These gadgets are initially attractive, but basically suck. Everywhere I've seen them installed, they go unused. First there are the inherent problems: the pen holders are large and awkward, the markers always seem to dry out due to poor engineering of the pen cap, the tiny expensive batteries wear out (and whose job is it to replenish them?), the pen holders are usually made of dark plastic that camouflages the fact that they are covered in ink - people learn not to touch them. The special eraser is undersized and rapidly becomes choked with ink.
Then there are the self-made problems. I worked for a VBC that wanted to install these gadgets in our conference rooms. However we didn't like the PC-centric approach which makes it a hassle to set up for each meeting with someone's personal laptop. We wanted to simply put the equipment on the network. Since the gear is not network-friendly, we were going to put a small Linux box in each room to publish the images on our intranet. We found that none of the vendors would disclose the protocol used between the host and the hardware. We tried reverse engineering it and found it very difficult.
I now work for one of the companies that makes these things. Although we have them in our conference rooms, nobody uses them for obvious reasons. I wrote an email to the product manager explaining why $VBC had not bought the product, and that enterprise customers need open, standards-based products that they can integrate into larger systems. I got no response.
So, aside from the inherent defects of these gadgets, they are one more bright idea that will never come to fruition under the current PC-centric, proprietary mindset. I really think that the current Microsoft-inspired climate is throttling the development of the computer industry.
The general population of Slashdot has very different views of P2P (go after the user!) vs open relays (shut it down!) even though at its heart they are the same issue.
Maybe you are making the common mistake of assuming that the same people are involved in both arguments. Anyhow, I think the "go after the user" argument is idiotic. If you really think that copying music is wrong, then Napster, Gnutella, et al. are wrong and should be punished much more severely because they are industrial strength infringers. The attempt to ascribe non-infringing uses to these tools is utterly dishonest. We use them to transfer material that cannot safely be published on the web. So my position is:
Spam is wrong. Therefore spam support is wrong.
Copying music is not wrong. Intellectual property is a legal fiction. Therefore supporting the copying of music is not wrong.
All the people crying "go after the users" will be very unhappy if this is actually done.
You would sue the ISP, in the jurisdiction where you are located. From this link:
Once the ISP has been identified, Internet attorneys will frequently file a lawsuit for defamation against the ISP, knowing full well that it cannot be held liable. The lawsuit also names an unknown co-defendant as "John Doe." Once the lawsuit is initiated, the attorneys are then permitted to make discovery demands on the identified ISP to obtain records and information that will reveal the true identity of the ISP's member who has been sending the offending e-mail. Once "John Doe" has been identified with the help of his own ISP, the ISP is usually dismissed from the lawsuit. The plaintiff then proceeds against the wrongdoer as the only defendant.
Why didn't you include the name of your ISP? That way we could verify for ourselves whether they have run a tight ship. I notice that complaints like this rarely come with verifiable specifics.
Re:You should be working on REMOVING him from offi
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
I think we (geeks) will eventually be forced to learn politics. And lesson one will probably be that 'the politics of vengeance' doesn't work. Instead of focusing on 'punishing' Hollings for introducing a bad law, in the hope of making an example of him, we need to start a realistic assessment of how different Senators will vote on the law. Now here's the important point: don't waste any energy on the Senators who will definitely vote for the law, like Hillary Clinton who receives huge checks from ??AA. Concentrate on the Senators who really don't care, and would only be voting for the law to earn a point with Hollings. If they don't have a piece of the action, they might be willing to oppose the law if they could earn some money or good publicity by doing so.
Someday we will learn real politics instead of futile ranting. Or else we will end up like the Palestinians.
Re:Should I send this to my congressmen?
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
Actually, it's worse than that. We have to hope that at least one of the 'certified technologies' is open source and royalty free. Because the law allows 'reasonable and non-discriminatory' (meaning royalty-encumbered) technologies - so it's possible that all software will have to pay license fees to the owner of the technology.
In which case there is no way to integrate the technology into a GPL'd piece of software. That would be the end of Linux in the US.
Re:Should I send this to my congressmen?
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
I don't think this letter is very effective. Since you consider Hollings a shill, you probably weren't going to vote for him anyway. I tend to think that an effective letter would make these points:
I voted for you in $YEAR because I knew you would [continue to] faithfully represent North Carolina.
I was planning to vote for you again in $YEAR2. (Insert two good things Hollings did for NC).
If the SSSCA passes, I will lose all respect for you and will not vote for you again.
Of course, few of us are in a position to truthfully write such a letter.
The MPAA and RIAA want you to live in a world of "my copy-controlled music sounds like ass on a 28K bitstream, and my movies are the size of postage stamps, better get broadband
I think the ??AA are realistic about the slow rate of broadband adoption. Their proposed protection schemes are not linked to an inability to save. Remember, when you save the encrypted content, it's just random noise to anything but the authorized hardware. Much of their thinking centers around the storage, transfer, and expiration of such encrypted works. So they want and expect you to download some content for repeated viewing. However your ability to play and copy that file will be governed by a complex set of 'rights' embedded in the file. Obviously, if the stream is marked 'stream only' it cannot be saved at all. But it may very well be marked 'can save for 3 days' or 'can listen 10x' or something.
If it's in my mailbox, it's unsolicited, and it was generated in bulk, it's spam, and I'll choose to either block the server that sent it, or report it to the sender's provider. What are you going to do?
I think NerdSlayer stated that the mail his organization sends is solicited. Therefore your point does not apply. As for your threat to send complaints, how meaningful do you think that is when the senders have already been the subject of 2000 complaints? Clearly their provider sees the complaints as just a side effect of running mailing lists.
In fact, I wonder if the flood of complaints from people who simply don't remember subscribing is swamping the legitimate complaints against spammers who actually scraped addresses off the web. Certainly most abuse desks seem pretty skeptical and slow to take action.
Spam is bad. But attempting to widen the defintion of spam to include undesired, but solicited email is very bad, because it weakens the credibility of anti-spam people and tools. On nanae, I frequently see posters wishing that SPEWS would list company X, when X is not in fact a spammer or spam-supporter. What they fail to realize is that SPEWS has the credibility and reach that it does because it avoids these marginal listings.
PS: Of course I agree with you that any legitimate mailing list operator should record the source of each address - probably the IP address and timestamp of the initial web request, plus the mail message sent by the subscriber to confirm.
"E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving..." According to whom? Every single person I know complains about spam.
First of all, they are not talking about spam. They are talking about ads inserted into subscription email newsletters. Second, they make no claims about the effectiveness or acceptability to recipients of email advertising. They claim rather that it is thriving. In other words, there is a market for ads inserted into subscription email newsletters, just as there is a market for ads inserted into web pages. The latter market is dying. The former is allegedly thriving. Or, a lot of those ads are allegedly being sold. This says nothing about the reaction of the recipient to the ad.
Feel free to give them a call and give them a piece of your mind.
Oh, absolutely. Let them know how upset you are that someone on a web board said that their product was spam related. And that you couldn't be bothered to read the fine web page and discover that Dartmail is simply a hosted mailing list management tool, and that there is nothing inherently spam-oriented about it.And if they ask you what kind of crack you're smoking, just start chanting "four legs good, two legs bad!".
Remember to be polite, you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Well, I guess if I were a salesman anxiously awaiting calls about my company's new product, I'd rather have my time wasted by polite illiterate uninformed fools than by rude illiterate uninformed fools.
And if you disagree with me, don't mod me down. Read the web page and explain how Dartmail is any more spam-friendly than Majordomo.
The problem with making the list maintainer anonymous and unaccountable (by which I mean they don't answer to anybody - no one can bring them back into line if they start getting it wrong) is that sysadms won't necessarily know that there is a problem and therefore that they should stop using the list.
Sounds like a theoretical, rather than practical, problem. At least with regard to SPEWS, which is probably the most useful list. Anyone disagreeing with a SPEWS listing can post to news.admin.net-abuse.email. On the very rare occasions where the complaint is legitimate, the listing is removed quickly. Almost always, the complainer is a spammer trying to weasel out of the consequences of his actions. Everyone on nanae is attuned to the danger of 'spite listings' and similar irresponsible behavior. (See ORBS). If SPEWS starts doing this it will be highly visible on nanae and they will lose their user base and therefore their importance.
The assumption that significant public blacklists are operating in the dark, unexamined is incorrect. The more important the list, the more scrutiny.
Now the lists which really do operate in the dark are those maintained privately by ISP's. You cannot ask earthlink whether or why they are blocking mail from your IP block. The maintainers of SPEWS are anonymous. Who are the maintainers of earthlink's blacklist?
That's an interesting way to look at it, but I seem to recall Rand validating the rights of corporations. For example, Taggart Transcontinentel seems to be a corporation, and Rand presents government regulation of their railroad operations as an intolerable intrusion. Although I don't think Rand really understood what a corporation is - I think she used corporations as simple proxies for powerful individuals. Thus Rearden Steel == Henry Rearden.
Many ISPs use these small-time black-holes because they
don't want to use MAPRBL (I assume its a money thing at this
point).
I don't think it's only a money thing. MAPS is almost useless - they don't list spammers until they've tried to "educate" them. I've noticed that servers sending me spam are never on MAPS. But the fact that they're charging doesn't help.
And if you get listed, how do you know that you're listed? You don't until somebody calls somebody and says "I can't get mail through to you". There needs to be a better way.
You generally know that you're listed because some of your outbound mail bounces with a message explaining that you are listed and giving a URL for further info. Are you saying that you've had outbound mail bounced due to a spam list and there was no indication of the reason? I realize this is theoretically possible, but I don't understand why someone would set up a mail server that way.
The article doesn't try to explain the benefits, if any, of digital projection. Are they claiming to achieve higher resolution than 35mm film? 70mm film has already been tried, and mostly abandoned. It provides too much resolution. I had the pleasure of seeing one of the '2001' films in a small screening room equipped with 70mm. You could see the brushstrokes on the cabinetwork of all the "futuristic plastic" spaceship interiors. 35mm is a better match for standard sets, costumes and makeup.
When the CD came out, it offered much better audio quality than the average analog media. But since then, there's more focus on compression and squeezing maximum efficiency out of digital media (since consumers don't seem to notice quality.) Hence, DVDs which don't even look as good as 1/4" videotape from the 80's, small-dish satellite TV which has horrible motion artifacts and digital cell phones. I'm not sure how many people are still gullible enough to think that "digital" is automatically better than "analog". It's entirely a question of resource allocation. Given adequate bandwidth or storage, and therefore the luxury of high-bitrate, high-dynamic range linear encoding, digital can generally outperform analog. But more typically today digital media are used to fine tune the level of crap which consumers will accept. Of course the popularity of MP3's is sending a clear message to the music industry that CD's are much too high quality for our taste.
Anyway, the main driver I can see for digital movie theaters is the ability to fire the projectionists, get rid of some moving parts, and exert much tighter central control over playback. I don't think they have much interest in offering higher performance. Ultimately you would pay $12 to watch an enlarged version of the HDTV in your house playing material that's not yet cleared for home viewing.
Yes, but if the cable has been declared illegal, then building your own cable from pinouts would be circumventing the "protection", and that is itself a violation of the DMCA.
Actually, the DMCA prohibits traficking in circumvention devices. So you are (for now) free to make cables for yourself, but you are forbidden from giving or selling either the cable or the info needed to make it.
Anyone with a little common sense could circle the words (like "motivated", for example) that management would like to see...
This assumes a rudimentary ability to think about "what management would like to see." Shockingly, there are people who don't have this ability at all. A second consideration is that the test may have included a "lie scale" - some response could be considered "too good to be true".
I am not responding to your larger point, but to your overestimation of the term "product manager". A product manager is usually not a manager. He's more like a crpss betweem a marketing guy and a secretary. He determines what features make it into the spec. Basically they are "glue" people who keep the communication and info flowing, and keep requests prioritized so the development doesn't become unbalanced. Big corporations have a lot of fluffy, non-technical people like this, and frankly they were overpaid and overtitled during the boom. Not that I wish them any harm - I would like the boom back for all of us, technical and non-technical. But please don't assign someone either technical or managerial credibility on the basis of the title 'product manager'.
With regard to the larger point, my perception is that the bust hit the fluffy jobs first, then the technical jobs. By now, all are suffering.
Actually, I think NTRM meant that the languages being proposed as victims of.NET bias are fairly marginal. C has got to be the single most important language, and the compromises, if any, involved in supporting it were not discussed. C is certainly more important than Eiffel.
I agree that the number of people using languages that aren't well supported by.NET would be small...
Lots of business apps are coded in Perl and Java. But I guess those are not "not well supported" - they're "not supported".
I think the whole thing is a marketing tempest in a teapot. Perl already runs on more platforms than.NET ever will. The Parrot VM is already faster than Perl 5.6 and it will support modern, efficient languages like Perl and Python.
These things have a range of a few feet at best. They're "passive", meaning that the electricity they have is generated from the signal sent to them.
First, with a sufficiently directional antenna on the querying unit you can appear quite "close" to the tag while being physically distant. This applies to both sending the power signal which is rectified to power the tag, and receiving the information signal from the tag. Second, even if that weren't true, during the 70's the Soviets (and probably the US) used dangerously high power levels of RF targetted at adversary facilities to excite passive listening devices inside the target facility such as flourescent ballasts and even simple diodes. Of course a rig like that would not get FCC approval, so it would not power a commercial threat to privacy. Third, this creates a niche for a DoubleClick-like company which would install scanner frames around the doors of retail shops. This would provide physical "walk trails" of shoppers and show the correlation between shopping at diferent stores. Participating merchants would have access to the data. This would be great data to have because it would tell the merchant about the non-buyers - those who looked around and didn't see anything they really liked. Every RFID on the person's body represents a buying decision he made in the past - couldn't that provide some clues about what the merchant should be selling/promoting/discounting?
She cited several Denver-area malls that have caught shoplifters with aluminum-lined shopping bags and even the so-called "iron pants" and could do nothing to stop it.
I don't understand. If they caught shoplifters, that means they had some evidence of shoplifting other than aluminum attire. Therefore it is not true that they "could do nothing to stop it." They (the malls) could arrest the shoplifters and charge them with theft. They did not need an additional law against aluminum attire.
If, as I suspect, there was no evidence that the aluminum-clad were shoplifting, then it is wrong to refer to them as shoplifters.
Never mind the RF tags. What I find interesting is:
The ARRL saw a threat to the RF commons (a "band threat" as they term it).
ARRL complained to the relevant authority (the FCC) using the words, procedures and scientific context with which the FCC is comfortable. They provided an argument which FCC officials might feel comfortable adopting as an official position.
Now contrast this with how the same drama would play itself out in computer-land:
We would learn of the threat after the ruling had been passed, or maybe two days before a deadline for comments.
We would not understand the context or language of the legislators/regulators. Our arguments would be framed in terms of abstract ideas of liberty or justice, based on quotes from the founding fathers. This is painfully illustrated by the quantity of irrelevant comments received in response to the proposed Microsoft settlement (although we are not told what proportion of the irrelevant comments are pro- or anti-settlement).
Having no credible, agreed-upon spokesman, we would simply barrage legislators with angry, incoherent, badly spelled emails.
We would probably send our email to the wrong address, for example a legislator who has no direct bearing on this particular process.
Inevitably, we would be defeated and retreat into sullen mumbling about the "corruption" of the government.
Anyhow, I respect the ARRL for understanding the rules of engagement and for not waiting until the enemy brings the fight to them. Whether they win or lose this specific battle is not as important - the important thing is that they have preserved the right of ordinary citizens to operate radios. Looks like that right may outlast the right of ordinary citizens to operate computers.
What would it take for the computer world to grow an ARRL?
Waco is hardly a victory for the government. It highlighted their brutal and heavyhanded tactics. It led to substantial internal questioning. Put it this way - every Waco decreases the likelihood of another Waco in the immediate future.
If the Waco folk were unarmed, law enforcement would have arrested them with little or no incident, and there would be no impetus to self-examination by federal agencies. Unfortunately, our agencies need to step over the line occasionally in order to remember that there is a line.
Slashdot Mirror
These gadgets are initially attractive, but basically suck. Everywhere I've seen them installed, they go unused. First there are the inherent problems: the pen holders are large and awkward, the markers always seem to dry out due to poor engineering of the pen cap, the tiny expensive batteries wear out (and whose job is it to replenish them?), the pen holders are usually made of dark plastic that camouflages the fact that they are covered in ink - people learn not to touch them. The special eraser is undersized and rapidly becomes choked with ink.
Then there are the self-made problems. I worked for a VBC that wanted to install these gadgets in our conference rooms. However we didn't like the PC-centric approach which makes it a hassle to set up for each meeting with someone's personal laptop. We wanted to simply put the equipment on the network. Since the gear is not network-friendly, we were going to put a small Linux box in each room to publish the images on our intranet. We found that none of the vendors would disclose the protocol used between the host and the hardware. We tried reverse engineering it and found it very difficult.
I now work for one of the companies that makes these things. Although we have them in our conference rooms, nobody uses them for obvious reasons. I wrote an email to the product manager explaining why $VBC had not bought the product, and that enterprise customers need open, standards-based products that they can integrate into larger systems. I got no response.
So, aside from the inherent defects of these gadgets, they are one more bright idea that will never come to fruition under the current PC-centric, proprietary mindset. I really think that the current Microsoft-inspired climate is throttling the development of the computer industry.
Maybe you are making the common mistake of assuming that the same people are involved in both arguments. Anyhow, I think the "go after the user" argument is idiotic. If you really think that copying music is wrong, then Napster, Gnutella, et al. are wrong and should be punished much more severely because they are industrial strength infringers. The attempt to ascribe non-infringing uses to these tools is utterly dishonest. We use them to transfer material that cannot safely be published on the web. So my position is:
All the people crying "go after the users" will be very unhappy if this is actually done.
Why didn't you include the name of your ISP? That way we could verify for ourselves whether they have run a tight ship. I notice that complaints like this rarely come with verifiable specifics.
I think we (geeks) will eventually be forced to learn politics. And lesson one will probably be that 'the politics of vengeance' doesn't work. Instead of focusing on 'punishing' Hollings for introducing a bad law, in the hope of making an example of him, we need to start a realistic assessment of how different Senators will vote on the law. Now here's the important point: don't waste any energy on the Senators who will definitely vote for the law, like Hillary Clinton who receives huge checks from ??AA. Concentrate on the Senators who really don't care, and would only be voting for the law to earn a point with Hollings. If they don't have a piece of the action, they might be willing to oppose the law if they could earn some money or good publicity by doing so.
Someday we will learn real politics instead of futile ranting. Or else we will end up like the Palestinians.
Thank you. Good thing I didn't send that letter.
Actually, it's worse than that. We have to hope that at least one of the
'certified technologies' is open source and royalty free. Because the law
allows 'reasonable and non-discriminatory' (meaning royalty-encumbered)
technologies - so it's possible that all software will have to pay
license fees to the owner of the technology.
In which case there is no way to integrate the technology into a GPL'd
piece of software. That would be the end of Linux in the US.
Of course, few of us are in a position to truthfully write such a letter.
I think the ??AA are realistic about the slow rate of broadband adoption. Their proposed protection schemes are not linked to an inability to save. Remember, when you save the encrypted content, it's just random noise to anything but the authorized hardware. Much of their thinking centers around the storage, transfer, and expiration of such encrypted works. So they want and expect you to download some content for repeated viewing. However your ability to play and copy that file will be governed by a complex set of 'rights' embedded in the file. Obviously, if the stream is marked 'stream only' it cannot be saved at all. But it may very well be marked 'can save for 3 days' or 'can listen 10x' or something.
I think NerdSlayer stated that the mail his organization sends is solicited. Therefore your point does not apply. As for your threat to send complaints, how meaningful do you think that is when the senders have already been the subject of 2000 complaints? Clearly their provider sees the complaints as just a side effect of running mailing lists.
In fact, I wonder if the flood of complaints from people who simply don't remember subscribing is swamping the legitimate complaints against spammers who actually scraped addresses off the web. Certainly most abuse desks seem pretty skeptical and slow to take action.
Spam is bad. But attempting to widen the defintion of spam to include undesired, but solicited email is very bad, because it weakens the credibility of anti-spam people and tools. On nanae, I frequently see posters wishing that SPEWS would list company X, when X is not in fact a spammer or spam-supporter. What they fail to realize is that SPEWS has the credibility and reach that it does because it avoids these marginal listings.
PS: Of course I agree with you that any legitimate mailing list operator should record the source of each address - probably the IP address and timestamp of the initial web request, plus the mail message sent by the subscriber to confirm.
First of all, they are not talking about spam. They are talking about ads inserted into subscription email newsletters.
Second, they make no claims about the effectiveness or acceptability to recipients of email advertising. They claim rather that it is thriving.
In other words, there is a market for ads inserted into subscription email newsletters, just as there is a market for ads inserted into web pages. The latter market is dying. The former is allegedly thriving. Or, a lot of those ads are allegedly being sold. This says nothing about the reaction of the recipient to the ad.
Oh, absolutely. Let them know how upset you are that someone on a web board said that their product was spam related. And that you couldn't be bothered to read the fine web page and discover that Dartmail is simply a hosted mailing list management tool, and that there is nothing inherently spam-oriented about it.And if they ask you what kind of crack you're smoking, just start chanting "four legs good, two legs bad!".
Well, I guess if I were a salesman anxiously awaiting calls about my company's new product, I'd rather have my time wasted by polite illiterate uninformed fools than by rude illiterate uninformed fools.
And if you disagree with me, don't mod me down. Read the web page and explain how Dartmail is any more spam-friendly than Majordomo.
Sounds like a theoretical, rather than practical, problem. At least with regard to SPEWS, which is probably the most useful list. Anyone disagreeing with a SPEWS listing can post to news.admin.net-abuse.email. On the very rare occasions where the complaint is legitimate, the listing is removed quickly. Almost always, the complainer is a spammer trying to weasel out of the consequences of his actions. Everyone on nanae is attuned to the danger of 'spite listings' and similar irresponsible behavior. (See ORBS). If SPEWS starts doing this it will be highly visible on nanae and they will lose their user base and therefore their importance.
The assumption that significant public blacklists are operating in the dark, unexamined is incorrect. The more important the list, the more scrutiny.
Now the lists which really do operate in the dark are those maintained privately by ISP's. You cannot ask earthlink whether or why they are blocking mail from your IP block. The maintainers of SPEWS are anonymous. Who are the maintainers of earthlink's blacklist?
That's an interesting way to look at it, but I seem to recall Rand validating the rights of corporations. For example, Taggart Transcontinentel seems to be a corporation, and Rand presents government regulation of their railroad operations as an intolerable intrusion. Although I don't think Rand really understood what a corporation is - I think she used corporations as simple proxies for powerful individuals. Thus Rearden Steel == Henry Rearden.
I don't think it's only a money thing. MAPS is almost useless - they don't list spammers until they've tried to "educate" them. I've noticed that servers sending me spam are never on MAPS. But the fact that they're charging doesn't help.
You generally know that you're listed because some of your outbound mail bounces with a message explaining that you are listed and giving a URL for further info. Are you saying that you've had outbound mail bounced due to a spam list and there was no indication of the reason? I realize this is theoretically possible, but I don't understand why someone would set up a mail server that way.
The article doesn't try to explain the benefits, if any, of digital projection. Are they claiming to achieve higher resolution than 35mm film? 70mm film has already been tried, and mostly abandoned. It provides too much resolution. I had the pleasure of seeing one of the '2001' films in a small screening room equipped with 70mm. You could see the brushstrokes on the cabinetwork of all the "futuristic plastic" spaceship interiors. 35mm is a better match for standard sets, costumes and makeup.
When the CD came out, it offered much better audio quality than the average analog media. But since then, there's more focus on compression and squeezing maximum efficiency out of digital media (since consumers don't seem to notice quality.) Hence, DVDs which don't even look as good as 1/4" videotape from the 80's, small-dish satellite TV which has horrible motion artifacts and digital cell phones. I'm not sure how many people are still gullible enough to think that "digital" is automatically better than "analog". It's entirely a question of resource allocation. Given adequate bandwidth or storage, and therefore the luxury of high-bitrate, high-dynamic range linear encoding, digital can generally outperform analog. But more typically today digital media are used to fine tune the level of crap which consumers will accept. Of course the popularity of MP3's is sending a clear message to the music industry that CD's are much too high quality for our taste.
Anyway, the main driver I can see for digital movie theaters is the ability to fire the projectionists, get rid of some moving parts, and exert much tighter central control over playback. I don't think they have much interest in offering higher performance. Ultimately you would pay $12 to watch an enlarged version of the HDTV in your house playing material that's not yet cleared for home viewing.
But how is this a problem? Make it so when a client logs in with a certain key, any existing sessions under that key are terminated.
This assumes a rudimentary ability to think about "what management would like to see." Shockingly, there are people who don't have this ability at all. A second consideration is that the test may have included a "lie scale" - some response could be considered "too good to be true".
I am not responding to your larger point, but to your overestimation of the term "product manager". A product manager is usually not a manager. He's more like a crpss betweem a marketing guy and a secretary. He determines what features make it into the spec. Basically they are "glue" people who keep the communication and info flowing, and keep requests prioritized so the development doesn't become unbalanced. Big corporations have a lot of fluffy, non-technical people like this, and frankly they were overpaid and overtitled during the boom. Not that I wish them any harm - I would like the boom back for all of us, technical and non-technical. But please don't assign someone either technical or managerial credibility on the basis of the title 'product manager'.
With regard to the larger point, my perception is that the bust hit the fluffy jobs first, then the technical jobs. By now, all are suffering.
Lots of business apps are coded in Perl and Java. But I guess those are not "not well supported" - they're "not supported".
I think the whole thing is a marketing tempest in a teapot. Perl already runs on more platforms than
First, with a sufficiently directional antenna on the querying unit you can appear quite "close" to the tag while being physically distant. This applies to both sending the power signal which is rectified to power the tag, and receiving the information signal from the tag.
Second, even if that weren't true, during the 70's the Soviets (and probably the US) used dangerously high power levels of RF targetted at adversary facilities to excite passive listening devices inside the target facility such as flourescent ballasts and even simple diodes. Of course a rig like that would not get FCC approval, so it would not power a commercial threat to privacy.
Third, this creates a niche for a DoubleClick-like company which would install scanner frames around the doors of retail shops. This would provide physical "walk trails" of shoppers and show the correlation between shopping at diferent stores. Participating merchants would have access to the data. This would be great data to have because it would tell the merchant about the non-buyers - those who looked around and didn't see anything they really liked. Every RFID on the person's body represents a buying decision he made in the past - couldn't that provide some clues about what the merchant should be selling/promoting/discounting?
I don't understand. If they caught shoplifters, that means they had some evidence of shoplifting other than aluminum attire. Therefore it is not true that they "could do nothing to stop it." They (the malls) could arrest the shoplifters and charge them with theft. They did not need an additional law against aluminum attire.
If, as I suspect, there was no evidence that the aluminum-clad were shoplifting, then it is wrong to refer to them as shoplifters.
Now contrast this with how the same drama would play itself out in computer-land:
Anyhow, I respect the ARRL for understanding the rules of engagement and for not waiting until the enemy brings the fight to them. Whether they win or lose this specific battle is not as important - the important thing is that they have preserved the right of ordinary citizens to operate radios. Looks like that right may outlast the right of ordinary citizens to operate computers.
What would it take for the computer world to grow an ARRL?
Waco is hardly a victory for the government. It highlighted their brutal and heavyhanded tactics. It led to substantial internal questioning. Put it this way - every Waco decreases the likelihood of another Waco in the immediate future.
If the Waco folk were unarmed, law enforcement would have arrested them with little or no incident, and there would be no impetus to self-examination by federal agencies. Unfortunately, our agencies need to step over the line occasionally in order to remember that there is a line.