OnCorp recently introduced a new product called SkipTrace. It is essentially a search of the TeleDirect phone data, or something similar that they say is current to 24 hours, that has severe limitations.
Searching by name is nearly useless because it only displays 14 entries for the searched name. The fact that you must know at least the province to go with a name, or the province AND city to go with an address, defeats the purpose. In essence, you have to know what phone book the person appears in to find him. If you knew that, then you wouldn’t need to spend $10 for the search.
Its redeaming feature may be that it allows reverse searching of a phone number. If it is truly current to within 24 hours, then this is something available nowhere else.
It seems that truly usable hardware encryption is beginning to emerge as a practical data safeguard. Seagate DriveTrust Technology integrates encryption into the drive itself by using the unaddressable part of the drive to store the encryption keys, unlike software encryption where you have keys floating around the OS.
This certainly makes laptops more secure, but data recovery will be much more complicated if the drive becomes damaged. However, it seems that hardware encrypted laptop drives will become common in a couple years with a large manufacturer like Seagate committed to the technology.
Handwriting is an important but severely neglected skill; yet we encounter the problems of lost productivity resulting from poor writing almost daily. However, we seem unable to address this problem effectively at any level of our society. This is not a new problem. Solutions do exist. We need to adopt the simple methods used in the renaissance to correct our handwriting in the computer age.
If you don’t think this is a problem consider this: Roman Vasquez of Monahans Texas who died a few years ago when his doctor prescribed Isordil, a heart drug, but the pharmasist read it as Plendil. The Vasquez family won a $450,000 judgement.
According to the Institute of Medicine, prescription, errors kill 7000 Americans every year. Continue reading ‘Handwriting Repair’
A PRIVATE school is insisting pupils use fountain pens, in an attempt to save the dying art of handwriting.Mary Erskine and Stewart’s Melville junior school in Edinburgh believes longhand is on the brink of extinction, thanks to text messaging and computers.
Bryan Lewis, the school’s headmaster, has banned the use of rollerball pens and pencils by pupils from P5 onwards. The school believes that mastering stylish handwriting with a fountain pen raises academic performance and boosts self-esteem.
Mr Lewis believes the problem to be so acute that new staff often have to be given lessons in how to write before entering the classroom to teach.
The move comes after Scottish Qualifications Agency examiners said markers were encountering problems on exam papers due to illegible handwriting.
LINK
Thoughts on How Lincoln’s Electric Communications Came to Affect Mine
By Tom Wheeler
I began writing Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails based on the thesis that Abraham Lincoln’s telegrams made him the first online president. As I watched Lincoln’s use of the telegraph evolve and read and re-read his messages I began to discover that I was thinking of his t-mails as I wrote my own emails. Here is how Abraham Lincoln’s t-mails ended up having an effect upon how I use email.
Hierarchy of Communications - Electronic messages were Lincoln’s least preferred means of communicating. First on his hierarchy were direct, in person exchanges. Today, however, the ease of email encourages us to use it as a primary means of communication. Worse still, we use email as a way to avoid personal interaction. Such habits are the exact opposite of Lincoln’s behavior. Lincoln sought face-to-face exchanges. Walking among the government agencies to drop in on one person or another, Lincoln could not only deliver a message, but also hear a reply, see the body language, and engage in dialog. Electronic communications became an important part of Lincoln’s leadership, but only in situations where distance was too great and mail or messenger too slow. I have become more aware that emails are not a substitute for walking down the hall or picking up the phone.
I wish everybody who sends me email would read the rest of this article. LINK
A video from the American Civil Liberties Union shows what it might be like to order a pizza if we had no privacy protection. It’s both amusing and scary.
The ACLU Privacy & Technology Web Pages offers an excellent overview of the issues surrounding privacy, technology, and civil liberties in the USA. While the ACLU is left-of-centre, these issues affect everybody in the industrialized world. The transparency of the US security operations should provide a warning for the rest of us. What they argue about in the USA is no doubt, occurring secretly in other industrialized countries.
How to get organized and stay that way by Samantha Grice, National Post,Published: Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The best part of this excellent article: Continue reading ‘Ways To Immediately Improve Your Life’
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