I remember reading this article by a guy who wants to discourage the use of booth babes. Here's one of the suggestions that appealed to me:
The Tactics: Actually, this part is pretty simple. When the first person at a booth approaches you, treat him or her exactly the same way you would a sales or implementation engineer. Ask questions regarding the technology. Ask about planned life cycles of the software, on use counts, and other things. Treat them exactly as you would an equal.
If this person is a booth babe (or a clueless marketing droid), they will inevitably hand you off to the lead technical (or sales) person at the booth. Here comes the important part: Demand to know why they wasted your time with manning the booth with clueless people. Don't discuss sales or tech with this person (which is what they will desperately want to do at this point). Ask why their company wastes everyone's time and their investors' money using people who provide no value. Tell them that you will not be doing business with them, regardless of their technology, because you believe that any company that needs to hide behind tricks, gimmicks, and sex appeal, can not offer you any value. Point out that a great number of their competitors don't need to use flimflam to sell their wares. Then walk away.
So as a concerned UK citizen, which government department(s) should I be writing to, to request that they prosecute themselves for running an illegal website?
Not just a US problem; I've been seeing the same trends in the UK for the last twenty years. Still, on the bright side it means I'll probably have a job for as long as I want one, so....
Remember kiddies, math is hard! Go off and do something more fun and easier instead with plenty of time for parties and shopping. Everyone knows the world needs more people with media studies and art appreciation diplomas. That's the ticket.
I work for one of the smaller ISPs in the UK serving mainly business customers. From time to time we've had emails from various sources purporting to represent the rights of copyright holders. These have all appeared to originate in the US and quote US legislation, an allegedly offending IP and the time at which they state the incident occurred. A few of the IP addresses have even fallen within our address ranges. Where this is the case I've always replied back asking for more information and pointing out that the legislation they are quoting is not relevant to UK law and asking for the UK equivalent under which they propose to press their claims. I've never heard back from any of them.
Alright that would give you close enough to a 50/50 male / female split. Now to solve the difficult problem. How to stop the male agents saving their 50% female quota for use on young, attractive females?
This "scientific discovery" directly conflicts with my belief that the entire universe is only 6000 years old.
It's 6016 years (give or take a year), and I agree this so called "scientific discovery" offends religious beliefs and so all articles about it on the interwebs should be removed immediately!
I'd write more about it, except I've got to get back to drawing my cartoons of Muhammad and writing rude limericks about the Thai royal family.
The advantage of using something like EncFS is that changing a file only causes the (encrypted) data for that file to be transferred. Using a TrueCrypt volume causes a potentially large amount of data to have to be transferred for every minor change.
My solution to the problem (not exactly DIY, just using tools available to privacy fix Dropbox's otherwise good solution), was to use EncFS to map a virtual file system onto the directory hierarchy synced using Dropbox. Essentially I have a clear text view that I work in, with every change being automatically reflected as a change in an encrypted file which Dropbox client software sees and syncs in the usual way. Since encryption is done on a per file basis rather than a volume basis, Dropbox still works efficiently. I use this to keep a directory tree synced on four OS X and Linux boxes.
... but use something like EncFS to keep all your files encrypted. You still get the advantages of on the fly synchronization over your various computers, but Dropbox loses the ability to do de-duplication to keep their storage costs down. That's what happens when you start playing silly legal games, users work around them and usually to your detriment.
So what's the password? I keep telling you "there is no password" but you won't listen. Should be interesting when it comes to court.
Oh, and of course use a proper password on your second and third level Truecrypt volumes, you know the ones where you hide your "Hello Kitty" club membership details.
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I remember reading this article by a guy who wants to discourage the use of booth babes. Here's one of the suggestions that appealed to me:
The Tactics: Actually, this part is pretty simple. When the first person at a booth approaches you, treat him or her exactly the same way you would a sales or implementation engineer. Ask questions regarding the technology. Ask about planned life cycles of the software, on use counts, and other things. Treat them exactly as you would an equal.
If this person is a booth babe (or a clueless marketing droid), they will inevitably hand you off to the lead technical (or sales) person at the booth. Here comes the important part: Demand to know why they wasted your time with manning the booth with clueless people. Don't discuss sales or tech with this person (which is what they will desperately want to do at this point). Ask why their company wastes everyone's time and their investors' money using people who provide no value. Tell them that you will not be doing business with them, regardless of their technology, because you believe that any company that needs to hide behind tricks, gimmicks, and sex appeal, can not offer you any value. Point out that a great number of their competitors don't need to use flimflam to sell their wares. Then walk away.
So as a concerned UK citizen, which government department(s) should I be writing to, to request that they prosecute themselves for running an illegal website?
Not just a US problem; I've been seeing the same trends in the UK for the last twenty years. Still, on the bright side it means I'll probably have a job for as long as I want one, so....
Remember kiddies, math is hard! Go off and do something more fun and easier instead with plenty of time for parties and shopping. Everyone knows the world needs more people with media studies and art appreciation diplomas. That's the ticket.
I work for one of the smaller ISPs in the UK serving mainly business customers. From time to time we've had emails from various sources purporting to represent the rights of copyright holders. These have all appeared to originate in the US and quote US legislation, an allegedly offending IP and the time at which they state the incident occurred. A few of the IP addresses have even fallen within our address ranges. Where this is the case I've always replied back asking for more information and pointing out that the legislation they are quoting is not relevant to UK law and asking for the UK equivalent under which they propose to press their claims. I've never heard back from any of them.
Alright that would give you close enough to a 50/50 male / female split. Now to solve the difficult problem. How to stop the male agents saving their 50% female quota for use on young, attractive females?
This "scientific discovery" directly conflicts with my belief that the entire universe is only 6000 years old.
It's 6016 years (give or take a year), and I agree this so called "scientific discovery" offends religious beliefs and so all articles about it on the interwebs should be removed immediately!
I'd write more about it, except I've got to get back to drawing my cartoons of Muhammad and writing rude limericks about the Thai royal family.
And the answer from me is "Thanks, but no thanks". I'll spend my tourist dollars somewhere else that doesn't pull stunts like this.
On the subject of "unlimited" deals, I've taken to asking people trying to sell me broadband what their "unlimit" is.
One of the best introductions to good programming practice that I know and it instilled in me some good habits I've managed to hang on to.
Syntax error on line 2 - processing aborted
The advantage of using something like EncFS is that changing a file only causes the (encrypted) data for that file to be transferred. Using a TrueCrypt volume causes a potentially large amount of data to have to be transferred for every minor change.
My solution to the problem (not exactly DIY, just using tools available to privacy fix Dropbox's otherwise good solution), was to use EncFS to map a virtual file system onto the directory hierarchy synced using Dropbox. Essentially I have a clear text view that I work in, with every change being automatically reflected as a change in an encrypted file which Dropbox client software sees and syncs in the usual way. Since encryption is done on a per file basis rather than a volume basis, Dropbox still works efficiently. I use this to keep a directory tree synced on four OS X and Linux boxes.
... but use something like EncFS to keep all your files encrypted. You still get the advantages of on the fly synchronization over your various computers, but Dropbox loses the ability to do de-duplication to keep their storage costs down. That's what happens when you start playing silly legal games, users work around them and usually to your detriment.
...and set it to "there is no password"
So what's the password? I keep telling you "there is no password" but you won't listen. Should be interesting when it comes to court.
Oh, and of course use a proper password on your second and third level Truecrypt volumes, you know the ones where you hide your "Hello Kitty" club membership details.