I can buy a solid-core cable at Fry's, too. For probably a lot less than 1/10 the price. There's nothing that special about solid wire. As for stranded cable being better for LANs because it's more flexible, well, that would sure make it better for most people's AV setups, too. The reason stranded wire is better for desktop use (rather than LAN per se, since solid is fine for long straight runs) is that it often has to go around tight corners, just like you might find on a home theater setup. Stranded is better in those kinds of applications because solid is more likely to get metal fatigue from bending, and then break.
I agree with the other poster who says you're astroturfing for Denon (or you could just be dumb, I suppose). If you can run GigE over stranded wire and get as close to wire speed as TCP/IP and the quality of your NIC will allow, you're not going to get any noticeable benefit out of it. I'd be surprised if you could even get a *measurable* benefit. Even if you could, it would certainly be nothing you could hear. The whole claim is ridiculous in the context of digital audio. The whole point of digital is that it delivers a perfect copy to the other end. You can get just as good of a copy delivered to the other end over a decent quality regular Ethernet cable as you can over that thing. And because a regular cable doesn't have that stupid woven covering, it'll be a lot easier to clean.
Plus, of course, a regular cable gives you the benefit of being able to impress your friends because you weren't stupid enough to spend 500 bucks on a cable when a ten dollar cable will do the job just as well.
What's comfortable depends so much on the person that the best thing to do is take him chair shopping and have him pick the one he likes best. For me, the Aeron is tops. I like it better than anything, even the LEAP chair. But my wife finds Aerons totally uncomfortable and likes a regular secretary's "task chair" better than anything.
My old boss had a fake Aeron chair that was also pretty comfortable, although not as good as a real one.
Don't count on it. CP web sites have led to *more* commercial exploitation of children, not less. CP sites are more common than ever these days (I'm in the filtering business; can't share any data, but can attest that it's true). As far as it keeping them at home is concerned, I think that's a dubious assertion at best. There are two, maybe three kinds of pedophiles:
1) The most dangerous ones, who are actively seeking to prey on children and will do whatever it takes to succeed. This type typically has a lot of CP material and is an active predator.
2) The ones who just have a lot of CP material but aren't active predators, but would molest a child if they had a good enough target of opportunity. For at least some of the, the CP materials act as a kind of "gateway drug" that leads them to try it for real, either in their own community or perhaps on a trip to a country where child prostitution is common.
3) The ones who only look at CP and would never cross the line into actually doing it, whether out of fear of being caught, shame, or some minimal sense of ethics. I suspect there are not many of these, thus the "maybe three."
Look at it this way: did wanking to $GIRLY_MAGAZINE when you were young keep you from wanting to actually get laid? Or did it make you want to get laid even more? As an adult, does viewing pr0n when you're not actively getting laid make you content to view pr0n, or does it make you want to get some for real?
It's not that I disagree with your assessment that blocking the sites is likely to be ineffective in itself; indeed, there's something to be said for leaving a site up and compromising it so you can find out who's running it and who's using it, then make some arrests and if you get lucky, save some kids. I have to take issue with the assertion that wide availability of CP sites somehow keeps perverts from preying on actual children. That just doesn't fly, not to mention all of the hardest-core sickos who get involved in making the sites and either directly victimize more children to satisfy demand, or have others do so.
You probably support that fool Obama, so you're in no position to criticize anyone else. His answer to our economic problems is to raise taxes. Good luck with that, Barak. Let me know how it works out. Not that Hillary Clinton is any better; her answer to economic problems is also to raise taxes.
By "don't much care for him," I mean that Bush is a tool. He's a false conservative, but he's no liberal, either. The best I can say about him is that he sucks less than Obama or either of the Clintons, and that's damning with faint praise, indeed.
And now, for the past few months, we've been wondering which of the three stooges would be our next president: Clinton, McCain, or Obama. I'd hope you're feeling as disenfranchised as I am (Ron Paul could make it as a fourth stooge, although less of one than the others, except no one ever wondered if he'd be the next president), except you appear to be actually dumb enough to support one of them.
If you support Hillary instead of Obama, I apologize for calling you an Obama supporter. You're still dumb, though.
Yes, this is flamebait. Or a troll. Take you pick. I don't care. I have so much/. karma I could post a goatse link every day for the rest of my life and still have excellent karma. I also don't care about burning it.
A couple years ago I was crossing a parking lot heading for a store, and a decent-sized Ford SUV passed near me, and there was something strange about it that took me a second to put my finger on, then it hit me (what was strange about it, not the SUV ): it was completely silent.
Looking closer, I saw that it was a hybrid. I wonder if they still make those? If not, they'd better get them back in production.
Overall, I think these pronouncements of the SUV's demise are a bit premature. It may be fair to say that the SUV as we know it is dead - or at least dying - but there will be others. Hybrid SUVs. Maybe even purely electric ones that you plug in it night. Fuel-cell SUVs. Possibly factory-made bio-diesel SUVs. Heck, the military has been into multi-fuel diesel vehicles for decades, they're not hard to make. Auto makers whine a lot about how they can't meet newer, stricter emissions and fuel economy regulations, but they always seem to manage to do it. This time it's market forces rather than the government dictating an improvement in fuel economy for SUVs, and I'm sure they will rise to the challenge.
Being in the IT security industry, I can tell you that the ID theft problem is not being blown out of proportion. In fact, the media are probably under-reporting its actual severity. It doesn't surprise me that data breach laws haven't done anything about the problem, though. Having to tell me after a breach occurs does nothing to prevent the breach.
Additionally, a big part of the problem comes from financial institutionswith poor email hygiene practices. I routinely see email from banks that I could believe is deliberately crafted to set their customers up to be phished. It's not deliberate, but it so ill-conceived that it would be easy to believe it was malicious rather than just incompetent. I saw one last week that actually said "If you are concerned about the authenticity of this message, please click here." That was an actual account-related mail from an actual mid-sized US bank. I bullshit you not.
With the FIs routinely doing things like that, it's no wonder that people get phished all the time. The top-drawer phishers, for their part, are very good at what they do. They seem to be building databases of information of what they know about people. Known bank account and credit card numbers, social security number, etc. For some percentage of victims, I'm sure they know at least as much about their marks as the government does, and as much or more than the marks' financial institutions do. Then they send out the "work at home processing our accounts receivable" type spams to build their money mule networks to extract profits from the stolen identities and leave the mules holding the bag.
One of the areas of my work involves best practices for FIs, so I hope that it someday pays off in them not setting their customers up to be phished so much anymore.
I suspect you're not involved in the security industry. I am, so I'm going to comment on this. The FBI is interested, and the DoJ is interested, and they certainly successfully prosecute cases and work very hard at it. I've met some of the people working on the security problem from the LE end of things, and they are very dedicated and talented individuals who are passionate about catching and prosecuting the criminals.
However, they face a lot of problems, none of which can be laid at the feet of Bush, or of Clinton before him (and it was during Clinton's presidency that this became a problem; all it's done under Bush's presidency is become a larger problem, even though they are throwing more resources at the problem now than they did under Clinton). Problems they face:
1) The criminals involved in identity theft of profit are mostly not American, nor operating in the United States.
2) The criminals are commonly operating in eastern European countries where enforcement is not good, cooperation from their LE with ours could be much better, and from which extradition is difficult.
3) The problem is *so* large that if every FBI agent were put on cybercrime (regardless of whether they were qualified for it or not), there wouldn't be enough of them to cover all the bases.
I suspect you were just looking for an excuse to post a Bush troll (not that I really blame you - I'm a Republican and I don't much care care for the guy, either) and I'm probably just feeding a troll, but as someone a lot closer to the problem than you are, I couldn't let that misguided and completely wrong dig at the DoJ and FBI go by without debunking it.
There are plenty of FAs where a Bush troll would be totally on topic. This isn't one of them.
And you mods who modded that tripe insightful - even if what he said was true, there's nothing there that would make it over the bar of "insightful." You should be ashamed of yourselves. If not for how dumb you are, than for wasting a mod point on crap.
Well, illegal aliens *are* criminals (that word illegal means something) and using someone else's social security number as your own - for *any* reason - is a felony. So again, they're criminals. Perhaps a better way to put it might be "the majority of the criminals are illegal aliens" rather than stating that the criminals are in the minority.
About immigration, I don't think it's mostly our policies that are ineffective, it's the enforcement. We need a southern border that a greased cockroach would find it difficult to sneak across. However, there is one policy that needs to be fixed: we need to end no longer necessary and foolish policies like granting automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. In most countries, citizenship by birth requires that at least one of the parents be a citizen of that country. In the United States, I would relax that a little: to have citizenship by birth, at least one parent must be either a US citizen or a legal permanent resident, and the other parent must be in the United States legally. In other words, if either of parent is in the United States illegally, no citizenship by birth. To get citizenship in such a case, it should be required that either the legal parent get legal status, or the child petition for citizenship upon turning 18. If we got rid of "anchor babies" we'd solve one part of the illegal alien problem.
Now, before anyone tries to jump on me as being any of a xenophobe, a racist, or $EPITHET_FOR_PEOPLE_WHOSE_POLTIICAL_OPINIONS_YOU_DONT_LIKE, I spent a large part of my life living and working outside the United States, all in countries where people who spoke my language or looked like me were pretty rare, and whose immigration laws are like those I support for the United States. I found that to be totally fair.
Secondly, my wife is a legal immigrant to the United States, is a member of a racial/ethnic group that would certainly be affected by the policy and enforcement changes I support (she's one of those people who don't look like me or natively speak my language, too). She supports them, too. They are reasonable, and are the law in her country of citizenship.
Third, all of our kids were born outside the United States. One was born in a country of which neither of us has citizenship. I don't find it in anyway unreasonable or unfair that our child doesn't have citizenship in that country; after all, she was just born there. That doesn't entitle her to anything. Our kids all have dual-citizenship as citizens of the US and of my wife's country; they shouldn't be entitled to citizenship of a third country just for being born there.
I can go with irresponsible - being in the security industry myself, I regularly get a front-row view the approach to security that most financial institutions have, and I'm occasionally astonished when I see one that is actually doing most things right. Typically, they're totally a mess. Why does phishing work so well? Because most financial institutions routinely send emails that set their customers up to be phished. Just the other day, I saw a real email from a well-known bank that actually said "If you are concerned about the authenticity of this message, click here." I bullshit you not.
WRT being criminally responsible for transporting backups in plaintext on the public streets, well, that's not against the law, so no criminal liability. They might be civilly liable, but even that could be a stretch. I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find anything like an accepted industry best practices document that says you should encrypt your off-site backups. Or better still, but even less rare, a company internal policy that mandated encryption of backups.
As much as I'd like to see everyone encrypting their backups before sending them offsite, I'd really hate to see the government get involved here and legally mandate it. Whenever the government starts micromanaging policies, it always creates more problems than it solves (AKA, government isn't the answer; government is the problem). So, this should get hashed out in civil court, not criminal court. Let a few lost lawsuits give them financial incentive to encrypt backups before sending them off-site and you'll see it happen.
No kidding. In San Diego County, to which my family moved in 1971, the last new power plants were units 2 and 3 at San Onofre (nuclear plant) in the early eighties. The population of the county during that same 25 years has increased incredibly, and a lot San Diego's electricity is now imported.
Enron manipulated the heck out of the market and controlled energy in ways that led to power shortages, but they didn't go around making attacks on infrastructure. What is being discussed here is not fallout from greed, but actual malice.
Pretty much agreed, although in this case the bank is just not the accountable party. If I mail you something by $COURIER, and it never arrives, I'm not responsible for the loss, the courier is. Whether the loss was in fact theft, they truly lost it, or they mis-delivered it, the responsibility is completely theirs.
What the bank should be responsible for in a case like this is timely notification of the authorities, timely notification of the customers affected, and watching the affected accounts closely for fraud.
There is s lesson in this for everyone: if you're sending backups off-site, *encrypt them* - you just can't count on their not being lost or stolen.
Leaving the question of whether or not they can prove that on the table (I don't know if they can either, and those who do know probably aren't going to talk about that publicly), I'll go to the corporate espionage angle.
I don't know if you're familiar with how business works in a communist country, or have ever lived in one to see it up close, but I worked for a foreign-owned consulting company in a communist country in East Asia, and a great deal of the companies there are government corporations, in whole or in part. We were importing wide-area wireless networking equipment and re-selling it, but we couldn't import it directly. The actual importer had to be another company, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of... the army. One of our largest prospective customers was a wholly owned subsidiary of... the post office.
In short, to say it's regular old corporate espionage when you're talking about a communist country is pretty much the same as saying "those working on behalf of the government and military" because most of the corporations are in fact owned by the government or military.
Just to touch on the power outage issue, that's not the sort of thing corporate spies do. If there were induced power outages, whoever did it had an agenda other than corporate espionage. That doesn't mean it was necessarily China - there are a number of state or non-state entities that might want to do something like that - but it makes corporate espionage highly unlikely.
I hear you about the carrier not keeping up their end of the bargain. I canceled T-Mobile because their coverage went in the toilet and got stuck with cancelation fees even though my reason for canceling was that my T-Mobile phone had become about as useful as a brick.
Last year I moved from southern California to the SF area to take a new job. I'd been a T-Mobile customer for four years at that point. Their coverage in SoCal was top-notch and I'd never experienced a drop call in four years. Their customer service early on was really lousy, but that had improved a lot and become very good by 2007.
When I moved to the bay area, however, I found their coverage was absolutely crap. At work, not being able to make or receive a call, or getting a dropped connection, was commonplace. The strongest the signal ever got was two bars. Often it was less. My office is within sight of San Francisco Airport, so it's not like I'm out in BFE or something. At my house, it's even worse. Most of the time, I couldn't make or receive calls. There's only one room in the house where the phone would work most of the time, and even then, I usually had to stand in exactly the right place, facing just the right direction. If I tried moving around, I'd get a dropped call.
T-Mobile was unable or unwilling to help at all. The only response I could get from customer service was "Our coverage map shows we have good coverage at both your home and work locations." I've got news for you, T-Mobile: your coverage map is full of crap. When your map says coverage is great and your customer who actually lives and works in that area says it stinks, you'd better believe your customer.
I asked around at work, and everyone said T-Mobile coverage around the bay area was worthless. Everywhere, I found people who'd moved to the area and dropped T-Mobile for some other carrier. I complained to T-Mobile again and said I wanted to be released from the contract (I was about a year into a renewal) because they just had no usable coverage in my area. They refused, but I needed cell coverage so I went ahead and canceled a three-line family plan anyway. I escalated to manager level but they were steadfast in refusing to just let me walk. I considered suing them for non-performance in small claims court, but with two young kids and a new job, was just too busy.
After looking at all available carriers, I settled in Sprint and found their coverage to be very good a both work and home, and their customer service in the store was awesome. The guy even told me some good places to fish around here, and some to not waste my time on. As for the phone customer service, I've been a Sprint customer for about 15 months now and I've never had to call them. Three months ago I had a battery go bad on one of our phones. I went to the Sprint store where I bought the phone, they checked it out, and just gave me another battery. No charge. I was out in less than five minutes.
If anyone who works for Sprint is reading this, you rock. I've recommended you to several people as a result of my experienes.
If anyone from T-Mobile is reading this, well, it goes the other way. A *lot* of people have heard about what a bad experience I had with you. I will never do business with T-Mobile again. You had every chance to make it right and you just blew it. I tell this story to anyone who's interested. And now it's on Slashdot. Congratulations, T-Mobile.
Why, exactly, is that ridiculous? You can't call yourself a CCIE unless you actually are (well, you could, but you'd be open to getting sued by Cisco and by your clients as well), you can't call yourself and MCSE unless you actually are (well, you could, but you'd be open to getting sued by Microsoft and by your clients as well), you can't call yourself a Sun Certified Solaris admin unless you actually are (well, you could, but you get the idea...).
And you can't call yourself a Realtor unless you actually are, either. There is a difference between a Realtor and someone just licensed to practice real estate.
And of course, if other copier companies put "Xerox" on their copiers, they'd get sued, too. The fact that a brand has become so successful that many people informally but incorrectly use it to refer to anything in that generic class doesn't mean anything in that generic class should be allowed to call *itself* by that trademark.
The way they phrase it (I'm a real estate licensee, in addition to my primary gig in IT) is awkward/duh, but what they mean is that Realtor is a registered trademark of the NAR, and that only members may call themselves a Realtor.
What, you may ask, is the benefit of that? Basically, it comes down to your rights if an agent screws you over. If that agent is not a member of her/his $STATE Association of Realtors (and by extension, the NAR), you can file a complaint with your state's Real Estate Commissioner and/or go to court. If the agent with whom you have a dispute is a Realtor, you can also file a grievance with your $STATE Association of Realtors and go to their arbitration panel. Those arbitration panels are fair, and the Realtor Code of Ethics is far stricter than what is required by state laws (and at least here in California, those state laws are fairly strict themselves). If a Realtor has violated the Code of Ethics and/or state real estate laws and you have some proof, the Realtor could be suspended and/or expelled as a Realtor, and may also face license suspension and/or revocation.
While more than a few of those reading this may doubt it, the majority of real estate agents, and particularly Realtors, are honest people who seek to do the best job possible for their clients. However, if you do have a legitimate problem with an agent, whether it's through dishonesty or just incompetence (and they are out there; it was through dealing with an incompetent agent when my wife and I bought our first house that I decided to get my own license; after joining a brokerage, I was amazed to find that a large number of my colleagues, including my broker had themselves gone into real estate for that very reason), you have a better chance of redress if your agent is also a Realtor.
Disclosers/disclaimers [1]:
1) I am not a lawyer, and none of the forgoing is intended as, nor should be construed as, legal advice. If you need legal advice, see a lawyer.
2) I hold a real estate agent's license but am currently not affiliated with a broker and so may not practice real estate. None of the forgoing is intended as, nor should be construed as, real estate advice. It is solely my personal opinion, and as such, may be completely wrong. Don't rely on it in any way.
3) I am not a real estate broker, and none of the forgoing is intended as, nor should be construed as, real estate advice. It is solely my personal opinion, and as such, may be completely wrong. Don't rely on it in any way.
[1] Why all the legal stuff? Real estate is very litigious business. If you're a doctor and the likelihood of a malpractice suit bothers you, just be glad you're not a real estate agent.
Mine had a questions about who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned? While I happen to know the answers to those things, it has absolutely nothing to do with my IQ, nor would not knowing them. At this point, I'm only certain of one thing: my IQ is higher than that of anyone who thinks that's an IQ test.
I don't know how long you've been playing games/talking with gamers/hearing people say "download it" and hearing the game industry saying that "If people keep doing this, there will be no more games because piracy will kill them blah blah blah" for more years than most slashdotters have been alive (I'm old enough that many or most/.ers could be my kids, at least if I'd married young instead of when I was 39) and I've gotta tell you, I've been hearing that whine from $SOFTWARE_INDUSTRY_SEGMENT for a long time - it goes back at least as far as Bill Gates' infamous open letter - and no matter how much $SOFTWARE_INDUSTRY_SEGMENT beats that drum/whine that whine/beast that dead horse, they not only keep producing software and keep making money at it, they keep producing bigger, better, and more profitable software than ever before.
So, taking the long view of decades of hearing that crap, I just have to call BS on your entire argument.
Yes, I am a true capitalist. And the problems you describe are not caused by capitalism. In fact, they are the most prevalent and most severe in countries that are the least capitalist. In fact, the problems you mention are least common in the most capitalist countries. Which countries have the least poverty, best health care, and fewest environmental problems? That would be the advanced capitalist economies.
Some of the problems you mention are of dubious veracity (3 billion people living on less than $2 a day) - not to mention that in a lot of places, $2 goes a lot farther than you might think.
Others, such as racism, war, and environmental catastrophe, are not particularly linked to capitalism. Racism? It's existed longer than capitalism, probably has a shot at existing longer than capitalism, if something better than capitalism ever comes along, and is just as common in communist countries as it is anywhere else. I not only know a lot of people who have lived under communism and can attest to that, but I personally have lived under communism and can attest to that.
Environmental catastrophe? Wow, you ought to look around the former USSR a bit if you want a good look at environmental catastrophe. Severe environmental problems in advanced capitalist democracies are notable for their rarity.
Endless wars? Let's see. The number of communist countries in the world that haven't become so at the point of a gun is, umm, oh yeah - zero. The former Soviet Union pulled of all eastern Europe into communism at the point of a gun and kept it there by the same method. Every communist country in the world became so not by an election by by a minority with guns successfully waging an armed conflict to displace the corrupt government and replace it with one even more corrupt (if you don't believe that, go live in a communist country for a while and you'll find out). There is also the inconvenient truth that war has existed far longer than capitalism and has become far less common as capitalism has progressed. Advanced capitalist ecomomies have too much to lose to fight each other. European countries used to be pretty much constantly at war with each other, either cold or hot. After WW II and with the rise of interlocking advanced capitalist economies, they've finally gotten that out of their systems. The best cure for war is prosperity and capitalism delivers that. Other systems don't. The next best cure is democracy, and other systems are pretty bad at delivering that, too. Capitalism and democracy are not the same thing, but the capitalist economic system has proven itself the best at supporting the democratic political system.
Unchecked global warming? Who is doing the most to attempt to check it? The advanced capitalist economies? Who is doing the least? Everybody else, who is pretty much doing nothing. I'm from southern California, and I thought I knew what air pollution was (LA), until I lived in a communist country for a while. Wow, LA is great compared to that.
So, what, then, would you do without us capitalists? You'd only have as much food or clothing as you could grow and make yourself, little or no medical and dental care, and little or no transportation apart from your own feet. To the extent that communist systems provide those things, it is only be badly emulating capitalist systems, but capitalist systems provide them much better. Oh, and you'd still have the wars, racism, and environmental problems. Poverty tends to exacerbate all of those things, and communism does poverty really well.
You say the owners of the game didn't put in any productive labor.
I bet to differ. They paid for it. That is the most productive thing of all, because without someone paying for it - that is, taking a *risk* with their money and bearing the opportunity cost of things they might otherwise have done with that money - the game never would have happened. They also did overall management of the project. You can argue that running a project and making sure the money is spent where it needs to be spent is not productive labor, if you want. Good luck with that.
The guy was hired as an independent contractor (not even a regular employee) to produce a work for hire and he was paid $100,000 to do fairly easy work for a fairly short amount of time (it takes me and most people a lot longer to make $100K than he spent on his voice-overs). The idea that he wants royalties is as ludicrous as an artist selling a painting to a museum and then whining that she's not getting a percentage of the museum's gate. I'm not saying no one does that - I'm sure someone, somewhere, has at least tried it - but it's ridiculous.
"Without workers the bosses have nothing" - well, Mr. Marx, without people to invest in projects and provide employment, we workers have nothing, either. Don't look now, but you can count up the remaining Marxist countries in the world without running out of fingers, and in those few, the only ones that are making a go of it economically have introduced so many capitalist market reforms that the only point on which they still look Marxist is that they have powerful, central unelected governments that took power at the point of a gun and have no regard for freedom of speech, political freedom, basic human rights, or any of the other things we take for granted in this horrible capitalist system of ours.
Leninism/Marxism/Communism is a complete failure, didn't you get the memo?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh man, I was eating dinner when I read that :p You'll excuse me while I go off and starve myself to death now...
You live in a place where they make ham out of *cows*? I don't think I want to eat /anything/ there, lead or not.
I can buy a solid-core cable at Fry's, too. For probably a lot less than 1/10 the price. There's nothing that special about solid wire. As for stranded cable being better for LANs because it's more flexible, well, that would sure make it better for most people's AV setups, too. The reason stranded wire is better for desktop use (rather than LAN per se, since solid is fine for long straight runs) is that it often has to go around tight corners, just like you might find on a home theater setup. Stranded is better in those kinds of applications because solid is more likely to get metal fatigue from bending, and then break.
I agree with the other poster who says you're astroturfing for Denon (or you could just be dumb, I suppose). If you can run GigE over stranded wire and get as close to wire speed as TCP/IP and the quality of your NIC will allow, you're not going to get any noticeable benefit out of it. I'd be surprised if you could even get a *measurable* benefit. Even if you could, it would certainly be nothing you could hear. The whole claim is ridiculous in the context of digital audio. The whole point of digital is that it delivers a perfect copy to the other end. You can get just as good of a copy delivered to the other end over a decent quality regular Ethernet cable as you can over that thing. And because a regular cable doesn't have that stupid woven covering, it'll be a lot easier to clean.
Plus, of course, a regular cable gives you the benefit of being able to impress your friends because you weren't stupid enough to spend 500 bucks on a cable when a ten dollar cable will do the job just as well.
What's comfortable depends so much on the person that the best thing to do is take him chair shopping and have him pick the one he likes best. For me, the Aeron is tops. I like it better than anything, even the LEAP chair. But my wife finds Aerons totally uncomfortable and likes a regular secretary's "task chair" better than anything.
My old boss had a fake Aeron chair that was also pretty comfortable, although not as good as a real one.
Don't count on it. CP web sites have led to *more* commercial exploitation of children, not less. CP sites are more common than ever these days (I'm in the filtering business; can't share any data, but can attest that it's true). As far as it keeping them at home is concerned, I think that's a dubious assertion at best. There are two, maybe three kinds of pedophiles:
1) The most dangerous ones, who are actively seeking to prey on children and will do whatever it takes to succeed. This type typically has a lot of CP material and is an active predator.
2) The ones who just have a lot of CP material but aren't active predators, but would molest a child if they had a good enough target of opportunity. For at least some of the, the CP materials act as a kind of "gateway drug" that leads them to try it for real, either in their own community or perhaps on a trip to a country where child prostitution is common.
3) The ones who only look at CP and would never cross the line into actually doing it, whether out of fear of being caught, shame, or some minimal sense of ethics. I suspect there are not many of these, thus the "maybe three."
Look at it this way: did wanking to $GIRLY_MAGAZINE when you were young keep you from wanting to actually get laid? Or did it make you want to get laid even more? As an adult, does viewing pr0n when you're not actively getting laid make you content to view pr0n, or does it make you want to get some for real?
It's not that I disagree with your assessment that blocking the sites is likely to be ineffective in itself; indeed, there's something to be said for leaving a site up and compromising it so you can find out who's running it and who's using it, then make some arrests and if you get lucky, save some kids. I have to take issue with the assertion that wide availability of CP sites somehow keeps perverts from preying on actual children. That just doesn't fly, not to mention all of the hardest-core sickos who get involved in making the sites and either directly victimize more children to satisfy demand, or have others do so.
You probably support that fool Obama, so you're in no position to criticize anyone else. His answer to our economic problems is to raise taxes. Good luck with that, Barak. Let me know how it works out. Not that Hillary Clinton is any better; her answer to economic problems is also to raise taxes.
/. karma I could post a goatse link every day for the rest of my life and still have excellent karma. I also don't care about burning it.
By "don't much care for him," I mean that Bush is a tool. He's a false conservative, but he's no liberal, either. The best I can say about him is that he sucks less than Obama or either of the Clintons, and that's damning with faint praise, indeed.
And now, for the past few months, we've been wondering which of the three stooges would be our next president: Clinton, McCain, or Obama. I'd hope you're feeling as disenfranchised as I am (Ron Paul could make it as a fourth stooge, although less of one than the others, except no one ever wondered if he'd be the next president), except you appear to be actually dumb enough to support one of them.
If you support Hillary instead of Obama, I apologize for calling you an Obama supporter. You're still dumb, though.
Yes, this is flamebait. Or a troll. Take you pick. I don't care. I have so much
A couple years ago I was crossing a parking lot heading for a store, and a decent-sized Ford SUV passed near me, and there was something strange about it that took me a second to put my finger on, then it hit me (what was strange about it, not the SUV ): it was completely silent.
Looking closer, I saw that it was a hybrid. I wonder if they still make those? If not, they'd better get them back in production.
Overall, I think these pronouncements of the SUV's demise are a bit premature. It may be fair to say that the SUV as we know it is dead - or at least dying - but there will be others. Hybrid SUVs. Maybe even purely electric ones that you plug in it night. Fuel-cell SUVs. Possibly factory-made bio-diesel SUVs. Heck, the military has been into multi-fuel diesel vehicles for decades, they're not hard to make. Auto makers whine a lot about how they can't meet newer, stricter emissions and fuel economy regulations, but they always seem to manage to do it. This time it's market forces rather than the government dictating an improvement in fuel economy for SUVs, and I'm sure they will rise to the challenge.
Being in the IT security industry, I can tell you that the ID theft problem is not being blown out of proportion. In fact, the media are probably under-reporting its actual severity. It doesn't surprise me that data breach laws haven't done anything about the problem, though. Having to tell me after a breach occurs does nothing to prevent the breach.
Additionally, a big part of the problem comes from financial institutionswith poor email hygiene practices. I routinely see email from banks that I could believe is deliberately crafted to set their customers up to be phished. It's not deliberate, but it so ill-conceived that it would be easy to believe it was malicious rather than just incompetent. I saw one last week that actually said "If you are concerned about the authenticity of this message, please click here." That was an actual account-related mail from an actual mid-sized US bank. I bullshit you not.
With the FIs routinely doing things like that, it's no wonder that people get phished all the time. The top-drawer phishers, for their part, are very good at what they do. They seem to be building databases of information of what they know about people. Known bank account and credit card numbers, social security number, etc. For some percentage of victims, I'm sure they know at least as much about their marks as the government does, and as much or more than the marks' financial institutions do. Then they send out the "work at home processing our accounts receivable" type spams to build their money mule networks to extract profits from the stolen identities and leave the mules holding the bag.
One of the areas of my work involves best practices for FIs, so I hope that it someday pays off in them not setting their customers up to be phished so much anymore.
I just want to thank the moderator who correctly modded this as flamebait rather than troll.
Well, for some value of correctly. He *is* a stupid piece of shit, so I could actually go with +1 Insightful.
Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week.
And I find you to be a stupid piece of shit. I guess we're even.
I suspect you're not involved in the security industry. I am, so I'm going to comment on this. The FBI is interested, and the DoJ is interested, and they certainly successfully prosecute cases and work very hard at it. I've met some of the people working on the security problem from the LE end of things, and they are very dedicated and talented individuals who are passionate about catching and prosecuting the criminals.
However, they face a lot of problems, none of which can be laid at the feet of Bush, or of Clinton before him (and it was during Clinton's presidency that this became a problem; all it's done under Bush's presidency is become a larger problem, even though they are throwing more resources at the problem now than they did under Clinton). Problems they face:
1) The criminals involved in identity theft of profit are mostly not American, nor operating in the United States.
2) The criminals are commonly operating in eastern European countries where enforcement is not good, cooperation from their LE with ours could be much better, and from which extradition is difficult.
3) The problem is *so* large that if every FBI agent were put on cybercrime (regardless of whether they were qualified for it or not), there wouldn't be enough of them to cover all the bases.
I suspect you were just looking for an excuse to post a Bush troll (not that I really blame you - I'm a Republican and I don't much care care for the guy, either) and I'm probably just feeding a troll, but as someone a lot closer to the problem than you are, I couldn't let that misguided and completely wrong dig at the DoJ and FBI go by without debunking it.
There are plenty of FAs where a Bush troll would be totally on topic. This isn't one of them.
And you mods who modded that tripe insightful - even if what he said was true, there's nothing there that would make it over the bar of "insightful." You should be ashamed of yourselves. If not for how dumb you are, than for wasting a mod point on crap.
Well, illegal aliens *are* criminals (that word illegal means something) and using someone else's social security number as your own - for *any* reason - is a felony. So again, they're criminals. Perhaps a better way to put it might be "the majority of the criminals are illegal aliens" rather than stating that the criminals are in the minority.
About immigration, I don't think it's mostly our policies that are ineffective, it's the enforcement. We need a southern border that a greased cockroach would find it difficult to sneak across. However, there is one policy that needs to be fixed: we need to end no longer necessary and foolish policies like granting automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. In most countries, citizenship by birth requires that at least one of the parents be a citizen of that country. In the United States, I would relax that a little: to have citizenship by birth, at least one parent must be either a US citizen or a legal permanent resident, and the other parent must be in the United States legally. In other words, if either of parent is in the United States illegally, no citizenship by birth. To get citizenship in such a case, it should be required that either the legal parent get legal status, or the child petition for citizenship upon turning 18. If we got rid of "anchor babies" we'd solve one part of the illegal alien problem.
Now, before anyone tries to jump on me as being any of a xenophobe, a racist, or $EPITHET_FOR_PEOPLE_WHOSE_POLTIICAL_OPINIONS_YOU_DONT_LIKE, I spent a large part of my life living and working outside the United States, all in countries where people who spoke my language or looked like me were pretty rare, and whose immigration laws are like those I support for the United States. I found that to be totally fair.
Secondly, my wife is a legal immigrant to the United States, is a member of a racial/ethnic group that would certainly be affected by the policy and enforcement changes I support (she's one of those people who don't look like me or natively speak my language, too). She supports them, too. They are reasonable, and are the law in her country of citizenship.
Third, all of our kids were born outside the United States. One was born in a country of which neither of us has citizenship. I don't find it in anyway unreasonable or unfair that our child doesn't have citizenship in that country; after all, she was just born there. That doesn't entitle her to anything. Our kids all have dual-citizenship as citizens of the US and of my wife's country; they shouldn't be entitled to citizenship of a third country just for being born there.
I can go with irresponsible - being in the security industry myself, I regularly get a front-row view the approach to security that most financial institutions have, and I'm occasionally astonished when I see one that is actually doing most things right. Typically, they're totally a mess. Why does phishing work so well? Because most financial institutions routinely send emails that set their customers up to be phished. Just the other day, I saw a real email from a well-known bank that actually said "If you are concerned about the authenticity of this message, click here." I bullshit you not.
WRT being criminally responsible for transporting backups in plaintext on the public streets, well, that's not against the law, so no criminal liability. They might be civilly liable, but even that could be a stretch. I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find anything like an accepted industry best practices document that says you should encrypt your off-site backups. Or better still, but even less rare, a company internal policy that mandated encryption of backups.
As much as I'd like to see everyone encrypting their backups before sending them offsite, I'd really hate to see the government get involved here and legally mandate it. Whenever the government starts micromanaging policies, it always creates more problems than it solves (AKA, government isn't the answer; government is the problem). So, this should get hashed out in civil court, not criminal court. Let a few lost lawsuits give them financial incentive to encrypt backups before sending them off-site and you'll see it happen.
No kidding. In San Diego County, to which my family moved in 1971, the last new power plants were units 2 and 3 at San Onofre (nuclear plant) in the early eighties. The population of the county during that same 25 years has increased incredibly, and a lot San Diego's electricity is now imported.
Enron manipulated the heck out of the market and controlled energy in ways that led to power shortages, but they didn't go around making attacks on infrastructure. What is being discussed here is not fallout from greed, but actual malice.
Pretty much agreed, although in this case the bank is just not the accountable party. If I mail you something by $COURIER, and it never arrives, I'm not responsible for the loss, the courier is. Whether the loss was in fact theft, they truly lost it, or they mis-delivered it, the responsibility is completely theirs.
What the bank should be responsible for in a case like this is timely notification of the authorities, timely notification of the customers affected, and watching the affected accounts closely for fraud.
There is s lesson in this for everyone: if you're sending backups off-site, *encrypt them* - you just can't count on their not being lost or stolen.
Leaving the question of whether or not they can prove that on the table (I don't know if they can either, and those who do know probably aren't going to talk about that publicly), I'll go to the corporate espionage angle.
I don't know if you're familiar with how business works in a communist country, or have ever lived in one to see it up close, but I worked for a foreign-owned consulting company in a communist country in East Asia, and a great deal of the companies there are government corporations, in whole or in part. We were importing wide-area wireless networking equipment and re-selling it, but we couldn't import it directly. The actual importer had to be another company, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of... the army. One of our largest prospective customers was a wholly owned subsidiary of... the post office.
In short, to say it's regular old corporate espionage when you're talking about a communist country is pretty much the same as saying "those working on behalf of the government and military" because most of the corporations are in fact owned by the government or military.
Just to touch on the power outage issue, that's not the sort of thing corporate spies do. If there were induced power outages, whoever did it had an agenda other than corporate espionage. That doesn't mean it was necessarily China - there are a number of state or non-state entities that might want to do something like that - but it makes corporate espionage highly unlikely.
I hear you about the carrier not keeping up their end of the bargain. I canceled T-Mobile because their coverage went in the toilet and got stuck with cancelation fees even though my reason for canceling was that my T-Mobile phone had become about as useful as a brick.
Last year I moved from southern California to the SF area to take a new job. I'd been a T-Mobile customer for four years at that point. Their coverage in SoCal was top-notch and I'd never experienced a drop call in four years. Their customer service early on was really lousy, but that had improved a lot and become very good by 2007.
When I moved to the bay area, however, I found their coverage was absolutely crap. At work, not being able to make or receive a call, or getting a dropped connection, was commonplace. The strongest the signal ever got was two bars. Often it was less. My office is within sight of San Francisco Airport, so it's not like I'm out in BFE or something. At my house, it's even worse. Most of the time, I couldn't make or receive calls. There's only one room in the house where the phone would work most of the time, and even then, I usually had to stand in exactly the right place, facing just the right direction. If I tried moving around, I'd get a dropped call.
T-Mobile was unable or unwilling to help at all. The only response I could get from customer service was "Our coverage map shows we have good coverage at both your home and work locations." I've got news for you, T-Mobile: your coverage map is full of crap. When your map says coverage is great and your customer who actually lives and works in that area says it stinks, you'd better believe your customer.
I asked around at work, and everyone said T-Mobile coverage around the bay area was worthless. Everywhere, I found people who'd moved to the area and dropped T-Mobile for some other carrier. I complained to T-Mobile again and said I wanted to be released from the contract (I was about a year into a renewal) because they just had no usable coverage in my area. They refused, but I needed cell coverage so I went ahead and canceled a three-line family plan anyway. I escalated to manager level but they were steadfast in refusing to just let me walk. I considered suing them for non-performance in small claims court, but with two young kids and a new job, was just too busy.
After looking at all available carriers, I settled in Sprint and found their coverage to be very good a both work and home, and their customer service in the store was awesome. The guy even told me some good places to fish around here, and some to not waste my time on. As for the phone customer service, I've been a Sprint customer for about 15 months now and I've never had to call them. Three months ago I had a battery go bad on one of our phones. I went to the Sprint store where I bought the phone, they checked it out, and just gave me another battery. No charge. I was out in less than five minutes.
If anyone who works for Sprint is reading this, you rock. I've recommended you to several people as a result of my experienes.
If anyone from T-Mobile is reading this, well, it goes the other way. A *lot* of people have heard about what a bad experience I had with you. I will never do business with T-Mobile again. You had every chance to make it right and you just blew it. I tell this story to anyone who's interested. And now it's on Slashdot. Congratulations, T-Mobile.
Why, exactly, is that ridiculous? You can't call yourself a CCIE unless you actually are (well, you could, but you'd be open to getting sued by Cisco and by your clients as well), you can't call yourself and MCSE unless you actually are (well, you could, but you'd be open to getting sued by Microsoft and by your clients as well), you can't call yourself a Sun Certified Solaris admin unless you actually are (well, you could, but you get the idea...).
And you can't call yourself a Realtor unless you actually are, either. There is a difference between a Realtor and someone just licensed to practice real estate.
And of course, if other copier companies put "Xerox" on their copiers, they'd get sued, too. The fact that a brand has become so successful that
many people informally but incorrectly use it to refer to anything in that generic class doesn't mean anything in that generic class should be allowed to call *itself* by that trademark.
since when I put it in my pants, it tends ruin your pace
I don't think I want to know what kind of game you have that requires you to put the wiimote in your pants. Heck, this one is bad enough :p
And just why should a wiimote in your pants ruin my pace, anyway? I don't even know you...
The way they phrase it (I'm a real estate licensee, in addition to my primary gig in IT) is awkward/duh, but what they mean is that Realtor is a registered trademark of the NAR, and that only members may call themselves a Realtor.
What, you may ask, is the benefit of that? Basically, it comes down to your rights if an agent screws you over. If that agent is not a member of her/his $STATE Association of Realtors (and by extension, the NAR), you can file a complaint with your state's Real Estate Commissioner and/or go to court. If the agent with whom you have a dispute is a Realtor, you can also file a grievance with your $STATE Association of Realtors and go to their arbitration panel. Those arbitration panels are fair, and the Realtor Code of Ethics is far stricter than what is required by state laws (and at least here in California, those state laws are fairly strict themselves). If a Realtor has violated the Code of Ethics and/or state real estate laws and you have some proof, the Realtor could be suspended and/or expelled as a Realtor, and may also face license suspension and/or revocation.
While more than a few of those reading this may doubt it, the majority of real estate agents, and particularly Realtors, are honest people who seek to do the best job possible for their clients. However, if you do have a legitimate problem with an agent, whether it's through dishonesty or just incompetence (and they are out there; it was through dealing with an incompetent agent when my wife and I bought our first house that I decided to get my own license; after joining a brokerage, I was amazed to find that a large number of my colleagues, including my broker had themselves gone into real estate for that very reason), you have a better chance of redress if your agent is also a Realtor.
Disclosers/disclaimers [1]:
1) I am not a lawyer, and none of the forgoing is intended as, nor should be construed as, legal advice. If you need legal advice, see a lawyer.
2) I hold a real estate agent's license but am currently not affiliated with a broker and so may not practice real estate. None of the forgoing is intended as, nor should be construed as, real estate advice. It is solely my personal opinion, and as such, may be completely wrong. Don't rely on it in any way.
3) I am not a real estate broker, and none of the forgoing is intended as, nor should be construed as, real estate advice. It is solely my personal opinion, and as such, may be completely wrong. Don't rely on it in any way.
[1] Why all the legal stuff? Real estate is very litigious business. If you're a doctor and the likelihood of a malpractice suit bothers you, just be glad you're not a real estate agent.
Mine had a questions about who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned? While I happen to know the answers to those things, it has absolutely nothing to do with my IQ, nor would not knowing them. At this point, I'm only certain of one thing: my IQ is higher than that of anyone who thinks that's an IQ test.
I don't know how long you've been playing games/talking with gamers/hearing people say "download it" and hearing the game industry saying that "If people keep doing this, there will be no more games because piracy will kill them blah blah blah" for more years than most slashdotters have been alive (I'm old enough that many or most /.ers could be my kids, at least if I'd married young instead of when I was 39) and I've gotta tell you, I've been hearing that whine from $SOFTWARE_INDUSTRY_SEGMENT for a long time - it goes back at least as far as Bill Gates' infamous open letter - and no matter how much $SOFTWARE_INDUSTRY_SEGMENT beats that drum/whine that whine/beast that dead horse, they not only keep producing software and keep making money at it, they keep producing bigger, better, and more profitable software than ever before.
So, taking the long view of decades of hearing that crap, I just have to call BS on your entire argument.
Yes, I am a true capitalist. And the problems you describe are not caused by capitalism. In fact, they are the most prevalent and most severe in countries that are the least capitalist. In fact, the problems you mention are least common in the most capitalist countries. Which countries have the least poverty, best health care, and fewest environmental problems? That would be the advanced capitalist economies.
Some of the problems you mention are of dubious veracity (3 billion people living on less than $2 a day) - not to mention that in a lot of places, $2 goes a lot farther than you might think.
Others, such as racism, war, and environmental catastrophe, are not particularly linked to capitalism. Racism? It's existed longer than capitalism, probably has a shot at existing longer than capitalism, if something better than capitalism ever comes along, and is just as common in communist countries as it is anywhere else. I not only know a lot of people who have lived under communism and can attest to that, but I personally have lived under communism and can attest to that.
Environmental catastrophe? Wow, you ought to look around the former USSR a bit if you want a good look at environmental catastrophe. Severe environmental problems in advanced capitalist democracies are notable for their rarity.
Endless wars? Let's see. The number of communist countries in the world that haven't become so at the point of a gun is, umm, oh yeah - zero. The former Soviet Union pulled of all eastern Europe into communism at the point of a gun and kept it there by the same method. Every communist country in the world became so not by an election by by a minority with guns successfully waging an armed conflict to displace the corrupt government and replace it with one even more corrupt (if you don't believe that, go live in a communist country for a while and you'll find out). There is also the inconvenient truth that war has existed far longer than capitalism and has become far less common as capitalism has progressed. Advanced capitalist ecomomies have too much to lose to fight each other. European countries used to be pretty much constantly at war with each other, either cold or hot. After WW II and with the rise of interlocking advanced capitalist economies, they've finally gotten that out of their systems. The best cure for war is prosperity and capitalism delivers that. Other systems don't. The next best cure is democracy, and other systems are pretty bad at delivering that, too. Capitalism and democracy are not the same thing, but the capitalist economic system has proven itself the best at supporting the democratic political system.
Unchecked global warming? Who is doing the most to attempt to check it? The advanced capitalist economies? Who is doing the least? Everybody else, who is pretty much doing nothing. I'm from southern California, and I thought I knew what air pollution was (LA), until I lived in a communist country for a while. Wow, LA is great compared to that.
So, what, then, would you do without us capitalists? You'd only have as much food or clothing as you could grow and make yourself, little or no medical and dental care, and little or no transportation apart from your own feet. To the extent that communist systems provide those things, it is only be badly emulating capitalist systems, but capitalist systems provide them much better. Oh, and you'd still have the wars, racism, and environmental problems. Poverty tends to exacerbate all of those things, and communism does poverty really well.
You say the owners of the game didn't put in any productive labor.
I bet to differ. They paid for it. That is the most productive thing of all, because without someone paying for it - that is, taking a *risk* with their money and bearing the opportunity cost of things they might otherwise have done with that money - the game never would have happened. They also did overall management of the project. You can argue that running a project and making sure the money is spent where it needs to be spent is not productive labor, if you want. Good luck with that.
The guy was hired as an independent contractor (not even a regular employee) to produce a work for hire and he was paid $100,000 to do fairly easy work for a fairly short amount of time (it takes me and most people a lot longer to make $100K than he spent on his voice-overs). The idea that he wants royalties is as ludicrous as an artist selling a painting to a museum and then whining that she's not getting a percentage of the museum's gate. I'm not saying no one does that - I'm sure someone, somewhere, has at least tried it - but it's ridiculous.
"Without workers the bosses have nothing" - well, Mr. Marx, without people to invest in projects and provide employment, we workers have nothing, either. Don't look now, but you can count up the remaining Marxist countries in the world without running out of fingers, and in those few, the only ones that are making a go of it economically have introduced so many capitalist market reforms that the only point on which they still look Marxist is that they have powerful, central unelected governments that took power at the point of a gun and have no regard for freedom of speech, political freedom, basic human rights, or any of the other things we take for granted in this horrible capitalist system of ours.
Leninism/Marxism/Communism is a complete failure, didn't you get the memo?