I publish AdSense on one of my websites. One of the things I've always valuable about it over competing ad programs is that it doesn't cookie my visitors for tracking purposes.
But the new Terms and Conditions, to which all publishers must agree to remain in the program, now requires:
You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users' browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.
That just plain sucks.
(A web beacon is also known as a web page; it's a small, invisible graphic placed in the page for tracking purposes.)
However, I'm hoping that a silver lining might be that, if advertising is made more effective by tracking, us publishers might get paid more. But I'm not counting on it.
Now, this was a long time ago, so no doubt things are much stricter nowadays.
I was traveling to visit a client, but didn't have a laptop, so I put all my stuff on an external SCSI drive enclosure. To save space and weight, I didn't carry its power cord, figuring the client could lend me one.
When it got X-rayed, they wanted me to power it on for them, so I could prove it wasn't a bomb. But I had no power cord! The guard was quite unfamiliar with SCSI drives.
In the end, he asked me for my business card, and let me pass when I gave it to him.
I don't remember clearly when it was, but the magazine article I read (Time I think) said that the Saturn plant was still under construction.
It was considered a huge and serious problem. Quite possibly something has been done to solve it since then.
Risking your life to test security
on
The Dirty Jobs of IT
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I took a security course at Interop many years ago. The guy who taught the course worked on a "Tiger Team" that tested the security of White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. They only base employee who knew in advance was the base commander.
My teacher stayed in a nearby motel and hacked in over the telephone, but a military officer with expertise in security parachuted into the base at night - it's a big base, with lots of wide open space.
He started breaking into computer rooms. Interestingly, he was detected but not caught. My teacher intercepted emails from the base staff warning that an intruder had been seen in the area.
Eventually they went public, and submitted a report to the staff as to how they could improve security.
They emphasized that this sort of thing is meant to help, and not to cost anyone their jobs.
There's been a problem for many years, in which bolts whose heads are marked to indicate that they are high-strength, are actually made from cheaper low-grade steel, and are therefor counterfeit.
A construction worker was killed while torguing such a bolt while building the Saturn car factory. The head tore off and he fell to his death.
In the same article where I read this, a general complained that you could find broken bolts littering the ground in the path of tanks on training maneuvers.
There is a way to test bolts for strength, but it's expensive.
I have published a great deal of writing on my own and various other websites, mainly on software engineering and mental illness, not just that of others but my own: I have schizoaffective disorder. It's just like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time.
While I would very much like to publish dead-tree books, I provide all my material online, free at least as-in-beer, so more readers can benefit from it than would be the case if I charged money for it. Another reason is that most traditional publishers would require that I assign them the copyrights to my books, something that I'm loathe to do.
But a fellow Kuro5hin member named lonelyhobo said:
You tried to say crawford would be (and is) well known for "living with schizoaffective disorder," which is something so plainly ridiculous I wonder if you've received any sharp blows to the head recently. You tried to cite your own absolutely unknown works on the internet to bolster your argument. You honestly think that a little piece of shit software or writing on the internet will get you known for any length of time or in any depth?...
Let's boil it down to something very simple (and very contrary to your personal outlook too, I'm sure): PUTTING SHIT ON THE INTERNET IS NOT AN ACCOMPLISHMENT. Not yours or mine or crawford's. The reason I can and do post the garbage I do on the internet is that I know it's completely meaningless.
I find his position perplexing. The only difference, in terms of accomplishment, between what I do now and traditional publication, is that a publisher's editor might stamp his seal of approval on my essays, and bookstore patrons might pay money for what they now can get for free.
But is that what it really means for writing to be notable? I claim that it's not. For one thing, there are many, many books published every year, that even manage to earn their publishers and authors some good money, but that are in no way notable or memorable. At best they're a pleasant way to pass the time.
In my writing, I aim to make a positive difference in the lives of others, whether they are fellow software engineers or fellow mentally ill people. And I have plenty of reason to believe that I have accomplished just that, and many times over.
A little while ago someone attempted to write up a Wikipedia article about me. Of course my many troll friends from Kuro5hin jumped all over it, vandalizing it - it seems I attended "the Batman school of junk touching" - and recommending it for deletion. In the deletion discussion the case was made that I wasn't notable, because not many publications written by others could be found in which my writing was discussed.
I mostly stayed out of the debate, but I did jump in a couple times to point out how hard I work to educate the public about mental illness. I have receved literally thousands of grateful email messages as a result - but for reasons that must be obvious, I couldn't post them.
The consensus of the debaters is that, because few others have discussed my work, I must not be notable enough to merit a Wikipedia article. Considering the difference I know my essays and articles have made in the lives of others, I assert that that is just plain wrong.
It happens that I studied Russian in college. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I had a similar idea, not so much to teach kids but to help exisiting Russian software engineers start software businesses so they could trade with the West.
I happened to meet Esther Dyson when she came to speak at Apple, where I worked at the time. She had traveled extensively in Russia, trying to bootstrap the software industry. When I told her my idea, she grabbed my arm and imperatively said "Russia needs you".
But in the end, I never acted on my idea.
I have a good job with a good company, and great coworkers. But I'm getting old, and feeling very concerned about what I'm going to leave behind when I'm gone. I know none of my code is going to outlive me. I'd like to leave more of a legacy than having gotten a lot of other people rich by writing proprietary code for them.
... to have the money to build all that infrastructure. Say you want to build a road. Well, you need a bulldozer. If there's no heavy industry in your country, you're going to have to buy one and import it. For that you need hard currency.
I applaud the efforts of government and charity to improve living conditions by donating money, but it won't be sustainable until those in need can earn the money through the sweat of their own brows.
Look at what it's doing for India, that they built the Indian Institutes of Technology, whose graduates are now doing software development for worldwide customers.
I understand that although it has a Linux-based OS, it doesn't have a regular kind of filesystem.
Lately I've been entertaining the idea of moving to somewhere in the developing world where all the kids have XOs, and teaching them to code.
I've seen two maps of the Earth that led to this idea. One was a photo of the entire Earth taken at night, made from many satellite photos mosaiced together. The other is a live display that they have in a lobby at Google, that shows a real-time display of queries submitted to their search engine, in the form of bright spikes whose height is proportional to the rate of query submissions.
In both of these, most of the world was lit up - except for Africa. South Africa had some light, but most of Africa was dark.
Maybe if we taught African kids to write software, they could start businesses that would make their lives better.
Click the link in my sig, download my tracks (sheet music too, if you play piano), and drop them in your shared folder. You'll really be helping me out - my hope is that by doing this, I will already be well-known when the time comes to play professionally.
He's also written several other books having to do with sleep and circadian rhythm.
Among the anecdotes in the book are an account of a coast-to-coast airplane crew who put the plane on autopilot then all fell asleep. The plane, loaded with passengers, overshot the destination and was a hundred miles out to sea before air traffic control was able to wake them over the radio.
Also, the author was paid a visit by a Secret Service agent - the people who guard the life of the US President. It seems they were expected to stay on the same shift, in local time, no matter where in the world the President went. That is, if they work 9 to 5 Washington time, then fly to Iraq, say - where the president has visited a couple times - they are expected to then work 9 to 5 Iraqi time, without taking any time to get used to the time zone change. The agent who consulted the author felt that their constant exhaustion that resulted put the President's life at risk.
My own experience includes, at my very first salaried programming job, where I wasn't paid very much and didn't get overtime pay, I was regularly expected to work twenty-hour days and once worked a twenty-nine hour day.
When I was self-employed as a software consultant, quite often I'd work twenty hour days trying to make a milestone so I could get paid. Several times, when times were really hard, I worked forty-hour "days".
Employers of salaried employees seem to feel quite justified in requiring their employees to work without enough sleep. I'd like to see legislation passed that forbids this. Even if your paid work isn't safety-critical, going without sleep needlessly puts lives at risk when you drive your car home. People are killed all the time when drivers fall asleep at the wheel.
I'd be interested to know if this explains the phenomenon, discovered a few years ago, that some rare individuals seem to be immune to HIV despite repeatedly engaging in unsafe sex.
I have schizoaffective disorder. It's just like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. One of the symptoms is depression, which at time can be quite severe - to the point of catatonia and suicide attempts.
Depression is actually my most prevalent symptom; I was depressed for most of my life before I was diagnosed.
I've taken quite a few different antidepressants. Paxil, which is one of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, did nothing whatsoever for me - this despite drug company hype that the SSRIs are more effective than the older, non-selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
Paxil is (or at least was at the time) a patented, name-brand drug, and therefore expensive.
Ironically, imipramine, whose patent expired decades ago and is available quite inexpensively, works just great for me. I think imipramine is the best thing since sliced bread.
Now, don't take this to mean that Paxil won't work for you. But psychiatric medication is very tricky; some works on some people and not on others. Really the best you and your doctor can do is try different medications until you find one that works. But you should definitely try the full range of available medicines, including the older, generic ones, and not just the name-brand patented ones.
She had one of those disclaimers for her sig. I pointed out that there were lots of ways that her email could be intercepted. She replied that her concern was not that someone might read her email, but that she would be held liable for allowing it. She said that the disclaimer absolved her of that liability.
IMHO, that's just wrong.
I take ten milligrams of Zyprexa every day
on
A $1 Billion Email Gaffe
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· Score: 5, Informative
I take it for my schizoaffective disorder. I didn't make the decision to take Zyprexa lightly - I was and still am concerned it could give me diabetes.
But schizoaffective disorder is a devastating illness: it's just like being manic-depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. The risperdal I took previously for my psychotic symptoms wasn't working anymore. From 2003 through 2007, I was in the emergency room five times for psychiatric reasons, culminating in an ambulance ride to the mental ward, where I stayed for three weeks.
The Zyprexa completely eliminates the paranoia and visual hallucinations I would otherwise have almost all the time. It also brought me down from the bipolar mania that led to my ambulance ride, and prevents me from getting manic anymore.
As a result of taking it, I am able to hold a steady job - and a good one - as a software engineer, to provide for my wife and to pay her University tuition.
I've heard rumours that Zyprexa might be withdrawn from the market. I really hope that doesn't happen, as I've never had a medicine work so well.
My first job out of high school was working at a gas station. Some lady drove off while the hose was still in her car. It ripped the hose right off the pump, which started spewing gasoline everywhere.
Fortunately, being a full-serve station, I was nearby and able to shut off the pump before we went up in a mushroom cloud. But what if there was no human attendant?
While The Pirate Bay primarily serves up infringing files, a friend of mine uploaded my legal.torrents to a bunch of pirate sites. So if those pirate sites are taken down, I suffer too.
Also most calls to block p2p don't suggest just blocking the warez sites, but the protocols as a whole, for example what the RIAA/MPAA keep trying to get Universities to do.
BitTorrent is critical for the success of Open Source and Free Software projects, in that it is used to distribute installation CD images. Distribution by HTTP alone is often prohibitively costly.
It's also important for musicians like myself, as well as to the musicians that are members of Jamendo, which distributes Creative Commons-licensed music via BitTorrent and eMule.
A struggling musian who distributes his work via HTTP can easily be bankrupted if one of his songs suddenly becomes a hit. P2P filesharing, via BitTorrent and other protocols, provides an affordable alternative.
In discussing P2P with other people, and especially with your legislators as well as your ISPs, it's important to stress the legal uses of it. Otherwise they will only see it as a source of lawbreaking and copyright infringment.
The top four hits at Google for Michael Crawford mental illness are pages of mine. Yet I still have a job - and a very good one. I've been a software engineer for twenty years.
In doing the search just now, I was very interested to find that another Michael Crawford has written extensively on mental illness. I'll have to drop him a line. He's the guy with the book at Amazon; all of my writing is online.
Learning a new song from sheet music is very slow and painful, but once I have the piece down, I can play it by thinking of the next note or chord a little ahead of when I actually play it.
I've also been learning all the major and minor scales - there are twelve major and thirty-six minor scales, all played with different combinations of keys and fingering. I know all but a few of them now. All the ones I know well I can play just by thinking of their sound, without thinking of the keys or fingering.
By rights holders, they mean the ones who hold the copyright to the music. For most artists signed to the major labels, that means the labels and not the artists. The record labels publicly lament that the artists aren't getting the money owed to them, when in fact the labels themselves do as much as they can to keep the artists from getting paid.
For example, the US copyright board is considering setting a new standard royalty rate for recordings. I think this is the money owed to the composers for each song sale. The board wants to raise the rate from the current nine cents a track to twelve, but the RIAA is arguing that it should actually be reduced to six cents.
One ISP I used to be with - I don't remember clearly which one now, but it was a big national ISP - said that all you needed to do to keep secure on their connection was to disable Windows filesharing. That's it.
Now, some people really need to use it, if they have more than one computer in the house. And there was no mention of protecting yourself from attacks coming from the Internet.
Simply irresponsible, I say, and by rights the ISP ought to be liable for it.
... at one of the major backbone facilities. One of the generals asked the guide - who later related this to a class I took at Interop - how the MILNet could be separated from the rest of the Internet in times of war.
Before the guide could answer, another general replied:
Slashdot Mirror
But the new Terms and Conditions, to which all publishers must agree to remain in the program, now requires:
That just plain sucks.(A web beacon is also known as a web page; it's a small, invisible graphic placed in the page for tracking purposes.)
However, I'm hoping that a silver lining might be that, if advertising is made more effective by tracking, us publishers might get paid more. But I'm not counting on it.
I was traveling to visit a client, but didn't have a laptop, so I put all my stuff on an external SCSI drive enclosure. To save space and weight, I didn't carry its power cord, figuring the client could lend me one.
When it got X-rayed, they wanted me to power it on for them, so I could prove it wasn't a bomb. But I had no power cord! The guard was quite unfamiliar with SCSI drives.
In the end, he asked me for my business card, and let me pass when I gave it to him.
It was considered a huge and serious problem. Quite possibly something has been done to solve it since then.
My teacher stayed in a nearby motel and hacked in over the telephone, but a military officer with expertise in security parachuted into the base at night - it's a big base, with lots of wide open space.
He started breaking into computer rooms. Interestingly, he was detected but not caught. My teacher intercepted emails from the base staff warning that an intruder had been seen in the area.
Eventually they went public, and submitted a report to the staff as to how they could improve security.
They emphasized that this sort of thing is meant to help, and not to cost anyone their jobs.
A construction worker was killed while torguing such a bolt while building the Saturn car factory. The head tore off and he fell to his death.
In the same article where I read this, a general complained that you could find broken bolts littering the ground in the path of tanks on training maneuvers.
There is a way to test bolts for strength, but it's expensive.
While I would very much like to publish dead-tree books, I provide all my material online, free at least as-in-beer, so more readers can benefit from it than would be the case if I charged money for it. Another reason is that most traditional publishers would require that I assign them the copyrights to my books, something that I'm loathe to do.
But a fellow Kuro5hin member named lonelyhobo said:
I find his position perplexing. The only difference, in terms of accomplishment, between what I do now and traditional publication, is that a publisher's editor might stamp his seal of approval on my essays, and bookstore patrons might pay money for what they now can get for free.But is that what it really means for writing to be notable? I claim that it's not. For one thing, there are many, many books published every year, that even manage to earn their publishers and authors some good money, but that are in no way notable or memorable. At best they're a pleasant way to pass the time.
In my writing, I aim to make a positive difference in the lives of others, whether they are fellow software engineers or fellow mentally ill people. And I have plenty of reason to believe that I have accomplished just that, and many times over.
A little while ago someone attempted to write up a Wikipedia article about me. Of course my many troll friends from Kuro5hin jumped all over it, vandalizing it - it seems I attended "the Batman school of junk touching" - and recommending it for deletion. In the deletion discussion the case was made that I wasn't notable, because not many publications written by others could be found in which my writing was discussed.
I mostly stayed out of the debate, but I did jump in a couple times to point out how hard I work to educate the public about mental illness. I have receved literally thousands of grateful email messages as a result - but for reasons that must be obvious, I couldn't post them.
The consensus of the debaters is that, because few others have discussed my work, I must not be notable enough to merit a Wikipedia article. Considering the difference I know my essays and articles have made in the lives of others, I assert that that is just plain wrong.
It happens that I studied Russian in college. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I had a similar idea, not so much to teach kids but to help exisiting Russian software engineers start software businesses so they could trade with the West.
I happened to meet Esther Dyson when she came to speak at Apple, where I worked at the time. She had traveled extensively in Russia, trying to bootstrap the software industry. When I told her my idea, she grabbed my arm and imperatively said "Russia needs you".
But in the end, I never acted on my idea.
I have a good job with a good company, and great coworkers. But I'm getting old, and feeling very concerned about what I'm going to leave behind when I'm gone. I know none of my code is going to outlive me. I'd like to leave more of a legacy than having gotten a lot of other people rich by writing proprietary code for them.
I applaud the efforts of government and charity to improve living conditions by donating money, but it won't be sustainable until those in need can earn the money through the sweat of their own brows.
Look at what it's doing for India, that they built the Indian Institutes of Technology, whose graduates are now doing software development for worldwide customers.
And yes, I realize this isn't patriotic.
Lately I've been entertaining the idea of moving to somewhere in the developing world where all the kids have XOs, and teaching them to code.
I've seen two maps of the Earth that led to this idea. One was a photo of the entire Earth taken at night, made from many satellite photos mosaiced together. The other is a live display that they have in a lobby at Google, that shows a real-time display of queries submitted to their search engine, in the form of bright spikes whose height is proportional to the rate of query submissions.
In both of these, most of the world was lit up - except for Africa. South Africa had some light, but most of Africa was dark.
Maybe if we taught African kids to write software, they could start businesses that would make their lives better.
Click the link in my sig, download my tracks (sheet music too, if you play piano), and drop them in your shared folder. You'll really be helping me out - my hope is that by doing this, I will already be well-known when the time comes to play professionally.
- The Twenty-Four Hour Society: Understanding Human Limits in a World That Never Sleeps by Martin Moore-Ede
He's also written several other books having to do with sleep and circadian rhythm.Among the anecdotes in the book are an account of a coast-to-coast airplane crew who put the plane on autopilot then all fell asleep. The plane, loaded with passengers, overshot the destination and was a hundred miles out to sea before air traffic control was able to wake them over the radio.
Also, the author was paid a visit by a Secret Service agent - the people who guard the life of the US President. It seems they were expected to stay on the same shift, in local time, no matter where in the world the President went. That is, if they work 9 to 5 Washington time, then fly to Iraq, say - where the president has visited a couple times - they are expected to then work 9 to 5 Iraqi time, without taking any time to get used to the time zone change. The agent who consulted the author felt that their constant exhaustion that resulted put the President's life at risk.
My own experience includes, at my very first salaried programming job, where I wasn't paid very much and didn't get overtime pay, I was regularly expected to work twenty-hour days and once worked a twenty-nine hour day.
When I was self-employed as a software consultant, quite often I'd work twenty hour days trying to make a milestone so I could get paid. Several times, when times were really hard, I worked forty-hour "days".
Employers of salaried employees seem to feel quite justified in requiring their employees to work without enough sleep. I'd like to see legislation passed that forbids this. Even if your paid work isn't safety-critical, going without sleep needlessly puts lives at risk when you drive your car home. People are killed all the time when drivers fall asleep at the wheel.
Depression is actually my most prevalent symptom; I was depressed for most of my life before I was diagnosed.
I've taken quite a few different antidepressants. Paxil, which is one of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, did nothing whatsoever for me - this despite drug company hype that the SSRIs are more effective than the older, non-selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
Paxil is (or at least was at the time) a patented, name-brand drug, and therefore expensive.
Ironically, imipramine, whose patent expired decades ago and is available quite inexpensively, works just great for me. I think imipramine is the best thing since sliced bread.
Now, don't take this to mean that Paxil won't work for you. But psychiatric medication is very tricky; some works on some people and not on others. Really the best you and your doctor can do is try different medications until you find one that works. But you should definitely try the full range of available medicines, including the older, generic ones, and not just the name-brand patented ones.
IMHO, that's just wrong.
But schizoaffective disorder is a devastating illness: it's just like being manic-depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. The risperdal I took previously for my psychotic symptoms wasn't working anymore. From 2003 through 2007, I was in the emergency room five times for psychiatric reasons, culminating in an ambulance ride to the mental ward, where I stayed for three weeks.
The Zyprexa completely eliminates the paranoia and visual hallucinations I would otherwise have almost all the time. It also brought me down from the bipolar mania that led to my ambulance ride, and prevents me from getting manic anymore.
As a result of taking it, I am able to hold a steady job - and a good one - as a software engineer, to provide for my wife and to pay her University tuition.
I've heard rumours that Zyprexa might be withdrawn from the market. I really hope that doesn't happen, as I've never had a medicine work so well.
Fortunately, being a full-serve station, I was nearby and able to shut off the pump before we went up in a mushroom cloud. But what if there was no human attendant?
Also most calls to block p2p don't suggest just blocking the warez sites, but the protocols as a whole, for example what the RIAA/MPAA keep trying to get Universities to do.
It's also important for musicians like myself, as well as to the musicians that are members of Jamendo, which distributes Creative Commons-licensed music via BitTorrent and eMule.
A struggling musian who distributes his work via HTTP can easily be bankrupted if one of his songs suddenly becomes a hit. P2P filesharing, via BitTorrent and other protocols, provides an affordable alternative.
In discussing P2P with other people, and especially with your legislators as well as your ISPs, it's important to stress the legal uses of it. Otherwise they will only see it as a source of lawbreaking and copyright infringment.
In doing the search just now, I was very interested to find that another Michael Crawford has written extensively on mental illness. I'll have to drop him a line. He's the guy with the book at Amazon; all of my writing is online.
I've also been learning all the major and minor scales - there are twelve major and thirty-six minor scales, all played with different combinations of keys and fingering. I know all but a few of them now. All the ones I know well I can play just by thinking of their sound, without thinking of the keys or fingering.
For example, the US copyright board is considering setting a new standard royalty rate for recordings. I think this is the money owed to the composers for each song sale. The board wants to raise the rate from the current nine cents a track to twelve, but the RIAA is arguing that it should actually be reduced to six cents.
Now, some people really need to use it, if they have more than one computer in the house. And there was no mention of protecting yourself from attacks coming from the Internet.
Simply irresponsible, I say, and by rights the ISP ought to be liable for it.
Here is my RPM Profile.
All of my current music is Creative Commons-licensed. All the new material will be too.
Before the guide could answer, another general replied:
I'm squarely behind Richard Stallman, the GPL and Free Software. I explain why in Why I'm Proud To Be A Dirty GNU Hippy.