If they do find another qualified candidate without any of those factors, it doesn't matter to them that you are also qualified. If they don't find another one, you're going to get a call anyway.
That only holds true in cases where an actual human is reading the résumés which have been submitted. Many businesses, particularly large multi-nationals, rely on software to reduce the pool of 100s of applicants down to a handful, not allowing even an unqualified HR person to make a call whether to move a résumé forward.
The last time I hired an assistant, the automated HR system eliminated every highly-qualified candidate that I had personally recommended for the position, leaving me with 6 candidates who had no real-world qualifications but were capable of putting the right buzzwords on their application. I ended up in a protracted fight with HR that was resolved by a VP granting permission to hire out-of-scope, just to get a qualified candidate for the job.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, it can be supposed from the case that the plaintiff's attorneys were attempting to broaden (or modernize, depending on your viewpoint) the definition of "commercial interest" with regard to Lanham-related issues. Doing so could protect individuals from exactly this kind of abuse by non-related commercial interests.
A good point. I was looking more at "commercial interest" in a broad form, not the specifics of the Lanham Act. FWIW, I think the plaintiff's attorneys chose a Lanham Act case with the hope of broadening Lanham definitions through case law, but IANAL so mine is only an informally educated one.
Again, that is just insane. What kind of fucking retarded employer would not only judge someone based on online behavior (which mostly has nothing to do with offline behavior, as people react differently offline than online in most cases), but trust spam results and such? Not one you'd want to work for, that's who.
The kind of employer who happens to be a Fortune 100 company, for starters. The one I work for monitors internet postings (like the one I'm writing) on many social networking sites, search results, and public records for employee or potential employee activity which may damage the company's public image or leak sensitive/proprietary information. If the information that the company does so weren't considered public knowledge, I would never have considered posting here. While most companies, my employer included, use (at least) a "human" filter for the gathered data, many rely on simple algorithms or third-party search agents which may provide a number of false positives.
The unfortunate fact of business life inside the corporate suite is that your life outside does directly affect your earnings and advancement. For instance, tweeting about a hobby the boss doesn't like (dog fighting, poetry slams, line dancing, whatever) can easily take a job offer off the table or cause the HR department to start the death-spiral paper trail. Facebook photos from high school or college where the subject is involved in illicit, distasteful, or bacchanalian behavior can quickly erase a large portion of lifetime earning potential should they be found and individually identifiable.
I wholeheartedly agree. Without looking at the merits of Ms. Quixote's case, I can't imagine the tortured process this court must have gone through in determining that a modern US citizen has no commercial interest in their own name. Googling new hires/clients is commonplace, as are surreptitious background checks, which means any negative information, even when demonstrably false, can hurt a person's commercial interests.
Googling a potential new hire or business associate for background information has become too widespread for anyone to have "no commercial interest" in their name. False information, even when obviously false, can and does adversely affect anyone looking for jobs or business opportunities beyond paper hats and drivethroughs. It goes to show how out of touch this court is from the mainstream of society.
Protectionism is precisely what a government SHOULD do, protect its citizens from predation by other national/quasi-national/corporate/global actors. Government should not exist solely to protect corporate interests.
Tariffs made the US into a powerful nation. Without them, we would have been easily steamrolled by the various quasi-national monopoly companies of the 18th/19th centuries and re-absorbed into the various nations from which our territory was purchased/won.
All it would take to correct many of the economic problems the middle classes of the industrialized world are feeling is to enforce a minimum wage at the borders. If a company won't pay employees in China or India what a US/Canadian/British/etc worker would receive for the same work, determine the difference between actual wages and the prevailing national wage for that type of work, then charge that difference as a tariff against the merchandise.
Your concept of what I.T. is only works in small companies. In companies with large I.T. workforces or large information assets, the job of I.T. is NOT to help the end user make the most of their available assets. In those cases, the job of I.T. is to protect company information, secure I.T. equipment against uses which may create a liability to the company or violate contracts or laws, and to enforce company policies (often based on legal requirements) regarding the use of information and I.T. equipment.
With the massive economic downturn, I.T. (in the U.S., at any rate) is more frequently called upon by Human Resources deptartments in large organizations to ferret out misuse of I.T. assets in order to terminate employees in such a way that unemployment compensation can be legally denied. This allows the company to perform RIFs without the penalty paid in higher unemployment insurance costs.
Never assume that I.T. exists only to help the end user. In many cases, if not most, I.T. is in place specifically to prevent the end user from overstepping their bounds or using information and assets in ways not approved by the governing body of the business.
I don't mean to suggest that this adversarial relationship is correct, nor excuse the dismissive attitude many I.T. pros have toward end users, but it is one of the chief purposes of current I.T. work. Were most companies to use I.T. assets to their full potential, they would need far less of those assets.
Hardware technicians are always going to have to be local, too. Of course, you're often working for the same type of companies and being treated as badly as the IT guys, but if you know your way around the inside of a PC, a printer, even just the basics of physical networking infrastructure, there's a market for those skills too.
Speaking as a local hardware support tech (for a Fortune 100) who is in the process of being outsourced to an Indian support group, I have to disagree.
Fedex is the great leveler for hardware support. It (apparently) becomes cheaper to package it up and ship halfway across the world than to keep someone on staff to handle local issues. Sure, the users will have to wait a week or two for problem resolution, but when looked at from the executive suite, that's a problem only for the individual user, not the company.
As for knowing your way around a printer, most large companies have been using throwaway printers for small workgroups for years. In larger settings, Xerox and Ricoh offer high volume systems with service contracts. The local support guy is quickly going the way of the farrier; the need won't completely vanish, but will be reduced drastically in coming years.
Now I'm headed back to college for a BS in Psychology. I dropped out of an IT program during the dot-com days, but I have little interest in continuing work in an increasingly commoditized field. It's time to learn how to hack humans.
Every degree on your thermostat will save you about 3%. If you don't have a 7-day programmable thermostat, get one with 4 states, wake, leave, return and sleep. Increase the sleeping and leave temps to 85degF and then set to 78degF for the other periods. They are less than $100 and would pay for itself in a few months.
Depending on the orientation (North, etc) of the windows, replacing inefficient single panes with double panes that have some reflective properties that can lower the solar gain significantly. With the economy in shambles, you can get construction work done at a great discount. Depending on the number of windows you need done, you can get them for about $300-$600 a window.
85F and 78F? Are you drying meat inside the house?!?
In winter, I program for wake: 70F, leave: 64F, return: 70F, and sleep 62F. (Summer is 74F, 85F, 75F, 72F) If you get cold at night, add a blanket. If I run the heat above 70F, everyone in the house complains that it's too warm. Of course, we try to keep the humidity 40%+ inside the house to help hold in some warmth. (And avoid the static nastiness that low humidity can cause.)
Of course, I live in the central US, where winter is 45F/35F and summer is 100F/85F, and our energy prices (electric and gas) are essentially unregulated, so we get gouged. Electric for my 3 bed, 1000sq/ft "ranch"-style house ranges from $35/mo in winter to $300/mo+ in summer, with gas going from $150/mo+ in winter to $15/mo in summer.
Still, if you're going to make jerky, get a smoker, don't hang it from the family room lamps.
As for the issue with kids loading p2p apps like bearshare and such, maybe ISPs need to offer a service to customers where (with customer approval), the customers accounts can be locked so that p2p apps wont run on them. (which would mean that parents could tell the ISPs to lock that out and stop their kids doing this stuff). This would work in the same way as the telcos who offer call barring that lets you prevent access to premium rate numbers (900 numbers etc)
When an ISP starts censoring or traffic shaping of that sort, they lose the safe harbor protections provided by the DMCA. At that point, they become liable for copyright violations on their network. Not something your average ISP wants.
in michigan i've seen a trend of one cop standing on a corner directing drivers without seatbelts into a parking lot where another 5 or 6 cops wait to issue $65 tickets. fine, there's a seat belt law, but there has to be a better way to use 6 or 7 cops for the day.
Just do the math. The officers, costing (with car) roughly $200-$250 per day. 6 cops cost $1200-$1500 for the entire shift.
Guessing a lowball of 20 seatbelt violations, at $65 each, that's $1300 for the city, over and above any other violations they catch or any non-tangible "benefit" the city gets from those officers being on duty in that area.
Since it's unlikely that the officers will spend an entire shift doing this, it's a net gain (PROFIT!!!) for the city. Not to mention that checkpoints like this give them the (questionably legal) chance to look for expired licenses, tags, uninsured motorists (if your state reqs insurance), and the inevitable open container or other "premium" violation.
Oh no! Whatever you do, be as scared as is humanly possible! Live in constant terror of death! It's the only way to defeat terrorism!
Give me a break. I live on the Great Plains. I'm in much more danger of being killed by a tornado, or dying from cancer caused by oilfield runoff. Should we declare "War on Weather"? Or, since 42,800 people died in automobile accidents on US roads in 2004 http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/suv_hig hway.html, we should declare "War on Cars"!
They must have some evidence, but to take him to trial now might compromise other investigations because just airing evidence in public court can reveal information to people involved in terrorist conspiracies againsst US (e.g. if the gov't provides eveidence in court - the terorsits know that we know about what ever it is). We can't afford to tip our hands.
Of course, they must have evidence, because they say so. Just like SCO obviously has evidence in SCOvIBM, they just can't show it right now because, uh, because they just can't.
Ever heard of a closed hearing? Sealed court documents? I was in a child support hearing and the backwater hick judge there sealed the evidence and closed the courtroom. Can't the Federal judiciary do the same thing? Or are you asking us to assume that some Federal judges are working with terrorists and would provide Al Qaeda with copies of any evidence presented at trial?
We are at war.
Yeah, at war with a country which had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, absolutely no infrastructure to manufacture WMD, and absolutely no stockpiles of the same. A country which, at the time of the invasion, had only begun to rebuild the civil infrastructures such as water purification, electric service, and sewer systems which the US military had bombed into oblivion just over a decade previously. We're at war, alright, but only with those we can defeat and whose oil we can take, not those who have hurt us.
Maybe something solid-state, spewing the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, or a dental drill, directly onto the phone line at 120db. It could connect inline between your phone and the wall, and only send the noise down the xmit side of the connection.
The high-tech community has an obvious similar problem, with an obvious similar fix.
We have spam blacklists, why not do something similar for direct marketers?
It would require a hack on existing caller-ID technology. In particular, a caller ID display that stores an updateable blacklist and blocks all calls from those numbers, before allowing a ring-through. Someone was doing something like this with "private" and "unknown" calls back in the late 90's.
The blacklist itself could be updated via a web site, ala Spamhaus, etc. and transferred to the caller ID via cheap USB key or something similar.
The hardest part is getting the list started, because it would require efforts by hundreds or thousands of participants adding the numbers of telemarketing firms.
At $50-$75 per ID/blocker, it could easily take off with the gadget crowd, and once word got out, economy of scale would drop the price and increase availability.
{This post does indeed constitute prior art and the concept is released into the public domain for the benefit of all.}
Something similar was tried in Canada, and now the CRIA is pushing for stronger copyright laws, including "DMCA" style legislation.
No matter what is done to appease the **IA**, they will continually ask for more until they get a cut of everything. The only way to combat this is to refuse to buy their wares. If a critical mass can be convinced not to participate in the market, the bad actors (e.g., old school industry people) will fail, fall into bankruptcy, or "see the light" and embrace new media.
Seriously though, do you think this push for punishment stems from a lust to control, or is it more readily explained as the natural progressoin of capitolism's affects on politics when campaign contributions go unchecked?
The natural progression of capitalism's effects on politics is lust for control. Thus, when capitalists are allowed to own ideas or other intangibles (IP), the natural desire is to squeeze out any competition and criminalize any attempt to use said "property" in any but the approved (charged for) method.
When corporatism (capitalism dominated by non-human "paper" entities) is allowed to influence government, fascism (as defined by Benito Mussolini) results, ending in a totalitarian state controlled by corporate and wealthy elite interests.
To bring this back to the original topic, our current government is seeking to criminalize the act of copying the expression of an idea or other intangible property. In other words, it (government) is trying to defend corporate profit through written law. Fascism, as properly defined.
Dood, I know this is/. and that we be abunchazealots, but still...
You can run Windows in a secure fashion. First thing: Disblable useless services (like Universal PnP, Remote *anything* and so on). Second: Setup separate user and admin accounts.
This is a great idea. And yes, Windows can be run securely. However, this all falls apart at midnight when mom decides that she has to install this great new IM widget so she can send and receive junk files via AIMSNCQ, and neither Trillian or GAIM will do it "right".
If she has the Admin password, she logs in and installs the new widget, along with all the associated malware, and finds out that she has to be logged in as the Admin to run the app. At this point, security just went out the window, all so mom can look at someone else's ugly grandkids.
If you as a third move install third-party software for netuse (Opera, Mozilla. That kind of stuff), you'll need some pretty clueless people in order to screw the machine over.
Again, this is a "best-practices" idea, but next to impossible to implement. Mozilla works great for mom and dad until they find out that their favorite website requires IE and popups to function. (And telling them to find a new favorite website is an unsafe proposition.) Block their ($*&%ing) game of Pogo (or Hearts, or whatever) and you're out of the will and not welcome at Thanksgiving dinner.
Taking care of our parents' systems requires, more than anything, education. User education, and lots of it. They have to have it drilled into them not to open stupid attachments, not to play stupid games (Elf Bowling, anyone?), not to hand out their email address to every Tom, Dick, and Sanford, and not to ever attempt to install anything, period. Given reasonably intelligent parents, eventually these restrictions can be relaxed. (Yes dad, you can intstall Deer Avenger XXIXXIXIXCMDMCMMDDDXXX, as long as you have the original CD. Here's how you do it.) The key is, just like with any other user, to make them think about their actions and the consequences before they do anything. This will make the job of family tech support much easier.
Imagine having a
factory unit that fits in your
hand and with a supply of air and water it could make more of itself or
make any structure or electronics gizmo you have a program for. Connect
yourself to the internet and get free programs to build housing,
greenhouses, furniture, computers, wireless nodes for the new internet,
cars, solar cells, all without significant human intervention and
costing nothing more than water, air, and power, or for the extra cheap
using only your own solar cells.
I just want to point out the obvious downside to this concept. Joe
Sixpack jumps online and finds the source for a great new house, but,
being Joe Sixpack, he doesn't know how to check the source for bugs and
doesn't realize until it's too late that the program was written by
some script kiddie who slipped a recursive loop into the instructions
and he's covered an entire city block with his dream house, and he
can't stop it. If the factory unit builds from available air and water,
how do you shut it down? We see everyday that non-technical people are
taken advantage of in similar ways. (MyDoom, etc.) Even if the thing
has a giant red button that says OFF,
a minority of people will still be so freaked out that they wouldn't
remember to hit it.
This is the
extremely conservative vision,
assuming that we will only be able to produce a few basic things with
nanomachines (but assuming we can build a nanofactory that reproduces
itself), not assuming we will be able to make foodstuffs, cybernetic
enhancements, or any of the obvious things that would be handy to have
as microscopic machines (blood cleaning & oxygenating machines,
cancer finding & eating machines, machines to be the roto-rooter to
your clogged arteries, etc).
Back to our theoretical script kiddie.
Let's say this kid is the same sort that releases highly damaging worms
into the wild. What happens when he gets angry at the jocks at his
school for picking on him and releases a nanobot that, instead of
finding and eating cancer, has been modified to find and eat cardiac
tissue or red blood cells? Or worse yet, the domestic terrorist who,
angry about trucking regulations, releases a bot into our water or food
supply that lies dormant until it comes into contact with another bot
released after certain demands aren't met, or perhaps just activates
after a certain date, etc.?
I'm not trying to be a Luddite about this, but our safeguards are far
from reliable to prevent these sorts of things, and even in the article
we see that safeguarding against possible problems is not at the
forefront of the nanotech wave. (Quoted: "Most nanotechnologists whom I talk to say
that disassembly is a great idea but not practical in the near future.")
If, in fact, your estimates are conservative, we should all be scared
silly. Innovation in any tech should be tempered with thoughts to what
could be done with it, and safeguards should be put in place to keep
damage to a minimum, and in the case of nanotech, this doesn't appear
to be happening. Again, I don't mean that it should be locked down to
all but a chosen few, or draconian security measures taken, but we
should think responsibly about the final uses of what we build. If
we're going to put the equivalent of a nuke in everyone's hand, we
should at least have a way to slow the initial blast.
No world wars? Do you recall the Cold War? Or more recently, the
(insert brassy fanfare) "War on Terror"?!? Just because it wasn't an
all-out, killeverythingthatmoves kind of war doesn't mean that
hostilities didn't occur, or that it didn't involve the "world".
Has negotiated and enforced many
peace treaties throughout that time.
And it has failed to negotiate and enforce just as many. Look up a
country called Rhodesia
and the history of the land it inhabited. No UN intervention there, and
we're still seeing the fallout in central Africa. Or better yet, look
at the strength of UN
resolutions at work in Israel. There have been UN
sanctions for decades against Israel, and it hasn't stopped the crimes
one bit.
Economic and other sanctions have had
positive effects on some countries.
Such sanctions have allowed dictators to divert funds from aid programs
to build military
infrastructure, enabled "ethnic
cleansing" such as that in former Yugoslavia, and created
situations leading to attacks on the US and other member nations.
WHO has done some
fantastic work in the 3rd world.
Is the world's first
supra-national organization and, more remarkably, has had its power
seriously challenged only a few times.
First?!? Even the UN
admits that the League
of Nations existed. And as for serious challenges to UN authority,
you can look at the record of the last 50 years to see the endless
challenges and flaunts of that authority. The UN has been ignored from Korea
to Iraq.
Has,
respectively, saved the countries of Korea,
Kuwait,and many others i'm forgetting by using multinational forces to
defeat a common agressor enemy.
The UN saved Korea?
The Korean War didn't end. It is still in a negotiated ceasefire, and
is still a divided country. As for Kuwait, the country it was ceased
to exist when they were invaded. To say that the UN saved these
countries is to ignore the facts. It would be more proper to say that
the UN helped to alleviate some of the destruction caused by internal
or external aggressors, and in some cases aided the victimized society
to rid itself of the invading force.
I'm not trying to say that the UN is a failure. However, the current
political and economic climate make the organization more of a pawn to
a few powerful nations than a true supranational entity charged with
protecting the peace and enforcing international law. While it has
contributed somewhat to international stability, it can be seen to
offer selective stability, chiefly for Western nations that expect UN
backing for their own whims.
(3) Voter confirms that text matches his wishes; if so he places the vote in the tallying machine which scans the bar code, puts it into a database, prints the database serial number on the ballot and deposits it into a locked box. If the ballot is unreadable,the machine spits the ballot back out and the voter can try a different machine. If for some reason the tallying machine will not accept a voter's ballot, the ballot is placed in a separte locked box for manual tallying.
This is great.
Now, instead of a vending machine with a dollar bill, I can stand in front of the vote tallying machine for an hour trying to get the damned thing to take my ballot.
Slashdot Mirror
If they do find another qualified candidate without any of those factors, it doesn't matter to them that you are also qualified. If they don't find another one, you're going to get a call anyway.
That only holds true in cases where an actual human is reading the résumés which have been submitted. Many businesses, particularly large multi-nationals, rely on software to reduce the pool of 100s of applicants down to a handful, not allowing even an unqualified HR person to make a call whether to move a résumé forward. The last time I hired an assistant, the automated HR system eliminated every highly-qualified candidate that I had personally recommended for the position, leaving me with 6 candidates who had no real-world qualifications but were capable of putting the right buzzwords on their application. I ended up in a protracted fight with HR that was resolved by a VP granting permission to hire out-of-scope, just to get a qualified candidate for the job.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, it can be supposed from the case that the plaintiff's attorneys were attempting to broaden (or modernize, depending on your viewpoint) the definition of "commercial interest" with regard to Lanham-related issues. Doing so could protect individuals from exactly this kind of abuse by non-related commercial interests.
A good point. I was looking more at "commercial interest" in a broad form, not the specifics of the Lanham Act. FWIW, I think the plaintiff's attorneys chose a Lanham Act case with the hope of broadening Lanham definitions through case law, but IANAL so mine is only an informally educated one.
Again, that is just insane. What kind of fucking retarded employer would not only judge someone based on online behavior (which mostly has nothing to do with offline behavior, as people react differently offline than online in most cases), but trust spam results and such? Not one you'd want to work for, that's who.
The kind of employer who happens to be a Fortune 100 company, for starters. The one I work for monitors internet postings (like the one I'm writing) on many social networking sites, search results, and public records for employee or potential employee activity which may damage the company's public image or leak sensitive/proprietary information. If the information that the company does so weren't considered public knowledge, I would never have considered posting here. While most companies, my employer included, use (at least) a "human" filter for the gathered data, many rely on simple algorithms or third-party search agents which may provide a number of false positives.
The unfortunate fact of business life inside the corporate suite is that your life outside does directly affect your earnings and advancement. For instance, tweeting about a hobby the boss doesn't like (dog fighting, poetry slams, line dancing, whatever) can easily take a job offer off the table or cause the HR department to start the death-spiral paper trail. Facebook photos from high school or college where the subject is involved in illicit, distasteful, or bacchanalian behavior can quickly erase a large portion of lifetime earning potential should they be found and individually identifiable.
I wholeheartedly agree. Without looking at the merits of Ms. Quixote's case, I can't imagine the tortured process this court must have gone through in determining that a modern US citizen has no commercial interest in their own name. Googling new hires/clients is commonplace, as are surreptitious background checks, which means any negative information, even when demonstrably false, can hurt a person's commercial interests.
Googling a potential new hire or business associate for background information has become too widespread for anyone to have "no commercial interest" in their name. False information, even when obviously false, can and does adversely affect anyone looking for jobs or business opportunities beyond paper hats and drivethroughs. It goes to show how out of touch this court is from the mainstream of society.
Damn, I miss my FidoNet node! And the nightly L.O.R.D. and B.R.E. runs on every BBS in my area code!
Protectionism is precisely what a government SHOULD do, protect its citizens from predation by other national/quasi-national/corporate/global actors. Government should not exist solely to protect corporate interests.
Tariffs made the US into a powerful nation. Without them, we would have been easily steamrolled by the various quasi-national monopoly companies of the 18th/19th centuries and re-absorbed into the various nations from which our territory was purchased/won.
All it would take to correct many of the economic problems the middle classes of the industrialized world are feeling is to enforce a minimum wage at the borders. If a company won't pay employees in China or India what a US/Canadian/British/etc worker would receive for the same work, determine the difference between actual wages and the prevailing national wage for that type of work, then charge that difference as a tariff against the merchandise.
Your concept of what I.T. is only works in small companies. In companies with large I.T. workforces or large information assets, the job of I.T. is NOT to help the end user make the most of their available assets. In those cases, the job of I.T. is to protect company information, secure I.T. equipment against uses which may create a liability to the company or violate contracts or laws, and to enforce company policies (often based on legal requirements) regarding the use of information and I.T. equipment.
With the massive economic downturn, I.T. (in the U.S., at any rate) is more frequently called upon by Human Resources deptartments in large organizations to ferret out misuse of I.T. assets in order to terminate employees in such a way that unemployment compensation can be legally denied. This allows the company to perform RIFs without the penalty paid in higher unemployment insurance costs.
Never assume that I.T. exists only to help the end user. In many cases, if not most, I.T. is in place specifically to prevent the end user from overstepping their bounds or using information and assets in ways not approved by the governing body of the business.
I don't mean to suggest that this adversarial relationship is correct, nor excuse the dismissive attitude many I.T. pros have toward end users, but it is one of the chief purposes of current I.T. work. Were most companies to use I.T. assets to their full potential, they would need far less of those assets.
Hardware technicians are always going to have to be local, too. Of course, you're often working for the same type of companies and being treated as badly as the IT guys, but if you know your way around the inside of a PC, a printer, even just the basics of physical networking infrastructure, there's a market for those skills too.
Speaking as a local hardware support tech (for a Fortune 100) who is in the process of being outsourced to an Indian support group, I have to disagree.
Fedex is the great leveler for hardware support. It (apparently) becomes cheaper to package it up and ship halfway across the world than to keep someone on staff to handle local issues. Sure, the users will have to wait a week or two for problem resolution, but when looked at from the executive suite, that's a problem only for the individual user, not the company.
As for knowing your way around a printer, most large companies have been using throwaway printers for small workgroups for years. In larger settings, Xerox and Ricoh offer high volume systems with service contracts. The local support guy is quickly going the way of the farrier; the need won't completely vanish, but will be reduced drastically in coming years.
Now I'm headed back to college for a BS in Psychology. I dropped out of an IT program during the dot-com days, but I have little interest in continuing work in an increasingly commoditized field. It's time to learn how to hack humans.
Every degree on your thermostat will save you about 3%. If you don't have a 7-day programmable thermostat, get one with 4 states, wake, leave, return and sleep. Increase the sleeping and leave temps to 85degF and then set to 78degF for the other periods. They are less than $100 and would pay for itself in a few months. Depending on the orientation (North, etc) of the windows, replacing inefficient single panes with double panes that have some reflective properties that can lower the solar gain significantly. With the economy in shambles, you can get construction work done at a great discount. Depending on the number of windows you need done, you can get them for about $300-$600 a window.
85F and 78F? Are you drying meat inside the house?!?
In winter, I program for wake: 70F, leave: 64F, return: 70F, and sleep 62F. (Summer is 74F, 85F, 75F, 72F) If you get cold at night, add a blanket. If I run the heat above 70F, everyone in the house complains that it's too warm. Of course, we try to keep the humidity 40%+ inside the house to help hold in some warmth. (And avoid the static nastiness that low humidity can cause.)
Of course, I live in the central US, where winter is 45F/35F and summer is 100F/85F, and our energy prices (electric and gas) are essentially unregulated, so we get gouged. Electric for my 3 bed, 1000sq/ft "ranch"-style house ranges from $35/mo in winter to $300/mo+ in summer, with gas going from $150/mo+ in winter to $15/mo in summer.
Still, if you're going to make jerky, get a smoker, don't hang it from the family room lamps.
He helped found the EFF, for bog's sake!
As for the issue with kids loading p2p apps like bearshare and such, maybe ISPs need to offer a service to customers where (with customer approval), the customers accounts can be locked so that p2p apps wont run on them. (which would mean that parents could tell the ISPs to lock that out and stop their kids doing this stuff). This would work in the same way as the telcos who offer call barring that lets you prevent access to premium rate numbers (900 numbers etc)
When an ISP starts censoring or traffic shaping of that sort, they lose the safe harbor protections provided by the DMCA. At that point, they become liable for copyright violations on their network. Not something your average ISP wants.
in michigan i've seen a trend of one cop standing on a corner directing drivers without seatbelts into a parking lot where another 5 or 6 cops wait to issue $65 tickets. fine, there's a seat belt law, but there has to be a better way to use 6 or 7 cops for the day.
Just do the math. The officers, costing (with car) roughly $200-$250 per day. 6 cops cost $1200-$1500 for the entire shift.
Guessing a lowball of 20 seatbelt violations, at $65 each, that's $1300 for the city, over and above any other violations they catch or any non-tangible "benefit" the city gets from those officers being on duty in that area.
Since it's unlikely that the officers will spend an entire shift doing this, it's a net gain (PROFIT!!!) for the city. Not to mention that checkpoints like this give them the (questionably legal) chance to look for expired licenses, tags, uninsured motorists (if your state reqs insurance), and the inevitable open container or other "premium" violation.
Do you want a dirty bomb attack in the US?
g hway.html, we should declare "War on Cars"!
Oh no! Whatever you do, be as scared as is humanly possible! Live in constant terror of death! It's the only way to defeat terrorism!
Give me a break. I live on the Great Plains. I'm in much more danger of being killed by a tornado, or dying from cancer caused by oilfield runoff. Should we declare "War on Weather"? Or, since 42,800 people died in automobile accidents on US roads in 2004 http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/suv_hi
They must have some evidence, but to take him to trial now might compromise other investigations because just airing evidence in public court can reveal information to people involved in terrorist conspiracies againsst US (e.g. if the gov't provides eveidence in court - the terorsits know that we know about what ever it is). We can't afford to tip our hands.
Of course, they must have evidence, because they say so. Just like SCO obviously has evidence in SCOvIBM, they just can't show it right now because, uh, because they just can't.
Ever heard of a closed hearing? Sealed court documents? I was in a child support hearing and the backwater hick judge there sealed the evidence and closed the courtroom. Can't the Federal judiciary do the same thing? Or are you asking us to assume that some Federal judges are working with terrorists and would provide Al Qaeda with copies of any evidence presented at trial?
We are at war.
Yeah, at war with a country which had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, absolutely no infrastructure to manufacture WMD, and absolutely no stockpiles of the same. A country which, at the time of the invasion, had only begun to rebuild the civil infrastructures such as water purification, electric service, and sewer systems which the US military had bombed into oblivion just over a decade previously. We're at war, alright, but only with those we can defeat and whose oil we can take, not those who have hurt us.
Maybe something solid-state, spewing the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, or a dental drill, directly onto the phone line at 120db. It could connect inline between your phone and the wall, and only send the noise down the xmit side of the connection.
The high-tech community has an obvious similar problem, with an obvious similar fix.
We have spam blacklists, why not do something similar for direct marketers?
It would require a hack on existing caller-ID technology. In particular, a caller ID display that stores an updateable blacklist and blocks all calls from those numbers, before allowing a ring-through. Someone was doing something like this with "private" and "unknown" calls back in the late 90's.
The blacklist itself could be updated via a web site, ala Spamhaus, etc. and transferred to the caller ID via cheap USB key or something similar.
The hardest part is getting the list started, because it would require efforts by hundreds or thousands of participants adding the numbers of telemarketing firms.
At $50-$75 per ID/blocker, it could easily take off with the gadget crowd, and once word got out, economy of scale would drop the price and increase availability.
{This post does indeed constitute prior art and the concept is released into the public domain for the benefit of all.}
Something similar was tried in Canada, and now the CRIA is pushing for stronger copyright laws, including "DMCA" style legislation.
No matter what is done to appease the **IA**, they will continually ask for more until they get a cut of everything. The only way to combat this is to refuse to buy their wares. If a critical mass can be convinced not to participate in the market, the bad actors (e.g., old school industry people) will fail, fall into bankruptcy, or "see the light" and embrace new media.
AT&T is broken up via anti-trust suit, and SBC (as Southwestern Bell) is created.
AT&T builds a mobile division, AT&T Wireless, then spins it off.
SBC builds a mobile division, Cingular.
Cingular eats AT&T Wireless.
Now SBC is eating AT&T.
I realize the metaphor isn't quite right, but I'm reminded of Kronos and his children.
Seriously though, do you think this push for punishment stems from a lust to control, or is it more readily explained as the natural progressoin of capitolism's affects on politics when campaign contributions go unchecked?
The natural progression of capitalism's effects on politics is lust for control. Thus, when capitalists are allowed to own ideas or other intangibles (IP), the natural desire is to squeeze out any competition and criminalize any attempt to use said "property" in any but the approved (charged for) method.
When corporatism (capitalism dominated by non-human "paper" entities) is allowed to influence government, fascism (as defined by Benito Mussolini) results, ending in a totalitarian state controlled by corporate and wealthy elite interests.
To bring this back to the original topic, our current government is seeking to criminalize the act of copying the expression of an idea or other intangible property. In other words, it (government) is trying to defend corporate profit through written law. Fascism, as properly defined.
The "Chronicles of George" has the best collection of bad tech support explanations I've ever seen. And, nominally, they're all from the same person.
http://chroniclesofgeorge.nanc.com/index.htm
This is a great idea. And yes, Windows can be run securely. However, this all falls apart at midnight when mom decides that she has to install this great new IM widget so she can send and receive junk files via AIMSNCQ, and neither Trillian or GAIM will do it "right".
If she has the Admin password, she logs in and installs the new widget, along with all the associated malware, and finds out that she has to be logged in as the Admin to run the app. At this point, security just went out the window, all so mom can look at someone else's ugly grandkids.
Again, this is a "best-practices" idea, but next to impossible to implement. Mozilla works great for mom and dad until they find out that their favorite website requires IE and popups to function. (And telling them to find a new favorite website is an unsafe proposition.) Block their ($*&%ing) game of Pogo (or Hearts, or whatever) and you're out of the will and not welcome at Thanksgiving dinner.
Taking care of our parents' systems requires, more than anything, education. User education, and lots of it. They have to have it drilled into them not to open stupid attachments, not to play stupid games (Elf Bowling, anyone?), not to hand out their email address to every Tom, Dick, and Sanford, and not to ever attempt to install anything, period. Given reasonably intelligent parents, eventually these restrictions can be relaxed. (Yes dad, you can intstall Deer Avenger XXIXXIXIXCMDMCMMDDDXXX, as long as you have the original CD. Here's how you do it.) The key is, just like with any other user, to make them think about their actions and the consequences before they do anything. This will make the job of family tech support much easier.
Imagine having a factory unit that fits in your hand and with a supply of air and water it could make more of itself or make any structure or electronics gizmo you have a program for. Connect yourself to the internet and get free programs to build housing, greenhouses, furniture, computers, wireless nodes for the new internet, cars, solar cells, all without significant human intervention and costing nothing more than water, air, and power, or for the extra cheap using only your own solar cells.
I just want to point out the obvious downside to this concept. Joe Sixpack jumps online and finds the source for a great new house, but, being Joe Sixpack, he doesn't know how to check the source for bugs and doesn't realize until it's too late that the program was written by some script kiddie who slipped a recursive loop into the instructions and he's covered an entire city block with his dream house, and he can't stop it. If the factory unit builds from available air and water, how do you shut it down? We see everyday that non-technical people are taken advantage of in similar ways. (MyDoom, etc.) Even if the thing has a giant red button that says OFF, a minority of people will still be so freaked out that they wouldn't remember to hit it.
This is the extremely conservative vision, assuming that we will only be able to produce a few basic things with nanomachines (but assuming we can build a nanofactory that reproduces itself), not assuming we will be able to make foodstuffs, cybernetic enhancements, or any of the obvious things that would be handy to have as microscopic machines (blood cleaning & oxygenating machines, cancer finding & eating machines, machines to be the roto-rooter to your clogged arteries, etc).
Back to our theoretical script kiddie. Let's say this kid is the same sort that releases highly damaging worms into the wild. What happens when he gets angry at the jocks at his school for picking on him and releases a nanobot that, instead of finding and eating cancer, has been modified to find and eat cardiac tissue or red blood cells? Or worse yet, the domestic terrorist who, angry about trucking regulations, releases a bot into our water or food supply that lies dormant until it comes into contact with another bot released after certain demands aren't met, or perhaps just activates after a certain date, etc.?
I'm not trying to be a Luddite about this, but our safeguards are far from reliable to prevent these sorts of things, and even in the article we see that safeguarding against possible problems is not at the forefront of the nanotech wave. (Quoted: "Most nanotechnologists whom I talk to say that disassembly is a great idea but not practical in the near future.")
If, in fact, your estimates are conservative, we should all be scared silly. Innovation in any tech should be tempered with thoughts to what could be done with it, and safeguards should be put in place to keep damage to a minimum, and in the case of nanotech, this doesn't appear to be happening. Again, I don't mean that it should be locked down to all but a chosen few, or draconian security measures taken, but we should think responsibly about the final uses of what we build. If we're going to put the equivalent of a nuke in everyone's hand, we should at least have a way to slow the initial blast.
No world wars in 50+ years
No world wars? Do you recall the Cold War? Or more recently, the (insert brassy fanfare) "War on Terror"?!? Just because it wasn't an all-out, killeverythingthatmoves kind of war doesn't mean that hostilities didn't occur, or that it didn't involve the "world".
Has negotiated and enforced many peace treaties throughout that time.
And it has failed to negotiate and enforce just as many. Look up a country called Rhodesia and the history of the land it inhabited. No UN intervention there, and we're still seeing the fallout in central Africa. Or better yet, look at the strength of UN resolutions at work in Israel. There have been UN sanctions for decades against Israel, and it hasn't stopped the crimes one bit.
Economic and other sanctions have had positive effects on some countries.
Such sanctions have allowed dictators to divert funds from aid programs to build military infrastructure, enabled "ethnic cleansing" such as that in former Yugoslavia, and created situations leading to attacks on the US and other member nations.
WHO has done some fantastic work in the 3rd world.
Work which includes proposing some of the most restrictive "health" laws ever seen.
Is the world's first supra-national organization and, more remarkably, has had its power seriously challenged only a few times.
First?!? Even the UN admits that the League of Nations existed. And as for serious challenges to UN authority, you can look at the record of the last 50 years to see the endless challenges and flaunts of that authority. The UN has been ignored from Korea to Iraq.
Has, respectively, saved the countries of Korea, Kuwait,and many others i'm forgetting by using multinational forces to defeat a common agressor enemy.
The UN saved Korea? The Korean War didn't end. It is still in a negotiated ceasefire, and is still a divided country. As for Kuwait, the country it was ceased to exist when they were invaded. To say that the UN saved these countries is to ignore the facts. It would be more proper to say that the UN helped to alleviate some of the destruction caused by internal or external aggressors, and in some cases aided the victimized society to rid itself of the invading force.
I'm not trying to say that the UN is a failure. However, the current political and economic climate make the organization more of a pawn to a few powerful nations than a true supranational entity charged with protecting the peace and enforcing international law. While it has contributed somewhat to international stability, it can be seen to offer selective stability, chiefly for Western nations that expect UN backing for their own whims.
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(3) Voter confirms that text matches his wishes; if so he places the vote in the tallying machine which scans the bar code, puts it into a database, prints the database serial number on the ballot and deposits it into a locked box. If the ballot is unreadable,the machine spits the ballot back out and the voter can try a different machine. If for some reason the tallying machine will not accept a voter's ballot, the ballot is placed in a separte locked box for manual tallying.
This is great. Now, instead of a vending machine with a dollar bill, I can stand in front of the vote tallying machine for an hour trying to get the damned thing to take my ballot.