IMO, the "last mile" problem is best addressed by innovation on the humble bicycle platform. Green Gear Cycling in Eugene OR (http://www.bikefriday.com/), maker of a fast-fold, public-transit friendly model called the Tikit, is on the right track (if it's fair to say about train-based intermodal transit). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_bu4JCO2-I&feature=PlayList&p=7889C5D2E10D4424&index=0. Weather objections are met by products such as the bike "roof" system distributed by GoEco in Limerick Ireland, a place not known for dray weather. http://www.goeco.ie/retractable_bike_roof.html. Brompton (UK) http://www.brompton.co.uk/ and Dahon (California) also offer folders although they are not aimed as directly at the intermodal market as Bike Friday's answer.
Opening Scene: Dusty banditos are trying to jump Bogie's claim in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." But in this sequence they're sombreros keep the desert sun off their Brooks Bros. suits and expensive Hartman briefcases. Dialogue: After confused discussion between the banditos about the strange word "Faxes" the rough-voiced leader shouts back to Bogie: "Faxes. . . We don' need no steenkin' Faxes!"
By law, all pleadings and motions filed in a United States District Court must be signed by an attorney of record or by the litigant appearing pro per. Fed Rul. Civ. Proc. 11(a); http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/Rule11.htm. United States District Courts in all states now require counsel to e-file substantially everything, effectively requiring e-signatures on every court document that is filed.
In the Eastern District of California, attorneys' e-signatures under Rule 11(a) and mis-use of e-signature privileges are specifically covered by Local Rules 7-131(c) and (d), insuring the integrity of the process. http://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caed/staticOther/page_459.htm And after at two years of experience with the system, our Judges, US Magistrates, court staff, attorneys, and paralegals would NEVER willingly go back to the old ways (which included fax-filing options).
In complex cases, California State Courts can order the parties to use Case Home Page, a well-run private, user-supported e-case management service that also requires e-signatures. (http://www.casehomepage.com). I am litigating a class action lawsuit and at least 12 related individual cases in San Diego County that would be logistically and economically impossible without the help of Case Home Page.
By taking advantage of off-the-shelf IT products (including video-conference capability), the Bench and Bar have cut our previously HUGE environmental footprint while providing user-friendly, fast, accessible, and substantially more economical service to our clients.
I'm prejudiced, of course: I helped beta the Eastern District Court's e-filing and case retrieval systems and take proud ownership of what my colleagues, our Judges, and the Court's consulting and resident geek staff members accomplished at extremely low cost to the Taxpayer. I beta tested a number of browsers running Linux (I think I used Yellow Dog and Red Hat for the tests), Windoze XP (both native and using a PowerPC compatible emulator), and MacOS 9 and X in a number of configurations using dial-ups, DSL, T-1 and T-3 access points. The Court's IT staff was a joy to work with and, as a Federal Bar Assn. Member, I'm really stoked to have been a part of the process.
Analogies can either be misleading or spot-on.
Anonymous Coward's vaccine analogy (like a lot of what AC contributes) is both +5 spot-on "insightful" but also something I'll use today to deflect wrath from couple of pissed-off staffers who got "vaccinated" yesterday.
Gotta talk to "Management" in ways they understand. I can sell "Dr. Merl" giving "vaccinations" a lot better than "social engineering" (which sounds like something an HR person would say).
Don't RIAA and its lawyers count as Internet Criminals?
These are the people who are suing 10-year-old girls (who were 7 at the time of the alleged download), using information obtained by one Time-Warner company (AOL) to shake down people for another Time-Warner company (Warner Brothers Records, Inc.), and who sue 61-year-old school teachers (with law enforcement training and no children in the home) whom RIAA and its lawyers know or should realistically have known before filing suit wouldn't be using a dial-up account to download 300+ tracks of cop-killer gangsta rap.
If internet-based abuse to extort money from little people by systematically abusing the court system to fatten the bottom line of Fortune 500 "entertainment" giants and a handfull of multi-national law firms isn't an "Internet Crime" it certainly should be.
Nice to see Soyuz mentioned. Lots of press this AM about US and UK rescuers of the Russian mini-sub. But what about the Russian rescue of the ISS when Columbia went splat on re-entry? With all the attention on nationalism/religious fanaticism/etc. let's not overlook how fragile our own lives on this little blue planet really are. "How Right we are - How Wrong they are" thinking doesn't get food water and O2 up to the ISS, warmth and O2 to submarines, or crewmembers home safe from either up or down missions. As long as guy-geeks & gal-geeks explore stuff (from new code to 10th/11th plants) we'll need open hearts to each other. If that's the real lesson of "manned" ("womaned?") flight, maybe sending ourselves into the hostile up and/or down occasionally isn't such a bad idea.
Our small business litigation boutique has no internal IT staff and a couple of big IP clients on both coasts. Our OS commitments are on 4 levels: solid security; up 365/24/7 for our clients & practice group; seamless interface with clients & colleagues; and limiting obstacles to leveraging of best available apps. At one point to meet those design constraints, I had XP (with emulator), Yellow Dog & OSX installed on my PB as did at least half the office. Real world result: OS10.2.4 gets 98% of our play. We bypass the GUI to take UNIX-like control in Terminal as needed. It ain't UNIX, which some prefer; some of our group still are hard-core Wintel folks. (Some also resisted getting rated in the firm's aircraft; hey, we respect that too.) But for ease of use, no hassel self-admin, and consistent focus on client service rather than CS issues (while leaving an open door for those of use who really enjoy learning enough CS to deliver max value to our IT clients) concensus has been reached on OSX as our default.
Although it sounds pedestrian, my law office uses Apple's free iCal program in its latest 10.4.1 quite successfully. It's not bloatware. But then, lawyers and their staffs are such IT nightmares that for any programming they touch "Simple is best."
We're a team-based business litigation botique that does business lit legal malpractice defense work, board-of-directors defense, etc. generally on referrral from other lawyers or insurance companies. Everything is time-critical; careful back-calendaring and team coordination is essential.
We tried a dedicated law office management program that was expensive, slow, and inaccurate on critical drop-dead dates set by local federal and State court rules. We used Office X/Entourage as well for awhile but didn't care for the costly upgrade to Office 2004 or the MS syncronization feature.
Apple's syncronization keeps everyone on the same page (literally), syncs our bluetooth Motorola cell phones' calendar and contacts functions, and operates in the background while we work. Hardware appears bullet-proof and the OS lawyer-proof. We get off-site backup and restore functions with our firm's dotMac account, a reassuring feature when "Leaping Lawyers with Laptops" data-loss issues are omnipresent.
There may be bloatware answers to calendaring. But for our money, iCal, iSync and dotMac have them all skunked!
Think four words: Excess Accumulated Earnings Tax.
First, the basics: every US business has a Silent Partner. We work away writing code an' stuff in a rented room oblivious to the fact that even though we're making our own coffee, paying our own T3 bill and doing all our own heavy lifting, we actually (fanfare please) have a silent, lazy, greedy and somewhat nerotic Partner. It's called the U.S. Gov'mint an' that bad boy is a Partner in every US business deal any of us do.
So what's this have to do with M$ and its cash stash? Plenty. Regardless of the political eyewash about Monopolistic abuse$ that the US Atty's Office, EU Trustbusters and similar lawyer-nuisances make headlines with, Bill's Partner has an abiding interest in seeing M$ make lots and lots of taxable income. The more success Bill & Co. has, the more money M$' silent Partner rakes in.
The tax part is pretty clear. Corporate taxes take about a 45 cent bite out of every dollar we make after expenses. Sure, we can pay ourselves a salary and report it on our 1040s, but since wages are deductible to our corporation those dollars still only get taxed once.
What our Partner really wants is to get two bites of the same dollar of earned income. To do that, the Gov'mint wants M$, Apple, and every other corporation with a substantial cash hoard to pay dividends even if it means the corporation might come up a little short when times get tough (Apple during the Sculley years is a case in point). At some point, the Tax Police will show up, tell Bill that his little company has "Excess Accumulated Earnings" and either tax the daylights out of M$' cash hoard right then or give Bill's legal dept ("D-a-d-!!!") about 48 hours to pay it out to the shareholders, where (except for a little loophole I'll ignore here for simplicity) it gets taxed again. Bingo! Our Gov'mint Partner -- who never once helped us out with a line of code or a fresh cup 'o joe -- has just helped itself to a double tax helping from the same earnings dollar.
Steve, Bill, and the rest of the IT community have done a pretty good job holding the industry's fatty Partner at bay. But eventually, the cash stashes are going to get distributed. And when they do, look for an Abe Lincoln cat dressed up like Bill Graham for a Dead show elbowing his way to the head of the line. It's just the Silent Partner, boys & girls, collecting his due.
All BSD/X geeks should really chear that one. Now they've got their own dot.mac without being too in your face about it. . . The shareholders gotta luvvit.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, the "last mile" problem is best addressed by innovation on the humble bicycle platform. Green Gear Cycling in Eugene OR (http://www.bikefriday.com/), maker of a fast-fold, public-transit friendly model called the Tikit, is on the right track (if it's fair to say about train-based intermodal transit). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_bu4JCO2-I&feature=PlayList&p=7889C5D2E10D4424&index=0. Weather objections are met by products such as the bike "roof" system distributed by GoEco in Limerick Ireland, a place not known for dray weather. http://www.goeco.ie/retractable_bike_roof.html. Brompton (UK) http://www.brompton.co.uk/ and Dahon (California) also offer folders although they are not aimed as directly at the intermodal market as Bike Friday's answer.
By law, all pleadings and motions filed in a United States District Court must be signed by an attorney of record or by the litigant appearing pro per. Fed Rul. Civ. Proc. 11(a); http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/Rule11.htm. United States District Courts in all states now require counsel to e-file substantially everything, effectively requiring e-signatures on every court document that is filed.
In the Eastern District of California, attorneys' e-signatures under Rule 11(a) and mis-use of e-signature privileges are specifically covered by Local Rules 7-131(c) and (d), insuring the integrity of the process. http://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caed/staticOther/page_459.htm And after at two years of experience with the system, our Judges, US Magistrates, court staff, attorneys, and paralegals would NEVER willingly go back to the old ways (which included fax-filing options).
In complex cases, California State Courts can order the parties to use Case Home Page, a well-run private, user-supported e-case management service that also requires e-signatures. (http://www.casehomepage.com). I am litigating a class action lawsuit and at least 12 related individual cases in San Diego County that would be logistically and economically impossible without the help of Case Home Page.
By taking advantage of off-the-shelf IT products (including video-conference capability), the Bench and Bar have cut our previously HUGE environmental footprint while providing user-friendly, fast, accessible, and substantially more economical service to our clients.
I'm prejudiced, of course: I helped beta the Eastern District Court's e-filing and case retrieval systems and take proud ownership of what my colleagues, our Judges, and the Court's consulting and resident geek staff members accomplished at extremely low cost to the Taxpayer. I beta tested a number of browsers running Linux (I think I used Yellow Dog and Red Hat for the tests), Windoze XP (both native and using a PowerPC compatible emulator), and MacOS 9 and X in a number of configurations using dial-ups, DSL, T-1 and T-3 access points. The Court's IT staff was a joy to work with and, as a Federal Bar Assn. Member, I'm really stoked to have been a part of the process.
So faxes? " . . we don' need no steenkin' Faxes!"
Analogies can either be misleading or spot-on. Anonymous Coward's vaccine analogy (like a lot of what AC contributes) is both +5 spot-on "insightful" but also something I'll use today to deflect wrath from couple of pissed-off staffers who got "vaccinated" yesterday. Gotta talk to "Management" in ways they understand. I can sell "Dr. Merl" giving "vaccinations" a lot better than "social engineering" (which sounds like something an HR person would say).
These are the people who are suing 10-year-old girls (who were 7 at the time of the alleged download), using information obtained by one Time-Warner company (AOL) to shake down people for another Time-Warner company (Warner Brothers Records, Inc.), and who sue 61-year-old school teachers (with law enforcement training and no children in the home) whom RIAA and its lawyers know or should realistically have known before filing suit wouldn't be using a dial-up account to download 300+ tracks of cop-killer gangsta rap.
If internet-based abuse to extort money from little people by systematically abusing the court system to fatten the bottom line of Fortune 500 "entertainment" giants and a handfull of multi-national law firms isn't an "Internet Crime" it certainly should be.
Nice to see Soyuz mentioned. Lots of press this AM about US and UK rescuers of the Russian mini-sub. But what about the Russian rescue of the ISS when Columbia went splat on re-entry? With all the attention on nationalism/religious fanaticism/etc. let's not overlook how fragile our own lives on this little blue planet really are. "How Right we are - How Wrong they are" thinking doesn't get food water and O2 up to the ISS, warmth and O2 to submarines, or crewmembers home safe from either up or down missions. As long as guy-geeks & gal-geeks explore stuff (from new code to 10th/11th plants) we'll need open hearts to each other. If that's the real lesson of "manned" ("womaned?") flight, maybe sending ourselves into the hostile up and/or down occasionally isn't such a bad idea.
Our small business litigation boutique has no internal IT staff and a couple of big IP clients on both coasts. Our OS commitments are on 4 levels: solid security; up 365/24/7 for our clients & practice group; seamless interface with clients & colleagues; and limiting obstacles to leveraging of best available apps. At one point to meet those design constraints, I had XP (with emulator), Yellow Dog & OSX installed on my PB as did at least half the office. Real world result: OS10.2.4 gets 98% of our play. We bypass the GUI to take UNIX-like control in Terminal as needed. It ain't UNIX, which some prefer; some of our group still are hard-core Wintel folks. (Some also resisted getting rated in the firm's aircraft; hey, we respect that too.) But for ease of use, no hassel self-admin, and consistent focus on client service rather than CS issues (while leaving an open door for those of use who really enjoy learning enough CS to deliver max value to our IT clients) concensus has been reached on OSX as our default.
We're a team-based business litigation botique that does business lit legal malpractice defense work, board-of-directors defense, etc. generally on referrral from other lawyers or insurance companies. Everything is time-critical; careful back-calendaring and team coordination is essential.
We tried a dedicated law office management program that was expensive, slow, and inaccurate on critical drop-dead dates set by local federal and State court rules. We used Office X/Entourage as well for awhile but didn't care for the costly upgrade to Office 2004 or the MS syncronization feature.
Apple's syncronization keeps everyone on the same page (literally), syncs our bluetooth Motorola cell phones' calendar and contacts functions, and operates in the background while we work. Hardware appears bullet-proof and the OS lawyer-proof. We get off-site backup and restore functions with our firm's dotMac account, a reassuring feature when "Leaping Lawyers with Laptops" data-loss issues are omnipresent.
There may be bloatware answers to calendaring. But for our money, iCal, iSync and dotMac have them all skunked!
First, the basics: every US business has a Silent Partner. We work away writing code an' stuff in a rented room oblivious to the fact that even though we're making our own coffee, paying our own T3 bill and doing all our own heavy lifting, we actually (fanfare please) have a silent, lazy, greedy and somewhat nerotic Partner. It's called the U.S. Gov'mint an' that bad boy is a Partner in every US business deal any of us do.
So what's this have to do with M$ and its cash stash? Plenty. Regardless of the political eyewash about Monopolistic abuse$ that the US Atty's Office, EU Trustbusters and similar lawyer-nuisances make headlines with, Bill's Partner has an abiding interest in seeing M$ make lots and lots of taxable income. The more success Bill & Co. has, the more money M$' silent Partner rakes in.
The tax part is pretty clear. Corporate taxes take about a 45 cent bite out of every dollar we make after expenses. Sure, we can pay ourselves a salary and report it on our 1040s, but since wages are deductible to our corporation those dollars still only get taxed once.
What our Partner really wants is to get two bites of the same dollar of earned income. To do that, the Gov'mint wants M$, Apple, and every other corporation with a substantial cash hoard to pay dividends even if it means the corporation might come up a little short when times get tough (Apple during the Sculley years is a case in point). At some point, the Tax Police will show up, tell Bill that his little company has "Excess Accumulated Earnings" and either tax the daylights out of M$' cash hoard right then or give Bill's legal dept ("D-a-d-!!!") about 48 hours to pay it out to the shareholders, where (except for a little loophole I'll ignore here for simplicity) it gets taxed again. Bingo! Our Gov'mint Partner -- who never once helped us out with a line of code or a fresh cup 'o joe -- has just helped itself to a double tax helping from the same earnings dollar.
Steve, Bill, and the rest of the IT community have done a pretty good job holding the industry's fatty Partner at bay. But eventually, the cash stashes are going to get distributed. And when they do, look for an Abe Lincoln cat dressed up like Bill Graham for a Dead show elbowing his way to the head of the line. It's just the Silent Partner, boys & girls, collecting his due.
All BSD/X geeks should really chear that one. Now they've got their own dot.mac without being too in your face about it. . . The shareholders gotta luvvit.