Just a side comment. You mentioned that you have pond-pumps running. I picked up one and have seen some other decent ones that run on individualized solar-panels. They're actually pretty neat, and you can decouple them easily from the regular electrical system.
I've seen people with pump-houses that look like cute little dog/animals-houses (some incorporate bird-baths or birdhouse-type designs as well), put the pump solar-panels on that and it should work pretty well without looking ugly.
After all, a solar plant isn't bringing in anything new that's not already there. For the same reason that it can't increase output by "throwing more coal on the fire" (if it's not sunny, it's not sunny), it wouldn't be able to use sunlight that wasn't already there in the first place. If the sunlight weren't hitting the station, it would still be shining on the same place.
Moreover, since heat and energy are to some extent interchangeable, converting heat (radiation) into an electrical energy source should mean that the heat has - in fact - changed form. If it's not heat, then it's less hot...
Privatize the power to conduct a legal prosecution. Imagine the possibilities
Yes, the ability by such private organizations to blackmail the government would be extraordinary, and then you'd have one more organization accepting bribes...
I think that perhaps what matters more is the overall list of who can get in (it more or less requires big bucks), and how those people are accountable to the public once they're in.
I'm a Canadian. We have more than two parties (mind you it usually comes down to 2-3 main contenders), but it doesn't really matter who you vote in. Until the politicians become more accountable for their actions, to the people, and to the laws of the land (and that includes not being able to write their way out of legal accountability), then nothing will change.
Even the nice ones are just good actors. Hell, Paul Bernardo and his wife Karla Homolka were considered model citizens and all around nice people until they got caught...
In a lot of cases, you don't need a lot of major skills/education to become a janitor or a farm-hand. Yes, you have be dedicated enough to do the job, but it's not often something that takes a lot of brains, or - depending on the actual tasks - brawn. It does take the ability to put up with some things beyond which other people are willing to do though, and I've actually seen some janitors that get paid pretty damn good.
Instant messaging is usually a distraction, but generally I keep my email reading to certain times o f they day, and then sort the messages with things-to-do into folders based on priority.
I'd much rather get things in email, where I can re-read, request more details, verify, and otherwise justify my work rather than an office drive-by work-assignment.
Being bombarded with emails sucks, but CC'ing the boss on well-tuned responses to idiotic requests is usually helpful, and if you're called to task on something dumb that was assigned to you by somebody else, an electronic trail helps too. Mileage may depend on how good your boss is, but a decent boss may just intervene if he notices a lot of CC's to somebody who's wasting your (and thus the company's) time.
Because I was already emailed with the initial "job offer," which included the base information like pay rate, holiday time, etc. In previous positions, this is pretty much all I got, and it was short, sweet, and to-the-point. In this case, there was an additional "contract" which surprised me with a lot of extra conditions and details.
I guess one other question would be, if you've been given an employment offer containing various terms of the employment, signed and accepted it, how free should they be to add the extra contract. What happens if you accept a job offering, but decide to later back out because the contract isn't so pretty?
The problem with a lot of this is, WHOIS records themselves invite SPAM (conveniently having your email address available to spammers) or other issues. Personally, I'd rather not have some internet eTard with a hot temper and righteous indignation at something I posted online coming to hunt me down via my address in a WHOIS entry...
I've not really notice China/Russia being any worse for SPAM than elsewhere, but one thing I did notice is that they seem to be much more often the source of cracking attempts against my boxen both at home and work. Even if a lot of it is just SSH password-guessing (sorry losers, I don't allow root-level SSH so you can stop trying that username), a large portion of the IP's involved in this seem to original from China and Russia. Still, I couldn't tell you how many are direct, deliberate attempts and how many are already-owned machines trying to expand their little armies...
A well, there's not much iCANN can does about this, as one doesn't need a DNS entry to port-sniff and attempt brute-forcing passwords. Denyhosts is pretty good at handling this, although I'd to find something that works a little closer to the firewall level so I could have some fun with redirects and tarpits.
Yeah, if the review lambasted the game for being buggy or having other issues that would likely be fixed at release, then it should definately take into account that it's working a pre-release/beta. On the other hand, if the plot was weak, lacked innovation, or other issues with the game-at large, I'd say let 'er rip. Sometimes even major gameplay issues can differ between the beta and release versions of a game though, a lot of RTS's etc even patch it midstream to allow for improved fairness as time goes on.
Yup. The question is, what happens when what you receive in writing at arrival (the contract) is different than what you receive in writing prior to (the job offer and acceptance letter). If I'd known that the two differed so greatly, I'd likely have held back for a less onerous contract before signing the offer/acceptance. In other places I've accepted employment the two were pretty much the same thing, with the exception of union rules etc in shops I worked that were unionized.
I have one of these, and I haven't been impressed with it. First of all, it's very generic, without being specific as to what knowledge I can't use in future employers, etc. It was also handed to me *after* I moved across the country about 4300km to my new employer, and after I had received and accepted the job offer (which I had before I left). Since I had already quit my former job and moved 4300km, there wasn't much I could do but accept. I even asked to append more specific details and was turned down.
Luckily, my company doesn't have any history of trying to enforce these idiotic things, and I have no plans on doing anything dumb like jumping ship and taking company-specific info or customers with me, but I do wonder how enforceable these boilerplate contracts are. From what I've researched, they're not very enforceable if they aren't rather specific (what the actual 'competition' would be, the competitive region, etc) , or if alternate methods would have sufficed (say to prevent stealing proprietary info or customers).
I do wonder of the legality of hitting somebody with this *after* the job offer has already been given and accepted. I had requested the contract before moving but had assumed that it was more or less in the offer.
I know some nice guys who had lasting, happy relationships, but often enough it was the jerks that lasted longer, because the girls felt some sort of weird responsibility to them.
A lot of nice guys go from 0 to doormat in about 60 seconds. At first the woman will be impressed, but the demands will ramp up in a twisted game of "how far can I go, how much can I get." Yes, the guy might be getting laid, but he'll also be getting treated like crap otherwise. Sometimes the sex lets the relationship last longer that it otherwise would without, but in the end the guy finally either gets dump, or manages to get the hell out.
So yeah, while some of those nice guys might settle down, other just settle, and many end up going through the continual dating circus just as much as the not-so-nice guys. In fact, these guys end up just as jaded as the women, though often enough they pick up enough skills to get laid etc.
For myself, I'd say I qualify as one of those guys. A lot of women these days comment at how nice I still am, but I've learned to avoid a lot of dating situations that have the potential to turn ugly. Of course, in some cases they might have turned out well, but a little healthy dating paranoia is the consequence of a string of really f***'ed up relationships. In the end I tend to have a lot of close female friends, but I'm not willing to let it go beyond that.
If you've still managed to keep enough of those "nice guy" characteristics and want to meet a nice girl, you'll may have to check your criteria. I see a bunch of suggestions about dating Asian women. Partly these are true, but don't expect everything to be "perfect", and keep in mind that "asian" is a pretty damn broad brush (there's Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and many others that may differ greatly in culture and expectations). I've also had a tendency to find that big-city girls in that aspect will start trashing you fairly early on.
My current girlfriend is asian (and specifically Chinese), but she's also older than me and a whole lot more mature than a lot of girls I dated. She's had crap relationships, I've had crap relationships, and we've both a little wary but otherwise getting along fabulously. I think the most amusing arguments we've had are about who will clean the dishes (and we've both volunteering).
So yeah, a nice guy can get a good girl, but if you're trying to bed the high-school cheerleader then maybe it's not just the girls that have skewed criteria for dating, hmmm.
Or maybe I just went to a more tolerant Canadian school. But back then, we had all sorts of fun within the rather poorly secured network. Heck, we wrote some games that the other kids loved, and then stashed backdoors in them to deal with the guys that were stealing our lunch money. They never did figure out why their computers froze or rebooted halfway through an unsaved piece of work (although to be fair they did that on their own sometimes anyhow).
Nowadays it seems that I would probably have been hung out to dry for that sorta thing. Back then, my prof more or less know about it, and was content to warn us when things got too out of hand. Of course, I actually ended up working for that same school district sometime later, but at least IMHO the networks were a fair bit more secure then, but when kids did get into places they weren't supposed to we generally leaned towards warnings (and suspensions if it was serious) rather than prison terms. I think the prison system is busy enough with the murderers, rapists, burglars, and others.
This kid was a jackass and deserved to get nailed, but he doesn't deserve to have them dig up every possible angle against the same thing, and hit him from all sides with it. The same tactics can (and have been) used to railroad those that didn't deserve a given charge, but were pressured into taking a lesser (though also undeserved) plea in fear of getting hit with the bigger punch if things went to trial. For example, see this case up here in Canada. Facing horrendous charges VS a lesser plea can push even innocent people to cave in.
It seems to me that stacking "multiple counts" of a crime perhaps shouldn't apply to all cases. If he meddled with the same system multiple times, it seems to me that it should be one count of the same crime, versus if he did something like - say - crack (I used the term loosely for this script-kiddie) into several different systems. The counts concept works fine if you've got a rapist, murderer, etc, but not some kid who's exploiting the same crack in the same place over a given period.
So it the kid was actually some form of misunderstood super-genious then it would be to name him with a shitload of charges and up to nearly two lifetime sentences worth of jail-time? No, he won't likely get it, but the will likely use the threat of a much bigger sentence to push him into accepting the plea-de-jour.
Does he deserve punishment, yes. Is it worth a perspective 38 years, no, and it sets a bad precedent if an overly hefty punishment is levied against him.
Never had any of my own servers hacked. I have seen plenty of attempts though.
Never saw illegal (as in content) porn on the corp boxes that were hacked either, but plenty of Warez software, and lots of porn that I just cleared off by rote without bothering to check into too deeply as to what variety it was. If I remember correctly the first server I saw hacked had pr0n mentioning horses, though.
I've run across this myself. I used to laugh at my co-workers who were paranoid about us sysadmins scooping their emails and discovering dirty jokes etc (although some shared the jokes with me, and they were actually rather good ones at that). It's really not worth the bother to go digging for this stuff.
On the other hand, systems require maintenance, which may require poking at logs, check out home directories (why is/home full and user "jdoe" using 50% of the space), or security-related issues.
I have been involved in incidents where we deliberately poked through emails as well, due to some complains about harassing emails etc. I have worked on machines with email issues and saw some headers that seemed rather interesting. Home directories full of porn, proxy entries of mp3 downloads, etc. You run into it all.
My take: unless it's causing a problem, or it's going to land the company in trouble, then it's not worth my time to look into until I'm directed to do so by management. However, cases do crop up, so it's always best to assume that - even if the sysadmins don't really want to read your email - you can be snooped on, and to behave in a manner befitting that.
I've heard of plenty of cases where restoring a damaged hard-drive has resulted in finding *very* interesting files, resulting in rather curt dismissals or sometimes even police intervention. Who would want to chance it?
Things do come up sometimes though. Fixing email accounts can require some poking through things (depending on the issue). In cases where disk-space or bandwidth was being consumed at an unusual rate, I've had to investigate over-large homedirs and discuss the issues of downloading movies/mp3's at work (well, in the case my previous employer - a school district - at school).
Really, I can't be bothered to go looking for stuff unless there's an issue that warrants it, but it's not uncommon for such issues to crop up.
Ah, but does that take care of the *other* accounts that might have SSH keys. Oh, what, you mean that you didn't know that the printer spool account on one machine of 50 had shell access, a key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, and supervisor access?
Firing sysadmins can be pretty scary. Most of the security put in the place to avoid these issues is implemented by... well... sysadmins.
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Just a side comment. You mentioned that you have pond-pumps running. I picked up one and have seen some other decent ones that run on individualized solar-panels. They're actually pretty neat, and you can decouple them easily from the regular electrical system.
I've seen people with pump-houses that look like cute little dog/animals-houses (some incorporate bird-baths or birdhouse-type designs as well), put the pump solar-panels on that and it should work pretty well without looking ugly.
After all, a solar plant isn't bringing in anything new that's not already there. For the same reason that it can't increase output by "throwing more coal on the fire" (if it's not sunny, it's not sunny), it wouldn't be able to use sunlight that wasn't already there in the first place. If the sunlight weren't hitting the station, it would still be shining on the same place.
Moreover, since heat and energy are to some extent interchangeable, converting heat (radiation) into an electrical energy source should mean that the heat has - in fact - changed form. If it's not heat, then it's less hot...
Privatize the power to conduct a legal prosecution. Imagine the possibilities
Yes, the ability by such private organizations to blackmail the government would be extraordinary, and then you'd have one more organization accepting bribes...
I think that perhaps what matters more is the overall list of who can get in (it more or less requires big bucks), and how those people are accountable to the public once they're in.
I'm a Canadian. We have more than two parties (mind you it usually comes down to 2-3 main contenders), but it doesn't really matter who you vote in. Until the politicians become more accountable for their actions, to the people, and to the laws of the land (and that includes not being able to write their way out of legal accountability), then nothing will change.
Even the nice ones are just good actors. Hell, Paul Bernardo and his wife Karla Homolka were considered model citizens and all around nice people until they got caught...
I've always preferred. Feet first, up to the neck, sand well packed (or in concrete) far out on a beach during low-tide.
The fun doesn't come in for a few hours, but it could be an enjoyable wait, so bring a BBQ and some lemonade.
In a lot of cases, you don't need a lot of major skills/education to become a janitor or a farm-hand. Yes, you have be dedicated enough to do the job, but it's not often something that takes a lot of brains, or - depending on the actual tasks - brawn. It does take the ability to put up with some things beyond which other people are willing to do though, and I've actually seen some janitors that get paid pretty damn good.
When you're in your probationary period, a company can fire you for pretty much anything short of discrimination, etc.
Instant messaging is usually a distraction, but generally I keep my email reading to certain times o f they day, and then sort the messages with things-to-do into folders based on priority.
I'd much rather get things in email, where I can re-read, request more details, verify, and otherwise justify my work rather than an office drive-by work-assignment.
Being bombarded with emails sucks, but CC'ing the boss on well-tuned responses to idiotic requests is usually helpful, and if you're called to task on something dumb that was assigned to you by somebody else, an electronic trail helps too. Mileage may depend on how good your boss is, but a decent boss may just intervene if he notices a lot of CC's to somebody who's wasting your (and thus the company's) time.
Because I was already emailed with the initial "job offer," which included the base information like pay rate, holiday time, etc. In previous positions, this is pretty much all I got, and it was short, sweet, and to-the-point. In this case, there was an additional "contract" which surprised me with a lot of extra conditions and details.
I guess one other question would be, if you've been given an employment offer containing various terms of the employment, signed and accepted it, how free should they be to add the extra contract. What happens if you accept a job offering, but decide to later back out because the contract isn't so pretty?
The problem with a lot of this is, WHOIS records themselves invite SPAM (conveniently having your email address available to spammers) or other issues. Personally, I'd rather not have some internet eTard with a hot temper and righteous indignation at something I posted online coming to hunt me down via my address in a WHOIS entry...
I've not really notice China/Russia being any worse for SPAM than elsewhere, but one thing I did notice is that they seem to be much more often the source of cracking attempts against my boxen both at home and work. Even if a lot of it is just SSH password-guessing (sorry losers, I don't allow root-level SSH so you can stop trying that username), a large portion of the IP's involved in this seem to original from China and Russia. Still, I couldn't tell you how many are direct, deliberate attempts and how many are already-owned machines trying to expand their little armies...
A well, there's not much iCANN can does about this, as one doesn't need a DNS entry to port-sniff and attempt brute-forcing passwords. Denyhosts is pretty good at handling this, although I'd to find something that works a little closer to the firewall level so I could have some fun with redirects and tarpits.
ROFLMEOW?
Yeah, if the review lambasted the game for being buggy or having other issues that would likely be fixed at release, then it should definately take into account that it's working a pre-release/beta. On the other hand, if the plot was weak, lacked innovation, or other issues with the game-at large, I'd say let 'er rip. Sometimes even major gameplay issues can differ between the beta and release versions of a game though, a lot of RTS's etc even patch it midstream to allow for improved fairness as time goes on.
Yup. The question is, what happens when what you receive in writing at arrival (the contract) is different than what you receive in writing prior to (the job offer and acceptance letter). If I'd known that the two differed so greatly, I'd likely have held back for a less onerous contract before signing the offer/acceptance. In other places I've accepted employment the two were pretty much the same thing, with the exception of union rules etc in shops I worked that were unionized.
I have one of these, and I haven't been impressed with it. First of all, it's very generic, without being specific as to what knowledge I can't use in future employers, etc. It was also handed to me *after* I moved across the country about 4300km to my new employer, and after I had received and accepted the job offer (which I had before I left). Since I had already quit my former job and moved 4300km, there wasn't much I could do but accept. I even asked to append more specific details and was turned down.
Luckily, my company doesn't have any history of trying to enforce these idiotic things, and I have no plans on doing anything dumb like jumping ship and taking company-specific info or customers with me, but I do wonder how enforceable these boilerplate contracts are. From what I've researched, they're not very enforceable if they aren't rather specific (what the actual 'competition' would be, the competitive region, etc) , or if alternate methods would have sufficed (say to prevent stealing proprietary info or customers).
I do wonder of the legality of hitting somebody with this *after* the job offer has already been given and accepted. I had requested the contract before moving but had assumed that it was more or less in the offer.
I know some nice guys who had lasting, happy relationships, but often enough it was the jerks that lasted longer, because the girls felt some sort of weird responsibility to them.
A lot of nice guys go from 0 to doormat in about 60 seconds. At first the woman will be impressed, but the demands will ramp up in a twisted game of "how far can I go, how much can I get." Yes, the guy might be getting laid, but he'll also be getting treated like crap otherwise. Sometimes the sex lets the relationship last longer that it otherwise would without, but in the end the guy finally either gets dump, or manages to get the hell out.
So yeah, while some of those nice guys might settle down, other just settle, and many end up going through the continual dating circus just as much as the not-so-nice guys. In fact, these guys end up just as jaded as the women, though often enough they pick up enough skills to get laid etc.
For myself, I'd say I qualify as one of those guys. A lot of women these days comment at how nice I still am, but I've learned to avoid a lot of dating situations that have the potential to turn ugly. Of course, in some cases they might have turned out well, but a little healthy dating paranoia is the consequence of a string of really f***'ed up relationships. In the end I tend to have a lot of close female friends, but I'm not willing to let it go beyond that.
If you've still managed to keep enough of those "nice guy" characteristics and want to meet a nice girl, you'll may have to check your criteria. I see a bunch of suggestions about dating Asian women. Partly these are true, but don't expect everything to be "perfect", and keep in mind that "asian" is a pretty damn broad brush (there's Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and many others that may differ greatly in culture and expectations). I've also had a tendency to find that big-city girls in that aspect will start trashing you fairly early on.
My current girlfriend is asian (and specifically Chinese), but she's also older than me and a whole lot more mature than a lot of girls I dated. She's had crap relationships, I've had crap relationships, and we've both a little wary but otherwise getting along fabulously. I think the most amusing arguments we've had are about who will clean the dishes (and we've both volunteering).
So yeah, a nice guy can get a good girl, but if you're trying to bed the high-school cheerleader then maybe it's not just the girls that have skewed criteria for dating, hmmm.
Or maybe I just went to a more tolerant Canadian school. But back then, we had all sorts of fun within the rather poorly secured network. Heck, we wrote some games that the other kids loved, and then stashed backdoors in them to deal with the guys that were stealing our lunch money. They never did figure out why their computers froze or rebooted halfway through an unsaved piece of work (although to be fair they did that on their own sometimes anyhow).
Nowadays it seems that I would probably have been hung out to dry for that sorta thing. Back then, my prof more or less know about it, and was content to warn us when things got too out of hand. Of course, I actually ended up working for that same school district sometime later, but at least IMHO the networks were a fair bit more secure then, but when kids did get into places they weren't supposed to we generally leaned towards warnings (and suspensions if it was serious) rather than prison terms. I think the prison system is busy enough with the murderers, rapists, burglars, and others.
This kid was a jackass and deserved to get nailed, but he doesn't deserve to have them dig up every possible angle against the same thing, and hit him from all sides with it. The same tactics can (and have been) used to railroad those that didn't deserve a given charge, but were pressured into taking a lesser (though also undeserved) plea in fear of getting hit with the bigger punch if things went to trial. For example, see this case up here in Canada. Facing horrendous charges VS a lesser plea can push even innocent people to cave in.
It seems to me that stacking "multiple counts" of a crime perhaps shouldn't apply to all cases. If he meddled with the same system multiple times, it seems to me that it should be one count of the same crime, versus if he did something like - say - crack (I used the term loosely for this script-kiddie) into several different systems. The counts concept works fine if you've got a rapist, murderer, etc, but not some kid who's exploiting the same crack in the same place over a given period.
So it the kid was actually some form of misunderstood super-genious then it would be to name him with a shitload of charges and up to nearly two lifetime sentences worth of jail-time? No, he won't likely get it, but the will likely use the threat of a much bigger sentence to push him into accepting the plea-de-jour.
Does he deserve punishment, yes. Is it worth a perspective 38 years, no, and it sets a bad precedent if an overly hefty punishment is levied against him.
Never had any of my own servers hacked. I have seen plenty of attempts though.
Never saw illegal (as in content) porn on the corp boxes that were hacked either, but plenty of Warez software, and lots of porn that I just cleared off by rote without bothering to check into too deeply as to what variety it was. If I remember correctly the first server I saw hacked had pr0n mentioning horses, though.
I've run across this myself. I used to laugh at my co-workers who were paranoid about us sysadmins scooping their emails and discovering dirty jokes etc (although some shared the jokes with me, and they were actually rather good ones at that). It's really not worth the bother to go digging for this stuff.
/home full and user "jdoe" using 50% of the space), or security-related issues.
On the other hand, systems require maintenance, which may require poking at logs, check out home directories (why is
I have been involved in incidents where we deliberately poked through emails as well, due to some complains about harassing emails etc. I have worked on machines with email issues and saw some headers that seemed rather interesting. Home directories full of porn, proxy entries of mp3 downloads, etc. You run into it all.
My take: unless it's causing a problem, or it's going to land the company in trouble, then it's not worth my time to look into until I'm directed to do so by management. However, cases do crop up, so it's always best to assume that - even if the sysadmins don't really want to read your email - you can be snooped on, and to behave in a manner befitting that.
I've heard of plenty of cases where restoring a damaged hard-drive has resulted in finding *very* interesting files, resulting in rather curt dismissals or sometimes even police intervention. Who would want to chance it?
Things do come up sometimes though. Fixing email accounts can require some poking through things (depending on the issue). In cases where disk-space or bandwidth was being consumed at an unusual rate, I've had to investigate over-large homedirs and discuss the issues of downloading movies/mp3's at work (well, in the case my previous employer - a school district - at school).
Really, I can't be bothered to go looking for stuff unless there's an issue that warrants it, but it's not uncommon for such issues to crop up.
Ah, but does that take care of the *other* accounts that might have SSH keys. Oh, what, you mean that you didn't know that the printer spool account on one machine of 50 had shell access, a key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, and supervisor access?
... well ... sysadmins.
Firing sysadmins can be pretty scary. Most of the security put in the place to avoid these issues is implemented by
When the laptop is at home it's on a private network. However, that's not always the case when the laptop is abroad (though it usually is).