Yes, there are arguably instances where tapping the lines is good policy. I think most people agree that the current level of restrictions on surveillance are rather more lax than what they used to be. But policy is something that will ebb and flow with the politics of the time, public sentiment, fear, etc.
The thing to remember, though, is that fundamental technological changes are uncaring of the law enforcement policies. Before telephones existed, line tapping did not exist at all. It seems plausible that further technological changes may make tapping infeasible. If so, then it should be dismissed because imposing it would represent an onerous burden on a promising and beneficial technology.
Next thing you know they'll outlaw building materials and construction methods that provide too much acoustic damping because it will limit an ability to eavesdrop that might exist.
if you go with the established, popular choice and things fail, the blame is more likely to go somewhere else.
Given the lucrative margins and excellent profits MS has made from their OS and from Office over the years, they probably think they've been compensated well for taking blame in these situations, whether they've deserved it or not.
Give me a US$5e10 pile of cash and you can call me scum-sucking leech, too!
Practically, no one ever wants to re-create any old macros or learn a new language if at all possible. No matter that the new language is faster, better, cheaper. Human time costs too much to re-do any old thing that basically works OK. Just look at all the decades old COBOL code running in banks, on mainframes, etc.
New stuff, sure. But the old VB macros that crunch Joe CPA's Excel spreadsheet will live longer than Joe CPA.
Re:Link me to them...
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You don't want anonymity
Yes, as long as you're interested in getting the comps. And, most casinos seem to respect their clients desire to be left alone, etc.
I'm not sure how it works when you cash in large quantities of chips (my best craps win was only $500 - a single bet).
But there is a threshhold where the cash transaction becomes reportable to tax authorities. In those instances it would be advantageous to cash-out incrementally to avoid the trigger threshhold.
If we assume that adverts are required to support our favourite programs
Never assume anything.
In the early days of cable television there were all kinds of commercial-free channels that made new subscribers feel like they were getting a good deal for their subscription money.
Then, gradually, advertisements started to creep into programming. Why? Because all those watching viewers represent a valuable resource to advertisers, one which can be exploited by being sold. As a business, it's foolish to resist an opportunity to make money.
It's not that such advertising revenue is required to support the programming. Indeed, a sound business model suggests that if you increase your revenue by selling ad time and keeping a tight lid on programming costs that you will be more profitable. The large number of recycled shows in syndication, many of which don't pay the original actors squat, testify to the reality of the low programming cost business model.
'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,'
There is always two jobs that are too sacred to move overseas.
1. CEO
2. shareholder
When boards of directors and shareholders start asking whether they can get better value for their money by outsourcing management activities, then I'll believe that statement.
Shareholders, I think, are pretty much free to move to whichever nation taxes them least.
Meanwhile, most workers will live in a state of heightened anxiety, hoping that their skills are rare enough to prevent their function from being outsourced to where the lowest bid in the global labor market takes it...
Yes, it's inevitable, economically correct, and very good for people in low wage countries. But as someone in a high wage country with concomitant costs of living I can't help but be nervous. I'd prefer at least a stagnant standard of living to one that decreases to equilibrate with the rest of the world.
People thought the attrition of union power in the US over the past several decades tilted the balance in favor of labor buyers.
All of that is nothing compared to the changes from globalization of the labor market.
Corporations can find out a helluva lot more about people than the federal government ever will. As private entities, they're not so legally encumbered by this bothersome Constitution thingie.
Better still, subvert from below by replacing it with a better, more modern frame buffer management system with a software library layer that provides full X functionality, including extensions.
Over time, though, developers of higher level graphical applications will start replacing calls to Xlib with Ylib calls, if they're faster and easier to work with.
But getting a more extensive set of free fonts with metric equivalence to the proprietary ones seems to be an overlooked but practically important ingredient to me.
Actually, playing the lottery sometimes is worth the risk, but only when the jackpots get up to incredibly high levels.
Eg, the last I heard the multi-state Powerball had odds of about 1 in 80e6 of winning the grand prize. Discounting the annuity value and the taxes means that buying a ticket is not worthwhile until the jackpot is at least about US$ 200e6.
At least with the lottery the risks are well-quantified.
With SCO, accurate quantification is difficult because legal analysis is hampered by SCO withholding a lot of key information. It's like poker more than the lottery, and most experts think they're bluffing, but we won't know for sure until their hand is called.
I find that most people tend to get tired and overlook all the costs of ownership and typically settle for Partial Cost of Ownership, PCO instead of TCO.
Analog radio has gotten excruciatingly annoying the last decade or so.
I'd really like to see lower barriers to entry - the local college station gets close to 90% of my radio listening time anymore as the conglomerate controlled outlets play all the same demographically-profiled comfortable pap.
Sadly, the best lawyers have their passion for right and wrong squeezed out of them completely.
It's kind of like the effect of seminary training causing people to lose their religious zeal.
Particularly, this issue arises in the SCO case, where David Boies is part of the law firm that owns a fifth of SCO and will profit if this legal action is successful.
This is the same David Boies that did such a nice job of cutting to pieces Microsoft's legal defense for the Justice Department, even if the government rolled over in the end.
It goes to show that good lawyers are professional about their work but not necessarily personal, passionate. Arguably, emotion could interfere and prove distracting to the best application of the legal profession (apart from the acting required in front of a jury).
I think MDs get this kind of thing all the time. You know, at a party, "You're a doctor! I've been having this pain in my abdomen..."
But it is bad with regard to the badness of the IT support situation. I'm only peripherally related to genuine IT desktop support, but mentioning the words "programming" or "computer" triggers new acquaintances to veer off about their latest PC mishap. I'll usually listen to the whole 45 second explanation before kindly deferring to ignorance about that particular area.
BTW, if you are an expert in astrophysics you might be able to help me. I've been having persistent problems with a broken universe that behaves in ways I don't like....
the biggest problem in this market: accountability. Small companys come in, install software, and then disappear.
The biggest problem is that the software the small company installed is binary so the local government has no option but to keep running some crusty old machine with 15 year old OS on it.
It gets worse.
The binary application not only runs on some old OS, but does I/O using some other crusty old application binary undocumented file format.
So the local government is obligated to keep up old systems, which not only consume electrical power, floor space, air-conditioning, maintenance contracts, but requires people there at the office to maintain expertise about some old system. Worse, they probably have to train new employees about the finicky quirks of the old database system that is essential to their business.
If only that binary application came with source code that was on a community site, so that when everyone upgraded from DOS 6.x to WinXP the code could have been recompiled and the I/O interface rewritten from FoxPro to XML.
makes shareholders happy because losing employees=lowering costs=raising stock price or perceived value.
One reason this tactic is still being used is that the consequences of laying off good people usually aren't felt for a quarter or two (longer in research and development).
By that time, the "genius" who came up with the idea will have been promoted upwards and sideways and the new manager will be asked a lot of questions about why customer complaints are up, quality is suffering, etc. He will be labeled a "bad manager" compared to the predecessor who left him a legacy of shit buckets on top of the door sill.
When my stock holdings and available time for analysis increase, you can bet I'll get real nervous if a company's profitability jumps through "streamlining". Depending on whether the cuts were in the fat department or in the muscle/bone department, it could be a sell signal.
I know all worker bee geeks constantly complain about the lack of management that has a clue about technology, so I'm generally in favor of more technical knowledge making its way into management ranks.
But.
Alan Cox has been such a phenomenally fantastic technical geek in the trenches that his loss will be felt if he does something else for a living.
In the larger scheme of things, he'd have to be an exceptionally damn good manager to make up for his loss as direct worker.
I agree with the earlier poster, too, who was motivated to learn how to re-build his computer after crashes because, well, no one else had time to do it.
I think that's a great way for kids to learn something practical as well as the moral lessons of actions/consequences, if you want something done you have to do it yourself, etc..
The double edged sword, of course, is that when your sharp kid learns the intricacies of re-installing the OS from scratch, getting the settings right, etc. that they'll be empowered to see the Internet in all its ugliness, too.
So the corollary is that, before you throw the installation CD and manuals and have your kid rebuild the computer, explain plainly the basic fact that much of the world is screwed up in these 23 different ways and that you'll see it all on the Internet.
Arbitrary ages of 18 ought to be replaced by "whatever age someone is able to figure out how to rebuild a computer" IMHO. Yes, there are some people who ought never to be exposed to some stuff no matter how old they are... The age of understanding concepts should be the threshhold for driving, voting, consuming harmful addictive substances, etc. rather than some X years.
I'm sorry I can't address your question for good remote filesystems in the face of an unreliable network. My network has been relatively reliable and that's been a decreasing concern. Perhaps network reliability will be less of a concern for you, too, in future.
Lately, what I've been looking for is a remote filesystem that provides performance, security, flexibility, the latter in reference to being able to log into someone else's desktop machine and easily get my home directory mounted, whether from a big server up 24x7, or from my desktop.
Some have dabbled with DCE/DFS, but I've heard that's slowly dieing, ponderous to set up, performance suffers.
SFS looks intriguing, but I haven't heard pro or con about its performance. It appears to be secure and flexible.
NFS is an old friend and, yes, if the network or the server dies, a lot of local sessions will hang interminably 'NFS server not responding'. But, this doesn't happen as much as it did 5 years ago.
Right now we're running NFS v3, but the new NFSv4 looks like it has a better security model.
Finally (and you shouldn't even think about this if network reliability is an issue), simple block service like iSCSI looks promising as a way of interchangeably moving around from desktop to desktop and getting your same home directory no matter where you are. More, you could conceivably even get your own flavor of OS booting, be it Red Hat 9, Win2K, XP, Gentoo, etc. Don't know about its security; it's heavily dependent on a reliable, high-performance network, but looks like a good way to get the most storage for your dollar (NAS instead of SAN).
Linux has taken primarily good UI design from Windows,
More accurately, the Linux desktop projects have acknowledged that fact that users have already ingrained UI habits from Windows that they will not easily trade for something different.
Even Microsoft itself has to respect the legacy it's created in user base expectations.
I notice my wife (a Windows user at work) drives our home PC loaded with SuSE and KDE and can get from point A to point B by herself for the most part because KDE mimics UI patterns that Windows users know.
Of course, I always cringe at her style of clicking on the [x] in the title bar to kill some window, and then restart the application. There was no need to brutally kill that Mozilla process outright (especially considering the load times if you restart it).]
Slashdot Mirror
if you can bring a connection to their point of presence, they'll dump your traffic in whatever city you like, cheap.
Great post.
Your point suggests to me that there is a business opportunity if the cost of buying connecting equipment is reasonable.
Is it?
Or is the crux of the problem in the costs of local redistribution of IP connectivity?
Yes, there are arguably instances where tapping the lines is good policy. I think most people agree that the current level of restrictions on surveillance are rather more lax than what they used to be. But policy is something that will ebb and flow with the politics of the time, public sentiment, fear, etc.
The thing to remember, though, is that fundamental technological changes are uncaring of the law enforcement policies. Before telephones existed, line tapping did not exist at all. It seems plausible that further technological changes may make tapping infeasible. If so, then it should be dismissed because imposing it would represent an onerous burden on a promising and beneficial technology.
Next thing you know they'll outlaw building materials and construction methods that provide too much acoustic damping because it will limit an ability to eavesdrop that might exist.
if you go with the established, popular choice and things fail, the blame is more likely to go somewhere else.
Given the lucrative margins and excellent profits MS has made from their OS and from Office over the years, they probably think they've been compensated well for taking blame in these situations, whether they've deserved it or not.
Give me a US$5e10 pile of cash and you can call me scum-sucking leech, too!
Technically, it wouldn't be hard at all.
Practically, no one ever wants to re-create any old macros or learn a new language if at all possible. No matter that the new language is faster, better, cheaper. Human time costs too much to re-do any old thing that basically works OK. Just look at all the decades old COBOL code running in banks, on mainframes, etc.
New stuff, sure. But the old VB macros that crunch Joe CPA's Excel spreadsheet will live longer than Joe CPA.
You don't want anonymity
Yes, as long as you're interested in getting the comps. And, most casinos seem to respect their clients desire to be left alone, etc.
I'm not sure how it works when you cash in large quantities of chips (my best craps win was only $500 - a single bet).
But there is a threshhold where the cash transaction becomes reportable to tax authorities. In those instances it would be advantageous to cash-out incrementally to avoid the trigger threshhold.
RFID chips might make this more difficult.
If we assume that adverts are required to support our favourite programs
Never assume anything.
In the early days of cable television there were all kinds of commercial-free channels that made new subscribers feel like they were getting a good deal for their subscription money.
Then, gradually, advertisements started to creep into programming. Why? Because all those watching viewers represent a valuable resource to advertisers, one which can be exploited by being sold. As a business, it's foolish to resist an opportunity to make money.
It's not that such advertising revenue is required to support the programming. Indeed, a sound business model suggests that if you increase your revenue by selling ad time and keeping a tight lid on programming costs that you will be more profitable. The large number of recycled shows in syndication, many of which don't pay the original actors squat, testify to the reality of the low programming cost business model.
hospice
and this guy refers to himself as a "doctor of reality", too.
'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,'
There is always two jobs that are too sacred to move overseas.
1. CEO
2. shareholder
When boards of directors and shareholders start asking whether they can get better value for their money by outsourcing management activities, then I'll believe that statement.
Shareholders, I think, are pretty much free to move to whichever nation taxes them least.
Meanwhile, most workers will live in a state of heightened anxiety, hoping that their skills are rare enough to prevent their function from being outsourced to where the lowest bid in the global labor market takes it...
Yes, it's inevitable, economically correct, and very good for people in low wage countries. But as someone in a high wage country with concomitant costs of living I can't help but be nervous. I'd prefer at least a stagnant standard of living to one that decreases to equilibrate with the rest of the world.
People thought the attrition of union power in the US over the past several decades tilted the balance in favor of labor buyers.
All of that is nothing compared to the changes from globalization of the labor market.
The real government has had this power for years.
Corporations can find out a helluva lot more about people than the federal government ever will. As private entities, they're not so legally encumbered by this bothersome Constitution thingie.
1. Take X11 and throw it out of the window.
Better still, subvert from below by replacing it with a better, more modern frame buffer management system with a software library layer that provides full X functionality, including extensions.
Over time, though, developers of higher level graphical applications will start replacing calls to Xlib with Ylib calls, if they're faster and easier to work with.
But getting a more extensive set of free fonts with metric equivalence to the proprietary ones seems to be an overlooked but practically important ingredient to me.
It's because I don't play the lottery.
Actually, playing the lottery sometimes is worth the risk, but only when the jackpots get up to incredibly high levels.
Eg, the last I heard the multi-state Powerball had odds of about 1 in 80e6 of winning the grand prize. Discounting the annuity value and the taxes means that buying a ticket is not worthwhile until the jackpot is at least about US$ 200e6.
At least with the lottery the risks are well-quantified.
With SCO, accurate quantification is difficult because legal analysis is hampered by SCO withholding a lot of key information. It's like poker more than the lottery, and most experts think they're bluffing, but we won't know for sure until their hand is called.
The thing is, TCO isn't everything either.
Absolutely.
I find that most people tend to get tired and overlook all the costs of ownership and typically settle for Partial Cost of Ownership, PCO instead of TCO.
NPR bellyaching for cash
With the recent $200M bequest from Ray Kroc's widow, hopefully that will change.
Analog radio has gotten excruciatingly annoying the last decade or so.
I'd really like to see lower barriers to entry - the local college station gets close to 90% of my radio listening time anymore as the conglomerate controlled outlets play all the same demographically-profiled comfortable pap.
one of the six best lawyers in the nation.
Sadly, the best lawyers have their passion for right and wrong squeezed out of them completely.
It's kind of like the effect of seminary training causing people to lose their religious zeal.
Particularly, this issue arises in the SCO case, where David Boies is part of the law firm that owns a fifth of SCO and will profit if this legal action is successful.
This is the same David Boies that did such a nice job of cutting to pieces Microsoft's legal defense for the Justice Department, even if the government rolled over in the end.
It goes to show that good lawyers are professional about their work but not necessarily personal, passionate. Arguably, emotion could interfere and prove distracting to the best application of the legal profession (apart from the acting required in front of a jury).
IOW, the question is whether this is going to be designed to be specifically bad for Linux.
Strictly speaking, no.
If there is anyway to leverage the technology to make it good for Microsoft, Intel, etc., then be assured that will happen.
get the same kind of fixit requests
I think MDs get this kind of thing all the time. You know, at a party, "You're a doctor! I've been having this pain in my abdomen..."
But it is bad with regard to the badness of the IT support situation. I'm only peripherally related to genuine IT desktop support, but mentioning the words "programming" or "computer" triggers new acquaintances to veer off about their latest PC mishap. I'll usually listen to the whole 45 second explanation before kindly deferring to ignorance about that particular area.
BTW, if you are an expert in astrophysics you might be able to help me. I've been having persistent problems with a broken universe that behaves in ways I don't like....
I'll have you know that our "objective third-party information" was the best that money could buy.
the biggest problem in this market: accountability. Small companys come in, install software, and then disappear.
The biggest problem is that the software the small company installed is binary so the local government has no option but to keep running some crusty old machine with 15 year old OS on it.
It gets worse.
The binary application not only runs on some old OS, but does I/O using some other crusty old application binary undocumented file format.
So the local government is obligated to keep up old systems, which not only consume electrical power, floor space, air-conditioning, maintenance contracts, but requires people there at the office to maintain expertise about some old system. Worse, they probably have to train new employees about the finicky quirks of the old database system that is essential to their business.
If only that binary application came with source code that was on a community site, so that when everyone upgraded from DOS 6.x to WinXP the code could have been recompiled and the I/O interface rewritten from FoxPro to XML.
makes shareholders happy because losing employees=lowering costs=raising stock price or perceived value.
One reason this tactic is still being used is that the consequences of laying off good people usually aren't felt for a quarter or two (longer in research and development).
By that time, the "genius" who came up with the idea will have been promoted upwards and sideways and the new manager will be asked a lot of questions about why customer complaints are up, quality is suffering, etc. He will be labeled a "bad manager" compared to the predecessor who left him a legacy of shit buckets on top of the door sill.
When my stock holdings and available time for analysis increase, you can bet I'll get real nervous if a company's profitability jumps through "streamlining". Depending on whether the cuts were in the fat department or in the muscle/bone department, it could be a sell signal.
It might help if some CIO's realized that
is, in terms of foolishness, ranking right alongsideexecutives that appreciate engineering
I know all worker bee geeks constantly complain about the lack of management that has a clue about technology, so I'm generally in favor of more technical knowledge making its way into management ranks.
But.
Alan Cox has been such a phenomenally fantastic technical geek in the trenches that his loss will be felt if he does something else for a living.
In the larger scheme of things, he'd have to be an exceptionally damn good manager to make up for his loss as direct worker.
Exactly right on.
I agree with the earlier poster, too, who was motivated to learn how to re-build his computer after crashes because, well, no one else had time to do it.
I think that's a great way for kids to learn something practical as well as the moral lessons of actions/consequences, if you want something done you have to do it yourself, etc..
The double edged sword, of course, is that when your sharp kid learns the intricacies of re-installing the OS from scratch, getting the settings right, etc. that they'll be empowered to see the Internet in all its ugliness, too.
So the corollary is that, before you throw the installation CD and manuals and have your kid rebuild the computer, explain plainly the basic fact that much of the world is screwed up in these 23 different ways and that you'll see it all on the Internet.
Arbitrary ages of 18 ought to be replaced by "whatever age someone is able to figure out how to rebuild a computer" IMHO. Yes, there are some people who ought never to be exposed to some stuff no matter how old they are... The age of understanding concepts should be the threshhold for driving, voting, consuming harmful addictive substances, etc. rather than some X years.
Nothing against Canada - some of my best friends are Canadian (that doesn't mean I'd let my daughter marry one) BUT:
Are high resolution satellite/aerial images available for other locations?
No, I don't expect to be able to buy hi-res images of Area 51, but was looking for my neighborhood.
Also, are there ways of getting really nice poster prints of high resolution images?
I'm sorry I can't address your question for good remote filesystems in the face of an unreliable network. My network has been relatively reliable and that's been a decreasing concern. Perhaps network reliability will be less of a concern for you, too, in future.
Lately, what I've been looking for is a remote filesystem that provides performance, security, flexibility, the latter in reference to being able to log into someone else's desktop machine and easily get my home directory mounted, whether from a big server up 24x7, or from my desktop.
Some have dabbled with DCE/DFS, but I've heard that's slowly dieing, ponderous to set up, performance suffers.
SFS looks intriguing, but I haven't heard pro or con about its performance. It appears to be secure and flexible.
NFS is an old friend and, yes, if the network or the server dies, a lot of local sessions will hang interminably 'NFS server not responding'. But, this doesn't happen as much as it did 5 years ago.
Right now we're running NFS v3, but the new NFSv4 looks like it has a better security model.
Finally (and you shouldn't even think about this if network reliability is an issue), simple block service like iSCSI looks promising as a way of interchangeably moving around from desktop to desktop and getting your same home directory no matter where you are. More, you could conceivably even get your own flavor of OS booting, be it Red Hat 9, Win2K, XP, Gentoo, etc. Don't know about its security; it's heavily dependent on a reliable, high-performance network, but looks like a good way to get the most storage for your dollar (NAS instead of SAN).
Linux has taken primarily good UI design from Windows,
More accurately, the Linux desktop projects have acknowledged that fact that users have already ingrained UI habits from Windows that they will not easily trade for something different.
Even Microsoft itself has to respect the legacy it's created in user base expectations.
I notice my wife (a Windows user at work) drives our home PC loaded with SuSE and KDE and can get from point A to point B by herself for the most part because KDE mimics UI patterns that Windows users know.
Of course, I always cringe at her style of clicking on the [x] in the title bar to kill some window, and then restart the application. There was no need to brutally kill that Mozilla process outright (especially considering the load times if you restart it).]