occasionally or call them at home outside of work hours, I'd expect them to be able to ask for the reverse if they wanted to flex the other way. That just seems fair.
I definitely know people who let their work run the rest of their lives, and run around with two cellphones, a Blackberry, and a pager, 24/7/365, but I don't think that anyone ever told them that was required. It's just how they're attempting to get ahead of everyone else, and to a certain extent it probably works: if you sleep on your cellphone and don't mind answering panicked calls at 2AM, eventually it might get around that you're a good go-to guy. (And that you have no life...) Your name might get remembered for this and maybe, in some way, that will affect your career positively. I don't think there's any way to stop this: if people want to sacrifice their personal lives for careerism, they're going to no matter what barriers we create. But that sort of thing ought to rightly be viewed as the exception and not the rule: it's keeping the overachiever from becoming the standard (keeping the standard from creeping upwards, in other words) that's the problem.
So to make a long answer longer, in general I definitely agree with your point, I'm just not sure that there's a good and simple answer to the problem.
Where I work, a certain amount of personal browsing is accepted, and a fair number of people even use AIM to talk to their families at home from the office as well, and that's never been a problem that I've heard of. (As far as I know, there aren't any other Slashdotters in my midst; fantasy sports leagues seem to be more my coworkers' fare.) If you do good work, it's been my experience that people don't really care what you do to produce it, or really even how much time you spent on it. Similarly, if you slave for hours but still turn out crap, I suspect you'll go nowhere quickly. (Though I've never had or worked with someone who's been just such a total zero that they washed out completely; problems seem to be more attitudinal than intellectual.)
There are certainly situations where sitting around and doing obviously non-work-related browsing just isn't appropriate: when you're working on a client's site on their dime, for example. Or any other time you might be perceived as representing a greater group of people besides yourself. That just strikes me as being obvious, though -- like "don't browse porn at work," I wouldn't want to have to tell someone that, and it's a bad sign if I do.
If I was the day-to-day manager of someone who was doing good work, but every time I went over to their desk was playing Solitaire, my reaction wouldn't be to fire them, but to try to find more challenging work for them to do. But aside from that, I'm a firm believer that, once people stay within the bounds of propriety, exactly how they budget their time and how they get their work done is their own business.
Especially as work environments become more distributed, with people working from home or at other sites -- so that you as a manager don't have any clue what they're doing while they're working -- judging people based on their output and performance (and thus having good metrics in place to measure output and performance in a realistic way) becomes more important.
You have a valid point, but unfortunately for them, whitelists are difficult to implement and maintain. Just ask anyone trying to stop spam that way: you can spend a lifetime setting up a whitelist, only to still get compromised because one of the machines you whitelisted some time in the past wasn't as secure as it was supposed to be.
Also, it would make doing business with the PRC much harder if this was their strategy: this is a good side-effect, since it makes the censorship that much more expensive for them as a nation. Social policies generally don't last very long when they fly in the face of billions or trillions of dollars of lost revenue, and that's what you'd be talking about if suddenly it became a lot harder for a multinational corporation to to business in China, versus say in Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, or any of the other emerging Pacific Rim commercial centers. (Granted, none of them are anywhere near the size or capacity of the PRC, but together they're not trivial.) And of course you have India.
So if the net effect of forcing such a policy was to suddenly make censorship five or ten or even 0.5 times more expensive than it is currently, I would fully support it. Anything that creates an economic disincentive to oppression is in my mind a good thing.
Can you give any evidence or substantiation to the claim that the U.S. Government is censoring your emails to or from Iran?
I have never heard of the USG actively censoring private email that wasn't to or from a serviceperson or that wasn't directly national security related (e.g., all the email to and from submariners and probably other Navy personnel afloat passes through censors who remove sensitive or geographically revealing information). Even then, they're pretty obvious about it.
If this is actually happening, yours is the first case I've heard of, and while I don't claim to be all-knowning (or even close to it) I consider myself pretty well-read in terms of current events... so I think it's fair to say most people would also be surprised.
Yup. That's why you need to hire people you can trust.
My personal feeling, given the work that I do, is that if I can't trust someone to not look at porn from his desk, I certainly can't trust them to make a presentation to a client or handle sensitive information which they could probably sell to a competitor for a not insignificant amount of cash (and, later, lots and lots of court-imposed fines for damages--but I don't expect someone who lacks the foresight to realize that pornography is going to get them fired to realize that leaking trade secrets will land them in court).
I would much rather figure out that I hired/was-assigned the wrong person because I walked up behind him one day and found him looking at porn, than after he did something really publicly embarrassing. Someone who doesn't implicitly get that it's not okay to look at porn while on company time, is not somebody I want to work with; full stop. It shows a lack of separation of one's personal life and business life, or at the minimum a great lack of understanding of the business world, which it is not an employer's job to rectify.
There seem to be a lot of companies that spend an awful lot of resources, from what I've read here on Slashdot, trying to control what their employees do online. It seems to me that those same resources would be better spent figuring out why they're hiring such dolts, and attracting and retaining quality people who don't need baby-sitting. Perhaps that's more expensive, but it makes for a much more pleasant workplace.
I think I agree with you, with certain reservations.
In another comment I likened the Sims to 'virtual pets,' or ant farms. This is a different type of play than usually happens with dolls (action figures, if you prefer), because with a pet, real or virtual, it's less open-ended. There's more feedback: if you pull the kitty's tail, eventually the kitty will scratch you and avoid you in the future. Although the ant farm doesn't seem to give much feedback, in actuality it does: if you don't feed them, they will die; if you fill it full of water, the ants will drown. (I assume they do, I never tried this, but it's my understanding they don't swim.)
Dolls are free-response objects. They're the physical equivalent of handing a child a blank piece of paper and a box of crayons and letting them do whatever they want, without toomuch suggestion. The form of the doll does give some suggestions (i.e., is it an infant/child/man/woman/soldier, etc.) to the interaction, but not much.
Virtual pets are what I would call "responsibility objects." They are things that a child knows--or ought to know--that they are supposed to care for. They come with certain sets of rules, and provide feedback (in various ways) based on whether these rules are followed or not. Thus the interaction with them always falls into a set structure, based on actions and reactions.
I know the author was just being funny, but I really have to wonder if killing a simulated person in a video game, over and over, isn't sort of a warning sign, in the same way that a kid that tortures animals is a warning sign.
I understand that there's an orders-of-magnitude difference between putting your Sim in a pool without a ladder (or any of the other ways you can kill them) and beating a leashed dog to death with a baseball bat, but on some level, if I saw some kid sitting in front of a computer killing Sims in various gruesome ways for hours on end and reveling in it, I probably would take them off my dog-sitting list. It's just one of those things that sets of warning bells, somewhere in the depths of my mind. If killing a dog is a giant air-raid klaxon horn, then this is a small microwave-alarm buzzer going off somewhere in comparison. Small, but still there.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying that everyone who's ever tried to kill a Sim (or see how many people on their wagon in Oregon Trail they could get to die of Typhoid or drown while fording the Really Big River) is going to be making lampshades out of their neighbors later in life, or anything close to it.
But, if someone is given responsibility for something else -- be it a Sim person, or a geranium, or an ant farm, or an actual mouse/rat/kitten/puppy -- and decides that destroying or torturing it is more interesting or fun than helping it grow, I'd start to wonder if there wasn't something wrong going on in their head. Experience so far in my life has taught me that there are generally two kinds of people in the world: people who enjoy building things, and people who enjoy breaking things. There is a place in the world for both, but for the latter only when tempered with a lot of self-control... and the desire to light something on fire just to watch it burn doesn't always come with the self-control necessary not to light the match.
Sadly, my favorite variety of those has been banned in the U.S. for quite some time.
Some of our young geniuses couldn't figure out which part was for eating and which part was for playing. (Or more likely, parents were giving them to kids who were too young to not put every loose item they find in their mouths.)
That example (The Book of Tea) is among the nicest LaTeX-made publications I've ever seen. I don't suppose the TeX source is available to it anywhere, is it?
I don't think making it available would increase the risk of plagiarism any, since it's already in PDF form; I'm just curious how it was done.
If you allow a user to make a connection -- particularly an encrypted connection -- to an untrusted computer outside the network (or at least out of your controlled zone), they can basically get to whatever content they want, that's available to them from that outside connection.
As the administrator, all you can do is play an endless game of cat and mouse, trying to close these connections down; in the end you'll always be one step behind though, unless you have a very selective whitelist of allowed connections, and block everything else.
No. That's the point -- he's saying that there are a lot more upper-middle-class people who care about performance and styling then they do about fuel economy and environmentally-friendliness.
And I think he hit the nail on the head; as SUV sales over the past few years have shown, people don't give a rat's rosy rear end about fuel economy or carbon emissions (except as it starts to get expensive, but even then it'll take more than $3/gal gasoline to turn people away), and a lot of people without kids are fairly indifferent to safety. People buy cars because they're fun to drive and because they look good.
The other reason BMWs sell, aside from performance and appearance, is that they're status symbols. They have a brand reputation that's been built over a century or so, and most electrics don't have that -- or worse, they have brands that are associated with the opposite end of the spectrum and drive away potential buyers who could afford new technology. (Any of the low-cost Asian brands.)
When BMW has an electric 3-series, or Mercedes puts out a hydrogen-powered S-class, then we'll know the technology has come of age.
This is true, but the reason why hybrid vehicles still have a mechanical connection between the wheels and combustion engine is that, when you're driving on the highway or otherwise running at a constant speed, a mechanical connection is more efficient than one that involves engine->generator->wires->motor. Mechanical transmissions are pretty good at transmitting mechanical energy.
So really for peak efficiency, you want to use the electric motors (charged by the combustion engine while running at the peak of it's power/efficiency curve) to get the car going and up to speed, and the connect the mechanical engine directly to the wheels to keep it moving. Then when you slow down, you want to use regenerative breaking, and only use conventional (thermal) breaks for panic stops.
Not Tor as it's currently implemented, no. I think the latency is way too high, even under ideal conditions (something that's perceptibly slow for HTTP traffic isn't going to fly with SIP packets). However that doesn't mean that you couldn't, at some point in the future -- maybe today -- set up something Tor-like for voice. The problem would be finding enough high speed and low-latency nodes to provide any real security, while also not injecting tons of latency into the call.
For one-way transmission it's probably easily doable, since you could buffer the stream heavily on the receiving end, but that wouldn't be too pleasant a way to have a two-way conversation.
Well said. The phrase and concept of "international law," at least as it is commonly used, gets to me also. I find it particularly amusing when nations are accused (mostly by folks in the media) of acting "illegally." A nation can't act illegally. It can only break agreements it has with other nations.
Notwithstanding the wet dreams of certain people in the U.N., there is no body or being above individual nations which has the power to dictate law in any meaningful way (although they do try); most of what they do is try to enforce agreements.
There is no objective "law" above that which nations voluntarily submit to, and thus they can never act "illegally." Badly, counterproductively, evilly, they can (and do) all those things, but never "illegal."
Why do so many Mac users insist on this fantasy that Windows users really hate Windows and would switch to the Mac OS in a flash if only they had a chance to touch it's brushed chrome goodness?
Well I'm not going to answer for anyone else here, but I think a lot of people hate Windows because I hear a lot of people talking about how much they hate Windows.
Actually I don't really know anyone who'd be willing to go out in public and tell everyone how much they like Windows and how wonderful they think it is, and otherwise extoll its virtues, who isn't drawing a paycheck from Microsoft. To most people, Windows is right up there with beige carpet and Steelcase office furniture and #2 pencils. It's just there; you use it because its what you were given and because it's what's standard and because its what everyone else uses. You might hate it and know on some dim level that there's a better way, but it's not so spectacularly bad to drive you out of your rut.
I think the great majority of people are apathetic about Windows, when you get right down to it.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
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Boot Camp For Suckers?
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The forklift was last year's model. This year is more environmentally friendly; it comes with a sherpa.
Slashdot Mirror
1905 would have been about the last time Patent clerks had spare time.
And even that German guy got out of the business eventually, and found better things to do.
This is also being discussed further up in the thread. There seem to be two ways such a system might work (that come to my mind):
1) The file will be transferred unencrypted, and then locked-down on the receiving end by WB's software using a user-specific key. This is stupid, since it's pretty trivial to capture the file in transmission and then you'd have a totally unencrypted copy. Or create a BT client that pretends to be WB's DRM-adding client, but really just writes the file to disk instead. Or, run WB's client inside a virtual machine that actually saves everything that the program writes to memory, to disk, so that you'd get the file before it was encrypted.
2) The file will be encrypted, using a key that doesn't change between users. This is also stupid, since when one user recovers the key, they can then share that key with others, unlocking the file.
I think their strategy has to be something like 1+2+FUD. Their playback software will add user-specific DRM, but the file itself will also be encrypted with a common (per-file) key, and they'll also go out of their way to make the format and software obscure and hard to reverse-engineer.
But anyway, as you, the GP, and others have pointed out, anything using Bittorrent to transfer DRMed content has to be flawed -- even moreso than DRM in general is flawed.
iTunes doesn't use Bittorrent for distribution of it's content. It uses regular HTTP transfers (I think) from a lot of servers placed strategically around the country/world (by Akamai). The Akamai servers have the unencrypted files, and then encrypt them for a particular user when you go to buy/download one. The result is that the file I download with my iTunes userid is different from the file that you download, with your iTunes userid. This would keep us from using Bittorrent to download the files -- they're not the same.
... it'll be interesting to see how they deal with this.
What the GP was referring to is that Bittorrent relies on the files being the same (or at least having a lot of identical chunks) -- and if the files are the same, then they aren't being encrypted/DRMed in transit, like iTunes' are. Thus, it ought to be fairly trivial to intercept the data before it gets DRMed all to hell on your computer and locked down. At least theoretically
The other option is to send an encrypted file, for which there is only one key, but then once one person recovers the key, they can share it with everyone else who's downloaded the file and you lose a lot of security.
Basically it just doesn't seem like Bittorrent in general is really conducive to transmitting DRMed content, at least in the way that most companies are implementing DRM right now.
I remember that!
They had a huge booth at the MacWorld conferences for several years; at the time I never quite understood what they were doing or what their purpose was there, but I always went over to pick up the freebies and drool on all the gear I would never, ever be able to afford. (And probably wouldn't know what to do with if I could.)
Maybe I'll buy one used. Slowly, I'm buying all the computers that I couldn't afford when I was in younger on the used market for pennies. Kind of sad in a way; I was at a trade show yesterday and there was a surplus dealer selling old systems literally out of the back of a truck. Sun SPARCStations, and Ultras, old Green-and-white Macs, a rather beat-up Workgroup Server. I probably still have magazines advertising the launches of some of those around somewhere. It was kind of amusing to sit there and realize he probably had a few million dollars worth of gear if you went by MSRP, most of which was now scrap metal. (Seriously: they had a 88-gal. drum of Pentium II and III processors that were being sold for the gold in them to a refiner.)
I'll have to keep a lookout for one of those purple Tezro jobs when they hit eBay in a few years. Two of them would make a nice coffee table, with a piece of Lexan on top maybe.
I was assuming that you wouldn't exactly tell them what you were planning to do with the botnet ... i.e. maybe you'd impersonate a spammer or say you were going to use them for a DDoS, then destroy them.
I don't really know how the "botnet trading scene" works so I'm not sure if this would work or not -- maybe they only rent 'nets to people that have been vetted or something.
Because it's widely perceived as offensive and inappropriate for a business environment.
People working from home can browse whatever porn they want to, it's not the porn that's a problem per se, but that it would offend others who might see it, and generally make the office a less pleasant place to work. I think this sort of generally extends to more than just pornography: I'd say that deathpics, and probably extremist political propaganda that would offend other people would also be on the short list of things that would get you a conversation with your manager.
No one (that I know of) is offended by Slashdot/MLB.com/Google News, so there's not really a problem.
It's a 'community standards' thing; you don't look at things when you're surrounded by other people who can see what you're doing and are going to be made uncomfortable or offended by it. That's just common courtesy, which as far as I'm concerned is a pretty critical skill.
Huh? I've upgraded the RAM in the original iMac, and it had a nice little door on the bottom that you opened up to insert more RAM. You didn't need to (and weren't supposed to!) crack the case. It was just a matter of unplugging it, setting it face-down on a towel or something, unscrewing the compartment cover, inserting the memory, and then putting the door back on.
I have stuff that's harder to change the batteries in than that. (Questionably designed stuff, but still.)
I can't remember exactly what "rev" that iMac was, but it was one of the original CRT ones; it might have been a slot-loader.
I wondered about something like this a while ago.
There are a lot of idiots out there who have zombiefied Windows machines and either don't realize, or don't really care (because it doesn't slow them down enough to make the system totally unusable) that their system might be sending out millions of spam messages per day.
I don't know how much renting a botnet costs, but I wonder if some anti-spam group could go and start renting botnets, and destorying them. Have the captive machines format their own drives or something. It would both remove them from the botnet, but also make the insecurities impossible for idiot owners to ignore anymore.
My feeling that owning a computer and having it sitting on an always-on connection is something of a responsibility. If you can't be bothered with keeping it patched up and secure, then you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, and you certainly don't have a "right" to do it, since it's just going to be used to damage other people's systems.
I'm not sure where you'd get the financial backing to go out and rent the zombie nets, but if you found a backer with money, you could really bring the security of zombiefied machines to the forefront of the discussion overnight.
That thread is great ... I wonder about the Oslo university thing (that's where they've now moved their server to). If anyone here speaks Norwegian and wanted to write them a letter, contact info is on the Digg page. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten taken down already, but maybe the sysop there doesn't read English (I assume all the Digg'ers have been writing in English...).
:; do curl -o /dev/null http://www.northworks.biz/install_mc_shareware.exe ; done
They also read through the forums and found some of the actual spammers' websites:
http://www.northworks.biz/ This one is one of the shadiest, they're selling email harvesters.
In case anyone wants to take matters into their own hands, as one of the Digg people pointed out, there's always:
while
His bandwidth bill is going to suck this month...
I don't really have any strong feelings one way or the other; it seems like someone's accessibility (whether they carry a cellphone/pager/Crackberry off-hours) is a function of their job role. I give out my personal cellphone number pretty freely, as do most of my co-workers, but I've never gotten a call that I thought was inappropriate or frivolous. I don't check email most weekends unless there's a reason, either.
It seems like there are definitely jobs out there that you shouldn't get involved with, if you don't like getting panicked phone calls in the middle of the night, or work very strange hours. If I was ever in a position to hire or bring onto a team somebody for a job like that, I'd hope to try and give them full disclosure of what they were getting into. Having someone who hates their job is just bad business all around.
But anyway, I agree with your sentiment; if I was going to ask someone to work a nontraditional schedule, or even just work late occasionally or call them at home outside of work hours, I'd expect them to be able to ask for the reverse if they wanted to flex the other way. That just seems fair.
I definitely know people who let their work run the rest of their lives, and run around with two cellphones, a Blackberry, and a pager, 24/7/365, but I don't think that anyone ever told them that was required. It's just how they're attempting to get ahead of everyone else, and to a certain extent it probably works: if you sleep on your cellphone and don't mind answering panicked calls at 2AM, eventually it might get around that you're a good go-to guy. (And that you have no life...) Your name might get remembered for this and maybe, in some way, that will affect your career positively. I don't think there's any way to stop this: if people want to sacrifice their personal lives for careerism, they're going to no matter what barriers we create. But that sort of thing ought to rightly be viewed as the exception and not the rule: it's keeping the overachiever from becoming the standard (keeping the standard from creeping upwards, in other words) that's the problem.
So to make a long answer longer, in general I definitely agree with your point, I'm just not sure that there's a good and simple answer to the problem.
No, I didn't post that at work. ;)
Where I work, a certain amount of personal browsing is accepted, and a fair number of people even use AIM to talk to their families at home from the office as well, and that's never been a problem that I've heard of. (As far as I know, there aren't any other Slashdotters in my midst; fantasy sports leagues seem to be more my coworkers' fare.) If you do good work, it's been my experience that people don't really care what you do to produce it, or really even how much time you spent on it. Similarly, if you slave for hours but still turn out crap, I suspect you'll go nowhere quickly. (Though I've never had or worked with someone who's been just such a total zero that they washed out completely; problems seem to be more attitudinal than intellectual.)
There are certainly situations where sitting around and doing obviously non-work-related browsing just isn't appropriate: when you're working on a client's site on their dime, for example. Or any other time you might be perceived as representing a greater group of people besides yourself. That just strikes me as being obvious, though -- like "don't browse porn at work," I wouldn't want to have to tell someone that, and it's a bad sign if I do.
If I was the day-to-day manager of someone who was doing good work, but every time I went over to their desk was playing Solitaire, my reaction wouldn't be to fire them, but to try to find more challenging work for them to do. But aside from that, I'm a firm believer that, once people stay within the bounds of propriety, exactly how they budget their time and how they get their work done is their own business.
Especially as work environments become more distributed, with people working from home or at other sites -- so that you as a manager don't have any clue what they're doing while they're working -- judging people based on their output and performance (and thus having good metrics in place to measure output and performance in a realistic way) becomes more important.
You have a valid point, but unfortunately for them, whitelists are difficult to implement and maintain. Just ask anyone trying to stop spam that way: you can spend a lifetime setting up a whitelist, only to still get compromised because one of the machines you whitelisted some time in the past wasn't as secure as it was supposed to be.
Also, it would make doing business with the PRC much harder if this was their strategy: this is a good side-effect, since it makes the censorship that much more expensive for them as a nation. Social policies generally don't last very long when they fly in the face of billions or trillions of dollars of lost revenue, and that's what you'd be talking about if suddenly it became a lot harder for a multinational corporation to to business in China, versus say in Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, or any of the other emerging Pacific Rim commercial centers. (Granted, none of them are anywhere near the size or capacity of the PRC, but together they're not trivial.) And of course you have India.
So if the net effect of forcing such a policy was to suddenly make censorship five or ten or even 0.5 times more expensive than it is currently, I would fully support it. Anything that creates an economic disincentive to oppression is in my mind a good thing.
Can you give any evidence or substantiation to the claim that the U.S. Government is censoring your emails to or from Iran?
... so I think it's fair to say most people would also be surprised.
I have never heard of the USG actively censoring private email that wasn't to or from a serviceperson or that wasn't directly national security related (e.g., all the email to and from submariners and probably other Navy personnel afloat passes through censors who remove sensitive or geographically revealing information). Even then, they're pretty obvious about it.
If this is actually happening, yours is the first case I've heard of, and while I don't claim to be all-knowning (or even close to it) I consider myself pretty well-read in terms of current events
Yup. That's why you need to hire people you can trust.
My personal feeling, given the work that I do, is that if I can't trust someone to not look at porn from his desk, I certainly can't trust them to make a presentation to a client or handle sensitive information which they could probably sell to a competitor for a not insignificant amount of cash (and, later, lots and lots of court-imposed fines for damages--but I don't expect someone who lacks the foresight to realize that pornography is going to get them fired to realize that leaking trade secrets will land them in court).
I would much rather figure out that I hired/was-assigned the wrong person because I walked up behind him one day and found him looking at porn, than after he did something really publicly embarrassing. Someone who doesn't implicitly get that it's not okay to look at porn while on company time, is not somebody I want to work with; full stop. It shows a lack of separation of one's personal life and business life, or at the minimum a great lack of understanding of the business world, which it is not an employer's job to rectify.
There seem to be a lot of companies that spend an awful lot of resources, from what I've read here on Slashdot, trying to control what their employees do online. It seems to me that those same resources would be better spent figuring out why they're hiring such dolts, and attracting and retaining quality people who don't need baby-sitting. Perhaps that's more expensive, but it makes for a much more pleasant workplace.
I think I agree with you, with certain reservations.
In another comment I likened the Sims to 'virtual pets,' or ant farms. This is a different type of play than usually happens with dolls (action figures, if you prefer), because with a pet, real or virtual, it's less open-ended. There's more feedback: if you pull the kitty's tail, eventually the kitty will scratch you and avoid you in the future. Although the ant farm doesn't seem to give much feedback, in actuality it does: if you don't feed them, they will die; if you fill it full of water, the ants will drown. (I assume they do, I never tried this, but it's my understanding they don't swim.)
Dolls are free-response objects. They're the physical equivalent of handing a child a blank piece of paper and a box of crayons and letting them do whatever they want, without toomuch suggestion. The form of the doll does give some suggestions (i.e., is it an infant/child/man/woman/soldier, etc.) to the interaction, but not much.
Virtual pets are what I would call "responsibility objects." They are things that a child knows--or ought to know--that they are supposed to care for. They come with certain sets of rules, and provide feedback (in various ways) based on whether these rules are followed or not. Thus the interaction with them always falls into a set structure, based on actions and reactions.
I know the author was just being funny, but I really have to wonder if killing a simulated person in a video game, over and over, isn't sort of a warning sign, in the same way that a kid that tortures animals is a warning sign.
... and the desire to light something on fire just to watch it burn doesn't always come with the self-control necessary not to light the match.
I understand that there's an orders-of-magnitude difference between putting your Sim in a pool without a ladder (or any of the other ways you can kill them) and beating a leashed dog to death with a baseball bat, but on some level, if I saw some kid sitting in front of a computer killing Sims in various gruesome ways for hours on end and reveling in it, I probably would take them off my dog-sitting list. It's just one of those things that sets of warning bells, somewhere in the depths of my mind. If killing a dog is a giant air-raid klaxon horn, then this is a small microwave-alarm buzzer going off somewhere in comparison. Small, but still there.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying that everyone who's ever tried to kill a Sim (or see how many people on their wagon in Oregon Trail they could get to die of Typhoid or drown while fording the Really Big River) is going to be making lampshades out of their neighbors later in life, or anything close to it.
But, if someone is given responsibility for something else -- be it a Sim person, or a geranium, or an ant farm, or an actual mouse/rat/kitten/puppy -- and decides that destroying or torturing it is more interesting or fun than helping it grow, I'd start to wonder if there wasn't something wrong going on in their head. Experience so far in my life has taught me that there are generally two kinds of people in the world: people who enjoy building things, and people who enjoy breaking things. There is a place in the world for both, but for the latter only when tempered with a lot of self-control
Just something to think about, I guess.
those chocolate eastern eggs with toys inside
Sadly, my favorite variety of those has been banned in the U.S. for quite some time.
Some of our young geniuses couldn't figure out which part was for eating and which part was for playing. (Or more likely, parents were giving them to kids who were too young to not put every loose item they find in their mouths.)
That example (The Book of Tea) is among the nicest LaTeX-made publications I've ever seen. I don't suppose the TeX source is available to it anywhere, is it?
I don't think making it available would increase the risk of plagiarism any, since it's already in PDF form; I'm just curious how it was done.
Yes.
If you allow a user to make a connection -- particularly an encrypted connection -- to an untrusted computer outside the network (or at least out of your controlled zone), they can basically get to whatever content they want, that's available to them from that outside connection.
As the administrator, all you can do is play an endless game of cat and mouse, trying to close these connections down; in the end you'll always be one step behind though, unless you have a very selective whitelist of allowed connections, and block everything else.
No. That's the point -- he's saying that there are a lot more upper-middle-class people who care about performance and styling then they do about fuel economy and environmentally-friendliness.
And I think he hit the nail on the head; as SUV sales over the past few years have shown, people don't give a rat's rosy rear end about fuel economy or carbon emissions (except as it starts to get expensive, but even then it'll take more than $3/gal gasoline to turn people away), and a lot of people without kids are fairly indifferent to safety. People buy cars because they're fun to drive and because they look good.
The other reason BMWs sell, aside from performance and appearance, is that they're status symbols. They have a brand reputation that's been built over a century or so, and most electrics don't have that -- or worse, they have brands that are associated with the opposite end of the spectrum and drive away potential buyers who could afford new technology. (Any of the low-cost Asian brands.)
When BMW has an electric 3-series, or Mercedes puts out a hydrogen-powered S-class, then we'll know the technology has come of age.
This is true, but the reason why hybrid vehicles still have a mechanical connection between the wheels and combustion engine is that, when you're driving on the highway or otherwise running at a constant speed, a mechanical connection is more efficient than one that involves engine->generator->wires->motor. Mechanical transmissions are pretty good at transmitting mechanical energy.
So really for peak efficiency, you want to use the electric motors (charged by the combustion engine while running at the peak of it's power/efficiency curve) to get the car going and up to speed, and the connect the mechanical engine directly to the wheels to keep it moving. Then when you slow down, you want to use regenerative breaking, and only use conventional (thermal) breaks for panic stops.
Not Tor as it's currently implemented, no. I think the latency is way too high, even under ideal conditions (something that's perceptibly slow for HTTP traffic isn't going to fly with SIP packets). However that doesn't mean that you couldn't, at some point in the future -- maybe today -- set up something Tor-like for voice. The problem would be finding enough high speed and low-latency nodes to provide any real security, while also not injecting tons of latency into the call.
For one-way transmission it's probably easily doable, since you could buffer the stream heavily on the receiving end, but that wouldn't be too pleasant a way to have a two-way conversation.
Well said. The phrase and concept of "international law," at least as it is commonly used, gets to me also. I find it particularly amusing when nations are accused (mostly by folks in the media) of acting "illegally." A nation can't act illegally. It can only break agreements it has with other nations.
Notwithstanding the wet dreams of certain people in the U.N., there is no body or being above individual nations which has the power to dictate law in any meaningful way (although they do try); most of what they do is try to enforce agreements.
There is no objective "law" above that which nations voluntarily submit to, and thus they can never act "illegally." Badly, counterproductively, evilly, they can (and do) all those things, but never "illegal."
Why do so many Mac users insist on this fantasy that Windows users really hate Windows and would switch to the Mac OS in a flash if only they had a chance to touch it's brushed chrome goodness?
Well I'm not going to answer for anyone else here, but I think a lot of people hate Windows because I hear a lot of people talking about how much they hate Windows.
Actually I don't really know anyone who'd be willing to go out in public and tell everyone how much they like Windows and how wonderful they think it is, and otherwise extoll its virtues, who isn't drawing a paycheck from Microsoft. To most people, Windows is right up there with beige carpet and Steelcase office furniture and #2 pencils. It's just there; you use it because its what you were given and because it's what's standard and because its what everyone else uses. You might hate it and know on some dim level that there's a better way, but it's not so spectacularly bad to drive you out of your rut.
I think the great majority of people are apathetic about Windows, when you get right down to it.
The forklift was last year's model. This year is more environmentally friendly; it comes with a sherpa.