I'll add one to this: multi-track programs. The earlier, the better. These are common in Japan at the high school level(at least; possibly before that?). At a high school where I taught, there was the A track, the B track, and the vocational track. A track was for kids who were intending to go to college. B track was for those who weren't (or couldn't handle the academic rigor of the A track, I suspect). Vocational track more or less a cosmetology program at the high school level. I didn't have any students from the V track, but I got the impression that they were ones who really had no further interest in academic study and wouldn't be there at all if they weren't also getting vocational training with their minimum-level high school classes.
Hand in hand with this, we need to stop teaching to the bottom level. Like you said, they're teaching to the lowest common denominator, or something near it. I currently have kids in first and second grade, and they tend to get bored (especially the older one) because their work is often not sufficiently challenging. The curriculum is pitched to the average, at best, and they aren't attending a low-level school, either; their school is rated a California Distinguished School and has the highest test scores in our district. My second grader could already read before she started kindergarten, and has been the best reader in her grade level ever year (how good is she? She read a Harry Potter book over the summer, and she's still six; in first grade, one day I found her reading aloud from a Canon printer manual in my home office, and she understood most of it). My first-grader isn't the best reader in the first grade, but she's probably in the top ten percent, and in the top quarter in math. My second grader is in the top 10% of her grade in math, in addition to being the best reader. Get the slower kids in the class onto a different track.Keeping them all grouped together helps no one.
I don't want them to skip a grade and would turn it down if offered - they were both born in the Fall and are among the youngest kids in their grades. Despite out-performing older kids academically, one year makes a big difference in maturity at that age. However, I wish there were some academically more rigorous track to put them on. We're going over our finances trying to figure out some way to get them into private school. We already live pretty frugally, so it doesn't look good. Selling our house and renting looks like the only way to free up that much money in our budget. If public schools had more options, this wouldn't be a concern.
I don't think lengthening school hours is the answer; I think doing more with the hours we have is the answer. That said, if they wanted to lengthen the school day, we wouldn't oppose it. I would be against lengthening the school year, however; in our district, the school year goes until mid-June and starts the week before Labor Day weekend (yeah, what genius came up with that great idea? Can't take a day off on the Friday before Labor Day and go somewhere b/c the kids are in school).
Lots more accountability from the school system would help, too. California schools have the highest percentage of the state budget they've ever had, still constantly complain that they don't have enough funding, and California's ranking compared to other states has plummeted at all levels of primary and secondary education since I was in school here (graduated high school in 1980). It's obvious that throwing money at the problem has not helped. Throwing some accountability and better methodology at the problem needs to be tried. I support all your ideas, especially vouchers that can be used at charter schools or the private school of one's choice. Competition breeds quality. This is well-known in business. I suspect it's perfectly well known by the educational establishment as well, but they fight it tooth and nail because it would also mean hard work, having to be better than someone in order to attract students, and the risk of closing if you fail. Without th
The trouble with that approach is that if there is an override, texting drivers will use the override. If there's not an override, then it severely inconveniences a lot of people who aren't driving. Some percentage of them will call the carrier and gripe, driving up support costs. If there is a carrier that doesn't do such a thing, some percentage of them will change carriers. I don't text myself and wouldn't care if my phone couldn't do SMS at all (sometimes even with it couldn't), but obviously, a lot of people care a lot about texting, so this idea would be problematic.
It's kind of like those nav system lockouts that cars have. It stops the *passenger* from operating the nav system above a certain (low) speed, and there's no override. A real pain in the ass, and an unnecessary one. The car already has a sensor in the seat to disable the passenger-side airbag when no one is sitting there; it couldn't be very hard to have a hook into the nav system to enable the passenger override when someone *is* sitting there. Honda, Mazda, and probably every other car maker, HTF can you miss something this easy?
WRT the bluetooth car, how does the phone differentiate between your car and any other bluetooth device?
As for the police knowing if you were texting, they can take your phone and check, right there at the scene or later during the investigation. A few months ago there was a commuter train crash here in California in which the dead train driver's phone was examined and he was found to have been texting while operating the train.
I'm not so sure a law would be ineffective, but it would require two things: a penalty expensive enough to hurt, and enforcement. In January, using a cell phone without a hands-free headest[1] became illegal in California, yet literally every day I see people driving down the road with a cell phone in hand, pressed to their ear. Usually, I notice because the driver just did something stupid and dangerous. I have seen people talking on phones like that with police cars practically right next to them, yet not be pulled over. If I were a traffic cop, I'd be all over that one. It'd really boost my ticket quota. I don't know why enforcement is so lax.
[1] I complete agree with you that hands-free != eyes-free, and it doesn't brain-free, either. There's a substantial body of evidence that hands-free headsets do little or nothing to reduce the danger of using a cell phone while driving. My solution is the only one known to work: I don't make calls while driving. Period. I don't answer calls while driving. Period. If I'm sitting at a light and I get a call important enough to take, I'll answer (my wife is the only one on that list), but get off the phone when traffic starts to move. If I really, really need to take the call, I'll ask the caller to hold on while I find a place to pull over.
And finally, technology that allows pepole to grossly endanger others *is* technology that caters to the millions of nimrods - because doing whatever they want to do, whenver and wherever they want to do it and without regard to propriety or anything else - is number one with seemingly most members of society today. I'm not for hobbling technology such that it becomes less useful, as with my nav system. I'm for beating people soundly with a clue-by-four to educate them, and having real enforcement to get the attention of those who cannot/will not b educated by any other means.
I work in email security (anti-phishing, in particular), and this has me sitting here saying "You've got to be f-ing kidding me! it doesn't actually surprise me all that much. I see banks do things all the time that are in themselves risky and that tend to encourage risky behavior. Things like:
-Sending account updates notices, etc., through ESPs, usually without either authorization via SPF or DKIM-signature. Nice, let's condition our customers to trust that email claiming to be from us, with no means of verification, is legit.
-URL redirects via third-party sites.
-Emailing statements via encrypted PDF. With instructions on what PII that you gave the bank when you opened your account forms the password. Not that encrypted PDFs present much of a challenge even without the instructions.
-Disallowing special characters in online banking passwords
-Sending temporary PIN and login password in plaintext email. The *same* plaintext email.
-"If you are concerned about the authenticity of this message, please click below or copy and paste the link below into your browser" Of course, any phish will also have a link that "confirms" the authenticity of the phish.
-Emailing customers because they haven't logged onto online banking in a while, and giving them handy hyperlinks to recover their userid or reset their password.
-And many more bad examples.
On the other hand, some institutions really get it. They never send a phone number or hyperlink in email, preferring to use phrases along the lines of "Contact us at the number on the back of your card, or go to our website" - with no hyperlink. As opposed to conditioning their customers to be phished (what most banks do), these institutions are conditioning their customers to never see phone numbers or URLs in emails from their bank. Most bank customers are not very savvy to either tech or crime and scams, which is why phishing continues to be so successful. However, almost anyone could understand the idea that "If an email purportedly from us contains a URL or phone number, it's not from us." Lowering the bar to this point could really make a dent in phishing. Sad that few institutions take this approach.
When you look at a lot of bank email, you can tell which banks have their security practices ran by the marketing department, and which ones have them run by the security department.
At my former employer, I had a company-issue Toshiba Tecra M4. Hard locks were common (OS was XP), especially in tablet mode for some reason. Docking station was a piece of junk. I wouldn't have one for personal use even if it was free.
While Windows 7 does appear to be possibly the best Windows Microsoft has ever done - and I am impressed by the fact that they knew they had to exceute well on it or get slaughtered in the marketplace, because Windows Vista was a disaster and Microsoft knows this regardless of what public face they put on it - I would not want to go back to work for Microsoft again. The culture is just too pathological. I now work for a Microsoft competitor (not Apple; I use a Mac but wouldn't want to work there; everything I've heard from people who do makes me think it would be eerily similar to working at Microsoft) and like my job, my boss, the work I do, the money I make - in short, everything - better than I liked Microsoft.
Could Microsoft offer me enough money to go back there? Maybe. If they put an absolutely ridiculous amount of money on the table, I might not be able to ignore it. I wouldn't enjoy it, but money talks and providing very well for one's family matters, too. So, yeah, they could. Would they? I doubt it. They made kind of a pass at me once, and I said I don't think you could offer what it would take to even get me to think about it. They asked how much that would be. I told them, and the answer was "You're right, I don't think we could offer that much." I didn't tell them that my number was only what it would take to get me to think about it, and the number it would take to get me to say "yes" is even larger.
That may sound greedy, but when I left Microsoft, I got a substantial raise at my new gig, and I've done well there since. The number I floated was one that I will reach anyway either next year or the year after, just from staying in this job, which is in a place that I like better than Redmond, at a company that I like better than Microsoft. So yeah, they could bribe me to go back, but they wouldn't. Heck, *I* even think they'd be nuts to offer me what it would take to get me to say yes:)
Well, no, that's wrong. They don't let you in the meeting with a gun. No amount of paperwork will get you into a presidential town hall meeting with a gun, unless that paperwork includes the appropirate law enforcement badge and screening by the Secret Service.
The individuals in question were outside on the sidewalk, and in the cases I read about, were carrying long guns. I don't know if they were unloaded, but I expect they probably were. It is not, at least in many states, illegal to carry a long gun (or even a handgun, as long as it's not concealed) in public.
The Democratic Party has also made liberal (no pun intended) use of free speech zones. Look it up.
As for fund raising events, they always consist primarily of supporters. Not many opposers will spend $1000 a plate or more just to get in and tell you how much you suck before being ejected.
Yes, I specifically mention public dissent. I also said they left tends to come for it later rather than sooner, and suggested anyone who doesn't believe me try living in a communist country. I have in fact lived in a communist country, and believe me, public dissent is about the fastest way to get yourself arrested. Much faster than any of the traditional methods, such as being a criminal. The place was, in fact, rife with street crime of various flavors, and the police were largely unable or uninterested in doing anything about it. But speak out against the government or its policies, and you could be sure of being hauled away.
When it comes to suppression of free speech and other aspects of a free society, the left cedes nothing to the right. The Junta in Myanmar. The rulers of the former USSR. The handful of communist countries still out there. Take your pick. In all of them, the extent to which free speech takes place is the extent to which they are not able to fully control it. They would if they could.
If you really believe that the left is less intrusive of civil liberties than the right, you just don't have enough experience with the left. Or you're willfully ignoring it. They just usually attack different civil liberties than (some of) the right attacks, but you can bet your bottom dollar that once they have their highest priorities taken care of, they'll go after the rest. One of the first to go will be - no surprise - freedom to dissent. That's neither particularly left nor right, governments of all stripes tend to dislike criticism and will suppress it if they can, by any means they can.
Don't believe any of that? Try living and working in a communist country for a while. It'll open your eyes.
I've been rather averse to spiders since I was bitten by a brown recluse. Got pretty sick, needed several injections of serious antibiotics. The pain was excruciating. Naturally, this happened right before finals week:p The only upside was that it happened on Friday before Memorial Day, so I had three days of recovery. I had to keep the foot elevated all the time, or just the weight/pressure of blood in my leg was unbearably painful.
After three days, I was able to drive, but couldn't walk (bite was near my shin) on it and had to use crutches for 2 or 3 days.
The NP at student health told me "I read literature all the time that says brown recluses don't live this far south and west, but I see several bites ever year. Yours is a classic brown recluse bite."
Do spray them before they bite you or one of your cats. The bite is incredibly painful in less than 24 hours. Don't know if it would kill a cat or not, but the suffering would be really bad.
No, but I know somebody who worked at a place like that, too.
The one in my example has these silly online "animals" that struck me as a knockoff of Pokemon, if you know who I mean. Surprisingly, they're still in business, so I may have misjudged their long term prospects, but I doubt I misjudged the value of working there. I'm sure my current gig is much better than that.
I've also interviewed 20 or 30 people in the last $timeframe and I could take either of those aproaches, too. While I haven't found 3/4 of the people to be incompetent or anything near it, most don't get hired, either. Our target candidates are basically the top 10% in the Silicon Valley area; maybe we're just a lot better at screening out the poor candidates well before the interview stage. I wouldn't dream of sticking somebody in a room with a test; it's not a good use of their time or mine, and it keeps both sides from using that time to size up the other.
Would I ask technical questions about the subject matter during an interview? Definitely. Answers can be done on the whiteboard, on my laptop, whatever they feel comfortable with. If people don't have what we want, it'll come out pretty quickly. It doesn't take a lot of time to evaluate technical competence. I spend most of the interview time evaluating the *person* and that person's fit with my team. Decent technical people aren't really *that* hard to find; finding people with the right personality fit takes a bit more work and is more important. We can weed out the bottom half just through resume readings and telephone screens, it's not hard. If you get to the interview stage, you should only be talking to serious candidates.
No, I wouldn't be willing to take a test, and I actually flat walked out on an interview in 2003 when I showed up and was told - by surprised - that I was going to be taking an exam. I was also then informed that the open position was for a junior position. When I expressed surprise at this, the HR flack's response was "Oh, didn't I mention that in my email?" She hadn't. Either of those would be sufficient for me to end the interview process, which I did.
Why would I refuse to take a test? Simple: if you're giving me a test, the usual reason is that I'm being interviewed by someone who does not possess the ability to discern whether I know what I'm doing/talking about or not. If that person is the hiring manager, then I certainly don't want to work there. Working for people who cannot identify competence or incompetence is not pleasant. If that person is not the hiring manager, I still don't want to work there: it shows they would waste my time by having me interview with such a person rather than with the hiring manager or any other person who can tell if I'm competent or not.
This is absolutely true. I used to work for a Very Large, Well-known, and Widely Reviled Software Company in the Pacific Northwest. One of the things the rep from Legal tells you during the onboarding process is to never, ever do patent searches. If there is a patent lawsuit over something you've done and discovery shows that you did a patent search, that's enough to change infringement from accidental to willful. It's even worse if your search uncovered the patent that you are later accused of violating. It was made very clear that patent searches, if they were done at all, were to be done only by those paid to do so (that is, Legal).
Sounds crazy and bass-ackwards, I know, but that's how the (broken) system works.
Yes, it means you should be able to say all that. The alternative is being able to say only that which the current $POWER thinks you should be allowed to say. That alternative is far, far worse than any of the examples you cite.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that just because you *can* say a thing, it doesn't mean you *should* say it. However, it's a long, long, long way from there to "you should be legally prohibited from saying it." If free speech is allowed so long as that speech toes the line of political correctness, it's not free at all. Sure, that means people can deny the holocaust. Advocate child molestation (NAMBLA, anyone?). Print Nazi and KKK literature. Promote radical Islam. Etc. Offend, insult, infuriate the whole of society. Yes, they should be able to do that. The test of free speech isn't the middle ground. The test of free speech is the corner cases, and if you don't allow those, you don't have free speech. There's a reason why the amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech is first; it's the most important. Without free speech and a free press, you don't have a free society. You don't have a democracy. You don't have a government "of the people, by the people, for the people." Sure, there's a good argument that we've gotten pretty far away from that already, and to a great extent, it walks hand in hand with restrictions (whether legal or social) on what sorts of speech should be allowed.
In most societies, people who say those sorts of things are going to have to stand the heat for it, so it's not for the faint of heart, but people should be legally able to state their beliefs, no matter what those beliefs are. You can't have partial freedom of speech; it's all or nothing.
Need for XP in a VM varies by what you do, I guess. The only time I ever use it is for setting up server-side rules for Exchange, which means almost never. Once in the last 6 months, maybe. I find Outlook to be the absolute most horrible MUA on the planet (Entourage, for all its faults, is still a far better MUA than Outlook) and I also have no need for Visio (w00t!). Docking station? Might be nice (IIRC there are some third party ones), but hardly essential, and it doesn't remove the need for a security lock, unless you have a docking station with a built-in one. Even then, it's possible (just harder) to steal it anyway.
I also have a desktop system running Kubuntu, and that's where I do most of my actual work. The MBP is used for email and working from remote locations. I'm considering taking a Thinkpad at my next refresh and putting Kubuntu on it, but OTOH, the Lenovo stinkpads don't make the same impression on me that the IBM ones did. I have several of those at home and love them. Lenovo, I'm not so sure about.
I work at the very big router company, and we've always been *allowed* to use Macs at work, and a very large percentage of our engineers do so, some of them having purchased one for work with their own money when they couldn't get approval. What has changed isn't that you can do it, but that a MacBook Pro is an official refresh option. Before, you had to get special approval (sign-off by your manager and somebody in finance, too) and it was a purchase, not a lease.
And yeah, iPhones are pretty popular around here, too. I have one, and so do most of the people that work around me.
This attack has been seen in the wild. About 10 years ago (IIRC), one of the first phishing attempts in Japan was done by sending CDs to the homes of potential victims. Phishing is still pretty rare in Japan (about 500K attempts per year, as of 2007), but this early attack was, IMO, one of the smartest. It worked on both technical and cultural/social levels, a brilliant social engineering attack.
Yes, I loathe these guys; I own the anti-phishing rule set at a major email security company and would like to see them jailed, but at the same time, I have to concede the best phishers show me a lot of ingenuity. If they weren't criminals, I'd want to hire them to work on my side of the fence.
Well, kind of. Mine is a regular 54G running standard firmware (all it's capable of), not a 54G-L.
My wireless connections at home are actually more reliable than my commercial-grade wireless connection at work, (not that the ones at work are bad, but I do have problems from time to time; at home, it's totally rock-solid. I've had to reboot the thing due to a problem with the connections only once, and I've been using it for years).
I have a 2003 vintage WRT54G running WPA2-Personal/AES and it has absolutely no stability issues. My cable connection is 15 mbps down and I routinely get as close to that wire speed as protocol overhead allows for. Yesterday, I downloaded an ISO image at 1.3 - 1.4 MB/sec sustained. Maybe the trouble is that you have a DL-514 instead of a WRT54G originally mentioned
After all, everybody knows that a device with as many blinkenlights as the WRT54G has to be better, right?:)
I think a lot of people would reverse that, saying that the surveillance itself is wrong, but that if you see a crime committed, then arresting the perp is right.
But that aside, the main point of TFA is that the surveillance just isn't effective. Most especially, that it isn't cost effective. Just as wars are won by troops on the ground, not air wars (no matter how much you bomb somebody, a bomber can't occupy territory), so crime isn't solved or prevented by huge numbers of CCTV cameras. Crime is prevented/solved by officers on the beat, doing good old-fashioned police work. Sure, they can and should use technology to assist with that work - laptop-equipped patrol cars, for example - but technology is not a substitute for police work. Trying to make it so is the mistaked of the CCTV system.
I think so, yes. I'm not sure if you're any more screwed than you are in the US, where bribery is rare but stuff still costs a lot. To take the most obvious cases, you're a lot more likely to be convicted if you're broke and have to use a public defender than if you can spend a million dollars or more on your defense if charged with a crime. And of course, paying for medical care.
If you don't have money, I think you're screwed more often than not, no matter where you are.
I used to live in Viet Nam, and things are pretty much the same way. I can't speak to the kickback issue personally, but WRT bribery, I can say that bribery fuels pretty much everything. Stopped by a traffic cop? A bribe will avoid a ticket.Not getting the service you need at a government office? A bribe will fix it.
Sadly, getting proper care for my mother-in-law when she was in the hospital also involved bribing the nurses, so nothing is perfect, but by and large, bribery smooths over a lot of bumps there.
More than 1 billion people in the US since SSNs were introduced? Not a chance. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935 and the first withholding (and benefit payments) started in 1937. Many of the original recipients of SSNs (including my parents, who were children at the time) are still alive.
According to the SSA FAQ (http://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html), numbers are not re-issued and about 415 million SSNs have been issued since the start of the system.
Some kind of adjustment to the numbering system will be required, but they estimate changes will not be needed for a few more generations.
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I'll add one to this: multi-track programs. The earlier, the better. These are common in Japan at the high school level(at least; possibly before that?). At a high school where I taught, there was the A track, the B track, and the vocational track. A track was for kids who were intending to go to college. B track was for those who weren't (or couldn't handle the academic rigor of the A track, I suspect). Vocational track more or less a cosmetology program at the high school level. I didn't have any students from the V track, but I got the impression that they were ones who really had no further interest in academic study and wouldn't be there at all if they weren't also getting vocational training with their minimum-level high school classes.
Hand in hand with this, we need to stop teaching to the bottom level. Like you said, they're teaching to the lowest common denominator, or something near it. I currently have kids in first and second grade, and they tend to get bored (especially the older one) because their work is often not sufficiently challenging. The curriculum is pitched to the average, at best, and they aren't attending a low-level school, either; their school is rated a California Distinguished School and has the highest test scores in our district. My second grader could already read before she started kindergarten, and has been the best reader in her grade level ever year (how good is she? She read a Harry Potter book over the summer, and she's still six; in first grade, one day I found her reading aloud from a Canon printer manual in my home office, and she understood most of it). My first-grader isn't the best reader in the first grade, but she's probably in the top ten percent, and in the top quarter in math. My second grader is in the top 10% of her grade in math, in addition to being the best reader. Get the slower kids in the class onto a different track.Keeping them all grouped together helps no one.
I don't want them to skip a grade and would turn it down if offered - they were both born in the Fall and are among the youngest kids in their grades. Despite out-performing older kids academically, one year makes a big difference in maturity at that age. However, I wish there were some academically more rigorous track to put them on. We're going over our finances trying to figure out some way to get them into private school. We already live pretty frugally, so it doesn't look good. Selling our house and renting looks like the only way to free up that much money in our budget. If public schools had more options, this wouldn't be a concern.
I don't think lengthening school hours is the answer; I think doing more with the hours we have is the answer. That said, if they wanted to lengthen the school day, we wouldn't oppose it. I would be against lengthening the school year, however; in our district, the school year goes until mid-June and starts the week before Labor Day weekend (yeah, what genius came up with that great idea? Can't take a day off on the Friday before Labor Day and go somewhere b/c the kids are in school).
Lots more accountability from the school system would help, too. California schools have the highest percentage of the state budget they've ever had, still constantly complain that they don't have enough funding, and California's ranking compared to other states has plummeted at all levels of primary and secondary education since I was in school here (graduated high school in 1980). It's obvious that throwing money at the problem has not helped. Throwing some accountability and better methodology at the problem needs to be tried. I support all your ideas, especially vouchers that can be used at charter schools or the private school of one's choice. Competition breeds quality. This is well-known in business. I suspect it's perfectly well known by the educational establishment as well, but they fight it tooth and nail because it would also mean hard work, having to be better than someone in order to attract students, and the risk of closing if you fail. Without th
The trouble with that approach is that if there is an override, texting drivers will use the override. If there's not an override, then it severely inconveniences a lot of people who aren't driving. Some percentage of them will call the carrier and gripe, driving up support costs. If there is a carrier that doesn't do such a thing, some percentage of them will change carriers. I don't text myself and wouldn't care if my phone couldn't do SMS at all (sometimes even with it couldn't), but obviously, a lot of people care a lot about texting, so this idea would be problematic.
It's kind of like those nav system lockouts that cars have. It stops the *passenger* from operating the nav system above a certain (low) speed, and there's no override. A real pain in the ass, and an unnecessary one. The car already has a sensor in the seat to disable the passenger-side airbag when no one is sitting there; it couldn't be very hard to have a hook into the nav system to enable the passenger override when someone *is* sitting there. Honda, Mazda, and probably every other car maker, HTF can you miss something this easy?
WRT the bluetooth car, how does the phone differentiate between your car and any other bluetooth device?
As for the police knowing if you were texting, they can take your phone and check, right there at the scene or later during the investigation. A few months ago there was a commuter train crash here in California in which the dead train driver's phone was examined and he was found to have been texting while operating the train.
I'm not so sure a law would be ineffective, but it would require two things: a penalty expensive enough to hurt, and enforcement. In January, using a cell phone without a hands-free headest[1] became illegal in California, yet literally every day I see people driving down the road with a cell phone in hand, pressed to their ear. Usually, I notice because the driver just did something stupid and dangerous. I have seen people talking on phones like that with police cars practically right next to them, yet not be pulled over. If I were a traffic cop, I'd be all over that one. It'd really boost my ticket quota. I don't know why enforcement is so lax.
[1] I complete agree with you that hands-free != eyes-free, and it doesn't brain-free, either. There's a substantial body of evidence that hands-free headsets do little or nothing to reduce the danger of using a cell phone while driving. My solution is the only one known to work: I don't make calls while driving. Period. I don't answer calls while driving. Period. If I'm sitting at a light and I get a call important enough to take, I'll answer (my wife is the only one on that list), but get off the phone when traffic starts to move. If I really, really need to take the call, I'll ask the caller to hold on while I find a place to pull over.
And finally, technology that allows pepole to grossly endanger others *is* technology that caters to the millions of nimrods - because doing whatever they want to do, whenver and wherever they want to do it and without regard to propriety or anything else - is number one with seemingly most members of society today. I'm not for hobbling technology such that it becomes less useful, as with my nav system. I'm for beating people soundly with a clue-by-four to educate them, and having real enforcement to get the attention of those who cannot/will not b educated by any other means.
I work in email security (anti-phishing, in particular), and this has me sitting here saying "You've got to be f-ing kidding me! it doesn't actually surprise me all that much. I see banks do things all the time that are in themselves risky and that tend to encourage risky behavior. Things like:
-Sending account updates notices, etc., through ESPs, usually without either authorization via SPF or DKIM-signature. Nice, let's condition our customers to trust that email claiming to be from us, with no means of verification, is legit.
-URL redirects via third-party sites.
-Emailing statements via encrypted PDF. With instructions on what PII that you gave the bank when you opened your account forms the password. Not that encrypted PDFs present much of a challenge even without the instructions.
-Disallowing special characters in online banking passwords
-Sending temporary PIN and login password in plaintext email. The *same* plaintext email.
-"If you are concerned about the authenticity of this message, please click below or copy and paste the link below into your browser" Of course, any phish will also have a link that "confirms" the authenticity of the phish.
-Emailing customers because they haven't logged onto online banking in a while, and giving them handy hyperlinks to recover their userid or reset their password.
-And many more bad examples.
On the other hand, some institutions really get it. They never send a phone number or hyperlink in email, preferring to use phrases along the lines of "Contact us at the number on the back of your card, or go to our website" - with no hyperlink. As opposed to conditioning their customers to be phished (what most banks do), these institutions are conditioning their customers to never see phone numbers or URLs in emails from their bank. Most bank customers are not very savvy to either tech or crime and scams, which is why phishing continues to be so successful. However, almost anyone could understand the idea that "If an email purportedly from us contains a URL or phone number, it's not from us." Lowering the bar to this point could really make a dent in phishing. Sad that few institutions take this approach.
When you look at a lot of bank email, you can tell which banks have their security practices ran by the marketing department, and which ones have them run by the security department.
At my former employer, I had a company-issue Toshiba Tecra M4. Hard locks were common (OS was XP), especially in tablet mode for some reason. Docking station was a piece of junk. I wouldn't have one for personal use even if it was free.
While Windows 7 does appear to be possibly the best Windows Microsoft has ever done - and I am impressed by the fact that they knew they had to exceute well on it or get slaughtered in the marketplace, because Windows Vista was a disaster and Microsoft knows this regardless of what public face they put on it - I would not want to go back to work for Microsoft again. The culture is just too pathological. I now work for a Microsoft competitor (not Apple; I use a Mac but wouldn't want to work there; everything I've heard from people who do makes me think it would be eerily similar to working at Microsoft) and like my job, my boss, the work I do, the money I make - in short, everything - better than I liked Microsoft.
Could Microsoft offer me enough money to go back there? Maybe. If they put an absolutely ridiculous amount of money on the table, I might not be able to ignore it. I wouldn't enjoy it, but money talks and providing very well for one's family matters, too. So, yeah, they could. Would they? I doubt it. They made kind of a pass at me once, and I said I don't think you could offer what it would take to even get me to think about it. They asked how much that would be. I told them, and the answer was "You're right, I don't think we could offer that much." I didn't tell them that my number was only what it would take to get me to think about it, and the number it would take to get me to say "yes" is even larger.
That may sound greedy, but when I left Microsoft, I got a substantial raise at my new gig, and I've done well there since. The number I floated was one that I will reach anyway either next year or the year after, just from staying in this job, which is in a place that I like better than Redmond, at a company that I like better than Microsoft. So yeah, they could bribe me to go back, but they wouldn't. Heck, *I* even think they'd be nuts to offer me what it would take to get me to say yes :)
Well, no, that's wrong. They don't let you in the meeting with a gun. No amount of paperwork will get you into a presidential town hall meeting with a gun, unless that paperwork includes the appropirate law enforcement badge and screening by the Secret Service.
The individuals in question were outside on the sidewalk, and in the cases I read about, were carrying long guns. I don't know if they were unloaded, but I expect they probably were. It is not, at least in many states, illegal to carry a long gun (or even a handgun, as long as it's not concealed) in public.
The Democratic Party has also made liberal (no pun intended) use of free speech zones. Look it up.
As for fund raising events, they always consist primarily of supporters. Not many opposers will spend $1000 a plate or more just to get in and tell you how much you suck before being ejected.
Yes, I specifically mention public dissent. I also said they left tends to come for it later rather than sooner, and suggested anyone who doesn't believe me try living in a communist country. I have in fact lived in a communist country, and believe me, public dissent is about the fastest way to get yourself arrested. Much faster than any of the traditional methods, such as being a criminal. The place was, in fact, rife with street crime of various flavors, and the police were largely unable or uninterested in doing anything about it. But speak out against the government or its policies, and you could be sure of being hauled away.
When it comes to suppression of free speech and other aspects of a free society, the left cedes nothing to the right. The Junta in Myanmar. The rulers of the former USSR. The handful of communist countries still out there. Take your pick. In all of them, the extent to which free speech takes place is the extent to which they are not able to fully control it. They would if they could.
If you really believe that the left is less intrusive of civil liberties than the right, you just don't have enough experience with the left. Or you're willfully ignoring it. They just usually attack different civil liberties than (some of) the right attacks, but you can bet your bottom dollar that once they have their highest priorities taken care of, they'll go after the rest. One of the first to go will be - no surprise - freedom to dissent. That's neither particularly left nor right, governments of all stripes tend to dislike criticism and will suppress it if they can, by any means they can.
Don't believe any of that? Try living and working in a communist country for a while. It'll open your eyes.
Something tells me you're not a musician.
Old Strads are popular for a reason. Old Strats are popular for a reason, too. Wouldn't trade my old one for a new one, thank you very much.
I've been rather averse to spiders since I was bitten by a brown recluse. Got pretty sick, needed several injections of serious antibiotics. The pain was excruciating. Naturally, this happened right before finals week :p The only upside was that it happened on Friday before Memorial Day, so I had three days of recovery. I had to keep the foot elevated all the time, or just the weight/pressure of blood in my leg was unbearably painful.
After three days, I was able to drive, but couldn't walk (bite was near my shin) on it and had to use crutches for 2 or 3 days.
The NP at student health told me "I read literature all the time that says brown recluses don't live this far south and west, but I see several bites ever year. Yours is a classic brown recluse bite."
Do spray them before they bite you or one of your cats. The bite is incredibly painful in less than 24 hours. Don't know if it would kill a cat or not, but the suffering would be really bad.
No, but I know somebody who worked at a place like that, too.
The one in my example has these silly online "animals" that struck me as a knockoff of Pokemon, if you know who I mean. Surprisingly, they're still in business, so I may have misjudged their long term prospects, but I doubt I misjudged the value of working there. I'm sure my current gig is much better than that.
I've also interviewed 20 or 30 people in the last $timeframe and I could take either of those aproaches, too. While I haven't found 3/4 of the people to be incompetent or anything near it, most don't get hired, either. Our target candidates are basically the top 10% in the Silicon Valley area; maybe we're just a lot better at screening out the poor candidates well before the interview stage. I wouldn't dream of sticking somebody in a room with a test; it's not a good use of their time or mine, and it keeps both sides from using that time to size up the other.
Would I ask technical questions about the subject matter during an interview? Definitely. Answers can be done on the whiteboard, on my laptop, whatever they feel comfortable with. If people don't have what we want, it'll come out pretty quickly. It doesn't take a lot of time to evaluate technical competence. I spend most of the interview time evaluating the *person* and that person's fit with my team. Decent technical people aren't really *that* hard to find; finding people with the right personality fit takes a bit more work and is more important. We can weed out the bottom half just through resume readings and telephone screens, it's not hard. If you get to the interview stage, you should only be talking to serious candidates.
No, I wouldn't be willing to take a test, and I actually flat walked out on an interview in 2003 when I showed up and was told - by surprised - that I was going to be taking an exam. I was also then informed that the open position was for a junior position. When I expressed surprise at this, the HR flack's response was "Oh, didn't I mention that in my email?" She hadn't. Either of those would be sufficient for me to end the interview process, which I did.
Why would I refuse to take a test? Simple: if you're giving me a test, the usual reason is that I'm being interviewed by someone who does not possess the ability to discern whether I know what I'm doing/talking about or not. If that person is the hiring manager, then I certainly don't want to work there. Working for people who cannot identify competence or incompetence is not pleasant. If that person is not the hiring manager, I still don't want to work there: it shows they would waste my time by having me interview with such a person rather than with the hiring manager or any other person who can tell if I'm competent or not.
3) Is it the same for straight women talking to hot guys?
This is absolutely true. I used to work for a Very Large, Well-known, and Widely Reviled Software Company in the Pacific Northwest. One of the things the rep from Legal tells you during the onboarding process is to never, ever do patent searches. If there is a patent lawsuit over something you've done and discovery shows that you did a patent search, that's enough to change infringement from accidental to willful. It's even worse if your search uncovered the patent that you are later accused of violating. It was made very clear that patent searches, if they were done at all, were to be done only by those paid to do so (that is, Legal).
Sounds crazy and bass-ackwards, I know, but that's how the (broken) system works.
Yes, it means you should be able to say all that. The alternative is being able to say only that which the current $POWER thinks you should be allowed to say. That alternative is far, far worse than any of the examples you cite.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that just because you *can* say a thing, it doesn't mean you *should* say it. However, it's a long, long, long way from there to "you should be legally prohibited from saying it." If free speech is allowed so long as that speech toes the line of political correctness, it's not free at all. Sure, that means people can deny the holocaust. Advocate child molestation (NAMBLA, anyone?). Print Nazi and KKK literature. Promote radical Islam. Etc. Offend, insult, infuriate the whole of society. Yes, they should be able to do that. The test of free speech isn't the middle ground. The test of free speech is the corner cases, and if you don't allow those, you don't have free speech. There's a reason why the amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech is first; it's the most important. Without free speech and a free press, you don't have a free society. You don't have a democracy. You don't have a government "of the people, by the people, for the people." Sure, there's a good argument that we've gotten pretty far away from that already, and to a great extent, it walks hand in hand with restrictions (whether legal or social) on what sorts of speech should be allowed.
In most societies, people who say those sorts of things are going to have to stand the heat for it, so it's not for the faint of heart, but people should be legally able to state their beliefs, no matter what those beliefs are. You can't have partial freedom of speech; it's all or nothing.
Need for XP in a VM varies by what you do, I guess. The only time I ever use it is for setting up server-side rules for Exchange, which means almost never. Once in the last 6 months, maybe. I find Outlook to be the absolute most horrible MUA on the planet (Entourage, for all its faults, is still a far better MUA than Outlook) and I also have no need for Visio (w00t!). Docking station? Might be nice (IIRC there are some third party ones), but hardly essential, and it doesn't remove the need for a security lock, unless you have a docking station with a built-in one. Even then, it's possible (just harder) to steal it anyway.
I also have a desktop system running Kubuntu, and that's where I do most of my actual work. The MBP is used for email and working from remote locations. I'm considering taking a Thinkpad at my next refresh and putting Kubuntu on it, but OTOH, the Lenovo stinkpads don't make the same impression on me that the IBM ones did. I have several of those at home and love them. Lenovo, I'm not so sure about.
I work at the very big router company, and we've always been *allowed* to use Macs at work, and a very large percentage of our engineers do so, some of them having purchased one for work with their own money when they couldn't get approval. What has changed isn't that you can do it, but that a MacBook Pro is an official refresh option. Before, you had to get special approval (sign-off by your manager and somebody in finance, too) and it was a purchase, not a lease.
And yeah, iPhones are pretty popular around here, too. I have one, and so do most of the people that work around me.
This attack has been seen in the wild. About 10 years ago (IIRC), one of the first phishing attempts in Japan was done by sending CDs to the homes of potential victims. Phishing is still pretty rare in Japan (about 500K attempts per year, as of 2007), but this early attack was, IMO, one of the smartest. It worked on both technical and cultural/social levels, a brilliant social engineering attack.
Yes, I loathe these guys; I own the anti-phishing rule set at a major email security company and would like to see them jailed, but at the same time, I have to concede the best phishers show me a lot of ingenuity. If they weren't criminals, I'd want to hire them to work on my side of the fence.
Well, kind of. Mine is a regular 54G running standard firmware (all it's capable of), not a 54G-L.
My wireless connections at home are actually more reliable than my commercial-grade wireless connection at work, (not that the ones at work are bad, but I do have problems from time to time; at home, it's totally rock-solid. I've had to reboot the thing due to a problem with the connections only once, and I've been using it for years).
I have a 2003 vintage WRT54G running WPA2-Personal/AES and it has absolutely no stability issues. My cable connection is 15 mbps down and I routinely get as close to that wire speed as protocol overhead allows for. Yesterday, I downloaded an ISO image at 1.3 - 1.4 MB/sec sustained. Maybe the trouble is that you have a DL-514 instead of a WRT54G originally mentioned
After all, everybody knows that a device with as many blinkenlights as the WRT54G has to be better, right? :)
I think a lot of people would reverse that, saying that the surveillance itself is wrong, but that if you see a crime committed, then arresting the perp is right.
But that aside, the main point of TFA is that the surveillance just isn't effective. Most especially, that it isn't cost effective. Just as wars are won by troops on the ground, not air wars (no matter how much you bomb somebody, a bomber can't occupy territory), so crime isn't solved or prevented by huge numbers of CCTV cameras. Crime is prevented/solved by officers on the beat, doing good old-fashioned police work. Sure, they can and should use technology to assist with that work - laptop-equipped patrol cars, for example - but technology is not a substitute for police work. Trying to make it so is the mistaked of the CCTV system.
I think so, yes. I'm not sure if you're any more screwed than you are in the US, where bribery is rare but stuff still costs a lot. To take the most obvious cases, you're a lot more likely to be convicted if you're broke and have to use a public defender than if you can spend a million dollars or more on your defense if charged with a crime. And of course, paying for medical care.
If you don't have money, I think you're screwed more often than not, no matter where you are.
I used to live in Viet Nam, and things are pretty much the same way. I can't speak to the kickback issue personally, but WRT bribery, I can say that bribery fuels pretty much everything. Stopped by a traffic cop? A bribe will avoid a ticket.Not getting the service you need at a government office? A bribe will fix it.
Sadly, getting proper care for my mother-in-law when she was in the hospital also involved bribing the nurses, so nothing is perfect, but by and large, bribery smooths over a lot of bumps there.
Nah, somebody's gonna get a bunch of them, repurpose the hardware for Pr0n and put them back on the shelf. Hilarity ensues.
More than 1 billion people in the US since SSNs were introduced? Not a chance. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935 and the first withholding (and benefit payments) started in 1937. Many of the original recipients of SSNs (including my parents, who were children at the time) are still alive.
According to the SSA FAQ (http://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html), numbers are not re-issued and about 415 million SSNs have been issued since the start of the system.
Some kind of adjustment to the numbering system will be required, but they estimate changes will not be needed for a few more generations.