My phone (and all my other electronic widgets) have an 'Off' switch.
I'm not afraid to use it.
If I'm paranoid enough to believe the switch is not really an 'Off' for everything, it is a simple matter to remove the battery. No power, no signal. Period.
If you're completely unhappy at your current job, the size of your paycheck is practically irrelevant. This is because said lack of happiness is going to cause you to perform at a much lower level than you might normally. Eventually, this will become a vicious circle, and I suspect you will find yourself caught up in the next batch of layoffs anyway.
I find it a little eerie that what you're describing is almost exactly what happened to me. I started out fixing Teletype machines, many moons ago. I moved on from there to doing telephone work, got bored with it, then moved into fixing land/mobile 2-way radios.
I went from that into computers, added networking to the mix, then finally got burned out with IT as a career and went back to my first and foremost interest (radios, RF, etc.) when I landed in a nice civil-service slot. Been there ever since, and I believe I've actually found the place I'll retire with.
My points are that there's nothing at all wrong with changing careers, and that you really do need to find an environment you can live with. For my part, I had no idea that I had the necessary mindset for civil service, or I would have done it years ago.
The difference for me is that, for the most part, the private sector is no longer about making the best product or service, and letting said product or service simply sell itself. Hasn't been for decades, ever since we sold off most of our manufacturing infrastructure and skill base to China, et al. All most places seem to be interested in is the worship of money, and finding new ways to get and accumulate it.
I don't think that way, I don't work that way. I guess the simple way to say it is that the private sector and I just don't get along.
Civil service, on the other wing, has proven to be a place where I get to use ALL my skills, not just a fraction of them. It has also proven to be a place where I actually feel like I'm making a real difference, every single day.
That's important, no matter where you are.
So, in essence -- find what you're happy with, find a spot where you can actually look forward to coming in, and you've got it made. Don't worry too much about pay changes. I took a pay cut when I first moved from Boeing to WA State government service -- and then a year later I was making more than I ever had at Boeing!
Oh, BTW... Blue Feather Tech, as referenced in my signature line, is just a side business for me, not my day job.
The best possible way that I see to avoid problems such as potential keyloggers is simple enough: Avoid using public terminals.
Carry your own laptop. Take advantage of Lord only knows how many free WiFi points are available. If you're self-hosted (as in retrieving from your own mail server), set up an encrypted VPN link.
Public terminals consistently trade security risks for convenience. Remember that the first line of computing security is the computer user. That being the case, ask yourself if it's really that wise to use a potentially insecure terminal for anything that you feel is sensitive.
You can have the latest, most sophisticated (and probably expensive) security hardware and software imaginable, use military-grade encryption on every single file, and post armed guards at the entrance to your data center.
But guess what? NONE of the above will make the slightest bit of difference as long as there are still people who write their passwords on sticky-notes without a second thought, and paste them to the front of their monitor, the inside of their desk drawer, or wherever.
None of the above will help as long as you still have people who are gullible enough to fall for phishing E-mails, and give up sensitive personal data, passwords and SSN's included, as long as the mail looks remotely legitimate.
Most especially: None of the above will help until each and every person that uses a computer starts getting a little bit paranoid and thinking "Is what I'm doing right now sensitive? Could it be compromised? If so, how? How would I do it if I were the attacker?"
Whatever else you may think of Bruce Schneier(sp?), he's got one thing absolutely spot-on: The first and most vulnerable point of attack in ANY computer setup, networked or not, is the person making use of that computer and/or network. If there's more than one person involved (and there almost certainly is these days), there are multiple vulnerabilities available to any would-be attacker.
Personally, I think that a world of good could be done by teaching people to read at least the essential parts of the headers in any E-mail, and showing them how to spot a fraud. I think if even 5% of the computer-using population would bother to check the headers inside any E-mail asking for personal data, it'd probably put a huge dent in phishing.
Heck... Teaching people to be just a little bit paranoid would probably do more good than anything else...
Consider: No matter how much marketing you have, it is ultimately up to the end user of a product to decide if they've gotten the value they expected to get. If said user finds that the closed-source product they paid (possibly) big bucks for isn't worth the media it was recorded on, they're going to cut their losses and try something else.
Alternatively, there are many small businesses that simply can't afford the kinds of prices that closed-source vendors often charge. I know this for a fact, because I'm one of those tiny businesses! If not for FreeBSD,Apache, and Postfix, to say nothing of the surplus hardware market, I would never have been able to get my Internet presence off the ground.
It's not just Freeware, either. How many of us have found low-cost Shareware products to be incredibly useful for the stuff we do, when comparable commercial products would have nearly required a second mortgage? Hex Workshop is, I think, a great example.
If that $60 billion figure is accurate, the commercial software vendors have no one but themselves to blame. Oh, there are some good values Out There, yes, but I think they've been largely drowned out by the flood of questionable products that are turned out with far more marketing than quality engineering.
The heck with (X)tra (P)ain. I'm not letting loose from my copies of 2000/SP4/Final Rollup, and 2000 Server, until they pry them both from my cold, dead fingers!
My systems do everything I expect of them, and they do it WELL. What more can I ask? Why should I "upgrade" what's not broken?
"Big light slated to appear in eastern sky. Sonic booms scare minority groups in Sector B. And there's hamburger all over the highway in Mystic, Connecticut..."
And if someone who's actually IN Mystic can confirm that, I'm sure we'd all be grateful.;-)
Ahhh... no, not quite. You're referring to the two hot legs of a typical household AC power feed as if they were DC, which is a dangerous misconception at best.
There is no "+120" and "-120" in house mains. What you have are two 'hot' phases with the AC on them separated in phase angle (theta) by about 90 degrees (you'd need to look at them with a power analyzer or ground-isolated oscilloscope to see this), and a neutral.
Typically, if I recall correctly, the two hot phases are connected to the outside ends of a transformer winding at the pole end, and the neutral is the center tap of that same transformer.
Neutral is, typically, grounded at the entrance panel.
So: My take on this issue is that it is indeed bad design on Dell's part, most likely the result of trying to shave one too many pennies off manufacturing costs. I'm surprised the thing even passed UL approval.
Dell is probably using those extra pennies they saved for their plant's fusebox.;-)
Seems to me that doing this sort of thing could, assuming minimal checking of the results, open one's code up to widespread abuse in the form of 'back doors' or 'logic bombs' that anyone not pleased with the idea (say, programmers unhappy with the entire outsourcing/offshoring pattern) could manage to slip in.
As others have (accurately) pointed out, this is also little more than a way to be lazy about doing a job, and not caring if it's done right as long as your company gets paid for it. What benefit do those actually writing your code get for their efforts?
There are right ways and wrong ways to go about doing any task. This strikes me as just plain wrong. I certainly wouldn't want to do any project I come up with this way. It would be like Boeing throwing open their design process to the world, and saying "OK, you design our next plane for us, but we get to use any idea you come up with and not pay you." Ludicrous, hmmm?
"...In addition, with the Internet you can basically walk to your computer and email the person you just talked to halfway around the world..."
Uh huh. Sure. And what if, for whatever reason, you cannot get to an Internet connection? Or what if you can, and the 'net is inaccessible or down at the recipient's end?
You obviously had your license at one time. Perhaps you're still active. Have you forgotten the single biggest advantage that the Amateur Radio service has over other communication methods, including the Internet? Specifically, that we can operate easily without ANY infrastructure. No phone lines? No problem. No Internet? No problem. Even in cases of no utility power? No problem. That's what batteries and even human-operated generators are for.
I've been licensed for 30 years, and I'm just now getting to a point where I can get HF capability back again. I wouldn't be burning time and money doing so if I thought that "Ham's day is over" or anything silly like that.
Like Life itself, amateur radio is a mirror. You get back out of it exactly what you put into it. Perhaps, if you're no longer happy with what you're getting back from it, you should seek another hobby...?
73 de KC7GR (formerly WD6EOS, original license December 1977).
And I will add that a few of my studio-pressed and paid-for DVDs are beginning to show signs of deterioration. I'm not paying for another copy when I can recover the original disc's file, repair it in the process, and re-burn it (as I should be able to do under Fair Use) to a replacement disc.
"...specially modified AT&T cellular phone towers which, in addition to their normal communications duties, will relay an aircraft's position to air traffic controllers and other aircraft in real time."
Am I the only one this rings a big alarm bell with? Anyone who's been in an earthquake or similar disaster knows how quickly the cellular network becomes utterly useless, either due to being overloaded with "We just had a quake!" traffic or equipment failure. Witness the Nisqually quake of 2001, or the Loma Prieta quake in the Bay Area in 1989.
Within five minutes after those events, the cellular phone networks in the area were completely unusable. I know, because I lived through both events. The only things that kept working were (in most cases) POTS landlines (and even then you sometimes had to wait about a minute for a dial tone), public-safety two-way radio systems that did not depend on the cell network, and ham radio repeaters.
I don't care how "specially modified" these towers will be. The idea of entrusting something as critical as air traffic control data to something that's part of the cellular network makes my skin crawl.
I'm a little surprised no one else has asked this yet.
We all know what a great job you did with MST3K, what the show was about, etc. HOWEVER -- I'm more curious about you!;-) What do you do when you're not lampooning bad movies? What do you do in the way of hobbies or relaxation? Favorite books? Heck, for that matter, what do you LIKE to see in terms of movies or animation?
And, perhaps most interestingly, are there any particular movies that you wouldn't dare lampoon?
Only you can decide what's right for your needs. With that said, here's what I did. Shopped around on the used/surplus arena for a nice Compaq ProLiant server (in my case, a DL380 G2 with a gig of RAM and twin PIII 1.4giggle CPUs). Loaded it up with 18GB drives. and made a RAID-5 array out of it.
That took care of a reliable data dumpster. Now, for backup, I shopped around some more and found a nice ADIC tape library with three DLT8000 drives. Paid about $210 for it all together. That, coupled with another $300 or so for the server and some odd change thrown in for tapes and mounting hardware, and I had a nice data stash for around $700 all told, pretty close to your figure. Not bad for enterprise-class hardware.
Granted, the server's a bit noisy. I eventually relocated it to the garage, and remoted the tape library via fiber channel SCSI. Paid less than $100 for the hardware to do it, again on the surplus market.
You can do some pretty amazing things with the right bit of scrounging.
Other posters have accurately pointed out that this is nothing more than political correctness taken to extremes, and that it is only one symptom of a much larger problem (paranoia, overprotecting kids, etc.)
I have discovered that situations like this are far from limited to Sesame Street. In a recent example, I found (much to my disgust) that Qubo, the USA distributor for WETA Workshop's series Jane and the Dragon, is censoring what they likely consider to be "lowbrow" humor from the show (belches, farts, etc.) I only found this out when I compared a snippet from an uncensored episode (called "Go West, Young Gardener") with the version Qubo was sending out to be broadcast. A magnificently funny scene, right near the end of the episode, was completely cut short as was an earlier scene about ten minutes in, and all because they featured a couple of dragon-sized farts.
I can't easily prove it, but I have reason to believe that Qubo is also cutting about 15-30 seconds out of each episode just to make more time for ads. That's not just big-brothering -- that's greed, plain and simple. I finally gave up and ordered the series DVDs from Australia (they're not available in the US).
The bizarre cultural 'war' on not letting kids experience the real world has permeated well outside the realm of media. Example: The Sea World parks are all extremely careful never to present any view of the animals which does not fit with their carefully-crafted image of "Everyone's Happy!" that they want the public to swallow. This is, I think, only one reason why audiences are often shocked when the park has behavioral trouble with the whales. The "Shamu" image that they like to present has no basis whatsoever in the reality that these animals have emotions, and free will of their own in terms of behavior. You cross the line with an orca in a bad mood (or any animal for that matter), and it is very likely you're going to get hurt.
As near as I can tell, these tendencies are pretty much limited to the USA. I've been to southeastern Mexico (Cancun, Playa del Carmen), and from what I've seen and experienced there the attitudes towards kids and the real world are 180 degrees different from inside US borders.
So, take heart... It doesn't seem to be anywhere near a worldwide thing (yet... pray it doesn't go that far).
While it is true that there is a potential for "private" information (name, address, etc.) to be publicly visible to spammers and marketers, it works the other way as well. If someone spams me, or someone else on my network, AND it's not a bot-net source, I find whois to be invaluable in terms of finding out where the stuff came from. If it's a mainstream company, they get a phone call (using the number in their whois record) and an earful about it, in that order.
As others have pointed out, this sounds like a lot of kerfuffle over nothing. If you're truly worried about privacy in your domain records, there are already a couple of options.
--Get a PO box, as I did, and use it for your registration address. ICANN regs don't prohibit it, and it's useful for stuff beyond domain registration.
--Use a whois-anonymizing registrar for your domain. ICANN doesn't prohibit this either, just as long as there is some way for said registrar to forward messages from the outside world to you.
Leave whois alone. It's too useful a tool. The fact that some few abuse it should not be cause to eliminate it (after all, to use an analogy, people abuse telephones all the time -- junk calls, junk FAXes -- and we still have them).
Moller must be running low on disposable cash. He'll pull this same stunt every couple of years to try and milk gullible investors. If you doubt this, take a look at what the SEC had to say in 2003.
Know what? I think that Moller is really the reincarnation of P.T. Barnum. It's the only explanation that makes sense. Next thing we'll probably see is a blurb for special "Skycars" for the military, equipped with high-power lasers.
"Spammers can get around blacklists anyways. They're about as effective as locking a door made of tissue paper. The number of false positives is high. The amount of spam blocked is negligible. My suggestion is to abandon the idea altogether..."
Thank you for your suggestion. It will be duly ignored, laughed at, or similarly ridiculed by those of us who actually run our own mail systems, or are responsible for such at work.
In my case, I'm self-hosted. Authoritative DNS for my domains, mail, web, Usenet, the works. I can say, from five-plus years of direct experience, that your statements above are just plain wrong.
I use a combination of Spamhaus and my own home-grown blacklist to keep spam in check. The few false positives I've gotten over the years have been ENTIRELY due to overly-broad entries in my LOCAL list, and have been easily and quickly corrected by white-listing.
I have NEVER received a false positive from any Spamhaus entry. Not once. The old SPEWS list, yes, but I haven't used them in years (and I'm leery of their successor, APEWS).
The fact remains that those who own mail systems have absolute and total authority over who they choose to communicate (or not) with. If a mail server operator decides to block a single address, a/24 IP address subnet, or even an entire country, that is their privilege. There is no legal recourse I know of that can force anyone to open their server(s) to traffic that they do not wish to carry (in short: private property rights).
"I'm sure you can think of some better reasons, but most of the ones you've given aren't any good..."
I beg to differ. They are excellent reasons. In fact, I don't believe either one is going to "kill" the other. Both have a permanent place in the computing world.
There are numerous applications, particularly in the 'specialized' arena, where laptops are more of a pain in the tailfeathers than an asset. One big area is the programming of land/mobile 2-way radio equipment. I've had the software for such simply refuse to work, under any conditions, with USB-to-RS232 converters yet work perfectly with a standard port.
To answer the obvious question: Updated software in this area is not always available, or practical. I still use a couple of separate desktop systems for this purpose, one for DOS-based software (yes, there's still plenty of it in some applications) and the other for Windows (2000, of course -- Neither XP nor Vista are permitted anywhere near systems that I maintain and use). You could not convince me to trade either of them out to laptops for any amount.
I also do electronic forensics, and support for 'legacy' electronic test equipment. For this, I often need to plug all kinds of oddball hardware into the systems I use as tools for such work. This includes things like GPIB/HPIB controller boards, time code generators/readers, RS485 serial boards, microprocessor and FPGA development and evaluation boards, in-circuit emulator (ICE) boxes... the list goes on.
The point I'm making is that many of those devices require full-blown host cards designed for ISA, EISA, or PCI buses. How many laptops have you seen with such?
How about a few more reasons? Let's start with display size. When was the last time you saw a laptop with a 20+ inch LCD panel? Or one that has two 20-inchers? Ever tried to draw a schematic, or design a printed circuit board, on anything less than a 20? Or perhaps hex-edit a big EPROM file? Trust me, it's painful at best, next to impossible at worst.
And keyboards? Already mentioned, I know, but let's mention it again. I learned to type on manual typewriters, and I have a very heavy touch as a result. To this day, I refuse to make long-term use of any keyboard other than the famous IBM 'clicker.' It's the only one that's proven to be durable and comfortable enough to make me happy.
Mice? Glide-pads are nice, but there's still nothing like a full-size Kensington trackball.
Laptops are good for 'On the Road.' Always have been, always will be. Desktops are good for versatility and expandability. Always have been, always will be.
Slashdot Mirror
My phone (and all my other electronic widgets) have an 'Off' switch.
I'm not afraid to use it.
If I'm paranoid enough to believe the switch is not really an 'Off' for everything, it is a simple matter to remove the battery. No power, no signal. Period.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you're completely unhappy at your current job, the size of your paycheck is practically irrelevant. This is because said lack of happiness is going to cause you to perform at a much lower level than you might normally. Eventually, this will become a vicious circle, and I suspect you will find yourself caught up in the next batch of layoffs anyway.
I find it a little eerie that what you're describing is almost exactly what happened to me. I started out fixing Teletype machines, many moons ago. I moved on from there to doing telephone work, got bored with it, then moved into fixing land/mobile 2-way radios.
I went from that into computers, added networking to the mix, then finally got burned out with IT as a career and went back to my first and foremost interest (radios, RF, etc.) when I landed in a nice civil-service slot. Been there ever since, and I believe I've actually found the place I'll retire with.
My points are that there's nothing at all wrong with changing careers, and that you really do need to find an environment you can live with. For my part, I had no idea that I had the necessary mindset for civil service, or I would have done it years ago.
The difference for me is that, for the most part, the private sector is no longer about making the best product or service, and letting said product or service simply sell itself. Hasn't been for decades, ever since we sold off most of our manufacturing infrastructure and skill base to China, et al. All most places seem to be interested in is the worship of money, and finding new ways to get and accumulate it.
I don't think that way, I don't work that way. I guess the simple way to say it is that the private sector and I just don't get along.
Civil service, on the other wing, has proven to be a place where I get to use ALL my skills, not just a fraction of them. It has also proven to be a place where I actually feel like I'm making a real difference, every single day.
That's important, no matter where you are.
So, in essence -- find what you're happy with, find a spot where you can actually look forward to coming in, and you've got it made. Don't worry too much about pay changes. I took a pay cut when I first moved from Boeing to WA State government service -- and then a year later I was making more than I ever had at Boeing!
Oh, BTW... Blue Feather Tech, as referenced in my signature line, is just a side business for me, not my day job.
Happy travels.
The best possible way that I see to avoid problems such as potential keyloggers is simple enough: Avoid using public terminals.
Carry your own laptop. Take advantage of Lord only knows how many free WiFi points are available. If you're self-hosted (as in retrieving from your own mail server), set up an encrypted VPN link.
Public terminals consistently trade security risks for convenience. Remember that the first line of computing security is the computer user. That being the case, ask yourself if it's really that wise to use a potentially insecure terminal for anything that you feel is sensitive.
Happy travels.
You can have the latest, most sophisticated (and probably expensive) security hardware and software imaginable, use military-grade encryption on every single file, and post armed guards at the entrance to your data center.
But guess what? NONE of the above will make the slightest bit of difference as long as there are still people who write their passwords on sticky-notes without a second thought, and paste them to the front of their monitor, the inside of their desk drawer, or wherever.
None of the above will help as long as you still have people who are gullible enough to fall for phishing E-mails, and give up sensitive personal data, passwords and SSN's included, as long as the mail looks remotely legitimate.
Most especially: None of the above will help until each and every person that uses a computer starts getting a little bit paranoid and thinking "Is what I'm doing right now sensitive? Could it be compromised? If so, how? How would I do it if I were the attacker?"
Whatever else you may think of Bruce Schneier(sp?), he's got one thing absolutely spot-on: The first and most vulnerable point of attack in ANY computer setup, networked or not, is the person making use of that computer and/or network. If there's more than one person involved (and there almost certainly is these days), there are multiple vulnerabilities available to any would-be attacker.
Personally, I think that a world of good could be done by teaching people to read at least the essential parts of the headers in any E-mail, and showing them how to spot a fraud. I think if even 5% of the computer-using population would bother to check the headers inside any E-mail asking for personal data, it'd probably put a huge dent in phishing.
Heck... Teaching people to be just a little bit paranoid would probably do more good than anything else...
Keep the peace(es).
Ah. Sorry for the terminology screwup. It's rare that I write pieces like this.
You are correct, of course. Thanks much.
Specifically, the closed-source software vendors.
Consider: No matter how much marketing you have, it is ultimately up to the end user of a product to decide if they've gotten the value they expected to get. If said user finds that the closed-source product they paid (possibly) big bucks for isn't worth the media it was recorded on, they're going to cut their losses and try something else.
Alternatively, there are many small businesses that simply can't afford the kinds of prices that closed-source vendors often charge. I know this for a fact, because I'm one of those tiny businesses! If not for FreeBSD, Apache, and Postfix, to say nothing of the surplus hardware market, I would never have been able to get my Internet presence off the ground.
It's not just Freeware, either. How many of us have found low-cost Shareware products to be incredibly useful for the stuff we do, when comparable commercial products would have nearly required a second mortgage? Hex Workshop is, I think, a great example.
If that $60 billion figure is accurate, the commercial software vendors have no one but themselves to blame. Oh, there are some good values Out There, yes, but I think they've been largely drowned out by the flood of questionable products that are turned out with far more marketing than quality engineering.
Happy tweaking.
What I want to know is... when do we get a quantum computer based on Quatloos?! And can you imagine a Beowu... never mind!
Bah! I wonder what kind of collateral damage could be obtained through a massive air-drop of two metric tons of overcooked spinach...
S P L A T T ! ! !
The heck with (X)tra (P)ain. I'm not letting loose from my copies of 2000/SP4/Final Rollup, and 2000 Server, until they pry them both from my cold, dead fingers!
My systems do everything I expect of them, and they do it WELL. What more can I ask? Why should I "upgrade" what's not broken?
Keep the peace(es).
...and with thanks to the Firesign Theater:
;-)
"Big light slated to appear in eastern sky. Sonic booms scare minority groups in Sector B. And there's hamburger all over the highway in Mystic, Connecticut..."
And if someone who's actually IN Mystic can confirm that, I'm sure we'd all be grateful.
Keep the peace(es).
I wondered why my daily spam load had dropped a bit. What the heck am I going to do now to fill the gap?
I suppose I'll have to count on the Russians to fill in with Viagra and Cialis offers...
Ahhh... no, not quite. You're referring to the two hot legs of a typical household AC power feed as if they were DC, which is a dangerous misconception at best.
;-)
There is no "+120" and "-120" in house mains. What you have are two 'hot' phases with the AC on them separated in phase angle (theta) by about 90 degrees (you'd need to look at them with a power analyzer or ground-isolated oscilloscope to see this), and a neutral.
Typically, if I recall correctly, the two hot phases are connected to the outside ends of a transformer winding at the pole end, and the neutral is the center tap of that same transformer.
Neutral is, typically, grounded at the entrance panel.
So: My take on this issue is that it is indeed bad design on Dell's part, most likely the result of trying to shave one too many pennies off manufacturing costs. I'm surprised the thing even passed UL approval.
Dell is probably using those extra pennies they saved for their plant's fusebox.
Keep the peace(es).
Seems to me that doing this sort of thing could, assuming minimal checking of the results, open one's code up to widespread abuse in the form of 'back doors' or 'logic bombs' that anyone not pleased with the idea (say, programmers unhappy with the entire outsourcing/offshoring pattern) could manage to slip in.
As others have (accurately) pointed out, this is also little more than a way to be lazy about doing a job, and not caring if it's done right as long as your company gets paid for it. What benefit do those actually writing your code get for their efforts?
There are right ways and wrong ways to go about doing any task. This strikes me as just plain wrong. I certainly wouldn't want to do any project I come up with this way. It would be like Boeing throwing open their design process to the world, and saying "OK, you design our next plane for us, but we get to use any idea you come up with and not pay you." Ludicrous, hmmm?
@jimmyhat3939...
"...In addition, with the Internet you can basically walk to your computer and email the person you just talked to halfway around the world..."
Uh huh. Sure. And what if, for whatever reason, you cannot get to an Internet connection? Or what if you can, and the 'net is inaccessible or down at the recipient's end?
You obviously had your license at one time. Perhaps you're still active. Have you forgotten the single biggest advantage that the Amateur Radio service has over other communication methods, including the Internet? Specifically, that we can operate easily without ANY infrastructure. No phone lines? No problem. No Internet? No problem. Even in cases of no utility power? No problem. That's what batteries and even human-operated generators are for.
I've been licensed for 30 years, and I'm just now getting to a point where I can get HF capability back again. I wouldn't be burning time and money doing so if I thought that "Ham's day is over" or anything silly like that.
Like Life itself, amateur radio is a mirror. You get back out of it exactly what you put into it. Perhaps, if you're no longer happy with what you're getting back from it, you should seek another hobby...?
73 de KC7GR (formerly WD6EOS, original license December 1977).
SlySoft.
And I will add that a few of my studio-pressed and paid-for DVDs are beginning to show signs of deterioration. I'm not paying for another copy when I can recover the original disc's file, repair it in the process, and re-burn it (as I should be able to do under Fair Use) to a replacement disc.
Keep the peace(es).
"...specially modified AT&T cellular phone towers which, in addition to their normal communications duties, will relay an aircraft's position to air traffic controllers and other aircraft in real time."
Am I the only one this rings a big alarm bell with? Anyone who's been in an earthquake or similar disaster knows how quickly the cellular network becomes utterly useless, either due to being overloaded with "We just had a quake!" traffic or equipment failure. Witness the Nisqually quake of 2001, or the Loma Prieta quake in the Bay Area in 1989.
Within five minutes after those events, the cellular phone networks in the area were completely unusable. I know, because I lived through both events. The only things that kept working were (in most cases) POTS landlines (and even then you sometimes had to wait about a minute for a dial tone), public-safety two-way radio systems that did not depend on the cell network, and ham radio repeaters.
I don't care how "specially modified" these towers will be. The idea of entrusting something as critical as air traffic control data to something that's part of the cellular network makes my skin crawl.
I'm a little surprised no one else has asked this yet.
;-) What do you do when you're not lampooning bad movies? What do you do in the way of hobbies or relaxation? Favorite books? Heck, for that matter, what do you LIKE to see in terms of movies or animation?
We all know what a great job you did with MST3K, what the show was about, etc. HOWEVER -- I'm more curious about you!
And, perhaps most interestingly, are there any particular movies that you wouldn't dare lampoon?
Inquiring knows want to mind!
Only you can decide what's right for your needs. With that said, here's what I did. Shopped around on the used/surplus arena for a nice Compaq ProLiant server (in my case, a DL380 G2 with a gig of RAM and twin PIII 1.4giggle CPUs). Loaded it up with 18GB drives. and made a RAID-5 array out of it.
That took care of a reliable data dumpster. Now, for backup, I shopped around some more and found a nice ADIC tape library with three DLT8000 drives. Paid about $210 for it all together. That, coupled with another $300 or so for the server and some odd change thrown in for tapes and mounting hardware, and I had a nice data stash for around $700 all told, pretty close to your figure. Not bad for enterprise-class hardware.
Granted, the server's a bit noisy. I eventually relocated it to the garage, and remoted the tape library via fiber channel SCSI. Paid less than $100 for the hardware to do it, again on the surplus market.
You can do some pretty amazing things with the right bit of scrounging.
Happy hunting.
Other posters have accurately pointed out that this is nothing more than political correctness taken to extremes, and that it is only one symptom of a much larger problem (paranoia, overprotecting kids, etc.)
I have discovered that situations like this are far from limited to Sesame Street. In a recent example, I found (much to my disgust) that Qubo, the USA distributor for WETA Workshop's series Jane and the Dragon, is censoring what they likely consider to be "lowbrow" humor from the show (belches, farts, etc.) I only found this out when I compared a snippet from an uncensored episode (called "Go West, Young Gardener") with the version Qubo was sending out to be broadcast. A magnificently funny scene, right near the end of the episode, was completely cut short as was an earlier scene about ten minutes in, and all because they featured a couple of dragon-sized farts.
I can't easily prove it, but I have reason to believe that Qubo is also cutting about 15-30 seconds out of each episode just to make more time for ads. That's not just big-brothering -- that's greed, plain and simple. I finally gave up and ordered the series DVDs from Australia (they're not available in the US).
The bizarre cultural 'war' on not letting kids experience the real world has permeated well outside the realm of media. Example: The Sea World parks are all extremely careful never to present any view of the animals which does not fit with their carefully-crafted image of "Everyone's Happy!" that they want the public to swallow. This is, I think, only one reason why audiences are often shocked when the park has behavioral trouble with the whales. The "Shamu" image that they like to present has no basis whatsoever in the reality that these animals have emotions, and free will of their own in terms of behavior. You cross the line with an orca in a bad mood (or any animal for that matter), and it is very likely you're going to get hurt.
As near as I can tell, these tendencies are pretty much limited to the USA. I've been to southeastern Mexico (Cancun, Playa del Carmen), and from what I've seen and experienced there the attitudes towards kids and the real world are 180 degrees different from inside US borders.
So, take heart... It doesn't seem to be anywhere near a worldwide thing (yet... pray it doesn't go that far).
Keep the peace(es).
While it is true that there is a potential for "private" information (name, address, etc.) to be publicly visible to spammers and marketers, it works the other way as well. If someone spams me, or someone else on my network, AND it's not a bot-net source, I find whois to be invaluable in terms of finding out where the stuff came from. If it's a mainstream company, they get a phone call (using the number in their whois record) and an earful about it, in that order.
As others have pointed out, this sounds like a lot of kerfuffle over nothing. If you're truly worried about privacy in your domain records, there are already a couple of options.
--Get a PO box, as I did, and use it for your registration address. ICANN regs don't prohibit it, and it's useful for stuff beyond domain registration.
--Use a whois-anonymizing registrar for your domain. ICANN doesn't prohibit this either, just as long as there is some way for said registrar to forward messages from the outside world to you.
Leave whois alone. It's too useful a tool. The fact that some few abuse it should not be cause to eliminate it (after all, to use an analogy, people abuse telephones all the time -- junk calls, junk FAXes -- and we still have them).
Keep the peace(es).
User-replaceable battery. 'Nuff said.
"It's only fair that the enrollment is not permanent otherwise one day the list would include nearly every number..."
;-)
And the problem with this is...?
Moller must be running low on disposable cash. He'll pull this same stunt every couple of years to try and milk gullible investors. If you doubt this, take a look at what the SEC had to say in 2003.
Know what? I think that Moller is really the reincarnation of P.T. Barnum. It's the only explanation that makes sense. Next thing we'll probably see is a blurb for special "Skycars" for the military, equipped with high-power lasers.
I refuse to be "Mollerfied" by a press release!
Keep the peace(es).
"Spammers can get around blacklists anyways. They're about as effective as locking a door made of tissue paper. The number of false positives is high. The amount of spam blocked is negligible. My suggestion is to abandon the idea altogether..."
/24 IP address subnet, or even an entire country, that is their privilege. There is no legal recourse I know of that can force anyone to open their server(s) to traffic that they do not wish to carry (in short: private property rights).
Thank you for your suggestion. It will be duly ignored, laughed at, or similarly ridiculed by those of us who actually run our own mail systems, or are responsible for such at work.
In my case, I'm self-hosted. Authoritative DNS for my domains, mail, web, Usenet, the works. I can say, from five-plus years of direct experience, that your statements above are just plain wrong.
I use a combination of Spamhaus and my own home-grown blacklist to keep spam in check. The few false positives I've gotten over the years have been ENTIRELY due to overly-broad entries in my LOCAL list, and have been easily and quickly corrected by white-listing.
I have NEVER received a false positive from any Spamhaus entry. Not once. The old SPEWS list, yes, but I haven't used them in years (and I'm leery of their successor, APEWS).
The fact remains that those who own mail systems have absolute and total authority over who they choose to communicate (or not) with. If a mail server operator decides to block a single address, a
Keep the peace(es).
"I'm sure you can think of some better reasons, but most of the ones you've given aren't any good..."
I beg to differ. They are excellent reasons. In fact, I don't believe either one is going to "kill" the other. Both have a permanent place in the computing world.
There are numerous applications, particularly in the 'specialized' arena, where laptops are more of a pain in the tailfeathers than an asset. One big area is the programming of land/mobile 2-way radio equipment. I've had the software for such simply refuse to work, under any conditions, with USB-to-RS232 converters yet work perfectly with a standard port.
To answer the obvious question: Updated software in this area is not always available, or practical. I still use a couple of separate desktop systems for this purpose, one for DOS-based software (yes, there's still plenty of it in some applications) and the other for Windows (2000, of course -- Neither XP nor Vista are permitted anywhere near systems that I maintain and use). You could not convince me to trade either of them out to laptops for any amount.
I also do electronic forensics, and support for 'legacy' electronic test equipment. For this, I often need to plug all kinds of oddball hardware into the systems I use as tools for such work. This includes things like GPIB/HPIB controller boards, time code generators/readers, RS485 serial boards, microprocessor and FPGA development and evaluation boards, in-circuit emulator (ICE) boxes... the list goes on.
The point I'm making is that many of those devices require full-blown host cards designed for ISA, EISA, or PCI buses. How many laptops have you seen with such?
How about a few more reasons? Let's start with display size. When was the last time you saw a laptop with a 20+ inch LCD panel? Or one that has two 20-inchers? Ever tried to draw a schematic, or design a printed circuit board, on anything less than a 20? Or perhaps hex-edit a big EPROM file? Trust me, it's painful at best, next to impossible at worst.
And keyboards? Already mentioned, I know, but let's mention it again. I learned to type on manual typewriters, and I have a very heavy touch as a result. To this day, I refuse to make long-term use of any keyboard other than the famous IBM 'clicker.' It's the only one that's proven to be durable and comfortable enough to make me happy.
Mice? Glide-pads are nice, but there's still nothing like a full-size Kensington trackball.
Laptops are good for 'On the Road.' Always have been, always will be. Desktops are good for versatility and expandability. Always have been, always will be.
Keep the peace(es).