I was suprised at the naiveté of the original topic heading. With all the security breaches that hit the newspapers these days (and all that don't!), I would expect that physical destruction of hard drives that are retired would certainly be the written standard, even if it's not always practiced. It's easy and cheap with desktop systems, sort of understandable how physical destruction might not happen for certain laptops though.
The contents of your computer are important and need to make the migration from your new system to old system. So, having a real backup of the system contents is a critical part of daily operation and migration as well. This is even more important for servers than desktops.
So, the cockammamie thing about all this is that the White House seems to be insisting on a pitifully poor system of back up and continuity, or are lying about why this poor system exists. For everybody else, doing this right is necessary to stay in business. For the White House, it's a violation of federal law to fail to keep these records.
Of course, some people don't seem to think that federal law applies to them, do they?
Actually, I think the situation is actually much worse than this.
There are lots of reasons beyond code quality that a company might choose to outsource some program functionality of variable degrees of goodness. Perhaps there's better support, perhaps it's cheaper than developing and maintaining it internally. Perhaps the new module has similar functionality but the vendor provides it as a part of something with greater overall scope (in my past lives, a lot of internally written code existed to provide a subset of functionality of something that would have been prohibitively expensive to license because of all the stuff we wouldn't have used!).
If I had developed function x for a company and that module was being replaced, it's not a far stretch of the imagination that I would continue to work on code in that general area. Depending on how "black box" the new functions are, I might even see the internal workings of the licensed code. Even if I never saw the implementation, I would certainly see the interfaces and architecture.
If that's the case, then my involvement with a similar open source project is potentially quite toxic. The open source project is tainted by contact with somebody's proprietary work. Certainly, the external vendor isn't going to be appreciative of what's going on, despite any statement of good intent on the part of the programmer.
And this programmer is still an employee of the company that's bought the license, almost certainly including terms to honor the intellectual property. So, it's not only a matter of the external vendor being mad at an individual working on an open source project, this person is an employee of a licensee, and the licensee granted permission and transferred copyright on what is becoming a competitive product.
On top of that, if the employee wants to continue to actually work on the open source project, they're in continued violation of their contract because what they develop belongs to the company.
This one is so easy that it's a total no-brainer. If they release the original code for somebody to open source, then they are open to liability and litigation. The well-meaning but naive employee will probably lose their job. Or they can just say "no" and have no hassles.
The only way that you'll get this sort of copyright release from management is if it's dead-ended work - the company isn't working on it anymore and nobody else is either. And, I imagine that most companies would probably go even farther than that and say that the employees that worked on this code probably can't work on the open source project anymore either.
Now, if it meets these criteria - it's really being cut loose for the benefit of previously uninvolved parties, then it really has the possibility of being positive for the company without downside.
AC here has highlighted the key point which is that Universal must make a good faith attempt to protect their trademarked property or lose it.
The solution for the guy who got the warning letter is probably even easier than what AC suggested. Perhaps the guy selling CafePress shirts sold thousands of shirts that violate copyright licensing, and made a ton of money. But the chances of that are actually happening are pretty slim. If he makes a reasonable showing that he sold some nominal number of items and didn't really make a significant profit from it and agrees to not sell them anymore, that will probably end the issue. A real accounting of costs would be better, and having a lawyer present it would help even more, but Universal will only press this if there's enough money coming out of it to make it worth doing (unlikely) or if they're trying to make an example of somebody (also unlikely even if they keep this up). CafePress probably made more profit from this than the originally cited guy did.
As will be pointed out endless times, if somebody says "hey, fanboy, help me promote this movie" you probably shouldn't plan on getting rich from it. That doesn't mean a smart guy coudln't get some bucks for it, but that meant asking questions up front like "how much will I get paid?" and "how about licensing?" instead of assuming that these were being granted.
Government information is really not very different than corporate information in that most of the security issues come from inside rather than out. People need to have access to information to do their jobs, but it's the abuse by authorized personnel that is the most common problem. Of course, what you actually ever hear about is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
People will look at whistleblowers in different ways. In many of the recent cases regarding disclosure of questionable Bush programs, the real situation here is that there exists a "proper" mechanism to raise issues with regards to the ethics and morals of government actions, and a big part of the problem is that Congress has forsaken it's oversight responsibility and short-circuited the governments ability to correct it's problems internally. The House Republicans have chosen not to pursue ethics violations, billing irregularities, and issues of constitutional powers. That's what causes these leaks to the press - right-wing zealots may say that people have done this to hawk books, but, even if that were true, it a smoke screen to cover the fact that many of these programs are clear violations of the law as it has been practiced through the pre-Bush history of the US.
Of course, there are unwanted side effects of security programs like this. PKI infrastructure can get screwed up ("but the government won't screw this up!" ha, ha, ha) and that will prevent people from doing their jobs, possibly at critical times. It also creates a new and very potent point of attack for those who would wish to do us harm. Being able to neutralize the military or government though the security infrastructure is the kind of attack that they are currently least able to defend against - thicker armor and taller walls won't stop a mole or hacker.
Even when it's not broken, these sorts of measures can pose a challenge. In the immediately post-9/11 days, people talked about the lame condition of the FBI information systems; that they were completely unable to perform the equivalent of a simple Google search across their own databases. I think old technology was a part of the problem, but the bigger problem was that that information needed to be compartmentalized for security reasons, just as it's intended to be. You *don't* want to have a global Google search available to all employees across classified data. That compartmentalization will only grow as security meausures increase. That's not a reason to not secure data, but certainly will have an effect.
If Google really wants to "do no evil", then they need to use this technology to recognize that a commercial just started, and turn the darn volume down! I'm a reasonable guy - they don't need to turn the volume off or skip over the commercial (although they are welcome to do this), just turn it down to the point where the overcompressed signal is not blasting me out of my brain. It's almost impossible to quietly watch any 10PM network TV show without getting blasted by the commercials for the next horror/exploding action movie that's in theaters.
My favorite "pointless thing that you notice" in the original Star Wars was when Obi-wan tells Luke after the jawa vehicle attack "These blast points are too accurate for anyone but Imperial stormtroopers." Those troopers basically didn't hit anything they were aiming at for the next 2 movies/6 years!
I too have the laserdisc versions both of the original commercial release and the remastered edition. Lucase wants our money. How long can it be before the "super-original" version comes out where the scrolling text starts with "Star Wars" instead of "Episode IV:A New Hope"? Now that would be something!
I guess this is possible and you know your situation better then I do, but the E911 system requires new hardware that most phones don't have so I think it's unlikely that this is the reason that Verizon didn't want to turn your phone back on. Probably more likely that it was based on a radio system that they were no longer supporting. I imagine that most of the carriers don't want to reactivate old analog AMPS phones for regular service (they have longer range but eat much more bandwidth). My first digital cell phone was a PacBell Wireless phone. Two or three mergers later, I have service with Cingular who is the same company but along they way, they converted most of their line to a different cell frequency. Maybe the Verizon customer service person had no clue?
All that said, the carrier or government can find your approximate position with a conventional (non-E911) phone by triangulation between different antennae that are picking up your phone. Since digital cells are smaller in size, they can see your position more accurately that way than with an analog phone. I have no idea whether the cell phone infrastructure has a giant regional brain that is making the decision about which receiver should be live among the ones that are getting your signal or whether that decision is distributed among the microcell routers, but at some level, if you are visible to more than one microcell your position becomes calculable.
Man, you didn't even capitalize "Bible". I'm going to write you up and turn you in to the BAA. Where's my $100?
I don't think that "conservatives get all their facts from the bible" is a typical liberal attitude at all. In fact, it's pretty clear to me that there's a big vein of people who call themselves conservatives and thump the Bible but clearly don't let what's in there sink too deeply into their skulls or lives. Pat Robertson, obviously didn't read all the way up to the "Thou shalt not kill" when referring to foreign heads of state. What? Oh, I see, Pat Robertson *isn't* a conservative? (For the record, I suspect that you and I might well agree that Pat Robertson is a nut).
Think this is a ridiculous argument? Do you really believe that this is IN ANY WAY different than what the BAA is trying to acheive at UCLA?
It's that kind of ignorance that kills your credibility.
Really now. It's the university's responsibility to decide who will teach the student body and how. There's nothing wrong with a professor having strong beliefs and advocating them, as long as it's within the boundaries that the university draws for their acceptable behavior. A faculty member can expouse a liberal or conservative viewpoint but they better be ready to listen and engage with a student's counter arguments should they arise if they want to meet their responsibilities as a teacher. I don't even think there's anything wrong with students making a list of where teachers stand and making decisions about who's class they take based on that (again, this swings both liberal and conservative).
But if a group like BAA wants to use this sort of list to influence the viewpoints that are presented by teachers executing their jobs within the guidelines of the university, I think that's wrong. And I hope the universities fight it tooth and nail, as I'm sure they're ready to do. If you think that the purpose of BAA is for anything *other* than trying to organize efforts to gag teachers who's viewpoints they see unacceptable, then again, I think this is exactly why your credibility is questioned.
When Apple puts out the "Manuel Special Edition" preloaded with all the episodes and a "He's from Barcelona" hat, you can find me up that the head of the line.
I'd be curious to how due dilligence is done on a product like this, especially how it would be scanned for GPL'ed code. The availability of source code or a guide to walk the reviewer through it is probably even more highly restricted when you're talking about security/DRM stuff like this. The purchaser is buying this software so they don't have to develop it internally and their internal resources are unlikely to be as expert at this as the vendor. Sony could hire another DRM firm to review it, but of course, first4 would never go for having their source reviewed by a competitor.
I don't know how big first4 is, but the problem here is the closely-related inverse of the SCO/IBM battle. There exists two worlds of code and transfers between them are dangerous grounds at this point. The big difference here is about visibility - if proprietary code has been illegally integrated into an open codebase, then that will be visible to the world. When GPL code is illegally integrated into proprietary code then it's only by happenstance that it will be uncovered as it has been here. first4 has fallen prey to the temptation of cribbing and ultimately stealing from the GPL to save some time and sought to obsfuscate to cover their tracks. How many thousands of products are like this to one extent or another today?
The way big corporations protect their own interests here is partly by having a big enough stick to have an opportunity to do a source review, perhaps with an external expert but mostly they do this by industrial-strength indemnification clauses in their contracts that are triggered by functional flaws or copyright/GPL infractions. first4 is already burnt toast on this - they easily could be sued for the full costs of the recall, legal fees. But it's the damage to the SonyBMG name that would be most costly, I think. If this is a smaller company, then Sony will torch the company and their insurers. And if turns out that they're not able to pony up, I suspect that they will start torching the chain of SonyBMG employees all the way up the chain that selected the vendor and strategy.
I certainly agree with your statement (although I don't particularly like that practice), but that's different than what I meant. The MSRP (independent of greed) for a Prius is somewhat higher than that of a Corolla tweaked to be similarly outfitted and *that* difference in price reflects a difference in cost which is due to the volume of production.
There's no fixed relationship between costs and selling price - the manufacturer sets it as part of their business model. I wouldn't be surprised if the incremental cost to manufacture a Prius is actually much more than then difference that makes it to the sticker, but Toyota could well be eating some profits to gain marketshare or put a stake in the ground that will be a profitable point for them down the line.
Congrats on your new wheels. I thought about buying one probably a year ago, and at that time in Northern California, you paid the sticker price for them, no more, no less but had a 9-12 month wait. I suspect with popularity and high visibility of the Prius now (definitely the best of the hybrids in my mind) it's probably hard for the greed factor not to set in.
As will be pointed out countless times, a big part of the reason why hybrids cost more is because there aren't as many of them now. Their presence creates more demand for things like D-cell sized NiMH batteries (I think that's what a Prius uses, but I could be wrong on that) which in turn causes their price to go down as volume increases. Whether or not the current premium reflects the true price delta at this time or whether it's just what Toyota decided the market could bear is an exercise for the reader (and sorry if I'm commenting on something addressed in the original post - it's already Slashdotted).
In my book, being nice to the environment is good enough reason to consider a hybrid if the vehicle can perform all the tasks that you want of it in an adequate way, independently of price of price of operation. For people tooling around on gov't business it would be nice if it were good enough for them too, but I think that your dad's situation is exactly right for them too - if it costs more and dollars are the bottom line, then don't do it. The process of doing what he did is actually the best thing that anybody can do - rather than an emotional buying decision or a green-conscious decision, he did a sober cost-benefit analysis for his business' situation and decided the mix wasn't quite there yet. The salesmen from Toyota can now report that up the chain, and the kind of analysis that he did is the strongest incentive that they have to fix the mix to sell more vehicles.
Just to be accurate, dBs are logarithmic so 150dB is 10x the energy of 140dB, but you brain perceives it as only twice as loud (before it melts into goo). That's why they're "decibels". An increase from 14 Bels to 15 Bels is perceived as a doubling in volume.
I think that military jets taking off will exceed 120dB when you're this close and I suspect that the pilot can exceed that level significantly if they decide to operate their plane like that.
It's hard for me to believe that a smoke detector is *only* 80-90 dB though.
I guess I must be the only person on/. that watches Nip/Tuck. It's a series on FX network about two plastic surgeons in Miami. The season opener this year was exactly this story, but I didn't realize it was a real case.
It was a good show the first year, slipped a little in the second and has went off on an extremely violent/misogynistic tear this year.
CNN carried a press conference with Condoleeza Rice, the US Secretary of State, who commented that there had been many offers of financial aid from foreign nations and that none had been refused.
That was all fine and good, but the next question was from another reporter who asked, "but isn't it true that none of these donations have actually been accepted yet?" Yup, you guessed it, that was correct - the offers are being recorded but not being accepted by the US. Don't ask me why (although seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if that is a process that might take some time).
Another question followed up on a comment from Rice that Sri Lanka, which is poor and still rebuilding from the tsunami, had made a pledge of an undislosed amount. The reporter asked whether this made any sense since this was basically giving back US foreign aid to Sri Lanka.
It's sort of interesting to watch these press conferences as you see they pretty much alternate puffball questions from shills with (often ridiculously accusatory) questions from the other side. Just another sign of the stupidly polarized political environment around here these days. Imagine trying to drive down the street if your only steering mechanism was full-lock left and full-lock right. Grrr...
That title, directly from the Variety review cited in the original posting.
How could the body odor *not* be stratospheric when the geeks who show up for the first week have been in line for at least a week (and, from the tone of the AICN review, possibly for the last 28 years)?:-)
That's "The Emmy-Award Winning William Shatner" to you, bub...
If there's room on TV for a "Chasing Farrah" reality show, then it's only a question whether Shatner or Nimoy is next. Spock's got the big teeth, and I'm sure that Shatner's nipples are at least as large as Farrah's!
Interesting that they wrote an article on this. I bought a 2003 GMC Yukon (e.g. giant SUV). I hadn't had an American car for many years, but this one has been really great.
Except for the occasional climate control bug, almost exactly as in the article. Sometimes, with no apparent external factors, the climate control system just decides to cook my in the driver's seat. Usually happens on days which are neither excessively warm or cold. In the Yukon, there's three climate zones, and the other too are just fine, perhaps gentle A/C. My side, scorching Hades, since heating and A/C are what American cars are best at. No dinking with the controls helps, or pounding on the sensor holes. "Rebooting" the car fixes it every time, but it's pretty annoying. Usually this problem crops up in the morning, so I don't realize that I'm in the kiln until the engine warms up and I'm slogging along in freeway traffic. Not the best time to reboot.
But it's never a good time to reboot, is it?
Re:Comprehensive interviews are very important.
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Defining Google
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For what it's worth, it's been my experience that the original Coward's comment is more correct. Make the right environment and choose the right people and most of them will be quite happy to stay.
But when that powerful original culture and vision (oh, god there are those words, but it's absolutely true) is disippated because the company is getting bigger with the wrong people, or the investors want to kick out the founders and put in "experienced management" or the company just starts to "do evil", then the exodus will happen and happen fast.
There's nothing better than being in a place and team that's "right". The minute the talented people feel that they're carrying the guy in the next cube who shouldn't be there or their idiot boss who got hired because somebody had to do the budget and reviews, they're gone because they know it can be better.
Some people's essential nature is to be entrepreneurial and to strike out on their own - of course, only a tiny percentage of them are successful. I think there's a large number of very talented people who would gladly stay in the right environment. Ask your friend sometime if they left MS because it changed, and you may be surprised.
I consider myself fortunate to have started working at Apple in 1981, when it was heaven and hell at the same time, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I saw a big chunk of the old-timers leave within a couple of years of the IPO because it wasn't the same, although I loved it then. And I left to a startup in the early 90's because culturally it had totally turned for me (and this, before the "bad years" of Gil Amelio and before the return of Steve). In the time since, I was both the "idiot boss" and the guy that made the world right, so I've had a chance to see that from both sides.
Perhaps mixing Tim O'Reilly with the others was intended to cause a combustion to power the spacecraft. Why, just mixing Tim O'Reilly with Karl Rove alone would produce enough heat to light Sebastopol for 6 months.
I have a Samsonite Rafter as well and would recommend it highly. I got a free Targus Blacktop pack when I bought something in the past, and the feel and construction are definitely a step below the Samsonite. I don't think wearability will be as good as well, as it looks like there's much less tacking and reinforcement at the stress points on the straps.
The Rafter has a protected sleeve for the laptop which would be nearest your back. Between you and the laptop, there are two corrugated plastic stiffeners which give the pack some structure when it's on your back, and a sort of padded sleeve that protects it from the other stuff in your pack. If you don't like the stiffeners (you will if you actually carry a laptop in there, but may not if you're carrying lighter stuff), then they can be removed.
There's a lot of pockets, and they have those gusset areas so you can unzip the pack fully but things won't fall out the sides. There's a pouch on the top intended for a CD player. There's a little porthole for headphones. I don't carry anything like that, but there's a little pouch that was supposed to hold the player again toward your back which is exactly the right size for me to carry 4-5 CDs in slim jewel boxes, so I have a good place to carry some blanks.
There's a good pen holder, a shock cord thing so you can carry a jacket outside the pack, and big rubber things on the zipper which are easy to grab. Also there are two zippered side pockets that are just right for 16oz water bottles, and elastic mesh holders outside that that look like water bottle holders (and, in my experience, will drop a bottle every time). The straps are well padded and long if you are an XXL geek like me. I don't know what you call that cross strap that connects the straps beneath your rib cage, but this pack doesn't have that, which is good in my book.
Even when you're not carrying a laptop, you'll find that it's an excellent backpack.
The bad part is that I think very large notebooks don't fit very well. I have an IBM T40 which is thin and not particularly small, but if you have a larger laptop (15" display or larger) then I don't know if it will fit. That Targus pack I have would definitely hold a larger laptop.
Before I got this Samsonite, I had a very nice (but more costly) Timberland bag. It had a better padded computer area, but was less functional in general. The materials seemed nicer in this pack vs. the Samsonite, but it didn't hold up as well as the Rafter is doing now, so maybe my judgement here is faulty.
One other bad thing about Targus or Kensington packs are that they sort of telegraph the fact that you have a laptop in there. With something like a Samsonite or Timberland, you're definitely incognito.
Man, I totally agree... Perhaps it's just the Brit jargon, but I just barely can understand what they're talking about in the article (and I don't think this is actually because of jargon!).
If this is what I think it says, then it's sort of clever, but hard to believe that anybody thinks you can "scrub out" a sharp, big image of the Smirnoff logo and not think that they will run afoul of the need for advertising permits.
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Excellent post.
I was suprised at the naiveté of the original topic heading. With all the security breaches that hit the newspapers these days (and all that don't!), I would expect that physical destruction of hard drives that are retired would certainly be the written standard, even if it's not always practiced. It's easy and cheap with desktop systems, sort of understandable how physical destruction might not happen for certain laptops though.
The contents of your computer are important and need to make the migration from your new system to old system. So, having a real backup of the system contents is a critical part of daily operation and migration as well. This is even more important for servers than desktops.
So, the cockammamie thing about all this is that the White House seems to be insisting on a pitifully poor system of back up and continuity, or are lying about why this poor system exists. For everybody else, doing this right is necessary to stay in business. For the White House, it's a violation of federal law to fail to keep these records.
Of course, some people don't seem to think that federal law applies to them, do they?
Actually, I think the situation is actually much worse than this.
There are lots of reasons beyond code quality that a company might choose to outsource some program functionality of variable degrees of goodness. Perhaps there's better support, perhaps it's cheaper than developing and maintaining it internally. Perhaps the new module has similar functionality but the vendor provides it as a part of something with greater overall scope (in my past lives, a lot of internally written code existed to provide a subset of functionality of something that would have been prohibitively expensive to license because of all the stuff we wouldn't have used!).
If I had developed function x for a company and that module was being replaced, it's not a far stretch of the imagination that I would continue to work on code in that general area. Depending on how "black box" the new functions are, I might even see the internal workings of the licensed code. Even if I never saw the implementation, I would certainly see the interfaces and architecture.
If that's the case, then my involvement with a similar open source project is potentially quite toxic. The open source project is tainted by contact with somebody's proprietary work. Certainly, the external vendor isn't going to be appreciative of what's going on, despite any statement of good intent on the part of the programmer.
And this programmer is still an employee of the company that's bought the license, almost certainly including terms to honor the intellectual property. So, it's not only a matter of the external vendor being mad at an individual working on an open source project, this person is an employee of a licensee, and the licensee granted permission and transferred copyright on what is becoming a competitive product.
On top of that, if the employee wants to continue to actually work on the open source project, they're in continued violation of their contract because what they develop belongs to the company.
This one is so easy that it's a total no-brainer. If they release the original code for somebody to open source, then they are open to liability and litigation. The well-meaning but naive employee will probably lose their job. Or they can just say "no" and have no hassles.
The only way that you'll get this sort of copyright release from management is if it's dead-ended work - the company isn't working on it anymore and nobody else is either. And, I imagine that most companies would probably go even farther than that and say that the employees that worked on this code probably can't work on the open source project anymore either.
Now, if it meets these criteria - it's really being cut loose for the benefit of previously uninvolved parties, then it really has the possibility of being positive for the company without downside.
AC here has highlighted the key point which is that Universal must make a good faith attempt to protect their trademarked property or lose it.
The solution for the guy who got the warning letter is probably even easier than what AC suggested. Perhaps the guy selling CafePress shirts sold thousands of shirts that violate copyright licensing, and made a ton of money. But the chances of that are actually happening are pretty slim. If he makes a reasonable showing that he sold some nominal number of items and didn't really make a significant profit from it and agrees to not sell them anymore, that will probably end the issue. A real accounting of costs would be better, and having a lawyer present it would help even more, but Universal will only press this if there's enough money coming out of it to make it worth doing (unlikely) or if they're trying to make an example of somebody (also unlikely even if they keep this up). CafePress probably made more profit from this than the originally cited guy did.
As will be pointed out endless times, if somebody says "hey, fanboy, help me promote this movie" you probably shouldn't plan on getting rich from it. That doesn't mean a smart guy coudln't get some bucks for it, but that meant asking questions up front like "how much will I get paid?" and "how about licensing?" instead of assuming that these were being granted.
Whatever for?
If it wasn't for the Society, there would be nobody to get "First Post"!
Government information is really not very different than corporate information in that most of the security issues come from inside rather than out. People need to have access to information to do their jobs, but it's the abuse by authorized personnel that is the most common problem. Of course, what you actually ever hear about is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
People will look at whistleblowers in different ways. In many of the recent cases regarding disclosure of questionable Bush programs, the real situation here is that there exists a "proper" mechanism to raise issues with regards to the ethics and morals of government actions, and a big part of the problem is that Congress has forsaken it's oversight responsibility and short-circuited the governments ability to correct it's problems internally. The House Republicans have chosen not to pursue ethics violations, billing irregularities, and issues of constitutional powers. That's what causes these leaks to the press - right-wing zealots may say that people have done this to hawk books, but, even if that were true, it a smoke screen to cover the fact that many of these programs are clear violations of the law as it has been practiced through the pre-Bush history of the US.
Of course, there are unwanted side effects of security programs like this. PKI infrastructure can get screwed up ("but the government won't screw this up!" ha, ha, ha) and that will prevent people from doing their jobs, possibly at critical times. It also creates a new and very potent point of attack for those who would wish to do us harm. Being able to neutralize the military or government though the security infrastructure is the kind of attack that they are currently least able to defend against - thicker armor and taller walls won't stop a mole or hacker.
Even when it's not broken, these sorts of measures can pose a challenge. In the immediately post-9/11 days, people talked about the lame condition of the FBI information systems; that they were completely unable to perform the equivalent of a simple Google search across their own databases. I think old technology was a part of the problem, but the bigger problem was that that information needed to be compartmentalized for security reasons, just as it's intended to be. You *don't* want to have a global Google search available to all employees across classified data. That compartmentalization will only grow as security meausures increase. That's not a reason to not secure data, but certainly will have an effect.
I think this is exactly right.
If Google really wants to "do no evil", then they need to use this technology to recognize that a commercial just started, and turn the darn volume down! I'm a reasonable guy - they don't need to turn the volume off or skip over the commercial (although they are welcome to do this), just turn it down to the point where the overcompressed signal is not blasting me out of my brain. It's almost impossible to quietly watch any 10PM network TV show without getting blasted by the commercials for the next horror/exploding action movie that's in theaters.
Hilarious!
My favorite "pointless thing that you notice" in the original Star Wars was when Obi-wan tells Luke after the jawa vehicle attack "These blast points are too accurate for anyone but Imperial stormtroopers." Those troopers basically didn't hit anything they were aiming at for the next 2 movies/6 years!
I too have the laserdisc versions both of the original commercial release and the remastered edition. Lucase wants our money. How long can it be before the "super-original" version comes out where the scrolling text starts with "Star Wars" instead of "Episode IV:A New Hope"? Now that would be something!
I guess this is possible and you know your situation better then I do, but the E911 system requires new hardware that most phones don't have so I think it's unlikely that this is the reason that Verizon didn't want to turn your phone back on. Probably more likely that it was based on a radio system that they were no longer supporting. I imagine that most of the carriers don't want to reactivate old analog AMPS phones for regular service (they have longer range but eat much more bandwidth). My first digital cell phone was a PacBell Wireless phone. Two or three mergers later, I have service with Cingular who is the same company but along they way, they converted most of their line to a different cell frequency. Maybe the Verizon customer service person had no clue?
All that said, the carrier or government can find your approximate position with a conventional (non-E911) phone by triangulation between different antennae that are picking up your phone. Since digital cells are smaller in size, they can see your position more accurately that way than with an analog phone. I have no idea whether the cell phone infrastructure has a giant regional brain that is making the decision about which receiver should be live among the ones that are getting your signal or whether that decision is distributed among the microcell routers, but at some level, if you are visible to more than one microcell your position becomes calculable.
I'm having a really hard time thinking of any way that they could have been more cavalier about this sensitive financial information.
Anyone, anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
If I allow somebody to cache my information, I would hope that they would at least try to protect it, rather than delivering to the world at large!
Man, you didn't even capitalize "Bible". I'm going to write you up and turn you in to the BAA. Where's my $100?
I don't think that "conservatives get all their facts from the bible" is a typical liberal attitude at all. In fact, it's pretty clear to me that there's a big vein of people who call themselves conservatives and thump the Bible but clearly don't let what's in there sink too deeply into their skulls or lives. Pat Robertson, obviously didn't read all the way up to the "Thou shalt not kill" when referring to foreign heads of state. What? Oh, I see, Pat Robertson *isn't* a conservative? (For the record, I suspect that you and I might well agree that Pat Robertson is a nut).
Think this is a ridiculous argument? Do you really believe that this is IN ANY WAY different than what the BAA is trying to acheive at UCLA?
It's that kind of ignorance that kills your credibility.
Really now. It's the university's responsibility to decide who will teach the student body and how. There's nothing wrong with a professor having strong beliefs and advocating them, as long as it's within the boundaries that the university draws for their acceptable behavior. A faculty member can expouse a liberal or conservative viewpoint but they better be ready to listen and engage with a student's counter arguments should they arise if they want to meet their responsibilities as a teacher. I don't even think there's anything wrong with students making a list of where teachers stand and making decisions about who's class they take based on that (again, this swings both liberal and conservative).
But if a group like BAA wants to use this sort of list to influence the viewpoints that are presented by teachers executing their jobs within the guidelines of the university, I think that's wrong. And I hope the universities fight it tooth and nail, as I'm sure they're ready to do. If you think that the purpose of BAA is for anything *other* than trying to organize efforts to gag teachers who's viewpoints they see unacceptable, then again, I think this is exactly why your credibility is questioned.
Fawlty Towers would be great.
When Apple puts out the "Manuel Special Edition" preloaded with all the episodes and a "He's from Barcelona" hat, you can find me up that the head of the line.
I'd be curious to how due dilligence is done on a product like this, especially how it would be scanned for GPL'ed code. The availability of source code or a guide to walk the reviewer through it is probably even more highly restricted when you're talking about security/DRM stuff like this. The purchaser is buying this software so they don't have to develop it internally and their internal resources are unlikely to be as expert at this as the vendor. Sony could hire another DRM firm to review it, but of course, first4 would never go for having their source reviewed by a competitor.
I don't know how big first4 is, but the problem here is the closely-related inverse of the SCO/IBM battle. There exists two worlds of code and transfers between them are dangerous grounds at this point. The big difference here is about visibility - if proprietary code has been illegally integrated into an open codebase, then that will be visible to the world. When GPL code is illegally integrated into proprietary code then it's only by happenstance that it will be uncovered as it has been here. first4 has fallen prey to the temptation of cribbing and ultimately stealing from the GPL to save some time and sought to obsfuscate to cover their tracks. How many thousands of products are like this to one extent or another today?
The way big corporations protect their own interests here is partly by having a big enough stick to have an opportunity to do a source review, perhaps with an external expert but mostly they do this by industrial-strength indemnification clauses in their contracts that are triggered by functional flaws or copyright/GPL infractions. first4 is already burnt toast on this - they easily could be sued for the full costs of the recall, legal fees. But it's the damage to the SonyBMG name that would be most costly, I think. If this is a smaller company, then Sony will torch the company and their insurers. And if turns out that they're not able to pony up, I suspect that they will start torching the chain of SonyBMG employees all the way up the chain that selected the vendor and strategy.
I certainly agree with your statement (although I don't particularly like that practice), but that's different than what I meant. The MSRP (independent of greed) for a Prius is somewhat higher than that of a Corolla tweaked to be similarly outfitted and *that* difference in price reflects a difference in cost which is due to the volume of production.
There's no fixed relationship between costs and selling price - the manufacturer sets it as part of their business model. I wouldn't be surprised if the incremental cost to manufacture a Prius is actually much more than then difference that makes it to the sticker, but Toyota could well be eating some profits to gain marketshare or put a stake in the ground that will be a profitable point for them down the line.
Congrats on your new wheels. I thought about buying one probably a year ago, and at that time in Northern California, you paid the sticker price for them, no more, no less but had a 9-12 month wait. I suspect with popularity and high visibility of the Prius now (definitely the best of the hybrids in my mind) it's probably hard for the greed factor not to set in.
As will be pointed out countless times, a big part of the reason why hybrids cost more is because there aren't as many of them now. Their presence creates more demand for things like D-cell sized NiMH batteries (I think that's what a Prius uses, but I could be wrong on that) which in turn causes their price to go down as volume increases. Whether or not the current premium reflects the true price delta at this time or whether it's just what Toyota decided the market could bear is an exercise for the reader (and sorry if I'm commenting on something addressed in the original post - it's already Slashdotted).
In my book, being nice to the environment is good enough reason to consider a hybrid if the vehicle can perform all the tasks that you want of it in an adequate way, independently of price of price of operation. For people tooling around on gov't business it would be nice if it were good enough for them too, but I think that your dad's situation is exactly right for them too - if it costs more and dollars are the bottom line, then don't do it. The process of doing what he did is actually the best thing that anybody can do - rather than an emotional buying decision or a green-conscious decision, he did a sober cost-benefit analysis for his business' situation and decided the mix wasn't quite there yet. The salesmen from Toyota can now report that up the chain, and the kind of analysis that he did is the strongest incentive that they have to fix the mix to sell more vehicles.
Just to be accurate, dBs are logarithmic so 150dB is 10x the energy of 140dB, but you brain perceives it as only twice as loud (before it melts into goo). That's why they're "decibels". An increase from 14 Bels to 15 Bels is perceived as a doubling in volume.
I think that military jets taking off will exceed 120dB when you're this close and I suspect that the pilot can exceed that level significantly if they decide to operate their plane like that.
It's hard for me to believe that a smoke detector is *only* 80-90 dB though.
I guess I must be the only person on /. that watches Nip/Tuck. It's a series on FX network about two plastic surgeons in Miami. The season opener this year was exactly this story, but I didn't realize it was a real case.
It was a good show the first year, slipped a little in the second and has went off on an extremely violent/misogynistic tear this year.
CNN carried a press conference with Condoleeza Rice, the US Secretary of State, who commented that there had been many offers of financial aid from foreign nations and that none had been refused.
That was all fine and good, but the next question was from another reporter who asked, "but isn't it true that none of these donations have actually been accepted yet?" Yup, you guessed it, that was correct - the offers are being recorded but not being accepted by the US. Don't ask me why (although seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if that is a process that might take some time).
Another question followed up on a comment from Rice that Sri Lanka, which is poor and still rebuilding from the tsunami, had made a pledge of an undislosed amount. The reporter asked whether this made any sense since this was basically giving back US foreign aid to Sri Lanka.
It's sort of interesting to watch these press conferences as you see they pretty much alternate puffball questions from shills with (often ridiculously accusatory) questions from the other side. Just another sign of the stupidly polarized political environment around here these days. Imagine trying to drive down the street if your only steering mechanism was full-lock left and full-lock right. Grrr...
That title, directly from the Variety review cited in the original posting.
:-)
How could the body odor *not* be stratospheric when the geeks who show up for the first week have been in line for at least a week (and, from the tone of the AICN review, possibly for the last 28 years)?
Oh, you mean "box office"? Nevermind!
That's "The Emmy-Award Winning William Shatner" to you, bub...
If there's room on TV for a "Chasing Farrah" reality show, then it's only a question whether Shatner or Nimoy is next. Spock's got the big teeth, and I'm sure that Shatner's nipples are at least as large as Farrah's!
Oops, made myself barf...
Would anybody have heard of Groklaw, had it not been for Slashdot?
Interesting that they wrote an article on this. I bought a 2003 GMC Yukon (e.g. giant SUV). I hadn't had an American car for many years, but this one has been really great.
Except for the occasional climate control bug, almost exactly as in the article. Sometimes, with no apparent external factors, the climate control system just decides to cook my in the driver's seat. Usually happens on days which are neither excessively warm or cold. In the Yukon, there's three climate zones, and the other too are just fine, perhaps gentle A/C. My side, scorching Hades, since heating and A/C are what American cars are best at. No dinking with the controls helps, or pounding on the sensor holes. "Rebooting" the car fixes it every time, but it's pretty annoying. Usually this problem crops up in the morning, so I don't realize that I'm in the kiln until the engine warms up and I'm slogging along in freeway traffic. Not the best time to reboot.
But it's never a good time to reboot, is it?
For what it's worth, it's been my experience that the original Coward's comment is more correct. Make the right environment and choose the right people and most of them will be quite happy to stay.
But when that powerful original culture and vision (oh, god there are those words, but it's absolutely true) is disippated because the company is getting bigger with the wrong people, or the investors want to kick out the founders and put in "experienced management" or the company just starts to "do evil", then the exodus will happen and happen fast.
There's nothing better than being in a place and team that's "right". The minute the talented people feel that they're carrying the guy in the next cube who shouldn't be there or their idiot boss who got hired because somebody had to do the budget and reviews, they're gone because they know it can be better.
Some people's essential nature is to be entrepreneurial and to strike out on their own - of course, only a tiny percentage of them are successful. I think there's a large number of very talented people who would gladly stay in the right environment. Ask your friend sometime if they left MS because it changed, and you may be surprised.
I consider myself fortunate to have started working at Apple in 1981, when it was heaven and hell at the same time, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I saw a big chunk of the old-timers leave within a couple of years of the IPO because it wasn't the same, although I loved it then. And I left to a startup in the early 90's because culturally it had totally turned for me (and this, before the "bad years" of Gil Amelio and before the return of Steve). In the time since, I was both the "idiot boss" and the guy that made the world right, so I've had a chance to see that from both sides.
:-)
Perhaps mixing Tim O'Reilly with the others was intended to cause a combustion to power the spacecraft. Why, just mixing Tim O'Reilly with Karl Rove alone would produce enough heat to light Sebastopol for 6 months.
I have a Samsonite Rafter as well and would recommend it highly. I got a free Targus Blacktop pack when I bought something in the past, and the feel and construction are definitely a step below the Samsonite. I don't think wearability will be as good as well, as it looks like there's much less tacking and reinforcement at the stress points on the straps.
The Rafter has a protected sleeve for the laptop which would be nearest your back. Between you and the laptop, there are two corrugated plastic stiffeners which give the pack some structure when it's on your back, and a sort of padded sleeve that protects it from the other stuff in your pack. If you don't like the stiffeners (you will if you actually carry a laptop in there, but may not if you're carrying lighter stuff), then they can be removed.
There's a lot of pockets, and they have those gusset areas so you can unzip the pack fully but things won't fall out the sides. There's a pouch on the top intended for a CD player. There's a little porthole for headphones. I don't carry anything like that, but there's a little pouch that was supposed to hold the player again toward your back which is exactly the right size for me to carry 4-5 CDs in slim jewel boxes, so I have a good place to carry some blanks.
There's a good pen holder, a shock cord thing so you can carry a jacket outside the pack, and big rubber things on the zipper which are easy to grab. Also there are two zippered side pockets that are just right for 16oz water bottles, and elastic mesh holders outside that that look like water bottle holders (and, in my experience, will drop a bottle every time). The straps are well padded and long if you are an XXL geek like me. I don't know what you call that cross strap that connects the straps beneath your rib cage, but this pack doesn't have that, which is good in my book.
Even when you're not carrying a laptop, you'll find that it's an excellent backpack.
The bad part is that I think very large notebooks don't fit very well. I have an IBM T40 which is thin and not particularly small, but if you have a larger laptop (15" display or larger) then I don't know if it will fit. That Targus pack I have would definitely hold a larger laptop.
Before I got this Samsonite, I had a very nice (but more costly) Timberland bag. It had a better padded computer area, but was less functional in general. The materials seemed nicer in this pack vs. the Samsonite, but it didn't hold up as well as the Rafter is doing now, so maybe my judgement here is faulty.
One other bad thing about Targus or Kensington packs are that they sort of telegraph the fact that you have a laptop in there. With something like a Samsonite or Timberland, you're definitely incognito.
Man, I totally agree... Perhaps it's just the Brit jargon, but I just barely can understand what they're talking about in the article (and I don't think this is actually because of jargon!).
If this is what I think it says, then it's sort of clever, but hard to believe that anybody thinks you can "scrub out" a sharp, big image of the Smirnoff logo and not think that they will run afoul of the need for advertising permits.