Also, people don't realize that keeping a computer in good working order takes a lot of work.
Bull. I have a Mac and know a slew of basically unskilled users who also own them, and they work fine without any maintenance at all. Unless you count clicking "Install" on the auto-update utility "a lot of work."
You change your car's oil because it's a consumable; there's nothing to compare in a computer (well, maybe the bearings in the fans, but those are probably good for several million rotations). A well-designed system shouldn't get slowly "messed up" just as a consequence of normal use and need to be "fixed." There is no reason why you should have to do anything that approaches "computer maintenance" if you are using the system within its design specifications and aren't doing anything that adversely affects it (installing shitty drivers or kernel extensions). There is no reason why you should have to defragment the hard drive, for example.
Believe it or not, if you go to Wal-Mart and get the really crummy mini light sets, they're wired so that a bulb dying knocks out about half the string of lights. The better GE and Westinghouse sets don't seem to do this. But get desparate one year for an extra string of lights and get a shitty one, and you'll be regretting it for years.
You know, sometimes I just feel cheated. It's 2006 -- we were supposed to have flying cars and people living on the moons of Jupiter, and instead we're still dealing with christmas lights wired in series.
He could be writing Applesoft BASIC, that doesn't require semicolons to end the line IIRC.
Everyone knows when you need a stable platform for your mission-critical application, the Apple IIe is where it's at. (Or is that the ][e?)
Re:My issue with Gnome is....
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Why KDE Rules
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Are you seriously telling me that Gnome has auto-condensing menus? Like Windows-XP style auto-condensing menus? Christ.
That feature made me want to throw my work computer through a window until I figured out how to turn it off, and I expect my Windows machine to be difficult and poorly designed. And I'm paid to use it, so I can keep my frustrating in check by reminding myself that as long as the company is signing my paychecks, I'll sit there and figure out whatever retardate-designed operating system they demand that I use, on their time.
Especially from a GUI system that supposedly has put as much time into usability as Gnome has, that's really laughable. Auto-condensing menus do hell to people's visual memory: even if I don't remember exactly what a command is called, I can probably remember what menu it was in, and where it was. I never realized how much I did this, until I used a system that hid options on me.
That does a lot to undermine how seriously I take Gnome's commitment to usabiliy, to be seduced by so dumb a "feature." The only people it helps are extreme novices, and even then I think it's more coddling than help -- it holds them back from seeing on first inspection the full power of their computer's applications. To be honest I think it's almost a litmus test: anyone who thinks that's a "usability improvement" is probably not anyone I want to use an interface from. We're just not going to see eye to eye on anything.
Actually you can bankrupt yourself out of most civil judgements, just not criminal ones. And there are significant exceptions to the civil ones that you can have vacated -- partiuclarly ones arising from DWI/DUI, back rent or condo fees, child support, etc. However outside of the exceptions, they can be vacated by a bankruptcy court, or paid off at a reduced rate when the debtor's assets are liquidated.
A while back I actually found the statute in the USC covering this, but I'm not a subscriber and don't have access to my back posts that far, and don't feel like looking it up again right now. There were some changes made to it just recently that make it tougher to do.
I also haven't RTFA, and I'm not clear on whether the damages arose as part of a civil suit, or as restitution for part of a criminal action. I don't think you can bankrupt yourself out of restitution payments under any circumstances. And as I said, the recent changes to bankruptcy law make it significantly more painful to do than it used to be.
This scumbag will definitely be hurting. Will he be shivering in a cardboard box down by the river, as I personally would find a satisfying conclusion? Probably not. But he'll lose any 'luxury items' he might have acquired, as well as his retirement and any property other than his primary residence.
The whole point of the receipt (which is separate from a paper trail) is so that you could go to a web site later, type in the key from the receipt, and make sure that your vote actually counted in the election, and was for the candidate that you cast it for. If you put it in some box, then it would be outside of your control and subject to manipulation.
The theory is that, if a large percentage of people kept their receipts and then checked them later on the Internet, and if the receipts contained the name of the candidate voted for, it would be easy to detect tampering. If the vote on the web site doesn't match the vote on the receipt, somebody monkeyed with something somewhere. Or at least it's a potential that would need to be investigated.
However as other people pointed out, there are a lot of problems with giving the voter a "take home" proof of who they voted for. It makes it easy to buy votes, or could easily become a social pressure (just think of some future where members of the cool political party proudly display their voting receipts -- if you don't have a receipt for the right candidate, you get ostracized).
I wonder if this could be fixed by doing a one-way hash of the candidate, plus the date and time that the vote was cast, and printing that on the receipt instead. Then you'd have a slip of paper that you could check to make sure that the vote that was counted under your name was the same one that you cast, but there'd never be anything that you'd take home saying who it was. I'll have to think about it.
Having receipts is a good idea, but there are a bunch of social problems that would have to be worked around first.
I know people who went to very large universities, and took 2-3 scantron exams per course per semester, five our more courses per semester, for four or five years, and got their test questions back in most cases along with the graded scantron sheet to check, if they wanted. Based on everything I've heard from them, the systems were very accurate. In fact I've never heard of anyone finding an error that was actually attributable to the scantron that didn't have some mitigating factor (sloppy erasing, etc.).
The biggest source of error is human. You skip a row of bubbles and forget to check numbers, and all of your answers are wrong (or randomized, so 80% of them are wrong or whatever). It's arguable and I'm tempted to agree, to a certain extent, that this is just the price you pay if you're stupid and can't fill out the right set of bubbles for the question; regardless of your stance on that however, the technology itself isn't to blame.
I'm sure there are other people out there who went to big state colleges who used scantron-type tests a lot, and if someone was really interested they could gather together a lot of old tests and sheets and calculate the accuracy. I'm willing to bet it's very, very high; probably higher than a human being would be at doing the same thing.
I also think perhaps the biggest benefit of Wikipedia is that, by reading both the article (and its history) and the discussion, you can actually get an idea of the various sides of the issue. Or at the very least -- assuming the article has a discussion -- perhaps where the person who wrote it is coming from and what sort of bias they might have.
I read a lot of stuff off of the Google News aggregator, and sometimes it's difficult when you read an article from some random small-town newspaper's website, to figure out what their bias is. Are they conservative? Liberal? Pro-corporate? Pro-union? Without doing a lot of background research it's nearly impossible to tell. With a contentious article on Wikipedia it's usually pretty easy to go into the discussion and figure out the stances of the major people involved in writing/editing the article, and then go and look at those people's revisions and see what's being disputed.
To be honest, I think the ability to get insight into multiple sides of an issue is one of Wikipedia's strengths; in a way it's superior to a theoretical encyclopedia that actually was perfectly NPOV.
I also think that, provided Wikipedia survives over time, that it will be very interesting to track how public perception of some issues has changed. Especially big social or political issues: we'll have the ability to see a modern, potentially revisionist interpretation, but also to easily dig down and get the first revision which might be years old. With conventional media you'd be digging through microfiche, requesting back issues, or begging for old tapes if you wanted that same level of access. That side of Wikipedia is a huge, and IMO underappreciated, cultural resource.
I find that hard to believe, but even if it's true, it's hardly representative of most SUV vs. passenger car crashes. It's just not. Perhaps the H2 is just poorly constructed in terms of side-impact protection or something, I can't say since I'm not familiar with it, but imagine that same collision occurring head-on. It barely matters what equipment each car has, because the H2, having much more mass, is going to decelerate much less violently. It's just not going to experience as serious a collision as the smaller car will.
There are many studies which support this (besides TFA), and I've personally seen (as an EMT) some really hideous SUV/Car collisions, and can tell you: the SUV usually wins. Sometimes there are mitigating factors, like the SUV will roll over and throw out and crush anyone that's not seat-belted, while the car will basically stay in one place, but if you have the choice between being in a Honda Civic and a GMC Suburban with similar safety equipment when they run into each other, you'd be insane not to pick the Suburban. Plus, the increased size of the car makes it likely that you'll get extricated from the vehicle a lot faster (again, assuming no rollover).
The biggest problem with SUVs, traditionally and still, is that they tend to roll over during hard panic maneuvers, or when hit from the side. Where I used to live, the biggest risk was people driving them too fast for conditions (no, your SUV does not mean you can drive on ice) and laying them over -- generally nonfatal though. But in a straightforward front-end or rear-end collision, there's something to be said for surrounding yourself with several thousand extra pounds of steel. Granted, you get that advantage at the expense of the person in the smaller car, and you have to be more careful taking it around a corner, but it's there nonetheless.
This is an outstanding point -- mod the parent up.
Too many people, environmentalists in particular, shoot down possible alternative energy sources because they're not as good as some theoretical "green energy" source. Of course, that theoretical source is probably unfeasible and won't ever get built, but it's enough to keep the practical alternative from being constructed. And once the hype settles down and the public's eye moves on, somebody builds a coal-fired plant instead.
We need to stop comparing every alternative energy idea that comes along to our own personal favorite energy-generation fantasies, and instead compare it to the system we have right now, or the logical extension of that system in the future.
Everything looks bad when you set an impossibly high bar; compared to what we have today though, a whole lot of things start looking good.
Fossil fuels are, to my knowledge anyway, mostly decayed organic matter. I assume that really none of the original carbon chains that were present in the organic material are still present in the fuel now, so I think it can be chalked up mostly as a "stored geologic" form of energy; the input came from the temperature and pressure deep underground, over time.
I suppose how you want to categorize it would depend on how you categorize the energy that comes from an earthquake -- is that solar? Or (as someone said above) "stored friction" from the motion of the core against the crust inside the Earth?
In a sense it's a pointless exercise, but many academic exercises are (in fact it might be a definition of 'academic' in some senses of the word), yet they're still potentially interesting and we still do them.
No he was ignoring Carnot efficiency and (I think) assuming 100% direct thermal-delta to electrical energy conversion. Obviously there is the theoretical limits imposed by the Carnot cycle, plus real-world losses in pumping the water up (even if you ignore resistance in the pipes and other irreversible losses, the cold water is more dense than the warm water at the top and thus energy is required to lift it).
I'm pretty intrigued by this whole concept, frankly. I've seen the geothermal systems in Iceland, and they're about as close to "free energy" as you can get: the biggest output is hot, salty mineral water, which they dump on the lava flats to cool (and have since turned into a tourist attraction). Obviously geothermal isn't really practical if you're not in a geologically active area, but a lot of countries -- particularly developing ones -- are surrounded by or near oceans.
I wonder if it would be possible to do it in one of the Great Lakes as a proof of concept: you might not have to deal with as severe weather as you would on the open ocean, and from a public relations perspective it might be more accessible to the media and garner more attention. I'm not sure you'd want to put such a system into full production in a lake, even a huge one, but it might work on a small scale.
For co-generation purposes, I wonder if this could work on small, deep lakes? Those can sometimes have (particularly in the summer) huge temperature deltas between the surface and the depths. I haven't really read up on how these things work or how hard they are to construct, but I wonder if smaller ones would be feasible.
Er, no. I challenge you to go somewhere up north, where there has been visible increases in the rate of ice shelf retreat and glacial calving, and say that global warming isn't really an issue. The world is getting warmer, period.
The question that I think you're alluding to, by "we don't know what the hell is happening to the environment" is that there's still a (somewhat) open debate as to whether the warming is caused by anything human beings did, or if it's part of some greater and not-yet-understood climactic cycle.
However in either situation, there are ongoing non-insigificant temperature increases and ice melt occurring, with resulting desalinization of regional oceans. The evidence for this is widespread and not in dispute by any reputable authority. Regardless of whether this is the result of fossil fuel consumption or "just nature," it's still something we're going to have to deal with the consequences of.
That's pretty impressive. I have some old film negatives that I took by putting the camera on a tripod and rotating it, and just mounted the prints very carefully with a razorblade so they looked psuedo-panoramic, that I'll have to scan in and give a try.
How does it do with interior panoramas? Have you tried standing in the center of a room and doing a full cylindrical 360? I'm curious how it looks under real-world, non ideal conditions. I know some realtors that would probably be impressed by something like that.
Any idea how it compares to the in-camera stitching that some of the new digis do?
You might be able to do this, but there are a number of problems that might arise:
1) Bluetooth is built-in to a lot of computers that you might want to use. This is a show-stopper, obviously. If both systems have internal BT, there's no way to do a KVM. The new Apple iMacs in particular are what I'm thinking of.
2) I'm not sure what the BT adaptor "looks like" to the computer, in terms of what kind of USB device it is. It might not like getting switched between two computers constantly. USB KVM switches accomplish what they do by emulating a generic keyboard and mouse, even when you have the real keyboard and mouse connected to the other CPU. So to the computer, it always has something connected. That way it doesn't get confused and you (hopefully) don't have to constantly unplug and replug your USB peripherals every time you switch from one CPU to the next. I don't think that this emulation would work with a Bluetooth adaptor. I'm sure it's possible in theory, but I don't know of any KVM switches that support it.
Also, think of some historical examples. I'll bet that very few people have been privy to most of the big cryptanalysis breakthroughs in the past 75 years, at least not at the time they actually occured. Others (breaking of the German Enigma or Japanese Naval cipher) were only revealed as a side-effect of using the intelligence gleaned from intercepts; and that was during a war when there was a lot of useful information flowing in and out.
Consider today, where the government is arguably more secretive, and information doesn't have to be disseminated to as large a number of people downstream. (In World War Two, the decisions made as a result of intercepts eventually had to flow downstream, towards the soldiers. Now, with the exception of rare operationally-useful bits, most information probably flows up from the NSA to the NSC and never comes back down.) The NSA could have a working quantum computer in their basement and it's entirely possible we'd never know for years; perhaps we'd never know until some totally implausible action was taken by the government which couldn't be explained in any other way.
It's not entirely farfetched to believe, and there is historical precident to support, that any number of governments might have technology that is decades ahead of what is in public use at any given time, but reserve it for very selective use (i.e. not in criminal cases, even serious ones).
Suppose his family is extremely wealthy, and they're discussing financial matters. Maybe he needs to ask for an account number or control code (or worst of all -- both), or some other information that has financial value.
They don't even have to be fantastically rich for this to be an issue. 'Targeted phishing' has become more and more common, it doesn't take a big mental leap to go from there to criminals picking out a rich mark who likes to do email while sitting in a park with open Wifi access and sniffing packets.
Everyone is concentrating on the government as if they're the only people who might want to monitor your communications. There are a lot more plausible situations that I can think of where you'd want to encrypt your email, which have nothing to do with some faceless technician in an NSA bunker somewhere reading over your fruitcake recipes. Environmentalism, corporate whistleblowing, labor organization are all activities that could potentially cause someone to send a private investigator after you, looking for potentially embarrassing information. There aren't any laws on what's admissible evidence in the court of public opinion, and I could think of a lot of sons and daughters of high-profile individuals that could easily be targets of a smear campaign.
If your email really is that boring, sure there's no reason for you to use encryption. Except maybe someday your life won't be so boring, and turning on encryption then will be a big red flag. That said, not everyone's family conversations are quite so pedestrian as you're making them out to be.
Using encryption is quite easy -- it's the setup that's not. I used to have Apple Mail set up to use encrpytion via X.509 certificates, and it was dead simple -- if the other person had sent you a signed message previously, then there would be an 'encrypt' option when writing them a new message. Check it -- done. PGP in Apple Mail is almost as easy (although importing the keys is not as automated.)
It's the setup that's a real bitch, though. I don't know if the situation has gotten any easier, but when I did it, I had to go through a huge rigamorole with Thawte and two different web browsers and some fairly obscure Terminal commands to generate, download, save, and import the certificate. Definitely far beyond the capability of my parents.
However if you're willing to set it up for them, and renew the certificates every year or so (I think Thawte gives out free one-year personal certificates), it's not hard to use at all. On the receiving end, assuming the email is encrypted to you, it's no harder than receiving a regular email. Arguably even easier than ripping open a envelope (no chance of paper cuts!).
Not necessarily. Depending on your usage patterns, you might seem like any well-supported work-at-home tech businessperson these days. I work for a company that distributes it's PCs with email clients already set up for transparent encryption of all email (using X.509 certs), and automatically uses a VPN when you're not plugged into the office network. I've never looked at the setup but I wouldn't be surprised if the connecting to the mailserver was secured with SSL or something, too.
Sure, if you're a home user sending tons of stuff from your comcast.net email address that's encrypted, and especially if you're sending it with unencrypted headers to equally suspicious recipients, you might get red-flagged somewhere, but depending on how far you go to create the illusion you could easily fit right in. Lots of industries have adopted encrypted communications -- finance especially.
Everyone in my family uses a Mac and Adium as an AIM client; it supports automatic, transparent encrpytion that can be enabled by either party. Just by setting my client to prefer encryption if possible (and telling my family to click 'yes' when prompted), we're chatting with encrpytion. Although I'm sure it's not terribly common, it's not very hard either.
Encryption is definitely common enough that, by itself, it's not going to land you on any watch lists. Whatever else you're doing, or how you're using it, certainly could (and perhaps for good reason -- but that's a separate debate). But using PGP to write home to Mom from college isn't going to get you a bunk in Gitmo. Cuba isn't big enough.
Exactly. Keep talking, and pay no attention to the Acme Flower Delivery van sitting on the other side of the street...:)
While you're at it, you might as well throw in heavy uses of "infidels" and "rise of the proletariat," just in case there aren't any watch lists you're not on already.
Even if you figure on one new iMac for each end of the conference, as a dedicated videoconferencing "appliance," the cost of an iChat system is very low for what you get. It's easy to set up and use, it works very well through firewalls and doesn't require a lot of tinkering with your network, doesn't need dedicated lines or anything, and isn't intimidating to use.
At the very least, anyone interested in videoconferencing should go down to an Apple store with a few friends when they're not busy and get a demonstration. (I'm sure they'd be happy to, especially if you told them that you're possibly interested in buying a handful of Macs.) If the resolution doesn't do it for you, then start considering dedicated options like the ones from Polycom.
The only "serious" videoconferencing system I've used is an ancient one that requires dedicated point-to-point ISDN connections. I've never been told the price but I've heard rumors of over $20k a unit, and the quality isn't particularly great. The only neat feature is that the cameras are remote-controllable and have pan and zoom, so you can close in on a presentation slide or just somebody's face.
Really what you need to consider is are you doing person-to-person conferencing (even with 3+ people, will the users be seated at a desk by themselves or in groups), or "conference room" style, where you want to link two or more rooms together with multiple people on each end. If you can do it by individuals, get an iMac and use iChat. Even if you don't use the Macs for anything else it'll be worth it. If you need to link whole rooms you're probably better to go with a professional solution. Just make sure it comes installed and maintained, so you don't have to fiddle with it. I know our sysadmin has grey hair from playing with our old beast.
Again, tell me why I should recommend we run our entire operation on Windows over an iSeries when we can afford the iSeries? What would justify such an enormous gamble?
Basically, in your situation, nothing. At least it doesn't sound like it.
Look at it this way: you're using AS/400 right now. So you get the company to upgrade to iSeries. Everyone is happy. Your boss, the '400 guy, likes it because it's familiar to him. You get some new training and get a new skill to put on your resume besides Windows stuff. If something does happen, you can always point fingers at Big Blue. It's the safe choice -- and it sounds like this is a system that's important enough to the business where you shouldn't be gambling.
Consider the alternatives: you push Windows. Your boss is unfamiliar with it, and is moving out of the company anyway, so a lot of the transitional responsibility gets dumped on you. While this might seem like a short term promotion, it's probably responsibility that you would have gotten anyway, and this way if anything goes wrong, you take the heat for it. Plus you'll have exectuives wandering into your office every other week when they hear about some Windows worm on MSNBC asking "hey, are our servers safe?" And you'll have to explain why they are, or aren't, or whatever. At least with an iSeries you can say "oh, yeah, that's a Windows vunerability. We don't run Windows."
It just seems like it would be a lot of needless risk on your part to push Windows. Plus, from a job-security standpoint, it's a lot better to be in an AS/400 shop than a Windows one, if you know both or if you know Win and they're willing to pay for training. Given that you already have Windows training, so you can leave if you want, but if they switched to Windows there'd always be the risk somewhere down the road that your position might be seen as easily replacable by two green-as-grass MCSEs. Of course that's a big assumption -- I don't know what your company is like, but it's something to consider if you plan on making a career of this place.
I can't think of a good reason why you'd want to switch to Windows boxes, unless there's something about the situation that we're just not getting from your question and previous posts. It seems like it would be a bad move both for the company and possibly a risk for you personally. Why take it?
It sounds to me like you answered your own question. If these consultants were pushing you to Windows for reasons you (seemingly quite easily) proved false, then it throws the rest of their conclusion into question as well.
If you found the ERP app for the iSeries, and you think it will work well, AND you already have experience with the AS/400 platform... I think you'd be crazy to switch to Windows, on the basis of what sounds like a shady consulting firm's opinion who obviously hadn't considered all of the alternatives.
I'm also guessing that you probably have an existing relationship with IBM because of your legacy hardware, or maybe a dormant relationship that you could rekindle, and that might give you the resources you need to convince other people in your company. I'm told that their salespeople can give a very convincing presentation; in fact so much so that if you don't like them you probably don't want them near your execs...:) But if you think that's the option you want to go with, you definitely don't have to make the case to higher by yourself.
I've run MS Word as a remote application, delivered using Citrix, over a VPN on a 768k ISDN line.
It's not particularly pleasant, but it's not unusable either. What gets really obnoxious is that when you have multiple windows open, the system tends to disconnect and stop updating the ones not in focus, so when you click back to them there's a significant lag while they reconnect and update.
That said, there are significant and obvious differences between remote-delivered applications using Citrix or remote-xwindows and a web-delivered application like what Google (I think) and IBM is experimenting with. I've never used the latter.
Ability to force iSync to do "Last name, first name" on Motorola v550s (and any other Motorola phone)
While we're nitpicking iSync issues, how about actually making the Bluetooth features of Address Book work with most phones? I've never gotten it to work with anything (all of my phones are Motorolas, my main one is a Razr V3).
I still think Apple has by far the best out-of-the-box implementation of Bluetooth syncronization, and combined with.Mac (which it would be great if they opened up) totally brainless computer-to-computer syncronization and backup. I've never seen anything on Windows or Linux that touches it for ease of use and seamlessness. Sure you can approximate the same thing in Linux with some well designed cron jobs and scripts involving rsync, but damned if Apple hasn't just Made It Work yet again. (For $99 a year.)
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Also, people don't realize that keeping a computer in good working order takes a lot of work.
Bull. I have a Mac and know a slew of basically unskilled users who also own them, and they work fine without any maintenance at all. Unless you count clicking "Install" on the auto-update utility "a lot of work."
You change your car's oil because it's a consumable; there's nothing to compare in a computer (well, maybe the bearings in the fans, but those are probably good for several million rotations). A well-designed system shouldn't get slowly "messed up" just as a consequence of normal use and need to be "fixed." There is no reason why you should have to do anything that approaches "computer maintenance" if you are using the system within its design specifications and aren't doing anything that adversely affects it (installing shitty drivers or kernel extensions). There is no reason why you should have to defragment the hard drive, for example.
Believe it or not, if you go to Wal-Mart and get the really crummy mini light sets, they're wired so that a bulb dying knocks out about half the string of lights. The better GE and Westinghouse sets don't seem to do this. But get desparate one year for an extra string of lights and get a shitty one, and you'll be regretting it for years.
You know, sometimes I just feel cheated. It's 2006 -- we were supposed to have flying cars and people living on the moons of Jupiter, and instead we're still dealing with christmas lights wired in series.
He could be writing Applesoft BASIC, that doesn't require semicolons to end the line IIRC.
Everyone knows when you need a stable platform for your mission-critical application, the Apple IIe is where it's at. (Or is that the ][e?)
Are you seriously telling me that Gnome has auto-condensing menus? Like Windows-XP style auto-condensing menus? Christ.
That feature made me want to throw my work computer through a window until I figured out how to turn it off, and I expect my Windows machine to be difficult and poorly designed. And I'm paid to use it, so I can keep my frustrating in check by reminding myself that as long as the company is signing my paychecks, I'll sit there and figure out whatever retardate-designed operating system they demand that I use, on their time.
Especially from a GUI system that supposedly has put as much time into usability as Gnome has, that's really laughable. Auto-condensing menus do hell to people's visual memory: even if I don't remember exactly what a command is called, I can probably remember what menu it was in, and where it was. I never realized how much I did this, until I used a system that hid options on me.
That does a lot to undermine how seriously I take Gnome's commitment to usabiliy, to be seduced by so dumb a "feature." The only people it helps are extreme novices, and even then I think it's more coddling than help -- it holds them back from seeing on first inspection the full power of their computer's applications. To be honest I think it's almost a litmus test: anyone who thinks that's a "usability improvement" is probably not anyone I want to use an interface from. We're just not going to see eye to eye on anything.
Actually you can bankrupt yourself out of most civil judgements, just not criminal ones. And there are significant exceptions to the civil ones that you can have vacated -- partiuclarly ones arising from DWI/DUI, back rent or condo fees, child support, etc. However outside of the exceptions, they can be vacated by a bankruptcy court, or paid off at a reduced rate when the debtor's assets are liquidated.
A while back I actually found the statute in the USC covering this, but I'm not a subscriber and don't have access to my back posts that far, and don't feel like looking it up again right now. There were some changes made to it just recently that make it tougher to do.
I also haven't RTFA, and I'm not clear on whether the damages arose as part of a civil suit, or as restitution for part of a criminal action. I don't think you can bankrupt yourself out of restitution payments under any circumstances. And as I said, the recent changes to bankruptcy law make it significantly more painful to do than it used to be.
This scumbag will definitely be hurting. Will he be shivering in a cardboard box down by the river, as I personally would find a satisfying conclusion? Probably not. But he'll lose any 'luxury items' he might have acquired, as well as his retirement and any property other than his primary residence.
The whole point of the receipt (which is separate from a paper trail) is so that you could go to a web site later, type in the key from the receipt, and make sure that your vote actually counted in the election, and was for the candidate that you cast it for. If you put it in some box, then it would be outside of your control and subject to manipulation.
The theory is that, if a large percentage of people kept their receipts and then checked them later on the Internet, and if the receipts contained the name of the candidate voted for, it would be easy to detect tampering. If the vote on the web site doesn't match the vote on the receipt, somebody monkeyed with something somewhere. Or at least it's a potential that would need to be investigated.
However as other people pointed out, there are a lot of problems with giving the voter a "take home" proof of who they voted for. It makes it easy to buy votes, or could easily become a social pressure (just think of some future where members of the cool political party proudly display their voting receipts -- if you don't have a receipt for the right candidate, you get ostracized).
I wonder if this could be fixed by doing a one-way hash of the candidate, plus the date and time that the vote was cast, and printing that on the receipt instead. Then you'd have a slip of paper that you could check to make sure that the vote that was counted under your name was the same one that you cast, but there'd never be anything that you'd take home saying who it was. I'll have to think about it.
Having receipts is a good idea, but there are a bunch of social problems that would have to be worked around first.
I know people who went to very large universities, and took 2-3 scantron exams per course per semester, five our more courses per semester, for four or five years, and got their test questions back in most cases along with the graded scantron sheet to check, if they wanted. Based on everything I've heard from them, the systems were very accurate. In fact I've never heard of anyone finding an error that was actually attributable to the scantron that didn't have some mitigating factor (sloppy erasing, etc.).
The biggest source of error is human. You skip a row of bubbles and forget to check numbers, and all of your answers are wrong (or randomized, so 80% of them are wrong or whatever). It's arguable and I'm tempted to agree, to a certain extent, that this is just the price you pay if you're stupid and can't fill out the right set of bubbles for the question; regardless of your stance on that however, the technology itself isn't to blame.
I'm sure there are other people out there who went to big state colleges who used scantron-type tests a lot, and if someone was really interested they could gather together a lot of old tests and sheets and calculate the accuracy. I'm willing to bet it's very, very high; probably higher than a human being would be at doing the same thing.
I also think perhaps the biggest benefit of Wikipedia is that, by reading both the article (and its history) and the discussion, you can actually get an idea of the various sides of the issue. Or at the very least -- assuming the article has a discussion -- perhaps where the person who wrote it is coming from and what sort of bias they might have.
I read a lot of stuff off of the Google News aggregator, and sometimes it's difficult when you read an article from some random small-town newspaper's website, to figure out what their bias is. Are they conservative? Liberal? Pro-corporate? Pro-union? Without doing a lot of background research it's nearly impossible to tell. With a contentious article on Wikipedia it's usually pretty easy to go into the discussion and figure out the stances of the major people involved in writing/editing the article, and then go and look at those people's revisions and see what's being disputed.
To be honest, I think the ability to get insight into multiple sides of an issue is one of Wikipedia's strengths; in a way it's superior to a theoretical encyclopedia that actually was perfectly NPOV.
I also think that, provided Wikipedia survives over time, that it will be very interesting to track how public perception of some issues has changed. Especially big social or political issues: we'll have the ability to see a modern, potentially revisionist interpretation, but also to easily dig down and get the first revision which might be years old. With conventional media you'd be digging through microfiche, requesting back issues, or begging for old tapes if you wanted that same level of access. That side of Wikipedia is a huge, and IMO underappreciated, cultural resource.
I find that hard to believe, but even if it's true, it's hardly representative of most SUV vs. passenger car crashes. It's just not. Perhaps the H2 is just poorly constructed in terms of side-impact protection or something, I can't say since I'm not familiar with it, but imagine that same collision occurring head-on. It barely matters what equipment each car has, because the H2, having much more mass, is going to decelerate much less violently. It's just not going to experience as serious a collision as the smaller car will.
There are many studies which support this (besides TFA), and I've personally seen (as an EMT) some really hideous SUV/Car collisions, and can tell you: the SUV usually wins. Sometimes there are mitigating factors, like the SUV will roll over and throw out and crush anyone that's not seat-belted, while the car will basically stay in one place, but if you have the choice between being in a Honda Civic and a GMC Suburban with similar safety equipment when they run into each other, you'd be insane not to pick the Suburban. Plus, the increased size of the car makes it likely that you'll get extricated from the vehicle a lot faster (again, assuming no rollover).
The biggest problem with SUVs, traditionally and still, is that they tend to roll over during hard panic maneuvers, or when hit from the side. Where I used to live, the biggest risk was people driving them too fast for conditions (no, your SUV does not mean you can drive on ice) and laying them over -- generally nonfatal though. But in a straightforward front-end or rear-end collision, there's something to be said for surrounding yourself with several thousand extra pounds of steel. Granted, you get that advantage at the expense of the person in the smaller car, and you have to be more careful taking it around a corner, but it's there nonetheless.
This is an outstanding point -- mod the parent up.
Too many people, environmentalists in particular, shoot down possible alternative energy sources because they're not as good as some theoretical "green energy" source. Of course, that theoretical source is probably unfeasible and won't ever get built, but it's enough to keep the practical alternative from being constructed. And once the hype settles down and the public's eye moves on, somebody builds a coal-fired plant instead.
We need to stop comparing every alternative energy idea that comes along to our own personal favorite energy-generation fantasies, and instead compare it to the system we have right now, or the logical extension of that system in the future.
Everything looks bad when you set an impossibly high bar; compared to what we have today though, a whole lot of things start looking good.
Fossil fuels are, to my knowledge anyway, mostly decayed organic matter. I assume that really none of the original carbon chains that were present in the organic material are still present in the fuel now, so I think it can be chalked up mostly as a "stored geologic" form of energy; the input came from the temperature and pressure deep underground, over time.
I suppose how you want to categorize it would depend on how you categorize the energy that comes from an earthquake -- is that solar? Or (as someone said above) "stored friction" from the motion of the core against the crust inside the Earth?
In a sense it's a pointless exercise, but many academic exercises are (in fact it might be a definition of 'academic' in some senses of the word), yet they're still potentially interesting and we still do them.
No he was ignoring Carnot efficiency and (I think) assuming 100% direct thermal-delta to electrical energy conversion. Obviously there is the theoretical limits imposed by the Carnot cycle, plus real-world losses in pumping the water up (even if you ignore resistance in the pipes and other irreversible losses, the cold water is more dense than the warm water at the top and thus energy is required to lift it).
I'm pretty intrigued by this whole concept, frankly. I've seen the geothermal systems in Iceland, and they're about as close to "free energy" as you can get: the biggest output is hot, salty mineral water, which they dump on the lava flats to cool (and have since turned into a tourist attraction). Obviously geothermal isn't really practical if you're not in a geologically active area, but a lot of countries -- particularly developing ones -- are surrounded by or near oceans.
I wonder if it would be possible to do it in one of the Great Lakes as a proof of concept: you might not have to deal with as severe weather as you would on the open ocean, and from a public relations perspective it might be more accessible to the media and garner more attention. I'm not sure you'd want to put such a system into full production in a lake, even a huge one, but it might work on a small scale.
For co-generation purposes, I wonder if this could work on small, deep lakes? Those can sometimes have (particularly in the summer) huge temperature deltas between the surface and the depths. I haven't really read up on how these things work or how hard they are to construct, but I wonder if smaller ones would be feasible.
Er, no. I challenge you to go somewhere up north, where there has been visible increases in the rate of ice shelf retreat and glacial calving, and say that global warming isn't really an issue. The world is getting warmer, period.
The question that I think you're alluding to, by "we don't know what the hell is happening to the environment" is that there's still a (somewhat) open debate as to whether the warming is caused by anything human beings did, or if it's part of some greater and not-yet-understood climactic cycle.
However in either situation, there are ongoing non-insigificant temperature increases and ice melt occurring, with resulting desalinization of regional oceans. The evidence for this is widespread and not in dispute by any reputable authority. Regardless of whether this is the result of fossil fuel consumption or "just nature," it's still something we're going to have to deal with the consequences of.
That's pretty impressive. I have some old film negatives that I took by putting the camera on a tripod and rotating it, and just mounted the prints very carefully with a razorblade so they looked psuedo-panoramic, that I'll have to scan in and give a try.
How does it do with interior panoramas? Have you tried standing in the center of a room and doing a full cylindrical 360? I'm curious how it looks under real-world, non ideal conditions. I know some realtors that would probably be impressed by something like that.
Any idea how it compares to the in-camera stitching that some of the new digis do?
You might be able to do this, but there are a number of problems that might arise:
1) Bluetooth is built-in to a lot of computers that you might want to use. This is a show-stopper, obviously. If both systems have internal BT, there's no way to do a KVM. The new Apple iMacs in particular are what I'm thinking of.
2) I'm not sure what the BT adaptor "looks like" to the computer, in terms of what kind of USB device it is. It might not like getting switched between two computers constantly. USB KVM switches accomplish what they do by emulating a generic keyboard and mouse, even when you have the real keyboard and mouse connected to the other CPU. So to the computer, it always has something connected. That way it doesn't get confused and you (hopefully) don't have to constantly unplug and replug your USB peripherals every time you switch from one CPU to the next. I don't think that this emulation would work with a Bluetooth adaptor. I'm sure it's possible in theory, but I don't know of any KVM switches that support it.
Excellent point.
Also, think of some historical examples. I'll bet that very few people have been privy to most of the big cryptanalysis breakthroughs in the past 75 years, at least not at the time they actually occured. Others (breaking of the German Enigma or Japanese Naval cipher) were only revealed as a side-effect of using the intelligence gleaned from intercepts; and that was during a war when there was a lot of useful information flowing in and out.
Consider today, where the government is arguably more secretive, and information doesn't have to be disseminated to as large a number of people downstream. (In World War Two, the decisions made as a result of intercepts eventually had to flow downstream, towards the soldiers. Now, with the exception of rare operationally-useful bits, most information probably flows up from the NSA to the NSC and never comes back down.) The NSA could have a working quantum computer in their basement and it's entirely possible we'd never know for years; perhaps we'd never know until some totally implausible action was taken by the government which couldn't be explained in any other way.
It's not entirely farfetched to believe, and there is historical precident to support, that any number of governments might have technology that is decades ahead of what is in public use at any given time, but reserve it for very selective use (i.e. not in criminal cases, even serious ones).
Not everyone's emails are that boring.
Suppose his family is extremely wealthy, and they're discussing financial matters. Maybe he needs to ask for an account number or control code (or worst of all -- both), or some other information that has financial value.
They don't even have to be fantastically rich for this to be an issue. 'Targeted phishing' has become more and more common, it doesn't take a big mental leap to go from there to criminals picking out a rich mark who likes to do email while sitting in a park with open Wifi access and sniffing packets.
Everyone is concentrating on the government as if they're the only people who might want to monitor your communications. There are a lot more plausible situations that I can think of where you'd want to encrypt your email, which have nothing to do with some faceless technician in an NSA bunker somewhere reading over your fruitcake recipes. Environmentalism, corporate whistleblowing, labor organization are all activities that could potentially cause someone to send a private investigator after you, looking for potentially embarrassing information. There aren't any laws on what's admissible evidence in the court of public opinion, and I could think of a lot of sons and daughters of high-profile individuals that could easily be targets of a smear campaign.
If your email really is that boring, sure there's no reason for you to use encryption. Except maybe someday your life won't be so boring, and turning on encryption then will be a big red flag. That said, not everyone's family conversations are quite so pedestrian as you're making them out to be.
Using encryption is quite easy -- it's the setup that's not. I used to have Apple Mail set up to use encrpytion via X.509 certificates, and it was dead simple -- if the other person had sent you a signed message previously, then there would be an 'encrypt' option when writing them a new message. Check it -- done. PGP in Apple Mail is almost as easy (although importing the keys is not as automated.)
It's the setup that's a real bitch, though. I don't know if the situation has gotten any easier, but when I did it, I had to go through a huge rigamorole with Thawte and two different web browsers and some fairly obscure Terminal commands to generate, download, save, and import the certificate. Definitely far beyond the capability of my parents.
However if you're willing to set it up for them, and renew the certificates every year or so (I think Thawte gives out free one-year personal certificates), it's not hard to use at all. On the receiving end, assuming the email is encrypted to you, it's no harder than receiving a regular email. Arguably even easier than ripping open a envelope (no chance of paper cuts!).
Not necessarily. Depending on your usage patterns, you might seem like any well-supported work-at-home tech businessperson these days. I work for a company that distributes it's PCs with email clients already set up for transparent encryption of all email (using X.509 certs), and automatically uses a VPN when you're not plugged into the office network. I've never looked at the setup but I wouldn't be surprised if the connecting to the mailserver was secured with SSL or something, too.
Sure, if you're a home user sending tons of stuff from your comcast.net email address that's encrypted, and especially if you're sending it with unencrypted headers to equally suspicious recipients, you might get red-flagged somewhere, but depending on how far you go to create the illusion you could easily fit right in. Lots of industries have adopted encrypted communications -- finance especially.
Everyone in my family uses a Mac and Adium as an AIM client; it supports automatic, transparent encrpytion that can be enabled by either party. Just by setting my client to prefer encryption if possible (and telling my family to click 'yes' when prompted), we're chatting with encrpytion. Although I'm sure it's not terribly common, it's not very hard either.
Encryption is definitely common enough that, by itself, it's not going to land you on any watch lists. Whatever else you're doing, or how you're using it, certainly could (and perhaps for good reason -- but that's a separate debate). But using PGP to write home to Mom from college isn't going to get you a bunk in Gitmo. Cuba isn't big enough.
Exactly. Keep talking, and pay no attention to the Acme Flower Delivery van sitting on the other side of the street ... :)
While you're at it, you might as well throw in heavy uses of "infidels" and "rise of the proletariat," just in case there aren't any watch lists you're not on already.
Even if you figure on one new iMac for each end of the conference, as a dedicated videoconferencing "appliance," the cost of an iChat system is very low for what you get. It's easy to set up and use, it works very well through firewalls and doesn't require a lot of tinkering with your network, doesn't need dedicated lines or anything, and isn't intimidating to use.
At the very least, anyone interested in videoconferencing should go down to an Apple store with a few friends when they're not busy and get a demonstration. (I'm sure they'd be happy to, especially if you told them that you're possibly interested in buying a handful of Macs.) If the resolution doesn't do it for you, then start considering dedicated options like the ones from Polycom.
The only "serious" videoconferencing system I've used is an ancient one that requires dedicated point-to-point ISDN connections. I've never been told the price but I've heard rumors of over $20k a unit, and the quality isn't particularly great. The only neat feature is that the cameras are remote-controllable and have pan and zoom, so you can close in on a presentation slide or just somebody's face.
Really what you need to consider is are you doing person-to-person conferencing (even with 3+ people, will the users be seated at a desk by themselves or in groups), or "conference room" style, where you want to link two or more rooms together with multiple people on each end. If you can do it by individuals, get an iMac and use iChat. Even if you don't use the Macs for anything else it'll be worth it. If you need to link whole rooms you're probably better to go with a professional solution. Just make sure it comes installed and maintained, so you don't have to fiddle with it. I know our sysadmin has grey hair from playing with our old beast.
Again, tell me why I should recommend we run our entire operation on Windows over an iSeries when we can afford the iSeries? What would justify such an enormous gamble?
Basically, in your situation, nothing. At least it doesn't sound like it.
Look at it this way: you're using AS/400 right now. So you get the company to upgrade to iSeries. Everyone is happy. Your boss, the '400 guy, likes it because it's familiar to him. You get some new training and get a new skill to put on your resume besides Windows stuff. If something does happen, you can always point fingers at Big Blue. It's the safe choice -- and it sounds like this is a system that's important enough to the business where you shouldn't be gambling.
Consider the alternatives: you push Windows. Your boss is unfamiliar with it, and is moving out of the company anyway, so a lot of the transitional responsibility gets dumped on you. While this might seem like a short term promotion, it's probably responsibility that you would have gotten anyway, and this way if anything goes wrong, you take the heat for it. Plus you'll have exectuives wandering into your office every other week when they hear about some Windows worm on MSNBC asking "hey, are our servers safe?" And you'll have to explain why they are, or aren't, or whatever. At least with an iSeries you can say "oh, yeah, that's a Windows vunerability. We don't run Windows."
It just seems like it would be a lot of needless risk on your part to push Windows. Plus, from a job-security standpoint, it's a lot better to be in an AS/400 shop than a Windows one, if you know both or if you know Win and they're willing to pay for training. Given that you already have Windows training, so you can leave if you want, but if they switched to Windows there'd always be the risk somewhere down the road that your position might be seen as easily replacable by two green-as-grass MCSEs. Of course that's a big assumption -- I don't know what your company is like, but it's something to consider if you plan on making a career of this place.
I can't think of a good reason why you'd want to switch to Windows boxes, unless there's something about the situation that we're just not getting from your question and previous posts. It seems like it would be a bad move both for the company and possibly a risk for you personally. Why take it?
It sounds to me like you answered your own question. If these consultants were pushing you to Windows for reasons you (seemingly quite easily) proved false, then it throws the rest of their conclusion into question as well.
... I think you'd be crazy to switch to Windows, on the basis of what sounds like a shady consulting firm's opinion who obviously hadn't considered all of the alternatives.
:) But if you think that's the option you want to go with, you definitely don't have to make the case to higher by yourself.
If you found the ERP app for the iSeries, and you think it will work well, AND you already have experience with the AS/400 platform
I'm also guessing that you probably have an existing relationship with IBM because of your legacy hardware, or maybe a dormant relationship that you could rekindle, and that might give you the resources you need to convince other people in your company. I'm told that their salespeople can give a very convincing presentation; in fact so much so that if you don't like them you probably don't want them near your execs...
I've run MS Word as a remote application, delivered using Citrix, over a VPN on a 768k ISDN line.
It's not particularly pleasant, but it's not unusable either. What gets really obnoxious is that when you have multiple windows open, the system tends to disconnect and stop updating the ones not in focus, so when you click back to them there's a significant lag while they reconnect and update.
That said, there are significant and obvious differences between remote-delivered applications using Citrix or remote-xwindows and a web-delivered application like what Google (I think) and IBM is experimenting with. I've never used the latter.
Ability to force iSync to do "Last name, first name" on Motorola v550s (and any other Motorola phone)
.Mac (which it would be great if they opened up) totally brainless computer-to-computer syncronization and backup. I've never seen anything on Windows or Linux that touches it for ease of use and seamlessness. Sure you can approximate the same thing in Linux with some well designed cron jobs and scripts involving rsync, but damned if Apple hasn't just Made It Work yet again. (For $99 a year.)
While we're nitpicking iSync issues, how about actually making the Bluetooth features of Address Book work with most phones? I've never gotten it to work with anything (all of my phones are Motorolas, my main one is a Razr V3).
I still think Apple has by far the best out-of-the-box implementation of Bluetooth syncronization, and combined with