Not certain on this, but I've heard that once you call 911, they have to send somebody out to your house. Police, fire department, someone. This is particularly true for calls to the police department that suddenly change their mind and say there is no need to send police. (spoken under duress)
Imagine the lawsuit that would result if you were told at gunpoint to tell the operator to nevermind and they failed to send out the cops?
It was originally designed to protect the artists but now it also benefits the labels and other big business. Now that big business has money at stake, it's like sharks in the water. They aren't looking for protection, they aren't looking to make sure they get a fair shake. They're already getting their due and they want more, more, MORE! However much they get is simply not enough. Every concession they are given only motivataes them to fight harder for MORE. Their apetite knows no bounds. It does no good to give into them because they'll only shut up for a few months and then be right back asking for more.
I realize money is their only motivator, but somehow it still amazes me how brazen and shameless they are when they are trying to squeeze more money out of the consumer. It's gone so far beyond reasonable that they simply have no ground to stand on when trying to justify their demands. I think everyone has gotten tired of them crying about the starving artists. When you look back at all the concessions that have already been given, it doesn't take a genius to realize the artists never benefited from those concessions.
Why should we believe they will ever benefit from more concessions?
I picked up a 4gb cruzer mini a few months back for $260, and I'd say it was worth every penny. I've worn the finish off the plastic. It gets used several times a day on average where I work.
I'm waiting for the 8gb drives to come out. This one's already got less than a gig free on it. They usually double the capacity every 4-6 months, so they're due to double again real soon.
The cruzer mini is no hippo either, like those ridiculous round seagate monstrosities or the "blocks every adjacent port" jetflashes. There are two things I'd change if I could though... the ability to function if plugged into an unpowered hub (like a keyboard!) and a write protect switch. (if i was doing av work on PCs the lack of write protect alone would be a show stopper)
It seems that half the parental population of the US wants the world to be their babysitters for them.
If parents would take more interest in their children and watch over them like they expect the government, their neighbors, and Mrs. Fitzgerald down the block to, there would be no need for these silly ideas of "protecting" their kids from everything short of bottled water. If the parents could be bothered to spend even 5 more minutes of every day with their kids, that would completely eliminate this need for filtering internet content. The only things I can attribute this "need" to are parental disinterest and laziness.
Parents of 30 years ago should be appalled if they looked at today's parents and their apparent total lack of parenting skills and dedication.
Brushless motors are more complex, and require an array of active electronics inside them to produce the AC and modulating magnetic field they need to operate. Most brushless motors are lower torque than their brushed counterparts. (majority, I know there will be exceptions) Brushed motors are more mechanical in nature and suffer from the usual mechanical issues, but they are less prone to failure than brushless. Also, traveling through space and landing on a planet that may not have a protective magnetic field, active (transistor based) electronics must be carefully protected against emi that can disable or damage them.
I'm sure they went brushed for a variety of very good reasons. The technology of brushless was available when the rovers were designed, and I can't imagine NASA not seriously considering them.
In my case I registered several years ago, and it cost around $9.95/yr with the quantity I registered. This was through Register.com. I've had very good luck with them - they have an 800 number you can call with questions or to do custom tweaks to your records that their web site does not support. (like wildcards) They will quote you around $15/yr at quanity, but if you dicker with them they will quote you a lower rate. They will also quote a lower rate if you call in for a friend and tell them you referred them and could get them a lower rate on referral.
So you can get it reasonably cheap if you ask for it, and they have extremely good phone and email support for a registrar. (I've heard horror stories from godaddy and others) A little more expensive than the fly by night registrars, but worth it I think.
Not very concerned here, I have my domain names reserved for several years to come. AFAIK, this registration is with my reigstrar, and has not been paid in advance to the registry. Part of the reason the registrars are screaming is they will have to pay more of the money I gave them to keep my name regsitered for the next several years than they were expecting. They can't raise my rate retroactively, so this cuts into their expected proffit. Sure they can raise my rates when my current payment expires (in 2016 or so) but it's the loss of money now that bothers them.
This is their own fault though - you know full well when you sign someone up with a prepaid contact that if your costs go up you will make less money. (or LOSE money) That is a risk you take in exchange for offering your customers convenience and also getting cash in hand to sit on and collect interest on for the term of the registration.
If the registrars don't like it, waaaaah. You took my money hapily, now deal with it.
On a different topic, I agree with multiple prior posters that wonder what the heck icann was thinking when they signed verisign up for this job. If that was an "impartial" decision they made, then they are apparently brain-dead.
The basic problem is this "IP" thing. When it all settles down, what it's alll about is creative people making things and then doing everything they can to maximize the money they get as a result. Nothing wrong with wanting to maximize proffits, but the problem here is they use a law that was ostensibly/originally designed to insure "just compensation" to the artist, and twist and squeeze it for every last penny they can. The problem is that laws are usually designed (originally) to protect someone weak from someone powerful, and in doing so they tend to be overbearing, and rely somewhat on the courts and the police etc to exercise them in a fair way to insure the balance the law was meant to enforce.
In the case of IP, we have gone from starving artists in studios trying to make a buck on their art, to starving artists in studios with these "middlemen" called record labels, taking fistfulls of money from the consumer and handing the artists a pittance. That's where the greed factors in, and we suddenly start seeing the laws squeezed and pulled for every dime they're worth. So it's no longer the law trying to insure fair treatment of the little guy, but it's big hammer is now being swung as hard as possible to wring money out of the consumer.
To this end, they impose truly ridiculous rules on what you can do with the art once you PAY for it. I am not a big fan of leasing/licensing, but I recognize it is necessary in some form to insure artists are compensated for their work. Unfortunately, when you get the labels in the middle, taking a massive cut, there is simply too much greed. And the laws being initially tilted to favor the poor artists, are now used by the major labels in ways the laws were never meant to be used. Laws that already put the consumer on the short end of the stick. If it were not for the fact that a few artists still benefit from the protection of copyright laws, I would say scrap the whole thing. Laws should be evaluated periodiucally to determine if they are still serving the purpose for which they were drafted, that no serious abuse of them is taking place (indicating they need some overhauling), and that there is still a need for the privleges they grant to the "weak". As of now, copyright laws are only minorly serving their original purpose and are being seriously abused, but unfortunately there is still a need for them for the numeric majority/financial minority in the industry.
The artists needed protecting. The labels DO NOT. They are already plenty cut-throat as it is, they're not starving artists by anyone's description, they don't need any more help.
Oh, I'm not saying the IT department needs to be the thought police. It's not my job to police the computer usage and it's not something I'd care to waste my time on. That's someone's manager's job. I'm just saying if you do something on company computers and have any notion that it was "personal", "private", etc from any other company employee, (your manager most specifically) then you are in for a rude and unpleasant surprise.
It's safest to assume that at work anything you put on your computer screen could be on the tackboard tomorrow with your name on it. If you think that's some sort of crime, you're probably misusing company resources and really deserve whatever you get in the way of unplanned exposure.
I don't have to police the screens, people that behave this way burn themselves nine times out of ten. One of the most brazen of these I've worked with actually installed a rear view mirror on his computer so he could see when the boss was approaching. The boss was not amused.
I pop into computers to fix reported problems on a regular basis. The users get a little icon on the screen to indicate that their screen is on my screen, but that's easy enough to overlook. More than once I've popped in on a screen where someone was writing a personal letter. I leave them alone, I don't have time to spectate, but they should be fully aware that I or any number of other people may have access to that personal letter they are writing.
You don't get to unilaterally decide whether something is your business or not.
This assumes you have some god-given right to declare "privacy!" on anything you do. You do not.
When you are being paid for your time by your employer, he is paying you for your time and in exchange you are surrendering all the work you produce during that time to him. That is the business deal that exists between the two of you. You cannot simply arbitrarily say that what you did from 2:10pm to 2:20pm is your property and not your bosses. He owns your production from 8am to 4:30pm less the half hour break you get for lunch.
This includes your email. Using the company's resources to make something for yourself is at best a poor use of time, and is at worst, theft. I guess I take a hard line on this sort of thing - I find it quite distasteful to see smokers step outside for 10 minutes every hour to have a paid break. I tried asking for a similar break to two different employers and was turned down on both occasions. One of them suggested that if I wanted the break I should take up smoking, I wasn't quite sure how to take that comment.
But this is getting a little OT. You give up some of your fredom when you are in someone's employment. There are legal restrictions on which fredoms you cannot be asked to give up of course, but for the most part I suppose you could look at it like they "own" you while you are on the clock. Looked at in this perspective, you could also view them as your representatives in the work they do. Technically then if they deleted your files on company time it might not be a cakewalk to make a case that they are liable for that, since it was done on the company dime. If you don't like the employee's performance, you can always fire them, that's how the deal works.
As for the letter example, personal emails have NO PLACE in the workplace. If you are foolish enough to create a personal email on a company computer on company time, you have already surrendered all rights of privacy to it, there is no privacy left to violate. If you come into my house and strip in my living room, you cannot complain about not having any privacy now can you? You brought your private affairs someplace you should not have.
With this gentleman, the case is probably against him. If he deleted the files while on company time, and it could be proved that he realized this would cause harm to the company, it could be argued he was not dealing in good faith with his employer and that the contract of employment was void, and that would open him up to "destruction of private property" among other charges. If he was terminated and the company made no attempt to collect the information from his personal computer in a reasonable period of time, I'd call it 'abandoned", and say format the sucker. But if he wiped the files before giving the company adequate opportunity to retrieve their data, again I would call destruction of private property.
Straying more off topic, if you're going to can someone, you should do it in a planned, organized manner. I heard an interesting description of how AT&T handles termination... lets say you have three "unplanned absenses" during probation. Even when you call them on the 3rd to say your house burned down last night and you won't be in today, they will say no problem come in when you can. What you don't know is you are already fired. See they need you to bring back in the company laptop and your keycard, and lying to you and telling you everything is OK is the most effective way for them to make sure they get their stuff back. They'll meet you at the door with a box of your stuff, take their stuff, and escort you out.
That's the way to fire someone. Make sure you have your stuff back. If you aren't smart enough to do this, the law will probably still pity you, but I sure won't.
You are missing something. If I take a sack lunch (or any property really) to work or anywhere else, it's still my property. Agreed. But when I use the company resources, and most likely on the company time, to create an email, (CREATE, on COMPANY TIME, that is the key) the company OWNS anything I produce while I am on the clock working for them. This includes material goods, documentation, and even ideas that I develop while thinking up ideas for company projects. If I write an email up on company time on a company computer, I have no expectation whatsoever that I own or have rights of privacy to it.
Other posters point out "it's none of your business" when walking up behind another employee's monitor. While I would agree there may be privacy concerns if you are say, editing medical records or something where the user is protecting someone else's privacy from you, but if you're typing up a personal email, I really don't care about whose business you think the email is. You are using company resources, on company paid time, to do that, and you should expect that at any time any employee of the comany may read that letter. If you feel this is invading your privacy, then why on earth did you do it in the first place? Go home and do it on your own time, with your own computer, and then you will have all the privacy you need.
I'd probably be called a BOFH for this, but I would find it appropriate that such an email would be printed out and posted on the company bulletin board for all to see, to demonstrate the point. It's a bit like leaving the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition. Some people just don't learn until their car gets stolen. Don't be stupid and you'll miss out on a lot of inconvenience and embarassment.
The issue gets stickier when you have people doing Stupid Things(tm) like doing R&D work at home for projects similar to what they do R&D for at work. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. One case where the employee won was the guy that thought up pulse wiping windshield wipers. He worked for a car company, but he convinced the courts that he thought up the idea on his own time, at home, which is why he was able to get a patent for it. (strangely enough, a similar thing happened with cruise control) Most others are not so lucky. You make it on company time, it's the company's property.
"the files" is the evidence, not the crime. I think you are confusing the two. Making the evidence go away does not nullify the crime. If he commits a "crime" and there are files ("evidence") that he destroys, and you can prove there was a crime and the files were incriminating evidence, he can be charged not only with the crime, but also with destruction of evidence, which is illlegal.
Also the files on the laptop, were company property. While you are a company employee, you are caring for those files as a representative of the company, and you can arguably do with them as you please. After he was fired, those files were no longer under his care (he was no longer authorized to manage company property and resources) and remained property of the company. Wiping the hard drive at that point could very easily be proven to be Destruction of Private Property, again this is illegal.
The lessons learned:
(1) anything you put on a company computer IS THE COMPANY'S PROPERTY. Don't cry invasion of privacy or personal files, they are NOT yours anymore. You surrendered your right to privacy of your documents the moment you put them on company property. This actually is a double edged sword - many companies don't like you to use your own laptop specifically because they have less legal control over it and the information on it during extreme circumstances like termination. And don't forget, this includes email. Company has the right to monitor your email and anything else you do on the computer. It's astounding how many people believe that company email is private and that their employers are "not allowed" to look at personal employee emails.
(2) it's sometimes easier for a prossicutor to get a conviction if you destroy some (but not enough) evidence.
(3) it's not unheard of for a company to obtain a search warrant and send the police to ransack your house and take your computers/HDs/CDs to retrieve "sensitive company information". You don't even have to have the company's laptop for that one - they just have to convince a judge that you have "work in progress" you took home from work and loaded onto your computer, and you want it back. Sadly, most judges belly up on this issue and just sign off without due consideration for what they're allowing to happen.
With point 1, I get a chuckle when I walk by someone on a computer, typing up an email, and when they see someone approaching from behind they flip to another window or hit screensaver etc. I want to say to them "you DO realize that's not private in any way shape or form and I or any of your managers could easily read it?" but I usually just walk away smiling at their ignorance.
At some point in the future reality will hit them like a brick, and give them a good case of the cold sweats.
the only thing that's important is if you live long enough to have kids at all. If you die at age 7 you won't matter much to evolution.
On the other hand, if EVERYONE lives to be exactly 40, the "survival of the fittest" part of evolution stops working and as I said, we revert to the natural selection aspect where your genetics influence your partner's selection of you as a mate. Look at the peacock... do you think that plumage makes him a better survivor? Of course not. There's just something about those colored feathers that trips the peahen's trigger and makes him be selected over more drab peacocks. I believe human evolution is on the same track, consisting almost entirely of natural selection and very little on survival of the fittest.
I recalled reading something that applies well here. It was a short article discussing the concept that someone evolved a genetic condition that gave him the powers of superman. Sounds exciting, but if he's sterile, does he matter? Or for that matter, if his condition isn't a result of genetic change and isn't going to be passed to his offspring, does his ability matter? As far as evolution is concerned, he never even existed.
One major software title I used to use a lot had this problem. I hopped on board at about version 2. This company had a very active beta program, and it was not uncommon to see a new version once a week. Unfortunately, they spent such an unbalanced amount of time on new development as opposed to bug fixing, that the new builds were very often worse than the old ones. You might argue that this was beta and so I cannot expect a polished product, and I agree. However, there was essentially no difference between the betas and the releases. It was widely believed that the week of the next planned release or paid upgrade, they'd take the best beta of the last few weeks and call it a release. (I don't think they ever did a "feature freeze")
It was very common among the developers that used the betas, to keep ALL previous betas. Many users were stuck several versions back because a critical feature they required had been broken several builds ago and had not been fixed yet. It was a very aggrivating tradeoff, to be dealing with a month-old build because you needed feature ABC to work, but then to see them fix (or add) three other things you really had been waiting for but that you can only drool at because you simply cannot upgrade until they fix your issue.
Sometimes you'd upgrade and then a week later get flooded with bug reports. Track down the problem and find it's the compiler itself that is causing the problem, and back you go, to last month's build. I was running several months behind on several occasions, using versions that were betas published prior to the most current release, which was already in a new beta cycle. In that case there simply was no release that ran acceptably.
All in all a very frustrating experience. I made my last paid upgrade at v4.5, it's now around version 7 I think, I've stopped keeping track of it since about 5.5. There are a lot of others in my same situation, agreeing that 4.52 is the best version that was ever released, from a stability standpoint.
What's really going to bite is when more companies go to a subscription model, and require a periodic payment to keep the program you already have running. When those companies go out of business or stop supporting an older version, you're just plain screwed. You'l be foreced to upgrade and suffer the consequences, or go through the torture that is changing products after you're already established with one.
Somewhat on topic... what's the current legal interpretation of software made by a company that is out of business? Is it considered public domain at that point? Or does the (defunct) author have to release it into the public domain? Or does it expire after a certain timespan or after termination of support?
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
The problem evolution is having now is that in order for the primary mechanism of evolution to "work", a significant portion of the members of a population have to die. (not survive long enough to reproduce) In today's modern human socity, life is valued and society helps people to survive that without help would not have made it.
Some of the most extreme examples include people that have a genetic defect that would normally be fatal, but due to modern medical technology they are able to go on living. They have children, some of which inherit those different genes and also suffer from the same genetic condition. 500 years ago this would not have happened because the original defect would have been "weeded out of the gene pool" and there would have been no children with the same defect.
Evolution may still be occurring, but it is very likely going a lot slower than it was even a decade ago. It's also likely working a little different now than it did in the past - the other functional feature of evolution is natural selection, and the random attributes that people find attractive in finding a partner have probably changed over time and this also would affect evoltion - I'd expect this to now be the dominent influence on human evolution.
There are dozens of ways we enumerate people today. Social Security Numbers, driver's license, telephone, voice mail box, theatre ticket numbers, just because it's not tattooed on your body doesn't mean it's not your number. If the radicals want to take a position, they have more than enough other issues to yell about, this is just the latest addition to the bottom of the list.
Though all these things are physically separate from your body. When we get into tattoos, RFID, implants, etc., I think that's where people think a line has been crossed, because an identifying change has been made to your body, a change that may be difficult to escape or leave behind.
DNA sampling and fingerprinting seem to blur even that line. It's something you can't escape or leave behind, but it's not something that's added to you, it's an inherent quality of you. These seem to be the current "front lines" for this issue, so I don't foresee the disconnected identifiers becomging a hot topic until dna and fingerprinting becomes completely acceptable. Then they'll move on to the more obscure and disconnected things.
Closed source has the immediate advantage of obscuring your code. Hackers can't pour over your source code for mistakes or the occasional red-flag comments. ("we'll just assume xyz here, will code in a check later when we get specs.") Open source is immediately open to scruteny.
In the short term, closed source is useful because when your code first hits the network no one knows much about the internals, there are no known holes, and finding holes is difficult. Open source is open to immediate and sophisticated attack as the hackers can see the program flow and exploit visible weakenesses.
As time goes on, open source is patched to deal with the flaws. Even though the open and closed source could technically be the exact same program, the open source one benefits from the initial exploitation by rapid evlution. Being open source though, it probably started out a little behind the closed source, because it likely did not have a paid and well-organized development group working on it, so it has a little catching up to do anyway. The closed source also evolves, but only in response to internal testing and analysis, and the occasional black/white hat that finds something by poking through the binaries.
So after a few years, the initial security/stability gap between the two is eliminated. Old open source projects do tend to stagnate after a few years, so development there probably slackens. This happens at about the time you'd expect two competing projects to about equal each other.
The question then is what happens from there? I believe this is very dependent on the open and the closed projects you examine. Open source may continue active development and surpass closed source. Or it may stagnate and be passed by the paid updates released on a continual basis from the closed source.
Because of this I don't believe either model is ideal. Depending on how the cards play out, either one could be the better solution. I'd like to think that open source is the winner, but I'm sure it isn't the clear winner.
Anyone paranoid about security would not believe a word the man says. If they were making a back door, would they tell you? Of course not, that would greatly lower the value of the back door. Anyone with sensitive information on their computer would be insane to trust bitlocker if he says there's a back door.
So we will have to rely on independent auditors - those people like DVD John that will ignore all the silly "no reverse engineering allowed" rules and tear it apart anyway. Then we will know for sure. When people really get serious, like international governments, do we see blind trust? No, we have "trust but verify". These people don't want to let anyone verify, so how can we just trust them?
Ignoring the possibility he's lying, you seriously have to ask yourself how many other back doors microsoft was created lately, without even trying. Worm of the Week, anyone? I don't think even if they tried to make it secure, that they could succeed on the first (or second) try. Their track record on security is very clear to see.
Even organizations with a great deal of money to lose can't make things bulletproof on the first try. The cryptographic weaknesses of CSS (DVD encrypting) are well documented, and that industry spent milllions of dollars developing it.
So either way you look at it, they're not worthy of our trust in this matter.
Apple tends to be the "white hat" in these situations, and they also have had home folder encryption for several years now, called FileVault. Even though I have more trust in Apple than I do in MicroSoft, I can't help but wonder about the possibilities of an intentional (or unintentional) back door in FileVault.
Around here anyway, with the landscape hilly the way it is, there are TV antenna towers all over the place. Most of them are around 40ft tall and are made from some cheap "ribbon candy" towers, that are only meant to support a TV antenna. Many of these towers are even freestanding, although you often see them with a few cables teathering them to the house corners, which in most cases isn't helping with how loose the cables are. Many of these towers are only 2 or 3 sections, enough to get 8-10 ft above the roof with the antenna.
There are a lot of old amateur radio operators in the area, easily spotted by the higher quality towers and sometimes very large antenna arrays. A few of the towers around here are 70ft or higher, and are guy-wired to buried anchors at the corners of their yard. There are still a couple monsters around 100ft tall in town.
Most of these towers are not currently used. I'd estimate 70% of the radio and 85% of the TV antennas up are not being used. (mostly from amateur radio operators that are no longer active, people that have gotten cable TV, and people that bought the house with the tower already installed) Only maybe 1/3 of the owners are interested in getting rid of them though - some people don't want kids crawling around on their roofs kicking up shingles, and some just think they might use it again. But that still leaves a very large number of people willing to sell their towers. Many of them will give it "free for the taking" so long as you clean up and use some tar or other sealant on the anchor points to make sure they don't get roof leaks as a result of your extraction. They're usually just glad to get rid of the eyesore.
The "good" towers (rohn for instance) last I checked were around $20/ft, so about $200/section if bought new. The top sections, with the end cap where you'd insert a mast for the antenna, are more common than you'd like to see - almost every tower has one and you can only use one yourself, so you usually end up stuck with one or two spare top sections you cannot use if you're trying for 3+ section tower, unless you cut them down a bit.
There's that pesky "for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction" rule. If you levitate a vibrating object, true, the object's inertia may help to buffer the vibration, and the lack of physical contact will certainly be a benefit, but in the end, the vibrating object will create a disturbance in the magnetic field that is levitating it, which will in turn cause the maglev unit itself to vibrate. Isn't this going to a lot of work for a very minor benefit?
I agree, in many cases when you shrink something you can simplify the design. But the point is, you have to change the design. That's not something that's easy to program into a self replicating computer. And when it down-sizes itself, does it simplify its brain too? It has to get smaller as well if the whole thing is to shrink. It gets harder to stay smart when you shrink your brain.;)
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Not certain on this, but I've heard that once you call 911, they have to send somebody out to your house. Police, fire department, someone. This is particularly true for calls to the police department that suddenly change their mind and say there is no need to send police. (spoken under duress)
Imagine the lawsuit that would result if you were told at gunpoint to tell the operator to nevermind and they failed to send out the cops?
It was originally designed to protect the artists but now it also benefits the labels and other big business. Now that big business has money at stake, it's like sharks in the water. They aren't looking for protection, they aren't looking to make sure they get a fair shake. They're already getting their due and they want more, more, MORE! However much they get is simply not enough. Every concession they are given only motivataes them to fight harder for MORE. Their apetite knows no bounds. It does no good to give into them because they'll only shut up for a few months and then be right back asking for more.
I realize money is their only motivator, but somehow it still amazes me how brazen and shameless they are when they are trying to squeeze more money out of the consumer. It's gone so far beyond reasonable that they simply have no ground to stand on when trying to justify their demands. I think everyone has gotten tired of them crying about the starving artists. When you look back at all the concessions that have already been given, it doesn't take a genius to realize the artists never benefited from those concessions.
Why should we believe they will ever benefit from more concessions?
I picked up a 4gb cruzer mini a few months back for $260, and I'd say it was worth every penny. I've worn the finish off the plastic. It gets used several times a day on average where I work.
I'm waiting for the 8gb drives to come out. This one's already got less than a gig free on it. They usually double the capacity every 4-6 months, so they're due to double again real soon.
The cruzer mini is no hippo either, like those ridiculous round seagate monstrosities or the "blocks every adjacent port" jetflashes. There are two things I'd change if I could though... the ability to function if plugged into an unpowered hub (like a keyboard!) and a write protect switch. (if i was doing av work on PCs the lack of write protect alone would be a show stopper)
It seems that half the parental population of the US wants the world to be their babysitters for them.
If parents would take more interest in their children and watch over them like they expect the government, their neighbors, and Mrs. Fitzgerald down the block to, there would be no need for these silly ideas of "protecting" their kids from everything short of bottled water. If the parents could be bothered to spend even 5 more minutes of every day with their kids, that would completely eliminate this need for filtering internet content. The only things I can attribute this "need" to are parental disinterest and laziness.
Parents of 30 years ago should be appalled if they looked at today's parents and their apparent total lack of parenting skills and dedication.
"Your free advertisement is no longer as effective as it used to be, and we demand full refun.... er.. .WE WANT SOME MONEY!"
twits.
Brushless motors are more complex, and require an array of active electronics inside them to produce the AC and modulating magnetic field they need to operate. Most brushless motors are lower torque than their brushed counterparts. (majority, I know there will be exceptions) Brushed motors are more mechanical in nature and suffer from the usual mechanical issues, but they are less prone to failure than brushless. Also, traveling through space and landing on a planet that may not have a protective magnetic field, active (transistor based) electronics must be carefully protected against emi that can disable or damage them.
I'm sure they went brushed for a variety of very good reasons. The technology of brushless was available when the rovers were designed, and I can't imagine NASA not seriously considering them.
In my case I registered several years ago, and it cost around $9.95/yr with the quantity I registered. This was through Register.com. I've had very good luck with them - they have an 800 number you can call with questions or to do custom tweaks to your records that their web site does not support. (like wildcards) They will quote you around $15/yr at quanity, but if you dicker with them they will quote you a lower rate. They will also quote a lower rate if you call in for a friend and tell them you referred them and could get them a lower rate on referral.
So you can get it reasonably cheap if you ask for it, and they have extremely good phone and email support for a registrar. (I've heard horror stories from godaddy and others) A little more expensive than the fly by night registrars, but worth it I think.
Not very concerned here, I have my domain names reserved for several years to come. AFAIK, this registration is with my reigstrar, and has not been paid in advance to the registry. Part of the reason the registrars are screaming is they will have to pay more of the money I gave them to keep my name regsitered for the next several years than they were expecting. They can't raise my rate retroactively, so this cuts into their expected proffit. Sure they can raise my rates when my current payment expires (in 2016 or so) but it's the loss of money now that bothers them.
This is their own fault though - you know full well when you sign someone up with a prepaid contact that if your costs go up you will make less money. (or LOSE money) That is a risk you take in exchange for offering your customers convenience and also getting cash in hand to sit on and collect interest on for the term of the registration.
If the registrars don't like it, waaaaah. You took my money hapily, now deal with it.
On a different topic, I agree with multiple prior posters that wonder what the heck icann was thinking when they signed verisign up for this job. If that was an "impartial" decision they made, then they are apparently brain-dead.
The basic problem is this "IP" thing. When it all settles down, what it's alll about is creative people making things and then doing everything they can to maximize the money they get as a result. Nothing wrong with wanting to maximize proffits, but the problem here is they use a law that was ostensibly/originally designed to insure "just compensation" to the artist, and twist and squeeze it for every last penny they can. The problem is that laws are usually designed (originally) to protect someone weak from someone powerful, and in doing so they tend to be overbearing, and rely somewhat on the courts and the police etc to exercise them in a fair way to insure the balance the law was meant to enforce.
In the case of IP, we have gone from starving artists in studios trying to make a buck on their art, to starving artists in studios with these "middlemen" called record labels, taking fistfulls of money from the consumer and handing the artists a pittance. That's where the greed factors in, and we suddenly start seeing the laws squeezed and pulled for every dime they're worth. So it's no longer the law trying to insure fair treatment of the little guy, but it's big hammer is now being swung as hard as possible to wring money out of the consumer.
To this end, they impose truly ridiculous rules on what you can do with the art once you PAY for it. I am not a big fan of leasing/licensing, but I recognize it is necessary in some form to insure artists are compensated for their work. Unfortunately, when you get the labels in the middle, taking a massive cut, there is simply too much greed. And the laws being initially tilted to favor the poor artists, are now used by the major labels in ways the laws were never meant to be used. Laws that already put the consumer on the short end of the stick. If it were not for the fact that a few artists still benefit from the protection of copyright laws, I would say scrap the whole thing. Laws should be evaluated periodiucally to determine if they are still serving the purpose for which they were drafted, that no serious abuse of them is taking place (indicating they need some overhauling), and that there is still a need for the privleges they grant to the "weak". As of now, copyright laws are only minorly serving their original purpose and are being seriously abused, but unfortunately there is still a need for them for the numeric majority/financial minority in the industry.
The artists needed protecting. The labels DO NOT. They are already plenty cut-throat as it is, they're not starving artists by anyone's description, they don't need any more help.
Oh, I'm not saying the IT department needs to be the thought police. It's not my job to police the computer usage and it's not something I'd care to waste my time on. That's someone's manager's job. I'm just saying if you do something on company computers and have any notion that it was "personal", "private", etc from any other company employee, (your manager most specifically) then you are in for a rude and unpleasant surprise.
It's safest to assume that at work anything you put on your computer screen could be on the tackboard tomorrow with your name on it. If you think that's some sort of crime, you're probably misusing company resources and really deserve whatever you get in the way of unplanned exposure.
I don't have to police the screens, people that behave this way burn themselves nine times out of ten. One of the most brazen of these I've worked with actually installed a rear view mirror on his computer so he could see when the boss was approaching. The boss was not amused.
I pop into computers to fix reported problems on a regular basis. The users get a little icon on the screen to indicate that their screen is on my screen, but that's easy enough to overlook. More than once I've popped in on a screen where someone was writing a personal letter. I leave them alone, I don't have time to spectate, but they should be fully aware that I or any number of other people may have access to that personal letter they are writing.
You don't get to unilaterally decide whether something is your business or not.
This assumes you have some god-given right to declare "privacy!" on anything you do. You do not.
When you are being paid for your time by your employer, he is paying you for your time and in exchange you are surrendering all the work you produce during that time to him. That is the business deal that exists between the two of you. You cannot simply arbitrarily say that what you did from 2:10pm to 2:20pm is your property and not your bosses. He owns your production from 8am to 4:30pm less the half hour break you get for lunch.
This includes your email. Using the company's resources to make something for yourself is at best a poor use of time, and is at worst, theft. I guess I take a hard line on this sort of thing - I find it quite distasteful to see smokers step outside for 10 minutes every hour to have a paid break. I tried asking for a similar break to two different employers and was turned down on both occasions. One of them suggested that if I wanted the break I should take up smoking, I wasn't quite sure how to take that comment.
But this is getting a little OT. You give up some of your fredom when you are in someone's employment. There are legal restrictions on which fredoms you cannot be asked to give up of course, but for the most part I suppose you could look at it like they "own" you while you are on the clock. Looked at in this perspective, you could also view them as your representatives in the work they do. Technically then if they deleted your files on company time it might not be a cakewalk to make a case that they are liable for that, since it was done on the company dime. If you don't like the employee's performance, you can always fire them, that's how the deal works.
As for the letter example, personal emails have NO PLACE in the workplace. If you are foolish enough to create a personal email on a company computer on company time, you have already surrendered all rights of privacy to it, there is no privacy left to violate. If you come into my house and strip in my living room, you cannot complain about not having any privacy now can you? You brought your private affairs someplace you should not have.
With this gentleman, the case is probably against him. If he deleted the files while on company time, and it could be proved that he realized this would cause harm to the company, it could be argued he was not dealing in good faith with his employer and that the contract of employment was void, and that would open him up to "destruction of private property" among other charges. If he was terminated and the company made no attempt to collect the information from his personal computer in a reasonable period of time, I'd call it 'abandoned", and say format the sucker. But if he wiped the files before giving the company adequate opportunity to retrieve their data, again I would call destruction of private property.
Straying more off topic, if you're going to can someone, you should do it in a planned, organized manner. I heard an interesting description of how AT&T handles termination... lets say you have three "unplanned absenses" during probation. Even when you call them on the 3rd to say your house burned down last night and you won't be in today, they will say no problem come in when you can. What you don't know is you are already fired. See they need you to bring back in the company laptop and your keycard, and lying to you and telling you everything is OK is the most effective way for them to make sure they get their stuff back. They'll meet you at the door with a box of your stuff, take their stuff, and escort you out.
That's the way to fire someone. Make sure you have your stuff back. If you aren't smart enough to do this, the law will probably still pity you, but I sure won't.
You are missing something. If I take a sack lunch (or any property really) to work or anywhere else, it's still my property. Agreed. But when I use the company resources, and most likely on the company time, to create an email, (CREATE, on COMPANY TIME, that is the key) the company OWNS anything I produce while I am on the clock working for them. This includes material goods, documentation, and even ideas that I develop while thinking up ideas for company projects. If I write an email up on company time on a company computer, I have no expectation whatsoever that I own or have rights of privacy to it.
Other posters point out "it's none of your business" when walking up behind another employee's monitor. While I would agree there may be privacy concerns if you are say, editing medical records or something where the user is protecting someone else's privacy from you, but if you're typing up a personal email, I really don't care about whose business you think the email is. You are using company resources, on company paid time, to do that, and you should expect that at any time any employee of the comany may read that letter. If you feel this is invading your privacy, then why on earth did you do it in the first place? Go home and do it on your own time, with your own computer, and then you will have all the privacy you need.
I'd probably be called a BOFH for this, but I would find it appropriate that such an email would be printed out and posted on the company bulletin board for all to see, to demonstrate the point. It's a bit like leaving the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition. Some people just don't learn until their car gets stolen. Don't be stupid and you'll miss out on a lot of inconvenience and embarassment.
The issue gets stickier when you have people doing Stupid Things(tm) like doing R&D work at home for projects similar to what they do R&D for at work. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. One case where the employee won was the guy that thought up pulse wiping windshield wipers. He worked for a car company, but he convinced the courts that he thought up the idea on his own time, at home, which is why he was able to get a patent for it. (strangely enough, a similar thing happened with cruise control) Most others are not so lucky. You make it on company time, it's the company's property.
"the files" is the evidence, not the crime. I think you are confusing the two. Making the evidence go away does not nullify the crime. If he commits a "crime" and there are files ("evidence") that he destroys, and you can prove there was a crime and the files were incriminating evidence, he can be charged not only with the crime, but also with destruction of evidence, which is illlegal.
Also the files on the laptop, were company property. While you are a company employee, you are caring for those files as a representative of the company, and you can arguably do with them as you please. After he was fired, those files were no longer under his care (he was no longer authorized to manage company property and resources) and remained property of the company. Wiping the hard drive at that point could very easily be proven to be Destruction of Private Property, again this is illegal.
The lessons learned:
(1) anything you put on a company computer IS THE COMPANY'S PROPERTY. Don't cry invasion of privacy or personal files, they are NOT yours anymore. You surrendered your right to privacy of your documents the moment you put them on company property. This actually is a double edged sword - many companies don't like you to use your own laptop specifically because they have less legal control over it and the information on it during extreme circumstances like termination. And don't forget, this includes email. Company has the right to monitor your email and anything else you do on the computer. It's astounding how many people believe that company email is private and that their employers are "not allowed" to look at personal employee emails.
(2) it's sometimes easier for a prossicutor to get a conviction if you destroy some (but not enough) evidence.
(3) it's not unheard of for a company to obtain a search warrant and send the police to ransack your house and take your computers/HDs/CDs to retrieve "sensitive company information". You don't even have to have the company's laptop for that one - they just have to convince a judge that you have "work in progress" you took home from work and loaded onto your computer, and you want it back. Sadly, most judges belly up on this issue and just sign off without due consideration for what they're allowing to happen.
With point 1, I get a chuckle when I walk by someone on a computer, typing up an email, and when they see someone approaching from behind they flip to another window or hit screensaver etc. I want to say to them "you DO realize that's not private in any way shape or form and I or any of your managers could easily read it?" but I usually just walk away smiling at their ignorance.
At some point in the future reality will hit them like a brick, and give them a good case of the cold sweats.
the only thing that's important is if you live long enough to have kids at all. If you die at age 7 you won't matter much to evolution.
On the other hand, if EVERYONE lives to be exactly 40, the "survival of the fittest" part of evolution stops working and as I said, we revert to the natural selection aspect where your genetics influence your partner's selection of you as a mate. Look at the peacock... do you think that plumage makes him a better survivor? Of course not. There's just something about those colored feathers that trips the peahen's trigger and makes him be selected over more drab peacocks. I believe human evolution is on the same track, consisting almost entirely of natural selection and very little on survival of the fittest.
I recalled reading something that applies well here. It was a short article discussing the concept that someone evolved a genetic condition that gave him the powers of superman. Sounds exciting, but if he's sterile, does he matter? Or for that matter, if his condition isn't a result of genetic change and isn't going to be passed to his offspring, does his ability matter? As far as evolution is concerned, he never even existed.
One major software title I used to use a lot had this problem. I hopped on board at about version 2. This company had a very active beta program, and it was not uncommon to see a new version once a week. Unfortunately, they spent such an unbalanced amount of time on new development as opposed to bug fixing, that the new builds were very often worse than the old ones. You might argue that this was beta and so I cannot expect a polished product, and I agree. However, there was essentially no difference between the betas and the releases. It was widely believed that the week of the next planned release or paid upgrade, they'd take the best beta of the last few weeks and call it a release. (I don't think they ever did a "feature freeze")
It was very common among the developers that used the betas, to keep ALL previous betas. Many users were stuck several versions back because a critical feature they required had been broken several builds ago and had not been fixed yet. It was a very aggrivating tradeoff, to be dealing with a month-old build because you needed feature ABC to work, but then to see them fix (or add) three other things you really had been waiting for but that you can only drool at because you simply cannot upgrade until they fix your issue.
Sometimes you'd upgrade and then a week later get flooded with bug reports. Track down the problem and find it's the compiler itself that is causing the problem, and back you go, to last month's build. I was running several months behind on several occasions, using versions that were betas published prior to the most current release, which was already in a new beta cycle. In that case there simply was no release that ran acceptably.
All in all a very frustrating experience. I made my last paid upgrade at v4.5, it's now around version 7 I think, I've stopped keeping track of it since about 5.5. There are a lot of others in my same situation, agreeing that 4.52 is the best version that was ever released, from a stability standpoint.
What's really going to bite is when more companies go to a subscription model, and require a periodic payment to keep the program you already have running. When those companies go out of business or stop supporting an older version, you're just plain screwed. You'l be foreced to upgrade and suffer the consequences, or go through the torture that is changing products after you're already established with one.
Somewhat on topic... what's the current legal interpretation of software made by a company that is out of business? Is it considered public domain at that point? Or does the (defunct) author have to release it into the public domain? Or does it expire after a certain timespan or after termination of support?
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
The problem evolution is having now is that in order for the primary mechanism of evolution to "work", a significant portion of the members of a population have to die. (not survive long enough to reproduce) In today's modern human socity, life is valued and society helps people to survive that without help would not have made it.
Some of the most extreme examples include people that have a genetic defect that would normally be fatal, but due to modern medical technology they are able to go on living. They have children, some of which inherit those different genes and also suffer from the same genetic condition. 500 years ago this would not have happened because the original defect would have been "weeded out of the gene pool" and there would have been no children with the same defect.
Evolution may still be occurring, but it is very likely going a lot slower than it was even a decade ago. It's also likely working a little different now than it did in the past - the other functional feature of evolution is natural selection, and the random attributes that people find attractive in finding a partner have probably changed over time and this also would affect evoltion - I'd expect this to now be the dominent influence on human evolution.
There are dozens of ways we enumerate people today. Social Security Numbers, driver's license, telephone, voice mail box, theatre ticket numbers, just because it's not tattooed on your body doesn't mean it's not your number. If the radicals want to take a position, they have more than enough other issues to yell about, this is just the latest addition to the bottom of the list.
Though all these things are physically separate from your body. When we get into tattoos, RFID, implants, etc., I think that's where people think a line has been crossed, because an identifying change has been made to your body, a change that may be difficult to escape or leave behind.
DNA sampling and fingerprinting seem to blur even that line. It's something you can't escape or leave behind, but it's not something that's added to you, it's an inherent quality of you. These seem to be the current "front lines" for this issue, so I don't foresee the disconnected identifiers becomging a hot topic until dna and fingerprinting becomes completely acceptable. Then they'll move on to the more obscure and disconnected things.
Closed source has the immediate advantage of obscuring your code. Hackers can't pour over your source code for mistakes or the occasional red-flag comments. ("we'll just assume xyz here, will code in a check later when we get specs.") Open source is immediately open to scruteny.
In the short term, closed source is useful because when your code first hits the network no one knows much about the internals, there are no known holes, and finding holes is difficult. Open source is open to immediate and sophisticated attack as the hackers can see the program flow and exploit visible weakenesses.
As time goes on, open source is patched to deal with the flaws. Even though the open and closed source could technically be the exact same program, the open source one benefits from the initial exploitation by rapid evlution. Being open source though, it probably started out a little behind the closed source, because it likely did not have a paid and well-organized development group working on it, so it has a little catching up to do anyway. The closed source also evolves, but only in response to internal testing and analysis, and the occasional black/white hat that finds something by poking through the binaries.
So after a few years, the initial security/stability gap between the two is eliminated. Old open source projects do tend to stagnate after a few years, so development there probably slackens. This happens at about the time you'd expect two competing projects to about equal each other.
The question then is what happens from there? I believe this is very dependent on the open and the closed projects you examine. Open source may continue active development and surpass closed source. Or it may stagnate and be passed by the paid updates released on a continual basis from the closed source.
Because of this I don't believe either model is ideal. Depending on how the cards play out, either one could be the better solution. I'd like to think that open source is the winner, but I'm sure it isn't the clear winner.
Anyone paranoid about security would not believe a word the man says. If they were making a back door, would they tell you? Of course not, that would greatly lower the value of the back door. Anyone with sensitive information on their computer would be insane to trust bitlocker if he says there's a back door.
So we will have to rely on independent auditors - those people like DVD John that will ignore all the silly "no reverse engineering allowed" rules and tear it apart anyway. Then we will know for sure. When people really get serious, like international governments, do we see blind trust? No, we have "trust but verify". These people don't want to let anyone verify, so how can we just trust them?
Ignoring the possibility he's lying, you seriously have to ask yourself how many other back doors microsoft was created lately, without even trying. Worm of the Week, anyone? I don't think even if they tried to make it secure, that they could succeed on the first (or second) try. Their track record on security is very clear to see.
Even organizations with a great deal of money to lose can't make things bulletproof on the first try. The cryptographic weaknesses of CSS (DVD encrypting) are well documented, and that industry spent milllions of dollars developing it.
So either way you look at it, they're not worthy of our trust in this matter.
Apple tends to be the "white hat" in these situations, and they also have had home folder encryption for several years now, called FileVault. Even though I have more trust in Apple than I do in MicroSoft, I can't help but wonder about the possibilities of an intentional (or unintentional) back door in FileVault.
Since this limit was "arbitrary", that means the only deciding factor was not technology, but money. I wonder how much the block cost Intel?
And now that it's in the open, (like that was going to take very long?) I wonder if they'll remove the block?
Around here anyway, with the landscape hilly the way it is, there are TV antenna towers all over the place. Most of them are around 40ft tall and are made from some cheap "ribbon candy" towers, that are only meant to support a TV antenna. Many of these towers are even freestanding, although you often see them with a few cables teathering them to the house corners, which in most cases isn't helping with how loose the cables are. Many of these towers are only 2 or 3 sections, enough to get 8-10 ft above the roof with the antenna.
There are a lot of old amateur radio operators in the area, easily spotted by the higher quality towers and sometimes very large antenna arrays. A few of the towers around here are 70ft or higher, and are guy-wired to buried anchors at the corners of their yard. There are still a couple monsters around 100ft tall in town.
Most of these towers are not currently used. I'd estimate 70% of the radio and 85% of the TV antennas up are not being used. (mostly from amateur radio operators that are no longer active, people that have gotten cable TV, and people that bought the house with the tower already installed) Only maybe 1/3 of the owners are interested in getting rid of them though - some people don't want kids crawling around on their roofs kicking up shingles, and some just think they might use it again. But that still leaves a very large number of people willing to sell their towers. Many of them will give it "free for the taking" so long as you clean up and use some tar or other sealant on the anchor points to make sure they don't get roof leaks as a result of your extraction. They're usually just glad to get rid of the eyesore.
The "good" towers (rohn for instance) last I checked were around $20/ft, so about $200/section if bought new. The top sections, with the end cap where you'd insert a mast for the antenna, are more common than you'd like to see - almost every tower has one and you can only use one yourself, so you usually end up stuck with one or two spare top sections you cannot use if you're trying for 3+ section tower, unless you cut them down a bit.
what happens when the power and/or batteries for the electronic 'knock' system is dead?
same thing that happens when you forget your keys.
There's that pesky "for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction" rule. If you levitate a vibrating object, true, the object's inertia may help to buffer the vibration, and the lack of physical contact will certainly be a benefit, but in the end, the vibrating object will create a disturbance in the magnetic field that is levitating it, which will in turn cause the maglev unit itself to vibrate. Isn't this going to a lot of work for a very minor benefit?
I agree, in many cases when you shrink something you can simplify the design. But the point is, you have to change the design. That's not something that's easy to program into a self replicating computer. And when it down-sizes itself, does it simplify its brain too? It has to get smaller as well if the whole thing is to shrink. It gets harder to stay smart when you shrink your brain. ;)
when you hear 'swarm', think of a carpet of ants streaming across your driveway.