I would. Granted, you said "if the airlines improve technology...", but...
I had an organ transplant several years ago, so I have to take anti-rejection medication twice a day, for the rest of my life. Given the airlines' record for losing baggage, the cost of the medication I take and the difficulty in replacing the medication on short notice (many pharmacies don't carry it since it's expensive, and not something in frequent demand), there is no way on God's green earth I am going to trust the airlines to get me and my luggage to my destination together every single time, without exception.
If I must pack my medication in checked baggage, and we don't arrive at the same airport within a reasonable time frame, I either 1) go back on dialysis (no thanks; been there, done that, and don't ever plan to do it again), 2) die (not an attractive option, either). I'll bring my meds in carry-on bags or I'll fly my own ******* plane, thank you very much.
perhaps we should be looking at ways to detect new weapons
The problem with this, and why the earlier poster was correct when he said technology will always fail to protect anyone from terror, is that the single most deadly weapon known to man is the human mind.
As you said, we are taking a completely reactive stance to airline security, and that path is doomed to failure. A sufficiently motivated person can *always* find a way around whatever restrictions you try to put in place.
IMO, so long as we expect "someone else" to protect us, we will always be vulnerable. On the other hand, if every last one of us was willing to take a stand and fight back, like the passengers on Flight 93 did, we would be more secure than ever, even if (especially if?) everyone on board was carrying pocket knives, box cutters, bottles of gel, and so on. But for that to work, the airlines, and especially our government, has to trust that the majority of people 1) will, in fact, take action when necessary, and 2) will act responsibly when given the freedom to do so.
*IF* that happens, then our airlines will no longer be the relatively easy, effective targets the terrorists now see them to be.
So what happens is as a citizen do you stand up and have the inconvinience of spending the night in a cell? no, it ends up being far easier to just do as they say...
True, but if Martin Luther King, Jr. had used this logic, we would still be segregating black from white. If George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, etc. had used this logic, we would still be loyal subjects of the (English) crown.
You're exactly right, as far as you go. It is easier to "just do as they say". But that doesn't mean it's *right* or even that it's a good idea. I haven't been in a position where I had to choose between "doing what they say" and spending the night in jail. But I'd like to *think* that I'd choose to stand up for my rights.
Your world is what you make it. I'd like to leave a better place for my daughter than the world I live in now.
The RIP Act forces suspects to reveal encryption keys on pain of imprisonment, whether charged with a crime or not.
So write a cron job that regenerates your ssh/ssl encryption keys on a daily basis, automatically deletes your old keys after pushing the new keys to your hosts, and do all of you VoIP/POP3/SMTP/IMAP/WhateverOtherNetworkProtocolsY ouUseRemotely transactions through an SSL tunnel (like OpenVPN). When asked why you felt it was necessary to go to this much trouble, tell them it's for the same reason you regularly change your desktop/laptop/server passwords.:D
Unfortunately, not everyone is as kind (or patched/anti-virus'ed/etc.) as your neighbors are.
I spent three years as an abuse admin at an ISP, and spoke with a number of customers where the only likely culprit for an abuse complaint was someone "borrowing" their Wi-Fi connection (nmap is a wonderful tool for finding likely infections/file sharing clients). In almost all of these cases, securing the Wi-Fi access point made the problem go away.
It's possible that my customers were lying and that they just latched on to the Wi-Fi excuse to get me off their backs, but after three years, it (usually) wasn't too hard to tell when someone honestly had no clue and when they were covering up:)
So *that's* why I object to people using my Wi-Fi without permission.
Let's establish a non-commercial Americal Idol type phenomena - people can compete for rating on the internet, and the most successful of those might be able to start playing live concerts, selling professional quality CDs with covers/etc. and other things that actually generate revenue.
Hook me up! I'm a musician, I've written a couple of songs (one of which I've released under the Creative Commons License, although it's targetted to a pretty specific sub-genre), and I've got a handful more in progress.
I don't buy too many CDs any more, since I don't like a lot of commercial music (NIN being an exception), and so I'd love to be part of what you are describing. Any other creative/.'ers with musical inclination?
Disclaimer: I'm still learning CSS, so be gentle if I am mistaken...:)
CSS can help, but there's a reason why people use tables rather than CSS to lay out web pages: it works. There are a lot of caveats with CSS. As other posters have noted, IE doesn't follow the W3C standards, and therefore tends to display a lot of content defined with stylesheets in unexpected and not altogether wonderful ways. On the other hand, if you rewrite your CSS to work in IE, other browsers don't always work well. However, I have yet to see a browser that choked on a straight HTML table layout (granted lynx/links butcher the layout, but the content is still there).
Furthermore, consider a simple web page with a rather standard layout: a title/logo section at the top, a navigation column to the side of the main content (doesn't matter which side for this discussion), a main content section and a copyright section at the bottom. This type of layout is very simple with a table: use the <tr> tags to separate the title bar, the navigation/content and the copyright, and use the <td> tags to place the navigation menu and the main content next to each other within the middle <tr> tag. With CSS, however, you place the various divisions where you want them. Unfortunately, if your content is dynamically generated, you won't know beforehand how far down the page your copyright notice should be. While you can use the overflow property to scroll the main content while keeping the rest of the page fixed in place, this is rather ugly, and wastes even more of your page with scroll bars. For an example of what I mean <shameless plug> you can take a look at one of my web pages. I tried to use CSS exclusively for layout on this site. I've since reverted to using tables on most of my web pages, since, IMHO, it just works better for 99% of what I do.
While there probably is a way around this problem, I haven't figured it out yet, which leads to the third problem with CSS. While it's really powerful, and can do some seriously cool stuff (click here for examples), it's not nearly as easy or intuitive as straight HTML. For professional web developers, that's okay, but for a lot of people, it's more hassle than it's worth.
You are exactly right, but unfortunately, that's the way a lot of places operate.
I used to work in a telco wire center, where the department I worked in was staffed 24x7. With two people per shift and coverage seven days a week, that means that four days a week, there was only one person in the building at any given time. The wire center was secured with card readers and magnetic locks on the doors, but one of the sensors kept malfunctioning--it would send an "open" alarm to the company contracted to provide security.
So, what was the security company's response? Would they send their on-site patrol guy, complete with radio, pepper spray, kevlar vest and semi-auto pistol? No, of course not! They called us to check the back door to see if it was a false alarm or if someone was actually trying to break in. Needless to say, that went over <sarcasm>REAL well </sarcasm>.
Re:Comments from people who actually create Creati
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
$0.01: I'm not quite sure I qualify as "primarily a designer" -- I'm a sys admin who does quite a bit of scripting and a fair amount of web development for fun -- but yes, I almost exclusively use the Gimp for my web graphics. From what I've seen, Photoshop is no more (or less) "intuitive" than the Gimp. Just because that's what you learned first doesn't mean it's "easier to learn" or more intuitive:) IMO, the Gimp is a fantastic program that does almost everything I need, and does it extremely well. The only thing I ever do that makes me gravitate towards another program is creating animated GIF's. The Gimp will do animated GIF's, but I prefer Paint Shop Pro's method of creating animations. Other than that, I can usually figure out what I need to know in any of the three programs within a few minutes, since all three programs seem very similar to me.
$0.02: At the company where I work, we use a *lot* of OSS, since we are a small company with relatively tight margins, and therefore the Gimp is the image processing program available to our employees, in most cases. While we will purchase closed source software (like Photoshop) if an employee has a compelling reason to use something else, most (all?) of our employees are using the Gimp for their work. From what I've seen, once they've used it for a little while, they have little trouble editing, enhancing or otherwise manipulating images with the Gimp.
Please excuse the stupid question, but most Apache (and I think IIS, as well) can log the referrer's and the client's IP address. Would it really be that hard to place a cap on the number of clicks from the same pair of client IP / referrer IPs within a given period of time from which the AdSense bill is generated? I would think you could also drop on the floor anything from either an RFC-1918 IP address or an address that matches the referring web server's address, as well.
I'm not real familiar with how AdSense works, since I've never run it on any of my web servers, but I would expect that if a shady webmaster is engaging in click fraud then either:
He is using computers on different networks to click on the add, in which case there is a limited subset of hosts from which he can operate (home computer, business computer, wireless from the coffee shop, etc.);
The fraudulent clicks will come from a number of RFC-1918 addresses, and therefore must have originated from the webmaster's internal network (assuming that AdSense sends the IP address from which the shady webmaster's server saw the click);
The fraudulent clicks will come from a single public IP address from which the shady webmaster's internal network is NAT'ed (assuming that the AdSense client's web server logs the IP address of the computer from which the click was generated).
In the first and third cases, the cap on clicks per unit of time from a single IP address will serve to reduce (but admittedly, not eliminate) click fraud. In the second case, dropping RFC-1918 addresses on the floor will prevent fraud, since *only* the webmaster's internal network could possibly have accessed the server from private IP space.
Yeah, you're working on bigger projects than I have:)
And I didn't think about the effects...I typically add effects to the instruments before my recording hardware, which probably isn't the best way to do it, since if I don't like the way the effect sounds in the mix, I have to re-record.
Of course I'd love to be able to do what I can currently do on my Windows box using equivalent Linux tools bu sadly there is nothing yet to compare to Logic Logic. (and yes I have tried Rosegarden, Audacity, Ardour etc. etc.)
Really? You couldn't get Rosegarden and Audacity to do what you need? Like you, I'm also into music in a big way, and I've been really happy with those two products. On a pretty low-end machine (500MHz Celeron, 384MB RAM on Slackware 9.1), I was able to lay down five stereo tracks of audio with Audacity before latency required me to bounce them into a single stereo track. Even at that, the recordings were fine, but the playback while recording was a little choppy:)
Just out of curiosity, what kind of problems were you having?
Also, since audio processing can be pretty demanding of your hardware, I'd be surprised if you can get the performance you want under an OS that was using Wine for compatibility. I haven't tried it, so I could be wrong, but I wouldn't expect outstanding performance while using software to emulate another OS and then running resource intensive software on top of that...assuming, of course that Wine will even run the software you want to use.
Yeah, but what are the relative velocities of the junk and the inflatable modules? If they are in orbit, their speeds have got to be similar, otherwise, well, they wouldn't be orbiting...they'd either be falling into the atmosphere or flying off into space.
Of course, even if speeds are similar, velocities can be wildly different, since velocity is a vector quantity...if one object is doing ~17,500 east to west while the other object is doing ~17,500 west to east, that's a closure rate of 35,000 <yikes!> and if they are moving perpendicular to each other, it's a closure rate of something like 24,745, IIRC.
My story, at least, has a happy ending. I now work for the ideal boss you describe above. I've tripled my pay since I was a flight instructor, and I don't think I could ever find a more relaxed, enjoyable work atmosphere than where I am now. My boss is great, and my coworkers are a lot of fun.
My job? Sys admin at a telco. Notice this was *not* one of the passions I listed before, but it *is* something that I like.
Soon, the internet will be rendered a privilage in which you need a license to access.
Having worked at an ISP, and having spoken with and e-mailed a number of completely clueless, paranoid users (bad combination, that), requiring a license seems to be a good thing to me <grin>
unless the job required Top Secret (unlikely for an internship).
Want to bet? I graduated from high school in Maryland in the late '80s, and at that time at least, the Department of Defense (among other agencies) would recruit high school seniors for a work study program. You would go to school half a day, then go to work at whatever agency hired you for the rest of the day. Many of these work study positions required top secret or better security clearances.
Excluding things like my wife, daughter and family, I basically have four passions in my life: music, rock climbing, kayaking and flying. About seven years ago, I did a six month stint as a flight instructor. When I was up with a student, I thought flight instructing had to be one of the greatest scams on the face of the earth--I mean, I was actually getting paid to do something that I had previously shelled out $$$$$ to do.
Unfortunately, at the end of six months, I was burned up and burned out. While on paper I was making a decent hourly wage as a flight instructor, in the real world, I was getting paid one hour for every two hours I was really working...if I was with a student. I spent many, many more unpaid hours hanging out at the flight school waiting for potential students to show up. For three of those six months, I was at the flight school from nine to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. That's on the order of 90 days straight with no time off, no weekends, nothing. I finally started drawing a line and said that I was willing to work this much time, on these days, but when I wasn't getting paid, I would work at my discretion. It was still more time than your average employee spends at work, and a good deal of the time would still be off the clock.
I got fired.
I've logged maybe 30 hours of flight time since.
In short, if there's something you really, truly enjoy doing, don't ruin it by trying to make a living at it. Find something you *like* and do it for a living, but don't take your *real* joy and make it work. When it becomes work, it's no fun any more.
I don't know how things are done in the UK, but I worked at an ISP in the US until a few months ago, and here was how things worked for us:
* Copyright infringement is against our terms and conditions of use, whether by filesharing, posting on a web server, etc.
* If we become aware that someone is engaging, knowingly or otherwise (i.e., botnet, virus, etc.), then we send a warning.
* That's it.
Our legal obligation ended at advising the user that we had become aware of copyright infringement activity originating on an IP address used by the customer's account at the time the offending activity occurred. If, at that point, the customer continued to engage in copyright infringement, we would continue to advise the customer that they needed to fix whatever was causing the offending activity.
If the **AA/BSA wished to escalate at that point, they could then get a court order requesting subscriber information. If not, then we had fulfilled our legal obligation, and any further action was at our discretion...which usually meant nothing else happened, since we were more concerned with spam, virus and port scanning activity originating on our network.
The Olympics should be about being the best athlete - not who can squeeze out a few fractions of a second because they have better/more expensive swimware.
In certain aerobatic competitions, they level the playing field by only allowing one type of airplane to be flown, so that the deciding factor is not "who has the best airplane?" but rather "who is the best pilot?" Perhaps there will come a time when a single swimsuit is mandated for swimming competitions, as well?
there is always going to be a guy with a sign that says, "The end of the world is nigh".
Yeah, but sooner or later, one of them will be right:)...whether it's the Second Coming or the sun burning out in...ummm...how many millions of years?...or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
I would. Granted, you said "if the airlines improve technology...", but...
I had an organ transplant several years ago, so I have to take anti-rejection medication twice a day, for the rest of my life. Given the airlines' record for losing baggage, the cost of the medication I take and the difficulty in replacing the medication on short notice (many pharmacies don't carry it since it's expensive, and not something in frequent demand), there is no way on God's green earth I am going to trust the airlines to get me and my luggage to my destination together every single time, without exception.
If I must pack my medication in checked baggage, and we don't arrive at the same airport within a reasonable time frame, I either 1) go back on dialysis (no thanks; been there, done that, and don't ever plan to do it again), 2) die (not an attractive option, either). I'll bring my meds in carry-on bags or I'll fly my own ******* plane, thank you very much.
As you said, we are taking a completely reactive stance to airline security, and that path is doomed to failure. A sufficiently motivated person can *always* find a way around whatever restrictions you try to put in place.
IMO, so long as we expect "someone else" to protect us, we will always be vulnerable. On the other hand, if every last one of us was willing to take a stand and fight back, like the passengers on Flight 93 did, we would be more secure than ever, even if (especially if?) everyone on board was carrying pocket knives, box cutters, bottles of gel, and so on. But for that to work, the airlines, and especially our government, has to trust that the majority of people 1) will, in fact, take action when necessary, and 2) will act responsibly when given the freedom to do so.
*IF* that happens, then our airlines will no longer be the relatively easy, effective targets the terrorists now see them to be.
...but by then, it will be too late.
You're exactly right, as far as you go. It is easier to "just do as they say". But that doesn't mean it's *right* or even that it's a good idea. I haven't been in a position where I had to choose between "doing what they say" and spending the night in jail. But I'd like to *think* that I'd choose to stand up for my rights.
Your world is what you make it. I'd like to leave a better place for my daughter than the world I live in now.
So write a cron job that regenerates your ssh/ssl encryption keys on a daily basis, automatically deletes your old keys after pushing the new keys to your hosts, and do all of you VoIP/POP3/SMTP/IMAP/WhateverOtherNetworkProtocols
Unfortunately, not everyone is as kind (or patched/anti-virus'ed/etc.) as your neighbors are.
:)
I spent three years as an abuse admin at an ISP, and spoke with a number of customers where the only likely culprit for an abuse complaint was someone "borrowing" their Wi-Fi connection (nmap is a wonderful tool for finding likely infections/file sharing clients). In almost all of these cases, securing the Wi-Fi access point made the problem go away.
It's possible that my customers were lying and that they just latched on to the Wi-Fi excuse to get me off their backs, but after three years, it (usually) wasn't too hard to tell when someone honestly had no clue and when they were covering up
So *that's* why I object to people using my Wi-Fi without permission.
Can we install a free, open-source government, next time? :P
It's not just your generation. I'm 35, and my wife is 41. We have the same arguments as you and your g/f. Sigh....
Hook me up! I'm a musician, I've written a couple of songs (one of which I've released under the Creative Commons License, although it's targetted to a pretty specific sub-genre), and I've got a handful more in progress.
I don't buy too many CDs any more, since I don't like a lot of commercial music (NIN being an exception), and so I'd love to be part of what you are describing. Any other creative
Disclaimer: I'm still learning CSS, so be gentle if I am mistaken... :)
CSS can help, but there's a reason why people use tables rather than CSS to lay out web pages: it works. There are a lot of caveats with CSS. As other posters have noted, IE doesn't follow the W3C standards, and therefore tends to display a lot of content defined with stylesheets in unexpected and not altogether wonderful ways. On the other hand, if you rewrite your CSS to work in IE, other browsers don't always work well. However, I have yet to see a browser that choked on a straight HTML table layout (granted lynx/links butcher the layout, but the content is still there).
Furthermore, consider a simple web page with a rather standard layout: a title/logo section at the top, a navigation column to the side of the main content (doesn't matter which side for this discussion), a main content section and a copyright section at the bottom. This type of layout is very simple with a table: use the <tr> tags to separate the title bar, the navigation/content and the copyright, and use the <td> tags to place the navigation menu and the main content next to each other within the middle <tr> tag. With CSS, however, you place the various divisions where you want them. Unfortunately, if your content is dynamically generated, you won't know beforehand how far down the page your copyright notice should be. While you can use the overflow property to scroll the main content while keeping the rest of the page fixed in place, this is rather ugly, and wastes even more of your page with scroll bars. For an example of what I mean <shameless plug> you can take a look at one of my web pages. I tried to use CSS exclusively for layout on this site. I've since reverted to using tables on most of my web pages, since, IMHO, it just works better for 99% of what I do.
While there probably is a way around this problem, I haven't figured it out yet, which leads to the third problem with CSS. While it's really powerful, and can do some seriously cool stuff (click here for examples), it's not nearly as easy or intuitive as straight HTML. For professional web developers, that's okay, but for a lot of people, it's more hassle than it's worth.
You are exactly right, but unfortunately, that's the way a lot of places operate.
I used to work in a telco wire center, where the department I worked in was staffed 24x7. With two people per shift and coverage seven days a week, that means that four days a week, there was only one person in the building at any given time. The wire center was secured with card readers and magnetic locks on the doors, but one of the sensors kept malfunctioning--it would send an "open" alarm to the company contracted to provide security.
So, what was the security company's response? Would they send their on-site patrol guy, complete with radio, pepper spray, kevlar vest and semi-auto pistol? No, of course not! They called us to check the back door to see if it was a false alarm or if someone was actually trying to break in. Needless to say, that went over <sarcasm>REAL well </sarcasm>.
$0.01: I'm not quite sure I qualify as "primarily a designer" -- I'm a sys admin who does quite a bit of scripting and a fair amount of web development for fun -- but yes, I almost exclusively use the Gimp for my web graphics. From what I've seen, Photoshop is no more (or less) "intuitive" than the Gimp. Just because that's what you learned first doesn't mean it's "easier to learn" or more intuitive :) IMO, the Gimp is a fantastic program that does almost everything I need, and does it extremely well. The only thing I ever do that makes me gravitate towards another program is creating animated GIF's. The Gimp will do animated GIF's, but I prefer Paint Shop Pro's method of creating animations. Other than that, I can usually figure out what I need to know in any of the three programs within a few minutes, since all three programs seem very similar to me.
$0.02: At the company where I work, we use a *lot* of OSS, since we are a small company with relatively tight margins, and therefore the Gimp is the image processing program available to our employees, in most cases. While we will purchase closed source software (like Photoshop) if an employee has a compelling reason to use something else, most (all?) of our employees are using the Gimp for their work. From what I've seen, once they've used it for a little while, they have little trouble editing, enhancing or otherwise manipulating images with the Gimp.
I'm not real familiar with how AdSense works, since I've never run it on any of my web servers, but I would expect that if a shady webmaster is engaging in click fraud then either:
In the first and third cases, the cap on clicks per unit of time from a single IP address will serve to reduce (but admittedly, not eliminate) click fraud. In the second case, dropping RFC-1918 addresses on the floor will prevent fraud, since *only* the webmaster's internal network could possibly have accessed the server from private IP space.
Yeah, you're working on bigger projects than I have :)
And I didn't think about the effects...I typically add effects to the instruments before my recording hardware, which probably isn't the best way to do it, since if I don't like the way the effect sounds in the mix, I have to re-record.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of problems were you having?
Also, since audio processing can be pretty demanding of your hardware, I'd be surprised if you can get the performance you want under an OS that was using Wine for compatibility. I haven't tried it, so I could be wrong, but I wouldn't expect outstanding performance while using software to emulate another OS and then running resource intensive software on top of that...assuming, of course that Wine will even run the software you want to use.
Yeah, but what are the relative velocities of the junk and the inflatable modules? If they are in orbit, their speeds have got to be similar, otherwise, well, they wouldn't be orbiting...they'd either be falling into the atmosphere or flying off into space.
Of course, even if speeds are similar, velocities can be wildly different, since velocity is a vector quantity...if one object is doing ~17,500 east to west while the other object is doing ~17,500 west to east, that's a closure rate of 35,000 <yikes!> and if they are moving perpendicular to each other, it's a closure rate of something like 24,745, IIRC.
They already know your number. They've been listening to your phone calls for the last five years :)
Exactly!
My story, at least, has a happy ending. I now work for the ideal boss you describe above. I've tripled my pay since I was a flight instructor, and I don't think I could ever find a more relaxed, enjoyable work atmosphere than where I am now. My boss is great, and my coworkers are a lot of fun.
My job? Sys admin at a telco. Notice this was *not* one of the passions I listed before, but it *is* something that I like.
Perhaps, but...
Excluding things like my wife, daughter and family, I basically have four passions in my life: music, rock climbing, kayaking and flying. About seven years ago, I did a six month stint as a flight instructor. When I was up with a student, I thought flight instructing had to be one of the greatest scams on the face of the earth--I mean, I was actually getting paid to do something that I had previously shelled out $$$$$ to do.
Unfortunately, at the end of six months, I was burned up and burned out. While on paper I was making a decent hourly wage as a flight instructor, in the real world, I was getting paid one hour for every two hours I was really working...if I was with a student. I spent many, many more unpaid hours hanging out at the flight school waiting for potential students to show up. For three of those six months, I was at the flight school from nine to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. That's on the order of 90 days straight with no time off, no weekends, nothing. I finally started drawing a line and said that I was willing to work this much time, on these days, but when I wasn't getting paid, I would work at my discretion. It was still more time than your average employee spends at work, and a good deal of the time would still be off the clock.
I got fired.
I've logged maybe 30 hours of flight time since.
In short, if there's something you really, truly enjoy doing, don't ruin it by trying to make a living at it. Find something you *like* and do it for a living, but don't take your *real* joy and make it work. When it becomes work, it's no fun any more.
I don't know how things are done in the UK, but I worked at an ISP in the US until a few months ago, and here was how things worked for us:
* Copyright infringement is against our terms and conditions of use, whether by filesharing, posting on a web server, etc.
* If we become aware that someone is engaging, knowingly or otherwise (i.e., botnet, virus, etc.), then we send a warning.
* That's it.
Our legal obligation ended at advising the user that we had become aware of copyright infringement activity originating on an IP address used by the customer's account at the time the offending activity occurred. If, at that point, the customer continued to engage in copyright infringement, we would continue to advise the customer that they needed to fix whatever was causing the offending activity.
If the **AA/BSA wished to escalate at that point, they could then get a court order requesting subscriber information. If not, then we had fulfilled our legal obligation, and any further action was at our discretion...which usually meant nothing else happened, since we were more concerned with spam, virus and port scanning activity originating on our network.
In certain aerobatic competitions, they level the playing field by only allowing one type of airplane to be flown, so that the deciding factor is not "who has the best airplane?" but rather "who is the best pilot?" Perhaps there will come a time when a single swimsuit is mandated for swimming competitions, as well?
Yeah, but sooner or later, one of them will be right
Tech Support Request:
No, I won't post the photo