It was a $150 card. It was worth persisting on. People who get scammed on a $25 gift card are more likely to just eat the loss and not spend 3 hours on the phone trying to get their money back.
I also wouldn't be completely shocked to find out that she got her money back shortly after Wallmart got their first press queries.
Cellphones are programmable these days. If I can write a game for your cellphone, I can write a 'game' that reads the GPS info and punts it to your website once a minute.
I think that there are actually commerciall services that do something like this that allow you to track your kids.
Combine either one with a motion sensor and a timer, and you're off and running (as soon as your target is).
As for 'affordable', we have no idea how much money this kook has in his bank. His version of 'affordable' might be a thousand dollars or so. For people that do things like stalk maxing out their credit card may not be much of a deterrent. For extreme cases, even a few months in jail doesn't seem to faze them.
He had a wonderful description of it that I'm sure would have passed the patent board. Unfortunately, he wasn't willing to go thru the expense of filing a patent application.
His point is that you can't treat the wikipedia as an authoritative source, because it's far too easy to insert the mistakes. . . . . . Either a source can be trusted, or it can't -- and wikipedia cannot.
Post-Iraq, I think that the same thing could be said about the CIA. The vast majority of the data that you get is accurate, but if you get a 'mole' willfully and strategically placing incorrect information, then you have to hunt down and remove the mole.
Point here is that the authratativeness of wikipedia is roughly in proportion with the vitality of the subject. Very popular subjects are more likely to get many eyes and many updates. Esoteric and boring subjects are likely to get few visits, and (for that reason) could go a long time before anybody bothers to correct an error.
I also agree that -- given the esoteric nature of the pages that were tainted, one week is a bit short for a proper test. On the other hand -- given that it's a 'live' encyclopedia -- I can understand him not wanting to leave the 'wrong' data in there for too long.
Also: All truth is relative. Just because something is widely believed, doesn't always mean that it's true (e.g. earth -> flat) -- and this guy seems to be eating a Google result as 'authoratative'(!). How does he know that the dates he got aren't my attempt at finding out how likely people are to complain about bad data? The only truly authoratative text on Layzie Bone's date of birth is his birth certificate, and even that might be 'fixed'.
OK: I think I see the tactics that the Bush camp is taking on:
I'm gonna presume that the grand-parent AC posting is a Bush Camp astro-turfer.... It's coming too close after the comments at the RNC.
Bush's biggest liability is the War in Iraq -- including how Intelligence was cooked to make a case for going into Iraq. One of the few ways to fight that would be to produce a similar liability on the part of Kerry -- "Hey: He sometimes voted for the war, and sometimes against it... We can point to that as being worse than misleading the world about why we were going to war!."
I'm thinking that the best that Kerry can do in the face of this kind of attack is to 'wade into the fire', and call for a proper comparison of the reasons for his changing support Vs Bush's changing version of the truth, and how the administration pushed the CIA so hard for a favorable interpretation that the CIA ignored many of it's rules of Intelligence analysis to provide it.
"Google still isn't major."
"I never said it wasn't major."
You win the John Kerry Award, congrats!
I would have said the George Bush award... Kerry has been wishy-washy in his support for the Iraq war, but it was Bush that said that they were going in for weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam definitely had lots of them . then that WMSs weren't the reason for going in, etc. etc.
I mean everybody goes there... Even linux geeks have to go there to get updates for their friends who are stuck on Windows and too virus-infected to get updates from via own computers.
Given that I've just proved that everybody goes there, I think that we could use that as a really good measure of what percentages of Web users use Mozilla vs IE.
No???
(( Asbestos suit, Asbestos suit.... where did I put my asbestos suit????? ))
Pray, what's the point in adopting a standard today, that most common devices that need internet access (read PCs) can't even dream of attaining?
Those sorts of speeds aren't meant for delivery to the curb.. They're for intercity communication. (read: Backbone connections). Remember that large ISPs were using multiple hundred megabit OC3 connections back when the standard desktop speed was in the 28-56Kilobit range
For a moment, I was surprised that they didn't use the patriot act to get this data, but I can see two reasons why not:
They wanted to let this 'investigation' get out -- create a sense of chill.
They didn't want to taint the Patriot act that bad.. My understanding is that the information in question is public... to bring 'posting' public information as part of a politicial action campaign under a (supposedly) anti-terrorist law would rip open the fact that the act is far more of a threat to our rights and freedoms than they have people believing at first blush.
As far as I can tell, they could have done this, but they just decided not to.
The judges who are voted in might be well-inclined to someone accused of helping them get in. For judges who get appointed, it's a bit more indirect, but I'd expect that the people who appointed them (and are, uhm, 'friends' of of the vote-tamperers) would probably know how to get their ear.
That there hold looks a bit square to me. More like framing for a back door. All you need is an easter-egg for a door-handle, and an easter egg would be pretty easy to obfuscate into their code.
There's a quickie ad I want to see put together, but I don't know flash. It would be like follows:
Screen made up like a voting screen: Do You Trust Electronic voting?
(O) Yes
(O) NO
with an overwrite of the vote count count.
Motion of various hands voting. 8 'yes'es, and one 'no'. With each vote, the on-screen count increments properly.
Finally a pair of hands come in and do a 'spock-pinch' motion (kinda like ctl-alt-del, but touching the upper and lower right corners and the middle of the left. A happy face appears in the middle of the screen, and one finger touches about an inch to the right of the happy face. The happy face disappears.
The hand then touches 'no', and the vote count rolls back, to 8 'no's and 2 'yes'es..
Screen-over: 8/10 'hackers' surveyed don't trust touch-screen voting. Guess why?, and perhaps a pointer to black-box-voting.org
Anybody up to it? I'll host it, if you are willing to do it (I can get bandwidth at near wholesale).
Thye're also coaunting votes for incoming judges, and -- buy the time this case reaches The Supreme Court, a good number of those judges should be appointees of Bush.
I've only got 256MB of ram, so it's a bit more of an issue for me.
As for the compositing , it wasn't that bad....The images had pretty good registration (Thank's NASA!). The hardest parts were choosing a color scale and doing trials (I think I only had 256MB on my system at the time, and it's not a speed demon any more).
Think doing GIMP operations on a 120MB image with 256MB of ram. It wasn't horribly slow, but it took long enough to be annoying.. Even so, I think it was worth it.
The one what was more of a bitch was the blackout comparison image. Those two images weren't quit so close It took a good bit more work to get the registration accurate, delete the extraneous bits, etc.
These images (or, at least, a version of them) was put up in Feb of 2002. They had a daytime image, and a nighttime image. I took a couple of hours with GIMP for me to create a a composite of the two..
CAUTION: the following link is a 2MB JPEG that expands to an 8Kx4K image.. that would be about 100megabytes as an uncompressed TIFF
(it's here). With only 380MB of RAM on my box, this chokes Mozilla, but loads OK if I save it and open it with gqview..
I have a second image of North America only that's a bit more manageable in size (1024x768),
And what if the impact was during the time antartica wasn't covered by ice?
Well, if it wasn't for the belief that (a href="http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/scien ces/story/0,12243,1286205,00.html">from the article)
The Antarctica strike occurred during an ice age, so even tidal waves would have been weakened to mere ripples by the calming effect of icebergs on the ocean.
Your might be worth more consideration. As it is, I'm guessing that more ice in Antarctica at the time is more likely than less.
(according to the article) in the middle of an ice age, with the world's oceans full of
Unlike the dinosaur strike there is no telltale layer of dust that demonstrates the history of the event.
Yeah, what do you expect when you vaporize hundreds of cubic miles of ice? a few extra inches of rainfall... At best, it might show up in the sand layers of any deserts that existed back then. For the most part, however, I'd expect the evidence to be washed away by itself.
This is one of those things that looks good when you start -- but what happens when everybody starts doing it? What I'd love to see is some info on the volume of water extracted from the lake for this project vs. the volume of water in the lake. This would give geeks like me a much better chance of being able to figure out for ourselves just how much this is going to affect Lake Ontario and how much the basic idea is going to affect the lake as the idea becomes more popular (as I expect it will).
Slashdot Mirror
Whack!
Don't even say it!
(get with the joke, buddy)
(and if you don't think that IBM can't make a piece of sh!t, you never saw the PCjr.
It was a $150 card. It was worth persisting on. People who get scammed on a $25 gift card are more likely to just eat the loss and not spend 3 hours on the phone trying to get their money back.
I also wouldn't be completely shocked to find out that she got her money back shortly after Wallmart got their first press queries.
If so, you're under arrest.
I think that there are actually commerciall services that do something like this that allow you to track your kids.
Combine either one with a motion sensor and a timer, and you're off and running (as soon as your target is).
As for 'affordable', we have no idea how much money this kook has in his bank. His version of 'affordable' might be a thousand dollars or so. For people that do things like stalk maxing out their credit card may not be much of a deterrent. For extreme cases, even a few months in jail doesn't seem to faze them.
He had a wonderful description of it that I'm sure would have passed the patent board. Unfortunately, he wasn't willing to go thru the expense of filing a patent application.
Post-Iraq, I think that the same thing could be said about the CIA. The vast majority of the data that you get is accurate, but if you get a 'mole' willfully and strategically placing incorrect information, then you have to hunt down and remove the mole.
Point here is that the authratativeness of wikipedia is roughly in proportion with the vitality of the subject. Very popular subjects are more likely to get many eyes and many updates. Esoteric and boring subjects are likely to get few visits, and (for that reason) could go a long time before anybody bothers to correct an error.
I also agree that -- given the esoteric nature of the pages that were tainted, one week is a bit short for a proper test. On the other hand -- given that it's a 'live' encyclopedia -- I can understand him not wanting to leave the 'wrong' data in there for too long.
Also: All truth is relative. Just because something is widely believed, doesn't always mean that it's true (e.g. earth -> flat) -- and this guy seems to be eating a Google result as 'authoratative'(!). How does he know that the dates he got aren't my attempt at finding out how likely people are to complain about bad data? The only truly authoratative text on Layzie Bone's date of birth is his birth certificate, and even that might be 'fixed'.
I'm gonna presume that the grand-parent AC posting is a Bush Camp astro-turfer.... It's coming too close after the comments at the RNC.
Bush's biggest liability is the War in Iraq -- including how Intelligence was cooked to make a case for going into Iraq. One of the few ways to fight that would be to produce a similar liability on the part of Kerry -- "Hey: He sometimes voted for the war, and sometimes against it... We can point to that as being worse than misleading the world about why we were going to war!."
I'm thinking that the best that Kerry can do in the face of this kind of attack is to 'wade into the fire', and call for a proper comparison of the reasons for his changing support Vs Bush's changing version of the truth, and how the administration pushed the CIA so hard for a favorable interpretation that the CIA ignored many of it's rules of Intelligence analysis to provide it.
"I never said it wasn't major."
You win the John Kerry Award, congrats!
I would have said the George Bush award ... Kerry has been wishy-washy in his support for the Iraq war, but it was Bush that said that they were going in for weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam definitely had lots of them . then that WMSs weren't the reason for going in, etc. etc.
er, um, Windowsupdate.microsoft.com????
I mean everybody goes there... Even linux geeks have to go there to get updates for their friends who are stuck on Windows and too virus-infected to get updates from via own computers.
Given that I've just proved that everybody goes there, I think that we could use that as a really good measure of what percentages of Web users use Mozilla vs IE.
No???
(( Asbestos suit, Asbestos suit .... where did I put my asbestos suit????? ))
"I'm sorry, I can't accept this."
"Why not?"
"I can't give one to all of my friends"
Those sorts of speeds aren't meant for delivery to the curb.. They're for intercity communication. (read: Backbone connections). Remember that large ISPs were using multiple hundred megabit OC3 connections back when the standard desktop speed was in the 28-56Kilobit range
We're talking bandwidth, not Latency. You from SCO or something?
- They wanted to let this 'investigation' get out -- create a sense of chill.
- They didn't want to taint the Patriot act that bad.. My understanding is that the information in question is public... to bring 'posting' public information as part of a politicial action campaign under a (supposedly) anti-terrorist law would rip open the fact that the act is far more of a threat to our rights and freedoms than they have people believing at first blush.
As far as I can tell, they could have done this, but they just decided not to.The judges who are voted in might be well-inclined to someone accused of helping them get in. For judges who get appointed, it's a bit more indirect, but I'd expect that the people who appointed them (and are, uhm, 'friends' of of the vote-tamperers) would probably know how to get their ear.
There's a quickie ad I want to see put together, but I don't know flash. It would be like follows:
Screen made up like a voting screen:
Do You Trust Electronic voting? (O) Yes
(O) NO
with an overwrite of the vote count count. Motion of various hands voting. 8 'yes'es, and one 'no'. With each vote, the on-screen count increments properly.
Finally a pair of hands come in and do a 'spock-pinch' motion (kinda like ctl-alt-del, but touching the upper and lower right corners and the middle of the left. A happy face appears in the middle of the screen, and one finger touches about an inch to the right of the happy face. The happy face disappears.
The hand then touches 'no', and the vote count rolls back, to 8 'no's and 2 'yes'es..
Screen-over: 8/10 'hackers' surveyed don't trust touch-screen voting. Guess why?, and perhaps a pointer to black-box-voting.org
Anybody up to it? I'll host it, if you are willing to do it (I can get bandwidth at near wholesale).
Who, me? Jaded??!
If you wanted real security, you should be runing sumething geeky like Linux.
As for the compositing , it wasn't that bad... .The images had pretty good registration (Thank's NASA!). The hardest parts were choosing a color scale and doing trials (I think I only had 256MB on my system at the time, and it's not a speed demon any more).
Think doing GIMP operations on a 120MB image with 256MB of ram. It wasn't horribly slow, but it took long enough to be annoying.. Even so, I think it was worth it.
The one what was more of a bitch was the blackout comparison image. Those two images weren't quit so close It took a good bit more work to get the registration accurate, delete the extraneous bits, etc.
CAUTION: the following link is a 2MB JPEG that expands to an 8Kx4K image .. that would be about 100megabytes as an uncompressed TIFF
(it's here). With only 380MB of RAM on my box, this chokes Mozilla, but loads OK if I save it and open it with gqview..
I have a second image of North America only that's a bit more manageable in size (1024x768),
Well, if it wasn't for the belief that (a href="http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/scien ces/story/0,12243,1286205,00.html">from the article)
Your might be worth more consideration. As it is, I'm guessing that more ice in Antarctica at the time is more likely than less. (according to the article) in the middle of an ice age, with the world's oceans full ofJust you wait.. They'll pass by quicker than most.
Yeah, what do you expect when you vaporize hundreds of cubic miles of ice? a few extra inches of rainfall... At best, it might show up in the sand layers of any deserts that existed back then. For the most part, however, I'd expect the evidence to be washed away by itself.
This is one of those things that looks good when you start -- but what happens when everybody starts doing it? What I'd love to see is some info on the volume of water extracted from the lake for this project vs. the volume of water in the lake. This would give geeks like me a much better chance of being able to figure out for ourselves just how much this is going to affect Lake Ontario and how much the basic idea is going to affect the lake as the idea becomes more popular (as I expect it will).
Try this link</a>.
This, of course, presumes that you have HTML formatting turned on.