Think about it -- if something like this had been done earlier, we could have saved an awful lot of time and money that was instead spent on anti-trust lawsuits that the government ultimately "lost" (yes, I know they technically won, but have _you_ noticed any benefits from that win? I sure haven't).
Here's the problem -- Federal, State, and Local Government agencies of all sorts put out press releases, solicitations, regulatory notices and the like by the tens of thousands on a daily basis. Companies and citizens who wish to read and/or respond to this data stream have no choice but to purchase Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in order to interact with the Government. Government has ensured the Micorsoft monopoly simply by continuing to support a product with closed and proprietary file formats. If other state Governments, and especially if the Federal Government endorses _independantly verifiable_ open document formats, the monopoly is broken without the expense of continued litigation or oversight.
I think that the same can be said in other areas as well. For instance -- Mozilla, and now FireFox, are making inroads into IE's domain. The progress is slow because many sites do not support the HTML standards put forth by the W3C. What if all government agencies declared that all web pages created or maintained by their agencies would support only open standards -- not some of the wrinkles introduced by IE? Again, problem solved over the long run.
IMHO, we depend too much on legal wrangling to try to enforce corporate behavior, rather than encouraging, architechting, and supporting an infrastructure that would lead to the same end without all the pushing, shoving, and head-butting along the way.
Yes, I know that I am naively idealistic. Deal with it.
I don't see this being more practical in small planes than simply having individual passenger parachutes in small planes, and letting them bail.
It may not make much difference to the passengers, but think about having the plane touch down (sort of) gracefully rather than, say, crashing into the middle of a housing development. Not to mention the fact that your insurance company will be far happier to repair a lightly damaged aircraft rather than shelling out for a replacement of the bits and pieces left behind in a smoking crater...
Yes, an ancient, alien artifact, pregnant with long-dormant, world-ravaging evil, which will no doubt unleash terrible plague and death and destruction the world over, consuming the entire human race in an unimaginable apocalypse, only possibly averted by some unlikely everyman hero who has heretofore been overlooked by society but who will, no doubt, be immortalized by his deeds on the day the evil is returned to this artifact and banished forever.
Anyone know any methods of getting around this short of physically ripping apart the printer and soldering a few wires together?
How about walking down to Kinkos and running your printout through a color copier? I doubt the copier would be able to pick up the printer's dot code, and unless someone was watching you duplicate your document, I doubt they'd be able to tie it back to you specifically unless they did fingerprint checks.
One thing though -- even if the code is embedded in your document, no one can trace it to you unless you've somehow sent info to the manufacturer tying your serial number to you...
You don't really get it to you ? How could awarding contracts now provide armour at the beginning of this year ? Think about it. The contracts have been awarded, how long before the vests / armour etc reach the front line troops ? These contracts should have been awarded a year or more ago so that the troops had the protection you're talking about
You might want to try re-reading my earlier post -- in particular, the last line:
"To say that we appear to have been caught unprepared for an extended conflict is an understatement of considerable magnitude."
Item five is a concern for me since I am an investor in a company that makes body armor (DHB if anyone cares). I can tell you that just yesterday (Oct 22) a solicitation closed which, over a 3-year period will provide for slightly more than 1 million Outer Tactical Vests (they wear out within 120 days or so of continueos use, hence the need for large numbers). These vests are reinforced by the use of SAPI (Small Arms Protective Ineserts) plating inserts front and rear. The SAPI contract was awarded earlier this year.
These awards are in response to the perception (and in some cases the apparent reality) that troops in the field are not being equipped with bullet-resistant armor, and the assertion that troops have been sent out with Vietnam-era flak jackets which are regarded as being pretty much useless.
As far as armoring vehicles is concerned, a company by the name of Armor Holdings (symbol AH) has scored major contract awards to up-armor thousands of Humvees to ward off the effects of IEDs in-theater. DHB likewise has been selling ballistic blankets as fast as they can ship them out the door -- these blankets can be cut to fit the contours of a vehicle, and are used to reduce or eliminate flying shrapnel in the event that your vehicle rides over a mine or something like it.
To say that we appear to have been caught unprepared for an extended conflict is an understatement of considerable magnitude.
Screw it. Put Carmen Electra, Pamela Anderson, Jada Pinket-Smith, Halle Berry and a few other hotties on Mars now, and it won't take men 30 years to get there...
I know I've considered attaching a jet engine to my mother in law before. Of course she's not in a wheel chair, but moving her a few hundred miles away quickly would be a desireable outcome!
BFD. Let me know when they can use light beams to bring me a stream of beer molecules...
Oh wait... Maybe they can use this technology so that I don't have to miss my TV show to go pee?
"Everything that we're not supposed to do while driving is on the books as being illegal! This wasn't on the books!"
As a former associate once roared when I tried a defense like that:
"It doesn't say don't piss on the carpet either, but you know it's wrong!"
There's too much politcal correctness. I can't say one thing to person "A". I can't say something else to person "B". God only knows what I can't say to a female co-worker. I can't keep up with it all, so my goal is to be equally annoying and/or outright abusive to everyone I come in contact with. That way, no one can claim to be singled out.
1985. Used to use a copy utility called JET. Unlike the DOS copy command, JET would let you copy files across 360kb floppies. With appropriate command line switches, it would even erase a floppy's contents before continuing on a multi-floppy copy task. I accidentally reversed the order of the switches one day. Wiped out 19 megs on a 24 meg HD. This was 17:00 one Friday. No Norton Utilities. Spent the whole weekend restoring the HD from backup floppies. In the end, wound up losing only *one* WordStar file.
Monday mornig, I fessed up to the boss that I'd wiped out one file. Calmly he explained that from now on I should back things up regularly...
I'm all for letting competition improve the company's bottom line. Just think how much money the average corporation could save if they outsourced all those expensive suits in the executive suite...
Perhaps you were not aware of the fact that O'Reilly no longer requires perpetual copyright. Rather, after a set period of time, copyright reverts to the author(s) for their benefit? Maybe he's not a Saint (tm), but he's a damn sight better than most out there, and seems to genuinely care about sharing, the commons, and the public domain.
Go to Wal-Mart. They have tons of ordinary jeans and at decent prices, too. Or are you too damned good to shop at Wal-Mart?
Yes, actually, I am. I have better things to do than spend my hard-earned money at a store that deprives others of the right to earn a living wage, and kills off local small business in the process. Mall Wart is the Kudzu of the retailing world.
In other words, it's fixing a problem that doesn't exist and is only meant to make people feel better.
Not only that, but imagine if this was implemented large-scale, especially in a large urban area. Any attempt at coordinated signal timing to maximize traffic flow (minimizing the frustration that leads some to spead in the first place) goes right down the toilet. I'd say this is a bogus idea that will only exacerbate the underlying issue -- too much trafic, not enough roads to efficiently carry it all.
Just like how they monitor your cell phone conversations and send you ads based on that?
I think encrypting the wireless signal would be pretty simple. Otherwise, don't wear it.
I'll say this slowly -- IT..... WAS.....A.....JOKE!
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the folks who are allergic to the iodine content in shellfish?
All we need to do then is to introduce a mechanism which will cause a divide by zero error and the tumor will crash without further intervention...
Same here. No access to personal accounts, no incoming attachments...
and Congress might actually produce some useful output...
Think about it -- if something like this had been done earlier, we could have saved an awful lot of time and money that was instead spent on anti-trust lawsuits that the government ultimately "lost" (yes, I know they technically won, but have _you_ noticed any benefits from that win? I sure haven't).
Here's the problem -- Federal, State, and Local Government agencies of all sorts put out press releases, solicitations, regulatory notices and the like by the tens of thousands on a daily basis. Companies and citizens who wish to read and/or respond to this data stream have no choice but to purchase Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in order to interact with the Government. Government has ensured the Micorsoft monopoly simply by continuing to support a product with closed and proprietary file formats. If other state Governments, and especially if the Federal Government endorses _independantly verifiable_ open document formats, the monopoly is broken without the expense of continued litigation or oversight.
I think that the same can be said in other areas as well. For instance -- Mozilla, and now FireFox, are making inroads into IE's domain. The progress is slow because many sites do not support the HTML standards put forth by the W3C. What if all government agencies declared that all web pages created or maintained by their agencies would support only open standards -- not some of the wrinkles introduced by IE? Again, problem solved over the long run.
IMHO, we depend too much on legal wrangling to try to enforce corporate behavior, rather than encouraging, architechting, and supporting an infrastructure that would lead to the same end without all the pushing, shoving, and head-butting along the way.
Yes, I know that I am naively idealistic. Deal with it.
One thing though -- even if the code is embedded in your document, no one can trace it to you unless you've somehow sent info to the manufacturer tying your serial number to you...
I agree. Please explain to me which part of the following sentence you do not understand:
"To say that we appear to have been caught unprepared for an extended conflict is an understatement of considerable magnitude."
"To say that we appear to have been caught unprepared for an extended conflict is an understatement of considerable magnitude."
Apology accepted in advance.
As far as armoring vehicles is concerned, a company by the name of Armor Holdings (symbol AH) has scored major contract awards to up-armor thousands of Humvees to ward off the effects of IEDs in-theater. DHB likewise has been selling ballistic blankets as fast as they can ship them out the door -- these blankets can be cut to fit the contours of a vehicle, and are used to reduce or eliminate flying shrapnel in the event that your vehicle rides over a mine or something like it.
To say that we appear to have been caught unprepared for an extended conflict is an understatement of considerable magnitude.
Screw it. Put Carmen Electra, Pamela Anderson, Jada Pinket-Smith, Halle Berry and a few other hotties on Mars now, and it won't take men 30 years to get there...
I'll spend more time listening to the pundits after the pundit's jobs have been outsourced...
BFD. Let me know when they can use light beams to bring me a stream of beer molecules... Oh wait... Maybe they can use this technology so that I don't have to miss my TV show to go pee?
"Everything that we're not supposed to do while driving is on the books as being illegal! This wasn't on the books!" As a former associate once roared when I tried a defense like that: "It doesn't say don't piss on the carpet either, but you know it's wrong!"
There's too much politcal correctness. I can't say one thing to person "A". I can't say something else to person "B". God only knows what I can't say to a female co-worker. I can't keep up with it all, so my goal is to be equally annoying and/or outright abusive to everyone I come in contact with. That way, no one can claim to be singled out.
Fork 'em if they can't fake a choke!
1985. Used to use a copy utility called JET. Unlike the DOS copy command, JET would let you copy files across 360kb floppies. With appropriate command line switches, it would even erase a floppy's contents before continuing on a multi-floppy copy task. I accidentally reversed the order of the switches one day. Wiped out 19 megs on a 24 meg HD. This was 17:00 one Friday. No Norton Utilities. Spent the whole weekend restoring the HD from backup floppies. In the end, wound up losing only *one* WordStar file.
Monday mornig, I fessed up to the boss that I'd wiped out one file. Calmly he explained that from now on I should back things up regularly...
Shit! Now you've done it! You do know he'll believe your post and act accordingly?
I'm all for letting competition improve the company's bottom line. Just think how much money the average corporation could save if they outsourced all those expensive suits in the executive suite...
Perhaps you were not aware of the fact that O'Reilly no longer requires perpetual copyright. Rather, after a set period of time, copyright reverts to the author(s) for their benefit? Maybe he's not a Saint (tm), but he's a damn sight better than most out there, and seems to genuinely care about sharing, the commons, and the public domain.