I think many are missing the biggest loophole here. This would only be truly effective if you were completely surrounded by painted surfaces. In an office? move near a window and hey presto, you get signal.
It means that you can limit access to some locations, and actively shield others, but its hardly a "kill all wifi" solution.
I do have another thought though, I wonder how useful paint like this would be on "stealth" aircraft. Could any RF engineers advise if a pseudo faraday cage such as this would effectively reflect enough energy for a radar to paint a target or not?
Ok, my bad for attempting to keep the question "to the point".
Since I work in a corporate environment, my choice of workstation operating system is well beyond my control, even more so than my ability to deploy command aliases to each individual server. I'm also on helpdesk, so I have no direct administrative access, just a limited shell account that is shared between myself and 5 other techs. I could try and make a business case for command aliases being deployed to all the servers, but as a helpdesk tech, the chances of this idea being taken seriously are small. I'm sure any of you who have served time on the front lines understand what I mean.
Thanks for the feedback though guys, for the most part it has been most enlightening =).
We the geek elite (ok, maybe not in some cases, but I'm trying to make a point here =D), we gamers, programmers, techies and sysadmins are unfortunately a very vocal minority when it comes to the people that buy internet services.
I know this because I used to work for a north australian internet service provider who aggressively avoided anything that would make them attractive to people like us. ISP's much prefer the mom and pop internet users who buy 20 hours a month and use 5, not the geeks who use 99.99999% of the bandwidth they pay for.
Boycotting an ISP for this kind of behaviour isn't going to upset them, as the expense of your bandwidth useage vs. profit from your account fees is much less than the aformentioned mom and pop internet user.
My point is, rather than simply boycott a company like this - and talk about it in a geek heavy forum - educate the masses of the uninitiated so that they take responsibility for their choices (political or otherwise). Big brother and the corporate leeches exist more due to willful ignorance of the general public than anything else.
The parent is a good example of "don't judge a book by its cover".
I have personally met people not only with extremely poor communication and literacy skills, but fairly odious personal habits too, but they have proven to be incredibly wise and inciteful in spite of their personal flaws.
You may judge this sort of person to be not worthy of your attention (at best), or maybe even worthy of your scorn and abuse (at worst). I'm willing to bet that such an individual may consequently judge you to be something along the lines of an elitest tool (not a personal attack on the parent, simply an observation of the polarity of the arguments at hand).
I'm not the best with spelling and grammar, and nothing drives me more insane than receiving an email from my father with the obligatory u instead of you, but I think we all need to stop taking ourselves so seriously and learn to accept some "good 'ole folksy talk'n" internet style once in a while.
I currently work for a private sector IT company, but we contract to a government agency. IMHO the public sector job would be much more stable, and you'll more than likely make more money over the lifespan of the job, with very little in the way of upsets. Plus you'll be on the inside, and likely have your own budget.
Your original query indicates that you'd be on contract with the fortune 10 company, which means every time you want to spend their money, you will have to justify it nine ways to sunday before they reach for the chequebook.
insofar as marketing is concerned this is a new trend, but this isn't something thats altogether new.
There are huge files locked away somewhere with your medical records on them, documents detailing every illness, disease and broken bone. The police keep records of your criminal history. Insurance companies keep track of your driving record and any claims made. Schools keep details not only of your grades, but also of your misdemeanours.
I don't personally agree with their collection of this information, but IMHO maybe we shouldn't be worrying about wether or not they collect the data, but more how we as the consumer should allow them to use it.
If you're in the process of replacing engine mounts on a car that age, you want to replace all of them, because they collapse over time.
granted though, this is somewhat offtopic =)
To return to the topic at hand, who would you prefer to trust? yourself or a third party contractor that you don't know personally.
This suggests two possibilities, either maintain a stock of spares as others have suggested, or alternatively develop a strong relationship with your support contractors to the degree of knowing their field techs on a first name basis. This way both parties see each other as valued and you get looked after.
What about aircraft launched torpedoes? Aside from the Japanese doing a profoundly successful job of this in WWII, the Australian Airforce maintain a number of P3-C Orion ASW aircraft. I've also heard of torpedos that can be delivered via a cruise missile system. There are plenty of ways to get a torpedo within strike range of just about anything. Also remember, for every technological advance in countermeasures, a new form of weaponry is developed.
Not meaning to specifically single out the parent, but the subject line was appropriate.
The issue here may also be less about censorship and more about redundancy. In my time as an ISP helpdesk phone bitch, I learned (and was always under the impression) that.com = commercial,.net = network afiliate,.org = non profit organisation etc etc. Since most porn sites are also commercial entities, they are IMHO just as entitled to a.com as anything else. This sorta makes the.xxx TLD somewhat unnecessary.
I doubt however that Bush is whining on this point, but I still felt that it was valid.
Having said all this however, I think it'd still be useful, and it would make it easier for the tech savvy to find what they want, when they want, instead of tripping over a million porn sites on their hunt for.. well anything else they want to find on the net.
... requires a fairly closed environment. Too many new ideas and they might loose the zeal for the cause.
Handing them an internet connection and teaching them to "surf the web" will inadvertantly lead them to online porn, and a lack of desire for anything but one handed surfing.
The newest weapon against terror - free online porn! =)
If you use a superconductor then its a matter of keeping the coil cold enough.
Further to this, if you have the whole module wrapped in charged superconductor material, could you not then use linear magnetic aceleration (basically a big assed rail gun) to save on fuel costs and mass when getting it off the ground?
of early ORPG's, but everyone I hear harping about WoW and Eq2 and how they get XP boosts if they don't log in for a few days, tell me that they easily catch up to their guildmates who game almost constantly. With this solution to the problem of leveling gaps, the game becomes much more social, as friends can game together more regularly.
Sometimes, you just gotta shut up and build the damn thing.
I don't know about anyone else, but I would feel a whole lot better knowing they had gotten the math right before they attempt to kickstart what is in essence an artificial sun no more than meters from the surface of our planet.
IMHO Fusion should be able to provide far more generated power per square foot of "reactor" than a decent sized wind farm, which means less wasteage of resources (in some countries, arable land can be, and is classed as a resource). I agree with the poster of the parent that something needs to be done, but in this particular case, I wouldn't personally advocate haste, just in case.
Personally, I hate all snipers in games, I don't think they enhance the fun of a game for anyone but snipers. Once upon a time, people sniped by increasing their mouse sensitivity and narrowing their Field Of Vision settings of the game engine. That was even lamer. I do accept that this is an opinion, and I respect that people disagree, but I despise snipers.
I have no direct objection to snipers per se, but I've played games of CS that end up being a 10 man team using the AWM, versus a team that can't get enough cash to have anything more than Mac-10's or TMP's. One idea to combat this is if they put in a weapon limit, eg. 10 players = 2 snipers + general infantry for each team. I can see problems with the implementation of this style of system, but I honestly believe that it'd assist game balance, especially on maps that (by pure nature of their open plan layout) encourage whoring with long range artillery.
Is it a case of too much information, or being bombarded by abuse from people who are willfully ignorant about the technology they use daily.
A certain amount of burnout can be fairly easily attributed to things like high end programming to short deadlines and small volumes of sysadmins being forced to manage huge server farms, but in my experience, for each systems engineer or sysadmin, you have at least two (in the company I work for, we have 14 helpdesk staff compared to 7 sysadmin/engineer staff) frontline geeks for each one behind the scenes.
I have had personal experience in supporting clients for an ISP, as well as my current job supporting state government, and the level of ignorance shown by the client (and the abuse and anger it generates) hits me much harder than being asked to support a new product or service.
IMHO this is one of those things that has more than one answer, though I wonder if other industries in their formative years experienced similar issues.
The only piece of malware that I haven't been able to remove was a variant of CoolWebSearch. Not even CWShredder got rid of it (or even detected it) as well as all of the other cleaners.
I managed to toast a version of this on a friends machine using assistance from Tech Suuport Guy forums, hijack this and CW Shredder. After this it was still a case of selectively searing registry entries and hunting obscure.dll's in the system and system32 directories. I also recommend to the original poster something that scans for BHO's. I believe software like BHODemon or MS's Spyware scanner check for these.
Its a good thing I enjoy hunting bugs on computers, its frustrating as hell, but I really do enjoy the challenge =).
They used to say this alot for portable CD players too, though I doubt the average discman would output more RF noise than a walkman or other audio device.
Also AFAIK (dredging through my old basic electronics training and sometimes dodgy memory) RF interferance needs to be at the same or a harmonic of the broadcast frequency to generate problems.
This last part is only things I have heard, and isn't verified truth, however I have been told that the reason they don't like you using mobile phones in aircraft is less about affecting instumentation, and more about the signal "footprint" you leave on the ground as your phone tries to access the nearest phone tower. This apparantly ties up channels on multiple towers. Do take this with a grain of salt however, as I am unable to verify it as fact.
Slashdot Mirror
I think many are missing the biggest loophole here. This would only be truly effective if you were completely surrounded by painted surfaces. In an office? move near a window and hey presto, you get signal.
It means that you can limit access to some locations, and actively shield others, but its hardly a "kill all wifi" solution.
I do have another thought though, I wonder how useful paint like this would be on "stealth" aircraft. Could any RF engineers advise if a pseudo faraday cage such as this would effectively reflect enough energy for a radar to paint a target or not?
Please mod up - this is almost exactly what I was asking for =) (there are others who have said similar, but none quite so concise)
Ok, my bad for attempting to keep the question "to the point".
Since I work in a corporate environment, my choice of workstation operating system is well beyond my control, even more so than my ability to deploy command aliases to each individual server. I'm also on helpdesk, so I have no direct administrative access, just a limited shell account that is shared between myself and 5 other techs. I could try and make a business case for command aliases being deployed to all the servers, but as a helpdesk tech, the chances of this idea being taken seriously are small. I'm sure any of you who have served time on the front lines understand what I mean.
Thanks for the feedback though guys, for the most part it has been most enlightening =).
Just a small point of interest from a local, they hit Kakadu a couple of years ago.
They're starting to be seen around Darwin itself, though they're still not common.
We the geek elite (ok, maybe not in some cases, but I'm trying to make a point here =D), we gamers, programmers, techies and sysadmins are unfortunately a very vocal minority when it comes to the people that buy internet services.
I know this because I used to work for a north australian internet service provider who aggressively avoided anything that would make them attractive to people like us. ISP's much prefer the mom and pop internet users who buy 20 hours a month and use 5, not the geeks who use 99.99999% of the bandwidth they pay for.
Boycotting an ISP for this kind of behaviour isn't going to upset them, as the expense of your bandwidth useage vs. profit from your account fees is much less than the aformentioned mom and pop internet user.
My point is, rather than simply boycott a company like this - and talk about it in a geek heavy forum - educate the masses of the uninitiated so that they take responsibility for their choices (political or otherwise). Big brother and the corporate leeches exist more due to willful ignorance of the general public than anything else.
and I'm suddenly glad I added that disclaimer to my post =D
The parent is a good example of "don't judge a book by its cover".
I have personally met people not only with extremely poor communication and literacy skills, but fairly odious personal habits too, but they have proven to be incredibly wise and inciteful in spite of their personal flaws.
You may judge this sort of person to be not worthy of your attention (at best), or maybe even worthy of your scorn and abuse (at worst). I'm willing to bet that such an individual may consequently judge you to be something along the lines of an elitest tool (not a personal attack on the parent, simply an observation of the polarity of the arguments at hand).
I'm not the best with spelling and grammar, and nothing drives me more insane than receiving an email from my father with the obligatory u instead of you, but I think we all need to stop taking ourselves so seriously and learn to accept some "good 'ole folksy talk'n" internet style once in a while.
So I guess the only appropriate question is, when will it support a force feedback "joystick"?
I currently work for a private sector IT company, but we contract to a government agency. IMHO the public sector job would be much more stable, and you'll more than likely make more money over the lifespan of the job, with very little in the way of upsets. Plus you'll be on the inside, and likely have your own budget.
Your original query indicates that you'd be on contract with the fortune 10 company, which means every time you want to spend their money, you will have to justify it nine ways to sunday before they reach for the chequebook.
insofar as marketing is concerned this is a new trend, but this isn't something thats altogether new.
There are huge files locked away somewhere with your medical records on them, documents detailing every illness, disease and broken bone. The police keep records of your criminal history. Insurance companies keep track of your driving record and any claims made. Schools keep details not only of your grades, but also of your misdemeanours.
I don't personally agree with their collection of this information, but IMHO maybe we shouldn't be worrying about wether or not they collect the data, but more how we as the consumer should allow them to use it.
IANAM (Mechanic) but my father dabbles.
If you're in the process of replacing engine mounts on a car that age, you want to replace all of them, because they collapse over time.
granted though, this is somewhat offtopic =)
To return to the topic at hand, who would you prefer to trust? yourself or a third party contractor that you don't know personally.
This suggests two possibilities, either maintain a stock of spares as others have suggested, or alternatively develop a strong
relationship with your support contractors to the degree of knowing their field techs on a first name basis. This way both parties
see each other as valued and you get looked after.
What about aircraft launched torpedoes? Aside from the Japanese doing a profoundly successful job of this in WWII, the Australian Airforce maintain a number of P3-C Orion ASW aircraft. I've also heard of torpedos that can be delivered via a cruise missile system. There are plenty of ways to get a torpedo within strike range of just about anything. Also remember, for every technological advance in countermeasures, a new form of weaponry is developed.
Not meaning to specifically single out the parent, but the subject line was appropriate.
.com = commercial, .net = network afiliate, .org = non profit organisation etc etc. Since most porn sites are also commercial entities, they are IMHO just as entitled to a .com as anything else. This sorta makes the .xxx TLD somewhat unnecessary.
The issue here may also be less about censorship and more about redundancy. In my time as an ISP helpdesk phone bitch, I learned (and was always under the impression) that
I doubt however that Bush is whining on this point, but I still felt that it was valid.
Having said all this however, I think it'd still be useful, and it would make it easier for the tech savvy to find what they want, when they want, instead of tripping over a million porn sites on their hunt for.. well anything else they want to find on the net.
... requires a fairly closed environment. Too many new ideas and they might loose the zeal for the cause.
Handing them an internet connection and teaching them to "surf the web" will inadvertantly lead them to online porn,
and a lack of desire for anything but one handed surfing.
The newest weapon against terror - free online porn! =)
If you use a superconductor then its a matter of keeping the coil cold enough.
Further to this, if you have the whole module wrapped in charged superconductor material, could you not then use linear magnetic aceleration (basically a big assed rail gun) to save on fuel costs and mass when getting it off the ground?
Some things such as his comments about classes i just plain disagree with.
While in complete agreement with the parent post, it just goes to show that one person's idea of perfect isn't necessarily someone elses.
of early ORPG's, but everyone I hear harping about WoW and Eq2 and how they get XP boosts if they don't log in for a few days, tell me that they easily catch up to their guildmates who game almost constantly. With this solution to the problem of leveling gaps, the game becomes much more social, as friends can game together more regularly.
Sometimes, you just gotta shut up and build the damn thing.
I don't know about anyone else, but I would feel a whole lot better knowing they had gotten the math right before they attempt to kickstart what is in essence an artificial sun no more than meters from the surface of our planet.
IMHO Fusion should be able to provide far more generated power per square foot of "reactor" than a decent sized wind farm, which means less wasteage of resources (in some countries, arable land can be, and is classed as a resource). I agree with the poster of the parent that something needs to be done, but in this particular case, I wouldn't personally advocate haste, just in case.
Personally, I hate all snipers in games, I don't think they enhance the fun of a game for anyone but snipers. Once upon a time, people sniped by increasing their mouse sensitivity and narrowing their Field Of Vision settings of the game engine. That was even lamer. I do accept that this is an opinion, and I respect that people disagree, but I despise snipers.
I have no direct objection to snipers per se, but I've played games of CS that end up being a 10 man team using the AWM, versus a team that can't get enough cash to have anything more than Mac-10's or TMP's. One idea to combat this is if they put in a weapon limit, eg. 10 players = 2 snipers + general infantry for each team. I can see problems with the implementation of this style of system, but I honestly believe that it'd assist game balance, especially on maps that (by pure nature of their open plan layout) encourage whoring with long range artillery.
to the phrase "artificial intelligence"
You paid, but somebody else's eyeballs got to see the content.
and if this is indeed the case, do the Feds arrest you for infringement after you receive corrective eye surgery to replace the lens/cornea/et al? =)
My question is more this.
Is it a case of too much information, or being bombarded by abuse from people who are willfully ignorant about the technology they use daily.
A certain amount of burnout can be fairly easily attributed to things like high end programming to short deadlines and small volumes of sysadmins being forced to manage huge server farms, but in my experience, for each systems engineer or sysadmin, you have at least two (in the company I work for, we have 14 helpdesk staff compared to 7 sysadmin/engineer staff) frontline geeks for each one behind the scenes.
I have had personal experience in supporting clients for an ISP, as well as my current job supporting state government, and the level of ignorance shown by the client (and the abuse and anger it generates) hits me much harder than being asked to support a new product or service.
IMHO this is one of those things that has more than one answer, though I wonder if other industries in their formative years experienced similar issues.
The only piece of malware that I haven't been able to remove was a variant of CoolWebSearch. Not even CWShredder got rid of it (or even detected it) as well as all of the other cleaners.
.dll's in the system and system32 directories. I also recommend to the original poster something that scans for BHO's. I believe software like BHODemon or MS's Spyware scanner check for these.
I managed to toast a version of this on a friends machine using assistance from Tech Suuport Guy forums, hijack this and CW Shredder. After this it was still a case of selectively searing registry entries and hunting obscure
Its a good thing I enjoy hunting bugs on computers, its frustrating as hell, but I really do enjoy the challenge =).
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Who said Asimov wasn't a prophet..
They used to say this alot for portable CD players too, though I doubt the average discman would output more RF noise than a walkman or other audio device.
Also AFAIK (dredging through my old basic electronics training and sometimes dodgy memory) RF interferance needs to be at the same or a harmonic of the broadcast frequency to generate problems.
This last part is only things I have heard, and isn't verified truth, however I have been told that the reason they don't like you using mobile phones in aircraft is less about affecting instumentation, and more about the signal "footprint" you leave on the ground as your phone tries to access the nearest phone tower. This apparantly ties up channels on multiple towers. Do take this with a grain of salt however, as I am unable to verify it as fact.