I think that this is slightly hyperbole, but in a couple of the places I have worked there were 60 hour work weeks with half of that being pointless meetings. 90% of the meetings were what I call "manager job justification" meetings. I specifically think of a consulting firm I worked for.
A little tear squeezed from the corner of my eye and I thought "Has heaven indeed begun to poke its head through into Earth?" Then I read the article and realized that the meetings have gone from as little as 30 hours a week to as long as the entire work week, just one long virtual meeting. "Ahh, Hell! You sneaky bum, disguising yourself as heaven again only to suck in the unwary."
You slaughter 'em I'll man the grill! But I would disagree with you, there are studies that show a correlation between TV time and ability to grasp information. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090601182830.htm is a great article on a study that talks about that, so there is some evidence for the original posters stand.
Not only that, I remember seeing an article on neweggs setup in one of their warehouses. http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2694&p=1 Let's just say that between the surveillance and the other security measures I can almost guarantee this wasn't a Newegg employee. I would guess that this happened at either the Costa Rican Intel sites or in the distribution chain. D & H actually has a pretty high rep, so I would guess that this was not a corporate issue even there, but an employee.
My guess is that NewEgg is going to have to do item audits in which they open random samples from their distributors to ensure this doesn't happen again.
I would guess that D&H is more pi$$ed than NewEgg is about this, since this kind of thing will definitely affect stock ratings if it comes to light as their own issue. Props to Newegg for NOT going ballistic publicly.
Go to a professional counselor! Seriously, there are people who are trained to answer the kinds of questions you have and are dealing with actual data that is good and is recent. Asking on Slashdot you are going to end up with a very poor signal to noise ratio, so I recommend going to someone who is a pro. Good luck, and remember that there are going to be times in the coming years when you wonder what you were thinking, they will pass.
OK, not to rain on this parade, but....isn't our educational system pretty much predicated on cramming as much info into your head only to have you barf it back out on a test, never to use it again without looking it up?
Buy an old radio that has enough room to fit the mother board and some cooling fans. Remove the guts to the radio, mount the MB and hard drive and use it as a streaming audio server.
Let's start out by saying that there is plenty of blame to go around. How much time are we going to waste trying to figure out whose fault the broken educational systems are?
Instead, lets try to redesign the systems. This is basic problem solving:
1) What are the goals we have?
- Universal Literacy?
- Scientific awareness? 2) What resources do we have available to reach those goals?
3) Put a plan together using the resources available that includes analysis not only of desired student outcomes, but desired teacher outcomes as well.
I guess it is easier to play the blame game. Personally, I wonder what the turnaround time from good teacher to bitter burnt out husk working towards retirement is?
Let's not forget about stiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction in the HD. If the HD has sat for that long there is a good chance it will not spin up.
OK, let's talk turkey. What you know enables you to do the job. Who you know enables you to get the job. My usual strategy when I am not working is to volunteer at a non-profit organization. Go the extra mile and help with fundraisers and do those things nobody else wants to do. This gets you noticed by the board, and those folks are usually decision makers or influential people in the business world. You can also do a stint in Americorps. This helps you pay back some of those loans and helps you make contacts.
Every job I got was because of who I knew, and not what I knew. Start networking now, actually you should have started networking two years ago, but it is not too late. Colleges teach you to know stuff, but unless you know people you are up the creek.
Good luck from a Masters student in the middle of changing careers. (Don't pass up opportunities that are not directly in your field if you think you might enjoy them.)
Yeah, but I worked for an ISP, and know that half of my customers had unsecured wireless networks, and that we didn't keep track of who had what IP address. I also administrated the tech bench and customers would bring their malware riddled pc in to get cleaned up, usually after the grandkids went home, and found all kinds of file sharing stuff on there. I can guarantee you that Grandma with her Billy Graham desktop didn't download Eminem using Shareaza. Keep up the good work Ray, we need more lawyers like you.
I agree with you completely. This is the key problem with the RIAA and MPAA, and red light cameras for that matter. There is no proof that the person whose name the internet account is in is the owner of all the computers connected, was the person who downloaded the items in question, or got the IP address 5 minutes after the idiots who "investigate" these matters, or was the person driving the car when it ran the red light. You cannot hold a person liable for actions taken with their "property" that they are unaware of.
Thanks for your well thought out response to my questions. I appreciate your perspective as it helps me understand the issues a bit better from an author's experience.
OK, so my questions are: Is access to a work of entertainment a right? Is there a difference between the right to access non-fictional information and fictional information? With the advent of self-publishing via the internet, what methods do you use, or would propose to sift through the dross to find the gold?
I think this ethical question will become a moot point when the publisher goes out of business in a couple of years.
You are making a huge assumption that people are inherently reasonable. People can operate reasonably, but very often we operate irrationally from our "reptilian" brain. When someone's consciousness is being dictated to from the "lower" brain functions, they become rationalizing instead of rational. So no matter how rationally you engage them it won't work. The only way to get folks to change is to engage them emotionally to the point that they feel safe enough to slough off the rationalization engines of the reptilian brain which is primarily focused on survival. This is the reverse of how cults operate in that they put people in a position in which they are totally reliant on the "reptilian" brain. For more info, see http://www.kheper.net/topics/intelligence/MacLean.htm
Actually, the below is from NIMH 1 in 4 people have a diagnosable mental illness and 1 in 17 have a severe mental illness. So yes, I can honestly say more than 1 percent of the population is mentally ill.
"Mental Disorders in America
Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older â" about one in four adults â" suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people. Even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion â" about 6 percent, or 1 in 17 â" who suffer from a serious mental illness. In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. Nearly half (45 percent) of those with any mental disorder meet criteria for 2 or more disorders, with severity strongly related to comorbidity." http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america.shtml
We can't blame the victims of problems and we can't let people remain, or think of themselves, as victims. How much time and money do you give to charities? Are you honestly telling me that if your taxes would drop, you would donate enough to charity to help make up for the gap in support that would occur if the government stopped all of its social programs? Do you honestly think enough other people would?
So, you are trying to tell me that people are poor because of choices they make, and that there are no outside influences like being born into a poor family or country that come into play. If you are, then you haven't had much contact with reality. Most of the folks I know who are poor are not there by choice, or through bad decisions. Some of the people my wife works with are poor because of other people's poor decisions or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because they developed a mental illness. Your overly simplistic view of life doesn't seem to account for sh!t happening. Your ending comment shows an incredible amount of ignorance of the causes of poverty. I know some people who are in poverty because they got sick and they didn't have insurance. There are millions of uninsured in this country who work hard for the money they bring home that isn't quite enough to cover everything and insure themselves. I sincerely hope that you never have to experience what some of my friends do on a daily basis through no fault of their own. I guess it is easy for someone like you, who has never had to deal with hard times to judge someone else who has. Life is tough, but people like you want to make it tougher than it already is. Some of the choices you made aren't available to everyone, so don't judge those you don't have the frame of reference to understand. Following that path leads to dehumanization and abuse, because they somehow "deserve" it. All I am saying is that you need to be careful in how you think of, and treat others who are less fortunate than you. One of the lessons I learned from working with people with traumatic brain injuries is that with one accident like tripping going down your front steps, you can lose all of the abilities that enable you to earn a decent living. So be careful and treat those who haven't had the good fortune you have better, because any of us are one trip shy of joining them.
People with money have choices, people with less money have less choices. What decisions you are going to make when the choice is between eating healthy and paying rent, or heating your home, or being able to drive to work? These are the reasons why the obesity epidemic is disproportionately hitting the poorer classes in the US. So yes, it does make perfect sense because spending $1 on a jar of peanut butter filled with corn syrup instead of $4 on one that isn't is, at it's core, an economic decision. So the economics, while not forcing people to buy certain ways, do put people in a position where they are having to trade off long-term health for short-term survival.
No it is definitely NOT the same as the one on your PC unless of course you happen to be running OpenBSD and ipf on your PC. The main difference is that your router is a device solely designed for networking. There are no other hooks into the OS that can easily breach your security as exist on your computer, which is designed to perform many functions other than networking. The firewall on your router was designed to work specifically with the exact hardware in that box. The firewall on your router also exists outside of your internal network and acts as a gatekeeper between the internal network and the outside world.
Ahh the great security blanket called the software firewall. I like to use the following analogy in regards to them. Having a software firewall on your computer is like having a security guard in your bathroom. If something gets to the guard it's too late, your network is already compromised.
I work for an ISP in Tacoma WA, and Software firewalls cause many more problems then they solve. I don't care which company makes it.
If you are really concerned about security then you will have a dedicated hardware firewall. These are inexpensive and common, even built into most SOHO routers.
So I know there will probably be flames, but if you write software firewalls, remember that the overwhelming majority of people who use them don't usually know they have one, and just ignore those little messages and click allow on everything until they actually read something and say "msimn.exe, what's that? I'm gonna block it!" And then they call me because their e-mail doesn't work.
One thing that I have not seen in this discussion is the most plausible scenario. User A buys a wireless router and plugs it in and makes no configuration changes. User B buys the same extremely popular model of router (rhymes with dinksis) and also does not configure it.
User A goes to visit someone who lives next door to user B. When user A powers on his laptop it AUTOMATICALLY connects to user B's network with no prompting from User A. User A's instant messaging client AUTOMATICALLY connects to its server, also with no action performed by User A.
How many barely computer literate people are going to end up with felonies because of this?
Here is my solution: Router manufacterers ship the router with the wireless network and internet access disabled by default. When a user connects to the router the first time, a setup wizard walks them through connecting to the internet, changing the default password and configuring the wireless network with WPA2 personal as the default option for security. (If you work for a wireless AP manufacturer: Why don't you already do this?)
The law in question seems to be a very poorly thought out attempt to fix a technical problem with a non-technical solution. Especially since a technical solution will do more towards prevention than some law a majority of the country has no idea actually exists.
While it may cost a little more, having your tools shipped will save wear and tear on the luggage, and the way airlines are charging extra based on weight of luggage, you will be better off not dealing with that potential snarl at the airport. Since airline regs mandate that your tools go in the checked baggage, you will have a better chance of actually having your tools arrive at the same time you do if you ship them.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the AC who posted the question might be a lazy network tech in China trying to close holes?
I think that this is slightly hyperbole, but in a couple of the places I have worked there were 60 hour work weeks with half of that being pointless meetings. 90% of the meetings were what I call "manager job justification" meetings. I specifically think of a consulting firm I worked for.
A little tear squeezed from the corner of my eye and I thought "Has heaven indeed begun to poke its head through into Earth?" Then I read the article and realized that the meetings have gone from as little as 30 hours a week to as long as the entire work week, just one long virtual meeting.
"Ahh, Hell! You sneaky bum, disguising yourself as heaven again only to suck in the unwary."
You slaughter 'em I'll man the grill! But I would disagree with you, there are studies that show a correlation between TV time and ability to grasp information. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090601182830.htm is a great article on a study that talks about that, so there is some evidence for the original posters stand.
but still mmm sacred cow burgers.
Not only that, I remember seeing an article on neweggs setup in one of their warehouses. http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2694&p=1 Let's just say that between the surveillance and the other security measures I can almost guarantee this wasn't a Newegg employee. I would guess that this happened at either the Costa Rican Intel sites or in the distribution chain. D & H actually has a pretty high rep, so I would guess that this was not a corporate issue even there, but an employee.
My guess is that NewEgg is going to have to do item audits in which they open random samples from their distributors to ensure this doesn't happen again.
I would guess that D&H is more pi$$ed than NewEgg is about this, since this kind of thing will definitely affect stock ratings if it comes to light as their own issue. Props to Newegg for NOT going ballistic publicly.
Go to a professional counselor! Seriously, there are people who are trained to answer the kinds of questions you have and are dealing with actual data that is good and is recent. Asking on Slashdot you are going to end up with a very poor signal to noise ratio, so I recommend going to someone who is a pro.
Good luck, and remember that there are going to be times in the coming years when you wonder what you were thinking, they will pass.
OK, not to rain on this parade, but....isn't our educational system pretty much predicated on cramming as much info into your head only to have you barf it back out on a test, never to use it again without looking it up?
No one seems to be asking the deeper questions:
Why do we have to pay kids to learn/study?
What are the specific flaws in the system?
What are we testing for?
What do we want to test for?
Are the testing methods adequate to the task?
Polly want a cracker?
Buy an old radio that has enough room to fit the mother board and some cooling fans. Remove the guts to the radio, mount the MB and hard drive and use it as a streaming audio server.
Let's start out by saying that there is plenty of blame to go around. How much time are we going to waste trying to figure out whose fault the broken educational systems are?
Instead, lets try to redesign the systems. This is basic problem solving:
1) What are the goals we have?
- Universal Literacy?
- Scientific awareness?
2) What resources do we have available to reach those goals?
3) Put a plan together using the resources available that includes analysis not only of desired student outcomes, but desired teacher outcomes as well.
I guess it is easier to play the blame game. Personally, I wonder what the turnaround time from good teacher to bitter burnt out husk working towards retirement is?
Let's not forget about stiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction in the HD. If the HD has sat for that long there is a good chance it will not spin up.
One of the choices here in Portland is FreeGeek. They build PCs for folks and offer classes in open source usage.
http://www.freegeek.org/
OK, let's talk turkey. What you know enables you to do the job. Who you know enables you to get the job.
My usual strategy when I am not working is to volunteer at a non-profit organization. Go the extra mile and help with fundraisers and do those things nobody else wants to do. This gets you noticed by the board, and those folks are usually decision makers or influential people in the business world.
You can also do a stint in Americorps. This helps you pay back some of those loans and helps you make contacts.
Every job I got was because of who I knew, and not what I knew.
Start networking now, actually you should have started networking two years ago, but it is not too late.
Colleges teach you to know stuff, but unless you know people you are up the creek.
Good luck from a Masters student in the middle of changing careers. (Don't pass up opportunities that are not directly in your field if you think you might enjoy them.)
Yeah, but I worked for an ISP, and know that half of my customers had unsecured wireless networks, and that we didn't keep track of who had what IP address. I also administrated the tech bench and customers would bring their malware riddled pc in to get cleaned up, usually after the grandkids went home, and found all kinds of file sharing stuff on there. I can guarantee you that Grandma with her Billy Graham desktop didn't download Eminem using Shareaza.
Keep up the good work Ray, we need more lawyers like you.
I agree with you completely. This is the key problem with the RIAA and MPAA, and red light cameras for that matter. There is no proof that the person whose name the internet account is in is the owner of all the computers connected, was the person who downloaded the items in question, or got the IP address 5 minutes after the idiots who "investigate" these matters, or was the person driving the car when it ran the red light.
You cannot hold a person liable for actions taken with their "property" that they are unaware of.
Thanks for your well thought out response to my questions. I appreciate your perspective as it helps me understand the issues a bit better from an author's experience.
OK, so my questions are:
Is access to a work of entertainment a right?
Is there a difference between the right to access non-fictional information and fictional information?
With the advent of self-publishing via the internet, what methods do you use, or would propose to sift through the dross to find the gold?
I think this ethical question will become a moot point when the publisher goes out of business in a couple of years.
You are making a huge assumption that people are inherently reasonable. People can operate reasonably, but very often we operate irrationally from our "reptilian" brain. When someone's consciousness is being dictated to from the "lower" brain functions, they become rationalizing instead of rational. So no matter how rationally you engage them it won't work. The only way to get folks to change is to engage them emotionally to the point that they feel safe enough to slough off the rationalization engines of the reptilian brain which is primarily focused on survival.
This is the reverse of how cults operate in that they put people in a position in which they are totally reliant on the "reptilian" brain. For more info, see http://www.kheper.net/topics/intelligence/MacLean.htm
If you deal with any kind of personal medical information, you have to be HIPAA compliant as well, and their requirements are your requirements.
For those requirements go here http://www.cms.hhs.gov/EducationMaterials/Downloads/SecurityStandardsTechnicalSafeguards.pdf
Actually, the below is from NIMH 1 in 4 people have a diagnosable mental illness and 1 in 17 have a severe mental illness. So yes, I can honestly say more than 1 percent of the population is mentally ill.
"Mental Disorders in America
Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older â" about one in four adults â" suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people. Even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion â" about 6 percent, or 1 in 17 â" who suffer from a serious mental illness. In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. Nearly half (45 percent) of those with any mental disorder meet criteria for 2 or more disorders, with severity strongly related to comorbidity." http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america.shtml
We can't blame the victims of problems and we can't let people remain, or think of themselves, as victims. How much time and money do you give to charities? Are you honestly telling me that if your taxes would drop, you would donate enough to charity to help make up for the gap in support that would occur if the government stopped all of its social programs? Do you honestly think enough other people would?
So, you are trying to tell me that people are poor because of choices they make, and that there are no outside influences like being born into a poor family or country that come into play. If you are, then you haven't had much contact with reality.
Most of the folks I know who are poor are not there by choice, or through bad decisions. Some of the people my wife works with are poor because of other people's poor decisions or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because they developed a mental illness. Your overly simplistic view of life doesn't seem to account for sh!t happening. Your ending comment shows an incredible amount of ignorance of the causes of poverty. I know some people who are in poverty because they got sick and they didn't have insurance. There are millions of uninsured in this country who work hard for the money they bring home that isn't quite enough to cover everything and insure themselves. I sincerely hope that you never have to experience what some of my friends do on a daily basis through no fault of their own. I guess it is easy for someone like you, who has never had to deal with hard times to judge someone else who has. Life is tough, but people like you want to make it tougher than it already is. Some of the choices you made aren't available to everyone, so don't judge those you don't have the frame of reference to understand. Following that path leads to dehumanization and abuse, because they somehow "deserve" it. All I am saying is that you need to be careful in how you think of, and treat others who are less fortunate than you. One of the lessons I learned from working with people with traumatic brain injuries is that with one accident like tripping going down your front steps, you can lose all of the abilities that enable you to earn a decent living. So be careful and treat those who haven't had the good fortune you have better, because any of us are one trip shy of joining them.
People with money have choices, people with less money have less choices. What decisions you are going to make when the choice is between eating healthy and paying rent, or heating your home, or being able to drive to work? These are the reasons why the obesity epidemic is disproportionately hitting the poorer classes in the US. So yes, it does make perfect sense because spending $1 on a jar of peanut butter filled with corn syrup instead of $4 on one that isn't is, at it's core, an economic decision.
So the economics, while not forcing people to buy certain ways, do put people in a position where they are having to trade off long-term health for short-term survival.
No it is definitely NOT the same as the one on your PC unless of course you happen to be running OpenBSD and ipf on your PC.
The main difference is that your router is a device solely designed for networking. There are no other hooks into the OS that can easily breach your security as exist on your computer, which is designed to perform many functions other than networking. The firewall on your router was designed to work specifically with the exact hardware in that box.
The firewall on your router also exists outside of your internal network and acts as a gatekeeper between the internal network and the outside world.
Ahh the great security blanket called the software firewall. I like to use the following analogy in regards to them. Having a software firewall on your computer is like having a security guard in your bathroom. If something gets to the guard it's too late, your network is already compromised.
I work for an ISP in Tacoma WA, and Software firewalls cause many more problems then they solve. I don't care which company makes it.
If you are really concerned about security then you will have a dedicated hardware firewall. These are inexpensive and common, even built into most SOHO routers.
So I know there will probably be flames, but if you write software firewalls, remember that the overwhelming majority of people who use them don't usually know they have one, and just ignore those little messages and click allow on everything until they actually read something and say "msimn.exe, what's that? I'm gonna block it!" And then they call me because their e-mail doesn't work.
One thing that I have not seen in this discussion is the most plausible scenario. User A buys a wireless router and plugs it in and makes no configuration changes. User B buys the same extremely popular model of router (rhymes with dinksis) and also does not configure it.
User A goes to visit someone who lives next door to user B. When user A powers on his laptop it AUTOMATICALLY connects to user B's network with no prompting from User A. User A's instant messaging client AUTOMATICALLY connects to its server, also with no action performed by User A.
How many barely computer literate people are going to end up with felonies because of this?
Here is my solution:
Router manufacterers ship the router with the wireless network and internet access disabled by default. When a user connects to the router the first time, a setup wizard walks them through connecting to the internet, changing the default password and configuring the wireless network with WPA2 personal as the default option for security. (If you work for a wireless AP manufacturer: Why don't you already do this?)
The law in question seems to be a very poorly thought out attempt to fix a technical problem with a non-technical solution. Especially since a technical solution will do more towards prevention than some law a majority of the country has no idea actually exists.
While it may cost a little more, having your tools shipped will save wear and tear on the luggage, and the way airlines are charging extra based on weight of luggage, you will be better off not dealing with that potential snarl at the airport.
Since airline regs mandate that your tools go in the checked baggage, you will have a better chance of actually having your tools arrive at the same time you do if you ship them.