What they really want is access to the state's documents explaining why the state chose their competitor so they can address their weaknesses before they're asked for bids on other contracts.
It would be truly ironic if one the "requirements" that caused diebold to fail the selection process was 'Minimize the risk of exposing the state to lawsuits and other legal expenses'
Apparently this is truly a no win situation with Diebold, even if you *don't* select them.
True, but I've always found that I am lugging my cell phone and iPod nano around everywhere I go. If they were one device then it would save me the hassle of two devices in my pockets.
Yes, combined devices may make sense for people already carrying both.
But there's a huge chunk of mp3 player equipped people that don't have cellphones: kids from around 6 to 16. Most parents I know don't want to pay for their kids cell phones, and as the kids have limited income, they just don't have cell phones, period. That isn't going to change until phone contracts and plans and devices are much cheaper than they are today.
Additionally, in my case, my cellphone lasts 2+ days without charging. My ipod if I'm using it barely makes one. Combine both devices on the same device and add wifi and I'll be out of juice by lunch time; that's unacceptable to me. I don't want a 'combined' device until batteries have improved considerably. It doesn't matter if my ipod dies in the middle of the day. I don't want that hassle on my cellphone. As part of my job I've tried other devices - the PPC6700, the MotoQ, the Treo700, and others, but I've always kept my primary contact number on a separate dedicated phone (currently a razr).
Plus when I go out at night I like the slim small razr in my pocket. I have no desire to take a PDA everywhere I go. Its big, heavy by comparison. And yeah, while the ability to shrink devices is going to increase, with PDA devices, beneath a certain size they become useless anyway. And I like my cellphone to be smaller than that pda threshold.
I would however consider buying combo Nintendo DS + iPod + Palm device. And if it was capable of cellular (evdo/edge) connectivity in addition to wifi that would be pretty slick...:)
Based on the other (correct) replies about not using ice to cool your burnt hand we can conclude 2 things:
1) You apparently shouldn't rely on what you 'figured out on your own'. 2) In addition to getting a plan for a security breach you should also look at getting some help with your first aid plan too.
I beg to differ. The book was rich with references to things unknown and times long gone. The pace was such that you could appreciate each setting intimately, not just the characters in the present situation and their fighting skills.
Movies aren't books. Movie adaptations of books are by definition: adaptations. Some adaptations have been good, others have been awful.
You can make more than one completely different GOOD movie adaptation of a book. (and countless awful ones too)
The point is the LotR movie trilogy were a fine adaptation of the books. They left out tons, glossed over acres, and changed a few things to bandage what they glossed over and left out. The end result was a good movie series that captured the lotr story fairly well.
As for capturing the essence of middle earth, no, it didn't do as well at that. The age of the world, its relions and mythologies and the depth and connectedness of its history, and the weight with its history weighed down into the current events were not captured in this adaptation.
Is that regrettable? No.
This movie adaptation was already a good 12 hours, and it was a great action/adventure/epic. I'd much rather watch another different adapation of LotR than try to cram even more material into this one. Perhaps an adaptation that that dropped the emphasis on the battle scenes and concentrated more on the world itself as a character. And I'd like to see movie covering segments of the Silmarillion, and so on.
Finally a lot of the 'back story' in the LotR novels was only barely hinted at and referenced, while the actual stories themselves are elsewhere; the appendices, lost tales, hobbit, silmarillion, etc etc. Understanding LotR in the context of the greater body of literature surrounding is quite a bit different than just reading the books without having read the larger body of work. A big chunk of the stuff 'missing' from lotr was barely actually in lotr at all, until you start 'getting' the references by having read the appendix, and other bodies of work.
I know far too many programmers who haven't a clue what is going on under the hood, so to speak, and have zero comprehension of what operations take longer than others. For instance, consider a C programmer I know who thinks strcat is a good routine to use.
Just have your friend write a strcat() himself using C, and he'll learn where/why its inefficient. (Or he won't and he's just dense.) Either way knowledge of assembler or lack thereof isn't the issue.
It's the equivalent of learning to drive a stick shift car without understand why there are gears at all. If you are ignorant of the very basics of internal combustion engines and can't understand the dangers of lugging or redlining an engine and the importance of using the right RPM, you will never be a good driver. It matters not whether you ever drive a stick in real life, it's just a matter of knowing how to handle your equipment.
You don't need to understand the dangers of lugging or redlining in terms of the mechanics of what is happening its enough to know that either leads to 'big engine problems' and to avoid them. That the mechanics involve engine strain, overheating, misfiring, etc is superfluous.
Its easy to feel lugging with just a bit of experience and even a complete neophyte knows what redlining looks & sounds like. From there on, its enough to know to avoid both.
Aren't kidnapping cases solved already, today? Some are. What about the ones that aren't?
With the existing powers?
Which existing power would that be?
The one that lets them ask, and hope the corporation helps? That would be like not having a law that makes drivers get out of the way of firetrucks. As long as everybody just gets out of the way we don't really need a law... but what happens if people just start ignoring the firetrucks?
That's what is starting to happen here. The cops have always had the power to ask for help in an emergency, and the corporations always gave it to them. It wasn't a policy, or a law, it just worked on trust. Now, as some agents are abusing that trust and corporations are facing angry (and litigious) customers they no longer want to give in - and we are going to start seeing legitimate emergency assistance requests being ignored.
Its reasonable to want to restore/preserve the situation to where cops can ask, and corporations can assist in the right circumstances, with proper oversight.
The point is we're not giving the cops new powers, we're simply enshrining what already happens now in law so that corporations can comply with emergency requests without violating the law and exposing themselves to lawsuits etc. The challenge is to ensure that the new law doesn't get abused like the existing trust system DID.
Agents can get the records, and save the kid, but they can't prosecute the adbuctor. They'll be reluctant to use this power unless there really is an emergency.
I see your angle, but doesn't that make kidnapping an almost unpunishable crime? You can almost rely on the police using emergency powers thereby guaranteeing that even if you get caught you can't be prosecuted?
I still prefer what I proposed, that every time it happens it be made public with a mandatory investigation. I think requiring an investigation should be enough to ensure they'll be reluctant to use them.
And making it public goes a long ways towards what you wanted. After all if they are sneaking up on a 'terrorist cell' and they start invoking emergency powers without a real emergency, that information would be readily available to the terrorists who would scatter. Thus it would only be used where 'having the information now' would be balanced by tipping off who you were coming after. Put a 2-3 day window between requesting the information, and making it public. And make it grounds for dismissing the case or at least disallowing the evidence if the defense lawyers can show that the evidence obtained like this wasn't made public in time (or at all). Naturally, if they invoke the powers to nab a copyright infringer, the case should be thrown out of court as there was no emergency, regardless of how quickly the publicized the information.
But wasn't Seltzer acting contrary to the law to begin with?
Not according to Seltzer.
Her contention is that she posted a brief clip for legitimate educational purposes. She is invoking her fair use rights, and therefore not contrary to any law.
(Furthermore she only posted the copyright notice, not even a clip of the football game itself, and the NFL claiming copyright infringement of the copyright notice is almost absurd.)
How do you know if this is an emergency or not? Do you expect the agents to brief you on the case, so that you can make your own decision?
Uh. Precisely. I don't know. That's WHY we fall back to trust in a (presumed) emergency.
That's why we shouldn't blame the corporate folk for complying with out-of-protocol 'emergency' requests, because it is correct for them to fall back to trust.
However, if the agents are verbally asking for records and its not an emergency then we should be 'angry' with them: AFTER THE FACT. Which implies that when protocol is bypassed for expediancy that full public disclosure is made AFTER THE FACT so that it can be judged whether the federal agents are abusing the trust and censure/reprimand/fire them if they are.
Why do people always pick on the federal agents for asking for documents, video, etc... without documentation.
Because in an presumed emergency, you trust the authority figures who are tasked with dealing with them. If your an IT manager for a bank, and a child has just been kidnapped from the premises, do you really want to tell the police to go back to the station fill out a subpoena, and get it signed by a judge before you'll let them review the surveillance tapes to see if they show who grabbed the child. You could, but that delay might seal the kids fate.
The people you should be angry with are the corporate folks who comply they're the ones who should ask for a warrant, subpoena, etc...
I disagree.
The reason for these 'emergency protocols' is so that things can happen as quickly as possible in emergencies. We really shouldn't blame 'corporate folks' for assisting law enforcement just because full protocol hasn't been followed, especially if the 'corporate folks' have been misled to beleive that an urgent response is required.
If the federal agents are verbally asking for records and its not an emergency we should be angry at the federal agents, and demanding accountability from them. They should be harshly dealt with when they abuse those policies. I'd even say it should be a matter of public record when emergency protocols are invoked, so that we can all review them after the fact.
The challenge is to make law enforcement accountable *without* making the accounting so onerous that they are unable to respond effectively in time sensitive situations. "Due Process" is great when time isn't a big deal, but sometimes it needs to be set aside for the greater good -- the trick is to ensure that it only happens when its actually needed. Simply banning 'emergency responses' isn't going to get rid of emergencies, and without emergency responses those emergencies are going to end badly.
Based on your "Luftwaffe" and "Moosewaffles" I'm guessing your referring to when the guards said: "Schutzstaffel", which is the full name of the "SS".
I was always mystified by the death cry myself, it had me stumped for years. I thought they might be trying to say "my name is..." in a last ditch effort to be remembered a people, but then dying mid-sentence. It apparently was really "Mein leben" which translates as "My life".
The only thing that I'm annoyed with is the "Documents and Settings" directory that is allocated on the OS partition, and I really would like to have the option of reallocating that beast to a different partition.
There are actually a couple ways of do this. In a server environment you can have roaming profiles. You can also achieve most of the effect with folder redirection (enough to move 'my documents', and 'application data', and 'desktop') which are the big ones. You can even move the whole documents and settings folder structure but its a more involved 'registry hack'.
All 3 work like a charm, in that they do exactly what you expect, and windows runs just fine like that. The only problems tend to come from software where the locations of these folders are 'hard-coded' instead of querying the OS for their proper locations.
No site is ever 100% secure. IT/management generally shoot for the most bang for the buck, to get where the risk/cost ratio of a problem balances with the needs of their business objectives.
Why is webmail blocked but USB ports allow anyone to plug and play a thumb drive? Couldn't someone bring a virus in the same way?
And if they blocked up the usb ports, someone could come in with a SATA drive and a screw driver. Couldn't someone bring in a virus that way too? So why not install intrusion detection systems in all the cases...?? And on it goes.
The answer: risk/cost analysis indicates that email is by FAR the number 1 transport for viruses. Yes other vectors exist, but if you only deal with email you address the lions share of the risk.
Additionally, removing webmail is usually aligns with managements objectives, so blocking it generally gets immediate management support.
Why do we block webmail but no other websites/services are blocked? Shouldn't we worry about someone surfing for pr0n or possibly looking for warez?
The answer: risk/cost analysis again. You address the big problems before the little ones, and the little ones before the ones you don't even have (yet). IE - Knock out MSN/Yahoo/Gmail and you remove a huge chunk of the useless sites that staff ARE spending hours on. If its worth it, you could keep going after every porn or warez site too, but the returns rapidly diminish while the cost keeps going higher.
If surfing porn/warez was a rampant problem then you could expect management to address it with technology. But for most companies a policy against warez and porn is usually enough to keep the problem at minimal levels. (Hell, most of the time you don't even need formal policy, in my experience most people just 'know better' and don't have to be told that surfing porn at work is against policy and grounds to be fired.)
Weaning webmail addicts off their personal accounts, on the other hand, sometimes requires a little help from technology.
Not at all. An employee that doesn't respect company policy isn't an employee worth having.
Moreover, in 'light security scenarios' the proxy server is not the 'bullet proof firewall with which to draw out the companies finest hackers' -- its a light support of the rules.
If I lock the server room and put a sign on it saying "contact IT admin for access", the idea isn't that its now a fort knox vault. The door is simply locked because its not a room most employees need to be in. If they are curious and try the door, it won't open, and they'll move on with their lives. And that's as secure as it really needs to be.
Sure anyone with a paper-clip could probably get it open, and if they do that without a damn good reason they probably deserve to be fired, or at least reprimanded.
Same goes for a basic web-proxy-filter. The point is to support a policy to keep people off sites they don't need to go. If they get 'curious', or have a silly impulse to check myspace or something, they get a gentle reminder that the site is blocked, equivalent to the locked server room door. If they decide to get clever and go around the proxy they're demonstrating the same level of ethics that the guy breaking into the server room did... with the same results.
Traditionally in a 'transaction' First Party - you/your company Second Party - the person at the other end of the 'transaction' Third Party - an other/external party.
So in email... its first party email it would be you/your companies second party would be if you were somehow interfacing directly with the recipients email (ie you could log into their email to leave them messages) third party - external companies (hotmail/gmail/your isps webmail...)
As you can see in terms of email software - "2nd party" doesn't really exist, as you never directly log into the recipients email to leave them messages.
I don't get it. You get the Win for "free" (or less) due to the nagware installed. Why not just get the pc with linux-capable components, let the advertizers pay for your unused copy of windows, and install your favorite flavor of linux (or whatever you plan on using)?
Well, the first issue, is 'principles'. I don't much care for microsoft, and find it offensive that I contribute to there revenue even when purchasing machines that will not run Microsofts OS.
I also suspect Microsoft would scream blue murder if they found out every time I bought a Dell $50 went to Apple or RHAT to cover a software license the average end user has no intention of using, so my sense of justice and fair play is not satisfied by the status quo.
===
Now, in the short term, since your argument is that advertisers effectively subsidize the OS, then perhaps we should be talking to the advertisers -- would they be interested to hear Dell is charging them to be installed on PCs Dell knows will never be booted into windows? If the advertisers decide they don't want to pay for placement on those units, perhaps that would be the impetus for Dell to offer a 'no-OS' PC.
(Whereby the customer indicates they intend to install linux, therefore the advertisers won't pay for placement, therefore the windows license cost is no longer covered, therefore Dell opts not to include it for 'free'... and as a bonus therefore Microsoft no longer gets paid for licenses that aren't needed or wanted.)
In the longer term should there be a market for an actual dell-ubuntu (dubuntu?) those advertisers might be interested in placing software on those, and with no MS license to offset, those ads could actually drive the unit price down, making a linux box cheaper than a windows box, which is as it should be. (And should fully functional dell supported linux pcs appear they'd probably sell quite well, especially to the budget conscious crowd.
Wow. I could make billions, billions with a B. Next time my contractor screws up and get into a dispute I won't sue for some measly 5 or 10k. I'll get 5 or 10% of his assets!!
Naturally I'll stop hiring small companies -- only HP, Dell, IBM, and Microsoft from now on!! I want to make that 5% to count!!
I dunno about you, but I think your proposed system has a flaw there.;)
Nearly all evidence is circumstantial. They could find the gun in your hand - all that means is you picked it up. Not that you fired it. They could find gunshot residue on your hand - all that means is you fired it, not that you fired it at the victim.
I'd hate to be that innocent bastard who stumbles over a gun and picks it up only to have it accidently discharge into the floor, before seeing his very recently murdered ex-girlfriend lying just a few feet away.
Similarly, finding this in her browser history doesn't make her guilty but it sure closes the window of 'reasonable doubt' a little more.
Whether there is oversubscribing upstream does not change the answer.
It does when "upstream" and "last mile" are pretty arbitrary and meaningless constructs. If I attached a 150' ethernet cable between my cable modem and router I could say I have a dedicated connection to the internet, because now the 'last link' is dedicated, and its only shared 'upstream'. That's absurd.
In one case, you have a private driveway and entrance to the freeway. In the other, you share the feeder roads with other cars. Whether the freeway is congested is not relevant to the last-mile discussion.
The trouble with that metaphor is that you don't have private driveway and entrance to the "freeway". You just have a private driveway and entrance to a "feeder road".
With cable modems, your data is sent into your neighbor's house.
That hasn't been true for a long time in modern cable systems.
Complain "it doesn't matter because the bottleneck is upstream." Just don't fabricate new and quite wrong definitions of "shared."
With ADSL you have a dedicated link to the dslam, and from there on up bandwidth is SHARED with everyone else on the dslam - ie "your neighbors". The dslam is not 'the internets'. The dslam is not the backbone. It its a big fancy switch that pools (another word for SHARE) your connection with your neighbours. And from their it pushes the traffic on up to the ISP, through a couple more layers where ultimately its linked to the backbone.
Saying ADSL is dedicated is literally saying you have a dedicated connection to a connection pooler that you and your neighbors all share.
Interestingly to get to the backbone of my ADSL ISP at work is 5 hops. To get to the backbone of my Cable ISP at home is 3 hops. And in my case ping time is slightly longer on adsl too. (28ms vs 17ms) One can't read too much into one subscribers data, but its suggestive that 'despite' my 'dedicated adsl connection to the internet' my traffic has to jump through more hoops to get there.
*shrug*. Everyone I've met who complains that TV is inane impresses me as sanctimonious. How is it that the Discovery Channel is for idiots with square eyes, and discovery.com is for the enlightened? With insane amounts of programming, the only reason to be exposed to "idiotic crap" on TV is to choose to watch it. There's plenty of idiotic crap on the Internet, too, isn't there, but the same people who smugly proclaim their lack of TV dick around on the Internet. Right.
No comparison imho. I can consume internet content at a much faster rate than I can watch or listen to the radio. Watching something like mythbusters for example; I find it unwatchable -- they take a bloody real-time hour (including commercials) to deliver content that can be summarized completely in half a dozen text paragraphs. Sure I "miss out" on the explosion, the chick who says "Wow" everytime something happens, the guy covered in yellow goo, the incessant 'coming up in the next scene' scenes before commercials, and of course the commercials themselves. But I don't need or want any of that.
The worst part is that even in video format there's only maybe 10 minutes out of the 45 that are worth watching. (60 counting commercials)
All the informational content can be summarized on a single page, and absorbed in ~1 minute by a decent reader of reasonable intelligence.
Even on the 'real world' internet which is choked full of ads and that one page worth of information isn't concisely presented, and you have to link-surf, scroll around ads, etc to find anything - you can still get all the information in a couple minutes.
(This is why I HATE 'audio' and 'video news' clips on the net. I don't want to listen to, or even worse WATCH some low res video segment for 5 minutes (often prefaced with a commercial). I want to read a transcript, which takes maybe me 10-15 seconds to skim.)
The only time I want to watch or listen to content delivered in real time is for entertainment purposes. Or when I need to see something. (e.g. I'd be interested in watching footage of a storm hitting a town, for example if I'm interested in the storm or town for some reason.)
But in general audio/video in realtime, padded with useless filler, then padded with teaser scenes, then padded with commercials is an excruciatingly painful way to absorb information.
That is just true enough for marketing to slip past legal.
When an ADSL rep tells you get told that ADSL is superior because its unshared while cable is shared the implicit message is that you'll be unaffected even if your neighbor is loading his connection, while someone 'sharing' with their neighbors using cable will be affected.
Which is utter rubbish.
To use the inevitable "bad car analogy":
With cable you park your car right on the street with your neighbors. ie 'shared' With ADSL you have your very own personal driveway dedicated to just you. ie 'unshared'
(of course, your driveway terminates on the public shared street, along with all the driveways of all your neighbours.)
If the local car club decides to drive to your neighbors house, the fact that they won't be on your driveway doesn't make the slightest difference. The road your precious private driveway connects to is still going to be choked full of cars and you aren't getting anywhere fast.
How many lanes are on the public road, and how much traffic each resident attached to it is permitted to generate is what's important -- and that is a business decision. And it affects both technologies equivalently.
Thus the 'adsl dedicated connection' is technically true, but its about as meaningful or relevant to your internet experience as having a driveway is to your daily commute.
Perhaps, as 'bad car analogies' go its actually pretty good?
The only difference is perhaps that you can't park on your ADSL driveway, so the one real advantage to having one for cars isn't even applicable to adsl.;)
When was the last time you watched a movie product placement is huge.
Indeed, for the first 10 minutes of 'I, Robot' I thought I was still watching the commercials that play before the movie starts. And the rest of the movie was only slightly less offensive product-placement-wise.
if it is done well most won't mind.
That's a big IF. And frankly they are going to do it as badly as they can get away with. (And that means, they'll do it to the point that the sales they LOSE by doing it is just shy of the extra profit they make by doing it.) I anticipate that will prove to be much worse than you might think. After all, if converse pays 200k for a downright invasive dedicated cutscene in the middle of Halo3 -- how many people are going to have to refuse to buy the game before it wasn't worth doing it?
Slashdot Mirror
What they really want is access to the state's documents explaining why the state chose their competitor so they can address their weaknesses before they're asked for bids on other contracts.
It would be truly ironic if one the "requirements" that caused diebold to fail the selection process was 'Minimize the risk of exposing the state to lawsuits and other legal expenses'
Apparently this is truly a no win situation with Diebold, even if you *don't* select them.
True, but I've always found that I am lugging my cell phone and iPod nano around everywhere I go. If they were one device then it would save me the hassle of two devices in my pockets.
... :)
Yes, combined devices may make sense for people already carrying both.
But there's a huge chunk of mp3 player equipped people that don't have cellphones: kids from around 6 to 16. Most parents I know don't want to pay for their kids cell phones, and as the kids have limited income, they just don't have cell phones, period. That isn't going to change until phone contracts and plans and devices are much cheaper than they are today.
Additionally, in my case, my cellphone lasts 2+ days without charging. My ipod if I'm using it barely makes one. Combine both devices on the same device and add wifi and I'll be out of juice by lunch time; that's unacceptable to me. I don't want a 'combined' device until batteries have improved considerably. It doesn't matter if my ipod dies in the middle of the day. I don't want that hassle on my cellphone. As part of my job I've tried other devices - the PPC6700, the MotoQ, the Treo700, and others, but I've always kept my primary contact number on a separate dedicated phone (currently a razr).
Plus when I go out at night I like the slim small razr in my pocket. I have no desire to take a PDA everywhere I go. Its big, heavy by comparison. And yeah, while the ability to shrink devices is going to increase, with PDA devices, beneath a certain size they become useless anyway. And I like my cellphone to be smaller than that pda threshold.
I would however consider buying combo Nintendo DS + iPod + Palm device. And if it was capable of cellular (evdo/edge) connectivity in addition to wifi that would be pretty slick
Based on the other (correct) replies about not using ice to cool your burnt hand we can conclude 2 things:
1) You apparently shouldn't rely on what you 'figured out on your own'.
2) In addition to getting a plan for a security breach you should also look at getting some help with your first aid plan too.
I beg to differ. The book was rich with references to things unknown and times long gone. The pace was such that you could appreciate each setting intimately, not just the characters in the present situation and their fighting skills.
Movies aren't books. Movie adaptations of books are by definition: adaptations.
Some adaptations have been good, others have been awful.
You can make more than one completely different GOOD movie adaptation of a book. (and countless awful ones too)
The point is the LotR movie trilogy were a fine adaptation of the books. They left out tons, glossed over acres, and changed a few things to bandage what they glossed over and left out. The end result was a good movie series that captured the lotr story fairly well.
As for capturing the essence of middle earth, no, it didn't do as well at that. The age of the world, its relions and mythologies and the depth and connectedness of its history, and the weight with its history weighed down into the current events were not captured in this adaptation.
Is that regrettable? No.
This movie adaptation was already a good 12 hours, and it was a great action/adventure/epic. I'd much rather watch another different adapation of LotR than try to cram even more material into this one. Perhaps an adaptation that that dropped the emphasis on the battle scenes and concentrated more on the world itself as a character. And I'd like to see movie covering segments of the Silmarillion, and so on.
Finally a lot of the 'back story' in the LotR novels was only barely hinted at and referenced, while the actual stories themselves are elsewhere; the appendices, lost tales, hobbit, silmarillion, etc etc. Understanding LotR in the context of the greater body of literature surrounding is quite a bit different than just reading the books without having read the larger body of work. A big chunk of the stuff 'missing' from lotr was barely actually in lotr at all, until you start 'getting' the references by having read the appendix, and other bodies of work.
I know far too many programmers who haven't a clue what is going on under the hood, so to speak, and have zero comprehension of what operations take longer than others. For instance, consider a C programmer I know who thinks strcat is a good routine to use.
Just have your friend write a strcat() himself using C, and he'll learn where/why its inefficient. (Or he won't and he's just dense.) Either way knowledge of assembler or lack thereof isn't the issue.
It's the equivalent of learning to drive a stick shift car without understand why there are gears at all. If you are ignorant of the very basics of internal combustion engines and can't understand the dangers of lugging or redlining an engine and the importance of using the right RPM, you will never be a good driver. It matters not whether you ever drive a stick in real life, it's just a matter of knowing how to handle your equipment.
You don't need to understand the dangers of lugging or redlining in terms of the mechanics of what is happening its enough to know that either leads to 'big engine problems' and to avoid them. That the mechanics involve engine strain, overheating, misfiring, etc is superfluous.
Its easy to feel lugging with just a bit of experience and even a complete neophyte knows what redlining looks & sounds like. From there on, its enough to know to avoid both.
Can I import any movie quicktime can play into iTunes?
That much at least is a straight forward: Yes.
I don't KNOW that iTunes can send ANY movie it can play to AppleTV, but its pretty likely.
Aren't kidnapping cases solved already, today?
Some are. What about the ones that aren't?
With the existing powers?
Which existing power would that be?
The one that lets them ask, and hope the corporation helps? That would be like not having a law that makes drivers get out of the way of firetrucks. As long as everybody just gets out of the way we don't really need a law... but what happens if people just start ignoring the firetrucks?
That's what is starting to happen here. The cops have always had the power to ask for help in an emergency, and the corporations always gave it to them. It wasn't a policy, or a law, it just worked on trust. Now, as some agents are abusing that trust and corporations are facing angry (and litigious) customers they no longer want to give in - and we are going to start seeing legitimate emergency assistance requests being ignored.
Its reasonable to want to restore/preserve the situation to where cops can ask, and corporations can assist in the right circumstances, with proper oversight.
The point is we're not giving the cops new powers, we're simply enshrining what already happens now in law so that corporations can comply with emergency requests without violating the law and exposing themselves to lawsuits etc. The challenge is to ensure that the new law doesn't get abused like the existing trust system DID.
Agents can get the records, and save the kid, but they can't prosecute the adbuctor. They'll be reluctant to use this power unless there really is an emergency.
I see your angle, but doesn't that make kidnapping an almost unpunishable crime? You can almost rely on the police using emergency powers thereby guaranteeing that even if you get caught you can't be prosecuted?
I still prefer what I proposed, that every time it happens it be made public with a mandatory investigation. I think requiring an investigation should be enough to ensure they'll be reluctant to use them.
And making it public goes a long ways towards what you wanted. After all if they are sneaking up on a 'terrorist cell' and they start invoking emergency powers without a real emergency, that information would be readily available to the terrorists who would scatter. Thus it would only be used where 'having the information now' would be balanced by tipping off who you were coming after. Put a 2-3 day window between requesting the information, and making it public. And make it grounds for dismissing the case or at least disallowing the evidence if the defense lawyers can show that the evidence obtained like this wasn't made public in time (or at all). Naturally, if they invoke the powers to nab a copyright infringer, the case should be thrown out of court as there was no emergency, regardless of how quickly the publicized the information.
But wasn't Seltzer acting contrary to the law to begin with?
Not according to Seltzer.
Her contention is that she posted a brief clip for legitimate educational purposes. She is invoking her fair use rights, and therefore not contrary to any law.
(Furthermore she only posted the copyright notice, not even a clip of the football game itself, and the NFL claiming copyright infringement of the copyright notice is almost absurd.)
How do you know if this is an emergency or not? Do you expect the agents to brief you on the case, so that you can make your own decision?
Uh. Precisely. I don't know. That's WHY we fall back to trust in a (presumed) emergency.
That's why we shouldn't blame the corporate folk for complying with out-of-protocol 'emergency' requests, because it is correct for them to fall back to trust.
However, if the agents are verbally asking for records and its not an emergency then we should be 'angry' with them: AFTER THE FACT. Which implies that when protocol is bypassed for expediancy that full public disclosure is made AFTER THE FACT so that it can be judged whether the federal agents are abusing the trust and censure/reprimand/fire them if they are.
Why do people always pick on the federal agents for asking for documents, video, etc... without documentation.
Because in an presumed emergency, you trust the authority figures who are tasked with dealing with them. If your an IT manager for a bank, and a child has just been kidnapped from the premises, do you really want to tell the police to go back to the station fill out a subpoena, and get it signed by a judge before you'll let them review the surveillance tapes to see if they show who grabbed the child. You could, but that delay might seal the kids fate.
The people you should be angry with are the corporate folks who comply they're the ones who should ask for a warrant, subpoena, etc...
I disagree.
The reason for these 'emergency protocols' is so that things can happen as quickly as possible in emergencies. We really shouldn't blame 'corporate folks' for assisting law enforcement just because full protocol hasn't been followed, especially if the 'corporate folks' have been misled to beleive that an urgent response is required.
If the federal agents are verbally asking for records and its not an emergency we should be angry at the federal agents, and demanding accountability from them. They should be harshly dealt with when they abuse those policies. I'd even say it should be a matter of public record when emergency protocols are invoked, so that we can all review them after the fact.
The challenge is to make law enforcement accountable *without* making the accounting so onerous that they are unable to respond effectively in time sensitive situations. "Due Process" is great when time isn't a big deal, but sometimes it needs to be set aside for the greater good -- the trick is to ensure that it only happens when its actually needed. Simply banning 'emergency responses' isn't going to get rid of emergencies, and without emergency responses those emergencies are going to end badly.
Based on your "Luftwaffe" and "Moosewaffles" I'm guessing your referring to when the guards said: "Schutzstaffel", which is the full name of the "SS".
I was always mystified by the death cry myself, it had me stumped for years. I thought they might be trying to say "my name is..." in a last ditch effort to be remembered a people, but then dying mid-sentence. It apparently was really "Mein leben" which translates as "My life".
-cheers
The only thing that I'm annoyed with is the "Documents and Settings" directory that is allocated on the OS partition, and I really would like to have the option of reallocating that beast to a different partition.
There are actually a couple ways of do this. In a server environment you can have roaming profiles. You can also achieve most of the effect with folder redirection (enough to move 'my documents', and 'application data', and 'desktop') which are the big ones.
You can even move the whole documents and settings folder structure but its a more involved 'registry hack'.
All 3 work like a charm, in that they do exactly what you expect, and windows runs just fine like that. The only problems tend to come from software where the locations of these folders are 'hard-coded' instead of querying the OS for their proper locations.
No site is ever 100% secure. IT/management generally shoot for the most bang for the buck, to get where the risk/cost ratio of a problem balances with the needs of their business objectives.
Why is webmail blocked but USB ports allow anyone to plug and play a thumb drive? Couldn't someone bring a virus in the same way?
And if they blocked up the usb ports, someone could come in with a SATA drive and a screw driver. Couldn't someone bring in a virus that way too? So why not install intrusion detection systems in all the cases...?? And on it goes.
The answer: risk/cost analysis indicates that email is by FAR the number 1 transport for viruses. Yes other vectors exist, but if you only deal with email you address the lions share of the risk.
Additionally, removing webmail is usually aligns with managements objectives, so blocking it generally gets immediate management support.
Why do we block webmail but no other websites/services are blocked? Shouldn't we worry about someone surfing for pr0n or possibly looking for warez?
The answer: risk/cost analysis again. You address the big problems before the little ones, and the little ones before the ones you don't even have (yet). IE - Knock out MSN/Yahoo/Gmail and you remove a huge chunk of the useless sites that staff ARE spending hours on. If its worth it, you could keep going after every porn or warez site too, but the returns rapidly diminish while the cost keeps going higher.
If surfing porn/warez was a rampant problem then you could expect management to address it with technology. But for most companies a policy against warez and porn is usually enough to keep the problem at minimal levels. (Hell, most of the time you don't even need formal policy, in my experience most people just 'know better' and don't have to be told that surfing porn at work is against policy and grounds to be fired.)
Weaning webmail addicts off their personal accounts, on the other hand, sometimes requires a little help from technology.
Not at all. An employee that doesn't respect company policy isn't an employee worth having.
Moreover, in 'light security scenarios' the proxy server is not the 'bullet proof firewall with which to draw out the companies finest hackers' -- its a light support of the rules.
If I lock the server room and put a sign on it saying "contact IT admin for access", the idea isn't that its now a fort knox vault. The door is simply locked because its not a room most employees need to be in. If they are curious and try the door, it won't open, and they'll move on with their lives. And that's as secure as it really needs to be.
Sure anyone with a paper-clip could probably get it open, and if they do that without a damn good reason they probably deserve to be fired, or at least reprimanded.
Same goes for a basic web-proxy-filter. The point is to support a policy to keep people off sites they don't need to go. If they get 'curious', or have a silly impulse to check myspace or something, they get a gentle reminder that the site is blocked, equivalent to the locked server room door. If they decide to get clever and go around the proxy they're demonstrating the same level of ethics that the guy breaking into the server room did... with the same results.
Traditionally in a 'transaction'
...)
First Party - you/your company
Second Party - the person at the other end of the 'transaction'
Third Party - an other/external party.
So in email... its first party email it would be you/your companies
second party would be if you were somehow interfacing directly with the recipients email (ie you could log into their email to leave them messages)
third party - external companies (hotmail/gmail/your isps webmail
As you can see in terms of email software - "2nd party" doesn't really exist, as you never directly log into the recipients email to leave them messages.
I don't get it. You get the Win for "free" (or less) due to the nagware installed. Why not just get the pc with linux-capable components, let the advertizers pay for your unused copy of windows, and install your favorite flavor of linux (or whatever you plan on using)?
Well, the first issue, is 'principles'. I don't much care for microsoft, and find it offensive that I contribute to there revenue even when purchasing machines that will not run Microsofts OS.
I also suspect Microsoft would scream blue murder if they found out every time I bought a Dell $50 went to Apple or RHAT to cover a software license the average end user has no intention of using, so my sense of justice and fair play is not satisfied by the status quo.
===
Now, in the short term, since your argument is that advertisers effectively subsidize the OS, then perhaps we should be talking to the advertisers -- would they be interested to hear Dell is charging them to be installed on PCs Dell knows will never be booted into windows? If the advertisers decide they don't want to pay for placement on those units, perhaps that would be the impetus for Dell to offer a 'no-OS' PC.
(Whereby the customer indicates they intend to install linux, therefore the advertisers won't pay for placement, therefore the windows license cost is no longer covered, therefore Dell opts not to include it for 'free'... and as a bonus therefore Microsoft no longer gets paid for licenses that aren't needed or wanted.)
In the longer term should there be a market for an actual dell-ubuntu (dubuntu?) those advertisers might be interested in placing software on those, and with no MS license to offset, those ads could actually drive the unit price down, making a linux box cheaper than a windows box, which is as it should be. (And should fully functional dell supported linux pcs appear they'd probably sell quite well, especially to the budget conscious crowd.
Wow. I could make billions, billions with a B. Next time my contractor screws up and get into a dispute I won't sue for some measly 5 or 10k. I'll get 5 or 10% of his assets!!
;)
Naturally I'll stop hiring small companies -- only HP, Dell, IBM, and Microsoft from now on!! I want to make that 5% to count!!
I dunno about you, but I think your proposed system has a flaw there.
don't you mean whorehouse?
Agreed.
Nearly all evidence is circumstantial. They could find the gun in your hand - all that means is you picked it up. Not that you fired it. They could find gunshot residue on your hand - all that means is you fired it, not that you fired it at the victim.
I'd hate to be that innocent bastard who stumbles over a gun and picks it up only to have it accidently discharge into the floor, before seeing his very recently murdered ex-girlfriend lying just a few feet away.
Similarly, finding this in her browser history doesn't make her guilty but it sure closes the window of 'reasonable doubt' a little more.
Whether there is oversubscribing upstream does not change the answer.
It does when "upstream" and "last mile" are pretty arbitrary and meaningless constructs. If I attached a 150' ethernet cable between my cable modem and router I could say I have a dedicated connection to the internet, because now the 'last link' is dedicated, and its only shared 'upstream'. That's absurd.
In one case, you have a private driveway and entrance to the freeway. In the other, you share the feeder roads with other cars. Whether the freeway is congested is not relevant to the last-mile discussion.
The trouble with that metaphor is that you don't have private driveway and entrance to the "freeway". You just have a private driveway and entrance to a "feeder road".
With cable modems, your data is sent into your neighbor's house.
That hasn't been true for a long time in modern cable systems.
Complain "it doesn't matter because the bottleneck is upstream." Just don't fabricate new and quite wrong definitions of "shared."
With ADSL you have a dedicated link to the dslam, and from there on up bandwidth is SHARED with everyone else on the dslam - ie "your neighbors". The dslam is not 'the internets'. The dslam is not the backbone. It its a big fancy switch that pools (another word for SHARE) your connection with your neighbours. And from their it pushes the traffic on up to the ISP, through a couple more layers where ultimately its linked to the backbone.
Saying ADSL is dedicated is literally saying you have a dedicated connection to a connection pooler that you and your neighbors all share.
Interestingly to get to the backbone of my ADSL ISP at work is 5 hops. To get to the backbone of my Cable ISP at home is 3 hops. And in my case ping time is slightly longer on adsl too. (28ms vs 17ms) One can't read too much into one subscribers data, but its suggestive that 'despite' my 'dedicated adsl connection to the internet' my traffic has to jump through more hoops to get there.
*shrug*. Everyone I've met who complains that TV is inane impresses me as sanctimonious. How is it that the Discovery Channel is for idiots with square eyes, and discovery.com is for the enlightened? With insane amounts of programming, the only reason to be exposed to "idiotic crap" on TV is to choose to watch it. There's plenty of idiotic crap on the Internet, too, isn't there, but the same people who smugly proclaim their lack of TV dick around on the Internet. Right.
No comparison imho. I can consume internet content at a much faster rate than I can watch or listen to the radio. Watching something like mythbusters for example; I find it unwatchable -- they take a bloody real-time hour (including commercials) to deliver content that can be summarized completely in half a dozen text paragraphs. Sure I "miss out" on the explosion, the chick who says "Wow" everytime something happens, the guy covered in yellow goo, the incessant 'coming up in the next scene' scenes before commercials, and of course the commercials themselves. But I don't need or want any of that.
The worst part is that even in video format there's only maybe 10 minutes out of the 45 that are worth watching. (60 counting commercials)
All the informational content can be summarized on a single page, and absorbed in ~1 minute by a decent reader of reasonable intelligence.
Even on the 'real world' internet which is choked full of ads and that one page worth of information isn't concisely presented, and you have to link-surf, scroll around ads, etc to find anything - you can still get all the information in a couple minutes.
(This is why I HATE 'audio' and 'video news' clips on the net. I don't want to listen to, or even worse WATCH some low res video segment for 5 minutes (often prefaced with a commercial). I want to read a transcript, which takes maybe me 10-15 seconds to skim.)
The only time I want to watch or listen to content delivered in real time is for entertainment purposes. Or when I need to see something. (e.g. I'd be interested in watching footage of a storm hitting a town, for example if I'm interested in the storm or town for some reason.)
But in general audio/video in realtime, padded with useless filler, then padded with teaser scenes, then padded with commercials is an excruciatingly painful way to absorb information.
my 0.02
ADSL is not shared at all.
;)
That is just true enough for marketing to slip past legal.
When an ADSL rep tells you get told that ADSL is superior because its unshared while cable is shared the implicit message is that you'll be unaffected even if your neighbor is loading his connection, while someone 'sharing' with their neighbors using cable will be affected.
Which is utter rubbish.
To use the inevitable "bad car analogy":
With cable you park your car right on the street with your neighbors. ie 'shared'
With ADSL you have your very own personal driveway dedicated to just you. ie 'unshared'
(of course, your driveway terminates on the public shared street, along with all the driveways of all your neighbours.)
If the local car club decides to drive to your neighbors house, the fact that they won't be on your driveway doesn't make the slightest difference. The road your precious private driveway connects to is still going to be choked full of cars and you aren't getting anywhere fast.
How many lanes are on the public road, and how much traffic each resident attached to it is permitted to generate is what's important -- and that is a business decision. And it affects both technologies equivalently.
Thus the 'adsl dedicated connection' is technically true, but its about as meaningful or relevant to your internet experience as having a driveway is to your daily commute.
Perhaps, as 'bad car analogies' go its actually pretty good?
The only difference is perhaps that you can't park on your ADSL driveway, so the one real advantage to having one for cars isn't even applicable to adsl.
I cannot even conceive of using 500 minutes in a single month.
/.er ;)
Spoken like a true
20 whole minutes on the phone per day? Unthinkable, why would the guy I order pizza from need to talk to me anywhere near that much?
And really, who else do we call?
When was the last time you watched a movie product placement is huge.
Indeed, for the first 10 minutes of 'I, Robot' I thought I was still watching the commercials that play before the movie starts. And the rest of the movie was only slightly less offensive product-placement-wise.
if it is done well most won't mind.
That's a big IF. And frankly they are going to do it as badly as they can get away with. (And that means, they'll do it to the point that the sales they LOSE by doing it is just shy of the extra profit they make by doing it.) I anticipate that will prove to be much worse than you might think. After all, if converse pays 200k for a downright invasive dedicated cutscene in the middle of Halo3 -- how many people are going to have to refuse to buy the game before it wasn't worth doing it?