Yes, dear, I know what cookies are, and why they were conceived.
Since you're still in the box, I'll lift the lid for you.
Since we really can;t ban cookies, and since we can't even tell the difference between a 'tracking cookie' and any number of useful and innocuous cookies, we're stuck with figuring out that we are being tracked, usually by accident. In this environment, theh FTC has a Sisyphean task in trying to implement a 'do-not-track' option for Internet users. Let's leave the foreign sites, aggregators, and such alone for now.
So do we expect the FTC to push the stone up the hill, only to watch it roll back down as another technique is developed? Sounds like our airline security system, save that people genererally don't fear death when tracked online, and the evil trackers are less constrained by politics and such.
Session cookies are too useful to eliminate. Any method that allows you to navigate a site ikn a useful way probably permits tracking that could be used for marketing purposes, and when more than one corporate entity shared data on you, well, you been tracked, and in the way that most people don't like.
Is there no way to limit tracking, or give users options to avoid it? Well, maybe two.
First, do we decide to truly punish transgressors? Assuming we can agree on what the transgressions are, slapping most outfits with a few hundred thousand dollars in fines is meaningless.
Second, when the data has been thrown around a bit, it's lost forever. Nothing compensates you.
I'm not at all hopeful the government (or any governments in any combination) have any hope of addressing this in a useful manner.
So, the third option. Browser add-ons to let you properly manage cookies, tracking data, and such.
I suspect this will come whether we ask for it or not. Those crazy kids out there will mash up some interesting stuff.
So climb out of the box, and don't think for a moment that everyone that yearns for a simple solution is oblivious to reality. It's ok to dream. You just have to stop eating that particular fruit.
What the FTC or whatever needs to do is not to build some Do-Not-Call system for Internet tracking. It's pointless to fine them insignificantly, and they never delete the data. Besides, they share it everywhere, and it's gone and done in minutes. Scattered everywher.
No, the FTC or whatever should build a Do-Not-TRY system. Internet sites should be required to not even try to track us, and honor a 'Universal Do-Not-Try-To-Track' cookie. Essentially, getting caught leaving cookies otherwise should be evidence of the attempt, and bill them. Among other things, troll for violations and fine them enough to at least pay for the system. Until they get it, and then it's the overseas sites that will be the culprits, and then we can play whack-a-mole and start in on forcing them to comply or sanction them along with the EU.
They are going to involve the EU also, right? If not, waste of time.
ps - Don't bother trying to sancton Chinese outfits. Just don't bother. You're kidding yourself.
Among the issues here in the valley(registration may be required):
Mesa has spent $100,000 this year replacing wiring in parks and rec areas.
These idiots were caught stealing from a home, among other things, wiring. Vacant homes get stripped regularly, taking even the internal wiring.
And there was a story this spring of a daycare center that shut down for a daty because their windoww-mount air conditioner was stolen. These get sold as salvage for the copper coils.
Despite having to sign for stuff, the thieves are doing well. And it's not a problem of illegal immigrants stealing copper to feed their familes - plenty of regular everyday residents are in on this. This moron got caught stealing the wire out of freeway lights. Nice.
I'm not hopeful that we'll see any letup in this here. More homes going empty. Not enough jobs returning. Scrap dealers can't do much more.
The Internet is assymetrical. I click a few times, and in comes gigs of movie. Even when I wax on about something important here, or send a Christmas email of a few kilobytes, I read many more. One post on facebook yields me megabytes of web page.
This is an old complaint. Multiple providers used to complain about peering arrangements in the late 90s, and then they got together and dealt with it. Sprint and Cogent get into hissy fits regularly, mostly because Cogent undercuts Sprint access pricing, and Sprint tries to hurt Cogen by raising their peering fees. It all goes away.
Now the cable companies are whining that other content providers are taking advantage of their networks by pouring data into their gateways without compensating these poor media delivery networks for the effort.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if the cable co ISPs, in particular, had a content delivery business that they could sell to non-subscribers, but they don't. So they want to encourage their subscribers to 'stay at home' and use the content they DO have, which is pretty much on-demand TV and pay-per-view movies. So far, subscribers aren't as interested as expected, and seem to prefer Netflix. Pricing has a lot to do with this, but massive numbers of new releases are the big driver.
So do the cable cos have a beef here? Should they be compensated by other Internet media providers for the highly assymetrical traffic they are receiving?
No. They already are being compensated by subscribers.
I pay Cox about $50/mo for Internet service, and I rarely watch or stream anything. My limited gaming is no great burden, the issue there being latency. My occasional downloads of ISOs for a Linux distro are so rare they can't be causing Cox any real trouble. I don't Hulu, don't Netflix, don't even YouTube. But I may have to. My video bill with Cox is closing in on $100/mo, and it's not worth it. In high season, I pay about $3 per show that I WANT to watch on TV. That's about 30 shows, assuming it is October and all my favs are on. Now that several have ended for the season, it actually costs me almost $5 per show tha I WANT to watch. The rest is idle channel-surfing, entirely optional viewing, and I could not do any of it and not feel cheated. Seems like a lot. If I could stream current episodes of some programming, I could kill my cable. Actually, I could kill my cable since only one show can't be had over the air, and I can deal with that. I can use ATSC and be done with cable. I live so close to the DSL box I can get slammin' speed and Qwest seems ready to call me back. I even have a wireless DS option that's good for 5MB down, and the hardware isn't too expensive. I may yet have to exercise my freedom and go elsewhere. I can buy a ChannelMaster DVR at Fry's for $300 if I'm too lazy to whip up a media server/PDVR out of stuff I'm not using any more.
But this is really about the ISP, this case being a cable co, trying to get paid twice. I pay for access to content. They want the providers to pay separately. Imagine the Post Office making you buy a stamp to send an envelope, and then having to buy another stamp to pick up your incoming mail. Nice.
My central air is fused at 50 amps. My service is fused at 100 amps. In Maine, 100 amp service is still not the norm, since many homes were built a while ago. The last house I lived in in Maine had 70 amp service and was not typical for the neighborhood.
Besides, I'm not sure you want to try to run near rated service for 8 hours.
So we'll have to upgrade our electrical service to support plug-in hybrids. Woop. We're just now grappling with having 10,000 gallon tanks of gasoline leaching into the groundwater. And water-soluble additives poisonings wells miles away. We can do this. It would be an improvement.
BTW, I am not an environmentalist. Just practical. Electricity has its problems, but aside from unstubstantiated complaints about EMF and such, it isn't the environmental hazard that petroleum is. I submit that even generation is less of a problem than gasoline and diesel.
"because these voltages are rather simply run underground"
Here in AZ, utilities are run underground except for high tension distribution.
Oh, and that's a LOT of what is along the roads.
Mmy old home, Maine, is not as easy to run underground electrical utilities. Variable geology (soil to shale to bedrock in 300 ft, for instance) and high water tables make it practically useless to run power underground except in urban downtowns. Just the way it is.
And in much of Maine, as well as other states, people complain about the decrepit distribution system without knowing much about it. A 50-year old system would be a blessing. And despite that, the number one cause of neighborhood outages is squirrels. Sometimes they don't clear one wire before they grasp the other.
Laugh if you want, but when I lived in the Deering section of Portland, power would go out monthly. Every time, I would chat up the nice lineman while he walked the street and found the frozen squirrel. Never failed. Either the wires need to be spaced better, or we need to consider the super-sized squirrels as a problem and stop feeding them.
Well, the phone +011 20 12 157-8967 would resolve to a mobile number in Egypt, the area code being non location-specific.
+011 20 3 441-1838 (the fax number) would resolve to Alexandria, Egypt, area code 3 and all.
201-215-78967 doesn't work as a DC-area number.
So let's believe the contact data and stipulate that Waleed lives in Egypt.
Also, he registered some other domains that have names consistent with an Arab-based business. And DHS might, just might, have some other interest in an Egyptian web site than just torrents, though the content it linked to might be the problem.
I'm not happy with these confiscations, but this doesn't seem to be as pointless as it might.
My hometown, Bangor Maine, shipped a LOT of timber to build the British fleet. America had old-growth pine forests with magnificent tall trees, just the ticket for masts. Oh, and the oak as well further south. Lots of timber came down the Penobscot River.
When wooden ships came out of favor, well, things changed. For the next 150 years sunken timber (much of it pulpwood that missed the mills by accident) rotted and decomposed, starving the river of oxygen and limiting the fish population. Then a few convenient hydro-electric dams made the Atlantic Salmon migration pretty much impossible for all but a relative few fish. Darn.
We can blame wooden ships for converting the Maine forest to virtual monocultured pulpwood pine, poisoning the Penobscot and destroying a magnificent salmon run, and ultimately turning the river into a very long lake.
So going back to wooden ships is just plain wrong. Imagine the immense loss it will cause. Please, don't do this. Please.
Thanks for the explanation. I actually didn't even bother to reference temperature, since the article was well into explaining how emissions were reduced but levels were still up, that emissions were down because of diminished economic activity and that levels were reduced because of cooling that inspired vegetation which absorbed more CO2 than usual, and the apparent conclusion that levels increased because generation and absorption both increased, all because while generation was down, it was actually up.
Yup. It made no sense to me either. The answer is to trust them.
We don't manually distribute certificates or CRLs here. Software distribution for all other purposes also serves that one.
Being snarky and encouraging the poster to indulge in a more fully-featured systems management environment is appropriate here. If you want to leave the porch, you'll have to run like a big dog... Otherwise, stay home.
"primarily because of the global economic downturn"
So a friend shares with me that the company cafeteria is proud of the reduction in paper napkin use in 2009, and promotes this as a collective effort and wonderful. Of course, the company laid off >20% of the workforce at the end of 2008. Yeay team! Good job reducing napkin usage! Next, we work on reducing electricity consumption by shutting down even more cubicles! And we're saving! We're saving!
Well, at least CO2 went down, apparently. I know my commute was a lot easier, should I be thinking that was a good thing?
"One big factor was La Niña, a natural seesaw shift in climate that takes place across the tropical Pacific every three to seven years, where the climate is cooler and wetter over large regions of land in the tropics, encouraging plant growth in tropical forests."
Ok, so which is it, global warming, global climate change, or climate cycles? I'm so confused.
"However the bad news is that even with the decrease in emissions the overall concentration of CO2 rose from 385 ppm in 2008 to 387 ppm in 2009, as concentrations continue to rise even as emissions slip because even at the reduced pace, humans are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can scrub the gas."
Ok, so emissions are down but the level is up. Again, Im so confused.
Let me summarize again:
Emissions were reduced due to economic decline. Atmospheric levels were reduced due to a climate cycle that increased absorption. Atmospheric levels actually increased due to increased emissions.
So emissions went down and up, and levels went down and up. All in the same year.
A spectacular opportunity, dommed to failure for all the same reasons as the others.
Nice trip down memory lane... I used DeskMate at home for a while, got into configuring DesqView for clients, and talked clients out of most of the rest.
I used DR-DOS for a long time to generate bootable floppies for stuff like patches and Norton Ghost, avoiding some of the unpleasentness of the various MSDOS problems. Ultimately, didn't DR-DOS go to Caldera? I have some of those disks still.
But Windows was pretty much unstoppable. My old buddies from then still lament that Apple never wrote Mac OS for Intel processors, but that would have gotten Apple into DLL and driver hell, trying to support even the worst drivers from the worst writers, and then getting tarnished with the reputation of unreliablility.
Still, Windows seems to have come out of that ok.
Did anyone else get a MACH board for Christmas, and drool over that awful mouse?
Anyone else ever play Balance Of Power? Damn, I miss that.
Back in '95, we were lamenting this problem of defending NetWare in the face of an overwhelming Windows assault. The consensus then was that when the suits read a back cover ad declaring this the 'year of Windows', and the t-shirts get free development tools and the promise of write-once-run-everywhere, even though running your server tools on the client was never a requirement, then NetWare was doomed. This actually started with NTAS and picked up unstoppable momentum with Windows Server 2000. Nevermind that Exchange took a little while longer to come of age, for many shops NetWare was what they clung to GroupWise for. Once GW was hammered, it was over. The interesting GW exploits didn't help.
ZenWorks was, back then and up to at least 2004, really clever and actually made Windows administration tolerable if not cool. Schools used that a lot for various clever reasons. But Even Microsoft saw that ADS administration needed to improve, and it pretty much did. Add in some licensing spiffs, a continuing campaign to destroy NetWare compatibility, and Novell ran out of time and market. Last I checked, they had solid revenue form licensing, but the end was in sight. SUSE is a whole other story. Novell should have acquired OpenOffice. SCO didn't help.
I'm not hopeful for Novell. This looks like the carving of the turkey. All this time, and they will die the death of a thousand divestments. Arghh...
I truly miss my NAMP server. But not enough to build it again.
I believe you. In 2006, I thought companies were looking for network admins and desktop wonks with a little HTML and Java experience just to score web developers for low-end admin pay. Nope, they were just jacking the requirements to get their H-1B approved. Nice. I almost took a job like that in level 3 support, but I confessed that my HTML would have to improve, and it might take me 60 days or so to get up to their advertised requirement.
The only good thing out of that was that the recruiter has called me back for other, equally unrealistic, positions. She appreciated my candor, and my willingness to further reinforce their inability to find qualified U.S. citizens. So I lost twice, but gracefully.
"...but for some reason not many American undergraduates chose to take this route."
I recall a little blurb in a technical publication, pointing out in 2006 that most PhDs in the U.S. were going to Chinese or other Asian graduates. And that most department chairs were Chinese. I've got to go back and find that article. At the time, no one claimed it was inaccurate.
"...would rather pursue jobs in consulting and banking than staying in engineering"
Hmm.. so engineering in the financial sector isn't called engineering? Actually, you may be on to something there...
"Who knows, maybe it will change some day when banking jobs start paying realistic salaries, i.e., a salary that is somewhat proportional to what you actually produce (which is close to zero in banking), and engineering becomes more attractive again."
Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. Next time you manage to buy your Starbucks latte with the plastic thingie in your wallet, remember that was not at all useful or worthy to you. If your complaint is the fees, charges, interest on your savings, or lack of easy credit so you can furnish your mansion and pay for it for the next 7 years, well, that's best reserved for the same sort of CEO that would bury their head in the sand for 20 years and then ask for a government bailout to save their industry from virtual collapse. Sadly, the technology workers pretty much get to do what they are told to. Same as McDonalds or Wal-Mart.
"If you are asking the foreign workers themselves, what you may not realize is that they are often threatened a lot about their visa status -- by HR or even their own management. In many of the big companies where I worked I found out that management/HR would threaten to fire foreign workers if they didn't work insane hours, or do exactly what they were told. Sure it's improper dismissal, but it's hard to argue from another continent. Or worse, their salary is often the lifeblood of their entire extended family. Even a short intermission in the money could lead to serious hardship. Their visa status is a very sore point because it is how they are able to be treated so badly by others."
Oh, this I know. Here, they often work 60-70 hour weeks. I would not be surprised, no I expect that either their agency or HR holds their visa as if it were their privates, and they know the threat to send them home at their own expense. And while the 60-70 hour week isn't exclusive to the visa workers, the regular full-timers often start looking for another opportunity and shift to something more sane. Many of the temporary workers here turn down full-time gigs because they get a slight pay cut in exchange for slightly better benefits and a 40% increase in work. Not worth it. But management does have a plan to pretty much force the temps into submission. And it may work.
And I know many of the current crop of visa workers do indeed support themr families at home. None have any family here.
I don't recall including Europeans on the list. We have some development going on in the UK, but nothing of note in Europe proper. The Indians I'm working with are not Europeans. Ask them.
I'm more interested in why U.S. citizens are consistently found unqualified. And why, in that scenario, we watch as citizens go jobless and even legal visa holders get those jobs.
Where I'm working, the workforce is changing from fairly well split between U.S. citizens and Indian nationals to a three way mix between citizens, Indians, and Asians. I'm not sure how that is happening. I also see various silos of technical work in many regions, on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. Every continent. Oh, with the notable exception of Europe, where it seems we do precious little development work. Hmm...
If I had to guess, I think current work allocations are favoring nations where the workers get little protection (Australia, for example has some interesting laws, while Chile doesn't) or the workers have already done the onshore shuffle and rotated back 'home'. Oh, and I dare not start asking about the visa status of some of these workers. It's a sensitive subject. Many will just get up and walk away.
It's frustrating to see what is clearly basic, everyday work going to visa holders when you know someone who is truly overqualified, but couldn't get past the first interview. As far as I can tell, pay is not the issue.
But I'm hypersensitive to this. I may be wrong about a lot if what I think, but I'm not yet convinced.
We use notebooks and docks at work to facilitate business continuity; take your NB home each night. We have VPN access to the network, so if the building goes down (we had a power failure a month ago) you are either at home or at some other place, VPN'd in and getting some work done. Dragging them to meetings to show of your latest deck is also desirable. If you have a need for continuity, this might help a lot.
Before you think much about the cloud, get some legal advice on how you can use shared services and the legal implications of not actually having your data onsite. as an NGO, you may have data that doesn't actually belong to you, or other agencies that want a say in what your data security looks like.
And your web server is best off somewhere that can manage DDOS attacks, intrusion prevention and detection, resilient links, and backup/restore/recovery. Do you NEED to take on web services for a public site? Now if this is a service for your business needs, think over the data location needs again and all the access problems. You will be getting into the VPN/access/firewalling stuff also.
Otherwise, your best investment will be documentation. Document EVERYTHING! It sucks, and you won't like it until you need it. Then your boss will appreciate your thoroughness, and see a potential disaster as an example of the process working as intended. Bear in mind you will need to scratch out the time to document from the limited time you will have to do all that is needed. Good luck.
"Well, it doesn't matter what they intended, there isn't anything which says the tickets enable the purchaser to attend, in fact they almost all specifically say they enable the ticket bearer to attend."
Not true. The New England Patriots season tickets are a license to attend, and the named purchaser cannot resell them by contract, except through the Patriots' reselling partners. This is not always enforced, but if the Patriots see blocks of tickets online elsewhere, they have been known to warn the seller that these tickets will not be honored except for the original purchaser. I bet other NFL teams do this. And yes, the Patriots do this to manipulate the market and share in the reselling profits. If the ticket or th eevent don't specify otherwise, well, then it's the bearer. The distinction between buying a ticket to attend and buying a ticket to speculate I won't delve into.
"So the intent is obviously that the ticket grants entrance, and that right transfers with the ticket itself. Thus, they are intended to be bought, sold, and transferred. Otherwise the ticket would say "not transferable"."
Semantics, perhaps, but I wonder how many exhibitors intend for their tickets to be resold, especially for a profit. As a business process, they would probably prefer to be profiting from the reselling activity - and in the case of Ticketmaster, they DO, though they are actually a seller, not an exhibitor.
"In which case instead of selling them to anonymous people they should put the ticket in someone's real name... problem solved."
Reference my notes about the Patriots.
"So stop attending events where the promoter relies on a first-come-first-serve system. THAT is the root of the problem; the promoter is too lazy to use a lottery-to-purchase system."
There goes 99% of the market. Thanks for the helpful advice. Leave it to an AC to recommend taking an action that guarantees failure to solve the problem.
And are lotteries any 'fairer'? At least I am under no presumption that anything but chance gets me a ticket. No change there either. Lotteries, by the way, don't solve the reselling or box-stuffing problem. The bots will happily enter the lottery in overwhelming numbers and win a disproportionate share of tickets. I bet it's already happened.
Reserving some tickets for walk-up sales doesn't solve the problem either. try will-call or walk-up purchases for a popular Broadway show. There is a regular business in people buying day of show tickets for various outlets, like hotels and even American Express, to offer to their clients as a perk or convenience.
Reality is that for a finite resource, there is no entirely fair way to market the product. This is the market at work. I would like it to be not so obviously and patently UNfair, but this grates on my Conservative principles, so mostly I just want the rules to be known anbd observed. Bots should be against the rules. But I may be all wet on this.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, dear, I know what cookies are, and why they were conceived.
Since you're still in the box, I'll lift the lid for you.
Since we really can;t ban cookies, and since we can't even tell the difference between a 'tracking cookie' and any number of useful and innocuous cookies, we're stuck with figuring out that we are being tracked, usually by accident. In this environment, theh FTC has a Sisyphean task in trying to implement a 'do-not-track' option for Internet users. Let's leave the foreign sites, aggregators, and such alone for now.
So do we expect the FTC to push the stone up the hill, only to watch it roll back down as another technique is developed? Sounds like our airline security system, save that people genererally don't fear death when tracked online, and the evil trackers are less constrained by politics and such.
Session cookies are too useful to eliminate. Any method that allows you to navigate a site ikn a useful way probably permits tracking that could be used for marketing purposes, and when more than one corporate entity shared data on you, well, you been tracked, and in the way that most people don't like.
Is there no way to limit tracking, or give users options to avoid it? Well, maybe two.
First, do we decide to truly punish transgressors? Assuming we can agree on what the transgressions are, slapping most outfits with a few hundred thousand dollars in fines is meaningless.
Second, when the data has been thrown around a bit, it's lost forever. Nothing compensates you.
I'm not at all hopeful the government (or any governments in any combination) have any hope of addressing this in a useful manner.
So, the third option. Browser add-ons to let you properly manage cookies, tracking data, and such.
I suspect this will come whether we ask for it or not. Those crazy kids out there will mash up some interesting stuff.
So climb out of the box, and don't think for a moment that everyone that yearns for a simple solution is oblivious to reality. It's ok to dream. You just have to stop eating that particular fruit.
What the FTC or whatever needs to do is not to build some Do-Not-Call system for Internet tracking. It's pointless to fine them insignificantly, and they never delete the data. Besides, they share it everywhere, and it's gone and done in minutes. Scattered everywher.
No, the FTC or whatever should build a Do-Not-TRY system. Internet sites should be required to not even try to track us, and honor a 'Universal Do-Not-Try-To-Track' cookie. Essentially, getting caught leaving cookies otherwise should be evidence of the attempt, and bill them. Among other things, troll for violations and fine them enough to at least pay for the system. Until they get it, and then it's the overseas sites that will be the culprits, and then we can play whack-a-mole and start in on forcing them to comply or sanction them along with the EU.
They are going to involve the EU also, right? If not, waste of time.
ps - Don't bother trying to sancton Chinese outfits. Just don't bother. You're kidding yourself.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Google is reduced to a front-end for eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia, et al.
And any government or other entity with anough power will compel them to just not tell us what we want to know, no matter the reason or legality.
Among the issues here in the valley(registration may be required):
Mesa has spent $100,000 this year replacing wiring in parks and rec areas.
These idiots were caught stealing from a home, among other things, wiring. Vacant homes get stripped regularly, taking even the internal wiring.
And there was a story this spring of a daycare center that shut down for a daty because their windoww-mount air conditioner was stolen. These get sold as salvage for the copper coils.
Despite having to sign for stuff, the thieves are doing well. And it's not a problem of illegal immigrants stealing copper to feed their familes - plenty of regular everyday residents are in on this. This moron got caught stealing the wire out of freeway lights. Nice.
I'm not hopeful that we'll see any letup in this here. More homes going empty. Not enough jobs returning. Scrap dealers can't do much more.
Land of opportunity, baby!
The Internet is assymetrical. I click a few times, and in comes gigs of movie. Even when I wax on about something important here, or send a Christmas email of a few kilobytes, I read many more. One post on facebook yields me megabytes of web page.
This is an old complaint. Multiple providers used to complain about peering arrangements in the late 90s, and then they got together and dealt with it. Sprint and Cogent get into hissy fits regularly, mostly because Cogent undercuts Sprint access pricing, and Sprint tries to hurt Cogen by raising their peering fees. It all goes away.
Now the cable companies are whining that other content providers are taking advantage of their networks by pouring data into their gateways without compensating these poor media delivery networks for the effort.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if the cable co ISPs, in particular, had a content delivery business that they could sell to non-subscribers, but they don't. So they want to encourage their subscribers to 'stay at home' and use the content they DO have, which is pretty much on-demand TV and pay-per-view movies. So far, subscribers aren't as interested as expected, and seem to prefer Netflix. Pricing has a lot to do with this, but massive numbers of new releases are the big driver.
So do the cable cos have a beef here? Should they be compensated by other Internet media providers for the highly assymetrical traffic they are receiving?
No. They already are being compensated by subscribers.
I pay Cox about $50/mo for Internet service, and I rarely watch or stream anything. My limited gaming is no great burden, the issue there being latency. My occasional downloads of ISOs for a Linux distro are so rare they can't be causing Cox any real trouble. I don't Hulu, don't Netflix, don't even YouTube. But I may have to. My video bill with Cox is closing in on $100/mo, and it's not worth it. In high season, I pay about $3 per show that I WANT to watch on TV. That's about 30 shows, assuming it is October and all my favs are on. Now that several have ended for the season, it actually costs me almost $5 per show tha I WANT to watch. The rest is idle channel-surfing, entirely optional viewing, and I could not do any of it and not feel cheated. Seems like a lot. If I could stream current episodes of some programming, I could kill my cable. Actually, I could kill my cable since only one show can't be had over the air, and I can deal with that. I can use ATSC and be done with cable. I live so close to the DSL box I can get slammin' speed and Qwest seems ready to call me back. I even have a wireless DS option that's good for 5MB down, and the hardware isn't too expensive. I may yet have to exercise my freedom and go elsewhere. I can buy a ChannelMaster DVR at Fry's for $300 if I'm too lazy to whip up a media server/PDVR out of stuff I'm not using any more.
But this is really about the ISP, this case being a cable co, trying to get paid twice. I pay for access to content. They want the providers to pay separately. Imagine the Post Office making you buy a stamp to send an envelope, and then having to buy another stamp to pick up your incoming mail. Nice.
Of course, in the end, we pay.
My central air is fused at 50 amps. My service is fused at 100 amps. In Maine, 100 amp service is still not the norm, since many homes were built a while ago. The last house I lived in in Maine had 70 amp service and was not typical for the neighborhood.
Besides, I'm not sure you want to try to run near rated service for 8 hours.
So we'll have to upgrade our electrical service to support plug-in hybrids. Woop. We're just now grappling with having 10,000 gallon tanks of gasoline leaching into the groundwater. And water-soluble additives poisonings wells miles away. We can do this. It would be an improvement.
BTW, I am not an environmentalist. Just practical. Electricity has its problems, but aside from unstubstantiated complaints about EMF and such, it isn't the environmental hazard that petroleum is. I submit that even generation is less of a problem than gasoline and diesel.
Ok, now bring it on.
"because these voltages are rather simply run underground"
Here in AZ, utilities are run underground except for high tension distribution.
Oh, and that's a LOT of what is along the roads.
Mmy old home, Maine, is not as easy to run underground electrical utilities. Variable geology (soil to shale to bedrock in 300 ft, for instance) and high water tables make it practically useless to run power underground except in urban downtowns. Just the way it is.
And in much of Maine, as well as other states, people complain about the decrepit distribution system without knowing much about it. A 50-year old system would be a blessing. And despite that, the number one cause of neighborhood outages is squirrels. Sometimes they don't clear one wire before they grasp the other.
Laugh if you want, but when I lived in the Deering section of Portland, power would go out monthly. Every time, I would chat up the nice lineman while he walked the street and found the frozen squirrel. Never failed. Either the wires need to be spaced better, or we need to consider the super-sized squirrels as a problem and stop feeding them.
The WHOIS I see:
Domain Name: TORRENT-FINDER.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com/
Name Server: NS1.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM
Name Server: NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM
Go look up SEIZEDSERVERS.COM. The owner has contracts with DHS.
Well, how's W looking to you now?
Well, the phone +011 20 12 157-8967 would resolve to a mobile number in Egypt, the area code being non location-specific.
+011 20 3 441-1838 (the fax number) would resolve to Alexandria, Egypt, area code 3 and all.
201-215-78967 doesn't work as a DC-area number.
So let's believe the contact data and stipulate that Waleed lives in Egypt.
Also, he registered some other domains that have names consistent with an Arab-based business. And DHS might, just might, have some other interest in an Egyptian web site than just torrents, though the content it linked to might be the problem.
I'm not happy with these confiscations, but this doesn't seem to be as pointless as it might.
Oh well, another great story shot to hell.
My hometown, Bangor Maine, shipped a LOT of timber to build the British fleet. America had old-growth pine forests with magnificent tall trees, just the ticket for masts. Oh, and the oak as well further south. Lots of timber came down the Penobscot River.
When wooden ships came out of favor, well, things changed. For the next 150 years sunken timber (much of it pulpwood that missed the mills by accident) rotted and decomposed, starving the river of oxygen and limiting the fish population. Then a few convenient hydro-electric dams made the Atlantic Salmon migration pretty much impossible for all but a relative few fish. Darn.
We can blame wooden ships for converting the Maine forest to virtual monocultured pulpwood pine, poisoning the Penobscot and destroying a magnificent salmon run, and ultimately turning the river into a very long lake.
So going back to wooden ships is just plain wrong. Imagine the immense loss it will cause. Please, don't do this. Please.
Not that actually writing an understandable article has any purpose here.
I don't think the author really meant for us to understand.
Thanks for the explanation. I actually didn't even bother to reference temperature, since the article was well into explaining how emissions were reduced but levels were still up, that emissions were down because of diminished economic activity and that levels were reduced because of cooling that inspired vegetation which absorbed more CO2 than usual, and the apparent conclusion that levels increased because generation and absorption both increased, all because while generation was down, it was actually up.
Yup. It made no sense to me either. The answer is to trust them.
We don't manually distribute certificates or CRLs here. Software distribution for all other purposes also serves that one.
Being snarky and encouraging the poster to indulge in a more fully-featured systems management environment is appropriate here. If you want to leave the porch, you'll have to run like a big dog... Otherwise, stay home.
"primarily because of the global economic downturn"
So a friend shares with me that the company cafeteria is proud of the reduction in paper napkin use in 2009, and promotes this as a collective effort and wonderful. Of course, the company laid off >20% of the workforce at the end of 2008. Yeay team! Good job reducing napkin usage! Next, we work on reducing electricity consumption by shutting down even more cubicles! And we're saving! We're saving!
Well, at least CO2 went down, apparently. I know my commute was a lot easier, should I be thinking that was a good thing?
"One big factor was La Niña, a natural seesaw shift in climate that takes place across the tropical Pacific every three to seven years, where the climate is cooler and wetter over large regions of land in the tropics, encouraging plant growth in tropical forests."
Ok, so which is it, global warming, global climate change, or climate cycles? I'm so confused.
"However the bad news is that even with the decrease in emissions the overall concentration of CO2 rose from 385 ppm in 2008 to 387 ppm in 2009, as concentrations continue to rise even as emissions slip because even at the reduced pace, humans are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can scrub the gas."
Ok, so emissions are down but the level is up. Again, Im so confused.
Let me summarize again:
Emissions were reduced due to economic decline.
Atmospheric levels were reduced due to a climate cycle that increased absorption.
Atmospheric levels actually increased due to increased emissions.
So emissions went down and up, and levels went down and up. All in the same year.
Science. We could use some here.
All you need to complete the scenario is a field sales force and some OEM deals.
A spectacular opportunity, dommed to failure for all the same reasons as the others.
Nice trip down memory lane... I used DeskMate at home for a while, got into configuring DesqView for clients, and talked clients out of most of the rest.
I used DR-DOS for a long time to generate bootable floppies for stuff like patches and Norton Ghost, avoiding some of the unpleasentness of the various MSDOS problems. Ultimately, didn't DR-DOS go to Caldera? I have some of those disks still.
But Windows was pretty much unstoppable. My old buddies from then still lament that Apple never wrote Mac OS for Intel processors, but that would have gotten Apple into DLL and driver hell, trying to support even the worst drivers from the worst writers, and then getting tarnished with the reputation of unreliablility.
Still, Windows seems to have come out of that ok.
Did anyone else get a MACH board for Christmas, and drool over that awful mouse?
Anyone else ever play Balance Of Power? Damn, I miss that.
Back in '95, we were lamenting this problem of defending NetWare in the face of an overwhelming Windows assault. The consensus then was that when the suits read a back cover ad declaring this the 'year of Windows', and the t-shirts get free development tools and the promise of write-once-run-everywhere, even though running your server tools on the client was never a requirement, then NetWare was doomed. This actually started with NTAS and picked up unstoppable momentum with Windows Server 2000. Nevermind that Exchange took a little while longer to come of age, for many shops NetWare was what they clung to GroupWise for. Once GW was hammered, it was over. The interesting GW exploits didn't help.
ZenWorks was, back then and up to at least 2004, really clever and actually made Windows administration tolerable if not cool. Schools used that a lot for various clever reasons. But Even Microsoft saw that ADS administration needed to improve, and it pretty much did. Add in some licensing spiffs, a continuing campaign to destroy NetWare compatibility, and Novell ran out of time and market. Last I checked, they had solid revenue form licensing, but the end was in sight. SUSE is a whole other story. Novell should have acquired OpenOffice. SCO didn't help.
I'm not hopeful for Novell. This looks like the carving of the turkey. All this time, and they will die the death of a thousand divestments. Arghh...
I truly miss my NAMP server. But not enough to build it again.
I believe you. In 2006, I thought companies were looking for network admins and desktop wonks with a little HTML and Java experience just to score web developers for low-end admin pay. Nope, they were just jacking the requirements to get their H-1B approved. Nice. I almost took a job like that in level 3 support, but I confessed that my HTML would have to improve, and it might take me 60 days or so to get up to their advertised requirement.
The only good thing out of that was that the recruiter has called me back for other, equally unrealistic, positions. She appreciated my candor, and my willingness to further reinforce their inability to find qualified U.S. citizens. So I lost twice, but gracefully.
"...but for some reason not many American undergraduates chose to take this route."
I recall a little blurb in a technical publication, pointing out in 2006 that most PhDs in the U.S. were going to Chinese or other Asian graduates. And that most department chairs were Chinese. I've got to go back and find that article. At the time, no one claimed it was inaccurate.
"...would rather pursue jobs in consulting and banking than staying in engineering"
Hmm.. so engineering in the financial sector isn't called engineering? Actually, you may be on to something there...
"Who knows, maybe it will change some day when banking jobs start paying realistic salaries, i.e., a salary that is somewhat proportional to what you actually produce (which is close to zero in banking), and engineering becomes more attractive again."
Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. Next time you manage to buy your Starbucks latte with the plastic thingie in your wallet, remember that was not at all useful or worthy to you. If your complaint is the fees, charges, interest on your savings, or lack of easy credit so you can furnish your mansion and pay for it for the next 7 years, well, that's best reserved for the same sort of CEO that would bury their head in the sand for 20 years and then ask for a government bailout to save their industry from virtual collapse. Sadly, the technology workers pretty much get to do what they are told to. Same as McDonalds or Wal-Mart.
"If you are asking the foreign workers themselves, what you may not realize is that they are often threatened a lot about their visa status -- by HR or even their own management. In many of the big companies where I worked I found out that management/HR would threaten to fire foreign workers if they didn't work insane hours, or do exactly what they were told. Sure it's improper dismissal, but it's hard to argue from another continent. Or worse, their salary is often the lifeblood of their entire extended family. Even a short intermission in the money could lead to serious hardship. Their visa status is a very sore point because it is how they are able to be treated so badly by others."
Oh, this I know. Here, they often work 60-70 hour weeks. I would not be surprised, no I expect that either their agency or HR holds their visa as if it were their privates, and they know the threat to send them home at their own expense. And while the 60-70 hour week isn't exclusive to the visa workers, the regular full-timers often start looking for another opportunity and shift to something more sane. Many of the temporary workers here turn down full-time gigs because they get a slight pay cut in exchange for slightly better benefits and a 40% increase in work. Not worth it. But management does have a plan to pretty much force the temps into submission. And it may work.
And I know many of the current crop of visa workers do indeed support themr families at home. None have any family here.
I distinguished between Indian nationals and Asians as in Indian natoinals and non-Indian Asians.
You, on the other hand, are being obtuse.
I don't recall including Europeans on the list. We have some development going on in the UK, but nothing of note in Europe proper. The Indians I'm working with are not Europeans. Ask them.
Moron. Try reading my posts, at least.
I'm more interested in why U.S. citizens are consistently found unqualified. And why, in that scenario, we watch as citizens go jobless and even legal visa holders get those jobs.
Where I'm working, the workforce is changing from fairly well split between U.S. citizens and Indian nationals to a three way mix between citizens, Indians, and Asians. I'm not sure how that is happening. I also see various silos of technical work in many regions, on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. Every continent. Oh, with the notable exception of Europe, where it seems we do precious little development work. Hmm...
If I had to guess, I think current work allocations are favoring nations where the workers get little protection (Australia, for example has some interesting laws, while Chile doesn't) or the workers have already done the onshore shuffle and rotated back 'home'. Oh, and I dare not start asking about the visa status of some of these workers. It's a sensitive subject. Many will just get up and walk away.
It's frustrating to see what is clearly basic, everyday work going to visa holders when you know someone who is truly overqualified, but couldn't get past the first interview. As far as I can tell, pay is not the issue.
But I'm hypersensitive to this. I may be wrong about a lot if what I think, but I'm not yet convinced.
Well, let's not even worry about that...
We use notebooks and docks at work to facilitate business continuity; take your NB home each night. We have VPN access to the network, so if the building goes down (we had a power failure a month ago) you are either at home or at some other place, VPN'd in and getting some work done. Dragging them to meetings to show of your latest deck is also desirable. If you have a need for continuity, this might help a lot.
Before you think much about the cloud, get some legal advice on how you can use shared services and the legal implications of not actually having your data onsite. as an NGO, you may have data that doesn't actually belong to you, or other agencies that want a say in what your data security looks like.
And your web server is best off somewhere that can manage DDOS attacks, intrusion prevention and detection, resilient links, and backup/restore/recovery. Do you NEED to take on web services for a public site? Now if this is a service for your business needs, think over the data location needs again and all the access problems. You will be getting into the VPN/access/firewalling stuff also.
Otherwise, your best investment will be documentation. Document EVERYTHING! It sucks, and you won't like it until you need it. Then your boss will appreciate your thoroughness, and see a potential disaster as an example of the process working as intended. Bear in mind you will need to scratch out the time to document from the limited time you will have to do all that is needed. Good luck.
"Well, it doesn't matter what they intended, there isn't anything which says the tickets enable the purchaser to attend, in fact they almost all specifically say they enable the ticket bearer to attend."
Not true. The New England Patriots season tickets are a license to attend, and the named purchaser cannot resell them by contract, except through the Patriots' reselling partners. This is not always enforced, but if the Patriots see blocks of tickets online elsewhere, they have been known to warn the seller that these tickets will not be honored except for the original purchaser. I bet other NFL teams do this. And yes, the Patriots do this to manipulate the market and share in the reselling profits. If the ticket or th eevent don't specify otherwise, well, then it's the bearer. The distinction between buying a ticket to attend and buying a ticket to speculate I won't delve into.
"So the intent is obviously that the ticket grants entrance, and that right transfers with the ticket itself. Thus, they are intended to be bought, sold, and transferred. Otherwise the ticket would say "not transferable"."
Semantics, perhaps, but I wonder how many exhibitors intend for their tickets to be resold, especially for a profit. As a business process, they would probably prefer to be profiting from the reselling activity - and in the case of Ticketmaster, they DO, though they are actually a seller, not an exhibitor.
"In which case instead of selling them to anonymous people they should put the ticket in someone's real name... problem solved."
Reference my notes about the Patriots.
"So stop attending events where the promoter relies on a first-come-first-serve system. THAT is the root of the problem; the promoter is too lazy to use a lottery-to-purchase system."
There goes 99% of the market. Thanks for the helpful advice. Leave it to an AC to recommend taking an action that guarantees failure to solve the problem.
And are lotteries any 'fairer'? At least I am under no presumption that anything but chance gets me a ticket. No change there either. Lotteries, by the way, don't solve the reselling or box-stuffing problem. The bots will happily enter the lottery in overwhelming numbers and win a disproportionate share of tickets. I bet it's already happened.
Reserving some tickets for walk-up sales doesn't solve the problem either. try will-call or walk-up purchases for a popular Broadway show. There is a regular business in people buying day of show tickets for various outlets, like hotels and even American Express, to offer to their clients as a perk or convenience.
Reality is that for a finite resource, there is no entirely fair way to market the product. This is the market at work. I would like it to be not so obviously and patently UNfair, but this grates on my Conservative principles, so mostly I just want the rules to be known anbd observed. Bots should be against the rules. But I may be all wet on this.