> I'm still flabbergasted that he was using servers in the U.S.
He may have used some servers in the U.S. but the server the FBI grabbed was overseas. From the complaint, page 14, item 22:
In particular, the FBI has located in a certain foreign country the server used to host Silk Road's website (the "Silk Road Web Server"). Pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request, an image of the Silk Road Web server was made on or about July 23, 2013, and produced thereafter to the FBI.
There's a list of U.S. Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties here. Who's got a guess?
Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey.
High pressure pneumatic tubes from all over the Bay Area emerge in the center of the facility, spilling silvery burritos onto a high-speed sorting line. The metal-jacketed burritos look like oversize bullets, and the conveyor belts that move them through the facility resemble giant belts of delicious ammunition. Within a few seconds of arrival the burritos have been bar coded, checked for balance and round on a precision lathe, and then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen.
The mouth of the tunnel is a small concrete arch in the side of a nearby hill, about as glamorous as an abandoned railway tunnel. Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away! To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps. At the tunnel’s deepest point the burritos will be traveling nearly two kilometers a second - even the faintest whiff of air would quickly drag them to a stop.
Though there are interesting speech recognition products for other applications ; for this task Dragon and IBM ViaVoice, both sold by ScanSoft, are pretty much the only software choices until someone qualified gets an NSF grant to beef up Sphinx.
I can second the recommendation of the LDC's XTrans if you're going to do this yourself.
If you want someone else to do it, here are a lot of podcasters who want transcripts, and a bunch of transcription services have sprung up to address the market. They've already implemented a lot of the quality-control mechanisms you'd have to address in order to get good results from something like the Mechnical Turk.
The Wall Street Journal ran a side-by-side comparison back in 2008 and recommended castingwords.com, but another provider may very well be better by now. Shop around.
If you just want an extremely basic program to make 2-dimenstion bar, line, or scatter graphs, xgraph is about as bare-bones simple as they come.
It runs on any Unix and dumps PostScript output files. Sometimes anything more is overkill.
> he knowingly hid and travelled on a revoked passport
You sound like someone who goes spouting off without knowing the facts of the matter. According to the Seattle Times, Bobby's passport was revoked without his knowledge before its expiration date.
Hypocrite US gov't violated the sanctions itself!
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's really hypocritical that the US government can go after Bobby Fischer for violating the UN sanctions on the former Yugoslavia, when that same government was violating them on a massive scale.
And while Bobby was just playing a chess match,
the Feds were shipping huge amounts of arms to their favorite players in the region, the separatist Bosnian Muslims. As the Guardian newspaper in England documented :
...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.
The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran...
Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.
I call bullshit. "falcon5768" is just parroting a whole bunch of half-formed, selective impressions, and making errors of act. Some are forgivable, because of the one-sided portrayal of the war in the U.S. media. Some are not.
First of all, to say that "Yugoslavia" caused the Bosnian war is as meaningless as saying that the United States caused the (U.S.) Civil War.
The Bosnian war started because some leaders of the Bosnian Muslims-- who as a people had historically been pro-Yugoslav-- wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and start their own Islamic state, and to impose Islamic law on all the people living there-- including the ethnic Serbs and Croats who made up a majority of the population. This was all detailed in their president Izetbegovic's "Islamic Declaration". Along with taking advantage of all the usual Muslim suspects-- including Osama's right-hand man al-Harbi-- who flocked there to fight the jihad, the Bosnian president also recreated
a WWII-era SS Division to help in the fight.
I am confused why you say that the Bosnian war "DID kill US and UN troops". What US or UN troops were in the region? And as for the "mass slaughter" of Muslims at Srebrenica, the story is now starting to leak out that it's not so clear-cut as that-- most of the bodies have never shown up, and many of the dead turned out to be the troops of Muslim warlord Nasr Oric, who would use the UN-protected "safe areas" as a base from which to launch raids involving beheadings of prisoners... sound familiar?
The most laughable part of your post (and, by extension, the US's case against Bobby Fischer) is when you go on about how the sanctions were meant to prevent the world from contributing to the war.
Of course, as the Guardian newspaper in England documented (much later after it was no longer inconvenient for the facts to come out), the US government was violating the embargo all along:
...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.
The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran...
The reason you, and so many other people, hold this inaccurate and deluded view of the Bosnian war, is attributable mostly to the really top-notch propaganda war waged in the U.S. and U.K. media, making the Bosnian Muslims out to be the wonderful, multicultural good guys and the Serbs the baddies.
It doesn't matter that so much of the lies have now been exposed-- like
what about a man in the middle attack? [...] How can you tell...?
Answers to lots of your questions at quantum.bbn.com,
which is the actual document repository used by the development team. I think it's pretty cool that they make so much material publically available. There's also an overview linked from the BBN homepage.
Reading the article I can't help but be reminded of one particular issue of Business Week, with a cover that was all black except for a forlorn little multicolored Apple logo, and the caption: "The Death of an American Icon".
Of course, this was in late 1997 when AAPL stock was around its all-time low, under ten bucks a share. Pretty soon the iMac came out, and the stock was up almost tenfold over the next few years as the tech boom hit. It's still at almost quadruple those "death" levels.
When the conventional wisdom is so unanimous, it's often wrong.
There are three rules for keeping your job when times are tough:
Erm, maybe on your planet. Here on Earth,
there as many different kind of "tough times" and potential layoff situations as there are employers.
Some companies are facing a temporary cash crunch;
some are facing dwindling market share; some are planning to trim or refocus their business; and some just want to outsource everything with legs and without an MBA to India. Your advice really only works for about one and a half of those situations.
For instance, a good friend of mine used to write the code that provisioned and monitored the VPN infrastructure for a now-defunct telecom operation. She made it through several rounds of layoffs by doing not only her own job, but those of employees on whom the axe had fallen. But she lost her job when they dumped the whole VPN operation. Instead of being "a rock of stability" and taking care of those VPN customers (your item #2) she should have bailed on the group and gotten
into something with a brighter future, like their nascent VoIP operation, which lasted a while longer before Ch. 11. Better yet, she should have bailed on the whole company while there were still telecom jobs to be had.
And about your item #1, "be a profit center", some savvy people I know at another local tech company did their level best to get into sysadmin and support work when profits started to shrink. Layoffs hit the developers whose groups were not brining in revenue, but support staff had already been budgeted for and their jobs were left intact. Sometimes, be a cost center.
When layoffs are in the cards, remember that it doesn't matter how much your employer likes you. All that will get you is a nicer going-away lunch, or maybe an extra couple weeks of severance, if your manager can bend the rules. You have to make sure your employer needs you, in order to survive.
The best way I have found to do this, is to make sure that your particular job function is as closely aligned with your employer's main line of business as possible. That wil tie your success most closely with the company's success, make them more anxious to make sure that you have what you need in order to succeed, and make it more likely that laying you off would be seen as cutting into the "meat" or "bone" of a company rather than "trimming the fat", in the usual overused metaphor.
In other words, if you are going to be a sysadmin, don't do it at a management consulting firm. If you want to work at a consulting firm, be a consultant-- and if you want to be a sysadmin, try to find a job at a dedicated sysadmin shop that businesses outsource their sysadmin work to.
Hey, didn't I just contradict my argument above that sysadmin and other support staff might be safe in a layoff? Yep, that's my point: every situation is different.
I googled around. The site at www.secnet11.com
is actually pretty informative, and there's some
other information floating around out there too.
Some highlights:
The card sticks out of the computer with two antennas poking up.
It uses an NSA encryption algorithm called BATON (from various
stuff on the Web, I get the impression that BATON is a 64-bit block
cipher with 128-bit keys that is designed for very fast operation)
the message address is encrypted to prevent traffic analysis (this
is a big selling point against VPN technology)
Each packet has an 80-bit IV (it's rare to learn even that much
about a Type 1 encryption system)
Cards cost over $2500 each. That's 30 times the price of a commercial WiFi card, but cheaper
than traditional NSA encryption data products which seem to run
around $5K per node.
"Red keys" are loaded via a special cable that connects to a data
transfer device such as the CYZ-10.
I wonder how much work it would be for someone
to implement a commercial version of this
using Rijndael, or AES, or something unclassified.
With a larger market than the government,
maybe it could be cheaper, and the development costs made up on volume...
Let's face it, it's a pain to set up IPSEC on all your boxes...
In the English language, the plural of acronyms and abbreviations is "'s". I am not sure what they are in your language.
Hmm, a naked assertion doesn't make it so.
Especially when you're an AC.
The Chicago Manual of Style says that so far as it can be done without confusion, single or multiple letters used as words . . . form the plural by adding 's' alone. Abbreviations with periods, lowercase letters used as nouns, and capital letters that would be confusing if 's' alone were added form the plural with an apostrophe and an 's.'
So, I wouldn't give you straight A's for spelling (nor a job as a copy editor), but at least I won't make you buy crippled bogus non-CDs.
Yet another book you might check out
is Michael Schmitt's "Pentium Processor Optimization Tools",
which is a 200-plus page textbook with handy references to instructions,
etc. in the appendices.
It's from 1994 and thus the pre-MMX,
pre-P6 world, and it is not especially well written
(although not bad), but there is a good discussion
of segmentation and of which instructions
pair in the Pentium's different pipelines,
and it really walks you though optimizing a bunch
of code.
I think some of it might well be useful
relative to the ten bucks it's going for on half.com.
(Actually, I found it remaindered
for $4.00 at the Cambridge, Mass Micro Center,
so you may do a little better too.)
For some people, the most daunting thing about building their own system is worrying that they might screw up something up with the fan clips or the heatsink compound, causing the CPU to overheat eventually, or the fan to someday fall off.
Today's processors smoke themselves pretty fast if you run them without the heatsink/fan attached properly. (I forget how long the Athlon is supposed to take to burn up, but IIRC it's something like 10 or 15 seconds.)
To cope with that, there are some PC shops who will install the processor in the motherboard, power it up to test it, and them ship the assembled unit, often with some memory. You'll often see this advertised as a "bundle". Perhaps the best-known (though not always cheap) vendor is JNCS.
This is the approach one of my moderately-technical classmates took-- she was quite up for installing the OS, PCI cards, and drivers, but didn't trust herself to diagnose a machine that, say, wouldn't power-up initially.
As I recall,
the reseller installed the mobo and CPU in a case,
and she took it from there. That way she was able to spec out her own spiffy video-editing system without coping with the nail-biting parts. Not necessarily a bad approach for the first-time PC builder.
I'd be interested if you could show me someplace I could get a Dual Athalon MP 1600+ system w/ 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, 128 MB GeForce 4 Ti video card etc, complete w/ software for under $3000. I'd be interested in finding someplace mainstream that even builds a system like that.
I can't tell if that's supposed to be a rhetorical question.
In any case, I dunno if Adamant counts as "mainstream", but their site lets you configurethe system you described (with a Tyan mobo, 2 gigs of PC2100 memory,
80 gig IBM drive, DVD/CD-RW combo,
and el-cheapo floppy/sound/56k/100-baseT/kbd/mouse rings up
under $2k. Add an extra hundred bucks for Windows
if you want it; they'll also install Red Hat for $65.
I put my previous computer together from parts,
and, as other posters have described, got raked
over the coals on shipping. Plus, it was a pain to deal with all the little pieces you never think of:
Finding cables to connect the processor fans to the particular motherboard's power connectors. I had to rewire the ones I bought to match the polarity.
Finding cables to connect CD-ROM audio to the soundcard. I eventually gave up.
Making sure the PPro's had the right silicon revision to boot in SMP with the mobo's old BIOS. (Maybe this sort of thing is better now.)
Finding mounting hardware-- screws and washers-- to get the mobo to sit securely in the case. The ones that came with the mobo were the wrong gauge.
After being around for all this, my roommate bought a bare-bones system from Adamant. (I have no other affiliation, just a satisfied customer-once-removed.) Worked fine, had all the aforementioned knick-knacks included, and not that much more money, compared to the time I wasted on treasure hunts.
Of course, even after all that, I built my current system from parts, too-- what'd'ya want, I'm a geek after all...
Not just biometrics-- corporations too
on
National Biometric IDs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There's a better article from UPI
with more juicy tidbits on the new licenses
they want to saddle us with.
Apparently the bill "directs that the chip [on the license] be capable of accepting software for other applications, including those of private companies".
This isn't about security, it's a taxpayer-funded giveaway of your privacy to big corporations.
It'll save them a few bucks lost to fraud and
make this even more of an electronic nanny state.
Luckily the EFF
spokesman pointed out that "The real thrust... is so that the ID card or driver's license will be even more useful to commercial entities in terms of tracking consumers, doing consumer profiling, telemarketing -- all those kinds of things that people currently consider to be an invasion of privacy."
This has to be fought on the retail level.
Hopefully Joe and Jane Public have enough
love of freedom left to be skeptical of the
government fingerprinting them at the DMV.
If it turns out they don't, I'm ashamed of-- and afraid for-- my country.
To me, the use of Allconet that's just about
as cool (well, okay, almost as cool) as wireless
broadband to the home is that they've gotten
the local animal shelter on line. (The Cumberland Times-News had an article on this, mirrored here.
What that's meant is that, since people can easily
see what animals are up for adoption without
having to schlep down to the pound, the Allegheny
County animal shelter had 60% of its stray
animals adopted last year.
That's two or three times
the 20%-30% national average, which means a lot more happy kids, and a lot fewer wasted lives of animals. And it's a pretty low-tech process,
once you've got a Web connection: a volunteer takes digital pictures every morning and puts them on a Web page.
I'm a geek and I'm usually more wrapped up in orphaned hardware than orphaned animals,
but this made me kinda happy. Are other animal shelters doing this?
I am told by my DVD-fanatic friends
that the player to get is the Malata N996;
supposedly, cheaper Malatas and Apexes
also do the PAL <-> NTSC conversion,
but they skew the aspect ratio, and the N996
does a much better job.
Also supposedly, the N996, unlike lesser Malatas,
can't be modified to be Macrovision-free. Of course, I'd be copying all my DVDs digitally anyway.
I haven't verified any of these statements myself, though.
I have no affiliation with Malata and have never even used one, but if you Google for 'malata "code free dvd"' you'll get a bunch of information.
>the introduction of a national identity card does not imply the apocalyptic consequences you describe.
Fair enough, but I never claimed to be showing a logical implication. You don't need to tag and track every air molecule in order to say which way the wind is blowing.
And in this case it's blowing from Social Security cards being marked "Not For Identification" (dropped in 1972); to even gas, phone, and electric companies commonly demanding SSNs for service; to mandatory SSN-linked driver's licenses; to post-9/11 ID checks everywhere; to today's announcement and, in my opinion, on to where I've suggested.
Call it extrapolation if you prefer; but we are
rolling down that slippery slope, and I don't see
anything standing in the way.
Once biometric, SSN-linked driver's licenses
are in place, we'll be on the slippery slope
and ready to roll. It'll be so convenient to
require the ID, that just about everyplace will
require it... ballparks, trains, stores...
And once there are nifty little networked readers
in all these places, it'll be incredibly trivial
for Big Brother to track your movements--
hey, you had to give your SSN when you
bought that prepaid cell phone after the
PATRIOT II passed in 2003, right?
And, of course, Big Brother has lots of annoying
minions working in the IRS, local law enforcement,
and collections agencies, all of whom are going
to have much easier access to records than the law
would suggest.
This isn't the America I want to live in.
I want to live in a country
where the long arm of the law doesn't have
the resources to pursue anyone but the real baddies, by conventional means like the ones
we had five or ten years ago.
I want this for your sake.
I want you to be able to escape bad debts,
a warrant for your arrest on drug charges,
the ex-spouse with an unfair judgement against you. Right now you could change your name, move to another state, pay cash, and live quietly, and thankfully, never screwing up again.
But once all this is in place, you'll be sickly aware that you'll never manage to avoid the little red light on the ID-card scanner that'll bust you in a moment. Then you'll be more prone to a
violent solution to your desparate situation,
once escape and disappearance are no longer a realistic option. That's worse for my own safety.
(Of course, it'll please the Feds-- more of an excuse to clamp down on gun rights!)
I want to live in a country with a little breathing room, without an omnipresent electronic nanny state. Doesn't anybody else, in the country
of Patrick Henry and Tom Paine? Isn't anybody going to fight this?
I know that some of you, for your "safety", want to have a national ID card, national ID number, surveillance cameras, and face recognition everywhere. But isn't there a place, actually otherwise a really nice place, that you could move to? I think it's called "Europe".
Have there been any laws since the LaMacchia case that make priacy without profit a federal crime?
As far as I can tell, the "No Electronic Theft"
or NET act, making it illegal "to reproduce or distribute, including by electronic means, one or
more copyrighted works having a total retail value of more than $1,000." (description from this page) is now law. It seems that you can read it
here.
Now, it should be obvious to any reasonable person that 99% of the people who warez down software either can't afford to buy it, and so never would have bought it, or are just trying it out and will probably either buy it or decide it's crap and never run it again. Software "piracy" might not be a victimless crime, but it comes awfully close.
But there's a subtler, more chilling trend going on, too. It's already illegal to buy or sell a radio scanner that tunes the cellular frequencies;
you can't buy a wideband receiver unless you're the government (or live overseas; so much for the "land of the free"), and I believe you're not allowed to tune into alphanumeric pagers, though I can't find a reference for this. And the electromagnetic spectrum belongs to all of us, not the government, damnit; why can't I do what I want with the electrons running through my antenna on my property?
With these raids, they're telling us what we can and can't do with the bits that come down our cable modem; and with the truly chilling SSSCA and prohibitions on digital VCRs, they're going to prevent the computer and home electronics manufacturers from selling boxes that will even permit us from doing things they don't like with the bits.
It's still a pretty long way before Big Brother and the two-way, spying TV-- but that is the direction we are moving, and as annoying as it is that I'm not gonna be able to get warez as easily now, the broader implications are what really bug me.
The other "Emergence" was much more than a 6
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I got excited when I saw this review,
because I thought people had finally
noticed the other "Emergence", a
really great sci-fi book which earned author David R. Palmer two Hugo and one Nebula nominations.
It's hands-down the best post-holocaust SF I have ever read, but it is, incredibly, out of print. If you like this sort of SF, it's worth tracking down a copy.
Unfortunately, the author wrote one more book, "Threshold", and then disappeared entirely.
I don't know whether he passed away, ditched writing, or what, but it's a shame.
Its really time to either:
A) Do something about the slippery path we have slid on
or
B) Walk away from it, buy a huge ranch/estate/tract of land, start a community of like minded individuals, and ignore what the government does.
...there's a few hundred people out
right now at the park near the water tower
in Arlington. Pretty good view for being
so close to the city, and there were still
a fair amount of shooting stars when I left
about 4:45am Eastern.
Slashdot Mirror
> I'm still flabbergasted that he was using servers in the U.S.
He may have used some servers in the U.S. but the server the FBI grabbed was overseas. From the complaint, page 14, item 22:
There's a list of U.S. Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties here. Who's got a guess?
I only support this if it can eventually make Maciej Ceglowski's awesome Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel a reality, so that we can finally get decent burritos on the East Coast:
Though there are interesting speech recognition products for other applications ; for this task Dragon and IBM ViaVoice, both sold by ScanSoft, are pretty much the only software choices until someone qualified gets an NSF grant to beef up Sphinx.
I can second the recommendation of the LDC's XTrans if you're going to do this yourself.
If you want someone else to do it, here are a lot of podcasters who want transcripts, and a bunch of transcription services have sprung up to address the market. They've already implemented a lot of the quality-control mechanisms you'd have to address in order to get good results from something like the Mechnical Turk.
The Wall Street Journal ran a side-by-side comparison back in 2008 and recommended castingwords.com, but another provider may very well be better by now. Shop around.
If you just want an extremely basic program to make 2-dimenstion bar, line, or scatter graphs, xgraph is about as bare-bones simple as they come.
It runs on any Unix and dumps PostScript output files. Sometimes anything more is overkill.
You sound like someone who goes spouting off without knowing the facts of the matter. According to the Seattle Times, Bobby's passport was revoked without his knowledge before its expiration date.
When you consider that the US government itself massively violated the UN sanctions by shipping arms to the Bosnian Muslim separatists, Fischer certainly seems to have a moral leg to stand on if not a legal one.
And while Bobby was just playing a chess match, the Feds were shipping huge amounts of arms to their favorite players in the region, the separatist Bosnian Muslims. As the Guardian newspaper in England documented :
Just as the trial of Slobodan Milosevic is exposing the fact that most of the claims used to justify the US's Kosovo war were bogus, maybe poor Fischer's inevitable trial will expose the lies told to justify the Bosnian war.
Now that it's been revealed that al-Qaeda members were fighting for the Bosnian Muslims, maybe the USA will acknowledge their mistaken policy, apologize to poor Bobby, and let him go.
Yeah, right. Being an Empire means never having to say you're sorry.
First of all, to say that "Yugoslavia" caused the Bosnian war is as meaningless as saying that the United States caused the (U.S.) Civil War.
The Bosnian war started because some leaders of the Bosnian Muslims-- who as a people had historically been pro-Yugoslav-- wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and start their own Islamic state, and to impose Islamic law on all the people living there-- including the ethnic Serbs and Croats who made up a majority of the population. This was all detailed in their president Izetbegovic's "Islamic Declaration". Along with taking advantage of all the usual Muslim suspects-- including Osama's right-hand man al-Harbi-- who flocked there to fight the jihad, the Bosnian president also recreated a WWII-era SS Division to help in the fight.
A history lesson, since falcon5768 and probably others need it: hundreds of thousands of Serbian civilians were murdered in concentration camps during WWII, when they were on the Allied side while the Bosnians and Croats were allied with the Nazis. Memories are long in that part of the world, and Islamic law is not much fun either-- so is it any wonder that not just Serbs but moderate Muslims like took up arms to prevent the secession of Bosnia, or at least keep their own land out from under the thumb of Izetbegovic and his cronies?
I am confused why you say that the Bosnian war "DID kill US and UN troops". What US or UN troops were in the region? And as for the "mass slaughter" of Muslims at Srebrenica, the story is now starting to leak out that it's not so clear-cut as that-- most of the bodies have never shown up, and many of the dead turned out to be the troops of Muslim warlord Nasr Oric, who would use the UN-protected "safe areas" as a base from which to launch raids involving beheadings of prisoners... sound familiar?
The most laughable part of your post (and, by extension, the US's case against Bobby Fischer) is when you go on about how the sanctions were meant to prevent the world from contributing to the war. Of course, as the Guardian newspaper in England documented (much later after it was no longer inconvenient for the facts to come out), the US government was violating the embargo all along:
The reason you, and so many other people, hold this inaccurate and deluded view of the Bosnian war, is attributable mostly to the really top-notch propaganda war waged in the U.S. and U.K. media, making the Bosnian Muslims out to be the wonderful, multicultural good guys and the Serbs the baddies. It doesn't matter that so much of the lies have now been exposed-- like
Answers to lots of your questions at quantum.bbn.com, which is the actual document repository used by the development team. I think it's pretty cool that they make so much material publically available. There's also an overview linked from the BBN homepage.
Of course, this was in late 1997 when AAPL stock was around its all-time low, under ten bucks a share. Pretty soon the iMac came out, and the stock was up almost tenfold over the next few years as the tech boom hit. It's still at almost quadruple those "death" levels.
When the conventional wisdom is so unanimous, it's often wrong.
Buy SUNW?
Erm, maybe on your planet. Here on Earth, there as many different kind of "tough times" and potential layoff situations as there are employers.
Some companies are facing a temporary cash crunch; some are facing dwindling market share; some are planning to trim or refocus their business; and some just want to outsource everything with legs and without an MBA to India. Your advice really only works for about one and a half of those situations.
For instance, a good friend of mine used to write the code that provisioned and monitored the VPN infrastructure for a now-defunct telecom operation. She made it through several rounds of layoffs by doing not only her own job, but those of employees on whom the axe had fallen. But she lost her job when they dumped the whole VPN operation. Instead of being "a rock of stability" and taking care of those VPN customers (your item #2) she should have bailed on the group and gotten into something with a brighter future, like their nascent VoIP operation, which lasted a while longer before Ch. 11. Better yet, she should have bailed on the whole company while there were still telecom jobs to be had.
And about your item #1, "be a profit center", some savvy people I know at another local tech company did their level best to get into sysadmin and support work when profits started to shrink. Layoffs hit the developers whose groups were not brining in revenue, but support staff had already been budgeted for and their jobs were left intact. Sometimes, be a cost center.
When layoffs are in the cards, remember that it doesn't matter how much your employer likes you. All that will get you is a nicer going-away lunch, or maybe an extra couple weeks of severance, if your manager can bend the rules. You have to make sure your employer needs you, in order to survive.
The best way I have found to do this, is to make sure that your particular job function is as closely aligned with your employer's main line of business as possible. That wil tie your success most closely with the company's success, make them more anxious to make sure that you have what you need in order to succeed, and make it more likely that laying you off would be seen as cutting into the "meat" or "bone" of a company rather than "trimming the fat", in the usual overused metaphor. In other words, if you are going to be a sysadmin, don't do it at a management consulting firm. If you want to work at a consulting firm, be a consultant-- and if you want to be a sysadmin, try to find a job at a dedicated sysadmin shop that businesses outsource their sysadmin work to.
Hey, didn't I just contradict my argument above that sysadmin and other support staff might be safe in a layoff? Yep, that's my point: every situation is different.
Some highlights:
- The card sticks out of the computer with two antennas poking up.
- It uses an NSA encryption algorithm called BATON (from various
stuff on the Web, I get the impression that BATON is a 64-bit block
cipher with 128-bit keys that is designed for very fast operation)
- the message address is encrypted to prevent traffic analysis (this
is a big selling point against VPN technology)
- Each packet has an 80-bit IV (it's rare to learn even that much
about a Type 1 encryption system)
- Cards cost over $2500 each. That's 30 times the price of a commercial WiFi card, but cheaper
than traditional NSA encryption data products which seem to run
around $5K per node.
- "Red keys" are loaded via a special cable that connects to a data
transfer device such as the CYZ-10.
I wonder how much work it would be for someone to implement a commercial version of this using Rijndael, or AES, or something unclassified. With a larger market than the government, maybe it could be cheaper, and the development costs made up on volume...Let's face it, it's a pain to set up IPSEC on all your boxes...
I am not sure what they are in your language.
Hmm, a naked assertion doesn't make it so.
Especially when you're an AC.
The Chicago Manual of Style says that
so far as it can be done without confusion, single or multiple letters used as words . . . form the plural by adding 's' alone. Abbreviations with periods, lowercase letters used as nouns, and capital letters that would be confusing if 's' alone were added form the plural with an apostrophe and an 's.'
So, I wouldn't give you straight A's for spelling (nor a job as a copy editor),
but at least I won't make you buy crippled bogus non-CDs.
It's from 1994 and thus the pre-MMX, pre-P6 world, and it is not especially well written (although not bad), but there is a good discussion of segmentation and of which instructions pair in the Pentium's different pipelines, and it really walks you though optimizing a bunch of code.
I think some of it might well be useful relative to the ten bucks it's going for on half.com. (Actually, I found it remaindered for $4.00 at the Cambridge, Mass Micro Center, so you may do a little better too.)
Today's processors smoke themselves pretty fast if you run them without the heatsink/fan attached properly. (I forget how long the Athlon is supposed to take to burn up, but IIRC it's something like 10 or 15 seconds.)
To cope with that, there are some PC shops who will install the processor in the motherboard, power it up to test it, and them ship the assembled unit, often with some memory. You'll often see this advertised as a "bundle". Perhaps the best-known (though not always cheap) vendor is JNCS.
This is the approach one of my moderately-technical classmates took-- she was quite up for installing the OS, PCI cards, and drivers, but didn't trust herself to diagnose a machine that, say, wouldn't power-up initially.
As I recall, the reseller installed the mobo and CPU in a case, and she took it from there. That way she was able to spec out her own spiffy video-editing system without coping with the nail-biting parts. Not necessarily a bad approach for the first-time PC builder.
In any case, I dunno if Adamant counts as "mainstream", but their site lets you configurethe system you described (with a Tyan mobo, 2 gigs of PC2100 memory, 80 gig IBM drive, DVD/CD-RW combo, and el-cheapo floppy/sound/56k/100-baseT/kbd/mouse rings up under $2k. Add an extra hundred bucks for Windows if you want it; they'll also install Red Hat for $65.
I put my previous computer together from parts, and, as other posters have described, got raked over the coals on shipping. Plus, it was a pain to deal with all the little pieces you never think of:
After being around for all this, my roommate bought a bare-bones system from Adamant. (I have no other affiliation, just a satisfied customer-once-removed.) Worked fine, had all the aforementioned knick-knacks included, and not that much more money, compared to the time I wasted on treasure hunts.
Of course, even after all that, I built my current system from parts, too-- what'd'ya want, I'm a geek after all...
Apparently the bill "directs that the chip [on the license] be capable of accepting software for other applications, including those of private companies".
This isn't about security, it's a taxpayer-funded giveaway of your privacy to big corporations. It'll save them a few bucks lost to fraud and make this even more of an electronic nanny state.
Luckily the EFF spokesman pointed out that "The real thrust... is so that the ID card or driver's license will be even more useful to commercial entities in terms of tracking consumers, doing consumer profiling, telemarketing -- all those kinds of things that people currently consider to be an invasion of privacy."
And the Center for Democracy and Technology calls it a "honeypot".
This has to be fought on the retail level. Hopefully Joe and Jane Public have enough love of freedom left to be skeptical of the government fingerprinting them at the DMV. If it turns out they don't, I'm ashamed of-- and afraid for-- my country.
What that's meant is that, since people can easily see what animals are up for adoption without having to schlep down to the pound, the Allegheny County animal shelter had 60% of its stray animals adopted last year.
That's two or three times the 20%-30% national average, which means a lot more happy kids, and a lot fewer wasted lives of animals.
And it's a pretty low-tech process, once you've got a Web connection: a volunteer takes digital pictures every morning and puts them on a Web page.
I'm a geek and I'm usually more wrapped up in orphaned hardware than orphaned animals, but this made me kinda happy.
Are other animal shelters doing this?
Here you go. (Slogan: Tired of flushing twice?)
Apparently the toilets are shipped from the Canadian side of Niagara falls, for $70. Ironically, one of the brands they sell is "American Standard".
They're actually imported legally, which makes sense-- toilets would seem kinda tough to smuggle.
supposedly, cheaper Malatas and Apexes also do the PAL <-> NTSC conversion,
but they skew the aspect ratio, and the N996 does a much better job.
Also supposedly, the N996, unlike lesser Malatas, can't be modified to be Macrovision-free.
Of course, I'd be copying all my DVDs digitally anyway.
I haven't verified any of these statements myself, though.
I have no affiliation with Malata and have never even used one, but if you Google for 'malata "code free dvd"' you'll get a bunch of information.
Fair enough, but I never claimed to be showing a logical implication. You don't need to tag and track every air molecule in order to say which way the wind is blowing.
And in this case it's blowing from Social Security cards being marked "Not For Identification" (dropped in 1972); to even gas, phone, and electric companies commonly demanding SSNs for service; to mandatory SSN-linked driver's licenses; to post-9/11 ID checks everywhere; to today's announcement and, in my opinion, on to where I've suggested.
Call it extrapolation if you prefer; but we are rolling down that slippery slope, and I don't see anything standing in the way.
And once there are nifty little networked readers in all these places, it'll be incredibly trivial for Big Brother to track your movements-- hey, you had to give your SSN when you bought that prepaid cell phone after the PATRIOT II passed in 2003, right?
And, of course, Big Brother has lots of annoying minions working in the IRS, local law enforcement, and collections agencies, all of whom are going to have much easier access to records than the law would suggest.
This isn't the America I want to live in. I want to live in a country where the long arm of the law doesn't have the resources to pursue anyone but the real baddies, by conventional means like the ones we had five or ten years ago.
I want this for your sake. I want you to be able to escape bad debts, a warrant for your arrest on drug charges, the ex-spouse with an unfair judgement against you. Right now you could change your name, move to another state, pay cash, and live quietly, and thankfully, never screwing up again.
But once all this is in place, you'll be sickly aware that you'll never manage to avoid the little red light on the ID-card scanner that'll bust you in a moment. Then you'll be more prone to a violent solution to your desparate situation, once escape and disappearance are no longer a realistic option. That's worse for my own safety.
(Of course, it'll please the Feds-- more of an excuse to clamp down on gun rights!)
I want to live in a country with a little breathing room, without an omnipresent electronic nanny state.
Doesn't anybody else, in the country of Patrick Henry and Tom Paine? Isn't anybody going to fight this?
I know that some of you, for your "safety", want to have a national ID card, national ID number, surveillance cameras, and face recognition everywhere. But isn't there a place, actually otherwise a really nice place, that you could move to? I think it's called "Europe".
As far as I can tell, the "No Electronic Theft" or NET act, making it illegal "to reproduce or distribute, including by electronic means, one or more copyrighted works having a total retail value of more than $1,000." (description from this page) is now law. It seems that you can read it here.
Now, it should be obvious to any reasonable person that 99% of the people who warez down software either can't afford to buy it, and so never would have bought it, or are just trying it out and will probably either buy it or decide it's crap and never run it again. Software "piracy" might not be a victimless crime, but it comes awfully close.
So why are the feds so concerned about it? Could be just that the adbusters people are right, and the corporations' interests override common sense and the public interest (like, having the FBI spend its time on actual threats to public safety rather than warez mavens, most of whom would probably never hurt a fly.)
But there's a subtler, more chilling trend going on, too. It's already illegal to buy or sell a radio scanner that tunes the cellular frequencies; you can't buy a wideband receiver unless you're the government (or live overseas; so much for the "land of the free"), and I believe you're not allowed to tune into alphanumeric pagers, though I can't find a reference for this. And the electromagnetic spectrum belongs to all of us, not the government, damnit; why can't I do what I want with the electrons running through my antenna on my property?
With these raids, they're telling us what we can and can't do with the bits that come down our cable modem; and with the truly chilling SSSCA and prohibitions on digital VCRs, they're going to prevent the computer and home electronics manufacturers from selling boxes that will even permit us from doing things they don't like with the bits.
It's still a pretty long way before Big Brother and the two-way, spying TV-- but that is the direction we are moving, and as annoying as it is that I'm not gonna be able to get warez as easily now, the broader implications are what really bug me.
It's hands-down the best post-holocaust SF I have ever read, but it is, incredibly, out of print. If you like this sort of SF, it's worth tracking down a copy.
Unfortunately, the author wrote one more book, "Threshold", and then disappeared entirely. I don't know whether he passed away, ditched writing, or what, but it's a shame.
A) Do something about the slippery path we have slid on
or
B) Walk away from it, buy a huge ranch/estate/tract of land, start a community of like minded individuals, and ignore what the government does.
A group of people trying to do a little of both can be found at http://www.freestateproject.com/.
Here's the mapquest link