I think it's just the American way. After all, wasn't part of the drumbeat of the Contract with America 10 years ago to get the "intellectual elite" out of our decision-making process, and to let common sense rule? It's never failed to amaze me how unwilling we are to accept the fact that many of the questions in life don't have simple answers. It is also too often the case that when the facts don't fit the agenda (be it Right or Left), they are challenged. We were this way before 9/11.
Things haven't changed one whit. My first computer took forever to load the word processor because I couldn't afford the extra $500 for a hard drive. Now I have over 200 times more memory and millions more KB's of disk space, and the word processor takes forever to load because I am too cheap to buy a faster computer with the memory needed.
OTOH, maybe things have changed after all. Now I am memory bound, not disk I/O bound. Oh, and that was 1988, come to think of it. In 1981, my notion of high tech in the word processing department was an IBM Selectric II that could erase my typos.
For surveillance during The Great War (they didn't know there'd be a second one), they used tethered hydrogen balloons over the lines. My grandfather trained to take photographs in one. Luckily for him, by the time he was due to be deployed, the Army had come up with a way to operate the camera remotely. The reason I consider him (& me) lucky is that fighter pilots on both sides made a good business of shooting the observation balloons down.
I believe tethered balloons were also used on a limited basis by the Union during the War between the States, but I'm not sure on that point.
Any course of study you follow with an aim of making piles of money in a single area of limited scope puts you at risk of failure because of some cyclical swing or technology shift. Diversifying your knowledge will prepare you to deal with anything that life throws at you. This is the way it works in the animal kingdom, and I think in human society as well.
This is not a put-down of engineering or of any other course of study. I majored in Spanish and endured a lot of jokes about how I would have to work in McDonald's (long before Spanish became the dominant language there). But I've survived so far.
It's been interesting to me that I have a special "spam" email address that I use on mailing lists and the like, and I don't get much spam on it. In fact, I think I'm getting about as much from my regular email address, which never sees the light of day on a mailing list.
OTOH, the email address I used to have with a major ISP became a target for dozens of spam emails each day, perhaps because the ISP was targeted and because I have a common surname. Now that I have my own domain name, I get very little.
I think that the key to avoiding spam is to give oneself an address like nospam@yourdomain.com. Any spammer worth his salt is going to skip the nospam email addresses.
For the longest time, I couldn't justify the extra expense of broadband. What pushed me over the edge was the realization that we needed the extra speed to download all the Windows patches. (To be fair, also the Linux patches.)
With an input of 540 watts and an output of ~1.57 KW (when hooking the motor to a generator) all you need to do is split the output of the generator between the motor and some other load, and your generator is now powering the motor that drives it and up to ~1KW load. That's 1KW of free energy!
Um, would you mind sending me your email address? I have a little money I need to get out of Nigeria....
but Herndon, Virginia, has tried them and still has a problem with people blowing through red lights. And then there's the problem for the rest of us, who weren't speeding and get hung on the light anyway.
I'm not. It's not like you need to know the secret handshake before you can become a network administrator. In a lot of places, it just means you're the guy who knows the most about it.
I'm not, either. Some jobs come with many hats to wear. And while I am sure there are some people who know everything about networking (or any other subject), most of the rest of us are continually learning. I figure once I know everything, I'll be dead.
My wife works as a business analyst for a large financial concern. Corporate policy requires them to report every hour worked, even though most of the people are "exempt" workers who aren't owed overtime if they work it. Therefore, you'd think there was no pressure to under-report hours worked by professional staff
Imagine her surprise when her boss pressured her to change some of the time she had reported. It seems that even though no actual money goes to the employees, departments charge each other in internal dollars for the time worked, and she was causing her project to go over budget. As a result of this, everyone fudges their time, and this time reporting tool they have is useless for tracking the effort that goes into projects.
It sounds like an April Fool's Joke, but then, so does online trading of Everquest loot.
... or stock, gold, tulips... or money. One of the interesting points of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos is how the value of things is what we make them. Today, an ounce of gold may be worth $400 to me (I haven't checked the market), but tomorrow, if I'm hungry, I may well trade it for a can of Dinty Moore stew.
If you have a bank account, you may feel comforted to know that the money you have in it is represented by ones and zeroes, the same as that Everquest loot. It could be worthless before the market closes today!
Cycling a sustained speed of 20 mph is a bit beyond most Americans. Beginning cyclists do well to average 10-12 mph on flat/gently-graded terrain. But in principle, I agree with you. Every time I hear someone moan about how long it took to go 2-10 miles, I am wont to remind them that they could've done it faster on a bike.
A better solution is simply making regular backups. Also, many word processors and editors include an automatic save feature to permit you to recover all but the last 5-10 minutes of work if the power goes out. MS Word permits you to save versions of your document.
As far as KeyKatcher goes with respect to personal privacy, it looks very easy to defeat, if you know about it. Unplug it, do your naughty things, and plug it back in. I think monitoring email, proxy server logs, etc., are going to be more effective, and harder for the end user to defeat.
MP have never made any claims of not cashing in! Somewhere in my collection is a record entitled something like Monty Python: The Final Ripoff>. Frankly, I respect them for seizing the moment. I had been thinking of trying to book The Passion of the Christ and Life of Brian for a double feature over at the brew cinema.
After I lost my loyalty card, I learned I could punch in my phone number at the local supermarket. Once I accidentally transposed a digit and it went through. Now I routinely switch digits around just to muck with the system, and when I hit a variation that isn't in the database, I apologize for the "mistake".
Besides being rankled by having marketers grubbing through my purchase records, I think there is a not-unreasonable security concern, too. If a group like the Nazis ever gains power in the U.S., it would be a simple matter for them go through the supermarket purchase records for kosher items to identify targets. (Granted, there are plenty of other indicators for them to use, so I'm probably screwed anyway, but why give them anything I don't have to.)
I wouldn't have the loyalty card at all but for the fact they won't give me the sale prices without it. So when my grocery order contains only non-sale items, I don't use my "loyalty card". The irony is that for many years, I was very loyal to this chain (which was locally-owned), but now that they've done this, I can't wait for the new interloper to finish the market he's building down the street.
Lessee.... Software vendors are ready to sell us out to the marketers and anyone else; OS vendors (okay, "vendor") are ready to sell us out; even BIOS vendors are ready to spy on us. Maybe we need a GNU BIOS project.
Maybe I'll just go back to my Olivetti typewriter!
And most importantly how do you handle authority (tardiness, work ethic, and workplace codes) with a girlfriend?
... and then there will be no question that she's the boss.
But seriously, a girlfriend will either turn into a wife (or equivalent S.O.), or an ex-girlfriend, and working out a relationship is taxing enough without adding a fledgling business to the mix.
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Red Delicious apples are like grocery store tomatoes, bred to look pretty but having neither the taste nor the consistency of the real fruit.
I think it's just the American way. After all, wasn't part of the drumbeat of the Contract with America 10 years ago to get the "intellectual elite" out of our decision-making process, and to let common sense rule? It's never failed to amaze me how unwilling we are to accept the fact that many of the questions in life don't have simple answers. It is also too often the case that when the facts don't fit the agenda (be it Right or Left), they are challenged. We were this way before 9/11.
Things haven't changed one whit. My first computer took forever to load the word processor because I couldn't afford the extra $500 for a hard drive. Now I have over 200 times more memory and millions more KB's of disk space, and the word processor takes forever to load because I am too cheap to buy a faster computer with the memory needed.
OTOH, maybe things have changed after all. Now I am memory bound, not disk I/O bound. Oh, and that was 1988, come to think of it. In 1981, my notion of high tech in the word processing department was an IBM Selectric II that could erase my typos.
For surveillance during The Great War (they didn't know there'd be a second one), they used tethered hydrogen balloons over the lines. My grandfather trained to take photographs in one. Luckily for him, by the time he was due to be deployed, the Army had come up with a way to operate the camera remotely. The reason I consider him (& me) lucky is that fighter pilots on both sides made a good business of shooting the observation balloons down.
I believe tethered balloons were also used on a limited basis by the Union during the War between the States, but I'm not sure on that point.
Any course of study you follow with an aim of making piles of money in a single area of limited scope puts you at risk of failure because of some cyclical swing or technology shift. Diversifying your knowledge will prepare you to deal with anything that life throws at you. This is the way it works in the animal kingdom, and I think in human society as well.
This is not a put-down of engineering or of any other course of study. I majored in Spanish and endured a lot of jokes about how I would have to work in McDonald's (long before Spanish became the dominant language there). But I've survived so far.
It's been interesting to me that I have a special "spam" email address that I use on mailing lists and the like, and I don't get much spam on it. In fact, I think I'm getting about as much from my regular email address, which never sees the light of day on a mailing list.
OTOH, the email address I used to have with a major ISP became a target for dozens of spam emails each day, perhaps because the ISP was targeted and because I have a common surname. Now that I have my own domain name, I get very little.
I think that the key to avoiding spam is to give oneself an address like nospam@yourdomain.com. Any spammer worth his salt is going to skip the nospam email addresses.
For the longest time, I couldn't justify the extra expense of broadband. What pushed me over the edge was the realization that we needed the extra speed to download all the Windows patches. (To be fair, also the Linux patches.)
With an input of 540 watts and an output of ~1.57 KW (when hooking the motor to a generator) all you need to do is split the output of the generator between the motor and some other load, and your generator is now powering the motor that drives it and up to ~1KW load. That's 1KW of free energy!
Um, would you mind sending me your email address? I have a little money I need to get out of Nigeria....
That reminds me of a good book by Bill Peet that I read to my daughter once.
I don't know about that. A broken-down motor vehicle in the yard is less likely to get into a collsion than one that is operational.
but Herndon, Virginia, has tried them and still has a problem with people blowing through red lights. And then there's the problem for the rest of us, who weren't speeding and get hung on the light anyway.
I think the time estimates for this are wildly optimistic.
I'm not. It's not like you need to know the secret handshake before you can become a network administrator. In a lot of places, it just means you're the guy who knows the most about it.
I'm not, either. Some jobs come with many hats to wear. And while I am sure there are some people who know everything about networking (or any other subject), most of the rest of us are continually learning. I figure once I know everything, I'll be dead.
My wife works as a business analyst for a large financial concern. Corporate policy requires them to report every hour worked, even though most of the people are "exempt" workers who aren't owed overtime if they work it. Therefore, you'd think there was no pressure to under-report hours worked by professional staff
Imagine her surprise when her boss pressured her to change some of the time she had reported. It seems that even though no actual money goes to the employees, departments charge each other in internal dollars for the time worked, and she was causing her project to go over budget. As a result of this, everyone fudges their time, and this time reporting tool they have is useless for tracking the effort that goes into projects.
Tell them your American friends are proud of how like the Americans your government is becoming. If that doesn't get you off, I'll be surprised.
Criminy! Next, you're going to tell me not to use my scissors tip to tighten a Philips screw!
It sounds like an April Fool's Joke, but then, so does online trading of Everquest loot.
... or stock, gold, tulips ... or money. One of the interesting points of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos is how the value of things is what we make them. Today, an ounce of gold may be worth $400 to me (I haven't checked the market), but tomorrow, if I'm hungry, I may well trade it for a can of Dinty Moore stew.
If you have a bank account, you may feel comforted to know that the money you have in it is represented by ones and zeroes, the same as that Everquest loot. It could be worthless before the market closes today!
Cycling a sustained speed of 20 mph is a bit beyond most Americans. Beginning cyclists do well to average 10-12 mph on flat/gently-graded terrain. But in principle, I agree with you. Every time I hear someone moan about how long it took to go 2-10 miles, I am wont to remind them that they could've done it faster on a bike.
A better solution is simply making regular backups. Also, many word processors and editors include an automatic save feature to permit you to recover all but the last 5-10 minutes of work if the power goes out. MS Word permits you to save versions of your document.
As far as KeyKatcher goes with respect to personal privacy, it looks very easy to defeat, if you know about it. Unplug it, do your naughty things, and plug it back in. I think monitoring email, proxy server logs, etc., are going to be more effective, and harder for the end user to defeat.
MP have never made any claims of not cashing in! Somewhere in my collection is a record entitled something like Monty Python: The Final Ripoff>. Frankly, I respect them for seizing the moment. I had been thinking of trying to book The Passion of the Christ and Life of Brian for a double feature over at the brew cinema.
... whether Strom will rise from the dead to dissuade SC theaters from showing it.
<apology>Sorry. A little South Carolina humor.</apology>So it was you!
They don't care what I buy -- and they do care, too. We get targeted marketing here.
After I lost my loyalty card, I learned I could punch in my phone number at the local supermarket. Once I accidentally transposed a digit and it went through. Now I routinely switch digits around just to muck with the system, and when I hit a variation that isn't in the database, I apologize for the "mistake".
Besides being rankled by having marketers grubbing through my purchase records, I think there is a not-unreasonable security concern, too. If a group like the Nazis ever gains power in the U.S., it would be a simple matter for them go through the supermarket purchase records for kosher items to identify targets. (Granted, there are plenty of other indicators for them to use, so I'm probably screwed anyway, but why give them anything I don't have to.)
I wouldn't have the loyalty card at all but for the fact they won't give me the sale prices without it. So when my grocery order contains only non-sale items, I don't use my "loyalty card". The irony is that for many years, I was very loyal to this chain (which was locally-owned), but now that they've done this, I can't wait for the new interloper to finish the market he's building down the street.
Lessee.... Software vendors are ready to sell us out to the marketers and anyone else; OS vendors (okay, "vendor") are ready to sell us out; even BIOS vendors are ready to spy on us. Maybe we need a GNU BIOS project.
Maybe I'll just go back to my Olivetti typewriter!
And most importantly how do you handle authority (tardiness, work ethic, and workplace codes) with a girlfriend?
... and then there will be no question that she's the boss.
But seriously, a girlfriend will either turn into a wife (or equivalent S.O.), or an ex-girlfriend, and working out a relationship is taxing enough without adding a fledgling business to the mix.
Good luck!