Cumulonimbus

Im not privy to billing discussions unfortunately. I know how we get the certs; we just tell our contact that we need a long cert for X machine, and 2-3 days later, it shows up in our email.

It's a pain,but we have only 14 machines we oversee, with 3 year certs on each. Nagios takes care of alerts within 60 days, so we can easily get the request in time.

Fortunately (and unfortunately) all the way up to the assistant vice president came from software engineers and systems engineers. So when Comodo did their little scam, the AVP called bullshit on them and told them off. (The unfortunately is that some of the higher ups are technically exceptional, they have low regard of people skills).

We're on LE for 90%. There's a client (there always is...) that demands Network Solutions certs. Yet they cannot put to words why that's their need, other than stupid bullyish business practices.

We're still trying to wrap our heads how LE plans to offer wildcards.. But I digress.

Indeed.

I worked at a factory that had me do the following:

Put bracket in machine. Press button to tap holes. Repeat.

I got the loop down to about 3.85 seconds which was 115% faster than the engineers said I could do.

I found I could listen to audiobooks at that job. It still didn't stop the existential dread. I worked there for 2 months before finding a better place.

But it's not forcing identities, or it wasn't back in the day.

Were you black? It didn't matter. White? So what. Male? Female? It didn't matter.

The words on the screen, and the thoughts behind the superficial bodily stuff was what mattered. How did they think? How did they communicate their ideas? How did they collaborate? What were their ethics and values? -- Those were what mattered, not that someone had a blue mohawk and were bisexual. Those things didn't matter.

Better yet, this method also transcended poor and rich... Yes, you had to have a certain amount to access a computer and the internet. Or you hacked the local university's access. Or used it at the library. Or had a cool friend. Except, now it's what you think, not what stylish clothes you wore, or the jewelry you had.

And this blurring of gender, sexual preference, race, weight, height,.. you name it was distilled down to "what's in that skull". And someone whom you might never walk up to and talk with, you could strike conversations with them, and they you. It also was the first steps of breaking down national borders - I could talk with people who say they live in Europe, or Asia, or Africa, or wherever...

At that time, for a small window, "We" were one peoples of this world. As the Hacker's Manifesto put it;

"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals."

I await this day to come again. Hopefully the next time, we can meet face to face, and celebrate our differences and come together as one peoples of this world.. But a few of us saw it the first time, for a bit.

This is an interesting area, with lots of opinion on implementations. It gets messy, and quick.

So it's normally part of the ADA to make things accessible. But with building, one can retrofit an older building that wasn't accessible with a certain percentage, and still avoid ADA compliance. I had that discussion in an architecture class, how to strictly comply with the law, whilst still skirting around it. The ADA as far as I know also applies to online as well, but the percentage change of a building doesn't really have an analogue with online.

The justification was purely money - disabled people work lower wage jobs, and aren't worth the money spent in upgrading a facility. It's disgusting logic, but there you have it.

I also think of DRM. It prevents end users from fair use (and also carte blanch copying).. Yet it also prevents converting the audio track to text with something like Sphinx. And with the deaf/hard of hearing, many sites prevent downloading and transcribing automatically. Youtube is trying with automatic transcription, and it certainly is a start. It's still hard, given the amount of sounds that are non-spoken that CC incorporates (sound of drums far away) (eerie music with footsteps).

And as mjevans said, what about an individual who releases content and doesn't have the resources to do ADA compliance? Is the correct answer is to ban said content? That seems to go in a really wrong direction as well. But we saw this earlier with (I forget which university) whom deleted all their videos primarily because they were dumped free online, without closed captioning. Instead, we all lost.

And as a developer, how do I determine how to write something that's disability friendly? It seems that flat text HTML with pictures and little/no JS seem to be the way. With pictures, include a alt text with a general description. With a video, include a transcript. Make sure the website will work effectively with Lynx because screen scrapers will tab through when reading.... But can I be sure that the above is correct? One thing I'm sure of, is that I'm missing a great deal of stuff. Red/Green or Blue/Yellow colorblindness, reduced vision, font issues (dyslexic fonts), Captcha handicap issues, and plenty more. How can I guarantee that I'm not just complying with the law, but makes my site usable? As far as I can tell, make a good attempt and wait for a lawsuit.

Then again, coming back to what was told of us in class - its an ugly "formula", but the disabled don't offer much in the way of economic gain, so why is there a reason to cater to them? (No, it's not what I believe, but a hard set of rules that people like Architects consider with regards to pricing with clients. I see no reason why this financial rubric isn't also considered online.)

I remember quite some time ago, before Social networks. Before blogs. Before all of what we think of the WWW.

We were still in Web 1.0 , with email, usenet, IRC, and other then-essential services. Dial-up was the way online. And when people talked with each other, we were told to not release who we are. Be guarded in your real-identity.

And that lead to user1 talks with user2. I didn't know if user2 was white, black, asian, hispanic, native, male, female, transgender, gay, asexual, or what. I only knew from the content of the text we traded in communication. There was enough bandwidth for pictures, but didnt. Webcams were bad and expensive. Scanners were hard to come by. And there was no impetus to link a pic to a person's text.

Now, it's "Real Name Policy". Facebook will encourage friends to rat your lying profile to catch you. Google will do similar, or datamine your real content. Everyone wants a picture for your profile.

What used to be "person talks to person", is now "Person with forced specific identity talks to person with forced specific identity". And it certainly doesn't feel better than before. It feels strictly worse, bringing identity politics in with it.

I want the old days back.

Before we can consider seeding terrestrial stations on Mars, we should consider seeding a communications net around Mars. Once we have a half dozen satellites circling Mars, we can start stable comms from the surface to orbit to Earth. It may take 10-20 minutes (for a signal to be received), but the communication is the essential piece here.

I'd also consider putting satellites in Earth and Mars lagrange L3, L4, and L5. It's the start of a solar system based internet, even if it is rudimentary. Think of this as a store-and-forward network where signals may be too weak for Earth to pick up, but can hit Jupiter L5 to Mars planet, to Earth L3.

And greetings, all, BTW.