No, that is not true Capitalism, that is greed and bungled regulation. Capitalism is not greed, and greed is not capitalism. I am AC above you, and I fully agree in terms of government culpability. But if you want to know where the blame against Halliburton is, you must have missed the kangaroo court, Stalinist commission hearings at the outset of the whole mess, where it was like watching the Three Stooges (Oceanic, BP, and Halliburton) in front of what amounts to a show trial. Probably because so much was done wrong from the get-go that they just could not be sure whose process failed and who would be ultimately responsible.
And to which treaty to you refer? If its the Kyoto Accord, the US has not gone with that because it allows exemptions for developing industrial countries, like China, and puts draconian restrictions on third-world countries essentially ensuring that they never develop.
Then there are the boycotts. How utterly stupid. First, BP will need the money to pay for the clean up and damage claims, as it is already beginning to liquidate assets of its North American operations. Secondly, the boycotts really only harm the local business owners. Lastly, if you are going to boycott BP on principal for the leak, then you should also check out the Niger Delta and ExxonMobile, and while you are at it why not boycott Citgo for being owned by a dictatorial regime which uses fear and intimidation, if not flat-out strong-armed tactics, to silence its critics.
And that is exactly how this system is supposed to work. The company which decides to screw and milk its customers falls flat in competition against a competitor which knows what the customer wants and how to provide it.
Provided, of course, we do not decide that, as a service, cable television is too big to fail and must be bailed out. Adapt or die.
Of course, while we are vilifying ComCast and its compatriots, how much do we know about background regulation which could be forcing this upon them? For instance, you know how you hate your bank when you accidentally overdraft your account and they process the big item first, ensuring that many or all smaller items following it will accrue an NSF fee? I have it on good authority from two different banks that this is required be federal regulation and, apparently, the fed gets a cut of NSF fees.
(I welcome any information supportive or to the contrary as I have had little time to research this myself. If true, would anyone truly be shocked?)
Except that ComCast and Cox (and their forerunners) have sued municipalities which attempt to bring in competition or set up their own cable system on the grounds that doing so is "anti-competitive."
That is how it was done about 10 years ago at the apartment complex where I worked. The complex had its own cable system with its head-end in a shack out by a laundry room (or it might have been the back half of a laundry room, I cannot exactly recall as I only went in there one time.) There was a satellite receiver box for each channel the complex received, each of which was then fed into an analog multiplexer which in turn was amplified and distributed throughout the complex. Not sure how many channels we had, maybe like 20 or 25. As well, there was an input for our "community channel," which was nothing more than a video feed from a video titler in the complex office.
Anyway. I have not had cable now for about three years, and I have not looked back since. Everything I want to watch is on Hulu or available directly from the producer (like "Babylon 5" on thewb.com.) When I visit family with cable or satellite I will spend a little time vegging out and catching up on what new stuff is out there (like "Pawn Stars," pretty interesting) but there is not a damned thing on TV without which I cannot live.
I missed out on the thread about what it means to be a "real" Amiga. I think I will have to find it on AO and have a read.
I recently acquired a G4 MacMini and installed MorphOS 2.4. I am pretty pleased with its operation, especially how quickly USB devices are recognized and mass storage devices get mounted (excellent work, Chris, thank you!) There is a nice selection of software -- free, shareware, and commercial -- out there for the various Amiga-oid platforms. And the native compatibility with OS3 (68k) software is a great benefit.
Why use it rather than Linux? Because it IS NOT Linux.
How did all these damned mosquitoes get into my house?!!
hehehe While looking for responses to my comments, I found that the Trollhammers are in full effect. You had better duck!
Though, in retrospect, I could have not used the f-bomb as much. Those were regrettable misstatements that I would gladly restate. I will also make a quick call to the local newspaper to apologize for my comments about MSNBC and CNN. That will set everything straight. What was I thinking?
Dear, God, I wish I could mod you. And moreover, while I was reading I was wishing you had not posted as AC -- which you then addressed. We really need people to make propositions like this with a name (or at least a solid handle) put to them.
As I am often insulted by nit-wits poking into my field of expertise, I can relate to and appreciate your indignation in this exercise. Bravo, my friend.
I am trying to understand why everything which spews from the mouths of one side of the arena is "taken out of context," or a regrettably misspoken statement which, given the opportunity, would be stated differently, and phone calls are made to people like Jessie Jackson, Al Sharption, the Special Olympics, and that makes everything okay. The other side, however, gets crucified.
The double standard would be amusing if so much was not at stake.
Frankly, I prefer not to be considered a "denier," but as supporter of Cyclical Earth Processes, and everyone else is a Cyclical Process Denier. Or, how about a supporter of the idea of Solar Influence, and everyone else is a Sun Denier. I like that.
By the way, I formed a consortium of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. We can conclusive prove with our peer-reviewed papers that 9/11 was an inside job. Our peers, of course, being other members of our consortium.
When I worked for a support department, we issued ourselves awards printed with The PrintShop v54. We then advertised ourselves as "Award Winning Support."
Ad nauseum.
If you take the entire global climate change (uh, climates change... ISTR being taught how several deserts in the world used to be quite lush) or global warming picture as a whole, you can trace it back to see where it started, where scientific "consensus" began to be encouraged *cough*extorted*cough*, where evil rich people who consume much much more, and subsequently excrete a larger "carbon footprint," than the average citizen they vilify stand to make millions upon millions of dollars. You know, at some point it sounds quite reasonable that human arrogance reigns supreme on several fronts.
By your logic, these people should also be held in contempt as they stand to make money from lying to you. MSNBC, CNN, and others should also be held in contempt for supporting and expounding the lies, since they stand to make money from it. In particular General Electric, which owns NBC, stands to make a shit load of money from several government proposals, which would normally make most anti-corporation types go absolutely ape shit.
Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change is a fucking scam. I sat on the other side of the fence for a while then on the fence for a short time. But the more I looked into it for myself (Google that shit... I'm not doing your homework for you) the more I became convinced that the scientific process has been corrupted and bastardized, and the majority of the support for it is emotional and based upon "facts" which refer to themselves. Al Gore is a fraud and should be held accountable for his part. Anybody who promotes this scam should be held with high skepticism.
One of my favorite quotes about global warm/cli(fuck it) came from an episode of "King of the Hill," in a clip sent to me by a colleague. One of the characters is selling "carbon credits" and explains it as a way for those who are worried about the environment to not have to actually do anything about it
Makes sense. The whole period between 1995 and 1998 is a mostly blur to me. I moved from BBSing on my 128D to the Amiga, then got hold of TermiteTCP and got online (aside from GEnie) via one of the local BBS's TCP/IP door. Once college offered dial-up Internet I was on-line thereafter pretty much 24/7. Then I discovered IRC, that was it for me. Not a quantum leap for me after having been in the ill-fated Q-Link rooms for years until the abrupt shutdown in 1994.
Although, I would say it might have been late 1997 as well. At the time ICQ was growing exceptionally fast. I could do some archeology in my system to make the determination, but I am pretty sure it was just before 1998 based upon jobs and moves.
IIRC, the only private information put into your ICQ account was your password. Anything else was public. If you are a dope and use the same passwords for everything, then you probably have concerns. Other than that, I cannot think of any. But it is in Russia, and there are plenty of stories about what happens once your information gets there.
But more concerning is the potential disconnect from the Oscar protocol. In short, will ICQ and AIM be able to communicate together still, and will ICQ remain using the Oscar protocol? And to what server will we connect? (Probably in TFA, but who reads those?)
I started using ICQ back in... 1995? I think, anyway around then with an 8 digit UIN starting with 12. I would have jumped on much sooner but I could not until StrICQ for the Amiga. I continued using ICQ after I started using Windows machines around 2000, but after AOL bought it the bloat became annoying: Xtraz or whatever, web search, ads, skins, and other crap. Fortunately, there are plenty of hacks to remove the annoying "features" in the full ICQ version after ICQLite was given the axe. And, no, I never bothered with any of the other chat clients on Windows so long as StrICQ and AmigAIM worked, Windows chat was just utility.
FFS. Of course, if one of these scientists said that the sun will rise in the morning because our global warming models predict it, when it does it will be the work of global warming by definition.
So, you take a predictable element of a cycle which generally runs longer than most peoples' attention spans or clear memory, attribute that to whatever the hell you want, and voila!
Were I a PhD-affixed scholar, I could predict that within the next eleven years we will see satellite communication disruptions caused by increased or decreased (either one could be arguably correct) ionization in the upper atmosphere caused by an increase in carbon dioxide. Since I am a magician... errr "scientist" I would be found to be accurate during the next major height of the solar cycle, and my accurate prediction would obviously prove my statement correct. Just as easily I could tie that prediction in with global warming.
These types of chicanery remind me of this little logic program from COMPUTE! Magazine way back when, which when fed this information and query would produce "I don't know."
A mortal will die. A unicorn is not moral. Will a unicorn die?
The global warming approach to science is putting the conclusion before the hypothesis.
But a lot of us saw this a mile and a-half away. There are a lot of people involved close-up with POTUS' CyberSecurity initiative, and I had the honor of meeting one of the top brass in October. As excited as the people on the advisement staff seem or seemed to be, I could not shake the perception of trepidation in the voice and comments of the presenter. I even queried him about the "CyberSecurity Czar" (or "Director," as it is preferred to be called) and received a fairly vague answer with little notion of what will really happen.
PowerPoint presentations for class lectures makes outlining lectures virtually impossible. I tried one semester and found that I was having to leave blank spots all over the place and return to topics and subtopics from sometimes pages ahead.
At least overhead transparencies were in some kind of outline format. I miss the days when thoughts were organized.
Not to say there are not good PowerPoint presentations out there. I have had one professor use PowerPoint in an amazingly effective manner, but essentially by breaking all the PowerPoint rules. Bah.
It may have been designed that way, but in practice the bean-counters have said "why are we paying for all this redundancy?!" and we cannot even handle a simple hurricane-caused fiber sever.
I think the other issue with which to contend is sometimes earlier seasons are not catchy enough to make a show. For instance, when I watched the first season of "Stargate: SG1" I was not drawn into the show at all. I watched a couple of shows from the eighth season and became hooked, then wanted to know more. At that point, I was willing to forgive poor plots, poor acting, or inconsistencies which often plague first seasons. I said it before and I will say it again, not all shows are "Battlestar Galactica" right out of the gate!
Could this possibly mean the release of OS4 for the Mac Mini? I, for one, would certainly hope so. Heading on over to AO and the rest to see the fireworks...
I have given this thought in the past and figured that since the USPTO does a lot of legwork to check out patents before granting them, why not let them do the research and then redo the patent filing based upon the rejection? Of course, the speed at which these are processed and public availability of filings would most likely make this simplistic scenario unrealistic. It was a thought, none-the-less.
And "The Cloud" must adjust to the fact that businesses and IT departments require reliability, not several-hour down-time, unavailability, and security issues which only affect a "subset of users."
The difference is that when you have children in your house, you generally have better control over behavior, and misbehavior is punished. When you let your children off to someone else's house, you have little control, if any, over behavior.
Put that into network terms. Also, consider that when money is being shelled out, one is more likely to pay attention to parts of the contract which say "we will send copies of your email to our centralized servers for analysis," and say BULL SHIT. But Google Apps has the primary motivation of being free or a lot less than the in-house options, so again security and confidentiality takes a back seat, if it gets a seat at all.
The number of employees with access to the information is not as relevant as the potential exposure. When Google Apps et al have little "oops" moment which affects only "a subset of users" with the effect of exposing private data to unauthorized people, the effect is the potential exposure to billions of people on the Internet, including hostile governments, groups, etc.
I will not knowingly or purposely do business with anyone who puts MY information at risk like that. It is bad enough that in some cases I do not have a choice -- communications companies, card processing companies, creditors, etc. -- but when I do have the choice, I choose no, and it is about damned time that these companies get smart about our objections.
This is my primary objection to a national smart-grid, which will be prime for the picking, especially when the Administration is dragging its heals on cybersecurity. What a wonderful idea: we put your electrical usage habits online for you, for your convenience, and for the convenience of anyone else who wants a shot at viewing your usage habits to determine when you are home, gone, and for how long. And one little "oops" is all it takes to reveal your private information to someone. But you can rest easy knowing that only a small subset of users will be affected.
The scenarios are actually pretty frightening when considered, and in the interest of budgets and paying for something NOW NOW NOW, security will, and does, often take a back seat, if any seat at all.
But why should you care? You do not have anything to hide, right? Wrong. Your habits are extremely valuable to those who would take away from you, be it property or life. Additionally, every time your security is compromised, a company upstream has to shell out money. That company has to recoup its losses and generally does so by increasing your costs, if you do not already pay for this in your fees. So when you get re-issued three Visa check cards because someone did not secure your information, know that you are paying for it in the end.
Seems like this would also cover the oubound SMTP port 25 blocks that ISPs use to prevent direct-to-MX spam. It is an illegal activity, but SMTP is a legitimate protocol. Thoughts?
Slashdot Mirror
That is a thought, actually. How would this affect DNS queries regime-mangled in oppressive countries...
No, that is not true Capitalism, that is greed and bungled regulation. Capitalism is not greed, and greed is not capitalism. I am AC above you, and I fully agree in terms of government culpability. But if you want to know where the blame against Halliburton is, you must have missed the kangaroo court, Stalinist commission hearings at the outset of the whole mess, where it was like watching the Three Stooges (Oceanic, BP, and Halliburton) in front of what amounts to a show trial. Probably because so much was done wrong from the get-go that they just could not be sure whose process failed and who would be ultimately responsible.
And to which treaty to you refer? If its the Kyoto Accord, the US has not gone with that because it allows exemptions for developing industrial countries, like China, and puts draconian restrictions on third-world countries essentially ensuring that they never develop.
Then there are the boycotts. How utterly stupid. First, BP will need the money to pay for the clean up and damage claims, as it is already beginning to liquidate assets of its North American operations. Secondly, the boycotts really only harm the local business owners. Lastly, if you are going to boycott BP on principal for the leak, then you should also check out the Niger Delta and ExxonMobile, and while you are at it why not boycott Citgo for being owned by a dictatorial regime which uses fear and intimidation, if not flat-out strong-armed tactics, to silence its critics.
And that is exactly how this system is supposed to work. The company which decides to screw and milk its customers falls flat in competition against a competitor which knows what the customer wants and how to provide it.
Provided, of course, we do not decide that, as a service, cable television is too big to fail and must be bailed out. Adapt or die.
Of course, while we are vilifying ComCast and its compatriots, how much do we know about background regulation which could be forcing this upon them? For instance, you know how you hate your bank when you accidentally overdraft your account and they process the big item first, ensuring that many or all smaller items following it will accrue an NSF fee? I have it on good authority from two different banks that this is required be federal regulation and, apparently, the fed gets a cut of NSF fees.
(I welcome any information supportive or to the contrary as I have had little time to research this myself. If true, would anyone truly be shocked?)
Except that ComCast and Cox (and their forerunners) have sued municipalities which attempt to bring in competition or set up their own cable system on the grounds that doing so is "anti-competitive."
Really?
That is how it was done about 10 years ago at the apartment complex where I worked. The complex had its own cable system with its head-end in a shack out by a laundry room (or it might have been the back half of a laundry room, I cannot exactly recall as I only went in there one time.) There was a satellite receiver box for each channel the complex received, each of which was then fed into an analog multiplexer which in turn was amplified and distributed throughout the complex. Not sure how many channels we had, maybe like 20 or 25. As well, there was an input for our "community channel," which was nothing more than a video feed from a video titler in the complex office.
Anyway. I have not had cable now for about three years, and I have not looked back since. Everything I want to watch is on Hulu or available directly from the producer (like "Babylon 5" on thewb.com.) When I visit family with cable or satellite I will spend a little time vegging out and catching up on what new stuff is out there (like "Pawn Stars," pretty interesting) but there is not a damned thing on TV without which I cannot live.
Which would be? And relevant to what?
I missed out on the thread about what it means to be a "real" Amiga. I think I will have to find it on AO and have a read.
I recently acquired a G4 MacMini and installed MorphOS 2.4. I am pretty pleased with its operation, especially how quickly USB devices are recognized and mass storage devices get mounted (excellent work, Chris, thank you!) There is a nice selection of software -- free, shareware, and commercial -- out there for the various Amiga-oid platforms. And the native compatibility with OS3 (68k) software is a great benefit.
Why use it rather than Linux? Because it IS NOT Linux.
How did all these damned mosquitoes get into my house?!!
hehehe While looking for responses to my comments, I found that the Trollhammers are in full effect. You had better duck!
Though, in retrospect, I could have not used the f-bomb as much. Those were regrettable misstatements that I would gladly restate. I will also make a quick call to the local newspaper to apologize for my comments about MSNBC and CNN. That will set everything straight. What was I thinking?
Dear, God, I wish I could mod you. And moreover, while I was reading I was wishing you had not posted as AC -- which you then addressed. We really need people to make propositions like this with a name (or at least a solid handle) put to them.
As I am often insulted by nit-wits poking into my field of expertise, I can relate to and appreciate your indignation in this exercise. Bravo, my friend.
I am trying to understand why everything which spews from the mouths of one side of the arena is "taken out of context," or a regrettably misspoken statement which, given the opportunity, would be stated differently, and phone calls are made to people like Jessie Jackson, Al Sharption, the Special Olympics, and that makes everything okay. The other side, however, gets crucified.
The double standard would be amusing if so much was not at stake.
Frankly, I prefer not to be considered a "denier," but as supporter of Cyclical Earth Processes, and everyone else is a Cyclical Process Denier. Or, how about a supporter of the idea of Solar Influence, and everyone else is a Sun Denier. I like that.
By the way, I formed a consortium of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. We can conclusive prove with our peer-reviewed papers that 9/11 was an inside job. Our peers, of course, being other members of our consortium.
When I worked for a support department, we issued ourselves awards printed with The PrintShop v54. We then advertised ourselves as "Award Winning Support."
Ad nauseum.
If you take the entire global climate change (uh, climates change... ISTR being taught how several deserts in the world used to be quite lush) or global warming picture as a whole, you can trace it back to see where it started, where scientific "consensus" began to be encouraged *cough*extorted*cough*, where evil rich people who consume much much more, and subsequently excrete a larger "carbon footprint," than the average citizen they vilify stand to make millions upon millions of dollars. You know, at some point it sounds quite reasonable that human arrogance reigns supreme on several fronts.
By your logic, these people should also be held in contempt as they stand to make money from lying to you. MSNBC, CNN, and others should also be held in contempt for supporting and expounding the lies, since they stand to make money from it. In particular General Electric, which owns NBC, stands to make a shit load of money from several government proposals, which would normally make most anti-corporation types go absolutely ape shit.
Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change is a fucking scam. I sat on the other side of the fence for a while then on the fence for a short time. But the more I looked into it for myself (Google that shit... I'm not doing your homework for you) the more I became convinced that the scientific process has been corrupted and bastardized, and the majority of the support for it is emotional and based upon "facts" which refer to themselves. Al Gore is a fraud and should be held accountable for his part. Anybody who promotes this scam should be held with high skepticism.
One of my favorite quotes about global warm/cli(fuck it) came from an episode of "King of the Hill," in a clip sent to me by a colleague. One of the characters is selling "carbon credits" and explains it as a way for those who are worried about the environment to not have to actually do anything about it
Makes sense. The whole period between 1995 and 1998 is a mostly blur to me. I moved from BBSing on my 128D to the Amiga, then got hold of TermiteTCP and got online (aside from GEnie) via one of the local BBS's TCP/IP door. Once college offered dial-up Internet I was on-line thereafter pretty much 24/7. Then I discovered IRC, that was it for me. Not a quantum leap for me after having been in the ill-fated Q-Link rooms for years until the abrupt shutdown in 1994.
Although, I would say it might have been late 1997 as well. At the time ICQ was growing exceptionally fast. I could do some archeology in my system to make the determination, but I am pretty sure it was just before 1998 based upon jobs and moves.
Blah. Enough of that rambling.
IIRC, the only private information put into your ICQ account was your password. Anything else was public. If you are a dope and use the same passwords for everything, then you probably have concerns. Other than that, I cannot think of any. But it is in Russia, and there are plenty of stories about what happens once your information gets there.
But more concerning is the potential disconnect from the Oscar protocol. In short, will ICQ and AIM be able to communicate together still, and will ICQ remain using the Oscar protocol? And to what server will we connect? (Probably in TFA, but who reads those?)
I started using ICQ back in... 1995? I think, anyway around then with an 8 digit UIN starting with 12. I would have jumped on much sooner but I could not until StrICQ for the Amiga. I continued using ICQ after I started using Windows machines around 2000, but after AOL bought it the bloat became annoying: Xtraz or whatever, web search, ads, skins, and other crap. Fortunately, there are plenty of hacks to remove the annoying "features" in the full ICQ version after ICQLite was given the axe. And, no, I never bothered with any of the other chat clients on Windows so long as StrICQ and AmigAIM worked, Windows chat was just utility.
FFS. Of course, if one of these scientists said that the sun will rise in the morning because our global warming models predict it, when it does it will be the work of global warming by definition.
So, you take a predictable element of a cycle which generally runs longer than most peoples' attention spans or clear memory, attribute that to whatever the hell you want, and voila!
Were I a PhD-affixed scholar, I could predict that within the next eleven years we will see satellite communication disruptions caused by increased or decreased (either one could be arguably correct) ionization in the upper atmosphere caused by an increase in carbon dioxide. Since I am a magician... errr "scientist" I would be found to be accurate during the next major height of the solar cycle, and my accurate prediction would obviously prove my statement correct. Just as easily I could tie that prediction in with global warming.
These types of chicanery remind me of this little logic program from COMPUTE! Magazine way back when, which when fed this information and query would produce "I don't know."
A mortal will die.
A unicorn is not moral.
Will a unicorn die?
The global warming approach to science is putting the conclusion before the hypothesis.
But a lot of us saw this a mile and a-half away. There are a lot of people involved close-up with POTUS' CyberSecurity initiative, and I had the honor of meeting one of the top brass in October. As excited as the people on the advisement staff seem or seemed to be, I could not shake the perception of trepidation in the voice and comments of the presenter. I even queried him about the "CyberSecurity Czar" (or "Director," as it is preferred to be called) and received a fairly vague answer with little notion of what will really happen.
All for show, in my estimation.
PowerPoint presentations for class lectures makes outlining lectures virtually impossible. I tried one semester and found that I was having to leave blank spots all over the place and return to topics and subtopics from sometimes pages ahead.
At least overhead transparencies were in some kind of outline format. I miss the days when thoughts were organized.
Not to say there are not good PowerPoint presentations out there. I have had one professor use PowerPoint in an amazingly effective manner, but essentially by breaking all the PowerPoint rules. Bah.
It may have been designed that way, but in practice the bean-counters have said "why are we paying for all this redundancy?!" and we cannot even handle a simple hurricane-caused fiber sever.
I think the other issue with which to contend is sometimes earlier seasons are not catchy enough to make a show. For instance, when I watched the first season of "Stargate: SG1" I was not drawn into the show at all. I watched a couple of shows from the eighth season and became hooked, then wanted to know more. At that point, I was willing to forgive poor plots, poor acting, or inconsistencies which often plague first seasons. I said it before and I will say it again, not all shows are "Battlestar Galactica" right out of the gate!
::rubbing chin:: Thank you!
Could this possibly mean the release of OS4 for the Mac Mini? I, for one, would certainly hope so. Heading on over to AO and the rest to see the fireworks...
I have given this thought in the past and figured that since the USPTO does a lot of legwork to check out patents before granting them, why not let them do the research and then redo the patent filing based upon the rejection? Of course, the speed at which these are processed and public availability of filings would most likely make this simplistic scenario unrealistic. It was a thought, none-the-less.
And "The Cloud" must adjust to the fact that businesses and IT departments require reliability, not several-hour down-time, unavailability, and security issues which only affect a "subset of users."
I, and a few people who know me, cannot wait for me to get off this rock.
Yup.
The difference is that when you have children in your house, you generally have better control over behavior, and misbehavior is punished. When you let your children off to someone else's house, you have little control, if any, over behavior.
Put that into network terms. Also, consider that when money is being shelled out, one is more likely to pay attention to parts of the contract which say "we will send copies of your email to our centralized servers for analysis," and say BULL SHIT. But Google Apps has the primary motivation of being free or a lot less than the in-house options, so again security and confidentiality takes a back seat, if it gets a seat at all.
The number of employees with access to the information is not as relevant as the potential exposure. When Google Apps et al have little "oops" moment which affects only "a subset of users" with the effect of exposing private data to unauthorized people, the effect is the potential exposure to billions of people on the Internet, including hostile governments, groups, etc.
I will not knowingly or purposely do business with anyone who puts MY information at risk like that. It is bad enough that in some cases I do not have a choice -- communications companies, card processing companies, creditors, etc. -- but when I do have the choice, I choose no, and it is about damned time that these companies get smart about our objections.
This is my primary objection to a national smart-grid, which will be prime for the picking, especially when the Administration is dragging its heals on cybersecurity. What a wonderful idea: we put your electrical usage habits online for you, for your convenience, and for the convenience of anyone else who wants a shot at viewing your usage habits to determine when you are home, gone, and for how long. And one little "oops" is all it takes to reveal your private information to someone. But you can rest easy knowing that only a small subset of users will be affected.
The scenarios are actually pretty frightening when considered, and in the interest of budgets and paying for something NOW NOW NOW, security will, and does, often take a back seat, if any seat at all.
But why should you care? You do not have anything to hide, right? Wrong. Your habits are extremely valuable to those who would take away from you, be it property or life. Additionally, every time your security is compromised, a company upstream has to shell out money. That company has to recoup its losses and generally does so by increasing your costs, if you do not already pay for this in your fees. So when you get re-issued three Visa check cards because someone did not secure your information, know that you are paying for it in the end.
Seems like this would also cover the oubound SMTP port 25 blocks that ISPs use to prevent direct-to-MX spam. It is an illegal activity, but SMTP is a legitimate protocol. Thoughts?