And I forgot to mention one of the many other problems with the current health-care system. It actually impedes worker re-education. I say this because of course health care is usually tied in to employment. Likewise, most educational institutions in this country require students to have health care in order to attend as a student. Therefore, if a worker loses their job, and hence their health care, it becomes difficult for them to go back to school, where of course they need the health care that they no longer have.
I do realize that of course some schools have plans available for students to buy in to, but there are many others that do not. They of course get away with this because of the old assumption that students will enter post-secondary education immediately after completing high school (and hence still be covered by mom & dad's insurance). Unfortunately, this is not the case with all the workers in this country that need to improve on their education.
I'd start by abolishing our for-profit health care system and implementing a single-payer system resembling any of the other G8 countries. I've been arguing for this since I was in middle school (the first time I got screwed by an HMO).
Frankly, I believe that this switch would also have the downstream effect of making our own domestic-made products more competitive against imported goods on a price basis. Before you label me as commie nutjob, take a look at what employers pay per employee for healthcare in this country. Then remove that cost from your (car/boat/television/trinket) that you buy that could be made domestically but isn't always price-competitive. If we could get US-made goods back into a reasonable price point in this country, then people might start to realize again that our factories are indeed turning out high-quality goods.
Then, I'd get our troops the hell out of the meat-grinder known as Iraq.
... but damn its funny. And I'm not even sure why I find it funny, to hear some guy complaining about not being able to buy 1lb rolls of Jimmy Dean sausage. But something about it cracked me up.
Originally it was Kool Desktop Environment.
There's a splash screen (one of the "tip of the day" screens) for KDE startup that claims the K doesn't stand for anything at all. That said, I don't think it said anything about it never having stood for anything, just that it no longer stands for anything.
This comment was brought to my attention through meta-mod, and I thought I'd give my $.02 in a reply.
Learn how to do suspension from the UK, maybe Lotus or Aston Martin. The Chevrolet Corvette has got leaf springs and a live rear axle
There's a reason why the Vette is set up how it is. Its because of what the market for the Vette expects. Similarly, the Ford Mustang (I am a Mustang owner myself) has maintained leafs with solid rear axle. Ford had even contemplated going to a live rear axle, but the customers complained that they wanted to keep the existing setup.
Now, if we were talking about a new concept car, that was designed as a companion or alternative to the Vette - without replacing the Vette - then it would be worthwhile to consider different setups. But the few American sports cars left are setup as they are because that's how the customers want them.
Learn how to do powerful, smooth and efficient diesel engines from the French.
I couldn't agree more. The diesels made by American companies are still lame in comparison to the rest of the world. Hell, it was only in the past year or two that we finally agreed to stop adding copious amounts of sulfur to our diesel. Clearly, we could do better over here with that technology yet for some reason we refuse to. My guess would be that it is brought on by the auto companies' strange insistence that customers really all want gas SUV's that get 14 mpg or less.
Learn how to do styling from, well, everyone really. This goes for the inside as well as the outside - the interior trim in American cars are by far the worst I've ever seen.
Take a look at who won car of the year from Motor Trend this year. For the first time way too long, it went to an American car. For that matter, its the first time in about 30 years that it went to a GM product. I think they are finally starting to get it on the design and materials.
Phone for a minicab. What kind of car arrives?
I'm not entirely sure what a minicab is. Here in the US, though, if you call for a taxicab, I'd say 90% or more of them are Ford Crown Victorias - often retired police cruisers. And if you look at the number of miles clocked on these land yachts, you'll see reliability is not a significant problem for them. Granted, the Crown Vic is ugly and magazines have reviewed its seats as being "giant slabs of spam", but the car runs and it runs for a long time.
PS - just in case you think I hated your comment - I selected "not flamebait".
Make them bankrupt themselves purchasing bogus domains?
Except they are a registrar. Normally people pay them for domain registration. Even if they registered an obscene number of domains, who would they pay for them? Themselves? I don't think they'd go broke giving themselves millions of dollars.
Though I suppose if we drove up the number high enough, and they had to pay taxes on the "purchases" (questionable, though), then they could end up incurring a cost that way. But it would be dwarfed by the non-money that they'd spend on the registration costs themselves.
The R series webcam is new, I hadn't seen it prior to the link that I posted for the newest R series from lenovo. I had an R31 before the R32 that I currently have, and IIRC, it did not have a firewire. On my R32, the firewire connection is on the same cradle that is used for inserting the hard drive, and also has the USB and audio in/out (on the left-hand side).
IRS I would fear the most...
Not sure if you're serious in that response or not, but I thought it would be worthwhile to point out that the only charges ever brought against Al Capone was tax evasion. Indeed, the IRS has shown itself to be quite powerful under certain circumstances.
Yet a certain southern governor managed to get out of a couple million on taxes back in the 90's. Go figure...
The three-year investigation was handled by the FBI, U.S. Postal Service and IRS Crimiminal Investigation.
If the investigation into this guy took three years before they could pull off an arrest, hopefully that means there are more ongoing spammer investigations in the pipelines that will lead to more arrests. We all know there are far to many other spammers out there for this one arrest to make a difference, but if this can lead towards bringing down some of the other big dogs out there, then maybe it will mean something.
Maybe they add a windows key
That could actually be valid. My ThinkPad R32 came with XP Pro, and did not have a windows key. I am typing this reply on a new touchpoint keyboard from IBM (one of the last made with the IBM logo on it), and it mysteriously has no windows key. Equally interesting is that IBM actually gives credit on the backside of said keyboard to Microsoft for the Windows logo, even though said logo appears nowhere on the keyboard itself.
Not that I miss not having one anyways...
And I see that even the newest "ThinkPad Keyboard" from IBM seems to be missing the windows key.
Its aura of "I could bludgeon you and your girly-man laptop to death with this thing, if I suddenly felt the need to do so".
If I had mod points (and wasn't already participating in this discussion) I would have given that comment +1 funny. I actually laughed out loud at the thought of someone being bludgeoned to death with a ThinkPad.
Somehow, I doubt that anyone could pull that off with my R32, however. Which, btw, I always figured was their consumer-friendly model, since the R series was the budget line when I bought it.
From the summary:
The IdeaPads will be the consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads.
WTF wasn't consumer friendly about the ThinkPad? Granted, I've been a big ThinkPad fan for some time myself, but really, what are they talking about? How do you make a notebook more consumer-friendly? For that matter, how could a notebook not be consumer friendly and sell?
we check for redundancy when archiving mails, in a way so that we can save a hell of a lot of space on spam
I could see that helping if the same spam is sent to the clients on your network, but it doesn't account for all the subsequent iterations of the spam.
YMMV, but I see a lot of spam carrying highly varied introductory garbage (to attempt to fool spam filtering software, of course). Some of my email accounts easily receive 10x as much spam as legitimate email, which would make a redundancy check difficult to apply.
I feel this is largely parallel to the stories and discussions we've had on the economic basis of spam, and the comments I've made on the economics that drive others to cover for the criminals.
Many of the phishing emails I have seen tend to use domains that are creatively re-arranged to look like the real thing - something like paypal.com.evilphishingdomain.com to substitute in for the real paypal.com. And of course, the evilphishingdomain.com was willingly sold to a crook by a registrar who themselves are of less-than-stellar reputation.
Just as I've said before regarding spamming domains, if there were better controls on the domain registration process, a lot of this could be reigned in. Sure, some phishing emails do go by IP addresses instead of domain names, but for the large portion of them that use names instead, we can shut down their game quicker by making registrars actually give a hoot about their customers' damage.
I have to admit, I'm quite annoyed with the detection on mine. I keep wanting to bash the thing against my coffee table because it won't detect that it is pointing at the screen.
Unfortunately, I cannot relate to this, as I have not been able to buy a wii for myself thus far. Your comment does remind me of my days with the good ol' NES, however. I know I intentionally swung those controllers around by their cords and bashed them on the floor for not working correctly.
I know there were many times where poor Ryu Hayabusa fell into one of many bottomless pits because the timing just wasn't right for the A button on those controllers. Even the "slow motion" feature on the "NES Advantage" couldn't save him...
I particularly like option
(B) the Wiimotes have a higher survival rate than Nintendo expected
Since this could imply that perhaps Nintendo expected more people to (inadvertently) send their wiimotes crashing through their TVs or sailing across the room...
Oh...the Wiimotes are out of stock too? *walking away, hanging head*
I presume you're making a joke on this part, and you've been accordingly modded +2 funny. But I thought I'd mention that by my own experiences, the wiimotes have been consistently well stocked, even with the wiis sold out constantly. Apparently it is nowhere near as difficult for nintendo to make the wiimotes as is it to make the wii itself...
Securing the PC just makes the teacher's job easier, but it's not the responsibility of the IT department to run the class.
I agree half-way with you on that one. I agree that securing the PC makes the teacher's job easier, however I would argue that it also makes the IT jobs easier because of the long-term implications of leaving systems wide open for students. Furthermore, I don't see how you could see that being a case of that being "the responsibility of the IT department to run the class". I believe that the IT department should have reasonably rigid rules for the PCs that the school has to follow. In particular, I really hope that the school doesn't have every user logging in with administrator privileges - though I know that may well be an irrational hope.
So ultimately, I will agree that based on the letter it appears the student did not follow the teacher's orders as said. On the other hand, we don't know exactly how far the student had to go to do so. We also don't know what the student needed to view on the internet - maybe the student had a reason to need firefox?
Should the students be allowed to install and run anything they want on school computers? Can you do that at YOUR job?
Its too bad that we don't have information as to whether or not the student actually installed firefox, or if they just ran something that was already installed. All we know is that it was running on a windows system (based on it having a ".exe" extension). I'd like to be able to assume that the IT person at said school was smart enough to set up the windows boxes to keep people from being able to just install any application willy-nilly, but of course we cannot make that assumption.
So really, due to the lack of good information in this case, the answers to your questions don't really apply. We could of course make some fun assumptions about how their IT is run at that school, and decide based on that, but that wouldn't likely help in this case.
Do the editors or the submitter start off the tags these days? This story came fresh with 4 tags...I thought it waited until "democracy" spoke. Wisdom of the masses et al.
I didn't watch this story really closely as it came off the pipe, but I can say that I have noticed we do have the ability to tag stories when they're still in the firehose. Perhaps this story was tagged there and then released, with tags attached, to the front page?
... that the teacher even noticed the difference? Really, the displays of firefox and ie are fairly similar, and if you aren't looking at the very top or very bottom of the window, a layperson might not notice the difference at all.
I do wonder what version of windows was being used that the teacher noticed it called "firefox.exe" (and then subsequently changed it to "foxfire.exe" in the write-up).
All my spam currently is 419 spam. I don't get fished. Thus there's no domain name in the link, so concede your point.
Except that spam is, by definition, unsolicited advertising. Nothing is advertised for sale in 419 spam, thus you are missing the point. Therefore no concession is necessary nor will any be given. Nice try, though.
Yeah, the old people vote Republican, so I say fuck them. They're borrowing off my future taxes. FUCK THEM!
If you were trying to make a point with that statement, I have no idea what it is or was. Unless you're just aiming to demonstrate the non-sensibility of the karma bonus here on slashdot.
The only cheaper prescriptions I've seen are for male enhancement drugs, not any other drugs. They aren't targeted because they don't have money.
Well, thats you own experience with spam. I see quite a few spam emails that offer plenty of other drugs. Heck, I have several in my box right now that offer valium, and / or human growth hormone. And when I checked out a couple just to see how deep their list was, they had pretty much every prescription drug I could imagine, on a website that claimed to have secure checkout. Many of the drug spammers run pretty complicated operations.
If they don't like the nanny state, unless it helps them, then the nanny state shouldn't help them avoid getting taken by some words by some random untrusted individual.
What? Thats an amazing run-on sentence there, but what its trying to say, I'm not sure. If you think that for some reason I'm trying to get the government to stop spam, then I can only conclude that you still haven't read what I wrote. The economic solution that I suggest needs to come from the registrars and the ICANN. Anyone who tries to legislate spam away is a fool, because very little spam starts, ends, and profits in just one country. Usually any given spam traverses at least 3-4 countries where someone is turning a buck off the profit. Good luck getting any such "nanny state" to solve that in any considerable way.
Slashdot Mirror
And I forgot to mention one of the many other problems with the current health-care system. It actually impedes worker re-education. I say this because of course health care is usually tied in to employment. Likewise, most educational institutions in this country require students to have health care in order to attend as a student. Therefore, if a worker loses their job, and hence their health care, it becomes difficult for them to go back to school, where of course they need the health care that they no longer have.
I do realize that of course some schools have plans available for students to buy in to, but there are many others that do not. They of course get away with this because of the old assumption that students will enter post-secondary education immediately after completing high school (and hence still be covered by mom & dad's insurance). Unfortunately, this is not the case with all the workers in this country that need to improve on their education.
I'd start by abolishing our for-profit health care system and implementing a single-payer system resembling any of the other G8 countries. I've been arguing for this since I was in middle school (the first time I got screwed by an HMO).
Frankly, I believe that this switch would also have the downstream effect of making our own domestic-made products more competitive against imported goods on a price basis. Before you label me as commie nutjob, take a look at what employers pay per employee for healthcare in this country. Then remove that cost from your (car/boat/television/trinket) that you buy that could be made domestically but isn't always price-competitive. If we could get US-made goods back into a reasonable price point in this country, then people might start to realize again that our factories are indeed turning out high-quality goods.
Then, I'd get our troops the hell out of the meat-grinder known as Iraq.
... but damn its funny. And I'm not even sure why I find it funny, to hear some guy complaining about not being able to buy 1lb rolls of Jimmy Dean sausage. But something about it cracked me up.
There's a splash screen (one of the "tip of the day" screens) for KDE startup that claims the K doesn't stand for anything at all. That said, I don't think it said anything about it never having stood for anything, just that it no longer stands for anything.
Learn how to do suspension from the UK, maybe Lotus or Aston Martin. The Chevrolet Corvette has got leaf springs and a live rear axle
There's a reason why the Vette is set up how it is. Its because of what the market for the Vette expects. Similarly, the Ford Mustang (I am a Mustang owner myself) has maintained leafs with solid rear axle. Ford had even contemplated going to a live rear axle, but the customers complained that they wanted to keep the existing setup.
Now, if we were talking about a new concept car, that was designed as a companion or alternative to the Vette - without replacing the Vette - then it would be worthwhile to consider different setups. But the few American sports cars left are setup as they are because that's how the customers want them.
Learn how to do powerful, smooth and efficient diesel engines from the French.
I couldn't agree more. The diesels made by American companies are still lame in comparison to the rest of the world. Hell, it was only in the past year or two that we finally agreed to stop adding copious amounts of sulfur to our diesel. Clearly, we could do better over here with that technology yet for some reason we refuse to. My guess would be that it is brought on by the auto companies' strange insistence that customers really all want gas SUV's that get 14 mpg or less.
Learn how to do styling from, well, everyone really. This goes for the inside as well as the outside - the interior trim in American cars are by far the worst I've ever seen.
Take a look at who won car of the year from Motor Trend this year. For the first time way too long, it went to an American car. For that matter, its the first time in about 30 years that it went to a GM product. I think they are finally starting to get it on the design and materials.
Phone for a minicab. What kind of car arrives?
I'm not entirely sure what a minicab is. Here in the US, though, if you call for a taxicab, I'd say 90% or more of them are Ford Crown Victorias - often retired police cruisers. And if you look at the number of miles clocked on these land yachts, you'll see reliability is not a significant problem for them. Granted, the Crown Vic is ugly and magazines have reviewed its seats as being "giant slabs of spam", but the car runs and it runs for a long time.
PS - just in case you think I hated your comment - I selected "not flamebait".
Except they are a registrar. Normally people pay them for domain registration. Even if they registered an obscene number of domains, who would they pay for them? Themselves? I don't think they'd go broke giving themselves millions of dollars.
Though I suppose if we drove up the number high enough, and they had to pay taxes on the "purchases" (questionable, though), then they could end up incurring a cost that way. But it would be dwarfed by the non-money that they'd spend on the registration costs themselves.
The R series webcam is new, I hadn't seen it prior to the link that I posted for the newest R series from lenovo. I had an R31 before the R32 that I currently have, and IIRC, it did not have a firewire. On my R32, the firewire connection is on the same cradle that is used for inserting the hard drive, and also has the USB and audio in/out (on the left-hand side).
Not sure if you're serious in that response or not, but I thought it would be worthwhile to point out that the only charges ever brought against Al Capone was tax evasion. Indeed, the IRS has shown itself to be quite powerful under certain circumstances.
Yet a certain southern governor managed to get out of a couple million on taxes back in the 90's. Go figure...
My ThinkPad R32 had firewire, and I bought it back in about 2002.
And the current R series ThinkPads have the webcam as at least an option.
If the investigation into this guy took three years before they could pull off an arrest, hopefully that means there are more ongoing spammer investigations in the pipelines that will lead to more arrests. We all know there are far to many other spammers out there for this one arrest to make a difference, but if this can lead towards bringing down some of the other big dogs out there, then maybe it will mean something.
That could actually be valid. My ThinkPad R32 came with XP Pro, and did not have a windows key. I am typing this reply on a new touchpoint keyboard from IBM (one of the last made with the IBM logo on it), and it mysteriously has no windows key. Equally interesting is that IBM actually gives credit on the backside of said keyboard to Microsoft for the Windows logo, even though said logo appears nowhere on the keyboard itself.
Not that I miss not having one anyways...
And I see that even the newest "ThinkPad Keyboard" from IBM seems to be missing the windows key.
If I had mod points (and wasn't already participating in this discussion) I would have given that comment +1 funny. I actually laughed out loud at the thought of someone being bludgeoned to death with a ThinkPad.
Somehow, I doubt that anyone could pull that off with my R32, however. Which, btw, I always figured was their consumer-friendly model, since the R series was the budget line when I bought it.
The IdeaPads will be the consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads.
WTF wasn't consumer friendly about the ThinkPad? Granted, I've been a big ThinkPad fan for some time myself, but really, what are they talking about? How do you make a notebook more consumer-friendly? For that matter, how could a notebook not be consumer friendly and sell?
I could see that helping if the same spam is sent to the clients on your network, but it doesn't account for all the subsequent iterations of the spam.
YMMV, but I see a lot of spam carrying highly varied introductory garbage (to attempt to fool spam filtering software, of course). Some of my email accounts easily receive 10x as much spam as legitimate email, which would make a redundancy check difficult to apply.
But if it works for you, then more power to you.
... Is Duke Nukem Forever considered to be the high or low water mark for vaporware?
... yep, that means a lot coming from 3d realms in this context...
I feel this is largely parallel to the stories and discussions we've had on the economic basis of spam, and the comments I've made on the economics that drive others to cover for the criminals.
Many of the phishing emails I have seen tend to use domains that are creatively re-arranged to look like the real thing - something like paypal.com.evilphishingdomain.com to substitute in for the real paypal.com. And of course, the evilphishingdomain.com was willingly sold to a crook by a registrar who themselves are of less-than-stellar reputation.
Just as I've said before regarding spamming domains, if there were better controls on the domain registration process, a lot of this could be reigned in. Sure, some phishing emails do go by IP addresses instead of domain names, but for the large portion of them that use names instead, we can shut down their game quicker by making registrars actually give a hoot about their customers' damage.
The Malware Economy Evolves (slashdot article)
Comments on Malware Economy
The Economic Basis of Spam (slashdot article)
Comments on Economic Basis of Spam
My journal article on the registrars' role in keeping spam alive
Unfortunately, I cannot relate to this, as I have not been able to buy a wii for myself thus far. Your comment does remind me of my days with the good ol' NES, however. I know I intentionally swung those controllers around by their cords and bashed them on the floor for not working correctly.
I know there were many times where poor Ryu Hayabusa fell into one of many bottomless pits because the timing just wasn't right for the A button on those controllers. Even the "slow motion" feature on the "NES Advantage" couldn't save him...
(B) the Wiimotes have a higher survival rate than Nintendo expected
Since this could imply that perhaps Nintendo expected more people to (inadvertently) send their wiimotes crashing through their TVs or sailing across the room...
I presume you're making a joke on this part, and you've been accordingly modded +2 funny. But I thought I'd mention that by my own experiences, the wiimotes have been consistently well stocked, even with the wiis sold out constantly. Apparently it is nowhere near as difficult for nintendo to make the wiimotes as is it to make the wii itself...
I agree half-way with you on that one. I agree that securing the PC makes the teacher's job easier, however I would argue that it also makes the IT jobs easier because of the long-term implications of leaving systems wide open for students. Furthermore, I don't see how you could see that being a case of that being "the responsibility of the IT department to run the class". I believe that the IT department should have reasonably rigid rules for the PCs that the school has to follow. In particular, I really hope that the school doesn't have every user logging in with administrator privileges - though I know that may well be an irrational hope.
So ultimately, I will agree that based on the letter it appears the student did not follow the teacher's orders as said. On the other hand, we don't know exactly how far the student had to go to do so. We also don't know what the student needed to view on the internet - maybe the student had a reason to need firefox?
Its too bad that we don't have information as to whether or not the student actually installed firefox, or if they just ran something that was already installed. All we know is that it was running on a windows system (based on it having a ".exe" extension). I'd like to be able to assume that the IT person at said school was smart enough to set up the windows boxes to keep people from being able to just install any application willy-nilly, but of course we cannot make that assumption.
So really, due to the lack of good information in this case, the answers to your questions don't really apply. We could of course make some fun assumptions about how their IT is run at that school, and decide based on that, but that wouldn't likely help in this case.
I didn't watch this story really closely as it came off the pipe, but I can say that I have noticed we do have the ability to tag stories when they're still in the firehose. Perhaps this story was tagged there and then released, with tags attached, to the front page?
Just a thought...
... that the teacher even noticed the difference? Really, the displays of firefox and ie are fairly similar, and if you aren't looking at the very top or very bottom of the window, a layperson might not notice the difference at all.
I do wonder what version of windows was being used that the teacher noticed it called "firefox.exe" (and then subsequently changed it to "foxfire.exe" in the write-up).
Except that spam is, by definition, unsolicited advertising. Nothing is advertised for sale in 419 spam, thus you are missing the point. Therefore no concession is necessary nor will any be given. Nice try, though.
Yeah, the old people vote Republican, so I say fuck them. They're borrowing off my future taxes. FUCK THEM!
If you were trying to make a point with that statement, I have no idea what it is or was. Unless you're just aiming to demonstrate the non-sensibility of the karma bonus here on slashdot.
The only cheaper prescriptions I've seen are for male enhancement drugs, not any other drugs. They aren't targeted because they don't have money.
Well, thats you own experience with spam. I see quite a few spam emails that offer plenty of other drugs. Heck, I have several in my box right now that offer valium, and / or human growth hormone. And when I checked out a couple just to see how deep their list was, they had pretty much every prescription drug I could imagine, on a website that claimed to have secure checkout. Many of the drug spammers run pretty complicated operations.
If they don't like the nanny state, unless it helps them, then the nanny state shouldn't help them avoid getting taken by some words by some random untrusted individual.
What? Thats an amazing run-on sentence there, but what its trying to say, I'm not sure. If you think that for some reason I'm trying to get the government to stop spam, then I can only conclude that you still haven't read what I wrote. The economic solution that I suggest needs to come from the registrars and the ICANN. Anyone who tries to legislate spam away is a fool, because very little spam starts, ends, and profits in just one country. Usually any given spam traverses at least 3-4 countries where someone is turning a buck off the profit. Good luck getting any such "nanny state" to solve that in any considerable way.