Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Fairness, Radioactivity, Recovery
Ha, ha, puny earthlings! TinoMNYY24 writes "The Independent broke the story of SpaceShipOne leaving the Earth's atmosphere. The headline of the story is "'SpaceShipOne' becomes first privately funded vehicle to break through earth's atmosphere." One more step towards the X-Prize."
A data recovery success story - please send more. bigdog1 writes "I also had the IBM 75GXP data loss problem reported on slashdot. Like the guy in this article, I was not able to pay someone to do my data recovery. However, I eventually was able to get almost all of my data back using a free program, NTFS Reader. The only problem was that the file names were not in the long format. From now on I am buying an extra hard drive, but has anyone else had success stories recovering their data? Long file names?"
Too little, too late. An anonymous reader writes "I recently e-mailed paypals's public relations department and urged them to restore Freenet's paypal account. Their reply indicates that they have reexamined Freenet's account and decided not to terminate it after all. No news on the freenet project page, but here's paypal's reply:
'I apologize that your concerns were not addressed in the previous email. Our Compliance Department has reviewed The Freenet Project account in question and the service has been fully restored. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again.
Sincerely,
Andrew
PayPal Account Manager'"
ultranova writes "Because PayPal has offered no explanation or apology, the project does not intend to continue advocating its usage, and has migrated to Amazon Honor System."
'Adventure Capitalist' is a much better motorcycle story anyhow. malign writes "Mary Mycio notes that the 'Ghost town' photo essay is probably faked, and notes her reasons. There go my fantasies! :(" Rumors and grumblings to this effect have been around for quite a while, but this seems the most straightforward debunking I've seen of the trip a Ukrainian woman named Elena claimed to have taken through the Chernobyl area.
(We posted two stories about the alleged trip in March.)
Corporate machinations meet the mounties. los furtive writes "The CBC is reporting that HP has agreed to pay back the Canadian Government $146 million that had been defrauded from the Department of National Defense (previously mentioned here). HP claims it was the victim of 'a complex scheme designed to exploit both parties through contracts inherited through HP's merger with Compaq Computer Corp.' In the end they decided it was more appropriate to take action against those responsible and not engage in protracted litigation with the government."
The HP/Compaq story seems to be implying that they are actually taking action against individual employees of the corporation who were responsible for doing such-and-such, as opposed to HP/Compaq itself.
This could set a GREAT precedent! As things stand currently, people within corporations can pretty much do whatever they want, while acting in the interest of the corporation, and they'll never see a personal fine or the inside of a jail cell. (Case in point: Bill Gates was never fined or jailed for all the things he did. MS just got a slap on the wrist, but nothing happened to Gates himself.) Maybe now, we'll see some accountability, as people won't simply be able to hide behind their involvement with $BIG_CORPORATION to avoid criminal charges...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
PayPal's restoration of Freenet doesn't help at all. It's hard to unring that bell, and Freenet now doesn't want to deal with them anyway.
PayPal wanted to break their association with Freenet, and they just got what they wanted.
The question I have is why did she fake it? I mean, the story says she went in the standard Chernobyl tourist ride with a helmet, in order to fake photos, so it was a deliberate, planned deception.
So why did she take the pain to do all this? I doubt it's the money, since she didn't sell her story AFAIK, and I doubt she wants to promote some form of radioactive tourism. So, unless she's completely mythomaniac and/or she really really wanted to delude herself that she had made the trip for real, I just don't get it...
So maybe she didn't motorcycle through... but the pictures aren't fake, are they? Are they ripped off from somewhere?
...weeks ago that the site was a fake. The story in Swedish is here.
At least that explains her stories about all the people who "stayed after the evacuation". There's been a careful, ongoing international study done on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. Her claims just didn't fit the facts of that study.
Of course, the inconsistencies didn't tip me off either. I just thought that she was stretching things a bit. *shrug*
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'm on a couple of these "fax your representative and senators" alert systems now. I have two feelings on them, either they've opened a new avenue (or rather mass transport for an older one" for communicating with our public servants, or they will just further immunize our representatives from individual opinions.
/dev/null.
:)
Of course the Senators and Congressmen (or thier staffers) are simply adding rules or filters to thier email to shuffle all messages from a "One-Click-Email" system into a folder they never read. Or possibly
Kudos on the Izzard quote
Are you serious? Look at the Tyco case...Dennis ain't exactly scott free, even if he did have a mistrial.
DAs are more than happy and able to go after individuals if they have the evidence to do so.
Please help metamoderate.
Corporate "immunity" has more to do with the shareholders than the employees or management. It simply means that people who bought stock in the corporation and don't oversee/participate in day-to-day functions of the corporation, meaning they had no say in the wrongdoings of people within and on behalf of the corporation, can't be sued for misconduct that they weren't part of. It also means that, should the corporation go into horrible debt, etc. the shareholders can't lose more than they put into the company - their stock value can go no lower than 0.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
It's a tour of an abandoned missile silo. Pretty kool. Don't try this at home (well unless your home IS a missile silo).
So if she just carried along a helmet, how did the motorcycle get into some of the pictures? Some other random abandoned Soviet highway? I have no idea if the site is a hoax, but Mycio's post gives me no reasons to think it is. "Motorcycles are forbidden", right, and Russian officials don't take bribes either.
Well, I gave PayPal a call - I have cancelled all of my accounts. I currently run over $10,000 per year through there, totalling somewhere around $500 in fees (the occasional uncovered chargeback, and lots of small transactions).
I let them know I would not do business with them(I know several people personally who have had problems with them as well), and I am in the process of switching to YowCow.
Slight recommendation: don't use SolarPay. I ended up buying a re-branded version of their software, and it is backdoored. No, I won't tell you the backdoor - there are a number of sites still using it.
This might sounds stupid, but I managed to get access to a unreachable IBM click'o'death disk in a very simple way : The drive was installed horizontaly in my PC case, well, tried to run it in a vertical position. Believe me or not, it worked, the disk started fine. I didn't investiguate how long it could still run this way. 15 minutes was all it took me to make a complete disk copy, then it got dumped.
//TODO: put sig here
It is still the former soviet union, enough cash in the right hands and I'll bet the ride could be had. Of course you would get the attention of (if your not already dealing with with)the mafia,the police and military. A real adventure if you have the stomach (and cash and connections) for it.
Hooo Son! This'uns a Hawg!
I am of the opinion that it was probably fakes, but the link does not in anyway disprove her claims.
In the former soviet union, we fake...unhem..excuse me, almost slipped.
In Russia(both before and after the fall) Anything can be had for money. I know someone who paid to have there military records marked them as deceased.
Now the link says:
" Zone Administration personnel were in an uproar over who approved a motorcycle trip in the zone."
of course, that doesn't mean she didn't give 100 bucks to the gate keeper. Or that they new about it, and became alarmed because of the media attention.
"Elena and her husband have changed the Web site and the story considerably in the last few days. Earlier versions of the narrative lied more blatantly about Elena taking lone motorcycle trips in the zone. That has been changed to merely suggest that she does so, which is still misleading."
That's called covering your ass, and in no way is proof of a fake.
I wonder what would be good proof that she did it?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fact is stranger than fiction: Amazon Presidential Candidates page
She did make reference at one point in her story of a girlfriend that went riding with her - or may be I dreamt of her with another woman? :-)
;-)
Seriously, she did mention it, I have not gone back to see if it is still there, but some shots I think are hard to fake, and if they were, who would spend THAT MUCH TIME to doctor some photos for any purpose.
BTW, has any questioned anything from the LA or NY Times lately?
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
looking back over the photos,I can clearly see the motorcycle in many of the photos that certainly appear to be delapidated chernobyl.
Perhaps the detractor didnt actually look the site over before spewing jealous allegations.Perhaps it has something to do with the husband thing.lol
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!