Remember though, the courts are stupid. They ordered 2600 Magazine to not link to anything ever having any remote thing to do with DeCSS. That looked like a pretty damn clear cut case of violations on 2600 Magazines' rights to freedom of speech, and also was kind of contrary to the entire point of HTML, but the courts did what they did anyway.
The fact that the RIAA is picking the cds instead of giving the recipients the choice of what to get is what's so stupid about this. They never should have been given that option.
Or they could make the standard array of commodity software that the public seems to go through. Messaging apps. Forum software. Journal software. Hell, I've heard that Microsoft already runs its people this way to a certain extent, that they get to "Check out" and work on a piece of a project, not really knowing deep down how that piece interrelates to the rest of the main project.
Based on the quality of Windows this wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
"But the real question is, considering the speed and price of 802.11g these days, why would you ever choose to run 802.11a?"
Multiple reasons:
Less people on it. Channels will be available until the end of time, and even if everyone in your neighbourhood has an access point, you won't have network problems.
Less interest with wardrivers. While "security through obscurity" isn't the best idea if you're going to pick only one way to secure your systems, if you combine the fact that most people aren't looking for 802.11a networks with the fact that there are tons of open 802.11b and 802.11g networks you won't be looked upon as a potential victim nearly as much. It's not the end of security, but it's a good beginning.
No protocol issues. 802.11b and 802.11g frequently have issues sharing, where the "g" features dumb down to "b" speeds if anything "b" is talking. This is bad in my opinion.
Few, if any consumer devices in the 5GHz range. Nothing running in the house on 5GHz means nothing interfering with the network. Since everyone seems to be making 900MHz and 2.4GHz devices, including microwaves, telephones, and other things, using the currently lightly-used 5GHz area makes a lot of sense to me.
I was really sad that 802.11a never really made it to prime time in Linux while it was still commercially viable to manufacturers. I'd have bought into it in a heartbeat.
"Or am I just not using shitty enough hardware on the PCs I've owned at home and maintained at work?"
What do you use? I've typically stuck with 3com for ethernet cards after the first set of problems that I had with the Realtek 8029 chipset, and I've stayed with some of the more expensive video cards that might not have the 3d performance that everyone raves about but continue to work well for years. I'm still running a Matrox G450 dualhead. I've had an EMU10K-based SB Live for a few years now, I try to use CAS2 memory instead of CAS3 (Still on decent quality PC/133) instead of going with complete crap for quality, and while I've switched to AMD for my processors, I try to buy the higher end stable boards rather than the $69 specials. I don't buy the Amptron crap, or the ever increasing array of Lite-On, WuTek, or MungaWunga Electronics crap.
Now, I've worked on a lot of PCs for people that bought all of the cheap shit, including 400W power supplies that cost $15 new, Amptron boards, Celeron processors, crappy Fry's Electronics special memory, fast but cheap video accelerators, cheap hard disk drives, Realtek or worse ethernet, AC/97 sound built on, and the like, and their computers just suck. No performance for normal business applications, and the 3d games crash after awhile. Their $499 PC isn't worth the materials that would be gained by scrapping it.
Back in 1998 or so I worked on a dual Pentium II system running NT4 that had a 3dLabs Oxygen video card with full GL support. It was a Dell Optiplex if memory serves, and I think that it had 256MB RAM. We put one of the Windows Quakes (I can't remember if it was Quake or Quake II) on the box and it ran 1024x768 full speed, absolutely beautiful. It was probably a $3500 computer at the time at least, and while it was extremely expensive it was very capable and probably served the user (who did 3d rendering and used this box for design and light duty preview) well for many, many years.
It's all commodity now. Almost all consumer hardware is commodity. Most consumer operating systems and software is commodity. When it breaks you don't send a bug report to the software company and get a serious patch or fixed release back, you go buy the next version, which has all of the previous version's bugs fixed but a whole slew of new ones. If everyone remembers the service pack release times from the Windows 95 and NT4.0 days, they came out every few months, with very occasional fixes otherwise, just to take care of emergencies. Today Microsoft releases patches only because of the overwhelming need to keep their crappy-ass product one step ahead of those who would destroy the userbase's machines, and they still don't necessarily keep up. It's pathetic.
"Or IBM could just keep on selling their hardware with SuSE and keep on developing it themselves, regardless of what Sun wants or thinks it wants. Makes no difference when it's all GPL."
Well, not all of SuSE's tools are GPL. I know that YaST for example wasn't for a long time. I've heard ramblings that YaST will be open sourced, but if there are any other tools then IBM would have to develop their own replacements for them. Not that I believe that's out of their abilities in the slightest, but the advantage that IBM has of getting Linux from another party who is active in the whole scene is that IBM doesn't have to pay quite as much attention as they would have if they did it all in house, and they don't have to maintain a system for non-paying distribution users to report back bugs and development issues, leaving that currently to SuSE.
IBM would probably be better off looking to another distribution if SuSE were damaged in some way. It'd be easier and a lot better for long term development.
"So how do you propose he should have done it? By asking his boss if it's true he plays Solitaire 70% of the time in office?"
By going to the state level director of audit services, or whatever their department is called, to get a formal audit started by that director, who would then elicit help from the IT department. If Audit Services wouldn't do it, then it's dead unless he wants to make it a political issue or go to the Governor's office.
Remember, in Government things are nasty. People backstab, store up information for use later, sabotage others, and make and break temporary alliances all of the time. It's made worse because government doesn't have to turn a profit to remain funded, it gets increasingly out of control to the point of utter ridiculousness. Internal battles that would ultimately force a private company under (or force change) don't get stopped in government. Also, it's generally difficult to terminate people. They pretty much have to outright break the rules (which obviously they considered this IT director to have done) for someone to lose a position. Things frequently build up to almost crucible-level insanity and remain there. If the IT person doesn't like the situation he's welcome to seek employment elsewhere. That's just the way it seems to work.
That's not the point though. I wanted to be able to do it quickly and easily. I didn't want to go scrounge for the phone, I wanted to go through easy channels to acquire and activate it. I didn't want to have to worry about finding the right one for the right carrier.
Most of the time I'm willing to go to extrordinarily geeky lengths to achieve a result, but sometimes I just want things to be smooth. If they're not I simply abstain from working with them. This was one of those cases.
Netscape was associated with a good, functional web browser, but Microsoft bundled IE in as a default install with the OS and we all saw what happened there. All that Microsoft has to do is skate the fine line between antitrust and default configuration to give their own product better placement than Google enjoys, so the masses automatically switch due to the ease that the computer/browser integrates with Microsoft's search engine.
Unfortunately for Google, their only recourse is to attempt to convince the court to require Microsoft to give them equal placement from an OEM perspective. The best they'll get is probably like how the various big internet services got a directory on the desktop with utilities to connect to them instead of Microsoft. And the consumer won't know what to do with these; even if Microsoft's search engine sucks people still will stay with it until more adept computer users go and physically switch a lesser user's setup over to Google.
Think of it along the lines that Mozilla is installed through now-- word of mouth or "a friend put it on for me" for the vast majority of regular users who have it.
I was all ready and willing to buy the Kyocera 7135, a Palm-based phone that retails with service for $499, until I found that only two really expensive services supported it in my area. By itself it would have been almost $700, and that wasn't worth it, and most of the services that I was interested in couldn't use it anyway. If you think about the way that people use cell phones, as address books, entertainment devices, and information stores, this idea made sense back to the old Qualcomm pdQ Smartphone (built by Kyocera even) and if more readily available would make sense. Something like that might even help the manufacturers, since they could charge a premium for a high quality phone that would be usable for many, many years, instead of these crappy ones that break easily and are more of a commodity trend than anything else.
That's something that I've never understood about laws that make for exacerbated charges if a crime is committed with X implement. If laws against armed robbery, assault, murder, causing a fatal accident, and the like are enforced the way that they ought to be then use of a gun, or of a knife, or of being in some altered state short of being stupidly out of control of one's faculties (drunk, high, etc) wouldn't need extra charges or laws.
I'll leave DUI laws alone for the most part, due to the extreme and immediate potential for harm that driving while intoxicated causes, but this 'DVD watching' isn't any worse than oogling pretty women along the side of the street and having an accident. The driver gets in trouble for the level of the damage, not the reasons he or she caused the damage. That's the driver's responsibility to handle on his or her own, and the driver made a bad decision that contributed to the accident that's called being stupid. I'd argue that specifically legislating things to be illegal will leave legal "that's allowed!" holes that can be used to counter in court. "But Your Honor, I was just changing my shoes, there's nothing against that! Everything that we're not supposed to do while driving is on the books as being illegal! This wasn't on the books!"
"I also can't imagine anyone who condones the killing of Catholics still being himself considered a Catholic by any sane person. Same goes for this guy."
Netcraft (July 12, 2004) - CP/M was announced as the world's fasatest growing web-serving operating system today. CP/M. First conceived in the late seventies by Gary Kildall, the operating system was believed to be nowhere available outside of a few hobbyists' archives and university research projects. CP/M showed infinite growth in June by going from zero reported servers to three, all apparently located in the basement of one mister Rob Malda. Sources close to Malda, famed creator of the popular geek news and information site Slashdot, say that he was looking for a more robust and less hackable platform than those which his current sites operate with. It is unknown if he plans to move Slashdot, or encourage any other site movements over to CP/M at this time.
"Come on! What terrorist would go out to freakin' Antarctica, drill a couple of kilometers down, just to get what basically amounts to mineral water someone left in a fridge for 500000 years? If you're actually scared of that, you should probably live in fear of terrorists raiding your fridge."
Yeah, I moved out of an apartment once where I left the fridge duct taped shut for the good of all mankind. When the food started speaking to me, not saying, "Eat me!" I became worried.
I've learned that fast food restaurants are a good thing. At least I don't have to be the one to clean them up...
"we've been through these discussions over and over again. linux is NOT a suitable desktop operating system for the majority of users. most users do NOT want to spend a whole lot of time reading documentation on how to setup/configure their system, and most find it fustrating."
What about when most users had Windows 3.1? Setting that up wasn't practical for an end user either, as it required the ability to physically set hardware addresses, configure things through the MCI control panel that were a little less than intuitive, and knowledge of how Program Manager tied into the actual programs.
Sell a preloaded computer with Linux to the masses, and I'm not just talking e-Machines or Walmart, and the books will follow. The "ten easy things to do in Linux" columns in laymans' computer magazines will follow.
People may not patch or compile their own kernels or programs, but that's okay. That's why distributions with package management utilities exist. I don't know about you, but I haven't had to compile anything by hand in quite some time since switching to Debian.
Most users where I work at don't have a clue anyway, so not having a clue in Linux isn't any worse than not having a clue in Windows. In fact, once they're shown the basics of how there are no drive letters and how things are just off of / I suspect that they'll work with it just fine, and they will have a significantly harder time breaking the system into pieces with stuff off of the Internet.
...as Israel has trouble with suicide bombers in public, in areas that the military is guarding. We have the same problem in Iraq right now.
The person committed to a mission, for whatever reason, will have figured out what they're willing to risk to complete that mission. Frequently people will actually risk more that initially reasoned, if they see the goal. So while there are cameras, and while there are people monitoring devices brought in and out on an "official" basis, it's not hard to get stuff in and out of otherwise "secure" areas unless they are willing to literally strip search and body cavity search someone. As for espionage, If another company is paying someone enough, I doubt that the person being paid would balk at a "sign this form" or a "routine inspection" when they could hide the device in a shoe, or behind a belt, or in underwear, or any other number of places.
That being said, if a company has a policy to allow any of these memory devices then people are used to seeing them in cubicles and accept them as legitimate. If a company doesn't accept them, then if someone is seen with one at all they're subject to search. Period. End of discussion. This would help to catch a perpetrator, as there is no real deterrent.
"I've delt with drug dealers that were less pushy then Best Buy employees. Now, I drive the extra 30 minutes to go to Fry's where no one bugs me until I ask a question."
You've gotten someone to actually help you at Fry's? The electronics/consumer crap store, right?
Wow. The most I've ever gotten is a date with one of the girls who works at the Earthlink kiosk.
So, if I can theoretically pitch an idea so it sounds absolutely awesome but in reality is totally full of crap, then I too can get venture capital money to use to create a company and pay myself a massive salary? Cool!
That doesn't help the morons who "shave" the door handles and door locks to make it all electronic. Of course, if they're dumb enough to do that then they get what's coming...
Slashdot Mirror
Remember though, the courts are stupid. They ordered 2600 Magazine to not link to anything ever having any remote thing to do with DeCSS. That looked like a pretty damn clear cut case of violations on 2600 Magazines' rights to freedom of speech, and also was kind of contrary to the entire point of HTML, but the courts did what they did anyway.
The fact that the RIAA is picking the cds instead of giving the recipients the choice of what to get is what's so stupid about this. They never should have been given that option.
Or they could make the standard array of commodity software that the public seems to go through. Messaging apps. Forum software. Journal software. Hell, I've heard that Microsoft already runs its people this way to a certain extent, that they get to "Check out" and work on a piece of a project, not really knowing deep down how that piece interrelates to the rest of the main project.
Based on the quality of Windows this wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Multiple reasons:
- Less people on it. Channels will be available until the end of time, and even if everyone in your neighbourhood has an access point, you won't have network problems.
- Less interest with wardrivers. While "security through obscurity" isn't the best idea if you're going to pick only one way to secure your systems, if you combine the fact that most people aren't looking for 802.11a networks with the fact that there are tons of open 802.11b and 802.11g networks you won't be looked upon as a potential victim nearly as much. It's not the end of security, but it's a good beginning.
- No protocol issues. 802.11b and 802.11g frequently have issues sharing, where the "g" features dumb down to "b" speeds if anything "b" is talking. This is bad in my opinion.
- Few, if any consumer devices in the 5GHz range. Nothing running in the house on 5GHz means nothing interfering with the network. Since everyone seems to be making 900MHz and 2.4GHz devices, including microwaves, telephones, and other things, using the currently lightly-used 5GHz area makes a lot of sense to me.
I was really sad that 802.11a never really made it to prime time in Linux while it was still commercially viable to manufacturers. I'd have bought into it in a heartbeat."The first laptop I had was a pdp-11"
An LED-screen-based terminal emulator with a 300 baud modem dialing up to the PDP 11 shouldn't really count...
"pdp-11 is much heavier than you think."
Not to anyone who's ever tried to pick one up!
"Or am I just not using shitty enough hardware on the PCs I've owned at home and maintained at work?"
What do you use? I've typically stuck with 3com for ethernet cards after the first set of problems that I had with the Realtek 8029 chipset, and I've stayed with some of the more expensive video cards that might not have the 3d performance that everyone raves about but continue to work well for years. I'm still running a Matrox G450 dualhead. I've had an EMU10K-based SB Live for a few years now, I try to use CAS2 memory instead of CAS3 (Still on decent quality PC/133) instead of going with complete crap for quality, and while I've switched to AMD for my processors, I try to buy the higher end stable boards rather than the $69 specials. I don't buy the Amptron crap, or the ever increasing array of Lite-On, WuTek, or MungaWunga Electronics crap.
Now, I've worked on a lot of PCs for people that bought all of the cheap shit, including 400W power supplies that cost $15 new, Amptron boards, Celeron processors, crappy Fry's Electronics special memory, fast but cheap video accelerators, cheap hard disk drives, Realtek or worse ethernet, AC/97 sound built on, and the like, and their computers just suck. No performance for normal business applications, and the 3d games crash after awhile. Their $499 PC isn't worth the materials that would be gained by scrapping it.
Back in 1998 or so I worked on a dual Pentium II system running NT4 that had a 3dLabs Oxygen video card with full GL support. It was a Dell Optiplex if memory serves, and I think that it had 256MB RAM. We put one of the Windows Quakes (I can't remember if it was Quake or Quake II) on the box and it ran 1024x768 full speed, absolutely beautiful. It was probably a $3500 computer at the time at least, and while it was extremely expensive it was very capable and probably served the user (who did 3d rendering and used this box for design and light duty preview) well for many, many years.
It's all commodity now. Almost all consumer hardware is commodity. Most consumer operating systems and software is commodity. When it breaks you don't send a bug report to the software company and get a serious patch or fixed release back, you go buy the next version, which has all of the previous version's bugs fixed but a whole slew of new ones. If everyone remembers the service pack release times from the Windows 95 and NT4.0 days, they came out every few months, with very occasional fixes otherwise, just to take care of emergencies. Today Microsoft releases patches only because of the overwhelming need to keep their crappy-ass product one step ahead of those who would destroy the userbase's machines, and they still don't necessarily keep up. It's pathetic.
"Or IBM could just keep on selling their hardware with SuSE and keep on developing it themselves, regardless of what Sun wants or thinks it wants. Makes no difference when it's all GPL."
Well, not all of SuSE's tools are GPL. I know that YaST for example wasn't for a long time. I've heard ramblings that YaST will be open sourced, but if there are any other tools then IBM would have to develop their own replacements for them. Not that I believe that's out of their abilities in the slightest, but the advantage that IBM has of getting Linux from another party who is active in the whole scene is that IBM doesn't have to pay quite as much attention as they would have if they did it all in house, and they don't have to maintain a system for non-paying distribution users to report back bugs and development issues, leaving that currently to SuSE.
IBM would probably be better off looking to another distribution if SuSE were damaged in some way. It'd be easier and a lot better for long term development.
"So how do you propose he should have done it? By asking his boss if it's true he plays Solitaire 70% of the time in office?"
By going to the state level director of audit services, or whatever their department is called, to get a formal audit started by that director, who would then elicit help from the IT department. If Audit Services wouldn't do it, then it's dead unless he wants to make it a political issue or go to the Governor's office.
Remember, in Government things are nasty. People backstab, store up information for use later, sabotage others, and make and break temporary alliances all of the time. It's made worse because government doesn't have to turn a profit to remain funded, it gets increasingly out of control to the point of utter ridiculousness. Internal battles that would ultimately force a private company under (or force change) don't get stopped in government. Also, it's generally difficult to terminate people. They pretty much have to outright break the rules (which obviously they considered this IT director to have done) for someone to lose a position. Things frequently build up to almost crucible-level insanity and remain there. If the IT person doesn't like the situation he's welcome to seek employment elsewhere. That's just the way it seems to work.
That's not the point though. I wanted to be able to do it quickly and easily. I didn't want to go scrounge for the phone, I wanted to go through easy channels to acquire and activate it. I didn't want to have to worry about finding the right one for the right carrier.
Most of the time I'm willing to go to extrordinarily geeky lengths to achieve a result, but sometimes I just want things to be smooth. If they're not I simply abstain from working with them. This was one of those cases.
Netscape was associated with a good, functional web browser, but Microsoft bundled IE in as a default install with the OS and we all saw what happened there. All that Microsoft has to do is skate the fine line between antitrust and default configuration to give their own product better placement than Google enjoys, so the masses automatically switch due to the ease that the computer/browser integrates with Microsoft's search engine.
Unfortunately for Google, their only recourse is to attempt to convince the court to require Microsoft to give them equal placement from an OEM perspective. The best they'll get is probably like how the various big internet services got a directory on the desktop with utilities to connect to them instead of Microsoft. And the consumer won't know what to do with these; even if Microsoft's search engine sucks people still will stay with it until more adept computer users go and physically switch a lesser user's setup over to Google.
Think of it along the lines that Mozilla is installed through now-- word of mouth or "a friend put it on for me" for the vast majority of regular users who have it.
I was all ready and willing to buy the Kyocera 7135, a Palm-based phone that retails with service for $499, until I found that only two really expensive services supported it in my area. By itself it would have been almost $700, and that wasn't worth it, and most of the services that I was interested in couldn't use it anyway. If you think about the way that people use cell phones, as address books, entertainment devices, and information stores, this idea made sense back to the old Qualcomm pdQ Smartphone (built by Kyocera even) and if more readily available would make sense. Something like that might even help the manufacturers, since they could charge a premium for a high quality phone that would be usable for many, many years, instead of these crappy ones that break easily and are more of a commodity trend than anything else.
That's something that I've never understood about laws that make for exacerbated charges if a crime is committed with X implement. If laws against armed robbery, assault, murder, causing a fatal accident, and the like are enforced the way that they ought to be then use of a gun, or of a knife, or of being in some altered state short of being stupidly out of control of one's faculties (drunk, high, etc) wouldn't need extra charges or laws.
I'll leave DUI laws alone for the most part, due to the extreme and immediate potential for harm that driving while intoxicated causes, but this 'DVD watching' isn't any worse than oogling pretty women along the side of the street and having an accident. The driver gets in trouble for the level of the damage, not the reasons he or she caused the damage. That's the driver's responsibility to handle on his or her own, and the driver made a bad decision that contributed to the accident that's called being stupid. I'd argue that specifically legislating things to be illegal will leave legal "that's allowed!" holes that can be used to counter in court. "But Your Honor, I was just changing my shoes, there's nothing against that! Everything that we're not supposed to do while driving is on the books as being illegal! This wasn't on the books!"
"Is this like a geek version of the weird places you've had sex?"
Funny, that. I could state, "in the ASU Galvin Playhouse men's room", but I didn't have a computer with me and I did have a girl with me...
Pwn3d!
"I also can't imagine anyone who condones the killing of Catholics still being himself considered a Catholic by any sane person. Same goes for this guy."
*cough*spanishinquisition*cough*
Netcraft (July 12, 2004) - CP/M was announced as the world's fasatest growing web-serving operating system today. CP/M. First conceived in the late seventies by Gary Kildall, the operating system was believed to be nowhere available outside of a few hobbyists' archives and university research projects. CP/M showed infinite growth in June by going from zero reported servers to three, all apparently located in the basement of one mister Rob Malda. Sources close to Malda, famed creator of the popular geek news and information site Slashdot, say that he was looking for a more robust and less hackable platform than those which his current sites operate with. It is unknown if he plans to move Slashdot, or encourage any other site movements over to CP/M at this time.
"Come on! What terrorist would go out to freakin' Antarctica, drill a couple of kilometers down, just to get what basically amounts to mineral water someone left in a fridge for 500000 years? If you're actually scared of that, you should probably live in fear of terrorists raiding your fridge."
Yeah, I moved out of an apartment once where I left the fridge duct taped shut for the good of all mankind. When the food started speaking to me, not saying, "Eat me!" I became worried.
I've learned that fast food restaurants are a good thing. At least I don't have to be the one to clean them up...
"we've been through these discussions over and over again. linux is NOT a suitable desktop operating system for the majority of users. most users do NOT want to spend a whole lot of time reading documentation on how to setup/configure their system, and most find it fustrating."
What about when most users had Windows 3.1? Setting that up wasn't practical for an end user either, as it required the ability to physically set hardware addresses, configure things through the MCI control panel that were a little less than intuitive, and knowledge of how Program Manager tied into the actual programs.
Sell a preloaded computer with Linux to the masses, and I'm not just talking e-Machines or Walmart, and the books will follow. The "ten easy things to do in Linux" columns in laymans' computer magazines will follow.
People may not patch or compile their own kernels or programs, but that's okay. That's why distributions with package management utilities exist. I don't know about you, but I haven't had to compile anything by hand in quite some time since switching to Debian.
Most users where I work at don't have a clue anyway, so not having a clue in Linux isn't any worse than not having a clue in Windows. In fact, once they're shown the basics of how there are no drive letters and how things are just off of / I suspect that they'll work with it just fine, and they will have a significantly harder time breaking the system into pieces with stuff off of the Internet.
I think that the fact that it's ending is more ironic. I hope that this doesn't bode ill for the universe...
...as Israel has trouble with suicide bombers in public, in areas that the military is guarding. We have the same problem in Iraq right now.
The person committed to a mission, for whatever reason, will have figured out what they're willing to risk to complete that mission. Frequently people will actually risk more that initially reasoned, if they see the goal. So while there are cameras, and while there are people monitoring devices brought in and out on an "official" basis, it's not hard to get stuff in and out of otherwise "secure" areas unless they are willing to literally strip search and body cavity search someone. As for espionage, If another company is paying someone enough, I doubt that the person being paid would balk at a "sign this form" or a "routine inspection" when they could hide the device in a shoe, or behind a belt, or in underwear, or any other number of places.
That being said, if a company has a policy to allow any of these memory devices then people are used to seeing them in cubicles and accept them as legitimate. If a company doesn't accept them, then if someone is seen with one at all they're subject to search. Period. End of discussion. This would help to catch a perpetrator, as there is no real deterrent.
"I've delt with drug dealers that were less pushy then Best Buy employees. Now, I drive the extra 30 minutes to go to Fry's where no one bugs me until I ask a question."
You've gotten someone to actually help you at Fry's? The electronics/consumer crap store, right?
Wow. The most I've ever gotten is a date with one of the girls who works at the Earthlink kiosk.
So, if I can theoretically pitch an idea so it sounds absolutely awesome but in reality is totally full of crap, then I too can get venture capital money to use to create a company and pay myself a massive salary? Cool!
"Why don't you fax in your Slashdot posts?"
Because it's so much more fun to key them in on a telegraph!
That doesn't help the morons who "shave" the door handles and door locks to make it all electronic. Of course, if they're dumb enough to do that then they get what's coming...