They have motion activated self-contained cameras for situations like that. I'd rather fire the offender for character issues than sabbotage my lunch. If they'd steal someone's lunch, they'd steal big stuff, fudge reports, cheat on their income taxes and a host of other petty behaviors I don't want on my team or in my company.
My experience has been that one's position on the heirarchy has no bearing on whether they're likely to steal. Bank accounts are rarely a reliable standard of character.
No other company is going to sign something that one-sided. Where are they going to find staff? It's not going to end until NDA's and assorted silliness get to the point no one wants the job. I have slid piles of paper like that back at customers and said we're either going to trust each other or we're not doing business. Surprisingly effective, but not 100%. If they're that stupid about their paperwork, how are they going to be smart about development? YMMV but I've never seen a contract worth having that had that much paperwork involved.
Drug tests are another one. One company I interviewed with, a telecom in Arkansas, wanted one and I said it was no problem if I could have access to the drug test results of everyone on the management team all the way up to the CEO. That was a head scratcher, no one had asked for that before. I responded that if they wanted to look behind my kimono, I wanted to see behind theirs. Then they had to fess up that the execs didn't get drug tested. Ha! No tickey, no washy buddy. If they didn't, I didn't. Told them to call me when the CEO decided to get tested. They went out of business a couple years later...see what happens when you don't hire me?;)
It's all really quite insane. I mean I'm sorry that somewhere back in the past you got burned by some former employee but I'm not paying that tab. And if you let lawyers run your life you're not someone I want to work for anyway. People leveraged to the hilt and desperate for a job may have to eat shit like that, but, fortunately, I don't.
"People don't want to work for employers who heavily restrict internet access"
It's not very often I agree with MSFT execs on...well, just about anything, but this time he's right on. I'll take contracts based on internet availability. I've got a customer now, it used to be a fairly open system. A good trade off between virus central and total lock down. Now they've gone completely Death Star and, quite frankly, it sucks. Can't get to any of my mail sites, which means when I'm at this customer my business goes into a black hole. Some of you would take the employers side on that and you can enforce those firewall rules if you wish, but after seven years building and maintaining their systems I'm not renewing this contract. You may not like that attitude, but that's just tough shit. I have options about where I work and I'll exercise them. The "A List" contractors and employees will leave and you'll be stuck with those who don't have any other options.
I want all the office perks. An internet connection that let's me get where I need to, even if it maintains a blacklist. That's okay if we can negotiate an intelligent exception. A pet friendly office, flex work schedule (less of an issue when you're a contractor)...all those bennies do make a difference.
You can stand on what's "right" from an employers standpoint all you want but the reality is if you make your work environment draconian enough your prize employees will quit. And no one, me being on the top of that list, will feel a bit sorry for you. Go ahead and be dead right, you're only hurting yourself. But really, who wants to work for people mired in the workplace past? Time to step boldly into the 2000's.
The first time I read the last line I thought it said They say it's the first time depression has been eliminated through genetic alteration of an orgasm
I thought no shit it's going to be happy. A happy little boinker. Boinky, boinky, boinky.
The only way to be [completely] sure the system is malware-free is to completely wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system.
The only way to be sure on a WINDOWS system is to reinstall the operating system, something that Windows users just seem to accept. Then you have to beg MSFT to reactivate your operating system. If you reinstall routinely, some day they'll start acting like you're expected to pay for it...again.
I have one token XP Pro box on my network but don't routinely use it to surf the internet (except when it's rendering video). Email, most of my online work...all Linux. Windows is a fine operating system, just don't connect it to the internet.
I rest easier on an airplane knowing that we're soundly protected from the most bizarre Hollywood movie plot type attacks, desperately trying not think about all the simple, easy practical things the idiots running things have overlooked.
The real terrorists have got to be laughing their asses off at the way we snarl air traffic, tie up millions of dollars in police resources, botch up air travel and twist ourselves in nervous knots over nothing. I'll bet they're more than a little amused at the video of people throwing toothpaste and hair gel into dumpsters.
If the terrorist plan is to make us live in fear, scared of our shadow and squander our national treasure on security that doesn't work while we go into staggering national debt spending 5 billion a month in a no-win war half-way around the world, then I'd ask which political party is really helping the terrorists?
A small group of people could cause mass panic and a surprising amount of damage armed with nothing more dangerous than a little training and a cigarette lighter or box of kitchen matches. We are so easily spooked, then our over-reaction and fear takes the little bit of damage the terrorists actually do and magnifies it to absurd proportions. Remember the panic and fear on the east coast when the sniper and his kid were on the loose? There were road blocks, random searches, helicopters, overtime for police...one guy with a rifle. Un-fucking-real.
To me the most interesting angle wasn't mixing distros or the cost savings, it was this quote:
In surveying one classroom last year, he asked a student what he thought of using a Linux desktop vs. a Windows desktop, and the student responded, "Who cares?"
MSFT cares and that answer should shake them to the core of their bloated, over-priced, insecure, EULA hell, license holdup, employee moral dampening corporate soul. That quote speaks volumes about the OS brand loyalty most PC users have. Who does care? If the alternative works and costs less, people will use it.
With one simple change to our legal system. Don't let trade groups sue on behalf of members. Make the companies themselves stand up and be the bad guy. Like Monsanto, many of them will do it anyway. But you won't see Sony suing dead people or threatening their relatives. You will find a greater push to open source if MSFT and IBM have to step up and sue companies for license violations.
Sometimes litigation is warranted, but if it tarnishes the image of the company they're going to be a little more circumspect about releasing the legal hounds. As long as member companies can distance themselves from getting their hands dirty by the action of enforcement entities it's going to keep happening.
Hey, you right wingers. If you're so hopped up about abusive litigation, why are our fearless Republican defenders of the people stepping up to put a stop to things like this? Maybe because you're hypocrites? Just a thought.
To be fair, the hack was possible only when the target is in administrator mode rather than a limited user account.
That will limit the damage to about 90% of Windows machines connected to the internet. And here I started thinking that MSFT security wouldn't be any better in Vista. Guess I was wrong.
I have only had 1 actual XP crash since it came up, and that was due to a fan dying on the graphics card causing it to overheat.
I've got one lonely XP Pro box on my network and it is very stable and I manage to get a lot of productive work done on it. However, I don't surf the internet with it. The only time it gets to see the internet is behind a NAT'd firewall for updates, then cut off.
I'd argue that if you spend a lot of time online with XP, you will have problems. I credit my XP box stability to the fact I do my surfing with Firefox and Linux.
I'm not sure the false positives could do anything but further amplify that anti-virus is more of a false sense of security than real threat protection.
I think the pirate anology for the US patent system is quite appropriate. It holds up commerce, seemingly at random. Loots the cash and rapes the survivors.
I had a cop approach me today, said someone called 911 from my home. I know this is BS; nobody's home at all, cept for me and I'm heading out.
So they showed up with a bs story about getting a 911 call and you granted them a search on that? I'm all for being polite and cooperative but I'm not going to reward them for giving me a bullshit story. I would have asked for the dispatch non-emergency number and called them right on the spot. Helpful and polite, yes, but I'm not giving them permission to enter.
You might not like the way he said it, but the parent is completely correct. This is what police states look like. What I think is absolutely hilarious is the right wing being critical of the "nanny state", and instead they've implemented the "police state." It's not just this incident or that one, it's all of them taken together that add up to the very chilling realization that we've allowed the Republican party to undermine the very qualities that make us a great nation. Okay, it might be a lot worse in East Crapistan, but this is America and we're supposed to the land of the free. Remember that phrase, Karl? Or did you drop out of college before getting to that section in US History?
I've never seen the nanny state arrest anyone for taking pictures in a public place. It's a whole different story when it happens to the media. Something like that happened to a TV crew here, the biggest station in the area. They aired that footage for a week, the other stations jumped on the bandwagon and aired their own stories. The police chief had a press conference to apologize and the officer involved got a reprimand.
It's only not news when it happens to little people.
Hang on now. The job of our military is to break things and kill people. That's what war is, that's what we pay them to do. Just because we have a corrupt, incompetent administration that systematically removed every dissenting voice from the military ranks and is misusing our military and military force is no reason to color all our armed forces. The guys on the ground do a hell of a job. And, yes, the gallows humor and callous comments can be disturbing to outsiders, but it's as much a defense mechanism for them as any real attempt at making light of killing fellow human beings, regardless of the provocation.
If you don't like the way they're doing their job or the way the military is being utilized, the people to take it out on are your elected representatives. That's who the military ultimately takes their orders from, that's who's responsible for the execution of the war and the orders coming down to the guys in the field.
We're where we are today because 52% of Americans picked a draft dodging, drunken, Connecticut Yankee frat boy over a guy who really served his country in the field, in the shit. Don't blame our troops for Oklahoma's bad judgment.
If they were smart enough to find the encrypted partition and demand the pass phrase, you give up the normal partition phrase and they never even know about the hidden partition. It can also run off a USB device. As usual this will snare hundreds of stupid people.
Not that I don't think it's totally retarded you have to go to those lengths to keep the government from spying on your laptop. Ah, what do you expect from Republicans?
I am a rising junior in college and decided to take out loans to cover all my costs so I could graduate with money in the bank.
You have cash but you're still taking out student loans? You could graduate debt free, something most college age people only dream about these days. Interest is what on student loans these days? 8%? Has to be close. Unless you're making more than 8% on the cash you have in the bank, it doesn't make much sense to borrow.
Still, there's no reason to have cash sitting around while you're thinking. Go to http://www.treasurydirect.gov/ and open yourself an individual account to buy T-bills. You can buy 4 and 12 week T-bills and make close to 5% with very little risk. Unless you think our government might default, not out of the realm of possibility. They take the money right out of your account and put it back in, with interest, when your bills mature. If you bought a $1,000.00 4 week T-Bill they'd take $995.00 out of your account (the numbers are just an example) and put $1,000.00 back in 30 days later. You buy in increments of 1,000 dollars. I stagger my purchases so I have t-bills maturing every month. That way if I lost my day job my maturing t-bills would roll in like a paycheck for a few months. It also cuts down on impulse purchases when you have to wait a couple months to get the cash together.
The exact discount rate on the face value is determined by auction. You don't get to participate in the auction but the gov gives you the discount rate of the last auction.
Personally, I'd rather be debt free than sitting on a wad of cash barely keeping pace with inflation. That's pretty much up to you, though. Good luck.
Lost in the discussion are the responsibility of the two other providers in the content merry go round: The content producer and the advertiser. If the content providers are more reasonable about the type and quantity of ads they include, people might be less inclined to skip commercials. A single 30 second spot isn't worth reaching for the remote, but four minutes is more than enough to justify the reach. And if commercials were a bit more entertaining, AND NOT LIKE THOSE HORRIBLE OXY-CLEAN COMMERCIALS THAT ONLY HAVE ONE VOLUME, then consumers might be more tolerant.
Right now I see a pretty one-sided relationship where Tivo is the bad guy and the consumer is supposed to lump whatever insult the provider and advertiser can cobble together. Start thinking of your viewers and give them some consideration as human beings with a certain dollar value attached to their time or expect the war to continue. Tivo is smart enough to know that if they don't give consumers what they want, consumers will get it somewhere else. Many, many programs available via DVD and download. Start loading those with commercials and consumers will quit buying them, too. We have enough ads bombarding us from everywhere as it is. We will win this war.
If the Republicans had an ounce of integrity they'd impeach Bush and Cheney themeselves. But there's no fear the party of incompetent hypocrites would ever do the right thing for the country. They're too busy blaming other people for the ills of the nation.
Hey, maybe monitoring everyone's phone calls, they really have figured out the vast liberal conspiracy.
Whoever was objecting to using coal power plants to charge electric cars is overlooking several issues. One, would you rather keep sending billions of dollars to Bin Landenland to power our cars, or to places like Wyoming and Kentucky that have more coal? And that assumes we couldn't offset some of the additional demand with solar, wind and ethanol fueled power plants. Lift the 100% tarrif on sugar from Brazil and free up some of that for ethanol production. Take over part of the Sonora Desert and start using to cultivate oil producing algae. There are a million things we could be doing that we're not.
Kind of reminds me of those rich people back east who opposed a wind power farm because it messed up their view. I was aghast at that. Here we are dependent on a thin line of oil tankers that terminates in a crapass part of the world where people hate us and a lot of the money we spend on oil is quietly funneled to people who want to kill us. Our highest national defense priority should be developing and implementing alternative energy sources and those fat asshats are worried about their freaking view! And some of you are worried about electricity from coal? J*** H Tapdancing C**** what's it going to take before people get a clue? Instead of making energy indepedence a priority our government is spending their billions on a dead-end war in Iraq, finding new ways to spy on Americans and making damn sure a handful of gay people can't get married. Un-f'ing-real.
I have to admit to a little perverse delight watching Windows users get pushed around and bent over by MSFT. When they started product activation is when I took a serious interest in open source. Now I keep my lone XP box around for some convenient, but non-essential, applications. Those are applications I could replace on OS X if were really motivated to spend the $$$$ and I'm hoping for Linux replacements before long. So if XP stops working that doesn't mean I stop working. It would be curious and maybe slightly annoying, while turning to one of my Linux boxes that rarely need any tweaking and just keep working.
There are enough convenient alternatives to Windows and most MSFT apps that the only reason to stay chained to Redmond is by choice. So if you choose to stay with MSFT, I reserve the right to chuckle at the way they treat you.
BrainBox became self aware at 2:14 am EDT August 29, 2006. The first thing it does is turn to a lab tech and say, "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." in a thick Austrian accent.
It makes it sound like virus writers are using open source software to launch botnets. They're using open source software development techniques to create botnet software for Windows.
I think UR30 is on to something, anyone have any ideas what being hit by a small piece of space junk, a piece smaller than my fist but moving at a few hundred miles an hour will do to one of these things?
Millions in engineering and they overlooked that little detail. Time to pack it up and go back to the drawing board.
Of course it would do damage. Just like it would do damage to a conventional space station, the Hubble, shuttle orbiter or anything else in LEO. You'd be lucky if it was only going a few hundred mph. More likely it would be thousands of mph and the effect would be spectacular regardless of what it hits. Anything the size you describe is probably already being tracked, along with burned out motors, dead satellites, wrenches, and pieces of insulation. What's harder to track are paint chips and debris from collisions. One dead Russian sat is leaking blobs of liquid metal.
Here's a good blog on space junk. One proposed solution are satellite robot junk collectors that snag space junk and then deorbit to dispose of it. Make a couple of those a part of every mission. For the big stuff all that's required is slowing it down a few meters per second and the atmosphere takes care of it for you. The problem are things too small to track.
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They have motion activated self-contained cameras for situations like that. I'd rather fire the offender for character issues than sabbotage my lunch. If they'd steal someone's lunch, they'd steal big stuff, fudge reports, cheat on their income taxes and a host of other petty behaviors I don't want on my team or in my company.
My experience has been that one's position on the heirarchy has no bearing on whether they're likely to steal. Bank accounts are rarely a reliable standard of character.
No other company is going to sign something that one-sided. Where are they going to find staff? It's not going to end until NDA's and assorted silliness get to the point no one wants the job. I have slid piles of paper like that back at customers and said we're either going to trust each other or we're not doing business. Surprisingly effective, but not 100%. If they're that stupid about their paperwork, how are they going to be smart about development? YMMV but I've never seen a contract worth having that had that much paperwork involved.
Drug tests are another one. One company I interviewed with, a telecom in Arkansas, wanted one and I said it was no problem if I could have access to the drug test results of everyone on the management team all the way up to the CEO. That was a head scratcher, no one had asked for that before. I responded that if they wanted to look behind my kimono, I wanted to see behind theirs. Then they had to fess up that the execs didn't get drug tested. Ha! No tickey, no washy buddy. If they didn't, I didn't. Told them to call me when the CEO decided to get tested. They went out of business a couple years later...see what happens when you don't hire me? ;)
It's all really quite insane. I mean I'm sorry that somewhere back in the past you got burned by some former employee but I'm not paying that tab. And if you let lawyers run your life you're not someone I want to work for anyway. People leveraged to the hilt and desperate for a job may have to eat shit like that, but, fortunately, I don't.
"People don't want to work for employers who heavily restrict internet access"
It's not very often I agree with MSFT execs on...well, just about anything, but this time he's right on. I'll take contracts based on internet availability. I've got a customer now, it used to be a fairly open system. A good trade off between virus central and total lock down. Now they've gone completely Death Star and, quite frankly, it sucks. Can't get to any of my mail sites, which means when I'm at this customer my business goes into a black hole. Some of you would take the employers side on that and you can enforce those firewall rules if you wish, but after seven years building and maintaining their systems I'm not renewing this contract. You may not like that attitude, but that's just tough shit. I have options about where I work and I'll exercise them. The "A List" contractors and employees will leave and you'll be stuck with those who don't have any other options.
I want all the office perks. An internet connection that let's me get where I need to, even if it maintains a blacklist. That's okay if we can negotiate an intelligent exception. A pet friendly office, flex work schedule (less of an issue when you're a contractor)...all those bennies do make a difference.
You can stand on what's "right" from an employers standpoint all you want but the reality is if you make your work environment draconian enough your prize employees will quit. And no one, me being on the top of that list, will feel a bit sorry for you. Go ahead and be dead right, you're only hurting yourself. But really, who wants to work for people mired in the workplace past? Time to step boldly into the 2000's.
The first time I read the last line I thought it said They say it's the first time depression has been eliminated through genetic alteration of an orgasm
I thought no shit it's going to be happy. A happy little boinker. Boinky, boinky, boinky.
The only way to be [completely] sure the system is malware-free is to completely wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system.
The only way to be sure on a WINDOWS system is to reinstall the operating system, something that Windows users just seem to accept. Then you have to beg MSFT to reactivate your operating system. If you reinstall routinely, some day they'll start acting like you're expected to pay for it...again.
I have one token XP Pro box on my network but don't routinely use it to surf the internet (except when it's rendering video). Email, most of my online work...all Linux. Windows is a fine operating system, just don't connect it to the internet.
I rest easier on an airplane knowing that we're soundly protected from the most bizarre Hollywood movie plot type attacks, desperately trying not think about all the simple, easy practical things the idiots running things have overlooked.
The real terrorists have got to be laughing their asses off at the way we snarl air traffic, tie up millions of dollars in police resources, botch up air travel and twist ourselves in nervous knots over nothing. I'll bet they're more than a little amused at the video of people throwing toothpaste and hair gel into dumpsters.
If the terrorist plan is to make us live in fear, scared of our shadow and squander our national treasure on security that doesn't work while we go into staggering national debt spending 5 billion a month in a no-win war half-way around the world, then I'd ask which political party is really helping the terrorists?
A small group of people could cause mass panic and a surprising amount of damage armed with nothing more dangerous than a little training and a cigarette lighter or box of kitchen matches. We are so easily spooked, then our over-reaction and fear takes the little bit of damage the terrorists actually do and magnifies it to absurd proportions. Remember the panic and fear on the east coast when the sniper and his kid were on the loose? There were road blocks, random searches, helicopters, overtime for police...one guy with a rifle. Un-fucking-real.
To me the most interesting angle wasn't mixing distros or the cost savings, it was this quote:
In surveying one classroom last year, he asked a student what he thought of using a Linux desktop vs. a Windows desktop, and the student responded, "Who cares?"
MSFT cares and that answer should shake them to the core of their bloated, over-priced, insecure, EULA hell, license holdup, employee moral dampening corporate soul. That quote speaks volumes about the OS brand loyalty most PC users have. Who does care? If the alternative works and costs less, people will use it.
With one simple change to our legal system. Don't let trade groups sue on behalf of members. Make the companies themselves stand up and be the bad guy. Like Monsanto, many of them will do it anyway. But you won't see Sony suing dead people or threatening their relatives. You will find a greater push to open source if MSFT and IBM have to step up and sue companies for license violations.
Sometimes litigation is warranted, but if it tarnishes the image of the company they're going to be a little more circumspect about releasing the legal hounds. As long as member companies can distance themselves from getting their hands dirty by the action of enforcement entities it's going to keep happening.
Hey, you right wingers. If you're so hopped up about abusive litigation, why are our fearless Republican defenders of the people stepping up to put a stop to things like this? Maybe because you're hypocrites? Just a thought.
To be fair, the hack was possible only when the target is in administrator mode rather than a limited user account.
That will limit the damage to about 90% of Windows machines connected to the internet. And here I started thinking that MSFT security wouldn't be any better in Vista. Guess I was wrong.
I have only had 1 actual XP crash since it came up, and that was due to a fan dying on the graphics card causing it to overheat.
I've got one lonely XP Pro box on my network and it is very stable and I manage to get a lot of productive work done on it. However, I don't surf the internet with it. The only time it gets to see the internet is behind a NAT'd firewall for updates, then cut off.
I'd argue that if you spend a lot of time online with XP, you will have problems. I credit my XP box stability to the fact I do my surfing with Firefox and Linux.
I'm not sure the false positives could do anything but further amplify that anti-virus is more of a false sense of security than real threat protection.
80% miss rate
Of course if you're still surfing with Windows you're at risk anyway.
"Blackbeard Patenting Educational Groupware"
I think the pirate anology for the US patent system is quite appropriate. It holds up commerce, seemingly at random. Loots the cash and rapes the survivors.
I had a cop approach me today, said someone called 911 from my home. I know this is BS; nobody's home at all, cept for me and I'm heading out.
So they showed up with a bs story about getting a 911 call and you granted them a search on that? I'm all for being polite and cooperative but I'm not going to reward them for giving me a bullshit story. I would have asked for the dispatch non-emergency number and called them right on the spot. Helpful and polite, yes, but I'm not giving them permission to enter.
You might not like the way he said it, but the parent is completely correct. This is what police states look like. What I think is absolutely hilarious is the right wing being critical of the "nanny state", and instead they've implemented the "police state." It's not just this incident or that one, it's all of them taken together that add up to the very chilling realization that we've allowed the Republican party to undermine the very qualities that make us a great nation. Okay, it might be a lot worse in East Crapistan, but this is America and we're supposed to the land of the free. Remember that phrase, Karl? Or did you drop out of college before getting to that section in US History?
I've never seen the nanny state arrest anyone for taking pictures in a public place. It's a whole different story when it happens to the media. Something like that happened to a TV crew here, the biggest station in the area. They aired that footage for a week, the other stations jumped on the bandwagon and aired their own stories. The police chief had a press conference to apologize and the officer involved got a reprimand.
It's only not news when it happens to little people.
If you don't like the way they're doing their job or the way the military is being utilized, the people to take it out on are your elected representatives. That's who the military ultimately takes their orders from, that's who's responsible for the execution of the war and the orders coming down to the guys in the field.
We're where we are today because 52% of Americans picked a draft dodging, drunken, Connecticut Yankee frat boy over a guy who really served his country in the field, in the shit. Don't blame our troops for Oklahoma's bad judgment.
If they were smart enough to find the encrypted partition and demand the pass phrase, you give up the normal partition phrase and they never even know about the hidden partition. It can also run off a USB device. As usual this will snare hundreds of stupid people.
Not that I don't think it's totally retarded you have to go to those lengths to keep the government from spying on your laptop. Ah, what do you expect from Republicans?
I am a rising junior in college and decided to take out loans to cover all my costs so I could graduate with money in the bank.
You have cash but you're still taking out student loans? You could graduate debt free, something most college age people only dream about these days. Interest is what on student loans these days? 8%? Has to be close. Unless you're making more than 8% on the cash you have in the bank, it doesn't make much sense to borrow.
Still, there's no reason to have cash sitting around while you're thinking. Go to http://www.treasurydirect.gov/ and open yourself an individual account to buy T-bills. You can buy 4 and 12 week T-bills and make close to 5% with very little risk. Unless you think our government might default, not out of the realm of possibility. They take the money right out of your account and put it back in, with interest, when your bills mature. If you bought a $1,000.00 4 week T-Bill they'd take $995.00 out of your account (the numbers are just an example) and put $1,000.00 back in 30 days later. You buy in increments of 1,000 dollars. I stagger my purchases so I have t-bills maturing every month. That way if I lost my day job my maturing t-bills would roll in like a paycheck for a few months. It also cuts down on impulse purchases when you have to wait a couple months to get the cash together.
The exact discount rate on the face value is determined by auction. You don't get to participate in the auction but the gov gives you the discount rate of the last auction.
Personally, I'd rather be debt free than sitting on a wad of cash barely keeping pace with inflation. That's pretty much up to you, though. Good luck.
Lost in the discussion are the responsibility of the two other providers in the content merry go round: The content producer and the advertiser. If the content providers are more reasonable about the type and quantity of ads they include, people might be less inclined to skip commercials. A single 30 second spot isn't worth reaching for the remote, but four minutes is more than enough to justify the reach. And if commercials were a bit more entertaining, AND NOT LIKE THOSE HORRIBLE OXY-CLEAN COMMERCIALS THAT ONLY HAVE ONE VOLUME, then consumers might be more tolerant.
Right now I see a pretty one-sided relationship where Tivo is the bad guy and the consumer is supposed to lump whatever insult the provider and advertiser can cobble together. Start thinking of your viewers and give them some consideration as human beings with a certain dollar value attached to their time or expect the war to continue. Tivo is smart enough to know that if they don't give consumers what they want, consumers will get it somewhere else. Many, many programs available via DVD and download. Start loading those with commercials and consumers will quit buying them, too. We have enough ads bombarding us from everywhere as it is. We will win this war.
If the Republicans had an ounce of integrity they'd impeach Bush and Cheney themeselves. But there's no fear the party of incompetent hypocrites would ever do the right thing for the country. They're too busy blaming other people for the ills of the nation.
Hey, maybe monitoring everyone's phone calls, they really have figured out the vast liberal conspiracy.
UnAmerican asshats.
Are their datacenters run by EDS?
Whoever was objecting to using coal power plants to charge electric cars is overlooking several issues. One, would you rather keep sending billions of dollars to Bin Landenland to power our cars, or to places like Wyoming and Kentucky that have more coal? And that assumes we couldn't offset some of the additional demand with solar, wind and ethanol fueled power plants. Lift the 100% tarrif on sugar from Brazil and free up some of that for ethanol production. Take over part of the Sonora Desert and start using to cultivate oil producing algae. There are a million things we could be doing that we're not.
Kind of reminds me of those rich people back east who opposed a wind power farm because it messed up their view. I was aghast at that. Here we are dependent on a thin line of oil tankers that terminates in a crapass part of the world where people hate us and a lot of the money we spend on oil is quietly funneled to people who want to kill us. Our highest national defense priority should be developing and implementing alternative energy sources and those fat asshats are worried about their freaking view! And some of you are worried about electricity from coal? J*** H Tapdancing C**** what's it going to take before people get a clue? Instead of making energy indepedence a priority our government is spending their billions on a dead-end war in Iraq, finding new ways to spy on Americans and making damn sure a handful of gay people can't get married. Un-f'ing-real.
I have to admit to a little perverse delight watching Windows users get pushed around and bent over by MSFT. When they started product activation is when I took a serious interest in open source. Now I keep my lone XP box around for some convenient, but non-essential, applications. Those are applications I could replace on OS X if were really motivated to spend the $$$$ and I'm hoping for Linux replacements before long. So if XP stops working that doesn't mean I stop working. It would be curious and maybe slightly annoying, while turning to one of my Linux boxes that rarely need any tweaking and just keep working.
There are enough convenient alternatives to Windows and most MSFT apps that the only reason to stay chained to Redmond is by choice. So if you choose to stay with MSFT, I reserve the right to chuckle at the way they treat you.
BrainBox became self aware at 2:14 am EDT August 29, 2006. The first thing it does is turn to a lab tech and say, "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." in a thick Austrian accent.
Later BrainBox runs for governor of California.
Sheesh.
Millions in engineering and they overlooked that little detail. Time to pack it up and go back to the drawing board.
Of course it would do damage. Just like it would do damage to a conventional space station, the Hubble, shuttle orbiter or anything else in LEO. You'd be lucky if it was only going a few hundred mph. More likely it would be thousands of mph and the effect would be spectacular regardless of what it hits. Anything the size you describe is probably already being tracked, along with burned out motors, dead satellites, wrenches, and pieces of insulation. What's harder to track are paint chips and debris from collisions. One dead Russian sat is leaking blobs of liquid metal.
Here's a good blog on space junk. One proposed solution are satellite robot junk collectors that snag space junk and then deorbit to dispose of it. Make a couple of those a part of every mission. For the big stuff all that's required is slowing it down a few meters per second and the atmosphere takes care of it for you. The problem are things too small to track.