Most GPS units I have seen have a "Training" or "Simulator" mode which still outputs the same data format (e.g. Garmin protocol) as the active mode. Set your GPS to training mode and have a canned route in another state or an offset (where your actual location may be in Oregon but is depicted as another location) to your actual route by several hundred miles to the east so that all your GPS tracking data indicates you are driving in Idaho or Wyoming.
Oregon is truly the most screwed up state when it comes to transportation funding. For example in the Portland metro area where voters reject every "Light Rail" train project, the liberals continue to build them. Forget about construction costs of over $135 Million per mile which are never recouped, operations alone are subsidized to the extent that taxpayers chip in around $43.00 every time somebody makes a train trip. Not to mention that ridership figures are artificially boosted by changing bus routes so busses overwhelmingly feed the trains rather than making their previous point to point routes. Result? What used to be a 40 minute bus trip (10-15 minute drive) now is over an hour due to transfers from bus to train to bus.
And busses? Portland's Tri-Met busses operate at 80% subsidy (rider fare is only 20% of the cost) yet has GPS on every bus and readouts at major stops which indicate bus arrivals. (Gee, my 5:00 PM bus will be here at 5:02:32!!!!whoopee)More fine stewardship of ever-rarer taxpayer dollars.
Let bus riders pay their own costs and car drivers get the roads their gas taxes are supposed to pay for.
Oregon's General Fund budget has increased 220%+ in 5 years which is well out of whack with population, wage and cost-of-living indexes. Not only that, but 60% of the entire budget comes from "fees" used to circumvent citizen opposition to taxes. Staggering waste with no corresponding increase in services.
And to those who touched on education...Portland will soon go to approx. 160-day school year. The shortest in the nation. The average teacher makes about $50k for this (equal to $75-80k for a regular full-time worker who also takes their work home with them) and the Ed budget breaks down to about $400,000 per 30-student classroom. Given the $50k for the teacher, where does the other $350,000 per classroom go? Maybe to the 80% of the employees in education who have no classroom duties? Maybe to the 1 "administrator" for every 1.5 "teachers"? Maybe to all sorts of needless junk?
So GPS based road taxes? One more means to confiscate the fruits of citizens labors against their wills and distribute it to those who didn't earn it.
While IT Director at a major oil company, a division HR Manager asked me to help solve the RSI complaint of an employee who was only affected by RSI at work (After work, she could golf, garden, play HOCKEY etc.). So I got her one of these chairs (a different brand) and the HR Manager agreed to have her workstation and this chair adjusted by an ergonomic consultant. This included recording all measurements/angles etc. The woman simply could not adapt to the keyboards on the armrests and her next complaint demanded VOICE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE. (not too available for the old JDEdwards text-based app on an AS/400) Instead, we noted that she had changed all the settings on her chair and removed the elevation blocks under her monitor.
SAFETY VIOLATION!!!! This is a BIG DEAL in an industry where OSHA compliance is so essential. "Failure to utilize provided essential ergonomic safety devices", "Intentionally circumventing protective devices"
Guess what? After that HR Visit, NO MORE COMPLAINTS.
Mr Congressman:
In the interest of equal justice under the law, would you:
1. Allow a designated expert to search your computers (work and home) for evidence of illegally obtained or pirated materials?
2. Give a plain-language translation of the EULA from any Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe or similar software publisher.
3. Answer a multiple-choice "what if" questionnaire concerning fair use scenarios.
4. Indicate whether you do or do not support DCMA etc.
5. If in favor of DCMA et. al., could you let us know what kind of pressure Jack Valenti, Hillary Rosen etc. have brought against you? (we know it won't show up in campaign finance disclosures) Is it under the table cash, or do they have pictures of you with underage girls, young boys or farm animals?
Lots of good points here, but anybody ever work on or manage a help desk?
Suppose you institute a new policy and set the global account preferences for a 30 day password expiration?
What do you think you will be dealing with on the morning of day 31?
I had to implement a similar policy at a major oil company with 7500+ employees.
Unfortunately the rocket scientists who came up with the password rules didn't bother to notice that NT, Novell and OS/400 treat such things as leading numerals, special characters and capitalization quite differently.
Whoops! There went single-sign-in for 7500 people!
Why not consider a few things?
Secure physical access to servers and critical devices. (get me a NT SAM on a properly configured and secured server without first having admin access...possible but easier said than done)
Properly apply security patches and policies.
Properly assign user rights and privileges. (seriously, how much damage will be done if somebody gets the password of a low level user, and who is going to target such an account instead of spending time on common admin and system accounts?)
Teach users about email attachments. One could easily find the password no matter the complexity of the format by sending an attachment containing a keystroke logging trojan or application and then just sit back and wait for the harvest. There are several which do not trigger virus warnings.
Imagine:
>
From: enforcement@sec.gov
To: CEO@bigcompany.com
Dear Sir,
This email is to notify you that the SEC is seeking information to determine whether further action is required concerning a filed complaint.
Please see the attached document for the full text of the original complaint:
>>
Now, even if the CEO doesn't personally read this, his assistant will, or a company attorney will.
Do you think the CEO will be happy to find out his 30-day password of %^HL23@qqEw was cracked and that every time he changes it, it's sent off to some hacker?
You may then find yourself in a position to create/modify and enforce a policy. Remember, bureaucrats hate being in the hotseat.(although asking for more $$$ never brings any shame)
Myself, I'd probably re-image all of the PCs with Windows2000 and use TweakUI to auto-login to a basic restricted user account so the users can't add or change anything.
Then I'd filter ports and throttle bandwidth as well as logging offender's actions.
Finally, you have a chance to do some intellectual Triage...
Pick your *NIX distro of choice and start building images for the assortment of PCs in your school. Quietly begin to deploy them.
You will quickly find 3 sorts of users: *Your future peers. *Users who can't tell the difference. *Boneheads who should be learning to read and write before they are allowed to touch computers or just perhaps need to focus on their future vocation of digging ditches.
Cultivate your peers Educate/tolerate your users Hire the boneheads to mow your lawn
Slashdot Mirror
Most GPS units I have seen have a "Training" or "Simulator" mode which still outputs the same data format (e.g. Garmin protocol) as the active mode. Set your GPS to training mode and have a canned route in another state or an offset (where your actual location may be in Oregon but is depicted as another location) to your actual route by several hundred miles to the east so that all your GPS tracking data indicates you are driving in Idaho or Wyoming. Oregon is truly the most screwed up state when it comes to transportation funding. For example in the Portland metro area where voters reject every "Light Rail" train project, the liberals continue to build them. Forget about construction costs of over $135 Million per mile which are never recouped, operations alone are subsidized to the extent that taxpayers chip in around $43.00 every time somebody makes a train trip. Not to mention that ridership figures are artificially boosted by changing bus routes so busses overwhelmingly feed the trains rather than making their previous point to point routes. Result? What used to be a 40 minute bus trip (10-15 minute drive) now is over an hour due to transfers from bus to train to bus. And busses? Portland's Tri-Met busses operate at 80% subsidy (rider fare is only 20% of the cost) yet has GPS on every bus and readouts at major stops which indicate bus arrivals. (Gee, my 5:00 PM bus will be here at 5:02:32!!!!whoopee)More fine stewardship of ever-rarer taxpayer dollars. Let bus riders pay their own costs and car drivers get the roads their gas taxes are supposed to pay for. Oregon's General Fund budget has increased 220%+ in 5 years which is well out of whack with population, wage and cost-of-living indexes. Not only that, but 60% of the entire budget comes from "fees" used to circumvent citizen opposition to taxes. Staggering waste with no corresponding increase in services. And to those who touched on education...Portland will soon go to approx. 160-day school year. The shortest in the nation. The average teacher makes about $50k for this (equal to $75-80k for a regular full-time worker who also takes their work home with them) and the Ed budget breaks down to about $400,000 per 30-student classroom. Given the $50k for the teacher, where does the other $350,000 per classroom go? Maybe to the 80% of the employees in education who have no classroom duties? Maybe to the 1 "administrator" for every 1.5 "teachers"? Maybe to all sorts of needless junk? So GPS based road taxes? One more means to confiscate the fruits of citizens labors against their wills and distribute it to those who didn't earn it.
While IT Director at a major oil company, a division HR Manager asked me to help solve the RSI complaint of an employee who was only affected by RSI at work (After work, she could golf, garden, play HOCKEY etc.).
So I got her one of these chairs (a different brand) and the HR Manager agreed to have her workstation and this chair adjusted by an ergonomic consultant. This included recording all measurements/angles etc.
The woman simply could not adapt to the keyboards on the armrests and her next complaint demanded VOICE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE. (not too available for the old JDEdwards text-based app on an AS/400)
Instead, we noted that she had changed all the settings on her chair and removed the elevation blocks under her monitor.
SAFETY VIOLATION!!!! This is a BIG DEAL in an industry where OSHA compliance is so essential. "Failure to utilize provided essential ergonomic safety devices", "Intentionally circumventing protective devices"
Guess what? After that HR Visit, NO MORE COMPLAINTS.
Mr Congressman: In the interest of equal justice under the law, would you: 1. Allow a designated expert to search your computers (work and home) for evidence of illegally obtained or pirated materials? 2. Give a plain-language translation of the EULA from any Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe or similar software publisher. 3. Answer a multiple-choice "what if" questionnaire concerning fair use scenarios. 4. Indicate whether you do or do not support DCMA etc. 5. If in favor of DCMA et. al., could you let us know what kind of pressure Jack Valenti, Hillary Rosen etc. have brought against you? (we know it won't show up in campaign finance disclosures) Is it under the table cash, or do they have pictures of you with underage girls, young boys or farm animals?
Lots of good points here, but anybody ever work on or manage a help desk? Suppose you institute a new policy and set the global account preferences for a 30 day password expiration? What do you think you will be dealing with on the morning of day 31? I had to implement a similar policy at a major oil company with 7500+ employees. Unfortunately the rocket scientists who came up with the password rules didn't bother to notice that NT, Novell and OS/400 treat such things as leading numerals, special characters and capitalization quite differently. Whoops! There went single-sign-in for 7500 people! Why not consider a few things? Secure physical access to servers and critical devices. (get me a NT SAM on a properly configured and secured server without first having admin access...possible but easier said than done) Properly apply security patches and policies. Properly assign user rights and privileges. (seriously, how much damage will be done if somebody gets the password of a low level user, and who is going to target such an account instead of spending time on common admin and system accounts?) Teach users about email attachments. One could easily find the password no matter the complexity of the format by sending an attachment containing a keystroke logging trojan or application and then just sit back and wait for the harvest. There are several which do not trigger virus warnings. Imagine: > From: enforcement@sec.gov To: CEO@bigcompany.com Dear Sir, This email is to notify you that the SEC is seeking information to determine whether further action is required concerning a filed complaint. Please see the attached document for the full text of the original complaint: >> Now, even if the CEO doesn't personally read this, his assistant will, or a company attorney will. Do you think the CEO will be happy to find out his 30-day password of %^HL23@qqEw was cracked and that every time he changes it, it's sent off to some hacker?
Perhaps if you write a nice note to the top bureaucrats concerning BSA audits and reference this recent Slashdot story?
9 21 8&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/22/171
You may then find yourself in a position to create/modify and enforce a policy. Remember, bureaucrats hate being in the hotseat.(although asking for more $$$ never brings any shame)
Myself, I'd probably re-image all of the PCs with Windows2000 and use TweakUI to auto-login to a basic restricted user account so the users can't add or change anything.
Then I'd filter ports and throttle bandwidth as well as logging offender's actions.
Finally, you have a chance to do some intellectual Triage...
Pick your *NIX distro of choice and start building images for the assortment of PCs in your school. Quietly begin to deploy them.
You will quickly find 3 sorts of users:
*Your future peers.
*Users who can't tell the difference.
*Boneheads who should be learning to read and write before they are allowed to touch computers or just perhaps need to focus on their future vocation of digging ditches.
Cultivate your peers
Educate/tolerate your users
Hire the boneheads to mow your lawn