I think that most geeks would have a natural talent for law.
Yes, and some are quite good at it, while others are total screw-ups. The same is the case with lawyers. I see good code and bad code (and probably write both kinds, myself), and I see good legal documents and bad ones, too. IMHO, law is a lot harder because it deals with the complexities of language and human nature.
Yeah, I figured that out years ago. Now, when I look at, say, a slimy, dead sump pump, I say to myself, "Is it really worth $200 to avoid washing my hands and changing my clothes?" I've saved a lot of money that way.
I just checked out the high school in my town, and the thing that struck me was how many "smiley faces" (good teachers) vs. "frowny faces" there were. I didn't count, but I'd say the number of teachers the kids are rating as bad is under one-quarter. Maybe the teachers are tech-savvy and pumping their ratings, but I'm not so sure; the kids in this town are as plugged-in as can be. All in all, I think that if the kids are flaming a teacher on this site, the teacher ought to take it as a wake-up call that he/she is doing something wrong. The kids have an appreciation for the value of the education they're getting from a teacher. My fifth-grader may hate her challenging math assignments, but she loves her math teacher, and I think she would rate the woman as a good, but challenging teacher.
That may have been back when you worked there, but it's quite obvious that it's not the case now. If ISPs gave a shit, they would block outbound port 25 by default for dynamic IP clients (and maybe ALL IPs). That would stop at LEAST 95% of the spam botnets.
I hope they don't do that. I use Verizon DSL, but my outbound mail server, hosted by someone else, uses port 25. It isn't an open relay, but shutting down port 25 would shut down my legitimate email traffic.
It seems to me like any good botnet would be moving to use the outbound services used by the victim machine anyway. That's what I'd do if I were writing a botnet program.
Why? Just because the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed an amicus curiae (sp?) brief supporting the plaintiff?
<sigh> Somehow, I'm not surprised. The Bush administration always seems to come down on the side of large corporations vs. the little guy.
FWIW, I found TFA just as biased as my preceding remark. Most cases that reach the the Supreme Court are a lot more complicated than they seem at first blush. Skimming FTC's brief, I found some good points being offered. On the whole, though, I think "vertical minimum resale price maintenance (RPM)" is not a good thing.
Don't use the bloody E-word! You'll get a flame war going!
I would like to know if this is a learned behavior from an outside source or if this is simply something they have discovered on their own.
Either way, it means we have competition now. If they blow the world up before we do, does that mean chimps are more intelligent, or less, given that we have a 10,000-400,000 year head start?
The company claims that the average price of Windows has held steady at $50 (PDF) for the last ten years,
Why is it I've never seen a full version of Windows for $50 at Staples, Office Depot, etc.? And, if I remember correctly, the "Microsoft tax" I paid when I bought my Dell laptop last year was around $100.
Too bad I don't live in Iowa. Well, maybe not. It's ten degrees Fahrenheit in Cedar Rapids right now.
Most people will go down to Best Buy and buy whatever is there. They'll never read the licensing agreements, will run it, and will kvetch about all the spam they get. They'll install Weather Gadget or similar gizmos, and then they'll wonder why their computer runs so slowly. Eventually they'll go out and buy another one. All Microsoft has to do is ensure that 90% of the PCs in the store have Vista on them. And they have.
Ask for a couple of hours to review it [not unreasonable].
Hours? Tell 'em you need a day or two to review it with your attorney. Never give notice until you have copies of the offer and any documents you are expected to sign, and any other contingencies. Some employers don't do background or credit checks until the offer has been extended. Some require a drug test. Certainly, you don't expect anything negative in any of them, but any of these things can trip you up. So, my bottom line is this: I don't give notice until the prospective employer has acknowledged in writing that all contingencies have been satisfied. And I am not going to give short notice that might hurt my old employer. Who knows? Sometimes you get to a new job and you aren't happy there. You want to be able to go back. Especially if your new employer turns out to be a sleazeball.
Your driver's license # and SSN are likely being sent right off to the big database companies that do credit scoring and collection of any bit of trivia about you that they can find. Wasn't one of them busted a year or two ago for not being very discriminating about who could buy a copy of the data? So you not only have to worry about the IT practices of the company you're hiring, but also any HR outsourcing company they've hired to handle job applications and job listings, and the behemoths who already know too much about you. (Well not you, perhaps, since you've been out of the country for the last 16 years.)
You probably won't get the job anyway. I've never talked to anyone who manages at a company with one of those online job application systems and likes the system. Your best avenue into a job is getting someone you know to put your resume in front of a hiring manager, who will then ride the backs of the HR people if necessary to get you into the company.
I may be wrong, but that's been my experience with job applications.
Overall, the murder rate in Brazil is five times that of New York City. As in the United States, much of that violence is poor-on-poor, although the toll redounds everywhere. The New York Times reported recently on a World Bank study concluding that if Brazil had the much lower homicide rate of Costa Rica, Brazil's GDP would have been three to eight percent higher in the 1990s.
I'm no fan of New York City, but he's definitely using a bogeyman here. In 2002, the murder rate in Washington, DC, was six times that of the Big Apple. New Orleans was nearly eight times more deadly, and that was before Katrina. The state of my birth, South Carolina, which is relatively rural, has a murder rate of around the same magnitude of New York City.
FWIW, I agree with the general thrust of the article, that such large wealth and income inequities are not a good thing.
That's a good point. My concern, though, is this business of the government thinking it doesn't need a warrant to get at my data stored on someone else's server. If it's on my premises, then at least they have to get a warrant.
I think the real solution is legislation or court rulings that accord your data stored on the ISP's server the same protections your physical possessions have in rented storage.
With that other post today about the U.S. government making the argument that they don't need a search warrant to read my mail on an ISP's server, I don't think I want my mail hanging around out there any longer than it takes to pull it down via POP. This is in addition to the worries one might have about proprietary information being accessible to potential competitors.
As we all know, programmers are most productive in assembly
I would mod your comment Funny, but I'm afraid you might be serious. I think I've managed to write many more bugs using higher level languages, and Python is my favorite current tool for writing bugs that really bugger things up. If anything is the Anti-Assembler, it's Python.
But your comment also makes me think of another use for vector bosons. Maybe we should try blasting them at all these applications we have now that require us to have gigabytes of memory and terabytes of disk space.
I think opt-in is already a default in some cases. My new phone (low-end LG model sold by Verizon) has a GPS feature that, if I read the documentation right, can provide GPS-based location information to the network. It has two settings: 1) always provide this information or 2) only provide this information when calling an "emergency number". Emergency numbers are specified in a small set of registers and include 911 and a couple of numbers for accessing the phone company's support services. The factory setting for the GPS location option in my phone was to provide the data to the network only when calling emergency numbers. IMHO, this is a responsible choice.
It would of course be an easy thing for Sprint to require phone manufacturers to always enable GPS location information; however, even if the phones didn't have GPS facilities at all, it would be possible for a phone company to provide other subscribers a way of knowing if you're within 25 miles of someone else. I am pretty sure that for cell phones to work, the phone has to be *much* closer to a cell tower, and the phone co. could simply use the cell tower that detects your phone to provide location information.
I guess if one is being stalked, the solution is for the stalkee to subscribe to the service and buy a hypothetical phone that alerts her/him whenever the stalker's cell phone is too close, but overall I think this whole thing is just a bad idea where the potential for harm is a lot greater than the potential for good.
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I'll be impressed when I see a penguin on the back of a jersey in the Tour de France.
Yes, but aren't you the only one there who reads /. anyway?
Yeah, I figured that out years ago. Now, when I look at, say, a slimy, dead sump pump, I say to myself, "Is it really worth $200 to avoid washing my hands and changing my clothes?" I've saved a lot of money that way.
I just checked out the high school in my town, and the thing that struck me was how many "smiley faces" (good teachers) vs. "frowny faces" there were. I didn't count, but I'd say the number of teachers the kids are rating as bad is under one-quarter. Maybe the teachers are tech-savvy and pumping their ratings, but I'm not so sure; the kids in this town are as plugged-in as can be. All in all, I think that if the kids are flaming a teacher on this site, the teacher ought to take it as a wake-up call that he/she is doing something wrong. The kids have an appreciation for the value of the education they're getting from a teacher. My fifth-grader may hate her challenging math assignments, but she loves her math teacher, and I think she would rate the woman as a good, but challenging teacher.
It seems to me like any good botnet would be moving to use the outbound services used by the victim machine anyway. That's what I'd do if I were writing a botnet program.
Forget all this FGPA crap. Use the thing that works best!
<sigh> Somehow, I'm not surprised. The Bush administration always seems to come down on the side of large corporations vs. the little guy.
FWIW, I found TFA just as biased as my preceding remark. Most cases that reach the the Supreme Court are a lot more complicated than they seem at first blush. Skimming FTC's brief, I found some good points being offered. On the whole, though, I think "vertical minimum resale price maintenance (RPM)" is not a good thing.
That's my thought, too. And they lay more eggs. So . . . we get rid of malaria but end up with more mosquitoes?
Thank God for Google and Urban Dictionary, or I'd have been scarred for life wondering what a goatse is. (Yes, some of us are too sheltered.)
Why is it I've never seen a full version of Windows for $50 at Staples, Office Depot, etc.? And, if I remember correctly, the "Microsoft tax" I paid when I bought my Dell laptop last year was around $100.
Too bad I don't live in Iowa. Well, maybe not. It's ten degrees Fahrenheit in Cedar Rapids right now.
Most people will go down to Best Buy and buy whatever is there. They'll never read the licensing agreements, will run it, and will kvetch about all the spam they get. They'll install Weather Gadget or similar gizmos, and then they'll wonder why their computer runs so slowly. Eventually they'll go out and buy another one. All Microsoft has to do is ensure that 90% of the PCs in the store have Vista on them. And they have.
I think it's a Massachusetts thing. I just checked my favorite power plant, Oconee Nuclear Station, and those three boys are still out in the open.
- Your driver's license # and SSN are likely being sent right off to the big database companies that do credit scoring and collection of any bit of trivia about you that they can find. Wasn't one of them busted a year or two ago for not being very discriminating about who could buy a copy of the data? So you not only have to worry about the IT practices of the company you're hiring, but also any HR outsourcing company they've hired to handle job applications and job listings, and the behemoths who already know too much about you. (Well not you, perhaps, since you've been out of the country for the last 16 years.)
- You probably won't get the job anyway. I've never talked to anyone who manages at a company with one of those online job application systems and likes the system. Your best avenue into a job is getting someone you know to put your resume in front of a hiring manager, who will then ride the backs of the HR people if necessary to get you into the company.
I may be wrong, but that's been my experience with job applications.I'm no fan of New York City, but he's definitely using a bogeyman here. In 2002, the murder rate in Washington, DC, was six times that of the Big Apple. New Orleans was nearly eight times more deadly, and that was before Katrina. The state of my birth, South Carolina, which is relatively rural, has a murder rate of around the same magnitude of New York City.
FWIW, I agree with the general thrust of the article, that such large wealth and income inequities are not a good thing.
The page has been taken down. The author says it was subject to a DoS attack. I guess that's what /. readers are, eh?
I think the real solution is legislation or court rulings that accord your data stored on the ISP's server the same protections your physical possessions have in rented storage.
With that other post today about the U.S. government making the argument that they don't need a search warrant to read my mail on an ISP's server, I don't think I want my mail hanging around out there any longer than it takes to pull it down via POP. This is in addition to the worries one might have about proprietary information being accessible to potential competitors.
But your comment also makes me think of another use for vector bosons. Maybe we should try blasting them at all these applications we have now that require us to have gigabytes of memory and terabytes of disk space.
Someone obviously has too much time on his hands. And to think he could have been reading /.
It would of course be an easy thing for Sprint to require phone manufacturers to always enable GPS location information; however, even if the phones didn't have GPS facilities at all, it would be possible for a phone company to provide other subscribers a way of knowing if you're within 25 miles of someone else. I am pretty sure that for cell phones to work, the phone has to be *much* closer to a cell tower, and the phone co. could simply use the cell tower that detects your phone to provide location information.
I guess if one is being stalked, the solution is for the stalkee to subscribe to the service and buy a hypothetical phone that alerts her/him whenever the stalker's cell phone is too close, but overall I think this whole thing is just a bad idea where the potential for harm is a lot greater than the potential for good.
Quick, get that thing to a mohel!