It's the main reason they replaced nicads in most applications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect

Except for the whole point that they fired him for refusing to give them the passwords? It's a matter of public record at this point. He could have easily asked for a waiver from them to indicate they understand the risks and it would have been done, in addition to the paper and digital trail where they requested the passwords.

He also could have raised concerns to H.R. who would have been obligated to note his concerns in his file.

This guy is an idiot.

They didn't 'misplace' them. They knew exactly where they were placed. Obviously they did not have the passwords in their possession, hence the very reason for this man's arrest. They don't require that he 'wipe his memory'. The law does require that he surrender the information.

It is well established that inventions or other IP created while under the employee of a company are the exclusive property of said company. There are countless cases that state this VERY clearly. He doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.

By your logic, he could write the passwords down and bury it in some hidden location on their property to claim they are in possession. The law would laugh you out of court (and I daresay you know it).

On a side note: Yes, your explaining it 'horribly badly'.

Games for Windows is a scourge. I don't know anyone who actually likes it. Games that use it typically are ports from the 360 (Fallout 3, Dirt 2, Gears of War to name a few). It only runs when the game is running (a blessing or a curse, depending on your point of view). Steam is far more popular in my circle of friends because you can just hop in to a TF2 server or get invited to a L4D game without having the game running already. Also, Steam DRM tends to suck less than the GfW DRM.

I finished an IT security & Responsibility training day on friday and heres what i learned.

In my company any passwords i have for any part of the system are my property and my responsability to maintain and protect.

My boss can not ask me for my passwords, in order for him to gain access to my system he has to go through an 'e-share' system of approval from our IT department and they allow or disallow it based on his actual need to access my files.

If my employment is terminated for anything other than misconduct i get a months notice and in that time i have to wind down any operations im involved in and hand over the keys to whoever is taking my place.

---
In the case of misconduct my pc is confiscated and im escorted from the building. The pc is sent to a data retreival company and any/all relevant info is sent back to employer and then the pc is wiped and returned.

2 weeks later i get a box in the mail with my personal effects left in my desk.

---

Now i havent been fired yet ;) but i know someone who has gone through the process and from all the companies ive worked in this company is my favorite for IT security.

I've been keeping track of Terry's case and i fully support his decision not to hand over passwords to critical systems to someone who was
a) Not authorised to have them
b) Not qualified to maintain the system they belong to

MythTV allows you to record programs and the commercials are automatically skipped without even needing a button press.

A couple of things....

First, encryption doesn't guarantee privacy - it just makes it more difficult to read the contents of something. It's a constant one-upping as we use better encryption techniques and get better technology.

The best encryption will probably be laughable in 20 years. Probably less. Look at WEP. Less than 10 years for that to be considered worthless.

From wikipedia....
"...no public-key encryption scheme has been shown to be secure against eavesdroppers with unlimited computational power. Proofs of security for asymmetric key cryptography therefore hold only with respect to computationally-limited adversaries"

So, really, what I've said is correct. It's just a question of degree. If you want to be president of the United States when you are 55, what you said back in an 'encrypted' e-mail when you were 19 about how you hate ______ people; well, that could come back to bite you. Theoretically.

Second, the public key/private key system isn't perfect for the same reason that PGP doesn't really work that great. If you want to communicate with someone you need for *them* to already have a public key.

Let's say you are a famous person, like Tiger Woods and you want to chat up the hottie you met at a golf tournament - and you don't want anyone to see it. Well, the odds of her having a public key/private key pair setup so that you can e-mail her and have her read it....virtually zero.

Third - There have already been demonstrable exploits to SSL. I understand that SSL is just one type of asymmetric encryption; but it's probably the most relevant to our discussion.

Here's an article about one of them.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/kaminsky/

The catch there, isn't that they've managed to crack the encryption algorithm or any of that jazz; but they've found a way around it. It works. It allowed them to impersonate others and get vital, supposedly safe thanks to our asymmetric encryption, data. So, I guess it's only as good as the weakest link?

Fourth - the encryption only protects the content of your message *in transmission*. So, even if that hottie you hit on behind your wife's back does have a public key and can decrypt your encrypted message....you have no control over the security of her PC. It could be compromised in a number of ways. And, if you are a typical user (IE - non techy) there is a reasonable chance that your computer is compromised. And, then you've got the whole 'the recipient' can make copies of whatever you sent. They can decrypt it and post it on the internet, forward it to everyone, take a screen shot, pull out a digital camera and take a picture of the screen and mail it out to everyone.

Bottom line is, nothing we've got even comes close to a guaranteed, lasting, privacy solution.

Not to mention you can’t have it both ways... rape is higher in the US because we suppress sexuality, and homicide is higher because we indulge in violent movies?

Does suppressing something encourage it, or does not suppressing it encourage it? If you’re arguing for one, you have a problem with the other.

The only logical conclusion is that suppressing or not suppressing something in the media has very little influence on whether people actually engage in those sorts of behaviours.

You couldn't buy it because 2-strokes put out much worse NOx emissions due to burning oil by design. Those kinds of emissions are regulated more heavily in the US than Europe. Oil injection/direct injection helps with this, but NOx regulations keep getting tighter, especially in California. Not just because California is a nanny state (although that's part of it), but also because they have some of the smoggiest cities in the world due to geography.

2-strokes also have a very tight power curve due to losing some of the fresh charge out the exhaust up until exhaust harmonics kick in to push it back. The Lotus design here specifically addresses that problem with a mechanism to shut the exhaust port before the cylinder rises to cover it. Quite clever!

I'm surprised this is coming out of Lotus. They're normally thought of as a chassis company, not a powertrain company. They build supercars with an engine out of a Corolla, after all.

Not really. The State still mandates that the owner of the pipes (BGE) must continue to meet the same level of service as prior to 2000. So really, the electrical monopoly is just as regulated as ever - but now we have multiple choices like we have with telephone

Comcast is a government-granted monopoly. The flaw is with government. Ask your leaders to revoke the monopoly, and allow other competitors to enter the market (like Verizon, AT&T, Cox, Charter, ...).
.

>>>What's wrong with having the government define broadband as anything over 768Kbps down and 200Kbps up?

Why does some redneck living on top of a Vermont mountain need faster than 768k? More importantly: Why should I pay for it with higher taxes/subsidies? Let the hillbilly move closer to the city if he wants faster service. Or stay put and get, as a minimum, 768k and stop whining.

Next you're going to demand the government hook-up the hillbilly with city water and sewer. Nonsense. It's not my job to provide city-level service to people who *choose* to live in the country. ----- The EU state of Spain mandates 1 Mbit/s minimum. Ditto the state of Sweden. I see nothing wrong with the U.S. being in the same 768k-1.5 Mbit/s range as a minimum broadband requirement.

Oh and as for the rest of the world "laughing at us", I disagree. The U.S. is not doing bad at all. Here are the internet speeds, averaged across the entire population, for the various continent-level federations around the world. As you can see the U.S. is right near the top, and has nothing to feel shame for:

Russian Federation 8.3 Mbit/s
U.S. 7.0
E.U. 6.6
Canada 5.7
Australia 5.1
China 3.0
Brazil 2.1
Mexico 1.1 Mbit/s

Clusty is by far the best search engine.

So is Clusty the crown of search?

*GROAN*

By having one wikileaks in a place not covered by US laws and another covered by US laws. What is the law for placing subdomains with a separate hosting provider broad by the way? Lets say us.wikileaks.org was hosted in France and www.wikileaks.org was hosted in the USA?

Another option might be to place a wikileaks on Freenet, and simply place references to the content on the wikileaks website.

There is a large shopping mall in Birmingham, UK that uses face recognition. It also uses RFID and collects details of who these people are when they make a transaction using a credit or debit card. System copes with over 1 million in footfall each week.

don't know about cellular network, but in MD taxes paid for Verizon's eastern shore fiber infrastructure. Last I checked my internet costs didn't go down because my taxes were paying for the infrastructure that would be generating profit for Verizon over the next 20 years.

IMHO taxes should never be used to buy infrastructure for private companies, ever. If they won't service a particular area, don't bribe them, tell them to serve the state or don't serve the state. If they won't, revoke their license to do business, kick them out and open the market up for someone that will.

That kind of crap pisses me off...