I would even go further to say that the top 5% owns 95% of the wealth. But that isn't random either. It's also true that the same 5% of the populatoin are the mega-producers, and I would venture to say deserve the top 5% of the wealth.
It is imperative that people are rewarded for the risks and investments they make. It is so so crucial that the people who employ 100's of thousands of people get to keep the wealth. It's vital that the people that have millions in stocks get and investments keep their earnings. Your one of these guys at the top and you have a million dollars sitting around. What do they do with it? They a) put it in the bank b) invest it in a company c) put it in the bank who invests in a company. Therefore, that bank has money to loan to you, and that company can now invest that money either a) hiring labor or b) buying stuff from another company which has to hire labor.
As long as the mega producers are paying a fair wage, they deserve to hold onto their money, and if you look at the average lifestyle of an American, most Americans are making a fair wage. How else would you explain the fact that the citizens of the United States live a higher lifestyle than everyone else?
Not everyone can own the wealth, and the ones who produce and take risks must be rewarded financially for it. I like having computers, vcrs, printers, xboxs, toasters, ovens, microwaves, frozen food, fast food, slow food, fast cars, a house, etc. etc. If you don't allow the wealthy to keep their wealth from production and innovation, all of these things go away, or at least cost a lot more.
Also, with the tax system the way it is and human nature, very few familie maintain wealth for more than 3-4 generations. Children of rich people often live a life of luxury, but the grandchildren of wealthy people often don't.
The reason this system is fair is because anyone can a) start a business that produces a desired product or comes between the manufacturer and the customer and become wealthy b) people who have money often put the money back in the economy so that everyone benefits from it through easy credit and company reinvestment.
Fair is not that everyone has the same money and luxury. Fair is that even the poorest person can become the wealthiest in a single generation through hard work, dedication, innovation, and production. If you don't want to work hard, give up fun time for work time, learn a product so well you can improve it, or take the risks involved with starting a business, that's fine. Be an employee. You'll have a decent lifestyle with very little financial up and downs any way, whether you recognize it or not.
I've been in companies were the Unions have completely disabled the company. I don't promote that. I'm not neccesarly saying Unions are the answer, but I do feel that employers do have a responsability to be good to their employees. Face it, not everyone can own their own company. If they did, many types of businesses would not be possible. (For example, how would UPS run if everyone was the boss? Packages wouldn't get any where).
Faced with the fact that employee-employer relationship is neccessary in order for the benefit of society, and businesses do affect the lives of it's employees so severly, I stand to argue that a business has a moral obligation to be good to it's employees. Just like the King's of monarchies have a moral obligation to be good to it's populace and slave owners of old-US had a moral obligation to be good to it's slaves. (Although slavery itself is immoral, most would agree that a kind slave owner was more moral than one who was quick to strike, split up families, or kill it's slaves.)
I think the threat of a Union can be strong motivating factor for a company to treat it's employees in a morally correct way. However, I agree that often Unions take things to the opposite extreme where it is difficult to fire an encompetant employee, etc.
In conclusion, I think it's the moral obligation for a company to be good to it's employees so there is no need for a Union. Once the Union becomes involved, the trust relationship is gone, and the company is as good as dead.
wow, you took that a little to the leftist conspiracy theory side. I wasn't trying to go there. I was just trying to say there is a happy medium. Sweat shops should be illegal. It should be illegal for a large company to fire 100 programmers and let them squirm for 3-6 months in the bad economy, and then hire them back at a far cheaper rate and less favorable conditions because of their desperacy. It should be illegal for a President of a company to loan himself a billion dollars while a company goes under and 100's of thousands of people loose their livelihood.
Someone said in another post that you didn't see anybody complaining when the times were good and employees were sticking it to the companies. That's because the economic need drove companies to satisfy the personal happiness of it's employees. Now, the economy isn't forcing the companies to meet the employees needs. They should do it because it really is the right thing to do.
In the past, the King was the supreme being and he was morally charged to look after his people... The good Kings in history were remembered for it, and called good. The bad Kings abused their populace, and as a result, their are Kings no more.
Companies have it within their power to please it's employee populace. If they fail, the system will fail, and companies will be stripped of the financial power of populace control. Like American have a responsability to defend their freedom with voting and volunteering, companies have a responsability to defend Capitalism by doing good to their employees.
To a certain degree, I agree. I do run my own businesses on the side and as soon as I make more money in my part time business, I will quite my job. However, if everyone ran their own business, who would run the big businesses that are required for the economy to run. There are a lot of one man businesses or 100% partner run only businesses, but lets be honest. In order for our economy to work, there has to be employers and employees. Look at UPS for example. That's a huge operation and not possible to run as a single man operation or even a huge partnership. We need big business. That's capitalism. So, if the economy needs employees and that's part of the system, it becomes partly the responsability of the big business to increase the quality of life of the employees.
Actually, bush was declared winner of Florida. It is the Gore camp that took the decision to court. The supreme court declared, in short, that this election would not be decided by the court, but by the votes. Also, if you read The Constitution, the popular vote of the combined United States is insignification. Because we are a United States, the President of such "United" States is decided by having each state vote. We are not a single populace, but a conglomerate of individual states. A national popular vote wouldn't make sense then. So your statement should be, ...won by Electoral College of the 50 United States
I agree with you that Unions can be the death or cancer of an industry. For example, in the late 70 and early 80's the car unions fought the implmentation of robots to replace workers. At first, the union kept jobs. But the plants in Japan implemented robots and were able to produce a car quicker, with higher quality, for cheaper. The end result is that the sales of Japanese cars sky-rocketed in the US at the sake of American cars. And all those jobs that were saved from not implementing robots were lost plus tens times that because the industry just couldn't compete. In this case, Unions inhibited inovation and in effect, killed themselves.
On the other hand, in America and all modern productive countries, the masses have given up their freedom to further the goals of the employer. As an employee, I spend most of my life serving my employer. So much of my quality of life is controlled by my employer. (And all full time employees). I think it is reasonable to expect and ask for job security, freedom from wrongful financial persecution (someone firing you 'cause they don't like you), and a reasonably comfortable work environment. After all, I am giving my employer my life. The least I could expect is to be treated fairly.
In conclusion, Unions can be horrible for an industry when they don't consider the business needs of the company. On the other hand, Companies need employees to make money. Employees sacrafice a great deal of control in the employee-employer realtionship. The least a company could do is provide employment fairness and comfort, and restraint on cracking the whip.
Although ancient greek may be a perfect language, easily translated, the rest of the languages in the world are not. The problem is that almost all human language has as many exceptions to rules as it has rules. And even if you know the rules, often a sentence taken literally cannot possibly be translated without all the understood background or explanation behind it. For example, if I were to say, "Government officials report there will be more 9-11's." that doesn't mean much literally. But when I associate with what I know happened on 9-11-2002 and I put it into the context of the rest of an article, I can pull out a lot more information. Such as the Government means the American Government. Officials mean people in the executive branch of the federal government.
So the problem is that languag just isn't defined by it's rules and exceptions buy also on an understanding of the world around us and the history of that world and the ability to think like a human. For example, teaching a computer to pick out when a human is telling a joke or using sarcasm is such a difficult task.
In the 70's AI scientests assumed that translating language was just a matter of symantics... translating "is" to "est" and "cat" to "gatto". But in fact it involves a computer 'knowing' and entire culture and history of a people. It requires a computer to have common sense.
Actually, I think you are on to something there. Of course a football game will never decide the Iraq issue. However, sports have become huge in the United States, and people the had become restless in the past and pushed for war are now occupied with whether Ohio State will beat Michigan or not.
My theory, the existance of organized sports could bring a group of people togethor and appease them removing the public push for war.
However, real issues can only be resolved with real War. Let's say said simulation happened and both parties were held to it. The US looses the simulation. The US ignores the result and puts it's army into Iraq and tries it for real.
In games, the goal is to show your superiority of intellect and sometimes resources. In War the goal is to force your opponent to give in to your will.
No game, whether it be online, football, or paintball could ever force someone to give into your will. That can only be accomplished by eliminating the enemy and thus taking your desired action, threat of death in order to coerce you into acting within your will, or coercian by offering something you want in exchange for acting within your will.
"We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield"
Good luck... This has been promised since the 70's. This problem has turned out to be an incredibly difficult problem and trillions have been spent on the project.
Is it possible? Sure.
Are promisses of a huge leap in human language translation by computers real? Not likely. This technology will gradually get better; there won't be huge leaps.
On a serious note, (cause the original post was obviously intentional flamebait)...
I think lack of voter-ship for a certain percentage of the people is contentness. On one hand, people migh say, 1 vote doesn't matter. But on the other hand, when something really important is up for the vote, you always get a lot better turnout. Which to me indicates, at least a certain percentage of people are content...
Kind of ironic wasn't it? You would think that would have been apparent with the "but no one cares" ending, hunh? But don't let a good opinion get in the way of the facts.
Maybe this will give people the courage and the motivation to make their ideas heard, at least somewhere...
You act like it is a good thing for everyone to protest and voice their opinions. It's not. In fact, I'm tired of hearing about it. Get a job. Stop stuffing my ears with your opinions. Maybe, 90% of people don't protest, 'cause things are good. You're just a winer who will never be happy no matter wheter X does Y or not.
Use standard web technology. That way, it doesn't matter which server/client you use. You can use a PDA for the client, or a cell phone, or whatever...
Run it over some SSL on an internal only network. Put a desktop as the end machine, and lock it down to only launch the POS client.
PC hardware is cheap, web serving is a known science, and the technology is proven stable. Use standard ethernet network.
Solaris SA with some kind of specialization. ie, Oracle DB, Directory Server (Iplanet), Webserver (Iplanet, Websphere). Need knowledge of Solaris including OS, shell scripting. This is worth about 80k-130k a year in Ohio, and it's relatively easy to find jobs. It will take 3-4 years to get into and build the skillset you need from scratch, but offers stability and high-pay.
If you are looking more shorterm, pick up some.net. If you catch it on the curve up, you can pull off some big cash, quick as companies try to implement new technology. Money here is limitless as the number of people who understand the technology is low, but the demand will be high (as Microsoft has a great marketing department.) Learning time is about 6 months, but skill usefullness is only about 2-3 years. (After 3 years or so, people will see all these other yokers making a killing the market will start to flood with knowledgeable pepole.
Check out veritos as well. I don't know exactly what it is, but I think it does high level disk management and perhaps some other high level datacenter functions. Pay starts at 100k.
That's like when people say you only use 4% of your brain... imagine if you could use 100%. Well, I IMAGINE that if you approached 6% of 'usage', your brain would probably melt... (not literally, but it wouldn't work quite right)
The percentage usage is based on concentrations of oxygen which are supposed to indicate usage... but really parts of your brain appear to be programmed to only be able to do certain things. ie, part of your brain will only be used to see, and as long as you can see, it will be used for that. So, it wouldn't make sense for you to use 100% of your brain to calculate math or compose and essay because X% will always be reserved for the tasks of seeing.
Exactly. Most fortune 500 companies won't even let you bring free software in the door. Use Solaris, it breaks, you call Sun on the phone and talk to the guy who wrote the component that's breaking. Linux breaks, who you going to call?
I would cut a square into your counter top, and place a glass in the square big enough to see your monitor through. Use sealant on the glass so that it is water resistant. Place the computer in the cabinet directly beneath it. Replace your normal drawer to fit a keyboard/touchpad/ or mouse.
This solves a couple of issues with other solutions. First, you can use and replace all parts with standard equipment. It keeps the thing completely hidden unless you are looking for it... it looks nice. It is as cheap or expensive as you want... that's what I would do.
Make sure you get a special saw blade for your counter top as normal blades will chip it.
You can run your network cable underneath your cabinat and through your floor, if you have a basement/crawspace. Shouldn't be too hard to install power either... (my garbage disposal is broken... thus I have a spare power outlet...)
In my experience, if you catch a Mircrsoft technology in the height of it's marketing buzz, you will get paid big to implment it. For example, Active Directory or in my personal experience ADSI (which is just a common library for Active Directory)
But when using a unique passphrase, "warez" replacements only serve to make the password harder to crack with a brute force attack by increasing the possibility of characters.
I agree with you that replacing numbers for letters does nothing to make the password any more secure if it is based off a dictionary word. ie, turning password into p@ssw0rd doesn't really help that much.
However, starting with the pass phrase "I like to pick very difficult passwords to crack", you get IlTpVdPtC which will never be in a dictionary. However, brute forcing this will take a lot longer if you say "1lTp7dP2C". Also, the key is to develope your own rules, but are easy to remember. For example, substituting numbers for entire words. "I am happy because I have a Full Life" "IaHbIhAfL" becomes "Ia3bIhA24L" because your personally defined system 3 equals happy because you have 3 kids and 24 is full because that's how many hours are in the day. It doesn't matter what your systems is as long as it is only stored in your head, it is easy to create passwords and to remember passwords with, and it makes the password especially difficult to a) guess b) crack with a dictionary c) brute force be trying every combination of letters, capital letters, and numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
I would even go further to say that the top 5% owns 95% of the wealth. But that isn't random either. It's also true that the same 5% of the populatoin are the mega-producers, and I would venture to say deserve the top 5% of the wealth.
It is imperative that people are rewarded for the risks and investments they make. It is so so crucial that the people who employ 100's of thousands of people get to keep the wealth. It's vital that the people that have millions in stocks get and investments keep their earnings. Your one of these guys at the top and you have a million dollars sitting around. What do they do with it? They a) put it in the bank b) invest it in a company c) put it in the bank who invests in a company. Therefore, that bank has money to loan to you, and that company can now invest that money either a) hiring labor or b) buying stuff from another company which has to hire labor.
As long as the mega producers are paying a fair wage, they deserve to hold onto their money, and if you look at the average lifestyle of an American, most Americans are making a fair wage. How else would you explain the fact that the citizens of the United States live a higher lifestyle than everyone else?
Not everyone can own the wealth, and the ones who produce and take risks must be rewarded financially for it. I like having computers, vcrs, printers, xboxs, toasters, ovens, microwaves, frozen food, fast food, slow food, fast cars, a house, etc. etc. If you don't allow the wealthy to keep their wealth from production and innovation, all of these things go away, or at least cost a lot more.
Also, with the tax system the way it is and human nature, very few familie maintain wealth for more than 3-4 generations. Children of rich people often live a life of luxury, but the grandchildren of wealthy people often don't.
The reason this system is fair is because anyone can a) start a business that produces a desired product or comes between the manufacturer and the customer and become wealthy b) people who have money often put the money back in the economy so that everyone benefits from it through easy credit and company reinvestment.
Fair is not that everyone has the same money and luxury. Fair is that even the poorest person can become the wealthiest in a single generation through hard work, dedication, innovation, and production. If you don't want to work hard, give up fun time for work time, learn a product so well you can improve it, or take the risks involved with starting a business, that's fine. Be an employee. You'll have a decent lifestyle with very little financial up and downs any way, whether you recognize it or not.
"Unions promote complacency"
I've been in companies were the Unions have completely disabled the company. I don't promote that. I'm not neccesarly saying Unions are the answer, but I do feel that employers do have a responsability to be good to their employees. Face it, not everyone can own their own company. If they did, many types of businesses would not be possible. (For example, how would UPS run if everyone was the boss? Packages wouldn't get any where).
Faced with the fact that employee-employer relationship is neccessary in order for the benefit of society, and businesses do affect the lives of it's employees so severly, I stand to argue that a business has a moral obligation to be good to it's employees. Just like the King's of monarchies have a moral obligation to be good to it's populace and slave owners of old-US had a moral obligation to be good to it's slaves. (Although slavery itself is immoral, most would agree that a kind slave owner was more moral than one who was quick to strike, split up families, or kill it's slaves.)
I think the threat of a Union can be strong motivating factor for a company to treat it's employees in a morally correct way. However, I agree that often Unions take things to the opposite extreme where it is difficult to fire an encompetant employee, etc.
In conclusion, I think it's the moral obligation for a company to be good to it's employees so there is no need for a Union. Once the Union becomes involved, the trust relationship is gone, and the company is as good as dead.
wow, you took that a little to the leftist conspiracy theory side. I wasn't trying to go there. I was just trying to say there is a happy medium. Sweat shops should be illegal. It should be illegal for a large company to fire 100 programmers and let them squirm for 3-6 months in the bad economy, and then hire them back at a far cheaper rate and less favorable conditions because of their desperacy. It should be illegal for a President of a company to loan himself a billion dollars while a company goes under and 100's of thousands of people loose their livelihood.
Someone said in another post that you didn't see anybody complaining when the times were good and employees were sticking it to the companies. That's because the economic need drove companies to satisfy the personal happiness of it's employees. Now, the economy isn't forcing the companies to meet the employees needs. They should do it because it really is the right thing to do.
In the past, the King was the supreme being and he was morally charged to look after his people... The good Kings in history were remembered for it, and called good. The bad Kings abused their populace, and as a result, their are Kings no more.
Companies have it within their power to please it's employee populace. If they fail, the system will fail, and companies will be stripped of the financial power of populace control. Like American have a responsability to defend their freedom with voting and volunteering, companies have a responsability to defend Capitalism by doing good to their employees.
To a certain degree, I agree. I do run my own businesses on the side and as soon as I make more money in my part time business, I will quite my job. However, if everyone ran their own business, who would run the big businesses that are required for the economy to run. There are a lot of one man businesses or 100% partner run only businesses, but lets be honest. In order for our economy to work, there has to be employers and employees. Look at UPS for example. That's a huge operation and not possible to run as a single man operation or even a huge partnership. We need big business. That's capitalism. So, if the economy needs employees and that's part of the system, it becomes partly the responsability of the big business to increase the quality of life of the employees.
...won by judicial decision.
...won by Electoral College of the 50 United States
Actually, bush was declared winner of Florida. It is the Gore camp that took the decision to court. The supreme court declared, in short, that this election would not be decided by the court, but by the votes. Also, if you read The Constitution, the popular vote of the combined United States is insignification. Because we are a United States, the President of such "United" States is decided by having each state vote. We are not a single populace, but a conglomerate of individual states. A national popular vote wouldn't make sense then. So your statement should be,
I agree with you that Unions can be the death or cancer of an industry. For example, in the late 70 and early 80's the car unions fought the implmentation of robots to replace workers. At first, the union kept jobs. But the plants in Japan implemented robots and were able to produce a car quicker, with higher quality, for cheaper. The end result is that the sales of Japanese cars sky-rocketed in the US at the sake of American cars. And all those jobs that were saved from not implementing robots were lost plus tens times that because the industry just couldn't compete. In this case, Unions inhibited inovation and in effect, killed themselves.
On the other hand, in America and all modern productive countries, the masses have given up their freedom to further the goals of the employer. As an employee, I spend most of my life serving my employer. So much of my quality of life is controlled by my employer. (And all full time employees). I think it is reasonable to expect and ask for job security, freedom from wrongful financial persecution (someone firing you 'cause they don't like you), and a reasonably comfortable work environment. After all, I am giving my employer my life. The least I could expect is to be treated fairly.
In conclusion, Unions can be horrible for an industry when they don't consider the business needs of the company. On the other hand, Companies need employees to make money. Employees sacrafice a great deal of control in the employee-employer realtionship. The least a company could do is provide employment fairness and comfort, and restraint on cracking the whip.
Common... a troll? Did you visit the link. It's not actually a sim game... It's just a lame advertisement... A troll? My god!
Although ancient greek may be a perfect language, easily translated, the rest of the languages in the world are not. The problem is that almost all human language has as many exceptions to rules as it has rules. And even if you know the rules, often a sentence taken literally cannot possibly be translated without all the understood background or explanation behind it. For example, if I were to say, "Government officials report there will be more 9-11's." that doesn't mean much literally. But when I associate with what I know happened on 9-11-2002 and I put it into the context of the rest of an article, I can pull out a lot more information. Such as the Government means the American Government. Officials mean people in the executive branch of the federal government.
So the problem is that languag just isn't defined by it's rules and exceptions buy also on an understanding of the world around us and the history of that world and the ability to think like a human. For example, teaching a computer to pick out when a human is telling a joke or using sarcasm is such a difficult task.
In the 70's AI scientests assumed that translating language was just a matter of symantics... translating "is" to "est" and "cat" to "gatto". But in fact it involves a computer 'knowing' and entire culture and history of a people. It requires a computer to have common sense.
This is crap.. don't go. It's just advertisement for a non-game product.
Actually, I think you are on to something there. Of course a football game will never decide the Iraq issue. However, sports have become huge in the United States, and people the had become restless in the past and pushed for war are now occupied with whether Ohio State will beat Michigan or not.
My theory, the existance of organized sports could bring a group of people togethor and appease them removing the public push for war.
However, real issues can only be resolved with real War. Let's say said simulation happened and both parties were held to it. The US looses the simulation. The US ignores the result and puts it's army into Iraq and tries it for real.
In games, the goal is to show your superiority of intellect and sometimes resources. In War the goal is to force your opponent to give in to your will.
No game, whether it be online, football, or paintball could ever force someone to give into your will. That can only be accomplished by eliminating the enemy and thus taking your desired action, threat of death in order to coerce you into acting within your will, or coercian by offering something you want in exchange for acting within your will.
That's hillarious dude... My mod points just expired, else I would give you some.
"We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield"
Good luck... This has been promised since the 70's. This problem has turned out to be an incredibly difficult problem and trillions have been spent on the project.
Is it possible? Sure.
Are promisses of a huge leap in human language translation by computers real? Not likely. This technology will gradually get better; there won't be huge leaps.
On a serious note, (cause the original post was obviously intentional flamebait)...
I think lack of voter-ship for a certain percentage of the people is contentness. On one hand, people migh say, 1 vote doesn't matter. But on the other hand, when something really important is up for the vote, you always get a lot better turnout. Which to me indicates, at least a certain percentage of people are content...
Kind of ironic wasn't it? You would think that would have been apparent with the "but no one cares" ending, hunh? But don't let a good opinion get in the way of the facts.
Maybe this will give people the courage and the motivation to make their ideas heard, at least somewhere...
You act like it is a good thing for everyone to protest and voice their opinions. It's not. In fact, I'm tired of hearing about it. Get a job. Stop stuffing my ears with your opinions. Maybe, 90% of people don't protest, 'cause things are good. You're just a winer who will never be happy no matter wheter X does Y or not.
Just my opinion... oh wait, no one cares.
Use standard web technology. That way, it doesn't matter which server/client you use. You can use a PDA for the client, or a cell phone, or whatever...
Run it over some SSL on an internal only network. Put a desktop as the end machine, and lock it down to only launch the POS client.
PC hardware is cheap, web serving is a known science, and the technology is proven stable. Use standard ethernet network.
Well, Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Dayton which encompuses much of the state. Of course, most in Ohio are within an hour of those locations.
Good luck in south-east Ohio, but you should be able to make enough to pay your trailer payments.
Solaris SA with some kind of specialization. ie, Oracle DB, Directory Server (Iplanet), Webserver (Iplanet, Websphere). Need knowledge of Solaris including OS, shell scripting. This is worth about 80k-130k a year in Ohio, and it's relatively easy to find jobs. It will take 3-4 years to get into and build the skillset you need from scratch, but offers stability and high-pay.
.net. If you catch it on the curve up, you can pull off some big cash, quick as companies try to implement new technology. Money here is limitless as the number of people who understand the technology is low, but the demand will be high (as Microsoft has a great marketing department.) Learning time is about 6 months, but skill usefullness is only about 2-3 years. (After 3 years or so, people will see all these other yokers making a killing the market will start to flood with knowledgeable pepole.
If you are looking more shorterm, pick up some
Check out veritos as well. I don't know exactly what it is, but I think it does high level disk management and perhaps some other high level datacenter functions. Pay starts at 100k.
That's like when people say you only use 4% of your brain... imagine if you could use 100%. Well, I IMAGINE that if you approached 6% of 'usage', your brain would probably melt... (not literally, but it wouldn't work quite right)
The percentage usage is based on concentrations of oxygen which are supposed to indicate usage... but really parts of your brain appear to be programmed to only be able to do certain things. ie, part of your brain will only be used to see, and as long as you can see, it will be used for that. So, it wouldn't make sense for you to use 100% of your brain to calculate math or compose and essay because X% will always be reserved for the tasks of seeing.
Something strange in your neighborhood. Who you gonna Call?
Exactly. Most fortune 500 companies won't even let you bring free software in the door. Use Solaris, it breaks, you call Sun on the phone and talk to the guy who wrote the component that's breaking. Linux breaks, who you going to call?
I would cut a square into your counter top, and place a glass in the square big enough to see your monitor through. Use sealant on the glass so that it is water resistant. Place the computer in the cabinet directly beneath it. Replace your normal drawer to fit a keyboard/touchpad/ or mouse.
This solves a couple of issues with other solutions. First, you can use and replace all parts with standard equipment. It keeps the thing completely hidden unless you are looking for it... it looks nice. It is as cheap or expensive as you want... that's what I would do.
Make sure you get a special saw blade for your counter top as normal blades will chip it.
You can run your network cable underneath your cabinat and through your floor, if you have a basement/crawspace. Shouldn't be too hard to install power either... (my garbage disposal is broken... thus I have a spare power outlet...)
I think I'm going to build this.
Your quote on "a lot" is alittle anal.
In my experience, if you catch a Mircrsoft technology in the height of it's marketing buzz, you will get paid big to implment it. For example, Active Directory or in my personal experience ADSI (which is just a common library for Active Directory)
But when using a unique passphrase, "warez" replacements only serve to make the password harder to crack with a brute force attack by increasing the possibility of characters.
I agree with you that replacing numbers for letters does nothing to make the password any more secure if it is based off a dictionary word. ie, turning password into p@ssw0rd doesn't really help that much.
However, starting with the pass phrase "I like to pick very difficult passwords to crack", you get IlTpVdPtC which will never be in a dictionary. However, brute forcing this will take a lot longer if you say "1lTp7dP2C". Also, the key is to develope your own rules, but are easy to remember. For example, substituting numbers for entire words. "I am happy because I have a Full Life" "IaHbIhAfL" becomes "Ia3bIhA24L" because your personally defined system 3 equals happy because you have 3 kids and 24 is full because that's how many hours are in the day. It doesn't matter what your systems is as long as it is only stored in your head, it is easy to create passwords and to remember passwords with, and it makes the password especially difficult to a) guess b) crack with a dictionary c) brute force be trying every combination of letters, capital letters, and numbers.