Now not only does the NSA keep track of most of the meta data on our emails and phone calls, now the FCC has a way to send a message to everyone who has a phone. What's next? . . .

And I like the government.

Send your thoughts to the FCC and the President

In theater metal flaps called barn doors are used to control where light falls. Flood lights typically have a very wide beam pattern. You could mount a flap of metal at the top of the fixture to limit how far out the light projects. If your problem is just with a neighbor's single window then a square of opaque material mounted on a very stiff wire and then adjusted to block the light to that window would work.

The other approach is down light. Use a more focused flood light and mount it higher and aim it down so excess light does not spill into your neighbor's windows.

Personally I have a different solution. Since I want light for walking around in my yard, I use battery powered motion detector LED lights. These are small units you mount on the wall. When you walk under them they light up. The only problem is that you have to change the batteries every year or two. But this is a lot cheaper than running a flood light all night long. The units I use are Megabright MB-DLM-83, http://www.amerasiaenterprises.com./ They are nice because the LED lighting head flips down so you can mount them vertically and shine the light on the ground. I still have conventional outdoor lighting for when I am working outside at night.

My first computer was in Sun's tech support group. A machine call onefive. It was an original Sun1 system with a 68000 CPU and 500 Kb of memory. I was low man on the totem pole and this was what was left over. But I thought it was better than a Wyse-50 terminal. It was kept around to support customers who had not had their systems upgraded to the new Sun2 68010 multibus board sets. SunOS 0.9 was a Uniplex (I think) port of Bell Labs Version 7. It had no window system but it did have TCP/IP networking. But it was OK, I was the trade show equipment guy so I had a herd of Sun 2/120's out in the cage that I could work on. Back then the convention at Sun was to name hosts after things that fly or things in the sky. As I recall each department had different themes. Engineering was day time, tech support was night time. But I may be wrong about this. Since I had an ever changing pool of workstations I choose Rudolf and the 7 reindeer to give me a pool of 8 hostnames.

I remember before my first trade show working in the cage doing simple things like ls, cd, mkdir and tar while Dave Cardinal and Pat McEvoy sat next tome and madly hacking the Imagen lpr printer driver because all they had was a Version 7 driver and SunOS was Berkeley Unix and we were shipping the servers and Imagen's new dry toner laser printer (with old Sun1 CPU boards in the printer electronics) the next day. Aha... those were the days.

I got an Apple TV for my parents. The remote was so small that my dad could not hold it (fine motor skills problems). And neither of them had much luck in understanding how to use it. They use a Roku now and it works much better for them.

Game collections like my old Sun2/3 workstations will appreciate over time. But they will go from almost no value to a little value. A quote that comes to mind is about investing in artwork:
"You had better really like it because you may wind up owning it for a very long time"

A common jail house saying that all criminal hackers should ponder.

I think the uproar around google glass is that it is causing the public to think about the privacy implications of possible pervasive video recording of their activities.
This is not a new problem. Ugly video glasses, cellphones with cameras for example. The press attention around these was mostly as an oddity:
"These could be used for . . ."
Google glass is more like ipads and smart phones which became ubiquitous in a very short period of time.

criminal != privacy.

When some uses heroin they are breaking the law. I probably can not sell a picture of someone shooting up without their permission (privacy). But the courts can use that picture to prove an activity by a person (criminal).

For me, free snacks are a minus. I am trying to keep a handle on my weight. And I will admit it, I have very little control over eating food with lots of calories. I.e. most snacks. I manage it personally by not having any junk food at home.

Snacks at work make it too easy to say "Oh, I will only have one..."

What a pleasant surprise to see Congress asking intelligent questions about a technical topic. I think we should encourage this type of thinking.

So when the sales person calls me from their cell phone and I make a contact from his call, what number do I store? His cellphone number or the internal number I am supposed to call?

Not much of an issue for devops folks but a big issue in sales and marketing.
I wonder if companies allow a sales phone number be switch to a competitor when the sales person switches jobs. This is what happens when Jane changes jobs.

Customer of company A calls Jane who has just gone to company B:
Jane: "Hi Sam, I am glad you called. I now work for B and let me tell you how their product is much better for you..."

There are other jobs like customer support that have similar problems. In this case you want your customers when they call the cell phone to reach someone who works for the company.

The above problems also apply to IM handles.

I have used free software starting with inews on the extra tape archive on the SunOS (not Solaris) 1.X and 2.X 1/4" QIC cartridge boot tapes.

The FSF with its devotion to making everything it touches be free of copyright restrictions and to require you to publish any code that touches the FSF code has relegated itself to irrelevance. A $54 USB WIFI adaptor. Whoopdedo.

I have moved on. Most of the open source software i use has a far less restrictive Berkeley or Apache style license.

I have a Roku box attached to my TV. It is always on and always connected. Since I got the box, I have thought this dangerous. (but I leave it on . . .)

The article quotes TechAmerica's director of California government affairs Robert Callahan stated that a 2005 California privacy law already enables consumers to ask what personal information companies are using.

Does anyone know what this law is and how to use it?