Please post some real stories. This is just stupid.
Reminds of back in the 50s when they were talking about how we'd all be flying helicopters by the 70s and it's just a realistic to say we'll have flying cars in 10 years.
If you can't figure out the reasons for yourself, let me give you a few:
1> People are bad drivers as it is. Do you want them flying around? Forget homeland security. You'd have drunks flying cars all over the place. Pedestrians would be dying left and right from falling cars.
2> Simple economics: You think it's expensive to refuel your SUV? That's nothing compared to what it'll cost to fuel up your flying car. Flying uses a lot more energy than rolling. That energy has to be created from fuel. The more energy the fuel produces, the more expensive the fuel. Nobody but the rich would be able to afford to fly daily. Not much different than today.
3> The cost of flying vehicles will continue to be prohibitively expensive for several reasons. Not least of which is what it would cost to make it safe for your average redneck with an IQ of 45 to fly the thing.
Nice pipe dream, but can Slashdot get on to "stuff that matters?"
To me, Java as a language is an excellent language. I think where it fails isn't the language itself so much as the user interface libraries. Most of them looks terrible and the ones that look decent are slow. At least this has been my experience. I have yet to use a Java user interface that made me "comfortable" as a user.
From a programming point of view, it's an excellent language. It has great features for producing code quickly as well as many features to minimize buggy code. But these things are only technically good. They don't necessarily produce programs that users want to use. To me this is the biggest failing of Java.
But like I said, it's not so much a failing of Java, but the UI libraries available for it.
...the most dangerous part of a knife for use in close combat is not the blade, but the handle.
... Same thing with a maglite or any other object of similar hardlyness for that matter.
Sorry, but you're an idiot. First of all "hardlyness" isn't a word. Invest in a dictionary and thesaurus (or hey, use one of million online ones for free) Second, imagine how threatened passengers would feel if a terrorist were holding a maglite to a passenger's throat.
Still, it's deadly, I agree, but you kill one person with a mag lite, the rest of the passengers will rush you and you're done. If you have a knife of some kind, they're going to think twice. The fact is, a knife has more power to terrorize than a flashlight.
Okay, let me ask you this: If after Sept. 11th, the airlines weren't asking for peoples IDs, what do you think people would say? They'd be going nuts. They'd be up in arms about how dangerous the airlines are and how they're not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough.
Really, could someone think before posting these ridiculous stories?
You want a real issue? Let's talk about the FBI investigating college students planning to protest the GOP convention. I mean, that to me is a serious waste of taxpayer money and is a much more real "big brother" issue than this stupid airline stuff.
Where in the constitution or bill of rights does it say you have the right to travel anonymously. Get over it. We live in a different world now. You want to complain, go to complain to the terrorists. They're the reason we have to do all this stuff. Whether or not it's entirely effective, the fact is, if they weren't doing it, people would be complaining.
You don't want to show your ID? Fine. Get a job and buy a car. But stop complaining about your "right" to travel anonymously.
You can do what I do. Try to hack them back. I don't do this for worm type attacks, but a if there are real obvious manual attempts to hack my system, I try to hack the person back. Doesn't always work, but what's really funny is so many of these guys have accidentally installed exploitable stuff on their machines, like BO2K server and otherwise have unprotected systems. I'll usually try to get in and leave a real obvious note. Maybe a message box or replace their wallpaper with a note saying, "Do you really think you ought to be hacking other people's boxes when you can't protect your own?" Stuff like that.
I'm not sure how effective a deterrent it is, but it sure is fun and gives me loads of satisfaction. As for the legal aspects, I can't say, but I figure someone trying to hack my box is pretty much giving me the right to hack theirs back. Of course, that's probably akin to vigilante justice which isn't legal...
Precisely. I love Google because they have no bias. I just checked Google News and they have the following headline on one of their top Sci/Tech stories:
Microsoft Deploys Newsbot To Track Down Headlines The Google newsbot put a front page link up about Microsoft's new newsbot.
Google has no bias? Do you really believe that? And do you think as a publicly owned company they won't be biased in the future?
Look, every publicly owned company has an obligation, including Microsoft, and soon Google, to try to make money for their stockholders. It's the law that they have to try to make money for their stockholders. Any publicly owned company that fails to do that is criminally negligent.
Look, I know it's all the rage on Slashdot to bash MS. And I'm certainly no fan of a lot of what they do. But do you think Google isn't out there trying to make a buck and that they're not going to biased in doing it themselves? If you really think that, you're fooling yourself.
Corporations are about self-interest. That is their primary goal. And they tend to achieve that through whatever means seem most promising. It's not just their job to be biased towards their well-being, it's the law.
This would have made for a good type of survey BEFORE the RIAA sued Napster. At least where I'm concerned. I've purchased exactly 1 CD since the RIAA sued Napster and that was for a gift. I refuse to purchase CDs because of the stance they've taken. Which is too bad for them because I was buying a lot of CDs because of Napster that I otherwise wouldn't have bought.
Also, as others have pointed out, this won't prove anything to the RIAA, MPAA or anyone else. There is a great deal missing from the questionaire to build any sort of meaningful statistics.
That said, I have no doubt that file sharing has made the RIAA and MPAA a great deal of money they otherwise wouldn't have made. Any serious reduction in sales would be due to two things that are glaringly obvious to me:
1: Some people, like me, have boycotted since the Napster lawsuit. Probably not enough to make a huge impact, but there are some of us out there.
2: The music industry, in particular, over the past couple of years hasn't put out much worth purchasing. Where have all the good musicians gone?
Why not just jam the wifi frequencies. There are plenty of ways to do it.
You can set up radio transmitters to do it. Or hell, get a few dozen APs, don't connect them to anything but power, each set to a different channel, put on some good antennas and spread them around. That ought to cause enough confusion to keep anyone from doing anything wireless.
"All of MS's own software is written & tuned for the NT kernel, so switching to a different kernel would mean a rewrite of MS-SQL and so on."
Methinks you don't quite understand. This is a subsystem that runs under the Windows kernel, side-by-side with your windows apps. It's not a separate kernel. It's kind of a layer between the Posix API and the Windows kernel, so to speak. So you could, for example, get rid of IIS (if Windows will even let you remove it) and run Apache, for example. Or you could run both side by side (using different ports, of course).
So, you could have SQL Server running but also have Apache running. No rewriting of anything.
I actually had this software when it was written by the company MS bought, and used it under NT 4.0. It was lacking in a lot of areas at the time and it sounds like they've done a lot more with it. Still, I imagine it won't be quite as good as running the software under Linux, in terms of performance. Not to mention, one of the biggest advantages of running apps under Linux is for stability and security. Why would you want to run Linux apps on a less stable, less secure OS?
Everyone keeps talking about how you can't make your own CCD chip. I don't know that that's what the poster intends. There's a lot more to creating a web cam than simply the CCD chip. First of all, you can buy CCD chips from a number of sources. You'd then need the associated logic.
Actually, a number of Astronomy hobbiests are into doing just this sort of thing because astronomy quality cams are quite expensive. A number of people have used regular web cams for astronomical work, usually with long-exposure modifications to the cams, with a great deal of success.
A team of French hobbiests created this Genesis cam from scratch. It's very impressive and better quality than most of the hobbiest level cameras you can buy since it's based on a very high-resolution and very light-sensitive CCD chip.
But if you want to create just a basic web cam, there are much cheaper CCD chips. The datasheets will probably give you enough of an idea for how to get started with a project.
The parent poster is absolutely correct here. The most important point I think, is that with the money you save by going open source, you can use that money to do more and the overall benefit to society as a whole is greater. That, to a large degree, is the hope of Open Source. On the other hand, you can't really blame Gates for making his comments. His job is to make money for the stockholders of Microsoft.
Microsoft is in real trouble because investors expect a stock to grow, but MS has pretty much saturated the market. The fact is, they can't really manage to squeeze much more profitibility out of software. I mean, how can they? They have software for just about everything people want.
I think he's wasting his time trying to scrape together another couple percent of the market. What they need to do, to please their shareholders, is find completely new sources of revenue.
It's part of the hell of being a publicly traded company. Once you've got all the available market share, there's not much else you can squeeze out of that market. It seems to me that MS really needs to concentrate more on finding new markets. If they spend too much time trying to milk the current one, investors are going to lose interest.
Open Source doesn't suffer from this problem because to a large degree, it doesn't care about market share. Sure, a lot of people want to see it get a large market share, but the authors generally don't have a vested interest (i.e. financial gain) with market share.
That means that Open Source can be more focused on the idea of improving society as a whole by providing a free basis for software. I think because of this, Open Source will be around longer than MS.
I finally started reading Neuromancer recently, but I just can't seem to get it in gear. I'm trying to fit it in between Latin, Italian, wood working, working out, dating, and a full time job.
Really, given the choice between reading a novel or trying to conquer another language, at least right now, I'll take the language.
You're probably in the minority if you don't have a semi-parabolic pan or pot lid lying around your kitchen (though, this is Slashdot, maybe you're not in the minority here). That's what I used for to focus the signal at my last place. Just used a pack of CDs to prop it up behind the antenna. It was a fairly signficant boost. I was impressed. And it didn't cost me anything I hadn't already paid.
"Parents can be much better parents than any government,"
But when the government locks away the parents for the crimes of their children, then what happens? I didn't say don't punish the children for their crimes. I just said the parents should be punished for the crimes of their kids.
I agree it will be an additional burden on the state and the kids may end up in foster homes. But, that said, I think the juvenile crime in this country would drop significantly overnight if you started holding the parents responsible for the actions of their children.
Why does he waste his time doing this? Especially with movies that weren't particularly good the first time around anyway.
Lucas movies don't suffer from lack of visual appeal. They suffer from poor direction (with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions, American Graffiti is the only one that comes to mind). The best Lucas films are the ones where he doesn't direct. He should really stay out of the director's chair and stick with writing and maybe producing.
Our problem in the States these days is that parents want the government to be responsible for their kids. When their kids get in trouble for shoplifting or shooting another kid over a pair of shoes, they want to point to violence on TV or the music they listen to as the problem. Unfortunately, the real problem, as most intelligent people know, is the parents themselves. They don't want to take the time to raise their kids. They want the onus of responsibility to be with the government, hence these absurd laws.
The Republicans are always going on about family values, and while I'm a liberal myself, I have to agree with that one issue. Family values in this country have, for the most part, gone to shit. I was raised by a single mother who worked full time. She still managed to raise me to know the difference between right and wrong. Even after a long, hard day's work, she managed to come home and spend time with me and talk to me about my day.
The fact is, getting the government to charge out after indecency on TV is a complete and utter waste of time. As if kids can't find stuff 100 times more indecent and profane in the SPAM in their inboxes anyway.
What we need is to start prosecuting parents for the crimes of their children so that parents will start taking responsibility for their kids again. At least that's my opinion. Parents can be much better parents than any government, if they have the incentive.
jammed a DIMM in backwards... vacuumed the dust out of the inside of the case while the machine was running... so removed the [heat] sink and turned the machine on...
Hi, this is MIT calling. Uh, we've decided to reconsider your eligibility for our Ph.D. program.
First of all, as others have said, if your company needs to make these kind of cutbacks to survive, then your company is in bigger trouble than you apparently think.
You have effectively received a pay cut. Do you want to work for a company that has cut your pay? If so, suck it up and keep working for them.
I will pass on a very painfully learned lesson regarding loyalty to your employer. Unless it's a real small operation (and I mean, a partnership or sole proprietorship), have none. With a CIO, this is clearly a corporation. I've worked for a lot of them and I've made the mistake of being loyal to a few that I thought were "good." In every case, that loyalty got me nothing substantial (a "thanks" was about the most) and often only the expectation of further loyalty.
The worst was working for someone who I've known for 25 years. In the end, things got so bad, he (via the company), effectively stole money out of my 401K (though I've since had the money returned). The point is: Don't expect your loyalty to get you anything. If things look bad, they're probably worse than you think and you should at the very least, start looking for a new job.
There's no way this will happen. They'd essentially have to make the internet illegal since every application written for the internet is about transferring data in one form or another. This is just stupid. Even if congress passes a law, I have no doubt the Supreme Court would strike it down, even THIS Supreme Court. I doubt Scalia or Thomas would help, but most of the rest have some basic sense of law and the bill of rights.
And as we saw in the Slashdot post yesterday, file sharing is clearly destroying the movie industry. Not! The only thing hurting the music industry is the music industry. They're putting out crap music and they're suing their customers. If they changed these two things, they'd probably be back to record (pun not intended) profits.
Not only am I not buying today's music, I'm not downloading today's music. Because it sucks. Britney, please don't do it again! Quit. Go home. Please!
I think its worth picking up a cheap network router or wireless router so you can have NAT firewall
Which unfortunately does you little good with our wonderful wireless routers having backdoors in them. I don't use Linux regularly, but where I do use it, is as my firewall. I've never trusted a Windows box to be on the net and these days, I don't trust the wireless routers. I'm sticking with my old Linux box. It's just an old cheap PII, and the power consumption is probably a bit high for a router, but it works and I trust it. And it's certainly fast enough to handle the routing demands of my home.
Slashdot Mirror
Please post some real stories. This is just stupid.
Reminds of back in the 50s when they were talking about how we'd all be flying helicopters by the 70s and it's just a realistic to say we'll have flying cars in 10 years.
If you can't figure out the reasons for yourself, let me give you a few:
1> People are bad drivers as it is. Do you want them flying around? Forget homeland security. You'd have drunks flying cars all over the place. Pedestrians would be dying left and right from falling cars.
2> Simple economics: You think it's expensive to refuel your SUV? That's nothing compared to what it'll cost to fuel up your flying car. Flying uses a lot more energy than rolling. That energy has to be created from fuel. The more energy the fuel produces, the more expensive the fuel. Nobody but the rich would be able to afford to fly daily. Not much different than today.
3> The cost of flying vehicles will continue to be prohibitively expensive for several reasons. Not least of which is what it would cost to make it safe for your average redneck with an IQ of 45 to fly the thing.
Nice pipe dream, but can Slashdot get on to "stuff that matters?"
To me, Java as a language is an excellent language. I think where it fails isn't the language itself so much as the user interface libraries. Most of them looks terrible and the ones that look decent are slow. At least this has been my experience. I have yet to use a Java user interface that made me "comfortable" as a user.
From a programming point of view, it's an excellent language. It has great features for producing code quickly as well as many features to minimize buggy code. But these things are only technically good. They don't necessarily produce programs that users want to use. To me this is the biggest failing of Java.
But like I said, it's not so much a failing of Java, but the UI libraries available for it.
...the most dangerous part of a knife for use in close combat is not the blade, but the handle.
... Same thing with a maglite or any other object of similar hardlyness for that matter.
Sorry, but you're an idiot. First of all "hardlyness" isn't a word. Invest in a dictionary and thesaurus (or hey, use one of million online ones for free) Second, imagine how threatened passengers would feel if a terrorist were holding a maglite to a passenger's throat.
Still, it's deadly, I agree, but you kill one person with a mag lite, the rest of the passengers will rush you and you're done. If you have a knife of some kind, they're going to think twice. The fact is, a knife has more power to terrorize than a flashlight.
Okay, let me ask you this: If after Sept. 11th, the airlines weren't asking for peoples IDs, what do you think people would say? They'd be going nuts. They'd be up in arms about how dangerous the airlines are and how they're not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough.
Really, could someone think before posting these ridiculous stories?
You want a real issue? Let's talk about the FBI investigating college students planning to protest the GOP convention. I mean, that to me is a serious waste of taxpayer money and is a much more real "big brother" issue than this stupid airline stuff.
Where in the constitution or bill of rights does it say you have the right to travel anonymously. Get over it. We live in a different world now. You want to complain, go to complain to the terrorists. They're the reason we have to do all this stuff. Whether or not it's entirely effective, the fact is, if they weren't doing it, people would be complaining.
You don't want to show your ID? Fine. Get a job and buy a car. But stop complaining about your "right" to travel anonymously.
Yeah, the original poster really needs to read the book "Eats, shoots & leaves" to improve that punctuation.
You can do what I do. Try to hack them back. I don't do this for worm type attacks, but a if there are real obvious manual attempts to hack my system, I try to hack the person back. Doesn't always work, but what's really funny is so many of these guys have accidentally installed exploitable stuff on their machines, like BO2K server and otherwise have unprotected systems. I'll usually try to get in and leave a real obvious note. Maybe a message box or replace their wallpaper with a note saying, "Do you really think you ought to be hacking other people's boxes when you can't protect your own?" Stuff like that.
I'm not sure how effective a deterrent it is, but it sure is fun and gives me loads of satisfaction. As for the legal aspects, I can't say, but I figure someone trying to hack my box is pretty much giving me the right to hack theirs back. Of course, that's probably akin to vigilante justice which isn't legal...
Precisely. I love Google because they have no bias. I just checked Google News and they have the following headline on one of their top Sci/Tech stories:
Microsoft Deploys Newsbot To Track Down Headlines The Google newsbot put a front page link up about Microsoft's new newsbot.
Google has no bias? Do you really believe that? And do you think as a publicly owned company they won't be biased in the future?
Look, every publicly owned company has an obligation, including Microsoft, and soon Google, to try to make money for their stockholders. It's the law that they have to try to make money for their stockholders. Any publicly owned company that fails to do that is criminally negligent.
Look, I know it's all the rage on Slashdot to bash MS. And I'm certainly no fan of a lot of what they do. But do you think Google isn't out there trying to make a buck and that they're not going to biased in doing it themselves? If you really think that, you're fooling yourself.
Corporations are about self-interest. That is their primary goal. And they tend to achieve that through whatever means seem most promising. It's not just their job to be biased towards their well-being, it's the law.
This would have made for a good type of survey BEFORE the RIAA sued Napster. At least where I'm concerned. I've purchased exactly 1 CD since the RIAA sued Napster and that was for a gift. I refuse to purchase CDs because of the stance they've taken. Which is too bad for them because I was buying a lot of CDs because of Napster that I otherwise wouldn't have bought.
Also, as others have pointed out, this won't prove anything to the RIAA, MPAA or anyone else. There is a great deal missing from the questionaire to build any sort of meaningful statistics.
That said, I have no doubt that file sharing has made the RIAA and MPAA a great deal of money they otherwise wouldn't have made. Any serious reduction in sales would be due to two things that are glaringly obvious to me:
1: Some people, like me, have boycotted since the Napster lawsuit. Probably not enough to make a huge impact, but there are some of us out there.
2: The music industry, in particular, over the past couple of years hasn't put out much worth purchasing. Where have all the good musicians gone?
Why not just jam the wifi frequencies. There are plenty of ways to do it.
You can set up radio transmitters to do it. Or hell, get a few dozen APs, don't connect them to anything but power, each set to a different channel, put on some good antennas and spread them around. That ought to cause enough confusion to keep anyone from doing anything wireless.
"This web page has a list of 120 years of electronic music from 1870 to 1990."
So has Slashdot come to the point where a link in a one sentence description constitutes a submission?
I see the future submissions:
This web page has news.
This web page has links to news
This web page has pr0n.
"All of MS's own software is written & tuned for the NT kernel, so switching to a different kernel would mean a rewrite of MS-SQL and so on."
Methinks you don't quite understand. This is a subsystem that runs under the Windows kernel, side-by-side with your windows apps. It's not a separate kernel. It's kind of a layer between the Posix API and the Windows kernel, so to speak. So you could, for example, get rid of IIS (if Windows will even let you remove it) and run Apache, for example. Or you could run both side by side (using different ports, of course).
So, you could have SQL Server running but also have Apache running. No rewriting of anything.
I actually had this software when it was written by the company MS bought, and used it under NT 4.0. It was lacking in a lot of areas at the time and it sounds like they've done a lot more with it. Still, I imagine it won't be quite as good as running the software under Linux, in terms of performance. Not to mention, one of the biggest advantages of running apps under Linux is for stability and security. Why would you want to run Linux apps on a less stable, less secure OS?
Everyone keeps talking about how you can't make your own CCD chip. I don't know that that's what the poster intends. There's a lot more to creating a web cam than simply the CCD chip. First of all, you can buy CCD chips from a number of sources. You'd then need the associated logic.
Actually, a number of Astronomy hobbiests are into doing just this sort of thing because astronomy quality cams are quite expensive. A number of people have used regular web cams for astronomical work, usually with long-exposure modifications to the cams, with a great deal of success.
A team of French hobbiests created this Genesis cam from scratch. It's very impressive and better quality than most of the hobbiest level cameras you can buy since it's based on a very high-resolution and very light-sensitive CCD chip.
But if you want to create just a basic web cam, there are much cheaper CCD chips. The datasheets will probably give you enough of an idea for how to get started with a project.
The parent poster is absolutely correct here. The most important point I think, is that with the money you save by going open source, you can use that money to do more and the overall benefit to society as a whole is greater. That, to a large degree, is the hope of Open Source. On the other hand, you can't really blame Gates for making his comments. His job is to make money for the stockholders of Microsoft.
Microsoft is in real trouble because investors expect a stock to grow, but MS has pretty much saturated the market. The fact is, they can't really manage to squeeze much more profitibility out of software. I mean, how can they? They have software for just about everything people want.
I think he's wasting his time trying to scrape together another couple percent of the market. What they need to do, to please their shareholders, is find completely new sources of revenue.
It's part of the hell of being a publicly traded company. Once you've got all the available market share, there's not much else you can squeeze out of that market. It seems to me that MS really needs to concentrate more on finding new markets. If they spend too much time trying to milk the current one, investors are going to lose interest.
Open Source doesn't suffer from this problem because to a large degree, it doesn't care about market share. Sure, a lot of people want to see it get a large market share, but the authors generally don't have a vested interest (i.e. financial gain) with market share.
That means that Open Source can be more focused on the idea of improving society as a whole by providing a free basis for software. I think because of this, Open Source will be around longer than MS.
My parent post was moderated offtopic? Must have been by the humor impaired. Granted, not that funny, but offtopic?
I finally started reading Neuromancer recently, but I just can't seem to get it in gear. I'm trying to fit it in between Latin, Italian, wood working, working out, dating, and a full time job.
Really, given the choice between reading a novel or trying to conquer another language, at least right now, I'll take the language.
Go read up on Sysco if you want one (they control basically all grain silos in the US).
It's Cisco, and they make routers, not grain silos. The grain silos guys, geez, what's their name. It starts with an 'S'.
You're probably in the minority if you don't have a semi-parabolic pan or pot lid lying around your kitchen (though, this is Slashdot, maybe you're not in the minority here). That's what I used for to focus the signal at my last place. Just used a pack of CDs to prop it up behind the antenna. It was a fairly signficant boost. I was impressed. And it didn't cost me anything I hadn't already paid.
"Parents can be much better parents than any government,"
But when the government locks away the parents for the crimes of their children, then what happens?
I didn't say don't punish the children for their crimes. I just said the parents should be punished for the crimes of their kids.
I agree it will be an additional burden on the state and the kids may end up in foster homes. But, that said, I think the juvenile crime in this country would drop significantly overnight if you started holding the parents responsible for the actions of their children.
Why does he waste his time doing this? Especially with movies that weren't particularly good the first time around anyway.
Lucas movies don't suffer from lack of visual appeal. They suffer from poor direction (with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions, American Graffiti is the only one that comes to mind). The best Lucas films are the ones where he doesn't direct. He should really stay out of the director's chair and stick with writing and maybe producing.
Our problem in the States these days is that parents want the government to be responsible for their kids. When their kids get in trouble for shoplifting or shooting another kid over a pair of shoes, they want to point to violence on TV or the music they listen to as the problem. Unfortunately, the real problem, as most intelligent people know, is the parents themselves. They don't want to take the time to raise their kids. They want the onus of responsibility to be with the government, hence these absurd laws.
The Republicans are always going on about family values, and while I'm a liberal myself, I have to agree with that one issue. Family values in this country have, for the most part, gone to shit. I was raised by a single mother who worked full time. She still managed to raise me to know the difference between right and wrong. Even after a long, hard day's work, she managed to come home and spend time with me and talk to me about my day.
The fact is, getting the government to charge out after indecency on TV is a complete and utter waste of time. As if kids can't find stuff 100 times more indecent and profane in the SPAM in their inboxes anyway.
What we need is to start prosecuting parents for the crimes of their children so that parents will start taking responsibility for their kids again. At least that's my opinion. Parents can be much better parents than any government, if they have the incentive.
jammed a DIMM in backwards ... vacuumed the dust out of the inside of the case while the machine was running... so removed the [heat] sink and turned the machine on...
Hi, this is MIT calling. Uh, we've decided to reconsider your eligibility for our Ph.D. program.
First of all, as others have said, if your company needs to make these kind of cutbacks to survive, then your company is in bigger trouble than you apparently think.
You have effectively received a pay cut. Do you want to work for a company that has cut your pay? If so, suck it up and keep working for them.
I will pass on a very painfully learned lesson regarding loyalty to your employer. Unless it's a real small operation (and I mean, a partnership or sole proprietorship), have none. With a CIO, this is clearly a corporation. I've worked for a lot of them and I've made the mistake of being loyal to a few that I thought were "good." In every case, that loyalty got me nothing substantial (a "thanks" was about the most) and often only the expectation of further loyalty.
The worst was working for someone who I've known for 25 years. In the end, things got so bad, he (via the company), effectively stole money out of my 401K (though I've since had the money returned). The point is: Don't expect your loyalty to get you anything. If things look bad, they're probably worse than you think and you should at the very least, start looking for a new job.
There's no way this will happen. They'd essentially have to make the internet illegal since every application written for the internet is about transferring data in one form or another. This is just stupid. Even if congress passes a law, I have no doubt the Supreme Court would strike it down, even THIS Supreme Court. I doubt Scalia or Thomas would help, but most of the rest have some basic sense of law and the bill of rights.
And as we saw in the Slashdot post yesterday, file sharing is clearly destroying the movie industry. Not! The only thing hurting the music industry is the music industry. They're putting out crap music and they're suing their customers. If they changed these two things, they'd probably be back to record (pun not intended) profits.
Not only am I not buying today's music, I'm not downloading today's music. Because it sucks. Britney, please don't do it again! Quit. Go home. Please!
I think its worth picking up a cheap network router or wireless router so you can have NAT firewall
Which unfortunately does you little good with our wonderful wireless routers having backdoors in them. I don't use Linux regularly, but where I do use it, is as my firewall. I've never trusted a Windows box to be on the net and these days, I don't trust the wireless routers. I'm sticking with my old Linux box. It's just an old cheap PII, and the power consumption is probably a bit high for a router, but it works and I trust it. And it's certainly fast enough to handle the routing demands of my home.
I use bioneural gel packs at a cost of $0.04 per teraquad. What is this hard drive of which you speak?