All Forum Posts by: Jeff Takle

Maleena,

A Landlording Forum or a Cheerleader?

I just ran across it in the Journal of Property Management:

www.GetRealGetReady.org

They did a little bit of overkill on the Intro, but whatever. Good tool in there to find real estate related classes, degrees, and scholarships and a neat one to find a local IREM rep who will meet for coffee and chat about the business--good networking tool. I am not affiliated in any way. Just wish I had these resources when I was 19!

Hey Adam. Welcome. I was also going to post this for another newcomer, but there's a nice website for young folks to learn the business and get involved on the education side. I haven't used it, just ran across it in the Journal of Property Management:

www.GetRealGetReady.org

They did a little bit of overkill on the Intro, but whatever. Good tool in there to find real estate related classes, degrees, and scholarships and a neat one to find a local IREM rep who will meet for coffee and chat about the business--good networking tool. I am not affiliated in any way. Just wish I had these resources when I was 19!

I've played with both GPG and its predecessor "PGP". They're top quality but they have never been overly simple to use. There are a lot of other options out there, some of which may be simpler to implement though not by much.

I also use a free Thawte certificate (www.thawte.com). They were purchased by Verisign some time ago and have the same top level of encryption keys, just not as well known of a name. You basically sign up and get a free digital certificate--you can pay more or go through some hoops and get it really personalized if you want/need. Then send someone an email from outlook and click the little digital certificate icon, looks like a gold and red icon.

If someone receives your email, they should be able to respond and click the little blue ribbon icon to Encrypt the message. Or select "Options" and "Security Settings" and set to encrypt. Done!

If your group of friends, or workplace, all have digital certs, it's very simple to encrypt emails back and forth. Contrary to popular belief this isn't for the uber-paranoid. It's a great way to reduce the spam you get, to prevent viruses from crawling your emails, and to in general protect your data. For anyone who's ever hit "Send" before you wanted to and sent a message to the wrong person--hey, if you don't have their digital cert, they'll never be able to read it! We try to send all our company legal, strategy, and marketing materials encrypted between us and vendors.

Good points. I would add though the military intelligence apparatus has pretty much since the inception of the Department of Army intelligence branches and the OSS, etc. held about 80% of the intelligence assets of the US. The CIA is the largest, but not the only, Human Intelligence (HUMINT) government agency--but the DoD also has the Defense HUMINT Service (old DHS) and each branch has its own human intelligence arm.

The traditional rub between CIA and the military rested largely on the condition where the military owned 80% of the assets and 80% of the intelligence budget but the CIA was put administratively in charge of them. Try being in charge of a strong willed child with no ability to reward or punish...it's a tough situation. That's one of the primary reasons for the Nat'l Director of Intelligence position, to oversee both taskings and budget. The concept is that finally, the person in charge has both the mandate AND the budget to execute.

I'm not sure how putting a military person in charge of the CIA (which owns <20% of the assets, albeit the "remaining" 20%...) will change the situation much, especially since both elements (CIA and DOD) report now to the NDI for budget and mission. The NDI, of course, is a political appointee (ah, yes!) and a civilian that should be subject to Senate confirmation.

Anyhow, I've had somewhat of a change of heart on this topic. While I do NOT believe that the Administration started tapping these phones, Internet, etc. for nefarious reasons, I whole-heartedly distrust putting that cookie jar in front of anybody in Washington. Senators, congressmen and women, the President, or the Supreme Court. It's a bad idea. Politicians have a stigma for being creepy and self serving because that's what history has repeatedly demonstrated for the past 10,000 years. I want my cookie jar back.

My all-in-one plugs into the VOIP router and so does my home phone. You can set it up so that you need to "accept" each fax as it comes in, or you can set the fax to auto-answer and it picks up after x-many rings. I have had some periodic problems with people calling and getting the fax...I ended up getting a separate fax line for it, which costs a few bucks. Now that I think about it, I might be stupid. I'll take another look at the k7 product, which is free. Not sure if k7 lets you take a digital image and fax it out to a phone-fax, though. That would be helpful too. hmmm.... :crazed:

Maleena,

People can actually use their phone-based fax to feed in the paperwork, dial another phone number (your virtual web fax) and send you the info. It's the same as if they used a scanner instead and then emailed you the file. But, people still have faxes, for whatever reason, even though we've got scanners. So the big difference is that they're sending it from a phone-based fax instead of a computer-based email.

First, just to set the record straight, you are all crazy. :D

I want to respond to just a bit of the silliness:

You're kidding, right? Yes, they do it. China censors about 85% of the Internet from its population so that it's not even accessible. Actually, many (perhaps most) of the other countries in the world censor the internet for their citizens. Sometiems just porn; sometimes also politics or other topics. Review the Harvard Berkman Institute's studies on Internet censorship for Iran and China and open your eyes. Though your point about it being bad government and an oppressive environment to have everything being watched is correct, your examples and citations are not.

As for the comment about a military person being in charge of the CIA being dangerous because you'd have "like minded people", that's just off base. I don't know too many people right now in the military that, just b/c they're in the military, love Rumsfeld or the war or what we're doing. That's like suggesting all the people who worked at Enron LOVED their CEO. Nor is there any basis for suggesting that the CIA has always been an honest broker, the beacon of reason, whereas the military has been cavalier. Vice versa, history suggests. Now, if the point is about putting a White House lackie in as Director, hey that's a real threat. Porter Goss was clearly not one. In my mind, Gen. Hayden is clearly better than Fran Townshend in any case. And now a word about intelligence analysis...

With the advent of computers, we can process tasks a lot faster than with good old shoe leather. That's why when someone gets their head chopped off and the cops take fingerprints, they don't just check them against a single person's for a match. They run them through the 25 million Americans and xxx million foreigners to see if there are matches. It isn't oppressive; it's efficient. Similar for signal intelligence, aka phone tapping. While ideally you would know every person involved in planning 9/11 and only tap their phones, in the real world of course you don't. So you cast the net wider and screen through those calls. So that's why they're doing it, not because they're trying to plant alien nanobots inside your ear drum. We have two congressional committees for oversight and a more or less free and open press to keep things on balance. Clearly, we have a free and open Internet too!

That said, we're very touchy about our civil liberties and even if ours are still LEAGUES better than China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and dozens of other countries, as Americans we want not just to be better, but to be the best. City on a Hill. That's a good thing. I'm certainly not defending Bush. I'm not saying there aren't dangers to what they're doing and I'm not saying there aren't violations, but at least do some due diligence before calling people liars, cheats, and bad naughty names. 8)

My two Abraham Lincolns...

#1: The purpose for having an "official" state language has nothing to do with pride, or rights, or fairness, or what language is "best." It has to do with cost and efficiency. We speak English here because 95%+ American speak English as a first or second language (I made that number up!). I don't see anything wrong with adding Spanish as a second "official" language as long as the percentage of the population that speaks Spanish as their primary, or only, language is large enough to offset the costs associated with redesigning all the federal forms and bureacracy, laws and customer service and advocacy rights, and CSPAN, and US postal service, etc...are justified. There are many countries with more than one official language, particularly in Africa. It can work. The question to me is: are there enough Spanish-only speaking American citizens (naturalized, native born, or otherwise legal immigrats or citizens--the only ones who deserve a voice in American politics) to justify the expense of changing the system? Personally, I don't think we're there yet. Brings up an interesting question about why we have immigration quotas...any ideas?

#2: Here's the twisted part: I don't think you are entitled to any US Government benefits, including the ability to live in a safe and profitable country secured by a military paid for by taxpayer citizens, unless you are paying taxes and registered with the government. At the same time, I spend many hours each year trying to reduce or eliminate the taxes I pay. Hmm. Also, the revolution was driven largely by a desire to eliminate or reduce taxation by the government...So, I realize my argument for who has rights in this country is thin at best.

With all-in-one printers really coming down in price, that's what I use. Don't need a dedicated fax line, it just piggy backs off the regular telephone line. I don't have a regular home phone but I do use VOIP (Vonage) which I've been reasonably happy with. With the VOIP feature, voicemails and faxes can also be dropped to email. I imagine that I can set up the all-in-one to receive faxes as digital images only and not print out the paper...but then I'd have to pull out the owner's manual...and it's all the way across the desk...ah forget it.

Looks like k7 only allows you to store 20 messages. Presumably you can save the files elsewhere but I haven't used it.

Be careful about keeping everything digital and not backing up though; I heard two stories lately that made me shudder. A fellow entrepreneur couple were getting ready to pitch their latest business plan to investors and their laptop went crazy. They lost EVERYTHING and hadn't backed up so had to recreate in about a week's time. Rotten. And, my neighbor lost all of her gound-level dissertation work--nearly seven year's worth--when her laptop got stolen. Yikes! I have an external hard drive where I back up about once a month and I burn a group of critical folders to cd/DVD every few months and store them in my fire safe box. Scary.