Satellite phone? I think not. I don't think the US would even need to *ask* the satellite operators before they all ceased to accept calls from the general region of N. Korea.
But I would wager that if we asked, with reason, NK would have no sat access within an hour.
On a total side note: WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH ALL THE AC POSTS! You know the ones I mean -- the spam from other threads.
I don't get it: WHY? There is no possible benifit. *sigh* Never mind. I forget that some people get off by being prats.
The fact that libraries exist, in major part, to serve people who don't have twenty dollars to leave lying in someone elses bank account.
Libraries must be free. Always. They define what America is supposed to be.
I have likened the abandonment of libraries to the fall of the American ideal. I consider it one of the most obvious 'canaries' we have.
After all, if we cannot support the growth and self-education of our poorest classes, what hope do we have of clothing and feeding them? Or, more to the point, helping them cloth and feed themselves, with out aid from the state?
There are individuals that control a billion dollars. HP takes in like 20 billion a year (gross) with something like a billion of that as profit.
And I guestimate more like 1/2 a billion to get there and back, if done by the likes of Rutan. For a crack team of engineers and just plain brilliant people, 500 mill can get a whole hellofa lot done in a hurry.
But yeah. Who bloody cares? When we are dropping a billion dollars worth of bombs on random countries, why fret over a few billion to get to Mars? Err.. the moon.
Oh. NASA can be a haven, but many engineers hate (*HATE*) dealing with the politics that exist at almost all levels of NASA. I have heard them bitch about it; some of them are friends of mine:~)
Re:In a word - "Yes". In two, "Not Yet".
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 1
(go ahead, try to thoroughly clean an LCD screen
LCD screens are glass. To my knowledge *ALL* LCD screens (for PC and laptop applications) are still glass.
Not nearly as thick as on a CRT, esp. in the case of laptops, but still glass.
Most monitors, CRT and LCD alike, have an anti glare coating. This is what you destroy when you wash *any* monitor with a harsh cleaner. Then you have to use some supa-cleaner glass-stripper type cleaner to get the glare coating completely off, or you will forever have that nappy 'unclean' look to your monitor.
I don't recommend using glass-stripper on anything. It can take paint off of cars. Blame me not if you destroy your monitor by doing this. I will say it worked great on my parents' 3 year SyncMaster CRT -- but I would never use it anything I wasn't willing to part with should it be destroyed.
Re:In a word - "Yes". In two, "Not Yet".
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 1
Supposedly, the higher the proof (more pure?) the alcohol the better and half water and half alcohol was mentioned
When the bottle says '50% by volume', it means 'half water, half Alcohol'. Mixing your own is a recipe for spotting -- unless you keep distilled water on hand.
Mixes I recall seeing at the drug store are 30%, 50% and 70%
I'm sure it will. I mean, 4 visitors are better then NONE right?
Seriously. Who here entertained even the most transient desire to go look up a blog on yogurt? Popcorn?
It is the middle of the night, and I doubt that even bored slashdotters are *THAT* desperate.
I believe it has its place in the corporate world; interesting jobs and people can make for OCCASIONAL interesting blogs. As a marketing tool for hiring new folks, I imagine that the MS blogs are great -- I've even seen some negative opinions of MS come out of their own blogs, which speaks *very* well of the system (were I job searching, and found only positive blogs, I would be rather skeptical).
As a tool for selling microsoft products? Eh. Not so much. *POSSIBLY* it increases brand recognition among a few individuals with some purchasing clout. But the price of paying someone to update their blog two or three times a week, taking an hour or more to do so each time, is pretty damn significant (rare are interesting 'mind dump' blogs, which require maybe 1/2 hour to produce). Significant to adding the same amount of potential brand recognition with a bit more ad spending. 3 hours a week times how many blogs? And the most interesting blogs (as in most read) are from the higher paid engineers, so we aren't talking 40-70K a year for these peoples salaries. I'm guessing twice that.
3 hours a week * 48 weeks * $75/hr = $10,800 per person blogging.
I say 75 an hour by picking a salary of 100K (~50 an hour) and adding a half for overhead (soc sec, office, chairs, computers, etc) that MS has to pay above the base salary. Should probably double it.
I will go on record as saying that it is a fad: bean counters at all but a few lucky companies will soon* notice that it does little or nothing that couldn't be done better by tossing the same cash to an ad agency. Or astroturfing;~)
1) If homosexuality were a gene, it would be observably convincing to say it is recessive.
There is much word on the street of a correlation between fun chemicals (e.g. plastics, pthalates, various atmospheric pollution levels) in an area affecting the number of homosexuals from said area.
This is *NOT* to say that I belive, or the scientists believe, that the pollution itself is the cause; however environment often triggers dormant genes.
As always, correlation is not causation. Who knows?
Holy hell, I'm hacking my 650 tonight! That piece of crap browses the web 'on phone' at MAYBE 14.4kpbs everywhere I've been with it (multiple states, rural, urban and downtown).
That is so very, very true, and incredibly good advice at the end there.
I like the sound of 'Pretender gene' better though -- it also has the advantage of sounding like a positive trait to those who don't understand that ADD *is* a positive trait: it is just a trait that is not taken advantage of by society to anywhere near its full potential.
first part: Without any direction a company has about zero chance of doing anything at all.
Second part. See my other reply at this level. And... you may be right, but I don't think you are right for the reasons which you were thinking as you typed.
However there would be no way of legally blocking the net total of wealth transfer; large companies will continue to pay huge sums for (hopefully) talented CEOs. Not without turning a country into a communist-like state. I don't say this flippently either; one would have to create massive taxes on earnings for the very wealthy. Thus creating a situation where extreme skill and effort can no longer be rewarded in proportion.
And finally... what about rewards for success? A CEO of a company that has gross earnings of a billion dollars and a profit of say 5%. Say a CEO moves the pieces in such a way as to increase the profit from 5% to 7% -- thats 20 million dollars.
Now lets look at HP.... Annual sales of twenty BILLION dollars. Annual profit of damn near a billion dollars. If a CEO increase profitability by 2% from 5% that would be.... 400 million dollars.
CEOs can and often do affect companies' bottom lines by a percent or more. And their reputation is often on the line, even when it is the board of directors that insists on doing something idiotic that screws the company.
And, finally, golden parachutes have probably saved more companys from bankruptcy than they have sent there. Any time a CEO is called in to make drastic changes they *should* REQUIRE a LARGE golden parachute. To protect the board of directors and the investors from themselves. Follow me here:
1.) CEO designs and implements big, multi-year-to-take-effect change (for example, large increases in R&D staffing levels).
2.) Stock price plumments on the the years stock reports. Oh MY GOD! They LOST MONEY (of course they did -- they were hardly making a profit before and the company just hired a bunch of people)!!!
3.) Investors scream (they don't care about the long report saying this was going to happen, because they threw it away without reading it), Board panics and fires CEO.
4.) New CEO was hired with the sole purpose of fixing what the previous CEO screwed up. Fires all the R&D guys.
5.) Old CEO chuckles to self as the company goes to hell.
After all, if they're in the company because they literally *love it*, they should love it if that company has ~ 1e7EUR more to invest, too!
The point being, most CEOs are not in love with the company they work for. They are hired guns. CEOs that ARE in love with a company likely started it, and DON'T take home multi-million dollar a year salaries -- cheaper tax wise just to take home what they are going to spend and/or invest in other opportunities.
Because a.) it is possible to lose money and b.) there is a need for longer-tem survival of the company.
You completely missed the point. IT ISN'T THE MONEY
Find someone with a few million dollars. Ask them if they would work for a group of people, half of whom they despise, for a million a year. Ten million. Twenty.
That group of people is called the board of directors.
It. Is. Not. The. Money.
A large company will not hire a CEO unless they have proven themselves in some fashion. That fashion usually involves something that has already made said future CEO quite able to retire any damned place they please.
Huge salaries are paid for three main reasons:
1.) Leverage: By requiring a huge salary it is possible to go to the board of directors and say 'You are paying me large sums of money. I want the company to do this. You don't? Then why are you paying me so much?' 2.) Acknowledgement (pron: 'Appeal to ego'): 'Tell me how much value you think I have to this company'. 3.) Outright bribe: 'Why would I help you, and put up with crap from the board? I already have x million dollars.'
The only people who will be happy in a 95% automated world are those that I sometimes find myself thinking of as 'NPCs'. I think anyone reading this will know the kind of people I refer to -- the type that can hold the same job their entire life, doing the same repetative task, has no hobbies, gets home from work and watches 3 hours of TV (or plays video games). Basically, the type of person who's net affect on the planet Earth is to consume oxygen and produce CO2. I know some very smart people who live this way, and it makes me very sad. And bitter -- they seem to be happier with life than I am. But so are the very naive, and I don't wish to be naive (again) any more than I wish to be able to fix the same problem every day.
Then again, that 'NPC' type of person would probably miss the routine of going to work every day.
Ideally an automated society would be brought about with making life better. I fear that in reality it will be implemented in such a way as to maximize profits -- e.g. continuing to extend the consumption based society.
-- Tangent: Remember the phrase 'Give us this day our daily bread'? Anyone know where it originated? The answer I am looking for isn't 'From the Bible'.
In Rome, bread was handed out in the streets every day. Everyone got their 'daily bread'. Two. Thousand. Years. Ago. Now, when one person can produce, I'm making an educated guess here, well over a TEN THOUSAND times as much grain as one person could 2000 years ago, a loaf of bread (that could actually keep you alive) costs damn near an hours wages at the federal minimum wage -- 1/8th of your each day goes to buying 'bread'.
The thresher alone eliminated probably hundreds of man-hours per acre. I don't know; whats it take to manually beat the hell out of an acres worth of wheat? Today, farming grain in the 1st world countries damn near *IS* fully automated. Most labor goes into maintaining machines, not USING them -- GPS enabled equipment can already plow, seed fertilize and harvest.
How do I ever agree. I have certainly found some limits, and oh boy have I found my betters. But most of my limits arise from, well, not caring enough about something. I HAVE been confronted with my mental limits a few times; the first time really did almost break me. Each and every time was working on homework assignments from one particular professor in college.
Anyway, I digress. People like us used to migrate to R&D departments. I fully intend to make my first billion by creating the method of FINDING people with the Pretender gene (that is great, hope you don't mind if I borrow it) and making all parties concerned happy by having a massive marketing team dedicated to marketing whatever comes out of GUIDED play time for a bunch of smart people with expensive toys at their disposal. And, I don't know about you, but I am almost always interested in solving hard problems. Soliciting hard problems from other companies and selling the solution would be no problem. I believe we call it consulting now;~)
But I wouldn't be to remiss if companies started doing this on their own.
On a happier note, we incredibly rare multi-tools will be the only humans that matter in a hundred or so years. The trend of computers replacing humans will only accelerate -- It is my belief that we could automate anything of importance *RIGHT NOW*. From transportation to food production to washing dishes. It would cost trillions, but we could do it. We just don't -- look at the recent longshoreman strike in SoCal... the arguement on automation was based on BARCODES being placed on cargo containers! (I know that the issues ran deeper, but that was actually on the table, and the union wanted it nixed).
There are people in this world who simply could not be replaced with any number of 'normal' employees -- because most employees want a 9 to 5 job and a paycheck, and that's it. From Starbucks to NASA. Some people make their jobs their lives -- hey, whatever makes you happy.
And.. I want to say *ANY 'employee' making over a few mill a year, but really it is just MOST people being paid such is being paid as a form of recognition, not because the person being paid cares about the money itself.
And a CEO with vision can be worth infinitely more than 500 programmers -- because a company without a PURPOSE goes bankrupt and there are no more programmers (div by zero;~) ).
That said, writing a contract that lets a CEO commit murder and still get paid is pretty damned stupid.
If they have access to your desk, they have access to your computer. If they have access to the computer, they can get your passwords one way or another -- brute force with an inline keyboard logger, take the whole bloody computer, software searches. What have you.
The funniest part of the Dave Foley sketch is how bloody TRUE it is -- I spent just enough time in Germany to be able to say, perfectly accented it would seem, 'I don't speak very good German, may I speak English?'
INSTANT rush of incomprhensible German. And then me back: Ahh! Mein deutsch ist schlecht! Auf englisch bitte?
Let that be a lesson -- if you need to say 'I don't speak 'x' very well, do you speak my language' always use improper grammer;~)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. They are.
Social stratification is bad enough without adding to it by introducing a class that can pay to be free of suspicion.
North?
Or South?
I can believe south.
Satellite phone? I think not. I don't think the US would even need to *ask* the satellite operators before they all ceased to accept calls from the general region of N. Korea.
But I would wager that if we asked, with reason, NK would have no sat access within an hour.
On a total side note: WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH ALL THE AC POSTS! You know the ones I mean -- the spam from other threads.
I don't get it: WHY? There is no possible benifit. *sigh* Never mind. I forget that some people get off by being prats.
The fact that libraries exist, in major part, to serve people who don't have twenty dollars to leave lying in someone elses bank account.
Libraries must be free. Always. They define what America is supposed to be.
I have likened the abandonment of libraries to the fall of the American ideal. I consider it one of the most obvious 'canaries' we have.
After all, if we cannot support the growth and self-education of our poorest classes, what hope do we have of clothing and feeding them? Or, more to the point, helping them cloth and feed themselves, with out aid from the state?
I've seen two versions: One, the crystal is a really friggen big single molecule.
;~)
The other simply referred to crytals as you did, a lattice.
But a lattice is made up of ATOMS! And if MOLECULES are recyclable, then Atoms must certainly be! And doubly so... because... because I said!
Anyway, you can get molecular lattices (not to be confused with things that go in salad) such as window glass.
You have to admit, grandparents observation was pretty damned funny
Oh yeah, forgot about that one :~)
Probably 99 too.
There are individuals that control a billion dollars. HP takes in like 20 billion a year (gross) with something like a billion of that as profit.
:~)
And I guestimate more like 1/2 a billion to get there and back, if done by the likes of Rutan. For a crack team of engineers and just plain brilliant people, 500 mill can get a whole hellofa lot done in a hurry.
But yeah. Who bloody cares? When we are dropping a billion dollars worth of bombs on random countries, why fret over a few billion to get to Mars? Err.. the moon.
Oh. NASA can be a haven, but many engineers hate (*HATE*) dealing with the politics that exist at almost all levels of NASA. I have heard them bitch about it; some of them are friends of mine
(go ahead, try to thoroughly clean an LCD screen
LCD screens are glass. To my knowledge *ALL* LCD screens (for PC and laptop applications) are still glass.
Not nearly as thick as on a CRT, esp. in the case of laptops, but still glass.
Most monitors, CRT and LCD alike, have an anti glare coating. This is what you destroy when you wash *any* monitor with a harsh cleaner. Then you have to use some supa-cleaner glass-stripper type cleaner to get the glare coating completely off, or you will forever have that nappy 'unclean' look to your monitor.
I don't recommend using glass-stripper on anything. It can take paint off of cars. Blame me not if you destroy your monitor by doing this. I will say it worked great on my parents' 3 year SyncMaster CRT -- but I would never use it anything I wasn't willing to part with should it be destroyed.
Supposedly, the higher the proof (more pure?) the alcohol the better and half water and half alcohol was mentioned
When the bottle says '50% by volume', it means 'half water, half Alcohol'. Mixing your own is a recipe for spotting -- unless you keep distilled water on hand.
Mixes I recall seeing at the drug store are 30%, 50% and 70%
I'm sure it will. I mean, 4 visitors are better then NONE right?
;~)
Seriously. Who here entertained even the most transient desire to go look up a blog on yogurt? Popcorn?
It is the middle of the night, and I doubt that even bored slashdotters are *THAT* desperate.
I believe it has its place in the corporate world; interesting jobs and people can make for OCCASIONAL interesting blogs. As a marketing tool for hiring new folks, I imagine that the MS blogs are great -- I've even seen some negative opinions of MS come out of their own blogs, which speaks *very* well of the system (were I job searching, and found only positive blogs, I would be rather skeptical).
As a tool for selling microsoft products? Eh. Not so much. *POSSIBLY* it increases brand recognition among a few individuals with some purchasing clout. But the price of paying someone to update their blog two or three times a week, taking an hour or more to do so each time, is pretty damn significant (rare are interesting 'mind dump' blogs, which require maybe 1/2 hour to produce). Significant to adding the same amount of potential brand recognition with a bit more ad spending. 3 hours a week times how many blogs? And the most interesting blogs (as in most read) are from the higher paid engineers, so we aren't talking 40-70K a year for these peoples salaries. I'm guessing twice that.
3 hours a week * 48 weeks * $75/hr = $10,800 per person blogging.
I say 75 an hour by picking a salary of 100K (~50 an hour) and adding a half for overhead (soc sec, office, chairs, computers, etc) that MS has to pay above the base salary. Should probably double it.
I will go on record as saying that it is a fad: bean counters at all but a few lucky companies will soon* notice that it does little or nothing that couldn't be done better by tossing the same cash to an ad agency. Or astroturfing
*soon = 2 to 5 years, would be my prediction.
1) If homosexuality were a gene, it would be observably convincing to say it is recessive.
There is much word on the street of a correlation between fun chemicals (e.g. plastics, pthalates, various atmospheric pollution levels) in an area affecting the number of homosexuals from said area.
This is *NOT* to say that I belive, or the scientists believe, that the pollution itself is the cause; however environment often triggers dormant genes.
As always, correlation is not causation. Who knows?
300kbps? THREEE HUNDRED!?
Holy hell, I'm hacking my 650 tonight! That piece of crap browses the web 'on phone' at MAYBE 14.4kpbs everywhere I've been with it (multiple states, rural, urban and downtown).
That is so very, very true, and incredibly good advice at the end there.
I like the sound of 'Pretender gene' better though -- it also has the advantage of sounding like a positive trait to those who don't understand that ADD *is* a positive trait: it is just a trait that is not taken advantage of by society to anywhere near its full potential.
Two 'And finally's. Damn I'm tired.
first part: Without any direction a company has about zero chance of doing anything at all.
Second part. See my other reply at this level. And... you may be right, but I don't think you are right for the reasons which you were thinking as you typed.
However there would be no way of legally blocking the net total of wealth transfer; large companies will continue to pay huge sums for (hopefully) talented CEOs. Not without turning a country into a communist-like state. I don't say this flippently either; one would have to create massive taxes on earnings for the very wealthy. Thus creating a situation where extreme skill and effort can no longer be rewarded in proportion.
And finally... what about rewards for success? A CEO of a company that has gross earnings of a billion dollars and a profit of say 5%. Say a CEO moves the pieces in such a way as to increase the profit from 5% to 7% -- thats 20 million dollars.
Now lets look at HP.... Annual sales of twenty BILLION dollars. Annual profit of damn near a billion dollars. If a CEO increase profitability by 2% from 5% that would be.... 400 million dollars.
CEOs can and often do affect companies' bottom lines by a percent or more. And their reputation is often on the line, even when it is the board of directors that insists on doing something idiotic that screws the company.
And, finally, golden parachutes have probably saved more companys from bankruptcy than they have sent there. Any time a CEO is called in to make drastic changes they *should* REQUIRE a LARGE golden parachute. To protect the board of directors and the investors from themselves. Follow me here:
1.) CEO designs and implements big, multi-year-to-take-effect change (for example, large increases in R&D staffing levels).
2.) Stock price plumments on the the years stock reports. Oh MY GOD! They LOST MONEY (of course they did -- they were hardly making a profit before and the company just hired a bunch of people)!!!
3.) Investors scream (they don't care about the long report saying this was going to happen, because they threw it away without reading it), Board panics and fires CEO.
4.) New CEO was hired with the sole purpose of fixing what the previous CEO screwed up. Fires all the R&D guys.
5.) Old CEO chuckles to self as the company goes to hell.
After all, if they're in the company because they literally *love it*, they should love it if that company has ~ 1e7EUR more to invest, too!
The point being, most CEOs are not in love with the company they work for. They are hired guns. CEOs that ARE in love with a company likely started it, and DON'T take home multi-million dollar a year salaries -- cheaper tax wise just to take home what they are going to spend and/or invest in other opportunities.
Because
a.) it is possible to lose money and
b.) there is a need for longer-tem survival of the company.
You completely missed the point.
IT ISN'T THE MONEY
Find someone with a few million dollars. Ask them if they would work for a group of people, half of whom they despise, for a million a year. Ten million. Twenty.
That group of people is called the board of directors.
It. Is. Not. The. Money.
A large company will not hire a CEO unless they have proven themselves in some fashion. That fashion usually involves something that has already made said future CEO quite able to retire any damned place they please.
Huge salaries are paid for three main reasons:
1.) Leverage: By requiring a huge salary it is possible to go to the board of directors and say 'You are paying me large sums of money. I want the company to do this. You don't? Then why are you paying me so much?'
2.) Acknowledgement (pron: 'Appeal to ego'): 'Tell me how much value you think I have to this company'.
3.) Outright bribe: 'Why would I help you, and put up with crap from the board? I already have x million dollars.'
1 and 2 are closely related.
A little dystopia? I'd say you'd get a lot!
The only people who will be happy in a 95% automated world are those that I sometimes find myself thinking of as 'NPCs'. I think anyone reading this will know the kind of people I refer to -- the type that can hold the same job their entire life, doing the same repetative task, has no hobbies, gets home from work and watches 3 hours of TV (or plays video games). Basically, the type of person who's net affect on the planet Earth is to consume oxygen and produce CO2. I know some very smart people who live this way, and it makes me very sad. And bitter -- they seem to be happier with life than I am. But so are the very naive, and I don't wish to be naive (again) any more than I wish to be able to fix the same problem every day.
Then again, that 'NPC' type of person would probably miss the routine of going to work every day.
Ideally an automated society would be brought about with making life better. I fear that in reality it will be implemented in such a way as to maximize profits -- e.g. continuing to extend the consumption based society.
-- Tangent:
Remember the phrase 'Give us this day our daily bread'? Anyone know where it originated? The answer I am looking for isn't 'From the Bible'.
In Rome, bread was handed out in the streets every day. Everyone got their 'daily bread'. Two. Thousand. Years. Ago. Now, when one person can produce, I'm making an educated guess here, well over a TEN THOUSAND times as much grain as one person could 2000 years ago, a loaf of bread (that could actually keep you alive) costs damn near an hours wages at the federal minimum wage -- 1/8th of your each day goes to buying 'bread'.
The thresher alone eliminated probably hundreds of man-hours per acre. I don't know; whats it take to manually beat the hell out of an acres worth of wheat? Today, farming grain in the 1st world countries damn near *IS* fully automated. Most labor goes into maintaining machines, not USING them -- GPS enabled equipment can already plow, seed fertilize and harvest.
So yeah -- Automation won't fix society.
How do I ever agree. I have certainly found some limits, and oh boy have I found my betters. But most of my limits arise from, well, not caring enough about something. I HAVE been confronted with my mental limits a few times; the first time really did almost break me. Each and every time was working on homework assignments from one particular professor in college.
;~)
Anyway, I digress. People like us used to migrate to R&D departments. I fully intend to make my first billion by creating the method of FINDING people with the Pretender gene (that is great, hope you don't mind if I borrow it) and making all parties concerned happy by having a massive marketing team dedicated to marketing whatever comes out of GUIDED play time for a bunch of smart people with expensive toys at their disposal. And, I don't know about you, but I am almost always interested in solving hard problems. Soliciting hard problems from other companies and selling the solution would be no problem. I believe we call it consulting now
But I wouldn't be to remiss if companies started doing this on their own.
On a happier note, we incredibly rare multi-tools will be the only humans that matter in a hundred or so years. The trend of computers replacing humans will only accelerate -- It is my belief that we could automate anything of importance *RIGHT NOW*. From transportation to food production to washing dishes. It would cost trillions, but we could do it. We just don't -- look at the recent longshoreman strike in SoCal... the arguement on automation was based on BARCODES being placed on cargo containers! (I know that the issues ran deeper, but that was actually on the table, and the union wanted it nixed).
There are people in this world who simply could not be replaced with any number of 'normal' employees -- because most employees want a 9 to 5 job and a paycheck, and that's it. From Starbucks to NASA. Some people make their jobs their lives -- hey, whatever makes you happy.
;~) ).
And.. I want to say *ANY 'employee' making over a few mill a year, but really it is just MOST people being paid such is being paid as a form of recognition, not because the person being paid cares about the money itself.
And a CEO with vision can be worth infinitely more than 500 programmers -- because a company without a PURPOSE goes bankrupt and there are no more programmers (div by zero
That said, writing a contract that lets a CEO commit murder and still get paid is pretty damned stupid.
And that, my friend, is a beautiful summary.
...lusrmgr.msc earlier today....
Or, in your case, you could use any of the standard PUNCTUATION KEYS as a backspace.... ;~)
If they have access to your desk, they have access to your computer. If they have access to the computer, they can get your passwords one way or another -- brute force with an inline keyboard logger, take the whole bloody computer, software searches. What have you.
The funniest part of the Dave Foley sketch is how bloody TRUE it is -- I spent just enough time in Germany to be able to say, perfectly accented it would seem, 'I don't speak very good German, may I speak English?'
;~)
INSTANT rush of incomprhensible German. And then me back: Ahh! Mein deutsch ist schlecht! Auf englisch bitte?
Let that be a lesson -- if you need to say 'I don't speak 'x' very well, do you speak my language' always use improper grammer
Holy shit does that thing transport the kitty crap to another dimension or what!?