Re:Gotta love governments who don't understand tec
on
Send out the Clones?
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· Score: 2
> Well, Sen. Brownback, your liver and heart are failing. There is some great cloning technology in China that would let you live for an extra 10-15 years. I guess we can't use that on you here though.
It's not legal here, sorry.
Good point. The whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.
Maybe not three years, but definitely within 10-15 years from now, it'll all be legalized. For some reason, a bunch of Congresscritters will start changing their minds when not only their largest campaign contributors, but they themselves, will need the technology.
This has the fringe benefit of there being 10-15 years of research being done (perhaps outside the US) to perfect the technology. Everybody wins, it just takes a little longer. Unfortunately, a lot of good US biotech docs will be working offshore, and that money won't come back into the States.
> I would guess that a brain is what makes a human, but if only a guy's head is left, I doubt the public would buy creating headless human bodies (that would be freaky!) In that case though, why not create the
parts one by one to avoid public/congressional objections?
Agreed. I'm ready for growing headless human clones, but the rest of the species isn't.
But the businessman inside me says "if the entire body's shot, and you need a head transplant", you've gotta solve the problem of nerve regrowth for quadraplegics first. So there wouldn't be much use for a whole ancephalic human clone of yourself, because the best you could do with it would be to hook yourself up to it and still be a quadriplegic.
Plus - and more importantly - it's probably a hell of a lot cheaper to only grow the part you need, one at a time. Maintaining single organs in small vats is bound to be cheaper than maintaining a whole body and growing it for the 10-12 years it would take for the parts to be interchangeable.
> This may also play into MSN's decision not to continue providing DSL after Northpoint went tits-up. If MSN
wants to buy ELNK, they'll have a DSL solution for their customers within four months, so why bother
rushing?
Of course, six hours ago, MSN teamped up with Qwest to provide DSL for msn.com, which kinda puts a damper on that theory.
"So ah could, ah say, ah could be wrong, y'know!"
- Foghorn Leghorn
> msn.com has gobs of uu.net dialups and a merged MSN/ELNK would no longer have to pay
through the nose to Worldcom for access to them
Bad form to follow-up to my own post, but I should clarify something here, as I left that statement totally unexplained, and it really deserves some discussion of its own.
I believe (based on the influx of spam I got last summer before they blocked port 25) that msn.com is the largest user of uu.net (Worldcom) POPs in the US. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of MSN's subscribers use uu.net POPs exclusively. Why? Because uu.net was 90% of outbound spam, and "one major reseller" consistently refused to block port 25. I believe that "one major reseller" was msn.com by process of elimination - nobody else is big enough.
If MSN really does have 4-5M users on uu.net dialups (which is my speculation as outlined above), it's reasonable to assume they helped Worldcom build out all that extra capacity, and got a much better deal on the lease of those POPs than the Earthlink/Mindspring/OneMain/Netcom borgcube, which leases POPs from everywhere as a result of it's growth-by-acquisition strategy.
Thus my belief that the heavy presence of uu.net POPs within MSN.com implies a cost savings in the event that they take over ELNK. It'd probably suck to be an Earthlink/Mindspring customer under this scenario, but since when did that matter?;-)
Disclosure: This is all speculation on my part. I own a few shares of Earthpink, just in case it all comes true. After all, I might as well make some money off it if I have to switch ISPs the day after the takeover's announced.
> Mindspring and Earthlink merged last year into one conpany, Earthlink. Sprint is a part owner of Earthlink, and has a contractual option (which it is not required to exercise) to purchase the remaining portion of Earthlink.
...and Sprint and Earthlink then decided to terminate this option this February.
Basically, in September 2001, Sprint will no longer have the right to acquire ELNK.
Also, a couple of days ago, Sprint filed with the SEC to sell about 10% of ELNK stock, which would leave them with a 17% stake.
All of this adds up to ELNK being a takeover target. Speculation is that the acquiring company will be MSFT (Yes, msn.com), because msn.com has gobs of uu.net dialups and a merged MSN/ELNK would no longer have to pay through the nose to Worldcom for access to them. And a merged MSN/Earthlink would have about 10M subscribers, which would put it in the same league as AOL for the ultimate showdown.
This may also play into MSN's decision not to continue providing DSL after Northpoint went tits-up. If MSN wants to buy ELNK, they'll have a DSL solution for their customers within four months, so why bother rushing?
All that aside, it doesn't change the fact that neither MSN, ELNK, nor MSPG (the old Mindspring) were phone providers. All are subject to the whims of the local ILEC or CLEC when it comes to DSL installation. And when the CLECs go *kaboom*, the DSL subscribers will be fux0red unless the ISP has another provider lined up.
It's a good time to be an ILEC. The CLECs got billions in capital from issuing bonds based on the value of their stock, which is how they built out the network. Then the CLECs got fux0red by the ILECs.
Perhaps the best example of said fux0ring would be a story I read about someone trying to get "Earthlink DSL", which was provided in his area through Covad (a CLEC). No dice, the equipment wasn't there, and the local phone company (i.e. ILEC) "wouldn't be able" to install it for a week. The customer cancelled his Earthlink contract and "decided" to get his DSL through his local phone company. The truck was there in two days and the equipment was installed. Funny, that.
The customer then told the ILEC to go screw itself, cancelled the DSL with the phone company, and signed back up with Covad through Earthlink. Since the phone company had already installed the equipment, he got his link up within the week.
Anyways - 99% of customers won't go to those lengths, and will just go with the ILEC for their DSL. The CLEC starves for cash, the interest on the bonds piles up, and finally the creditors come a-calling. One more dead CLEC, with assets available to the ILEC at pennies on the dollar.
The cheapest way to build a network is to let the other guy build the network, go tits-up, and pick it off his carcass.
You can always spot the pioneers - they're the ones with the arrows in their backs.
> at least people are competent enough to turn on the computer, open up the desired office (or open source deriviative) application, and print it out.
Don't get me wrong here - I'm all for usability. It's great that you don't have to grok CONFIG.SYS and set your FILES and BUFFERS stuff to run WordPerfect 4.0, or all that Lotus/EMS stuff for 1-2-3.
But the ability to use a computer should not be confused with the ability to administer a machine on a network.
I'd love it if people enclued themselves to do both, but in general, they don't. They enclue themselves only to the point that they can accomplish the desired task.
That's not a slight against the secretary - she's not paid to make sure that her RedHat box is running a current version of BIND (or better yet, that it's not running BIND at all - does her workstation really need to be acting as a nameserver? An FTP server? identd?). There are, after all, only eight hours in the typical workday - is she being paid to write 8 hours of memos, or 3 hours of memos, and 5 hours of reading CERT advisories and applying patches?
As long as most users don't need to know what's going on beneath the hood in order to accomplish their goals, they won't learn it. The trend for the past ten years has been increasingly towards insulating the user from the nuts-and-bolts stuff. Therefore, just like we still need auto mechanics 85 years after the Model T, we'll continue to need sysadmins for the forseeable future.
> [scare tactics] only works on rubes, and laymen are becoming increasingly sophisticated about computers.
An excellent point - but it requires that laymen become sophisticated about computers. That ain't happening, not from where I sit. If anything, it's getting worse.
I'll grant you that if the secretary's enclued, and the OS is well-designed, she won't blow things up.
I just won't grant you that Joe Sixpack is gonna get enclued over the long term.
The increasing level of abstraction in today's PC world has led to less clue, not more, at the user level.
Although Joe Sixpack isn't putting two floppies in the 5.25" drive ("because the manual didn't tell me to take the last one out!"), that doesn't mean he's learned anything lately. Ask him where that spam came from and he'll read you the From: line. Ask him why his mail server is bogged down and he'll say "My machine's just fine" (sure, but the mail server's bogged down because he just got hit with Hybris). Ask him what kind of CPU he has and he'll tell you it's a Dell. Ask him what operating system he's running and he'll say "Office".
> With no perceptible peril at all, organizations have long since forgotten their need for blacksmiths,
elevator operators, typists, dispatch riders, and archers.
...and mechanics will become obsolete when cars become so easy to operate that anyone can run one.
We don't need to know how to turn the crank to start the engine because we have starter motors. We don't need to downshift before entering a curve because we have an automatic transmissions. But somehow there's still a market for mechanics.
The scariest moment of my life was when a cow orker told me she'd never changed the oil in her car because she didn't know where the dipstick was.
> [our IT folks] were having an affair, which lead to both of them getting divorced
and are now married to each other... [... ] the
new IT guy (the lovers got fired/quit) is still repairing the mess they caused.
Let this be a warning to y'all. Love juices and server farms don't mix. Don't bend her over the NetApp box when you do her.
Coulda been worse, I suppose. What if he'd bent her over the back of a 21" monitor while humping away in a Halon-controlled server room?
> The future of IT is as a part-time hassle for non-specialists. Soon enough, the secretary will be able to handle 90% of the sysadmin's job, and the rest will be farmed out. At the cost of a few hours of overtime for the secretary every month, things will run just as smoothly as they do now.
Right up until the point when something happens that Clippy can't help her with, and the secretary blows away half the filesystem.
Then you'll be on the phone to the nearest headhunter, begging for the opportunity to pay $500/h for a sysadmin to come over now, because the SEC is breathing down your neck if your firm's annual report isn't filed on time, and your secretary didn't realize she needed to make the backups.
You don't need a full-time sysadmin per computer. But you sure as hell do need at least one per organization. Organizations forget this at their peril.
> For the ComputerII elective one of our projects was to statically display a word on the Hex-display bar
on the 6802 based 'trainer' boards in the lab. I was bored, so my display instead scrolled 'Eat at Joe's
Bar and Grill.'
ROFLMAO.
Reminds me of an episode from my larval stage. Back in high school, we were supposed to do some sort of graphics thing in BASIC, using a series of PEEKs and POKEs to clear graphics RAM, create a graphic object, and move it around.
So I did. In assembly.
(I figured if anyone wanted to give me a hard time about it, I could argue that technically it was still written BASIC. Of course, the BASIC code was just a series of POKEs to poke the data and code into RAM, and one call to start running it;-)
> Ohyeah, my point. Those envelopes are fucking EXPENSIVE to use in junkmail campaigns. So when you
get'em, at least take pleasure in the fact that the bastard who sent it to you spent way too much money to have
people just throw'em away.
Oh yeah, I did. Bigtime!;-)
But thanks for confirming what I suspected about the cost of that campaign.
> you really generated income from images from nntp?
I'll bet he did.
Those who are willing to pay for pr0n over port 80 are unlikely to have even heard of USENET, let alone know how to use it.
It's a self-selecting sample - anyone aware of NNTP would get their pr0n there, rather than paying bahtama for it.
Of course, bahtama may be at risk of getting nuked for copyright infringement, as the magazine that originally owned those images (or the web site where they were originally posted) could open up a can of whoopass on him.
But with a gazillion small-time sites out there, they'd have to find him first. And remember, he said used it to finance his own website, which implies that it was a small enough site to live comfortably under the radar. So odds are extremely good that he'll get away with it.
Indeed, depending on your views on intellectual property, there may be nothing to "get away with" in the moral sense. Only in the "Don't get sued by a pr0n company with more lawyers than you" sense.
> If you've first moved that much water up there, why let people drop it down again in the sewer? Place a water
resirculation plant or three in the building at different heights, and save on the amount of plumbing required to both pump
water up and let sewage down.
I wonder how much energy you could extract by sticking turbines between each level when you let the sewage down?
The problem with water is that it's massive - it takes energy to haul it to the top of the tower.
The solution is to extract that same energy on the way down. Apart from evaporative losses (remember those "windows" in the aluminum and friction, you should be able to get most of the energy back.
Just a friendly public service reminder for those of you in the USA:
When your bank or brokerage sends you a copy of its privacy policy, full of ambiguous language, and saying "Since we protect your privacy, there's no need for you to opt out of our information sharing among our family of companies", do two things:
1) Opt-out. Yes, it means writing a letter and putting a stamp on it. Deal with it.
2) In your letter, mention that you're opting-out because it's your only option available under the law, but that you're doing so under protest - and that you consider anything less than opt-in a violation of your privacy rights. Congratulate the bank on coming up with a wording ("information sharing") that sounds so harmless that most consumers are unlikely to realize what it really means.
3) Print out a second copy and send it to your Representative and Senator. Use proper "Cc:" snail-mail etiquette -- you want your bank to know you're telling your Congresscritter, and you want your Congresscritter to know that your bank knows.
Thank the critter (especially if he or she voted for it) for the new privacy law that's forced banks to do this very small ("opt-out") notification. Tell them that you realize the bank (or more accurately, the DMA, on request of its members) to use a low response rate to this "you have an opportunity to opt-out" mailing campaign as "evidence" that the consumers really do like to eat their spam, "or they'd opt-out, but since 0.00001% actually bothered to opt-out, the other 99.99999% must like receiving special offers through the mail and telephone and email!".
Tell your congresscritters that silence does not imply assent.
You know the argument's bogus. But the DMA, with millions of dollars in lobby funds, is gonna try to make it. And they'll succeed, unless you - yes, you there, behind the keyboard - get off your ass and do something.
Silence does not imply assent. But the DMA is going to try very hard to convince your congresscritter that it does.
The logical response is to deny the DMA the silence it needs to pull off the scam.
> > we urge you to withdraw the paper submitted for the upcoming
> > Information Hiding Workshop, assure that it is removed from the
> > Workshop distribution materials and destroyed, and avoid
> > a public discussion of confidential information.
>
> Oops! Now it's on the Internet. I hope everyone saves a copy
> for when cryptome is shut down
Yeah, just goes to show you what these jokers know about
information hiding! How 'ya 'sposedta hide information when it gets onto
Cryptome and mirrored all over hell's half acre?
Now RIAA - those l33t d00dz are serious about information-hiding! Invite them to this information-hiding thingy, they know what it's all about!
> [excellent division of the problem into five groups snipped] > 1. People who found/bought/were given (by you) your email address. These people will really take you off
the list if you ask. Call this "Legitimate opt-out" spam. These people respect you as a customer.
The problem with this category is that there's no way to distinguish it from #2.
That is, if I'm a marketer, can I spam you on behalf of my three clients: "Tackhead's Bait and Tackle Shop", "Tackhead's Bait & Tackle Shop", "Tackhead's Bait/Tackle Shoppe?"
If you're gonna argue that by using that route in bad faith, I've become part of your #2 category ("2. People who won't let you opt out, just use opt out as a legal cover/way to verify your address. "Real" businesses."), I've got one word for you: EBay.
Since I - as a recipient of email - have no way of telling whether a company is in #1 or #2, I must treat them both the same way. For me, that means LARTing their upstreams.
> Imagine finding your
snail mail box full of mail, with hundreds of envelopes, each and every day [... ] Many of the
envelopes are intentionally disguised to look like important messages. (E.g., it's a letter from the
IRS - announcing an "Inventory Reduction Sale" at the local "Herb Tarlek" Car Lot!")
I don't have to imagine that.
Sickest one I saw yet was some credit card company that sent me a full-size (10x12") envelope done up to look like a FedEx package, complete with fake "express delivery" labels and machine-generated "signature" on it. The logo wasn't FedEx's, but the colors were identical.
I had half a mind to grab a couple of Pantone swatches, a FedEx envelope, see if they matched, and if so, mail it off to FedEx's corporate counsel, asking them if they had a trademark on their color scheme, and if this direct marketer wasn't somehow diluting their brand with its misleading packaging.
Then I realized the cure would've been as bad as the disease;)
*sigh*
Rule #1 ("Spammers lie") in action - applies to telemarketers and junk mail spammers as well as spam. At least the pigfucking credit card bottom-feeder had to pay to send it to me.
yes, i agree this is right thing to do, all are employees need to read this
H. Ounds,
President, Attention Allocation Resources
> We, the upper management of eSourceTec Inc., have discovered that employees have been wasting valuable
time dealing with unnecessary e-mail. Here are the steps we are taking to eliminate this waste of time and
energy:
1. All employees will be required to attend a series of company meetings on the subject of "Eliminating
Unnecessary E-mail."
2. Following these meetings, employees will be required to attend department specific "E-Mail Task Force"
meetings to come up with specific strategies for eliminating unnecessary e-mail.
3. Each day, employees will be required to send e-mail to their managers summarizing the amount and type
of e-mail they have sent that day, flagging any e-mail exchanges that they feel could have been shortened or
eliminated.
4. On a weekly basis, managers will have a one-on-one session with each employee in which they discuss
how well e-mail strategies have been implemented, and what new strategies might be employed in the
elimination of unnecessary e-mail.
> We feel confident that these steps will drastically reduce the amount of time spent each day on pointless and
unnecessary tasks, and lead our company into new strata of efficiency.
>
Regards,
D. R. Baskerville
Vice-President, Attention Allocation Resources
(Tackhead's back: Please, God, smite the guy who invented top-posting email and news clients)
> "telephone skills" are often cited as necessary when a job is advertised. I wonder when "email skills" (you could even say "written word
skills"!) will receive as high a priority?
Never.
Because if they were, half the PHBs in America would be exposed for the illiterate, dr00ling cretins they are.
On voice mail, nobody knows you can't spell past the sixth grade level.
> Maybe that "this service is unavailable to kids under 13" warning when the Windows ICQ client
pops up aren't so stupid after all...
It's certainly better spin / marketing than the truth - which is "We resell all our users' information, but under COPPA, the law would rake us over the coals for it if we didn't have this disclaimer. By continuing to use this service, you agree that you're over 13, and therefore, that we're legally entitled to resell the shit out of anything our spyware can find out about you."
> pay $50 a year for membership or sit through a 20-second Flash-animated commercial. > >
There is a third choice. Get your news from somewhere else.
Yup.
I realized last month that I haven't read a print magazine in two or three years.
When I want to find out what Wired thinks is happening, I go to wired.com. I get the news that day. (And I filter out the LAYER tag with the Doubleclick page for privacy purposes). But even if I didn't filter out the ad, the banner ads are a small portion of their actual content.
Have you seen the ad-saturation of the print version lately? Sheesh! It's like there are about 3 times as many pages devoted to ads as there are articles.
And I'd have to pay for the print version, no less! Double-sheesh! (Yeah, I know it'd cost $10 or more per issue if it didn't have the ads, but my point is that print magazines have lower S/N ratios than the most banner-laden web site, and cost more.)
And last, but not least - I'd get the print version of Wired, umm, lessee, about a month after everything in it happened. The web site is same-day info.
In the case of financial news and other time-sensitive stuff, I've found it to be almost the same deal - I watch the earnings get released after-hours, watch a message board that gets the analyst reports within an hour or so of publication, and by the time I go home at night to watch the same-day TV news, I know what the stories are gonna be that night.
If I read the morning paper at the office, it's mainly as a way of confirming that the headlines in the morning paper - that reflect yesterday's news - are the same ones I thought they'd be, 16 hours earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. The whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.
Maybe not three years, but definitely within 10-15 years from now, it'll all be legalized. For some reason, a bunch of Congresscritters will start changing their minds when not only their largest campaign contributors, but they themselves, will need the technology.
This has the fringe benefit of there being 10-15 years of research being done (perhaps outside the US) to perfect the technology. Everybody wins, it just takes a little longer. Unfortunately, a lot of good US biotech docs will be working offshore, and that money won't come back into the States.
Agreed. I'm ready for growing headless human clones, but the rest of the species isn't.
But the businessman inside me says "if the entire body's shot, and you need a head transplant", you've gotta solve the problem of nerve regrowth for quadraplegics first. So there wouldn't be much use for a whole ancephalic human clone of yourself, because the best you could do with it would be to hook yourself up to it and still be a quadriplegic.
Plus - and more importantly - it's probably a hell of a lot cheaper to only grow the part you need, one at a time. Maintaining single organs in small vats is bound to be cheaper than maintaining a whole body and growing it for the 10-12 years it would take for the parts to be interchangeable.
Problem is, these brainless clones wouldn't be useful for organ harvesting.
I suppose they could be used as fucktoys, though. Now that'd be a growth industry. Like RealDolls(tm) made out of meat!
It's a conference on information hiding, what did you expect? RIAA just happens to interpret that phrase a little more literally than the rest of us :)
"HALT, Citizen! Put down the math textbook!"
Of course, six hours ago, MSN teamped up with Qwest to provide DSL for msn.com, which kinda puts a damper on that theory.
"So ah could, ah say, ah could be wrong, y'know!"
- Foghorn Leghorn
Bad form to follow-up to my own post, but I should clarify something here, as I left that statement totally unexplained, and it really deserves some discussion of its own.
I believe (based on the influx of spam I got last summer before they blocked port 25) that msn.com is the largest user of uu.net (Worldcom) POPs in the US. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of MSN's subscribers use uu.net POPs exclusively. Why? Because uu.net was 90% of outbound spam, and "one major reseller" consistently refused to block port 25. I believe that "one major reseller" was msn.com by process of elimination - nobody else is big enough.
If MSN really does have 4-5M users on uu.net dialups (which is my speculation as outlined above), it's reasonable to assume they helped Worldcom build out all that extra capacity, and got a much better deal on the lease of those POPs than the Earthlink/Mindspring/OneMain/Netcom borgcube, which leases POPs from everywhere as a result of it's growth-by-acquisition strategy.
Thus my belief that the heavy presence of uu.net POPs within MSN.com implies a cost savings in the event that they take over ELNK. It'd probably suck to be an Earthlink/Mindspring customer under this scenario, but since when did that matter? ;-)
Disclosure: This is all speculation on my part. I own a few shares of Earthpink, just in case it all comes true. After all, I might as well make some money off it if I have to switch ISPs the day after the takeover's announced.
Basically, in September 2001, Sprint will no longer have the right to acquire ELNK.
Also, a couple of days ago, Sprint filed with the SEC to sell about 10% of ELNK stock, which would leave them with a 17% stake.
All of this adds up to ELNK being a takeover target. Speculation is that the acquiring company will be MSFT (Yes, msn.com), because msn.com has gobs of uu.net dialups and a merged MSN/ELNK would no longer have to pay through the nose to Worldcom for access to them. And a merged MSN/Earthlink would have about 10M subscribers, which would put it in the same league as AOL for the ultimate showdown.
This may also play into MSN's decision not to continue providing DSL after Northpoint went tits-up. If MSN wants to buy ELNK, they'll have a DSL solution for their customers within four months, so why bother rushing?
All that aside, it doesn't change the fact that neither MSN, ELNK, nor MSPG (the old Mindspring) were phone providers. All are subject to the whims of the local ILEC or CLEC when it comes to DSL installation. And when the CLECs go *kaboom*, the DSL subscribers will be fux0red unless the ISP has another provider lined up.
It's a good time to be an ILEC. The CLECs got billions in capital from issuing bonds based on the value of their stock, which is how they built out the network. Then the CLECs got fux0red by the ILECs.
Perhaps the best example of said fux0ring would be a story I read about someone trying to get "Earthlink DSL", which was provided in his area through Covad (a CLEC). No dice, the equipment wasn't there, and the local phone company (i.e. ILEC) "wouldn't be able" to install it for a week. The customer cancelled his Earthlink contract and "decided" to get his DSL through his local phone company. The truck was there in two days and the equipment was installed. Funny, that.
The customer then told the ILEC to go screw itself, cancelled the DSL with the phone company, and signed back up with Covad through Earthlink. Since the phone company had already installed the equipment, he got his link up within the week.
Anyways - 99% of customers won't go to those lengths, and will just go with the ILEC for their DSL. The CLEC starves for cash, the interest on the bonds piles up, and finally the creditors come a-calling. One more dead CLEC, with assets available to the ILEC at pennies on the dollar.
The cheapest way to build a network is to let the other guy build the network, go tits-up, and pick it off his carcass.
You can always spot the pioneers - they're the ones with the arrows in their backs.
Don't get me wrong here - I'm all for usability. It's great that you don't have to grok CONFIG.SYS and set your FILES and BUFFERS stuff to run WordPerfect 4.0, or all that Lotus/EMS stuff for 1-2-3.
But the ability to use a computer should not be confused with the ability to administer a machine on a network.
I'd love it if people enclued themselves to do both, but in general, they don't. They enclue themselves only to the point that they can accomplish the desired task.
That's not a slight against the secretary - she's not paid to make sure that her RedHat box is running a current version of BIND (or better yet, that it's not running BIND at all - does her workstation really need to be acting as a nameserver? An FTP server? identd?). There are, after all, only eight hours in the typical workday - is she being paid to write 8 hours of memos, or 3 hours of memos, and 5 hours of reading CERT advisories and applying patches?
As long as most users don't need to know what's going on beneath the hood in order to accomplish their goals, they won't learn it. The trend for the past ten years has been increasingly towards insulating the user from the nuts-and-bolts stuff. Therefore, just like we still need auto mechanics 85 years after the Model T, we'll continue to need sysadmins for the forseeable future.
An excellent point - but it requires that laymen become sophisticated about computers. That ain't happening, not from where I sit. If anything, it's getting worse.
I'll grant you that if the secretary's enclued, and the OS is well-designed, she won't blow things up.
I just won't grant you that Joe Sixpack is gonna get enclued over the long term.
The increasing level of abstraction in today's PC world has led to less clue, not more, at the user level.
Although Joe Sixpack isn't putting two floppies in the 5.25" drive ("because the manual didn't tell me to take the last one out!"), that doesn't mean he's learned anything lately. Ask him where that spam came from and he'll read you the From: line. Ask him why his mail server is bogged down and he'll say "My machine's just fine" (sure, but the mail server's bogged down because he just got hit with Hybris). Ask him what kind of CPU he has and he'll tell you it's a Dell. Ask him what operating system he's running and he'll say "Office".
> With no perceptible peril at all, organizations have long since forgotten their need for blacksmiths, elevator operators, typists, dispatch riders, and archers.
We don't need to know how to turn the crank to start the engine because we have starter motors. We don't need to downshift before entering a curve because we have an automatic transmissions. But somehow there's still a market for mechanics.
The scariest moment of my life was when a cow orker told me she'd never changed the oil in her car because she didn't know where the dipstick was.
Let this be a warning to y'all. Love juices and server farms don't mix. Don't bend her over the NetApp box when you do her.
Coulda been worse, I suppose. What if he'd bent her over the back of a 21" monitor while humping away in a Halon-controlled server room?
Right up until the point when something happens that Clippy can't help her with, and the secretary blows away half the filesystem.
Then you'll be on the phone to the nearest headhunter, begging for the opportunity to pay $500/h for a sysadmin to come over now, because the SEC is breathing down your neck if your firm's annual report isn't filed on time, and your secretary didn't realize she needed to make the backups.
You don't need a full-time sysadmin per computer. But you sure as hell do need at least one per organization. Organizations forget this at their peril.
ROFLMAO.
Reminds me of an episode from my larval stage. Back in high school, we were supposed to do some sort of graphics thing in BASIC, using a series of PEEKs and POKEs to clear graphics RAM, create a graphic object, and move it around.
So I did. In assembly.
(I figured if anyone wanted to give me a hard time about it, I could argue that technically it was still written BASIC. Of course, the BASIC code was just a series of POKEs to poke the data and code into RAM, and one call to start running it ;-)
Oh yeah, I did. Bigtime! ;-)
But thanks for confirming what I suspected about the cost of that campaign.
I'll bet he did.
Those who are willing to pay for pr0n over port 80 are unlikely to have even heard of USENET, let alone know how to use it.
It's a self-selecting sample - anyone aware of NNTP would get their pr0n there, rather than paying bahtama for it.
Of course, bahtama may be at risk of getting nuked for copyright infringement, as the magazine that originally owned those images (or the web site where they were originally posted) could open up a can of whoopass on him.
But with a gazillion small-time sites out there, they'd have to find him first. And remember, he said used it to finance his own website, which implies that it was a small enough site to live comfortably under the radar. So odds are extremely good that he'll get away with it.
Indeed, depending on your views on intellectual property, there may be nothing to "get away with" in the moral sense. Only in the "Don't get sued by a pr0n company with more lawyers than you" sense.
Poor bastard. If he's got a SO, I'll bet she's pissed.
Jon's SO: "Hi Jonny, glad you came home early today... wanna fool around?"
Jon: "Aaaauuuugh, eight hours a day at work and now I gotta work with you nipples too? Nipples, nipples, nipples, I'm sick and tired of nipples!"
I wonder how much energy you could extract by sticking turbines between each level when you let the sewage down?
The problem with water is that it's massive - it takes energy to haul it to the top of the tower.
The solution is to extract that same energy on the way down. Apart from evaporative losses (remember those "windows" in the aluminum and friction, you should be able to get most of the energy back.
When your bank or brokerage sends you a copy of its privacy policy, full of ambiguous language, and saying "Since we protect your privacy, there's no need for you to opt out of our information sharing among our family of companies", do two things:
1) Opt-out. Yes, it means writing a letter and putting a stamp on it. Deal with it.
2) In your letter, mention that you're opting-out because it's your only option available under the law, but that you're doing so under protest - and that you consider anything less than opt-in a violation of your privacy rights. Congratulate the bank on coming up with a wording ("information sharing") that sounds so harmless that most consumers are unlikely to realize what it really means.
3) Print out a second copy and send it to your Representative and Senator. Use proper "Cc:" snail-mail etiquette -- you want your bank to know you're telling your Congresscritter, and you want your Congresscritter to know that your bank knows.
Thank the critter (especially if he or she voted for it) for the new privacy law that's forced banks to do this very small ("opt-out") notification. Tell them that you realize the bank (or more accurately, the DMA, on request of its members) to use a low response rate to this "you have an opportunity to opt-out" mailing campaign as "evidence" that the consumers really do like to eat their spam, "or they'd opt-out, but since 0.00001% actually bothered to opt-out, the other 99.99999% must like receiving special offers through the mail and telephone and email!".
Tell your congresscritters that silence does not imply assent.
You know the argument's bogus. But the DMA, with millions of dollars in lobby funds, is gonna try to make it. And they'll succeed, unless you - yes, you there, behind the keyboard - get off your ass and do something.
Silence does not imply assent. But the DMA is going to try very hard to convince your congresscritter that it does.
The logical response is to deny the DMA the silence it needs to pull off the scam.
> > Information Hiding Workshop, assure that it is removed from the
> > Workshop distribution materials and destroyed, and avoid
> > a public discussion of confidential information.
>
> Oops! Now it's on the Internet. I hope everyone saves a copy
> for when cryptome is shut down
Yeah, just goes to show you what these jokers know about information hiding! How 'ya 'sposedta hide information when it gets onto Cryptome and mirrored all over hell's half acre?
Now RIAA - those l33t d00dz are serious about information-hiding! Invite them to this information-hiding thingy, they know what it's all about!
>
1. People who found/bought/were given (by you) your email address. These people will really take you off the list if you ask. Call this "Legitimate opt-out" spam. These people respect you as a customer.
The problem with this category is that there's no way to distinguish it from #2.
That is, if I'm a marketer, can I spam you on behalf of my three clients: "Tackhead's Bait and Tackle Shop", "Tackhead's Bait & Tackle Shop", "Tackhead's Bait/Tackle Shoppe?"
If you're gonna argue that by using that route in bad faith, I've become part of your #2 category ("2. People who won't let you opt out, just use opt out as a legal cover/way to verify your address. "Real" businesses."), I've got one word for you: EBay.
Since I - as a recipient of email - have no way of telling whether a company is in #1 or #2, I must treat them both the same way. For me, that means LARTing their upstreams.
I don't have to imagine that.
Sickest one I saw yet was some credit card company that sent me a full-size (10x12") envelope done up to look like a FedEx package, complete with fake "express delivery" labels and machine-generated "signature" on it. The logo wasn't FedEx's, but the colors were identical.
I had half a mind to grab a couple of Pantone swatches, a FedEx envelope, see if they matched, and if so, mail it off to FedEx's corporate counsel, asking them if they had a trademark on their color scheme, and if this direct marketer wasn't somehow diluting their brand with its misleading packaging.
Then I realized the cure would've been as bad as the disease ;)
*sigh*
Rule #1 ("Spammers lie") in action - applies to telemarketers and junk mail spammers as well as spam. At least the pigfucking credit card bottom-feeder had to pay to send it to me.
H. Ounds,
President, Attention Allocation Resources
> We, the upper management of eSourceTec Inc., have discovered that employees have been wasting valuable time dealing with unnecessary e-mail. Here are the steps we are taking to eliminate this waste of time and energy: 1. All employees will be required to attend a series of company meetings on the subject of "Eliminating Unnecessary E-mail." 2. Following these meetings, employees will be required to attend department specific "E-Mail Task Force" meetings to come up with specific strategies for eliminating unnecessary e-mail. 3. Each day, employees will be required to send e-mail to their managers summarizing the amount and type of e-mail they have sent that day, flagging any e-mail exchanges that they feel could have been shortened or eliminated. 4. On a weekly basis, managers will have a one-on-one session with each employee in which they discuss how well e-mail strategies have been implemented, and what new strategies might be employed in the elimination of unnecessary e-mail. > We feel confident that these steps will drastically reduce the amount of time spent each day on pointless and unnecessary tasks, and lead our company into new strata of efficiency.
> Regards, D. R. Baskerville Vice-President, Attention Allocation Resources
(Tackhead's back: Please, God, smite the guy who invented top-posting email and news clients)
Never.
Because if they were, half the PHBs in America would be exposed for the illiterate, dr00ling cretins they are.
On voice mail, nobody knows you can't spell past the sixth grade level.
It's certainly better spin / marketing than the truth - which is "We resell all our users' information, but under COPPA, the law would rake us over the coals for it if we didn't have this disclaimer. By continuing to use this service, you agree that you're over 13, and therefore, that we're legally entitled to resell the shit out of anything our spyware can find out about you."
> -Vic Reeves
Vic was an optimist
- Tackhead
(With apologies to Sturgeon, who said 94% of everything was crap, and the .sig I saw that said he was an optimist)
>
> There is a third choice. Get your news from somewhere else.
Yup.
I realized last month that I haven't read a print magazine in two or three years.
When I want to find out what Wired thinks is happening, I go to wired.com. I get the news that day. (And I filter out the LAYER tag with the Doubleclick page for privacy purposes). But even if I didn't filter out the ad, the banner ads are a small portion of their actual content.
Have you seen the ad-saturation of the print version lately? Sheesh! It's like there are about 3 times as many pages devoted to ads as there are articles.
And I'd have to pay for the print version, no less! Double-sheesh! (Yeah, I know it'd cost $10 or more per issue if it didn't have the ads, but my point is that print magazines have lower S/N ratios than the most banner-laden web site, and cost more.)
And last, but not least - I'd get the print version of Wired, umm, lessee, about a month after everything in it happened. The web site is same-day info.
In the case of financial news and other time-sensitive stuff, I've found it to be almost the same deal - I watch the earnings get released after-hours, watch a message board that gets the analyst reports within an hour or so of publication, and by the time I go home at night to watch the same-day TV news, I know what the stories are gonna be that night.
If I read the morning paper at the office, it's mainly as a way of confirming that the headlines in the morning paper - that reflect yesterday's news - are the same ones I thought they'd be, 16 hours earlier.