I've lived on the East Coast of the U.S. for almost my entire life. Here's what I've experienced and learned over the years on the "why you don't leave the house without heat in the winter."
Depending on the age of the house, i.e., most older houses have less insulation, it's a bad idea to let the internal temperature of the house drop below 58F if/when the outside temperature drops below 20F for a number of consecutive days(which often happens in New England). The reason is that the air temperature in the house may be above freezing, but the air inside the walls may not be. Pipes will freeze inside the wall, burst and make a big fat mess. Most pipes that burst are on outside walls of a home; like the one that ran through the garage to the kitchen of the house in Poughkeepsie, NY that burst when I was five. That's the main reason for keeping the place warm.
Beyond the pipe freezing thing you also have to worry about other things like electronics, magnetic media, batteries, medicines, and other temperature sensitive things you may not be aware of. Lots of things we have around the house don't like temperatures below 40F and will either degrade or fail when exposed to lower (or higher, above 100F) than prescribed temperatures for storage and operation. I can't tell you how many rechargeable batteries and magneto-optical media I lost to cold before I figured out what was going on.
I can't believe the OP is looking for a technology solution for this. Dude! Don't you have any friends?!?!
BTW, 40F is no where near enough "buffer room" if you live in a structure older than 25 years. Any pipes on an outside wall will freeze if the internal temperature is that low and it's below freezing (32F) outside for a number of days. Plus, find me a thermostat that goes that low for a furnace?!?! Duh.
I'm not saying that what the TSA is doing to this guy (or any of us) is right. I think it's blatant sour grapes! But, I don't condone Chris Soghoian's actions either. He should have "done the right thing" and approached the TSA *BEFORE* he made his findings public, and he certainly *NEVER* should have made his web app public. What he did was dumb and irresponsible, period. Was it illegal, ummm, that's up to the courts to decide.
This is hypothetical and would require an OS level DRM scheme to be plausible, but an OS level DRM scheme could detect an "attempt" to copy a protected piece of content whether successful or not and report said attempt to the copyright holder or authorities. You could see prosecution occur at that point, but that would challenge the "innocent until proven guilty" aspect of the U.S. legal system (everywhere but New Orleans that is). How do they know it wasn't a kid (under 12) or just a mistake that caused the alert to be sent? This DRM scheme doesn't exist today, but I'm sure it's something the RIAA and MPAA would LOVE to see.
Ooo...you're on shakey ground with that ascertion. There is certainly intent assumed when you willfully download and install a file sharing tool. Ignorance of its capabilities is *NOT* a defense when you willfully sought out, downloaded, installed, clicked past the EULA and ran a file sharing app on your computer. That's completely different from a piece of spyware being added to your machine without your knowledge due to a vulnerability or a piece of code that was toughted to be for another purpose that installed a bot client on your machine.
Yeah, this is offtopic with the whole murder angle (I hate people that use other crimes as examples when they're not lawyers), but in most states just saying you're going to kill someone (even as a threat) is *NOT* prosecutable unless the threatened person dies of un-natural causes. In some states this has been changed so that a threat of murder is considered to be a crime (I believe it counts as a misdemeanor assault charge or the like), but in most states in the U.S. it is not a crime to say you're going to kill someone. Unless an act of murder is committed it's just words. Albeit, words that could be used against you in a trial.
Well, I helped design and build what was the third fastest (public) computer in the world three years ago, System X. That was pretty cool. I'm still not done with doing stuff like that yet.;-)
... now design me a desk to hold my shit at that complimentary angle WHILE AND AT THE SAME TIME not defying gravity!
All funny business aside. Unless you get some sort of mechanical pod to work in (I'll pass on that by the way), sitting at that angle and *trying* to work with objects out of orientation is going to have an adverse effect on the body too. Some fo the funny posts above make some sense as you would need a massive KVM and a trackball to keep from hurting yuorself trying to work without a rotating cage around you!
Here, here! I agree. The original poster didn't ask for unethical responses to questions of morality (which many respondents offered up [rolls eyes]). He asked for professional responses to personal concerns of morality related to projects in the workplace. Frankly, the answer *is* quite simple. If the place you are working for accepts projects that *you* feel are morally questionable you have three options:
1. Do the work, but do not have your name associated with it publicly in any form. (I've done this)
2. Ask to be put on another project while you look for employment elsewhere. (I've done this)
3. Resign and find work elsewhere. (I've done this, too)
Flash work is not hard to come by, especially if you live in a major metro area (or have contacts). There is plenty of ethical and morally grounded work out there for talented Flash developers. There is no reason why anyone should have to work for an organization that doesn't share similar ethics or morals (they aren't the same by the way).
I'm a web dev whore. I admit it, but there are some personal moral boundaries that I won't cross. One of them was passing on a big contract for Phillip Morris. Said no. No hesitation, no further discussion. But, I've also done work for companies that I thought were unethical, but not immoral. Those are usually the ones I refuse to put my name on. I'll do the work, and take their dirty money, but I'm not telling a soul I did the work for them. I've also just flat out been handed a project by an employer and asked not to be involved, and if that's the type of situation you're in, it's up to you to suck it up and take responsibility for your actions. If that means you quit and eat Ramen noodles for six weeks while you find another gig, then that's what you have to do to sleep at night. It's your call.
1. The MPAA can blow me!
2. If my elected officials want to get re-elected they better take a similar stance to the MPAA/RIAA and any other organization that wants to sanction personal freedom for $$$.
I never claimed to be stating fact about who sacked Bibliotheca Alexandrina or when, I was actually trying to be humorous (to a degree) with my first post. I was more commenting on the destructive nature of man and its historical influence on human development. I was not stating any other "fact" than that. BTW, you realize you contradicted yourself with the the first and third lines of your post proving that there are no "facts" to support your or my "claim" of who sacked the BA. I may have been spouting common knowledge (which is not fact before you try to jump on that) with regard to the Romans, but I didn't stick my foot in my mouth doing it.
Having worked my way up through the ranks to management and seen both non-technical and technical managers, I'd have to say that managers with a technical background and are keeping their skills or knowledge (at least) current are better than many of non-technical managers. As was stated in a previous post above it all depends on whether the technical manager has a head for the business side of things, and vice-versa. If the non-technical manager is at least reading journals, studying trends in the market, and listening to input from multiple sources on and off their own technical team they can be very effective managers. The exact opposite of that is a technical manager that may not have a strong business head, but is at least doing his/her homework and working with other management colleagues to develop their business understanding.
I will say that this is a pretty silly argument, and that the ability to work with people of multiple personalities, common sense and a good work ethic makes a good manager regardless of their technical expertise. The role of a manager is to provide strategic direction based on needs, mentoring of employees, conflict resolution, and an avenue for the employees that work for said manager to relay concerns to upper management. Yes, it's nice if they can pitch in and help get the technical work done, but I don't believe that it is imperative that they have the same or similar skills to those they are managing. Dilbert provides an example of the stereotypical worst case scenario and is meant to be humorous, but it's not representative to the whole of IT.
Yes, I read the article and the Wikipedia article on the device, as well as a few others when the research began a while ago to decipher the thing. You missed the point, and the irony. If the Romans had not sacked the Library of Alexandria, the knowledge of this device may not have been lost for 2000+ years and science may have been far more advanced today and we wouldn't have to be using multimillion/billion dollar technologies to figure the thing out.
There are very few instances where individuals under the age of 18 in *ANY* country are brought to trial as adults, therefore, settling out of court is an acceptable option. This certainly isn't a "we probably can't pin this on you" thing, it's a we can bring your parents up on these charges (because they *ARE* responsible for their children's actions until they reach adulthood) or we can settle this and save you and your family a lot of grief.
I'll take it one further. The Target website is database driven, meaning all the content is in or referenced in a database and then displayed using HTML/CSS. Talk about EASY to make accessible! OMG! So you add some fields to the DB for the ALT tags and do a different CSS that's accessible. We might be talking about 2,000 person hours to do all this including populating the ALT tag fields, if that. That's one person's salary for a year, or five people for ten weeks. Target, STFU and fix your damned website! I could see people whining if the content was all on static pages, but IT'S NOT! We're not talking about a lot of work to fix this problem. I looked at the site. There's maybe a dozen different page styles and maybe 100 to 150 different page elements defined, not all of which would need to be changed. I hear a lot of crying over not that much work.
1. No one for *any* personal reason or belief has a right to tell *anyone* how they can live their life, or what they can do with their body.
2. If a fetus is a real person, PROVE IT! Don't say it like it's the truth when there is *absolutely* no proof to either side of the is-the-fetus-a-complete-person argument
3. You do *NOT* have the "right" to practice your religion in public in the United States. In fact, there are "soapbox" laws against it in many states. What you have is the right to the freedom of religion like any other individual in the United States whether a citizen or not. No one has the "right" to force their opinion on anyone else whether in public or private. You have the right to voice your opinion publicly under the First Amendment of the Constitution, but you do not have the right to torment others with your beliefs. If the law of the land allows abortions, you are allowed to voice your opposition of the law, but not to harass citizens who are doing *nothing* wrong under the laws of man. Until we die, and if there is a God, we are judged by the laws of man. Until we *all* understand this we are nothing but barbarians!
1. Belize, New Zealand, Australia, Costa Rica
2. I haven't left because I have credit card debt to pay off. Once that's gone... I'm most likely gone. Unless the startup I'm involved in kicks off, then six more years and then cash out and gone.
Here's a good question: What's the point? With as many free websites (GooTube, MySpace, etc.) that allow you to post video, albeit to a non-specific recipient, what use does this service have? Also, there are synchronous methods for video (iChat AV, Yahoo Voice and Video, etc.) does this really have a market? I'd say this is too little too late. It doesn't supplant any existing technologies or methods, and certainly doesn't introduce anything innovative or even new. Hell, I can send up to a 10 MB video clip via a free, public email account to a specific recipient if I want. So what's the deal here?
That's it? That's all he'll save is $2.00 a month? That's news? WTF!?!? He could cut out his $10/day Starbucks habit and save more energy *AND* money...not to mention my patience.
Slashdot Mirror
VersionTracker.com also has it for download on their mirrors.
Yeah, we might have to wait for the double-sided version first, then all bets are off and I'm climbing the Empire State Building!
I've lived on the East Coast of the U.S. for almost my entire life. Here's what I've experienced and learned over the years on the "why you don't leave the house without heat in the winter."
Depending on the age of the house, i.e., most older houses have less insulation, it's a bad idea to let the internal temperature of the house drop below 58F if/when the outside temperature drops below 20F for a number of consecutive days(which often happens in New England). The reason is that the air temperature in the house may be above freezing, but the air inside the walls may not be. Pipes will freeze inside the wall, burst and make a big fat mess. Most pipes that burst are on outside walls of a home; like the one that ran through the garage to the kitchen of the house in Poughkeepsie, NY that burst when I was five. That's the main reason for keeping the place warm.
Beyond the pipe freezing thing you also have to worry about other things like electronics, magnetic media, batteries, medicines, and other temperature sensitive things you may not be aware of. Lots of things we have around the house don't like temperatures below 40F and will either degrade or fail when exposed to lower (or higher, above 100F) than prescribed temperatures for storage and operation. I can't tell you how many rechargeable batteries and magneto-optical media I lost to cold before I figured out what was going on.
I can't believe the OP is looking for a technology solution for this. Dude! Don't you have any friends?!?!
BTW, 40F is no where near enough "buffer room" if you live in a structure older than 25 years. Any pipes on an outside wall will freeze if the internal temperature is that low and it's below freezing (32F) outside for a number of days. Plus, find me a thermostat that goes that low for a furnace?!?! Duh.I wish your post could get moved, not modded, up to the top of the comments list. This little tidbit would save a lot of ignorant comments.
I'm not saying that what the TSA is doing to this guy (or any of us) is right. I think it's blatant sour grapes! But, I don't condone Chris Soghoian's actions either. He should have "done the right thing" and approached the TSA *BEFORE* he made his findings public, and he certainly *NEVER* should have made his web app public. What he did was dumb and irresponsible, period. Was it illegal, ummm, that's up to the courts to decide.
FTFA:
Many security experts said they believe corporate espionage is the main motive behind the attacks.Wow! If that doesn't make Corporate America take another look at an MS alternative office suite I don't know what should!?!?!?
This is hypothetical and would require an OS level DRM scheme to be plausible, but an OS level DRM scheme could detect an "attempt" to copy a protected piece of content whether successful or not and report said attempt to the copyright holder or authorities. You could see prosecution occur at that point, but that would challenge the "innocent until proven guilty" aspect of the U.S. legal system (everywhere but New Orleans that is). How do they know it wasn't a kid (under 12) or just a mistake that caused the alert to be sent? This DRM scheme doesn't exist today, but I'm sure it's something the RIAA and MPAA would LOVE to see.
Ooo...you're on shakey ground with that ascertion. There is certainly intent assumed when you willfully download and install a file sharing tool. Ignorance of its capabilities is *NOT* a defense when you willfully sought out, downloaded, installed, clicked past the EULA and ran a file sharing app on your computer. That's completely different from a piece of spyware being added to your machine without your knowledge due to a vulnerability or a piece of code that was toughted to be for another purpose that installed a bot client on your machine.
Yeah, this is offtopic with the whole murder angle (I hate people that use other crimes as examples when they're not lawyers), but in most states just saying you're going to kill someone (even as a threat) is *NOT* prosecutable unless the threatened person dies of un-natural causes. In some states this has been changed so that a threat of murder is considered to be a crime (I believe it counts as a misdemeanor assault charge or the like), but in most states in the U.S. it is not a crime to say you're going to kill someone. Unless an act of murder is committed it's just words. Albeit, words that could be used against you in a trial.
Well, I helped design and build what was the third fastest (public) computer in the world three years ago, System X. That was pretty cool. I'm still not done with doing stuff like that yet. ;-)
... now design me a desk to hold my shit at that complimentary angle WHILE AND AT THE SAME TIME not defying gravity!
All funny business aside. Unless you get some sort of mechanical pod to work in (I'll pass on that by the way), sitting at that angle and *trying* to work with objects out of orientation is going to have an adverse effect on the body too. Some fo the funny posts above make some sense as you would need a massive KVM and a trackball to keep from hurting yuorself trying to work without a rotating cage around you!
Here, here! I agree. The original poster didn't ask for unethical responses to questions of morality (which many respondents offered up [rolls eyes]). He asked for professional responses to personal concerns of morality related to projects in the workplace. Frankly, the answer *is* quite simple. If the place you are working for accepts projects that *you* feel are morally questionable you have three options:
1. Do the work, but do not have your name associated with it publicly in any form. (I've done this)
2. Ask to be put on another project while you look for employment elsewhere. (I've done this)
3. Resign and find work elsewhere. (I've done this, too)
Flash work is not hard to come by, especially if you live in a major metro area (or have contacts). There is plenty of ethical and morally grounded work out there for talented Flash developers. There is no reason why anyone should have to work for an organization that doesn't share similar ethics or morals (they aren't the same by the way).
I'm a web dev whore. I admit it, but there are some personal moral boundaries that I won't cross. One of them was passing on a big contract for Phillip Morris. Said no. No hesitation, no further discussion. But, I've also done work for companies that I thought were unethical, but not immoral. Those are usually the ones I refuse to put my name on. I'll do the work, and take their dirty money, but I'm not telling a soul I did the work for them. I've also just flat out been handed a project by an employer and asked not to be involved, and if that's the type of situation you're in, it's up to you to suck it up and take responsibility for your actions. If that means you quit and eat Ramen noodles for six weeks while you find another gig, then that's what you have to do to sleep at night. It's your call.
1. The MPAA can blow me!
2. If my elected officials want to get re-elected they better take a similar stance to the MPAA/RIAA and any other organization that wants to sanction personal freedom for $$$.
I never claimed to be stating fact about who sacked Bibliotheca Alexandrina or when, I was actually trying to be humorous (to a degree) with my first post. I was more commenting on the destructive nature of man and its historical influence on human development. I was not stating any other "fact" than that. BTW, you realize you contradicted yourself with the the first and third lines of your post proving that there are no "facts" to support your or my "claim" of who sacked the BA. I may have been spouting common knowledge (which is not fact before you try to jump on that) with regard to the Romans, but I didn't stick my foot in my mouth doing it.
Having worked my way up through the ranks to management and seen both non-technical and technical managers, I'd have to say that managers with a technical background and are keeping their skills or knowledge (at least) current are better than many of non-technical managers. As was stated in a previous post above it all depends on whether the technical manager has a head for the business side of things, and vice-versa. If the non-technical manager is at least reading journals, studying trends in the market, and listening to input from multiple sources on and off their own technical team they can be very effective managers. The exact opposite of that is a technical manager that may not have a strong business head, but is at least doing his/her homework and working with other management colleagues to develop their business understanding.
I will say that this is a pretty silly argument, and that the ability to work with people of multiple personalities, common sense and a good work ethic makes a good manager regardless of their technical expertise. The role of a manager is to provide strategic direction based on needs, mentoring of employees, conflict resolution, and an avenue for the employees that work for said manager to relay concerns to upper management. Yes, it's nice if they can pitch in and help get the technical work done, but I don't believe that it is imperative that they have the same or similar skills to those they are managing. Dilbert provides an example of the stereotypical worst case scenario and is meant to be humorous, but it's not representative to the whole of IT.
Yes, I read the article and the Wikipedia article on the device, as well as a few others when the research began a while ago to decipher the thing. You missed the point, and the irony. If the Romans had not sacked the Library of Alexandria, the knowledge of this device may not have been lost for 2000+ years and science may have been far more advanced today and we wouldn't have to be using multimillion/billion dollar technologies to figure the thing out.
There are very few instances where individuals under the age of 18 in *ANY* country are brought to trial as adults, therefore, settling out of court is an acceptable option. This certainly isn't a "we probably can't pin this on you" thing, it's a we can bring your parents up on these charges (because they *ARE* responsible for their children's actions until they reach adulthood) or we can settle this and save you and your family a lot of grief.
... had the Library of Alexandria not been sacked, would we still have the instruction booklet for this thingy?
I'll take it one further. The Target website is database driven, meaning all the content is in or referenced in a database and then displayed using HTML/CSS. Talk about EASY to make accessible! OMG! So you add some fields to the DB for the ALT tags and do a different CSS that's accessible. We might be talking about 2,000 person hours to do all this including populating the ALT tag fields, if that. That's one person's salary for a year, or five people for ten weeks. Target, STFU and fix your damned website! I could see people whining if the content was all on static pages, but IT'S NOT! We're not talking about a lot of work to fix this problem. I looked at the site. There's maybe a dozen different page styles and maybe 100 to 150 different page elements defined, not all of which would need to be changed. I hear a lot of crying over not that much work.
1. No one for *any* personal reason or belief has a right to tell *anyone* how they can live their life, or what they can do with their body.
2. If a fetus is a real person, PROVE IT! Don't say it like it's the truth when there is *absolutely* no proof to either side of the is-the-fetus-a-complete-person argument
3. You do *NOT* have the "right" to practice your religion in public in the United States. In fact, there are "soapbox" laws against it in many states. What you have is the right to the freedom of religion like any other individual in the United States whether a citizen or not. No one has the "right" to force their opinion on anyone else whether in public or private. You have the right to voice your opinion publicly under the First Amendment of the Constitution, but you do not have the right to torment others with your beliefs. If the law of the land allows abortions, you are allowed to voice your opposition of the law, but not to harass citizens who are doing *nothing* wrong under the laws of man. Until we die, and if there is a God, we are judged by the laws of man. Until we *all* understand this we are nothing but barbarians!
Why don't they just finish the exclamation off: OGAWD!!!
1. Belize, New Zealand, Australia, Costa Rica ... I'm most likely gone. Unless the startup I'm involved in kicks off, then six more years and then cash out and gone.
2. I haven't left because I have credit card debt to pay off. Once that's gone
Here's a good question: What's the point? With as many free websites (GooTube, MySpace, etc.) that allow you to post video, albeit to a non-specific recipient, what use does this service have? Also, there are synchronous methods for video (iChat AV, Yahoo Voice and Video, etc.) does this really have a market? I'd say this is too little too late. It doesn't supplant any existing technologies or methods, and certainly doesn't introduce anything innovative or even new. Hell, I can send up to a 10 MB video clip via a free, public email account to a specific recipient if I want. So what's the deal here?
... Deep Freeze. http://www.faronics.com/html/deepfreeze.asp
That's it? That's all he'll save is $2.00 a month? That's news? WTF!?!? He could cut out his $10/day Starbucks habit and save more energy *AND* money...not to mention my patience.