Actually, I have the SCOTUS PDF document open on my computer right now. It mentions that the inquiry from the officer needs to be made within the context of a Terry stop. The term you're looking for is "reasonable suspicion" on the officer's part. It's important that you use those words, as "probable cause" is immediately arrestable. And I quote -
Hiibel argues unpersuasively that the statute circumvents the probable-cause requirement by allowing an officer to arrest a person for being suspicious, thereby creating an impermissible risk of arbitrary police conduct. These familiar concerns underlay Kolender, Brown, and Papachristou. They are met by the requirement that a Terry stop be justified at its inception and be "reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified" the initial stop. Terry, 392 U. S., at 20. Under those principles, an officer may not arrest a suspect for failure to identify himself if the identification request is not reasonably related to the circumstances justifying the stop.
So the question now becomes "how the hell am I supposed to know if the stop is justified?" Clearly the officer thinks it is, but if I disagree, may I call for arbitration prior to being arrested for witholding my name? And if the stop was unjustified, how do I get un-arrested? The 10-card won't magically disappear out of the system, nor will the account of the arrest and subsequent dismissal from the courts. When I apply for my next job, I have to answer the "have you ever been arrested?" question as "yes." Employers don't like to see "yes" to that question.
If you haven't been abused by the system, you're probably willing to roll over and play nice, because no police officer has eeever abused the system. Noooo. We have rules and policies about stuff like that. I realize that cops deal with lots of scumbags, but that's not an excuse to encroach on the rights of the general population for the sake of their convenience. If it's true that "a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances," as quoted from the SCOTUS opinion document, then why bother asking for it in the first place? You think they're asking that question for my benefit?
Yes, this is the root of what I find disturbing about the ruling. As a non-arrested individual, I have less rights than someone under arrest - he has the right to remain silent, where I apparently don't.
I take it very seriously when the government takes *rights* away from me.
If a police officer, off duty or not, approaches you in a bar and casually asks "hi, I'm so-and-so. what's your name?" you are mow legally compelled to tell him/her. You now face arrest if you refuse. That should make you uncomfortable. If I don't want to talk to a person at a grocery store or a bar or the gas station, I shouldn't have to, cop or not.
Yep, polar orbits are useful when you need global coverage. Think about one of those basketball-things and imagine in spinning like the Earth. Now use your finger as the satellite. Equatorial orbits will only cover a thin horizontal stripe of area (remember that LEO spacecraft don't have a huge footprint because they're not too high above hte planet.)
If you now move the satellite in a polar orbit, you'll see that the footprint will cover the entire basketball-earth in a series of vertical stripes.
Why is this useful? Consider remote data collection anywhere on the planet. If you're observing weather in Peru, or ice flows in the North Atlantic shipping channels, and want to convey that information to your university research center in the Bahamas, then you need global coverage for the transponders (especially for the ice flows - you can't determine where they're going to go.)
Polar orbit spacecraft like NOAA7 and NOAA9 performed store-and-forward functions for jobs like these. I built sonar-buoy hardware for tracking conditions in the North Atlantic shipping lanes waaaay back. Here's a decent summary of some of the NOAA satellites that used polar LEO orbits.
There are a buttload of non-W2 income sources that go into the tax calculation. (The "W2" being the "wage and salary information" for non-US folks...) If you're a contractor, your compensation may get recorded on a 1099 (also electronically submitted to the IRS by the payor.) Did you have a mutual fund that paid dividends? 1099-DIV (electronically submitted, too.)
The information already gets sent to the IRS. It's your responsibility to identify the amount of taxes you're obligated to pay. You have a responsibility to yourself to figure out what that minimum obligation is.
So how is the IRS supposed to know about the tax-deductable charitable contributions you made this year? Oh, that's right, the nuns at the convent will submit the information electronically to the IRS on your behalf, right?
Sounds a hell of a lot like the situation we're going to have with electronic voting systems. Electronic input, no paper audit trail, and easily manipulated by they folks who have access to the database.
So we're supposed to trust the cretins who are providing oversight for the elections - the same cretins who don't think twice about shaving time from a minimum-wage employee's timecard?
I have exactly zero faith in the electronic voting systems. The same lack of faith exists for electronic timekeeping systems - I've kept paper copies of all my submitted e-timecards for the last decade. Honest. It's saved my vacation balance more than once (i.e. "shaving" for salaried/exempt employees.)
If sitting at your desk writing memos with Word is your definition of "doing business," then I'd agree. However, he travels to customer sites and works within whatever IT framework already exists. Sometimes he's there for weeks. Recently, he was at a customer's site and was required to use their VPN client as well as a bunch of security apps they have. He also was running beta versions of custom software written for this large customer (think airport-large or 1.5-million-square-feet-warehouse-distribution-cen ter-large.) Working through the logistics of the beta software were part of the job. After returning home and attempting to uninstall all the apps, his machine was completely twitchy. He spent about an hour trying to fix it, then concluded that nuking XP would take less time (it probably did.)
There are plenty of so-called "business apps" that will hose your machine. Hell, I've had personal experience with CAD tools from several vendors that have crippled machines. "Surfing for p0rn" isn't the only way to break things.
My dad was having problems recently - apparently ActiveX got hosed because a cow-irker unplugged a USB drive without unmounting it first. Now IE6 is broken. I can't explain why...
Anyway, he's spent days trying to remedy the problem. I had the fortune of dropping a Knoppix live CD on his desk about a week ago, and this incident actually motivated him to try it out. He's cautious, because his business survives on his PCs. He can't afford to have them down for substantial time. The Knoppix "try before you commit" concept was well received, and that was the last real barrier keeping him from trying Linux.
If I can get him switched over to *any* Linux distro, I won't have to listen to the monthly stories about why he had to reload XP again. That'll cut down on my therapy bills...
At my former job (got laid off), I used to print all of my documents on the laser near the accounting/legal group. My explanation was that "it's the only printer that has legal-size paper in it." Good stuff for engineering spreadsheets, schematics, and code listings.
Of course, there were ample opportunities to "accidentally" read someone else's prints that had gotten mixed-in with mine. Hyu-mons are predictably lazy - you can learn a great deal if your timing is right. It also helps if you use the adjacent copier (i.e. large flat surface) to sort out the prints. "Oops, accidentally hit the copy button... again..."
"Privacy Officer for the Department of Homeland Security" is such a discontinuous mouthful. Perhaps they're planning to rename the position to "Minister of Truth."
Our politicians seem more determined to provide the "appearance of security/privacy/rights" rather than the actual goods. I s'pose it's less expensive for the taxpayer, and therefore a good thing!
I did a little Googling, and found several references to "Technipak" in Greeley Colorado. Most were folks like www.pheromones-attract-women.com who state something like "discreetly shipped in a plain package with a shipping label from Technipak Delivery
Service"
The corporate website
Looks like they're a full service order fulfillment company. It'll probably be easy enough for them to claim "reasonable ignorance" if they're just doing the order fulfillment. It might be more difficult to make those claims if they're doing website maintenance, customer service and raw materials procurement. Either way, they're probably the wrong folks to go after with accusations of fraud. Going after the international businesses won't be easy either. I hope Mr. Horton has enough financial backing to pursue it, 'cause it ain't gonna be cheap.
I won't lie for someone else's convenience... not even my wife's. It sets a horrible precedent, and has a ton of "unintended consequences" just waiting to be unleashed. The truth is the truth, and sometimes it's painful.
As for sleeping on the couch, if she's so torqued that she can't stand to share the bed with me, she can damn well mosey on out to the living room. After all, I'm not the one with the pent-up angst, am I?
Most ATMs contain IBM's super-whiz-bang secure processor (or an equivalent device certified to FIPS 140 per NIST,) complete with multiple levels of physical tamper detection. The action of opening the chassis - by an administrator or anyone else - should have immediately zeroized the keys stored internally. That's a pretty basic security element. Of course, it sounds like Diebold's position is "you're not supposed to do that." Note to Diebold - the bad guys don't play by your steenking rules. They're a lot smarter and more determined than you think. They probably won't attack a single machine in a public polling forum. I'd bet the aggregation server is a much more lucrative target. Better be prepared for "man in the middle" attacks.
Episode: "A Taste of Armageddon"
Provides your virtual war without the inconvenience of actual weapons. Casualties are much less messy, too.
Maybe CC et al could create "virtual markets" to broadcast their "virtual entertainment" into, eliminating the messy audience satisfaction surveys. Personally, I despise the homogenous nature of the broadcasters (radio and TV.) Why do I need more than one channel if they're all the same?
This is just another step. There are any number of other situations where you're required to present fingerprints and other information for background checks as a condition of employment. Need a security clearance? Want to be an elementary school teacher? A daycare provider? A warehouse employee where explosive materials are stored?
They take your fingerprints, and do what with them after the background investigation is complete? File 13? I think not. It goes into your "permanent record", and I ain't talking about the one that the high school administrators threatened you with.
Once you release the information to the gub'ment, you can't take it back. There are many seemingly innocent "checks" that will funnel the information into places you really don't need it to go. My fingerprints are on file with the gub'ment because of a job application that required a clearance. Ultimately I didn't take the job, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm "accounted for" to the same degree as someone who's been arrested. I didn't realize how disturbing it would be until after the fact.
I RTFA, and I got the distinct impression that the format creators are paying attention to one application - movies. I hope that it's just the author's bias, and that the standards bodies aren't being myopic and ignoring computer applications.
If they want to jump-start the early adopters, they need to produce a writable format Superty-Duper-DVD that holds 4x to 10x what current DVD+R or DVD-RW drives do. Companies easily justify the expense of a $3000 SDDVD drive for backing up the corporate database in one swoop (as opposed to segmenting is across multiple media; and don't get me started about mag tape.) Coprpoations are better early-adopters than the consumer audio/videophile buttheads. I don't see a lot of my peers doing anything with recordable DVD discs, but I do see many companies working with them as the preferred backup medium over CDRs.
I've been personally involved with telecom standards generation, and it completely irks me when the folks creating the standard ignore the implementation and market-acceptance issues.
Whenever I need information about a product or application, I very much appreciate having access to a PDF version. I can take it with me on my laptop when I'm in the field or at a customer site, and I can archive it on CD in the event that the product is discontinued (or the company goes tits-up, leaving me with the maintenance issues.)
I've noticed that many companies have taken to presenting product data as HTML-only. I find that annoying because, assuming I'm interested, the first thing I end up doing is printing the HTML page to a PDF file so I can archive it. Usually I need to futz with the page formatting before I get a useful output, and that futz-time costs me time and aggrivation. I'm not advocating that all content should be PDF'd, but I do believe it has substantial value. Balancing the amount of HTML and PDF content presented is the tricky (and subjective) part.
In an early morning press conference, Nokia announced that it would attempt to derail software crackers by changing it's N-Gage software to either O-Gage or the ever-popular HO-Gage. Model railroaders around the world were confused.
Troll? Perhaps, though I stand by the statement that it was a boring movie. Both my wife and I watched it, and were tempted to leave early. As I understand it, Frodo needs to destroy the ring. He's still got it, and doesn't appear much closer to getting rid of it. The whole 10000-Orc battle just seemed to be a CG animator's wet dream, and a distraction from the main plot line. The combat was pedantic at best, and cartoonish at worst. It failed to draw me into the storyline, and that left me without emotional interest in the outcome.
I'm not sure I really care about additional footage showing the romantic interest between Aragorn and Eowyn, unless their child grows up to ultimately fight his father and save the Empire. Oh wait, that'd require Natalie Portman and her cardboard performance... nevermind.
I don't know if you were paying attention during the analysis of the WTC attacks, but the guys with the box cutters spent two or three years planning the attacks. They had false IDs, covert means to deliver money and intelligence, and a whole support infrastructure in place before they "just carried a bunch of box cutters onto a plane." This was a completely professional job.
Given that, future acts of terrorism will probably be equally complex. Having the ability to shut down a hazmat tanker won't do squat to deter the bad guys. They'll purchase a school bus, mod it to look like it's got kids inside (or worse...), insert IED, and drive it to the doorstep of the target. A school bus isn't a threat, right?
This proposed "remote shutdown" thing/crap is probably a result of two situations: a) a company looking for a way to peddle it's crap; and b) the Homeland Secutiry folks looking to demonstrate that they're "doing something to protect the common folks." Unfortunately, this does nothing to address honest-to-ghod real security. It's just meant to placate Joe and Jane Sixpack into going about their daily lives.
I used to work in the backstabbing corporate machine. The place was real hell. I had a program pulled out from under me on the day before our populated circuit boards arrived. The Principal Engineer called a meeting with the CEO, the COO, head of sales, etc. and said "I don't know what they're doing, but I'd do it this other way." To call it a hatchet-job would be overly polite.
We produced meeting logs and design review documentation that was signed by the backstabbing PE, etc. It didn't help much, as the PE was the CEO's butt-boy.
Folks used to think we were overly paranoid because we made the managers physically sign all of our documentation. After "Black Thursday," folks had a different attitide.
I'm sure there are places to work where the office politics are pretty benign. Unfortunately, there are a lot of weasels out there, and they thrive on "improving" situations that already run well. Enjoy it while it lasts.
To extend your highway analogy - we currently pay for highway access (through taxes) regardless of what we're transporting*. If the phone companies ran the highway system, you're going to pay a different fee to drive four people across town relative to just driving yourself. Same distance, same car, same wear-and-tear on the road system. The only difference is that the 4-person transport has more value to you, and the phone company wants a piece of that.
The "free" part isn't really free, but rather an unrestricted use of the bandwidth you pay for. If I'm paying for brodband cable or DSL, the transport company shouldn't care what data I send over the pipe as long as I don't exceed the bandwidth limit.
The counter-arguement is that transporting voice over a telephony network is a pain in the ass. I work in that industry, and the end-to-end latency is what kills you. The transport vendors will argue that meeting the latency requirement for VoIP costs them extra, so they need to charge you by-the-minute or by-the-packet (on which I call bullshit.) They can bill me a fixed fee for a VoIP-capable broadband connection, added to my monthly ISP fee, should I desire to use VoIP.
It all distills down to money-grubbing for the almighty buck. (I was going to say "greenback," but that's obsolete now, isn't it?)
*Yes, I realize that there's a different fee structure for vehicles Class 3 and above, but that's largely because they tear up the road more. The fee is structured by weight of the vehicle, so hauling 10 tons of chickens is considered the equivalent of carrying 10 tons of steel. Yes, Hazmats are different too...
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Actually, I have the SCOTUS PDF document open on my computer right now. It mentions that the inquiry from the officer needs to be made within the context of a Terry stop. The term you're looking for is "reasonable suspicion" on the officer's part. It's important that you use those words, as "probable cause" is immediately arrestable. And I quote -
Hiibel argues unpersuasively that the statute circumvents the probable-cause requirement by allowing an officer to arrest a person for being suspicious, thereby creating an impermissible risk of arbitrary police conduct. These familiar concerns underlay Kolender, Brown, and Papachristou. They are met by the requirement that a Terry stop be justified at its inception and be "reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified" the initial stop. Terry, 392 U. S., at 20. Under those principles, an officer may not arrest a suspect for failure to identify himself if the identification request is not reasonably related to the circumstances justifying the stop.
So the question now becomes "how the hell am I supposed to know if the stop is justified?" Clearly the officer thinks it is, but if I disagree, may I call for arbitration prior to being arrested for witholding my name? And if the stop was unjustified, how do I get un-arrested? The 10-card won't magically disappear out of the system, nor will the account of the arrest and subsequent dismissal from the courts. When I apply for my next job, I have to answer the "have you ever been arrested?" question as "yes." Employers don't like to see "yes" to that question.
If you haven't been abused by the system, you're probably willing to roll over and play nice, because no police officer has eeever abused the system. Noooo. We have rules and policies about stuff like that. I realize that cops deal with lots of scumbags, but that's not an excuse to encroach on the rights of the general population for the sake of their convenience. If it's true that "a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances," as quoted from the SCOTUS opinion document, then why bother asking for it in the first place? You think they're asking that question for my benefit?
Yes, this is the root of what I find disturbing about the ruling. As a non-arrested individual, I have less rights than someone under arrest - he has the right to remain silent, where I apparently don't.
I take it very seriously when the government takes *rights* away from me.
If a police officer, off duty or not, approaches you in a bar and casually asks "hi, I'm so-and-so. what's your name?" you are mow legally compelled to tell him/her. You now face arrest if you refuse. That should make you uncomfortable. If I don't want to talk to a person at a grocery store or a bar or the gas station, I shouldn't have to, cop or not.
Yep, polar orbits are useful when you need global coverage. Think about one of those basketball-things and imagine in spinning like the Earth. Now use your finger as the satellite. Equatorial orbits will only cover a thin horizontal stripe of area (remember that LEO spacecraft don't have a huge footprint because they're not too high above hte planet.)
If you now move the satellite in a polar orbit, you'll see that the footprint will cover the entire basketball-earth in a series of vertical stripes.
Why is this useful? Consider remote data collection anywhere on the planet. If you're observing weather in Peru, or ice flows in the North Atlantic shipping channels, and want to convey that information to your university research center in the Bahamas, then you need global coverage for the transponders (especially for the ice flows - you can't determine where they're going to go.) Polar orbit spacecraft like NOAA7 and NOAA9 performed store-and-forward functions for jobs like these. I built sonar-buoy hardware for tracking conditions in the North Atlantic shipping lanes waaaay back. Here's a decent summary of some of the NOAA satellites that used polar LEO orbits.
There are a buttload of non-W2 income sources that go into the tax calculation. (The "W2" being the "wage and salary information" for non-US folks ...) If you're a contractor, your compensation may get recorded on a 1099 (also electronically submitted to the IRS by the payor.) Did you have a mutual fund that paid dividends? 1099-DIV (electronically submitted, too.)
The information already gets sent to the IRS. It's your responsibility to identify the amount of taxes you're obligated to pay. You have a responsibility to yourself to figure out what that minimum obligation is.
So how is the IRS supposed to know about the tax-deductable charitable contributions you made this year? Oh, that's right, the nuns at the convent will submit the information electronically to the IRS on your behalf, right?
Sounds a hell of a lot like the situation we're going to have with electronic voting systems. Electronic input, no paper audit trail, and easily manipulated by they folks who have access to the database.
So we're supposed to trust the cretins who are providing oversight for the elections - the same cretins who don't think twice about shaving time from a minimum-wage employee's timecard?
I have exactly zero faith in the electronic voting systems. The same lack of faith exists for electronic timekeeping systems - I've kept paper copies of all my submitted e-timecards for the last decade. Honest. It's saved my vacation balance more than once (i.e. "shaving" for salaried/exempt employees.)
If sitting at your desk writing memos with Word is your definition of "doing business," then I'd agree. However, he travels to customer sites and works within whatever IT framework already exists. Sometimes he's there for weeks. Recently, he was at a customer's site and was required to use their VPN client as well as a bunch of security apps they have. He also was running beta versions of custom software written for this large customer (think airport-large or 1.5-million-square-feet-warehouse-distribution-cen ter-large.) Working through the logistics of the beta software were part of the job. After returning home and attempting to uninstall all the apps, his machine was completely twitchy. He spent about an hour trying to fix it, then concluded that nuking XP would take less time (it probably did.)
There are plenty of so-called "business apps" that will hose your machine. Hell, I've had personal experience with CAD tools from several vendors that have crippled machines. "Surfing for p0rn" isn't the only way to break things.
My dad was having problems recently - apparently ActiveX got hosed because a cow-irker unplugged a USB drive without unmounting it first. Now IE6 is broken. I can't explain why ...
...
Anyway, he's spent days trying to remedy the problem. I had the fortune of dropping a Knoppix live CD on his desk about a week ago, and this incident actually motivated him to try it out. He's cautious, because his business survives on his PCs. He can't afford to have them down for substantial time. The Knoppix "try before you commit" concept was well received, and that was the last real barrier keeping him from trying Linux.
If I can get him switched over to *any* Linux distro, I won't have to listen to the monthly stories about why he had to reload XP again. That'll cut down on my therapy bills
It that the language the UPS-guy from MadTV speaks?
At my former job (got laid off), I used to print all of my documents on the laser near the accounting/legal group. My explanation was that "it's the only printer that has legal-size paper in it." Good stuff for engineering spreadsheets, schematics, and code listings.
... again ..."
Of course, there were ample opportunities to "accidentally" read someone else's prints that had gotten mixed-in with mine. Hyu-mons are predictably lazy - you can learn a great deal if your timing is right. It also helps if you use the adjacent copier (i.e. large flat surface) to sort out the prints. "Oops, accidentally hit the copy button
A long while ago, somebody* called Mir "The Orbiting Space Barge of Death." Perhaps the ISS could be renamed "The International Space Barge of Death."
/. poll, but I couldn't locate the source.)
*(I wanna say it was from an old
"Privacy Officer for the Department of Homeland Security" is such a discontinuous mouthful. Perhaps they're planning to rename the position to "Minister of Truth."
Our politicians seem more determined to provide the "appearance of security/privacy/rights" rather than the actual goods. I s'pose it's less expensive for the taxpayer, and therefore a good thing!
I did a little Googling, and found several references to "Technipak" in Greeley Colorado. Most were folks like www.pheromones-attract-women.com who state something like "discreetly shipped in a plain package with a shipping label from Technipak Delivery Service"
The corporate website
Looks like they're a full service order fulfillment company. It'll probably be easy enough for them to claim "reasonable ignorance" if they're just doing the order fulfillment. It might be more difficult to make those claims if they're doing website maintenance, customer service and raw materials procurement. Either way, they're probably the wrong folks to go after with accusations of fraud. Going after the international businesses won't be easy either. I hope Mr. Horton has enough financial backing to pursue it, 'cause it ain't gonna be cheap.
I won't lie for someone else's convenience ... not even my wife's. It sets a horrible precedent, and has a ton of "unintended consequences" just waiting to be unleashed. The truth is the truth, and sometimes it's painful.
As for sleeping on the couch, if she's so torqued that she can't stand to share the bed with me, she can damn well mosey on out to the living room. After all, I'm not the one with the pent-up angst, am I?
Most ATMs contain IBM's super-whiz-bang secure processor (or an equivalent device certified to FIPS 140 per NIST,) complete with multiple levels of physical tamper detection. The action of opening the chassis - by an administrator or anyone else - should have immediately zeroized the keys stored internally. That's a pretty basic security element. Of course, it sounds like Diebold's position is "you're not supposed to do that." Note to Diebold - the bad guys don't play by your steenking rules. They're a lot smarter and more determined than you think. They probably won't attack a single machine in a public polling forum. I'd bet the aggregation server is a much more lucrative target. Better be prepared for "man in the middle" attacks.
Episode: "A Taste of Armageddon"
Provides your virtual war without the inconvenience of actual weapons. Casualties are much less messy, too.
Maybe CC et al could create "virtual markets" to broadcast their "virtual entertainment" into, eliminating the messy audience satisfaction surveys. Personally, I despise the homogenous nature of the broadcasters (radio and TV.) Why do I need more than one channel if they're all the same?
This is just another step. There are any number of other situations where you're required to present fingerprints and other information for background checks as a condition of employment. Need a security clearance? Want to be an elementary school teacher? A daycare provider? A warehouse employee where explosive materials are stored?
They take your fingerprints, and do what with them after the background investigation is complete? File 13? I think not. It goes into your "permanent record", and I ain't talking about the one that the high school administrators threatened you with.
Once you release the information to the gub'ment, you can't take it back. There are many seemingly innocent "checks" that will funnel the information into places you really don't need it to go. My fingerprints are on file with the gub'ment because of a job application that required a clearance. Ultimately I didn't take the job, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm "accounted for" to the same degree as someone who's been arrested. I didn't realize how disturbing it would be until after the fact.
I RTFA, and I got the distinct impression that the format creators are paying attention to one application - movies. I hope that it's just the author's bias, and that the standards bodies aren't being myopic and ignoring computer applications.
If they want to jump-start the early adopters, they need to produce a writable format Superty-Duper-DVD that holds 4x to 10x what current DVD+R or DVD-RW drives do. Companies easily justify the expense of a $3000 SDDVD drive for backing up the corporate database in one swoop (as opposed to segmenting is across multiple media; and don't get me started about mag tape.) Coprpoations are better early-adopters than the consumer audio/videophile buttheads. I don't see a lot of my peers doing anything with recordable DVD discs, but I do see many companies working with them as the preferred backup medium over CDRs.
I've been personally involved with telecom standards generation, and it completely irks me when the folks creating the standard ignore the implementation and market-acceptance issues.
Whenever I need information about a product or application, I very much appreciate having access to a PDF version. I can take it with me on my laptop when I'm in the field or at a customer site, and I can archive it on CD in the event that the product is discontinued (or the company goes tits-up, leaving me with the maintenance issues.)
I've noticed that many companies have taken to presenting product data as HTML-only. I find that annoying because, assuming I'm interested, the first thing I end up doing is printing the HTML page to a PDF file so I can archive it. Usually I need to futz with the page formatting before I get a useful output, and that futz-time costs me time and aggrivation. I'm not advocating that all content should be PDF'd, but I do believe it has substantial value. Balancing the amount of HTML and PDF content presented is the tricky (and subjective) part.
I dunno, but I think history has the bicycle being more like "Dad" than "Bro."
In an early morning press conference, Nokia announced that it would attempt to derail software crackers by changing it's N-Gage software to either O-Gage or the ever-popular HO-Gage. Model railroaders around the world were confused.
Troll? Perhaps, though I stand by the statement that it was a boring movie. Both my wife and I watched it, and were tempted to leave early. As I understand it, Frodo needs to destroy the ring. He's still got it, and doesn't appear much closer to getting rid of it. The whole 10000-Orc battle just seemed to be a CG animator's wet dream, and a distraction from the main plot line. The combat was pedantic at best, and cartoonish at worst. It failed to draw me into the storyline, and that left me without emotional interest in the outcome.
... nevermind.
I'm not sure I really care about additional footage showing the romantic interest between Aragorn and Eowyn, unless their child grows up to ultimately fight his father and save the Empire. Oh wait, that'd require Natalie Portman and her cardboard performance
Another 43 minutes to suffer through? Sheesh. Enough already.
I don't know if you were paying attention during the analysis of the WTC attacks, but the guys with the box cutters spent two or three years planning the attacks. They had false IDs, covert means to deliver money and intelligence, and a whole support infrastructure in place before they "just carried a bunch of box cutters onto a plane." This was a completely professional job.
...), insert IED, and drive it to the doorstep of the target. A school bus isn't a threat, right?
Given that, future acts of terrorism will probably be equally complex. Having the ability to shut down a hazmat tanker won't do squat to deter the bad guys. They'll purchase a school bus, mod it to look like it's got kids inside (or worse
This proposed "remote shutdown" thing/crap is probably a result of two situations: a) a company looking for a way to peddle it's crap; and b) the Homeland Secutiry folks looking to demonstrate that they're "doing something to protect the common folks." Unfortunately, this does nothing to address honest-to-ghod real security. It's just meant to placate Joe and Jane Sixpack into going about their daily lives.
I used to work in the backstabbing corporate machine. The place was real hell. I had a program pulled out from under me on the day before our populated circuit boards arrived. The Principal Engineer called a meeting with the CEO, the COO, head of sales, etc. and said "I don't know what they're doing, but I'd do it this other way." To call it a hatchet-job would be overly polite.
We produced meeting logs and design review documentation that was signed by the backstabbing PE, etc. It didn't help much, as the PE was the CEO's butt-boy.
Folks used to think we were overly paranoid because we made the managers physically sign all of our documentation. After "Black Thursday," folks had a different attitide.
I'm sure there are places to work where the office politics are pretty benign. Unfortunately, there are a lot of weasels out there, and they thrive on "improving" situations that already run well. Enjoy it while it lasts.
To extend your highway analogy - we currently pay for highway access (through taxes) regardless of what we're transporting*. If the phone companies ran the highway system, you're going to pay a different fee to drive four people across town relative to just driving yourself. Same distance, same car, same wear-and-tear on the road system. The only difference is that the 4-person transport has more value to you, and the phone company wants a piece of that.
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The "free" part isn't really free, but rather an unrestricted use of the bandwidth you pay for. If I'm paying for brodband cable or DSL, the transport company shouldn't care what data I send over the pipe as long as I don't exceed the bandwidth limit.
The counter-arguement is that transporting voice over a telephony network is a pain in the ass. I work in that industry, and the end-to-end latency is what kills you. The transport vendors will argue that meeting the latency requirement for VoIP costs them extra, so they need to charge you by-the-minute or by-the-packet (on which I call bullshit.) They can bill me a fixed fee for a VoIP-capable broadband connection, added to my monthly ISP fee, should I desire to use VoIP.
It all distills down to money-grubbing for the almighty buck. (I was going to say "greenback," but that's obsolete now, isn't it?)
*Yes, I realize that there's a different fee structure for vehicles Class 3 and above, but that's largely because they tear up the road more. The fee is structured by weight of the vehicle, so hauling 10 tons of chickens is considered the equivalent of carrying 10 tons of steel. Yes, Hazmats are different too