(There's a downside of course: he frequently ignored the CEO because something else was more important right now, and besides, he knew a better way to do it. He could be a real bastard about that too, but he delivered the goods, so nobody complained.)
So it may be that he was exactly right? What a downside to have...
"No one with a brain and access to the internet really believed that Iraq had a stockpile of WMD."
This is a lie, unless you want to define "with a brain" liberally.
In fact, this is used in the international relations literature as a classic example of unavoidable groupthink
Iraqis obstructed UN inspections in a way that indicates that they were up to something. They either were, or wanted it to appear that way to start a game of chicken with the US. If they didn't have WMD, they could have diffused the situation at any time by allowing inspections. They could have stopped the invasion even if they had them simply by giving them up. If they had WMD, they had plenty of time to hide, destroy, or move it since the US invasion was rather less than a secret. They certainly moved something to Syria.
So the fact is that the Iraqis acted deliberately to goad the US into action. That isn't groupthink. The missing bit of the puzzle is, why? Was there a possible outcome that could have benefited top Iraqi leaders? Was there internal pressure (stupidly) forcing the confrontation?
Ten to one the IT dept had an internally-developed product that did pretty much the same as yours did, and they didn't want to lose their baby to an outside solution.
We have a faction of management who wanted control of an internal project but couldn't take it away. So they killed all funding and initiated an outsourcing project to fix the problems caused by the funding starvation (they could get control this way). The outsourcing project is having serious issues, so now they want IT to own the problems while the outsourcing company has all the control.
I can see why any IT dept. would want to avoid this kind of trouble...
Or, the GPS is calculating a weighted moving average of the past few seconds and recording point in time information only every 30 seconds. In which case the GPS recorded speed is very nearly his instant speed, with the limitation that you only get updates every 30 seconds. This is how the data logging in all the GPSs I've owned works.
I'd say this boils down to one simple thing. Pay at the door. If an officer doesn't like the way you look and you drive past while they are meeting quota, you just became guilty. 'Driving while teenager' is an offense under that rule, as is 'driving sports car' so he is guilty twice. Good thing he wasn't 'driving while minority' also.
When I got my drivers license as a teenager the fine officers taught me that driving the speed limit is -not- an acceptable defense from a speeding ticket. In fact when I argued about it I found that I had also run a red light and changed lanes without a turn signal. It seems that this was regular income producing activity for the town, apparently promoted by city hall. About six months later the officers of that town enforced an impromptu curfew one weekend. They simply arrested every driver who appeared to be under 21 and impounded their car. That finally got them some grief, but only because they'd done it to the kids of some folks with influence outside the city.
Or look at it another way. Either an electronics company creates and markets a product for making sure your precious snowflake doesn't speed, but fails -so- badly that said snowflake can drive 68 while the GPS only reads 45, or the prosecutor wants to maintain the system where you're guilty when they say you are no matter what actually happened.
I notice that the prosecutor didn't, say, actually demonstrate with an actual car that they could cause no more than a 45mph reading while actually reaching a speed of 68mph. Why not? If they could do that, the case would be won in an instant. It's the most obvious path to victory.
We start something like a dead pool with a bounty for spammers. The top 30 list of rokso spammers are put in a drawing. The pot money is used to by a hitman for the winner. We don't have to kill them all, just make being a top sender an eventual death sentence. It would be far cheaper than the bandwidth and manpower expenses we pay now.
Mafia anti-spam anyone?
There are multiple reasons that any sensible person can quickly come up with as to why this would be a useless guesture:
There are too many spammers to kill them all (or even make a dent in the spam volume by trying)
Spammers are stateless, and will just flee to countries where spam laws don't exist - where they can continue to make money through spamming
There is too much money in spam to prevent people from going into it just because there is a remote chance of facing criminal charges in one country for it
The solution is to stop making a death penalty case a $3 million windfall to the lawyers then.
If the cost differential between a death penalty trial and a life incarceration trial exceeds about $3 million, the incarceration becomes more cost effective pretty much 100% of the time.
So why doesn't the open source community combine tech from web harvesters and spambots to create false info to pollute the data?
Even better, google bomb the data and see if any companies that use that data can be convinced to bring doomed products to market based on the false data.
Wait, does this explain the hello kitty vibrator and harry potter vibrating broomstick?
Now we need a buzz about needing 'walking bear' t-shirts with links to a pedo-bear seal of approval.
I did a quick search for someone in Denver talking about their xcel bill. It look like they already have 8 fees on the bill in addition to the cost of the power! Denver slashdotters - has xcel just been adding a new fee to your bill every year, and this is just the current years scam to do it again?
Others posted above there are no extra fees, but I'm looking at the electricity part of my xcel bill, and can't even find the rate for actual usage; itemized amounts on the bill include:
Residential General (I'm guessing that's the usage amount, by process of elimination)
GRSA
Air Quality improvement
Trans cost Adj
Elec Commodity Adj
Demand Side Mgmt Cost
Purch Cap Cost Adj
Renew. Energy Std Adj
Franchise Fee
Sales Tax?
It was in response to that that the US Stealth fighter program was initiated in the early 1970s. But, just imagine if we had thought, geez, the Germans had came up with a way to evade radar, we have the plane, newer technology...
You have to wonder, what if?
And when your slower, more expensive 'Radar' stealth fighter was shot down by heat seeking missiles anyway, what good would you have done? Your needed more than just radar stealth by the 60s.
The F4 and A6 used in Vietnam had either bomb load and/or speed as considerations. You two 500 pound bomb fighter will have to be very busy to keep up with an A6 that carries a larger payload than a B-17. Radar stealth didn't arrive sooner in practice because tech arrived that could find you without radar, and because radar got better faster than practical radar stealth did.
Why wouldn't a Time Warner or Comcast take them up on such an offer, especially in areas where they are the only broadband provider? Ad a clause to the agreement barring disclosure, and they'll get free money.
Anyone think cable companies would avoid this for ethical reasons??
Every weekend I go to National Bookstore at the shopping mall, and browse through the new releases... before I buy any book, I'll want to read at least the prologue, introduction OR cover...
The back of those same books frequently adds the first chapter of another of the authors books as a teaser.
This is another patent of normal business practices but this time 'on the intarweb'.
But how are properly functioning cookies any threat to privacy?
If the cookies are set by a 3rd party who has linked content on many websites, that 3rd party can track your activity through all of those sites. If you visit a website that you've given your personal details (say, to buy something), then the website and 3rd party can share information about you. Now they both know who you are and what you do online.
How do you feel about banner ads hosted by 3rd parties setting cookies on your computer now?
Thirded. Spammers in general should die horribly, and this idiot or idiots should be the first one up against the wall.
I have a modest proposal. We create a google 'bounty' ad account, and all place at least one ad for that account on our sites. The bounty is payable to the hitman who kills one of the top ten ROKSO spammers. Like a lottery, the bounty increases until claimed.
Perhaps we could convince spammers that being one of the top ten is a bad idea!
Um, changing the firmware isn't going to put a LCD screen on the mirror. Apparently you haven't grasped how a SLR works.
Or maybe you don't have enough imagination.
It would slightly increase button-press-to-photograph time, but not by much. Histogram in Live View mode would do this. There are at least two negatives. You'll burn through the battery, and using Live View heats the SLR sensor. Heating the sensor increases noise and 'hot' (temporarily stuck) pixels. SLRs can take pictures so quickly that it usually isn't a problem to just take a test shot. It would be a nice feature, but not that important.
(I suppose you could probably keep the shutter open longer than necessary then expose electronically like point-and-shoot cameras, but I'm not positive this would work.)
Some Recent Nikon SLRs actually do this, so it's possible and has been done. Certain flash sync tricks are only possible with these models. See strobist.com for more info.
I'd love modified SLR firmware for Canon to add features they've left off, presumably to sell high priced external add ons. I want an intervalometer! (simple program to do time lapse shots in camera - Nikon's have it built in...)
A firmware checksum against that region of the chip could make it very tough to make a chip that runs standard firmware. That could be enough to make the bootleg chips virtually worthless in the marketplace.
If someone wants to counterfeit a chip design, then it'll be counterfeited--if by nothing else, then by someone with access to an electron microscope and a solid background in chip design theory
And now we see Microsoft making something of a public embarrassment of itself on the world stage, fighting its battle with Yahoo in the press. If you're considering a proxy fight to initiate a hostile takeover, you don't talk about it in the newspapers. You communicate that privately to the Yahoo board, and if they again tell you where to shove it, you just taking action. You don't slug it out in the newspapers like a Brittany Spears saga. Yahoo owns software like Zimbra that MS would kill if they took over Yahoo. I think the public announcements are at least partly intended to cause serious and justified concern for the users of those products. That in turn will make it difficult for Yahoo to make big new sales.
MS: We can force adoption of Vista at the OEM level. Why should we 'fix' Vista when we can instead rename the repairs 'Windows 7' or something else and charge for Windows all over again?
Exactly, colleges and universities could benefit most from something like this! Imagine if they could charge the same high price for textbooks but make them expire at the end of each semester. No more competing with used books in the marketplace, no need for any expensive revisions or 2nd editions for force additional purchases, and repeat sales to students who need a textbook for more than one semester.
With DRM, no more photocopying pages. They can have a per page printing fee. Resistance to sales? Make the etextbooks compulsory and that's a thing of the past. I think you're right, these are a college must have technology.
I'll probably hold the grudge for another five-ish years if they can keep their nose clean.
Well, since they followed that up with the memory stick rootkit I don't think I'll be going back ever. Do new Sony computers have the rootkit pre-installed?
I used to have lots of Sony equipment (tv, camera, tuner, dvd player, monitor), but I've excluded them from consideration for anything new. As the IT Director for a nationwide company, I haven't selected any Sony equipment for purchase since the rootkit fiasco and don't foresee buying any in the future. I wonder how many others have decided to do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
and then we can unleash the Scientologists upon them to help "cure" their scarred psyches! We can kill two birds with one stone! Who's with me????
You sir are a magnificent evil bastard! Where can I subscribe to your newsletter?
(There's a downside of course: he frequently ignored the CEO because something else was more important right now, and besides, he knew a better way to do it. He could be a real bastard about that too, but he delivered the goods, so nobody complained.)
So it may be that he was exactly right? What a downside to have...
"No one with a brain and access to the internet really believed that Iraq had a stockpile of WMD." This is a lie, unless you want to define "with a brain" liberally. In fact, this is used in the international relations literature as a classic example of unavoidable groupthink
Iraqis obstructed UN inspections in a way that indicates that they were up to something. They either were, or wanted it to appear that way to start a game of chicken with the US. If they didn't have WMD, they could have diffused the situation at any time by allowing inspections. They could have stopped the invasion even if they had them simply by giving them up. If they had WMD, they had plenty of time to hide, destroy, or move it since the US invasion was rather less than a secret. They certainly moved something to Syria.
So the fact is that the Iraqis acted deliberately to goad the US into action. That isn't groupthink. The missing bit of the puzzle is, why? Was there a possible outcome that could have benefited top Iraqi leaders? Was there internal pressure (stupidly) forcing the confrontation?
Ten to one the IT dept had an internally-developed product that did pretty much the same as yours did, and they didn't want to lose their baby to an outside solution.
We have a faction of management who wanted control of an internal project but couldn't take it away. So they killed all funding and initiated an outsourcing project to fix the problems caused by the funding starvation (they could get control this way). The outsourcing project is having serious issues, so now they want IT to own the problems while the outsourcing company has all the control.
I can see why any IT dept. would want to avoid this kind of trouble...
How many Martian rovers have landed on Earth? Zero.
Martians must have better stealth technology than we have!
Or, the GPS is calculating a weighted moving average of the past few seconds and recording point in time information only every 30 seconds. In which case the GPS recorded speed is very nearly his instant speed, with the limitation that you only get updates every 30 seconds. This is how the data logging in all the GPSs I've owned works.
I'd say this boils down to one simple thing. Pay at the door. If an officer doesn't like the way you look and you drive past while they are meeting quota, you just became guilty. 'Driving while teenager' is an offense under that rule, as is 'driving sports car' so he is guilty twice. Good thing he wasn't 'driving while minority' also.
When I got my drivers license as a teenager the fine officers taught me that driving the speed limit is -not- an acceptable defense from a speeding ticket. In fact when I argued about it I found that I had also run a red light and changed lanes without a turn signal. It seems that this was regular income producing activity for the town, apparently promoted by city hall. About six months later the officers of that town enforced an impromptu curfew one weekend. They simply arrested every driver who appeared to be under 21 and impounded their car. That finally got them some grief, but only because they'd done it to the kids of some folks with influence outside the city.
Or look at it another way. Either an electronics company creates and markets a product for making sure your precious snowflake doesn't speed, but fails -so- badly that said snowflake can drive 68 while the GPS only reads 45, or the prosecutor wants to maintain the system where you're guilty when they say you are no matter what actually happened.
I notice that the prosecutor didn't, say, actually demonstrate with an actual car that they could cause no more than a 45mph reading while actually reaching a speed of 68mph. Why not? If they could do that, the case would be won in an instant. It's the most obvious path to victory.
Mafia anti-spam anyone?
There are multiple reasons that any sensible person can quickly come up with as to why this would be a useless guesture:
If the cost differential between a death penalty trial and a life incarceration trial exceeds about $3 million, the incarceration becomes more cost effective pretty much 100% of the time.
So why doesn't the open source community combine tech from web harvesters and spambots to create false info to pollute the data?
Even better, google bomb the data and see if any companies that use that data can be convinced to bring doomed products to market based on the false data.
Wait, does this explain the hello kitty vibrator and harry potter vibrating broomstick? Now we need a buzz about needing 'walking bear' t-shirts with links to a pedo-bear seal of approval.
Others posted above there are no extra fees, but I'm looking at the electricity part of my xcel bill, and can't even find the rate for actual usage; itemized amounts on the bill include:
Residential General (I'm guessing that's the usage amount, by process of elimination)
GRSA
Air Quality improvement
Trans cost Adj
Elec Commodity Adj
Demand Side Mgmt Cost
Purch Cap Cost Adj
Renew. Energy Std Adj
Franchise Fee
Sales Tax?
It was in response to that that the US Stealth fighter program was initiated in the early 1970s. But, just imagine if we had thought, geez, the Germans had came up with a way to evade radar, we have the plane, newer technology...
You have to wonder, what if?
And when your slower, more expensive 'Radar' stealth fighter was shot down by heat seeking missiles anyway, what good would you have done? Your needed more than just radar stealth by the 60s.
The F4 and A6 used in Vietnam had either bomb load and/or speed as considerations. You two 500 pound bomb fighter will have to be very busy to keep up with an A6 that carries a larger payload than a B-17. Radar stealth didn't arrive sooner in practice because tech arrived that could find you without radar, and because radar got better faster than practical radar stealth did.
Why wouldn't a Time Warner or Comcast take them up on such an offer, especially in areas where they are the only broadband provider? Ad a clause to the agreement barring disclosure, and they'll get free money. Anyone think cable companies would avoid this for ethical reasons??
Every weekend I go to National Bookstore at the shopping mall, and browse through the new releases ... before I buy any book, I'll want to read at least the prologue, introduction OR cover ...
The back of those same books frequently adds the first chapter of another of the authors books as a teaser.
This is another patent of normal business practices but this time 'on the intarweb'.
But how are properly functioning cookies any threat to privacy?
If the cookies are set by a 3rd party who has linked content on many websites, that 3rd party can track your activity through all of those sites. If you visit a website that you've given your personal details (say, to buy something), then the website and 3rd party can share information about you. Now they both know who you are and what you do online.
How do you feel about banner ads hosted by 3rd parties setting cookies on your computer now?
Perhaps the real reason for the recall is that the pre-installed Sony rootkit isn't working.
Thirded. Spammers in general should die horribly, and this idiot or idiots should be the first one up against the wall.
I have a modest proposal. We create a google 'bounty' ad account, and all place at least one ad for that account on our sites. The bounty is payable to the hitman who kills one of the top ten ROKSO spammers. Like a lottery, the bounty increases until claimed.
Perhaps we could convince spammers that being one of the top ten is a bad idea!
Still trying to get it going under Cygwin. You'll need a libcap, WinPcap seems to be the ticket. This is a wiki describing the install Download WinPcap here.
Some Recent Nikon SLRs actually do this, so it's possible and has been done. Certain flash sync tricks are only possible with these models. See strobist.com for more info.
I'd love modified SLR firmware for Canon to add features they've left off, presumably to sell high priced external add ons. I want an intervalometer! (simple program to do time lapse shots in camera - Nikon's have it built in...)
If someone wants to counterfeit a chip design, then it'll be counterfeited--if by nothing else, then by someone with access to an electron microscope and a solid background in chip design theory
Yahoo owns software like Zimbra that MS would kill if they took over Yahoo. I think the public announcements are at least partly intended to cause serious and justified concern for the users of those products. That in turn will make it difficult for Yahoo to make big new sales.
When they allowed millions of illegal aliens to enter our country, they manufactured an excuse.
MS: We can force adoption of Vista at the OEM level. Why should we 'fix' Vista when we can instead rename the repairs 'Windows 7' or something else and charge for Windows all over again?
Exactly, colleges and universities could benefit most from something like this! Imagine if they could charge the same high price for textbooks but make them expire at the end of each semester. No more competing with used books in the marketplace, no need for any expensive revisions or 2nd editions for force additional purchases, and repeat sales to students who need a textbook for more than one semester.
With DRM, no more photocopying pages. They can have a per page printing fee. Resistance to sales? Make the etextbooks compulsory and that's a thing of the past. I think you're right, these are a college must have technology.
Well, since they followed that up with the memory stick rootkit I don't think I'll be going back ever. Do new Sony computers have the rootkit pre-installed?
I used to have lots of Sony equipment (tv, camera, tuner, dvd player, monitor), but I've excluded them from consideration for anything new. As the IT Director for a nationwide company, I haven't selected any Sony equipment for purchase since the rootkit fiasco and don't foresee buying any in the future. I wonder how many others have decided to do the same.