I have no problem with people not wanting to use computers. Its a choice and this is a free society. I do think pretty much Adult living in the United States could extract some value from owning one and knowing how to use it.
My neighbor next door, my "real" neighbor actually, has never used email. And yet, he has a number of computers that he uses on a daily basis to do his bidding. He's a trucker by trade. He has a fancy portable gps unit that talks to him, and that can also play DVD movies. His work truck and his personal truck both have inboard computers for their engine, which no doubt, his mechanic(s) will plug in a device to extract the error codes from and print out the possible solutions (listed from top to bottom -- to be tried in a sequential order -- from most likely to solve the problem to least likely to solve the problem). And since he's a truck driver himself, he may have or his work place may already have purchased a stripped down version of that device from the local Kragen auto parts store or Walmart. In his apartment, he has digital cable, with on-demand movies, an electronic TV guide, and who knows what else... (with what looks like some box with a small computer on top of his TV). Most likely, he also has an atm card, which allows him to retrieve cash, get his balance, do wire transfers (and do a lot more considering that's he's probably with bank of america and that bank just revamped/added many awesome new features (scanning capabilities, handwriting recognition, etc) to all their atms in our area).
That being said, and it may even sound like I am contradicting myself, but he even has a one year old Apple computer (that he purchased brand-new). He just never has used email and he's not really interested in learning how to use email. His top priority actually has been to find out how he could record streaming/embedded videos from youtube (at least, that's what he told me, but I suspect he just wants to learn that for porn). Email, I offered to teach him as well, but he was not really interested in that. Google, he uses, but I don't think he's aware of its full potential, or if he's aware, he does have his own informal network of family, friends, neighbors, work colleagues, professionals that he hires, who do have "personal" computers themselves, so he's not anywhere as disconnected to the internet as you make it sound that he is. For instance, when I showed him a report I had printed out from GasBuddy, he told me he didn't want that, every day, truck drivers share Diesel price information over their cb radio and their cell phone, that sharing of information is a social activity for him, and he had no intention to replace that social activity with a daily print out or a scheduled sms notification going to his cell phone. And I find it's no accident that my mechanic has a desktop computer connected to the internet, in a corner of his garage, these days most mechanics use the internet as well. The same for my medical doctor as well, some medical doctor may resent the fact that their patients have too much information at their fingertips, but when I ask him detail about something -- my own doctor will give me some print out he found from the internet (which suits me just fine actually, he probably knows how to look for and judge the relevancy of the information he finds on the web much better than I can).
Im surprised they're not using them to break the spam filter of yahoo/hotmail/gmail though, I mean if they all started sending each other spam and marketing it as ham, wouldn't that pretty much break any feedback based system that their using to protect their users.
Wouldn't collaborative baysian filtering mitigate that problem? The preferences of people who actually enjoy receiving spam would be combined with the preference of other similar-minded individuals. So then the people who like spam get their spam and the people who do not -- don't.
That's all well and good for people whose ISPs aren't throttling bittorrent traffic. Some of us however would just be screwed.
So I guess you must also be against public transportation and carpooling, after all if the roads carry the same payload -- but less traffic over all -- this somehow must be bad for you. Do I have this right?
In any case, a smart ISP would temporarily re-enable p2p, or at the very least they'd set up a proxy server for the most popular downloads. The proxy thing is what AOL used to do, it made economic sense for them to do this for certain super popular sites (at least for content that's cachable), it will make economic sense for them do that in the future as well.
2. I wonder what he means by "commercial data available in the public domain". Either it's commercial and you have to pay for it, or it's public domain. My long distance calling patterns are commercial data (and is sold by the phone company for marketing), but they're not "public domain" in the way that most of us would understand it.
You do your search on google, you click on that little image thingy they have, and you take out the most obvious false positives out of the results. What you end up getting is a pretty good list of results.
Now if this researcher could just find a way to put a couple of tubes between google and government public records, to filter out the plane hijackers that have already killed themselves, that would be totally sweet. As a taxpayer, I would be willing to pay a couple of trillion dollars to make that happen.
...they want to have a closed system that noone can pull the plug on come WW3.
Or may be, they want to have a closed system that noone can pull the plug on or purposefully cripple during peace time. After all, the American GPS civilian system is purposefully being crippled by the military. The only time it's been uncrippled was for the Iraq War, for when it was much easier for military personnel to get Costco purchased "Made in China" GPS units instead of getting military-grade "Made in America" GPS units. Getting more accurate GPS readings would certainly be a welcome change. I would be all over that.
I see the picture you're trying to paint, but it has the wrong focus. Tony Kvaric was not just some impressionable young member, he is the co-founder of Fairlight. To correctly expand your analogy about the "drug scene," it would be as if Pablo Escobar of the Medellin Cartel had come to the USA and become a Democratic Party leader.
Your comparison is exaggerated. Pablo Escobar is a mass murderer, not just some high-profile smuggler.
Fairlight and its founders haven't tried to kill anybody (as far as I know). If you want to compare anybody to Pablo Escobar, compare high ranking members of the Republican party. Henry Kissinger, Oliver North, Caspar Weinberger, (possibly) Ronald Reagan, etc. Those Republican leaders weren't just mass murderers in South America, making tens of thousands of people disappear, they also used drug trafficking in the Americas as a way to finance their covert black ops throughout the rest of the World.
I recommend Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers by Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan. The title of the book itself doesn't sound all that appealing, but this is the book you want. It will teach you all the little tricks that seasoned practitioners know, but that most books won't even tell you about.
Other guides I have found useful are the old Radio Shack notebooks. I'm not sure how they're called, or where you'd get them legally. I haven't seen them at Radio Shack and I do not know if they're still in print.
And last, I have to plug this TechShop establishment since they offer classes at very reasonable rates and they were kind enough to host our Ruby Hackfest in their awesome space last month.
Where did you get that idea?
The general consensus on the street seemed to be that Microsoft was offering *too much* money... which is why Microsoft stock dropped when the offer was first announced...
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but it really looked to me like they wanted Yahoo. It was Yahoo's executives who didn't want the deal to go through.
Maybe I just watch too much CNBC.
There you go, I corrected those spelling mistakes for you.
The general consensus on the street seemed to be that Microsoft was ISSUING AND offering *too much* NEW WORTHLESS MSN STOCK... which is why Microsoft stock dropped when the offer was first announced...
I AM INDEED a fan of MSN, but it really looked to me like they wanted Yahoo'S ASSETS. It was Yahoo's executives WHO DIDN'T WANT TO GET FIRED.
Maybe I just watch too much CNBC, WHICH HAPPENS TO BE AN AFFILIATE OF A PARTNER IN MSNNBC.
So I owe the New York government absolutely nothing for my ebay/amazon sales, and I'd like to see them try to cross the border and come get me. I don't think Pennsylvania would accept NY soldiers/officers marching across its territory in order to reach me in Maryland.
Not that this is going to happen, but they could cut some of the web traffic going to your site, and they could force their local banks not to do business with you. There is plenty they can do within their own physical borders. It's just that under Federal law, many of those things would probably be illegal.
And if a rogue internal State did try to disobey Federal law, then the Federal government can indeed do many things to retaliate against it. It's written right there in the Constitution. If a State doesn't want to obey carpool laws, the Federal government can withhold the disbursement of its Federal highway funds. If a State tries to close down its borders to specific goods, the Federal government can carpet bomb its infrastructure, apply pressure on its most disenfranchised inhabitants to start a grassroots rebellion, and restore freedom, justice, purity, and democracy -- by installing a puppet government of its very own choosing.
It would behoove people to leave their computers off overnight unless they have a compelling reason for leaving them on. Not only does it waste electricity, it also enables many computers to be used as spambots. If instead of banning incandescent light bulbs, Congress had told the American people to turn off their computers overnight, we would have been able to take out two birds with one stone.
Then what? Turn power plants off during the night. The problem is not power consumption during the night, it's excess power consumption during peak hours. Since power storage is really-really expensive, and since most power is generated 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Turning off the turbines during the night would be a waste also.
And then, there is the replacement cost of your hardware. Turning computer hardware on and off shrinks and expands different at different rates. And it's often better to leave it on always -- to keep the temperature more constant.
Which is why Pidgin offers the use of plugins. Yet the developers refuse to add a "resize input area" plugin to the list of default plugins (despite the demand) for fear of cluttering up the plugin area.
But if there is a demand for this plugin, the people making that demand can install that special plugin? Right? So this isn't about some upset users not knowing about the plugin, it's about some upset users that know about the plugin -- but that are upset that *other* users may not find out about it.
And since this plugin has already been written, and the need has already been filled, I wouldn't call this a fork really as much as it is a repackaged distribution. Right? Or am I missing a piece of the story?
HIPPA is the 800 lbs gorilla in healthcare IT and I believe that unauthorized release of identifiable medical data is a $50,000.00 fine; I'm not sure if losing backup tapes with 2 million records is one release or 2 million releases! I expect lawyers to get rich on this one when it goes class action, that's when everybody on the tapes will get notified.
But that's the point, that tape they lost was encrypted (apparently to a high enough level). The contingency plan was this encryption. The system looks like it worked. And it really doesn't look like any lawyer/crook will get rich on this one.
LTO4 includes on-tape encryption as part of the spec.
These'll be modern tapes (which are still very much in use).
Forget my previous post, if this university was located in my jurisdiction, it may not even be legally required to notify anyone about its loss (although, I couldn't be sure about that since I do not work in a Medical field). So please, someone chime in if you know about that.
Not everything is on Google. If we're talking tapes, we're probably talking old mainframe-level systems. That means the problem might even be at the level of accessing the tape at all. The data coming off the tape is still just a string of ones and zeroes to them.
Actually, this is not rocket science.
You could hook up/jerry rig any tape player that's remotely close to the backup tape in question, in terms of size and reading area of the magnetic head (the magnetic head could be bigger too), the rotation speed of the tape wouldn't matter either (it would be corrected for after the fact). The tape player would need a serial output, a headphone jack or a usb jack would work (although, for the usb connection you'd need to google for instructions to select the right pins to insert into the right holes of your serial input port).
Now if you were to hook up this tape player to a speaker, and could slow down the speed of the tape slow enough, this series of ones and zeros would start sounding like an audible pulse.
But you wouldn't need to go that far. On a Windows PC, you have HyperTerminal. On a Mac, you have Zterm. On the unix flavors, you have something else (I forget what it's called, but a scripting language should be able to do the trick for you if you just listen to the right device on the right port with the right library). With your terminal software, you will be able to tune it to the right data rate (the data rate is essentially the same thing as the timing of each pulse).
Then don't be surprised if you get to see a big dump of ascii text right in your terminal window. Also, if you examine the first bytes that come your way, don't be surprised if the parent poster was right about the header information. In the vast majority cases, it will give you the right header information right off the bat.
However if you still only see non-ascii gibberish on your terminal window, it will mean it's still in binary format, and the header information doesn't pan out (which will only happen a minority of the time). Then there is always WireShark (formerly Ethereal), that you can always google around for some screencasts on learning how to use it (youtube should have something too). WireShark will be able to infer a lot. And unless the data backup was encrypted (which is technically what they were supposed to do) then WireShark should be able to read some of that data successfully.
I store my password at mydomain.com/password.txt so I can just copy/paste when I'm remote.
Why use a password -- when you could use mailinator (no password necessary, your inbox is public)
If you wanted to get banking information for instance, you could have your bank email notifications of transactions (and daily account balance) directly to your gmail account, and then you would have gmail forward any relevant emails to your public mailinator inbox.
The reason you'd need something like gmail as a go-between is because you'd want to make sure messages fitting only specific patterns went through -- otherwise a crook could easily request additional information (or even your own password) and then your bank might send it back to him via your public inbox.
An even better solution would be to filter that information down further, but I'm not sure how do this without programming something. For instance, I just took a look at the notifications my bank sends me, and it contains the name of my bank, my full name, my email address, and the last four digits of my bank account. It would be nice if gmail (or some other server-side free email filtering service) removed some of those specific references before forwarding it on, this way it would give key-loggers/sniffers/screenshot-loggers on a public terminal even less information to work with.
Saying the government bailed out all of those companies is a gross and horrible oversimplification.
An "oversimplification", yes.
A "gross and *horrible* oversimplification", I do not think so.
If we keep on bailing out those who fund the gamblers, then we're effectively bailing out the gamblers themselves. Corporate personhood is a fiction anyway. The first line creditors that get bailed out will be the past executives and employees that are owed wages and compensation in arrears, and any other first line creditors that get reimbursed first will be the creditors that were smart enough to have known better anyway.
This is only insuring that the cycle repeats itself. If we keep on bailing out the gamblers, then we're only encouraging more gambling in the long run.
Does that mean I'll have to introduce methods that waste people's time in order to prevent google from registering on my site multiple times?
Yes, if you require all your human visitors to read your robots.txt, and then require them to check a checkbox to mean that they clearly read and understood the entire body of your robots.txt. Then yes, you'll have to introduce some sort of almost impossible-to-read translucent captcha written in classical Chinese.
We are supposed to be the people supporting technology.
You've got it backwards. Technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
How easy is it to throw ballots in a river or forge them? A six-year old can do it for God's sake! In contrast, how many people can really hack an election?
With paper, you would need many six-year olds to rig an election. With technology, you may only need one six year old adept at Visual Basic to hack the elections (Yes, Diebold uses Visual Basic for Applications).
With paper, everyone can be included in the design of the election process. With technology, the majority of election officials and the majority of the people can easily be bamboozled into an half-assed solution. With paper, security comes from transparency. With technology, security comes from obscurity (even if most of us disagree with that, the fact is that many of our leaders do not think the same way we do).
Also the law on the books was about using both technology *and* paper, therefore increasing transparency and audibility. Framing this debate as Technology vs. Non-Technology is a distortion of what this proposal is trying to achieve. This law is only trying to add transparency to the technology. It is not trying to replace the technology.
And finally, take a look at any gerrymandered congressional district maps (I don't know if you have them where you live). But the congressional maps we have now are the perfect examples of what can go wrong -- when incumbents (both republicans or democrats) are free to make decisions about small technical matters that will affect their own reelection chances. If we can't trust them to draw their own maps (with the help of the right technical consultants), we certainly can't trust them to design the right software processes for their own elections (we just know that the majority of people will be left out of that design process, as opposed to the design process for paper ballots and a paper trail).
This phenomena has been extensively studied in Japan which has an extremely high suicide rate. It has been noted that it is extremely easy to fall under the radar and just be completely ignored in Japan.
Citations please. The last time I had easy everyday access to medical journals, which was around ten years ago, I only found studies citing higher rates of suicide in Japan among the oldest people -- not the rest. Of course, any kind of suicide is still a suicide, but I'm just trying to clarify what seems to be a popular myth about teen suicides and office worker suicides in Japan.
The studies I looked at showed that almost everyone in Japan (everybody but old people) were actually much less likely to commit suicides than the people in the United States.
I certainly could see why you'd think the opposite was true. There is a cultural history of suicides in Japan, whether it's in the form of Sepuku (ritual suicide) or Kamikazes. There is also an acknowledged underground subculture of suicides, see the movie "The Suicide Club". And even ten years ago, when I looked it up, I had seen an American documentary actually citing higher rates of suicides in Japan and showing us one example of a Japanese kid who had committed suicide because of bullying, and then they had showed the interview of a wife who had lost her office worker husband because of his suicide (which was office work and over-work-related), but otherwise I do not think that our popular impression of Japan actually translates into reality in these cases.
I also believe that the often quoted higher rates of suicide and people jumping off buildings during the depression in the United States was a myth. It sounds true enough. And it was reported widely as true at the time -- generally speaking. But when you dig down enough and try to find such incidents, you can't find any specific one.
Now of course, not having the evidence doesn't mean it didn't happen. And there is certain amount of shame around suicides, and in some places it's intentionally misreported (for instance, I had a female relative who did commit suicide in Portugal a while ago, and it was purposefully misreported by the family/press/doctor), but unless I see an actual scientific study attempting to quantify the rates of suicides in Japan (and the corresponding attempt to explain/quantify the uncertainty involved in such a study), I'm just going to assume that you're just rehashing some studies you've actually seen cited on TV, and not some actual published peer-reviewed scientific study -- that the rest of us consider a real study.
But if you consider the poster's experience, the librarian appears to think that "most men are pedophiles and rapists", a crucial difference which makes her behaviour unacceptable.
No. The librarian probably thought that any person "who looks out of place" is a potential abductor. The human mind is a pattern-recognition machine, or should I say an exception-recognition machine. It does not distinguish patterns very well, but it does notice a pattern as soon as that pattern gets broken. That's why a person won't notice a recurring sound that's part of the background, but it will immediately notice if that sounds stops.
In this case, it could either be that the librarian watched too much Dateline, or it could be that the librarian doesn't even watch TV and it's the man himself who watched too much Dateline. In such cases, it's not just the man and his location that's the matter, but it's probably also a combination of his body language and his eye contact that looked completely out of place.
And sure, men probably do get accosted by suspicious librarians far more frequently than women, but I'll bet that most of those people (male or female) who do get accosted look fearful. Fear often begets fear. And if a man enters the children's section of a library thinking about the Dateline episode he just saw last night, he's much more likely to give off clues that he's afraid of being accosted and questioned by the staff, and therefore he's much more likely to make this thought a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The FCC did what now?
The FCC has the authority to regulate the use of a few communications-valuable portions of the RF spectrum.
To the best of my knowledge, they have no authority to regulate trade. We even have a similarly-named governmental TLA for that - The FTC.
Anyone care to 'splain it to me, by what stretch of the imagination fining retailers satisfies the goal of allocating spectrum for the greatest public good?
By your logic, then the FDA shouldn't able to fine supermarkets for changing the expiration dates on prepackaged meat, the IRS shouldn't be able to fine retailers for selling cigarettes without the federal sticker, and cops shouldn't be able to fine quickie-marts for selling alcohol to underage kids. This should all be under the purview of the FTC right?
Overlapping and criss-crossing jurisdictions is a fact in this country. I'm not saying this actual fine is justified. But as an agency that regulates the spectrum, I don't think the FCC should only be limited to regulating and fining manufacturers and broadcasters, the supply chain for consumer electronics is a long one. Sometimes, it's just too costly to impose all your regulations and fining at the manufacturer level, or at the border and customs levels. For instance at the customs level, only 2% of shipping containers actually get opened, and I'm sure each customs official already has a thousand things to check already.
In any case, if something should be challenged, it should be the FCC's fines on Howard Stern (before he moved to satellite). I'm not really a fan of Howard Stern, but I personally think that bad words used on the radio have even less to do with spectrum allocation than forcing retailers to tell consumers the spectrum allocation has changed. And if congress really wants to regulate morals -- it should do just that, create a Federal Morals Commission, not regulate Morals through the back door of some other agency.
According to this site, Dr. Chen is being quite devious, seemingly in order to discredit a colleague.
Why devious? If he was the first to get this idea, then he should be the first who gets the credit. He shouldn't have to include experiments conducted after he shared this idea with his colleagues. Or do you think it was just a coincidence that an experiment correcting the same problem came out from the same group of friends?
...as much as I favor OSS, MySQL is a joke compared to MS SQL Server.
Who cares if MySQL is a joke compared to MS SQL Server. Two years ago, my startup was paying something like $10,000 for each license of the MS SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition (never mind getting the Enterprise version). Now thanks to the pressure from MySQL and some of the lesser known open source databases, we paid a fraction of that cost last year for the SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition (without sacrificing on the functionality from the Standard Edition), and Microsoft has even come out with a free version dubbed the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (which is comparable to MySQL because it doesn't come with all the wizards and the goodies the higher versions come with, and yet it's more adequate than just using a crippled purposefully limited data source created from Access).
How the HELL are we supposed to train average people to "be secure" about online activities when MIXING of inter-domain inter-company data is this complicated and so absolutely FREAKING HARD to determine if it's being done safely or not.
Remember, it was a TECHNICAL user that started out this huge thread...
I completely agree. I think the gmail api developers from google should tell the music web site (assuming the original poster can find its name again) to stop trying to be so clever in its intermixing of gmail iframes and gmail api calls. This slight of hands is only freaking people out, for no apparent gain in added functionality or usability.
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My neighbor next door, my "real" neighbor actually, has never used email. And yet, he has a number of computers that he uses on a daily basis to do his bidding. He's a trucker by trade. He has a fancy portable gps unit that talks to him, and that can also play DVD movies. His work truck and his personal truck both have inboard computers for their engine, which no doubt, his mechanic(s) will plug in a device to extract the error codes from and print out the possible solutions (listed from top to bottom -- to be tried in a sequential order -- from most likely to solve the problem to least likely to solve the problem). And since he's a truck driver himself, he may have or his work place may already have purchased a stripped down version of that device from the local Kragen auto parts store or Walmart. In his apartment, he has digital cable, with on-demand movies, an electronic TV guide, and who knows what else... (with what looks like some box with a small computer on top of his TV). Most likely, he also has an atm card, which allows him to retrieve cash, get his balance, do wire transfers (and do a lot more considering that's he's probably with bank of america and that bank just revamped/added many awesome new features (scanning capabilities, handwriting recognition, etc) to all their atms in our area).
That being said, and it may even sound like I am contradicting myself, but he even has a one year old Apple computer (that he purchased brand-new). He just never has used email and he's not really interested in learning how to use email. His top priority actually has been to find out how he could record streaming/embedded videos from youtube (at least, that's what he told me, but I suspect he just wants to learn that for porn). Email, I offered to teach him as well, but he was not really interested in that. Google, he uses, but I don't think he's aware of its full potential, or if he's aware, he does have his own informal network of family, friends, neighbors, work colleagues, professionals that he hires, who do have "personal" computers themselves, so he's not anywhere as disconnected to the internet as you make it sound that he is. For instance, when I showed him a report I had printed out from GasBuddy, he told me he didn't want that, every day, truck drivers share Diesel price information over their cb radio and their cell phone, that sharing of information is a social activity for him, and he had no intention to replace that social activity with a daily print out or a scheduled sms notification going to his cell phone. And I find it's no accident that my mechanic has a desktop computer connected to the internet, in a corner of his garage, these days most mechanics use the internet as well. The same for my medical doctor as well, some medical doctor may resent the fact that their patients have too much information at their fingertips, but when I ask him detail about something -- my own doctor will give me some print out he found from the internet (which suits me just fine actually, he probably knows how to look for and judge the relevancy of the information he finds on the web much better than I can).
So I guess you must also be against public transportation and carpooling, after all if the roads carry the same payload -- but less traffic over all -- this somehow must be bad for you. Do I have this right?
In any case, a smart ISP would temporarily re-enable p2p, or at the very least they'd set up a proxy server for the most popular downloads. The proxy thing is what AOL used to do, it made economic sense for them to do this for certain super popular sites (at least for content that's cachable), it will make economic sense for them do that in the future as well.
Obviously, he's talking about this http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=pictures+of+terrorists&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2
You do your search on google, you click on that little image thingy they have, and you take out the most obvious false positives out of the results. What you end up getting is a pretty good list of results.
Now if this researcher could just find a way to put a couple of tubes between google and government public records, to filter out the plane hijackers that have already killed themselves, that would be totally sweet. As a taxpayer, I would be willing to pay a couple of trillion dollars to make that happen.
Your comparison is exaggerated. Pablo Escobar is a mass murderer, not just some high-profile smuggler.
Fairlight and its founders haven't tried to kill anybody (as far as I know). If you want to compare anybody to Pablo Escobar, compare high ranking members of the Republican party. Henry Kissinger, Oliver North, Caspar Weinberger, (possibly) Ronald Reagan, etc. Those Republican leaders weren't just mass murderers in South America, making tens of thousands of people disappear, they also used drug trafficking in the Americas as a way to finance their covert black ops throughout the rest of the World.
I recommend Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers by Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan. The title of the book itself doesn't sound all that appealing, but this is the book you want. It will teach you all the little tricks that seasoned practitioners know, but that most books won't even tell you about. Other guides I have found useful are the old Radio Shack notebooks. I'm not sure how they're called, or where you'd get them legally. I haven't seen them at Radio Shack and I do not know if they're still in print.
And last, I have to plug this TechShop establishment since they offer classes at very reasonable rates and they were kind enough to host our Ruby Hackfest in their awesome space last month.
And if a rogue internal State did try to disobey Federal law, then the Federal government can indeed do many things to retaliate against it. It's written right there in the Constitution. If a State doesn't want to obey carpool laws, the Federal government can withhold the disbursement of its Federal highway funds. If a State tries to close down its borders to specific goods, the Federal government can carpet bomb its infrastructure, apply pressure on its most disenfranchised inhabitants to start a grassroots rebellion, and restore freedom, justice, purity, and democracy -- by installing a puppet government of its very own choosing.
And then, there is the replacement cost of your hardware. Turning computer hardware on and off shrinks and expands different at different rates. And it's often better to leave it on always -- to keep the temperature more constant.
But if there is a demand for this plugin, the people making that demand can install that special plugin? Right? So this isn't about some upset users not knowing about the plugin, it's about some upset users that know about the plugin -- but that are upset that *other* users may not find out about it.
And since this plugin has already been written, and the need has already been filled, I wouldn't call this a fork really as much as it is a repackaged distribution. Right? Or am I missing a piece of the story?
You could hook up/jerry rig any tape player that's remotely close to the backup tape in question, in terms of size and reading area of the magnetic head (the magnetic head could be bigger too), the rotation speed of the tape wouldn't matter either (it would be corrected for after the fact). The tape player would need a serial output, a headphone jack or a usb jack would work (although, for the usb connection you'd need to google for instructions to select the right pins to insert into the right holes of your serial input port).
Now if you were to hook up this tape player to a speaker, and could slow down the speed of the tape slow enough, this series of ones and zeros would start sounding like an audible pulse.
But you wouldn't need to go that far. On a Windows PC, you have HyperTerminal. On a Mac, you have Zterm. On the unix flavors, you have something else (I forget what it's called, but a scripting language should be able to do the trick for you if you just listen to the right device on the right port with the right library). With your terminal software, you will be able to tune it to the right data rate (the data rate is essentially the same thing as the timing of each pulse).
Then don't be surprised if you get to see a big dump of ascii text right in your terminal window. Also, if you examine the first bytes that come your way, don't be surprised if the parent poster was right about the header information. In the vast majority cases, it will give you the right header information right off the bat.
However if you still only see non-ascii gibberish on your terminal window, it will mean it's still in binary format, and the header information doesn't pan out (which will only happen a minority of the time). Then there is always WireShark (formerly Ethereal), that you can always google around for some screencasts on learning how to use it (youtube should have something too). WireShark will be able to infer a lot. And unless the data backup was encrypted (which is technically what they were supposed to do) then WireShark should be able to read some of that data successfully.
If you wanted to get banking information for instance, you could have your bank email notifications of transactions (and daily account balance) directly to your gmail account, and then you would have gmail forward any relevant emails to your public mailinator inbox.
The reason you'd need something like gmail as a go-between is because you'd want to make sure messages fitting only specific patterns went through -- otherwise a crook could easily request additional information (or even your own password) and then your bank might send it back to him via your public inbox.
An even better solution would be to filter that information down further, but I'm not sure how do this without programming something. For instance, I just took a look at the notifications my bank sends me, and it contains the name of my bank, my full name, my email address, and the last four digits of my bank account. It would be nice if gmail (or some other server-side free email filtering service) removed some of those specific references before forwarding it on, this way it would give key-loggers/sniffers/screenshot-loggers on a public terminal even less information to work with.
An "oversimplification", yes.
A "gross and *horrible* oversimplification", I do not think so.
If we keep on bailing out those who fund the gamblers, then we're effectively bailing out the gamblers themselves. Corporate personhood is a fiction anyway. The first line creditors that get bailed out will be the past executives and employees that are owed wages and compensation in arrears, and any other first line creditors that get reimbursed first will be the creditors that were smart enough to have known better anyway.
This is only insuring that the cycle repeats itself. If we keep on bailing out the gamblers, then we're only encouraging more gambling in the long run.
You're right. I was wrong. I was the one with the misconception.
Hopefully if the moderators are still watching, the mod points will realign themselves accordingly.
Also the law on the books was about using both technology *and* paper, therefore increasing transparency and audibility. Framing this debate as Technology vs. Non-Technology is a distortion of what this proposal is trying to achieve. This law is only trying to add transparency to the technology. It is not trying to replace the technology.
And finally, take a look at any gerrymandered congressional district maps (I don't know if you have them where you live). But the congressional maps we have now are the perfect examples of what can go wrong -- when incumbents (both republicans or democrats) are free to make decisions about small technical matters that will affect their own reelection chances. If we can't trust them to draw their own maps (with the help of the right technical consultants), we certainly can't trust them to design the right software processes for their own elections (we just know that the majority of people will be left out of that design process, as opposed to the design process for paper ballots and a paper trail).
The studies I looked at showed that almost everyone in Japan (everybody but old people) were actually much less likely to commit suicides than the people in the United States. I certainly could see why you'd think the opposite was true. There is a cultural history of suicides in Japan, whether it's in the form of Sepuku (ritual suicide) or Kamikazes. There is also an acknowledged underground subculture of suicides, see the movie "The Suicide Club". And even ten years ago, when I looked it up, I had seen an American documentary actually citing higher rates of suicides in Japan and showing us one example of a Japanese kid who had committed suicide because of bullying, and then they had showed the interview of a wife who had lost her office worker husband because of his suicide (which was office work and over-work-related), but otherwise I do not think that our popular impression of Japan actually translates into reality in these cases.
I also believe that the often quoted higher rates of suicide and people jumping off buildings during the depression in the United States was a myth. It sounds true enough. And it was reported widely as true at the time -- generally speaking. But when you dig down enough and try to find such incidents, you can't find any specific one.
Now of course, not having the evidence doesn't mean it didn't happen. And there is certain amount of shame around suicides, and in some places it's intentionally misreported (for instance, I had a female relative who did commit suicide in Portugal a while ago, and it was purposefully misreported by the family/press/doctor), but unless I see an actual scientific study attempting to quantify the rates of suicides in Japan (and the corresponding attempt to explain/quantify the uncertainty involved in such a study), I'm just going to assume that you're just rehashing some studies you've actually seen cited on TV, and not some actual published peer-reviewed scientific study -- that the rest of us consider a real study.
In this case, it could either be that the librarian watched too much Dateline, or it could be that the librarian doesn't even watch TV and it's the man himself who watched too much Dateline. In such cases, it's not just the man and his location that's the matter, but it's probably also a combination of his body language and his eye contact that looked completely out of place.
And sure, men probably do get accosted by suspicious librarians far more frequently than women, but I'll bet that most of those people (male or female) who do get accosted look fearful. Fear often begets fear. And if a man enters the children's section of a library thinking about the Dateline episode he just saw last night, he's much more likely to give off clues that he's afraid of being accosted and questioned by the staff, and therefore he's much more likely to make this thought a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Overlapping and criss-crossing jurisdictions is a fact in this country. I'm not saying this actual fine is justified. But as an agency that regulates the spectrum, I don't think the FCC should only be limited to regulating and fining manufacturers and broadcasters, the supply chain for consumer electronics is a long one. Sometimes, it's just too costly to impose all your regulations and fining at the manufacturer level, or at the border and customs levels. For instance at the customs level, only 2% of shipping containers actually get opened, and I'm sure each customs official already has a thousand things to check already.
In any case, if something should be challenged, it should be the FCC's fines on Howard Stern (before he moved to satellite). I'm not really a fan of Howard Stern, but I personally think that bad words used on the radio have even less to do with spectrum allocation than forcing retailers to tell consumers the spectrum allocation has changed. And if congress really wants to regulate morals -- it should do just that, create a Federal Morals Commission, not regulate Morals through the back door of some other agency.