I didn't mean that they would buy it for the purpose of burying it. I just think that Sun has a way of taking potentially great innovations and turning them into bloated crap. In my opinion, it's a corporate culture issue.
Don't turn off your firewalls, regardless of what MS says. I leave mine on while updating and have no problems whatsoever. I install Windows, AV, and firewall. Then plug in the NIC and get an IP address, then pull down updates. DONE! What I NEVER EVER EVER do is turn off my firewall.
I'm not going to comment either way on the whole "America sucks!"/"America rocks!" thread, but I would like to point out the ignorance of the "if you don't like it, go elsewhere" statement. In this country, if you don't like something, you should work to change it. Critcicism can be constructive. Criticism is not in and of itself unpatriotic, though you can take it there if you really want to. Another problem is that going somewhere else doesn't necessarily make a difference. The US tends to exert influence all over the world. So even though you moved to a different country, your new gov. may be making decisions based off of US policy (i.e. Afghanistan, Iraq, UK, etc.) So the "go elsewhere" part of your argument won't necessarily work. Unless you want to move to some place like central/southern Africa, which the US typically ignores. Yes, we may be giving $15 billion in AIDS relief, etc. but ask yourself how much we would be giving Europe if they had several countries where 20-30% of the population had AIDS. It's a matter of comparitive interest. Anyway, that last part went off topic. To sum up the point that I'm trying to get across, if you don't like how things are going in the US, don't go somewhere else. Work to change it. It's your country as much as it is any other citizen's.
Bottom line. If it's on my side of the gateway, they have no right to snoop around. Whether it's determining how many PCs connect to my home network (PC to PC traffic doesn't suck up their bandwidth) or monitoring the traffic on my LAN, it's none of their business. PERIOD. Once the traffic leaves the gateway and starts heading down their cable lines, fine. But whether or not I'm streaming an MPEG, MP3, etc from one PC to another within my home is none of their business. To me that's like having my cable box monitor my DVD player and VCR. Sure they all interconnect, but so what. I don't try to hack into my cable company's billing server because I think they're overbilling me.
I've used both Xandros 1 and 2. It's a great distro to set someone up on if you want to move them from Windows to Linux. It's Debian based. Like Lindow's Click-and-Run Warehouse, users can easily install software from their online repository. They don't have much of a selection (especially during the install). But there is a menu option in their software installation program to add online repositories and you can simply add your desired Debian repository and get access to all of the usual programs you can get to with apt-get. I didn't have any problems installing straight Debian stuff on Xandros. It's not a good distro for Linux power users, but everything is laid out kind of like Windows. And if you buy the version that comes with the Crossover Office plug-in, they can install MS Office. And before everyone jumps on me about using OSS office suites instead to avoid the usual plague of problems with MS Office, it is sometimes the only way to get a user to switch. Most users don't mess around with their OS a whole lot, so switching that with Xandros wouldn't be too hard, but people are REALLY picky about software that they've grown accustomed to. Put them on MS Office and add OpenOffice.org and Evolution and try to migrate them slowly. Anyway. Just my $.02. Xandros is not a power distro, but is great for your typical Windows user.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to go with the AC on this one. If I were to do a search and replace on this article and replace every instance of Apple and OSX with Microsoft and Windows XP, then repost it,the Mac fans would be screaming that this was just another reason why Macs are better. I hate Apple, but love Mac OSX. The same way I hate Microsoft, but love Windows XP. MS has their stupid closed-source proprietary software and Apple has the same insistance on locking people into specific hardware and peripherals. Sorry to break it to you Mac lovers, but the only difference between Apple and Microsoft (the companies and their intentions - not their software) is market share. If Apple had market share in the 90th percentile, they would be using the exact same tactics as MS. Anyway, the bottom line is that it is hipocritical to trash MS for not telling people about a vulnerability until you release the patch and then saying that Apple can do it because they have good intentions.
The link doesn't bring up an article. But you can't really compare Mars and Earth. Completely different atmospheres, soils, etc. Evaporation, the water going subterranean, etc. could explain Mars. A complete shift in Earth's atmosphere within the last few thousand years would be highly noticeable to us. I don't think that the "once" NASA is referring to means a few thousand years ago. It's probably more like millions of years ago. So no, I don't think that Mars' situation could explain the disappearance of a lot of water within the last few thousand years. I have no problems believing that a catastrophic flood hit the area of Mesopotamia. I do have some problems believing that it was world wide. I don't know of any similar stories from the Indus River region, China, or the ancient America's that correspond. Then again, scientists are exploring cities off the coasts of Cuba and other Caribbean islands that are under 2000 ft of water. Sunken City (Reuters)
We'll just have to wait and see what we find.
You couldn't transfer ISOs because they DO have an attachment limit. I know 3-4 years ago it was something like 16 MB between AOL/Compuserve accounts and just a few MB if it wasn't internal.
Hmm...a little late on the posting but...ouch. Anyway, what is your "rhythm"? What programs do you use? Are you using a Mac or PC notebook? Roughly how long does it take you to get MP3s (or whatever your preferred output format is) from songs that you've downloaded (let's say for 50 songs since I'd prefer to do them in batches)?
That would solve the coaster problem. Though it doesn't solve my time problem. I still have to essentially babysit my CD Burner (unless you know a program that will burn to disc, then rip from it - without ejecting the disc in the process.
My complaint about AAC -> CD -> OGG/MP3 would be the fact that I have to continually burn coasters. I like my music in MP3 format because then any of my devices can read them (MP3 car CD player, Creative MuVo Nomad, WinAmp, etc.). I burn my music to CD for my car, but it's still in MP3 format so that I can burn a lot of songs on a single CD. Burning standard audios CDs of every song just so that I can get an MP3 of it is ridiculous. I don't drink enough to use that many coasters.
Here are the specs on my $1550 laptop from PCTorque:
P4 2.8 GHz w/HT
512 MB DDR400 (PC3200)
60 GB 5400 rpm hard drive
CD-RW/DVD combo
128 MB Radeon 9600 Pro video card
Built-in webcam and 7-in-1 card reader
Above all, the 15" SXGA+ screen has a high-contrast glossy coating that makes video look like a friggin' HDTV. It's beautiful. Doesn't work well outside due to glare though.
You can buy a similar model (5680) for about $50 that has a UXGA screen without the coating and uses dual-channel DDR and has an additional bay for another hard drive or optical drive.
Check out Sagers from PCTorque.com and PowerNotebooks.com. They are as good as the Alienware and Voodoo laptops for hundreds or sometimes even aver a thousand dollars less. And heres a note for those of you buying the more expensive ones - they're all Clevo rebrands. They're made by the same people and "recased" for whatever company made the sale. If you don't believe me, spec out identical Alienwares and Sagers and check out the price difference. The difference between my dream laptop from Alienware or Voodoo and the same one from Sager is almost $1500 (dual HDDs, 1 GB RAM, DVD-RW, etc.) Don't buy directly from Sager though (bad direct support. Buy from PCTorque or PowerNotebooks. I have a Sager 4080 and love it. It kicks ass on BF1942, CoD, and all of my other games. Check out their ratings on ResellerRatings.com.
Here's the problem with the whole "below average for the team" concept. What happens if you have 5 people in a team and every one of them is highly knowledgeable, works 60 hours per week and produces top quality work? One of them is going to be ranked as needing to be disciplined because they are the worst out of the 5. It doesn't matter that they may be in the top 5% of the industry and a workaholic. They still get screwed because of the preconceived notion that a statistical curve exists. I have yet to work anywhere that comes even close to meeting the curve. I've worked with largely lazy groups, where a curve would over-rate most a good portion of them. I've also worked with excellent groups of people where a large portion would be under-rated.
If supervisors can't handle the pressure of firing bad employees and keep letting them coast, perhaps it's time for the supervisor to be let go.
So are you agreeing with the comparisons to extrorters and embezzlers. And you're right. It's not like being a common thief. They can only steal from one place at a time. MS extorts money from everyone at all times. Look at their contracts with major PC vendors. Now why is it so hard to buy a major-brand PC without an OS?
$500 million is enormous to most companies, but it's 1/80th of the CASH that MS has in the bank. Not 1/80 of the company's total value, 1/80th of the amount that they can write a check for. Most companies would give far more than 1/80th of their cash if it meant that was the cost of maintaining a monopoly. From a cost/benefit standpoint, MS is getting off easy. That's why certain European countries have started making traffic fines a percentage of a person's income, rather than a flat rate for everyone. $150 will make me think twice about speeding, but it's the price of lunch for a millionaire. It's the same for MS. Let me ask you this. Let's say you lie, cheat, and defraud people in a completely illegal manner for years until you've become the richest man in the world. You have $40 billion in the bank. The fine for having done all of that is $500 million. Do you think that's excessive? You get to keep the other $39.5 BILLION that you extorted from people. In the world of individuals (as opposed to corporations), thieves, extorters, and embezzlers don't get to keep what they've stolen. But MS does. At least 79/80ths of it. Peanuts my friend, peanuts.
Since you and the government seem to feel that doing something bad to someone else or doing something to intimidate them or influence their decision qualifies as terrorism, schoolyard bullies could be arrested, armed robbers are terrorists, stalkers, drug dealers, and anyone who threatens someone else could all come under the technical definition of terrorists. The problem is that the definition is far too vague and broad. A lot of people (i.e. Ashcroft) would say that is because terrorists don't always walk around wearing "I am a terrorist" shirts. So the vagueness is there to make sure that they can apply it to terrorists who don't necessarily have 10 pounds of TNT strapped to their waist in the obvious terrorist fashion. Sure, I could accept that if the government would stop applying terrorism laws to crap like this, to drug dealers (they charged a guy with a meth lab of terrorism), and to all kinds of other crimes so that they could have increased powers in those cases. There are reasons that they don't have increased powers in those cases. If they were meant to have it, it would have been granted to them. The FBI has a tendency to abuse the law by stretching them beyond their intended scope. I think this should be considered a terrorist act since the purpose in most cases is to intimidate the accused and influence their decision on how to handle the case. "Plead guilty and we'll drop the terrosim charge (20 years in jail) and you'll just get the 3 years that the other charges carry (the ones actually related to the crime you're charged with). If I were innocent and charged with a 3-year crime, and faced with the prospect of doing 20 years if I lose (yes, sometimes innocent people can lose) I might choose to take a guaranteed 3 years over a possible 23 years. Terrorism I tell you - terrorism.:)
Manage to locally infect one voting machine with a worm. Then when it dials in directly to the main server, it can infect the server, which can then infect any other voting machines that connect to it. Then have the worms DDOS the main servers. Then wipe the results from the memory cards. Fun for everyone. Since most, if not all of the machines run Windows, how hard can it be.
And this isn't even correct. If you're selling physical products (let's say cell phones for example) and you sell $4,000 a day in cell phones, you can't claim the whole $4,000, only the profit that was lost. Let's say you get 25% profit. You lost the $1,000 profit, but the $3,000 in phones are still in your warehouse. You didn't lose them.
This is the perfect example of why the numbers given are far larger than the actual losses.
First, if you have a medium-sized company that has no virus protection or doesn't update it, yes, you're going to lose a hell of a lot, but you're pretty much asking for it. You may not deserve it, but you're asking for it. Also if you're one of the first infected and the AV company hasn't been able to put out definitions yet, but they're usually pretty damned fast.
**Helpdesk hours that are lost answering questions from people with a mailbox full of bounces for stuff they didn't send (or we hope not);**
That's what they're there for. Those costs are already factored into the business. Overtime can be counted for hourly employees, but other than that, if they were going to be paid anyway, it's not extra cost.
**Helpdesk hours that are lost disinfecting the
machines of all those who clicked the attachment. Mostly, the same ones who fell for it last time, too.**
If you don't have good virus protection on your systems, you're a moron. If you just happen to be one of the first companies hit and there aren't definitions out yet, then it's understandable
**t's say you make $20 per hour at your job. The cost of your benefits is probably also about $20 hour, assuming health insurance, etc. Heck, it could be more. But lets go with $40/hour as the total cost of your compensation for this example.**
You can't count most of the benefits because they are the same cost whether you work 40 hours or 80 hours. Overtime and the payroll taxes will go up, but health insurance, 401k, etc. don't increase.
**Now, let's say you lost 30 minutes of productivity to a worm. OK, $20 bucks that your company spent on having you do something other than your job function. But, you're way smarter than most of your colleagues. You didn't click it. You've just wasted 30 minutes initially looking at what it was, deleting more copies that came in, and deleting bounces, and you ever even called the help desk. Most people are probably at one hour, maybe more. Lots more, if they got infected.**
I don't know anyone who spends 30 minutes looking at an e-mail to figure out if it's a virus and another figuring out if they're infected. It's more like 2 minutes of looking at it with a puzzled look before they call the help desk who tells them that they're infected and to please disconnect their network cable.
Now, most (not all) medium-sized business have virus protection, so the only thing they see are calls to the help desk where their antivirus program told them that it quarantined or cleaned a virus. Those calls take about 1 minute apiece.
**If by some chance it works out that the average cost of compensation (salary + benefits) in your company is $40/hour, and you have 100 employees and on average each person lost 30 minutes to the worm (again, I bet it's hard to get the number that low in most companies when a big wrom like this appears), that's $2000 right there. Antivirus software is not even factored in because you either had it already or not, but either way, it's not a directly related expense.
OK, that was the first day. People will deal with more crap in their mailboxes tomorrow, and the day after and quite a few days after. At least for a week, you might expect to have a company-wide average of 30 minutes per person, per day, spent on things related to the worm.
Now we're at $10,000.**
Once again, you can't count the benefits. So let's stick with $20/hr. Now, not all 100 people are going to open the attachment. Once a few do, the word spreads pretty quickly not to open them. Then it's really just a matter of people deleting e-mail out of their mailboxes. And, with the exception of the most extreme infections, that's not hard and doesn't take much time.
By the second day, it's usually tapering off. Everyone got the memo and is simply deleting e-mails. Not much productivity loss there.
Sager laptops (which use the same components as Alienware and Voodoo laptops but in different cases) are cheaper than Dells if you're looking for a high-end laptop. Plus, you don't have to pay the Microsoft tax. Don't buy directly from Sager though. Buy from powernotebooks.com or pctorque.com. Both are cheaper than buying directly from Sager and, unlike Sager iteself, both have unbelievably good support (check resellerratings.com). That's one thing that no other PC company can match Powernotebooks and PCTorque on - service. The support people are actual laptop tech, not training room book-fed.
They bend over backwards to help you and you get responses immediately. Not canned, pre-typed responses, actual e-mails/phone calls.
I bought a Sager 4080. It has a 15" SXGA+ screen that has a glossy/high-contrast coating on it that makes it far clearer than a standard SXGA+ screen. It's hard to make out the individual pixels. It came with a P4 2.8 GHz processor with HT, 800 MHz FSB, 512 MB of PC3200 DDR400, 60 GB 5400 rpm hard drive, 128 MB RADEON 9600, and a built-in webcam.
The whole thing only cost me a little over $1500.
They also have a 5680 model that supports dual-channel DDR and has a UXGA screen and an 8890 model that supports 2 CD/DVD drives and 2 hard drives at the same time (running RAID). Or swap on of those CD/hard drives out with a 2nd battery. It also has a built-in TV tuner card. And a built-in floppy to boot. Anyway, I used to buy only Dell or Toshiba, but now I'm strictly Sager
I have just finished my database with every word in every human language. Therefore any speech written words would be considered a subset of my database. I am charging $1.00 per word. And before everyone goes out and learns German to cut down on royalty fees, just know that German words cost $1.50 since half of them a compound words (blitzkrieg). If you all persist in speaking, I will smite you with a massive media campaign featuring myself talking about the evils of language piracy. Below is an excerpt:
"You know. You spend hours compiling lists of known words and then someone comes along, opens their mouth, and utters a few sounds and they reap all that benefit"
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mean that they would buy it for the purpose of burying it. I just think that Sun has a way of taking potentially great innovations and turning them into bloated crap. In my opinion, it's a corporate culture issue.
So much for all of the advancements Novell was starting to make with Linux. Sun will probably bury it.
Don't turn off your firewalls, regardless of what MS says. I leave mine on while updating and have no problems whatsoever. I install Windows, AV, and firewall. Then plug in the NIC and get an IP address, then pull down updates. DONE! What I NEVER EVER EVER do is turn off my firewall.
I'm not going to comment either way on the whole "America sucks!"/"America rocks!" thread, but I would like to point out the ignorance of the "if you don't like it, go elsewhere" statement. In this country, if you don't like something, you should work to change it. Critcicism can be constructive. Criticism is not in and of itself unpatriotic, though you can take it there if you really want to. Another problem is that going somewhere else doesn't necessarily make a difference. The US tends to exert influence all over the world. So even though you moved to a different country, your new gov. may be making decisions based off of US policy (i.e. Afghanistan, Iraq, UK, etc.) So the "go elsewhere" part of your argument won't necessarily work. Unless you want to move to some place like central/southern Africa, which the US typically ignores. Yes, we may be giving $15 billion in AIDS relief, etc. but ask yourself how much we would be giving Europe if they had several countries where 20-30% of the population had AIDS. It's a matter of comparitive interest. Anyway, that last part went off topic. To sum up the point that I'm trying to get across, if you don't like how things are going in the US, don't go somewhere else. Work to change it. It's your country as much as it is any other citizen's.
Bottom line. If it's on my side of the gateway, they have no right to snoop around. Whether it's determining how many PCs connect to my home network (PC to PC traffic doesn't suck up their bandwidth) or monitoring the traffic on my LAN, it's none of their business. PERIOD. Once the traffic leaves the gateway and starts heading down their cable lines, fine. But whether or not I'm streaming an MPEG, MP3, etc from one PC to another within my home is none of their business. To me that's like having my cable box monitor my DVD player and VCR. Sure they all interconnect, but so what. I don't try to hack into my cable company's billing server because I think they're overbilling me.
I've used both Xandros 1 and 2. It's a great distro to set someone up on if you want to move them from Windows to Linux. It's Debian based. Like Lindow's Click-and-Run Warehouse, users can easily install software from their online repository. They don't have much of a selection (especially during the install). But there is a menu option in their software installation program to add online repositories and you can simply add your desired Debian repository and get access to all of the usual programs you can get to with apt-get. I didn't have any problems installing straight Debian stuff on Xandros. It's not a good distro for Linux power users, but everything is laid out kind of like Windows. And if you buy the version that comes with the Crossover Office plug-in, they can install MS Office. And before everyone jumps on me about using OSS office suites instead to avoid the usual plague of problems with MS Office, it is sometimes the only way to get a user to switch. Most users don't mess around with their OS a whole lot, so switching that with Xandros wouldn't be too hard, but people are REALLY picky about software that they've grown accustomed to. Put them on MS Office and add OpenOffice.org and Evolution and try to migrate them slowly. Anyway. Just my $.02. Xandros is not a power distro, but is great for your typical Windows user.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to go with the AC on this one. If I were to do a search and replace on this article and replace every instance of Apple and OSX with Microsoft and Windows XP, then repost it,the Mac fans would be screaming that this was just another reason why Macs are better. I hate Apple, but love Mac OSX. The same way I hate Microsoft, but love Windows XP. MS has their stupid closed-source proprietary software and Apple has the same insistance on locking people into specific hardware and peripherals. Sorry to break it to you Mac lovers, but the only difference between Apple and Microsoft (the companies and their intentions - not their software) is market share. If Apple had market share in the 90th percentile, they would be using the exact same tactics as MS. Anyway, the bottom line is that it is hipocritical to trash MS for not telling people about a vulnerability until you release the patch and then saying that Apple can do it because they have good intentions.
The link doesn't bring up an article. But you can't really compare Mars and Earth. Completely different atmospheres, soils, etc. Evaporation, the water going subterranean, etc. could explain Mars. A complete shift in Earth's atmosphere within the last few thousand years would be highly noticeable to us. I don't think that the "once" NASA is referring to means a few thousand years ago. It's probably more like millions of years ago. So no, I don't think that Mars' situation could explain the disappearance of a lot of water within the last few thousand years. I have no problems believing that a catastrophic flood hit the area of Mesopotamia. I do have some problems believing that it was world wide. I don't know of any similar stories from the Indus River region, China, or the ancient America's that correspond. Then again, scientists are exploring cities off the coasts of Cuba and other Caribbean islands that are under 2000 ft of water.
Sunken City (Reuters)
We'll just have to wait and see what we find.
You couldn't transfer ISOs because they DO have an attachment limit. I know 3-4 years ago it was something like 16 MB between AOL/Compuserve accounts and just a few MB if it wasn't internal.
Hmm...a little late on the posting but...ouch. Anyway, what is your "rhythm"? What programs do you use? Are you using a Mac or PC notebook? Roughly how long does it take you to get MP3s (or whatever your preferred output format is) from songs that you've downloaded (let's say for 50 songs since I'd prefer to do them in batches)?
Is I-Movie free and am I able to use it on a PC? Or can you give me the name of a free (or cheap) PC-compatible program that will do this?
That would solve the coaster problem. Though it doesn't solve my time problem. I still have to essentially babysit my CD Burner (unless you know a program that will burn to disc, then rip from it - without ejecting the disc in the process.
My complaint about AAC -> CD -> OGG/MP3 would be the fact that I have to continually burn coasters. I like my music in MP3 format because then any of my devices can read them (MP3 car CD player, Creative MuVo Nomad, WinAmp, etc.). I burn my music to CD for my car, but it's still in MP3 format so that I can burn a lot of songs on a single CD. Burning standard audios CDs of every song just so that I can get an MP3 of it is ridiculous. I don't drink enough to use that many coasters.
Here are the specs on my $1550 laptop from PCTorque: P4 2.8 GHz w/HT 512 MB DDR400 (PC3200) 60 GB 5400 rpm hard drive CD-RW/DVD combo 128 MB Radeon 9600 Pro video card Built-in webcam and 7-in-1 card reader Above all, the 15" SXGA+ screen has a high-contrast glossy coating that makes video look like a friggin' HDTV. It's beautiful. Doesn't work well outside due to glare though. You can buy a similar model (5680) for about $50 that has a UXGA screen without the coating and uses dual-channel DDR and has an additional bay for another hard drive or optical drive.
Check out Sagers from PCTorque.com and PowerNotebooks.com. They are as good as the Alienware and Voodoo laptops for hundreds or sometimes even aver a thousand dollars less. And heres a note for those of you buying the more expensive ones - they're all Clevo rebrands. They're made by the same people and "recased" for whatever company made the sale. If you don't believe me, spec out identical Alienwares and Sagers and check out the price difference. The difference between my dream laptop from Alienware or Voodoo and the same one from Sager is almost $1500 (dual HDDs, 1 GB RAM, DVD-RW, etc.) Don't buy directly from Sager though (bad direct support. Buy from PCTorque or PowerNotebooks. I have a Sager 4080 and love it. It kicks ass on BF1942, CoD, and all of my other games. Check out their ratings on ResellerRatings.com.
Here's the problem with the whole "below average for the team" concept. What happens if you have 5 people in a team and every one of them is highly knowledgeable, works 60 hours per week and produces top quality work? One of them is going to be ranked as needing to be disciplined because they are the worst out of the 5. It doesn't matter that they may be in the top 5% of the industry and a workaholic. They still get screwed because of the preconceived notion that a statistical curve exists. I have yet to work anywhere that comes even close to meeting the curve. I've worked with largely lazy groups, where a curve would over-rate most a good portion of them. I've also worked with excellent groups of people where a large portion would be under-rated. If supervisors can't handle the pressure of firing bad employees and keep letting them coast, perhaps it's time for the supervisor to be let go.
know having an accent does not imply stupidity. True, but when you're already stupid AND you have an accent, it makes things more amusing.
So are you agreeing with the comparisons to extrorters and embezzlers. And you're right. It's not like being a common thief. They can only steal from one place at a time. MS extorts money from everyone at all times. Look at their contracts with major PC vendors. Now why is it so hard to buy a major-brand PC without an OS?
$500 million is enormous to most companies, but it's 1/80th of the CASH that MS has in the bank. Not 1/80 of the company's total value, 1/80th of the amount that they can write a check for. Most companies would give far more than 1/80th of their cash if it meant that was the cost of maintaining a monopoly. From a cost/benefit standpoint, MS is getting off easy. That's why certain European countries have started making traffic fines a percentage of a person's income, rather than a flat rate for everyone. $150 will make me think twice about speeding, but it's the price of lunch for a millionaire. It's the same for MS. Let me ask you this. Let's say you lie, cheat, and defraud people in a completely illegal manner for years until you've become the richest man in the world. You have $40 billion in the bank. The fine for having done all of that is $500 million. Do you think that's excessive? You get to keep the other $39.5 BILLION that you extorted from people. In the world of individuals (as opposed to corporations), thieves, extorters, and embezzlers don't get to keep what they've stolen. But MS does. At least 79/80ths of it. Peanuts my friend, peanuts.
Since you and the government seem to feel that doing something bad to someone else or doing something to intimidate them or influence their decision qualifies as terrorism, schoolyard bullies could be arrested, armed robbers are terrorists, stalkers, drug dealers, and anyone who threatens someone else could all come under the technical definition of terrorists. The problem is that the definition is far too vague and broad. A lot of people (i.e. Ashcroft) would say that is because terrorists don't always walk around wearing "I am a terrorist" shirts. So the vagueness is there to make sure that they can apply it to terrorists who don't necessarily have 10 pounds of TNT strapped to their waist in the obvious terrorist fashion. Sure, I could accept that if the government would stop applying terrorism laws to crap like this, to drug dealers (they charged a guy with a meth lab of terrorism), and to all kinds of other crimes so that they could have increased powers in those cases. There are reasons that they don't have increased powers in those cases. If they were meant to have it, it would have been granted to them. The FBI has a tendency to abuse the law by stretching them beyond their intended scope. I think this should be considered a terrorist act since the purpose in most cases is to intimidate the accused and influence their decision on how to handle the case. "Plead guilty and we'll drop the terrosim charge (20 years in jail) and you'll just get the 3 years that the other charges carry (the ones actually related to the crime you're charged with). If I were innocent and charged with a 3-year crime, and faced with the prospect of doing 20 years if I lose (yes, sometimes innocent people can lose) I might choose to take a guaranteed 3 years over a possible 23 years. Terrorism I tell you - terrorism. :)
Manage to locally infect one voting machine with a worm. Then when it dials in directly to the main server, it can infect the server, which can then infect any other voting machines that connect to it. Then have the worms DDOS the main servers. Then wipe the results from the memory cards. Fun for everyone. Since most, if not all of the machines run Windows, how hard can it be.
And this isn't even correct. If you're selling physical products (let's say cell phones for example) and you sell $4,000 a day in cell phones, you can't claim the whole $4,000, only the profit that was lost. Let's say you get 25% profit. You lost the $1,000 profit, but the $3,000 in phones are still in your warehouse. You didn't lose them.
This is the perfect example of why the numbers given are far larger than the actual losses. First, if you have a medium-sized company that has no virus protection or doesn't update it, yes, you're going to lose a hell of a lot, but you're pretty much asking for it. You may not deserve it, but you're asking for it. Also if you're one of the first infected and the AV company hasn't been able to put out definitions yet, but they're usually pretty damned fast. **Helpdesk hours that are lost answering questions from people with a mailbox full of bounces for stuff they didn't send (or we hope not);** That's what they're there for. Those costs are already factored into the business. Overtime can be counted for hourly employees, but other than that, if they were going to be paid anyway, it's not extra cost. **Helpdesk hours that are lost disinfecting the machines of all those who clicked the attachment. Mostly, the same ones who fell for it last time, too.** If you don't have good virus protection on your systems, you're a moron. If you just happen to be one of the first companies hit and there aren't definitions out yet, then it's understandable **t's say you make $20 per hour at your job. The cost of your benefits is probably also about $20 hour, assuming health insurance, etc. Heck, it could be more. But lets go with $40/hour as the total cost of your compensation for this example.** You can't count most of the benefits because they are the same cost whether you work 40 hours or 80 hours. Overtime and the payroll taxes will go up, but health insurance, 401k, etc. don't increase. **Now, let's say you lost 30 minutes of productivity to a worm. OK, $20 bucks that your company spent on having you do something other than your job function. But, you're way smarter than most of your colleagues. You didn't click it. You've just wasted 30 minutes initially looking at what it was, deleting more copies that came in, and deleting bounces, and you ever even called the help desk. Most people are probably at one hour, maybe more. Lots more, if they got infected.** I don't know anyone who spends 30 minutes looking at an e-mail to figure out if it's a virus and another figuring out if they're infected. It's more like 2 minutes of looking at it with a puzzled look before they call the help desk who tells them that they're infected and to please disconnect their network cable. Now, most (not all) medium-sized business have virus protection, so the only thing they see are calls to the help desk where their antivirus program told them that it quarantined or cleaned a virus. Those calls take about 1 minute apiece. **If by some chance it works out that the average cost of compensation (salary + benefits) in your company is $40/hour, and you have 100 employees and on average each person lost 30 minutes to the worm (again, I bet it's hard to get the number that low in most companies when a big wrom like this appears), that's $2000 right there. Antivirus software is not even factored in because you either had it already or not, but either way, it's not a directly related expense. OK, that was the first day. People will deal with more crap in their mailboxes tomorrow, and the day after and quite a few days after. At least for a week, you might expect to have a company-wide average of 30 minutes per person, per day, spent on things related to the worm. Now we're at $10,000.** Once again, you can't count the benefits. So let's stick with $20/hr. Now, not all 100 people are going to open the attachment. Once a few do, the word spreads pretty quickly not to open them. Then it's really just a matter of people deleting e-mail out of their mailboxes. And, with the exception of the most extreme infections, that's not hard and doesn't take much time. By the second day, it's usually tapering off. Everyone got the memo and is simply deleting e-mails. Not much productivity loss there.
Sager laptops (which use the same components as Alienware and Voodoo laptops but in different cases) are cheaper than Dells if you're looking for a high-end laptop. Plus, you don't have to pay the Microsoft tax. Don't buy directly from Sager though. Buy from powernotebooks.com or pctorque.com. Both are cheaper than buying directly from Sager and, unlike Sager iteself, both have unbelievably good support (check resellerratings.com). That's one thing that no other PC company can match Powernotebooks and PCTorque on - service. The support people are actual laptop tech, not training room book-fed. They bend over backwards to help you and you get responses immediately. Not canned, pre-typed responses, actual e-mails/phone calls. I bought a Sager 4080. It has a 15" SXGA+ screen that has a glossy/high-contrast coating on it that makes it far clearer than a standard SXGA+ screen. It's hard to make out the individual pixels. It came with a P4 2.8 GHz processor with HT, 800 MHz FSB, 512 MB of PC3200 DDR400, 60 GB 5400 rpm hard drive, 128 MB RADEON 9600, and a built-in webcam. The whole thing only cost me a little over $1500. They also have a 5680 model that supports dual-channel DDR and has a UXGA screen and an 8890 model that supports 2 CD/DVD drives and 2 hard drives at the same time (running RAID). Or swap on of those CD/hard drives out with a 2nd battery. It also has a built-in TV tuner card. And a built-in floppy to boot. Anyway, I used to buy only Dell or Toshiba, but now I'm strictly Sager
I have just finished my database with every word in every human language. Therefore any speech written words would be considered a subset of my database. I am charging $1.00 per word. And before everyone goes out and learns German to cut down on royalty fees, just know that German words cost $1.50 since half of them a compound words (blitzkrieg). If you all persist in speaking, I will smite you with a massive media campaign featuring myself talking about the evils of language piracy. Below is an excerpt: "You know. You spend hours compiling lists of known words and then someone comes along, opens their mouth, and utters a few sounds and they reap all that benefit"