One example she gives is a tech support person whose systems in Brazil went down — during Carnival: "...We had to wait more than a week for the locals to sober up enough to reconnect the line. In the end, I had to walk a tech (who did not know the system) through the process step by step via an interpreter. Of course, the interpreter was not technical. So it was kind of like explaining to your mom to tell your grandfather (who is hard of hearing) how to do something while she is on the phone and he is across the room from her."
Ok, that's just... I don't even know what it is... ethnocentric? It's stupid... not everyone in Brazil gets wasted during carnival. Businesses still run, things still work. If you had a line go down for a week without repair, that wasn't your remote users fault. That was your businesses fault for having a shit contract. Where we work we have tens of thousands of data and voice connections in every remote area you can imagine and there's no way something could go out for a week without a very good excuse like the building burnt down, or there was a flood. Even then we'd find a way around the problem temporarily. It's been more than one time I've kept a company in business with Cat5 strung through some trees.
And the language thing? Give me an Fing break. I had to support a doctor in India that did not speak english, so I made a wild guess, hit the directory of the hospital and looked for an American sounding name. Sure enough it was an American and he was nice, helped translate. I sent him detailed instructions and he helped walk the other doctor through it. That's our Job If I'm a window washer, I'm not going to complain when I come across a dirty one.
this is how disputes over large projects between large organizations are almost always handled, nobody takes their ball and goes home just because something is disputed unless one or both organizations have a serious cult of personality issue.
Right... I think everyone doing business with Oracle is Simultaneously working on a project, negotiating their contract renewal and in legal preceding. That's how Oracle works.
That 6 figure DBA is just as qualified to maintain any of the free alternatives. So why pay Oracle?
I maintain an Oracle app/DB and they're deprecating some major functionality and refuse to support older versions that do have it, so I'm supposed to come up with alternatives. I strongly favor an open/free alternative. My management came to me and said "But how do we get support?!?!" to which I replied "We haven't had support for over 10yrs, why start now?"
Even worse, all this would do is end Public testing and relegate it to secret testing. Something that's easy for first world countries to do, but would prevent countries like India and Pakistan from keeping their arsenal in any way equivalent to the rest of the worlds.
I actually do believe there wouldn't be use for nukes. Not for any moral reasons, but because I'm fairly certain the big players like the US already have warhead equipped platforms in space. They'd be easier, faster and cheaper than a hypersonic missile, it just makes sense.
Dude even blocked the doorway after we got up and tried to leave. I eventually threatened to call the police, and he finally gave up.
Happened to me to, I literally walked into a timeshare sales pitch like that... I walked in, thinking it was a gift shop and got trapped as the sale guy blocked the exit and put both hands in the door way so we couldn't leave and had to listen to his sale pitch. Within about 10 seconds I realized what was going on and tried to leave but the guy wouldn't let me through the doorway. I threw a punch, he moved so as not to get a broken nose. You try to prevent me from leaving a room, you're getting hit, I'm more than willing to spend the night in jail over that. Depending on the state, you might even get shot.
SV is not going to care about the Streisand Effect if they are in prison for the next 40 years, which is something that happens when you forge court documents.
Not to corporate entities it doesn't. If they can pin the forged document to a single person, then maybe, but the way these things usually shake out they never do, the company pays a tiny fine and on they go.
It doesn't matter how much content amazon has, nor how many datacenters they have. Amazon, Apple, Google...etc are all hostages to the last mile providers. Their business models depend on that last mile for delivery of their product.
In the end, the UPS/FedEx model will probably prevail where content providers will pay a delivery company for delivery of their product.
Google seems to be the only company with the foresight to start building their own last mile network. Unfortunately, at the rate they are going my great great grandkids might have Google Fiber available in their area.
There are ISPs for sale, all over this country, every day of the year. Amazon could buy them up cheap if they wanted to. Despite what slashdot would have you believe, they are not all that profitable. Hosting some videos in Seattle and charging people to see them with little to no overhead? Very profitable. Expect them to invest heavily in that side of the business.
The FCC gave up on net neutrality, and now they're giving up on the universal service fund. You think it's bad now? Just wait. You're going to get your wish, but it's going to be a monkeys paw. Prices will go down for people in major Urban areas... the other 99% of the country will likely not have internet access at all when this is over.
My only hope at this point is for some new wireless technology, but I'm not holding my breath.
My first pet predated social media, and there are no online pics of it. There's probably 2 people who could guess that one, and I'm not worried about either of them cracking my accounts.
Most of the time the attacker is your spouse. Would your wife know?
My answers to security questions are always as many characters of gibberish as it will allow.
These are not "public" conversations and this is not the police.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This is the military opening our mail, literally. That's unconstitutional and illegal. Period.
What on earth are you talking about? I have piles of these things (I love e-readers) they are like like MP3 players, you dump the files in flash memory and all the thing needs is a way to select files and turn the page. The Sony Ereaders are $30, are those lemons? lol I can walk down to the local grocary store and they have them on end-caps for under $40.
The fact that these towers are found next to military bases speaks volumes.
The military needs to there own version of everything to make sure things work in times of national crisis, emergency, or security. They need to have their own infrastructure to insure communications. They need to control their communications around bases and know who is saying or doing what. They need to be able to anticipate attacks. Nobody should have any expectation of privacy on or next to a military base.
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this.
Last time I checked, my constitutional rights didn't get suspended inside a casino in Las Vegas... did you miss that part? Many were on bases, but not all or even most. If the military wants to control their own communications they are welcome to start their own cellular network, they could even use these towers and then have their staff roam to other networks when they weren't near a base.
The only reason they are doing this is to intercept the calls of us citizens which is both illegal and unconstitutional. Your imaginary safety is not worth my constitutional rights. This sort of surveillance is exactly what the constitution was created to protect us from. It's not some weird esoteric thing the founders could never have anticipated like Machine guns or Abortions. This is the government listening in to the private correspondence of citizens for the sole purpose of security. That's expressly and unarguably forbidden legally, constitutionally and every other way you can think of.
What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases.
The summary says...
Many of them are built around U.S. military bases.
Way to slant the summary to make it look like Chinese towers rather than our towers.
I do not think those statements mean different things. They could, but from what I know of cell towers all they could really know is that the tower is near the base, not if it was right on it or not. It's not like they were triangulating the signal or anything.
But they're revealing that he is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.
Wouldn't they just send him to the closest psychiatric hospital AND TELL THE PRESS THAT HE WENT THERE for evaluation? If there is no problem with the actions of the police then there is no need for secrecy.
They did not say "They" took him, just that he went somewhere, and has no ability to travel and that he was going through some sort of evaluation. As far as we know he might have gotten into a car accident the day before they were going to talk to him so he's on leave until he wakes up and under continual evaluation.
I really want to freak out on this one, but there's just not enough information yet to do that. Slashdots burned me before.
Treated like scum? I agree that I often feel that we're not treated like equals on par with management. I think we get treated better than a lot of other employee groups, though. When I think of professions I'd change places with, the list often comes up short.
Agreed... I worked my way up from a call center and got my education after I got my job. I'm treated like a God where I am now compared to being hourly. If you think you're treated as a slave now, that just means you've never had a "real" job. At times we get into a spat because I think something could be written better or we should spend more time on X or Y, but when I did hourly work? I wasn't allowed to speak in meetings. Much less have an opposing viewpoint. Arguing with the boss would have gotten me walked right out the front door, and that's been true of every hourly job I've had.
According to people who claim to 'know more', he was using aliases for real life things like when he applied for the job, not just pseudonyms for writing. People claiming to be parents have also chimed in saying there was 'real fear' around this person, but I would not be surprised if this fear came after the board discovered his books as opposed to before.
There are also claims he sent a 'disturbing letter' to the school board, but 'it was not their place to update with facts', so I am skeptical of the poster.
yea, the only way this could really end up making any sense was that some old lady librarian at the school found his books, got concerned and went to the school-board/police... who had to talk to him for due diligence, and when they did talk to him, they found out completely by accident that the dude was actually nuts. Maybe he threatened suicide or took a swing at a cop? Getting someone committed is NOT easy, I've tried doing it before, it's nearly impossible.
If they really committed him for writing 2 books, no matter how bad they are, this is completely off the rails insane.
The person's chances are not all that good. Unless the union backs them up (and even then it can be a stretch) schools are pretty hard to go up against. "Think of the children", while often mocked, is a pretty powerful rallying cry for local officials who might be worried about parental outrage or practicing 'cover your ass' security where it is better to come down hard and be seeing to be doing something then risk something happening and be blamed for not acting. The life of some middle school teacher does not even begin to factor in.
Nah... I don't live in Maryland, but in my state... in my highschool, one of our teachers that was in his mid 30's started "Dating" a freshman. She broke up with him, so he started sending her letters, stalking her, finally ended up crawling in her bedroom window one night and her dad caught him. They fired him, he was charged and convicted of statutory, but then a judge forced the school to hire him back, with back pay. As far as I know he's still teaching there. Totally ostracized and they gave him a "Shop class" that no one takes, but he has a job.
So yea, it's pretty hard to get fired as a teacher.
I love reading through this... lot of people that have never been on a low carb diet, and likely have been thin their whole lives, giving everyone else advice.
Low Carb diets work. Very well, and the weight stays off, unlike low fat diets. You have more energy, are less hungry, less irritable, etc... The problem with them? Our entire food industry is completely centered on Carbohydrates. You cannot find low carb foods easily. Want a sandwitch for lunch? You can't have bread! Potatoes, the number 1 vegetable in the US, are completely out. No pasta! No Rice!
you're basically eating Steak and Fish, with vegetables, all day every day. Those things don't heat up in the microwave well.
Can we get stories about when kernel developers go to the bathroom as well?
This is hardly anything that matters or belongs on slashdot. Hans Reiser slaying his wife... okay, sure, that meant the end of reiserfs effectively. One kernel dev serving time for a basic civil disobedience charge? Who cares? Its about as important as Bennett Hasleton rants about things he utterly fails to understand.
Yea, a war between 2 of the largest countries in Europe isn't "news that matters" at all. The imprisonment of Kernel developers for their political beliefs, nah... who cares right?
If so, and they ignored it, oh well, it's your own damn fault.
I hear this argument a lot. But the fact of the matter is, if you're neighbor is stupid enough to let their kids play with matches... yes, that's their fault, but that doesn't mean your house isn't going to burn down right along with theirs. A breach of this scale could have repercussions for the internet as a whole. I run into this attitude at work all the time... lets say we're building a website and we put a button on the screen over to the right, but if they have the window too small they can't see that button. Someone invariably says something to the effect of "Well, you'd have to be an idiot to have your window shrunk down to that size! It's their own fault for being stupid!" at which point I pipe up and say "We want stupid peoples money to don't we?"
You can't just ignore stupid people on the net. That's about 99.99% of people, and they're paying for the rest of us to actually use it properly.
My suggestion to Namecheap (and other domain registrars or hosting companies) would be to lock them all down if possible, force all users to change the passwords from e-mail or other contact method before they can login again. We don't know what they have and we don't know what their plans are. This is a gaping security hole in the internet.
Unless the users had the same password for their email account which is likely. This is the problem with the username/password system, people want single signon, but companies don't want to cooperate unless it involves giving up any shred of anonymity i.e. Facebook/Google longon.
The government confiscating all your cash in a time of financial turmoil however... that's pretty much guaranteed to happen.
If they had wanted to be truly innovative... the card would not be a Mastercard, but a Bitcoin hardware wallet, where the user would have to program it with their Public/Private key pair, and each citizen would be given at least three... one pair of e-cards primary/backup, and a paper document that could be used to prove ID in order to replace documents in case the other two were lost, so they could carry the first, lockup the second someplace safe, and put the third in a safety deposit vault.
It's Africa, the later 2 likely do not exist for the majority of citizens. I went there a few years back and it changed my entire world view. The people are poorer than you could possibly imagine compared to the US. You could be literally dieing in the street and nothing could be done for you. Fall out of a tree and no-one you know is around? you're screwed. (I actually witnessed a man die in this very way) But despite that incredible poverty, everyone has a feature phone with built in calculator, messaging, calander, etc... which, unlike the US, they actually use to run their lives. They barter with cellphone minutes, transferring money via their phones. Completely homeless people rent slots in cinder block buildings to run shops off their phones selling whatever they could find to locals and tourists alike. I felt great despair and overwhelming hope for humanity all at the same time.
which leak memory like a sieve and treat memory like everything has unlimited quantities of it.
You have no idea what a memory leak is. None. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard a layman use the term correctly. A memory leak would lead to the application using a hell of a lot more memory than Firefox ever could in just a few seconds, if not immediately, and lead to the application faulting. And, for a point of fact, modern computers start with 8gig of memory, and then there's the page file/swap space. Effectively memory is unlimited, at least in comparison to the paltry 1 gig of memory Firefox is using. Firefox is a browser meant for browsing... and if that's what you're doing with it, that 1gig of memory is nothing. What background apps are using up the other 7gig? If you're running it in the background to do something, you're using the wrong application. Pandora has its own lightweight app for example.
A well designed web browser supporting ALL of the HTML, Javascript and other web standards could use a small fraction of what Firefox uses if it is written properly and in a better language like Ruby.
Example? Why aren't we all using it? Firefoxes massive advertising budget?
There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM.
Of course there is. You seem to have this idea that memory is the be all end all of resources. This was true in the 70s and 80s. Memory was $$$ then and you gave up everything to save memory. But now memory is insanely cheap... so you can use more memory if it decreases load times, lowers CPU load... or in the case of firefox, if it reduces badnwidth usage. Now-a-days bandwidth is the $$$. Many people in the world are on capped internet connections or they get charged by the gig downloaded. So Firefox has made caching its #1 priority, You are saving money on you monthly internet bill at the expense of storing that data in memory.
Slashdot Mirror
I never understood this. There's no need to "bust bunkers" You just need to collapse the entrance, problem solved.
One example she gives is a tech support person whose systems in Brazil went down — during Carnival: "...We had to wait more than a week for the locals to sober up enough to reconnect the line. In the end, I had to walk a tech (who did not know the system) through the process step by step via an interpreter. Of course, the interpreter was not technical. So it was kind of like explaining to your mom to tell your grandfather (who is hard of hearing) how to do something while she is on the phone and he is across the room from her."
Ok, that's just... I don't even know what it is... ethnocentric? It's stupid... not everyone in Brazil gets wasted during carnival. Businesses still run, things still work. If you had a line go down for a week without repair, that wasn't your remote users fault. That was your businesses fault for having a shit contract. Where we work we have tens of thousands of data and voice connections in every remote area you can imagine and there's no way something could go out for a week without a very good excuse like the building burnt down, or there was a flood. Even then we'd find a way around the problem temporarily. It's been more than one time I've kept a company in business with Cat5 strung through some trees.
And the language thing? Give me an Fing break. I had to support a doctor in India that did not speak english, so I made a wild guess, hit the directory of the hospital and looked for an American sounding name. Sure enough it was an American and he was nice, helped translate. I sent him detailed instructions and he helped walk the other doctor through it. That's our Job If I'm a window washer, I'm not going to complain when I come across a dirty one.
this is how disputes over large projects between large organizations are almost always handled, nobody takes their ball and goes home just because something is disputed unless one or both organizations have a serious cult of personality issue.
Right... I think everyone doing business with Oracle is Simultaneously working on a project, negotiating their contract renewal and in legal preceding. That's how Oracle works.
What is the better choice?
That 6 figure DBA is just as qualified to maintain any of the free alternatives. So why pay Oracle?
I maintain an Oracle app/DB and they're deprecating some major functionality and refuse to support older versions that do have it, so I'm supposed to come up with alternatives. I strongly favor an open/free alternative. My management came to me and said "But how do we get support?!?!" to which I replied "We haven't had support for over 10yrs, why start now?"
Sounds fair...
Even worse, all this would do is end Public testing and relegate it to secret testing. Something that's easy for first world countries to do, but would prevent countries like India and Pakistan from keeping their arsenal in any way equivalent to the rest of the worlds.
I actually do believe there wouldn't be use for nukes. Not for any moral reasons, but because I'm fairly certain the big players like the US already have warhead equipped platforms in space. They'd be easier, faster and cheaper than a hypersonic missile, it just makes sense.
Dude even blocked the doorway after we got up and tried to leave. I eventually threatened to call the police, and he finally gave up.
Happened to me to, I literally walked into a timeshare sales pitch like that... I walked in, thinking it was a gift shop and got trapped as the sale guy blocked the exit and put both hands in the door way so we couldn't leave and had to listen to his sale pitch. Within about 10 seconds I realized what was going on and tried to leave but the guy wouldn't let me through the doorway. I threw a punch, he moved so as not to get a broken nose. You try to prevent me from leaving a room, you're getting hit, I'm more than willing to spend the night in jail over that. Depending on the state, you might even get shot.
SV is not going to care about the Streisand Effect if they are in prison for the next 40 years, which is something that happens when you forge court documents.
Not to corporate entities it doesn't. If they can pin the forged document to a single person, then maybe, but the way these things usually shake out they never do, the company pays a tiny fine and on they go.
It doesn't matter how much content amazon has, nor how many datacenters they have. Amazon, Apple, Google...etc are all hostages to the last mile providers. Their business models depend on that last mile for delivery of their product.
In the end, the UPS/FedEx model will probably prevail where content providers will pay a delivery company for delivery of their product.
Google seems to be the only company with the foresight to start building their own last mile network. Unfortunately, at the rate they are going my great great grandkids might have Google Fiber available in their area.
There are ISPs for sale, all over this country, every day of the year. Amazon could buy them up cheap if they wanted to. Despite what slashdot would have you believe, they are not all that profitable. Hosting some videos in Seattle and charging people to see them with little to no overhead? Very profitable. Expect them to invest heavily in that side of the business.
The FCC gave up on net neutrality, and now they're giving up on the universal service fund. You think it's bad now? Just wait. You're going to get your wish, but it's going to be a monkeys paw. Prices will go down for people in major Urban areas... the other 99% of the country will likely not have internet access at all when this is over.
My only hope at this point is for some new wireless technology, but I'm not holding my breath.
fair enough, but the system doesn't work the way It's "supposed to" so now what?
My first pet predated social media, and there are no online pics of it. There's probably 2 people who could guess that one, and I'm not worried about either of them cracking my accounts.
Most of the time the attacker is your spouse. Would your wife know?
My answers to security questions are always as many characters of gibberish as it will allow.
These are not "public" conversations and this is not the police.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This is the military opening our mail, literally. That's unconstitutional and illegal. Period.
What on earth are you talking about? I have piles of these things (I love e-readers) they are like like MP3 players, you dump the files in flash memory and all the thing needs is a way to select files and turn the page. The Sony Ereaders are $30, are those lemons? lol
I can walk down to the local grocary store and they have them on end-caps for under $40.
Generic E-Readers are cheaper than that.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html...|R40|R40&_sacat=0&LH_ItemCondition=3&_nkw=ereader&_udhi=30
You can even get used kindles for between $5 and $10
Those librarians need to kick the hobos browsing porn off the library computers so they can get on ebay.
The fact that these towers are found next to military bases speaks volumes.
The military needs to there own version of everything to make sure things work in times of national crisis, emergency, or security. They need to have their own infrastructure to insure communications. They need to control their communications around bases and know who is saying or doing what. They need to be able to anticipate attacks. Nobody should have any expectation of privacy on or next to a military base.
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this.
Last time I checked, my constitutional rights didn't get suspended inside a casino in Las Vegas... did you miss that part? Many were on bases, but not all or even most. If the military wants to control their own communications they are welcome to start their own cellular network, they could even use these towers and then have their staff roam to other networks when they weren't near a base.
The only reason they are doing this is to intercept the calls of us citizens which is both illegal and unconstitutional. Your imaginary safety is not worth my constitutional rights. This sort of surveillance is exactly what the constitution was created to protect us from. It's not some weird esoteric thing the founders could never have anticipated like Machine guns or Abortions. This is the government listening in to the private correspondence of citizens for the sole purpose of security. That's expressly and unarguably forbidden legally, constitutionally and every other way you can think of.
The article says ...
What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases.
The summary says ...
Many of them are built around U.S. military bases.
Way to slant the summary to make it look like Chinese towers rather than our towers.
I do not think those statements mean different things. They could, but from what I know of cell towers all they could really know is that the tower is near the base, not if it was right on it or not. It's not like they were triangulating the signal or anything.
But they're revealing that he is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.
Wouldn't they just send him to the closest psychiatric hospital AND TELL THE PRESS THAT HE WENT THERE for evaluation? If there is no problem with the actions of the police then there is no need for secrecy.
They did not say "They" took him, just that he went somewhere, and has no ability to travel and that he was going through some sort of evaluation. As far as we know he might have gotten into a car accident the day before they were going to talk to him so he's on leave until he wakes up and under continual evaluation.
I really want to freak out on this one, but there's just not enough information yet to do that. Slashdots burned me before.
Treated like scum? I agree that I often feel that we're not treated like equals on par with management. I think we get treated better than a lot of other employee groups, though. When I think of professions I'd change places with, the list often comes up short.
Agreed... I worked my way up from a call center and got my education after I got my job. I'm treated like a God where I am now compared to being hourly. If you think you're treated as a slave now, that just means you've never had a "real" job. At times we get into a spat because I think something could be written better or we should spend more time on X or Y, but when I did hourly work? I wasn't allowed to speak in meetings. Much less have an opposing viewpoint. Arguing with the boss would have gotten me walked right out the front door, and that's been true of every hourly job I've had.
(adding)
According to people who claim to 'know more', he was using aliases for real life things like when he applied for the job, not just pseudonyms for writing. People claiming to be parents have also chimed in saying there was 'real fear' around this person, but I would not be surprised if this fear came after the board discovered his books as opposed to before.
There are also claims he sent a 'disturbing letter' to the school board, but 'it was not their place to update with facts', so I am skeptical of the poster.
yea, the only way this could really end up making any sense was that some old lady librarian at the school found his books, got concerned and went to the school-board/police... who had to talk to him for due diligence, and when they did talk to him, they found out completely by accident that the dude was actually nuts. Maybe he threatened suicide or took a swing at a cop? Getting someone committed is NOT easy, I've tried doing it before, it's nearly impossible.
If they really committed him for writing 2 books, no matter how bad they are, this is completely off the rails insane.
The person's chances are not all that good. Unless the union backs them up (and even then it can be a stretch) schools are pretty hard to go up against. "Think of the children", while often mocked, is a pretty powerful rallying cry for local officials who might be worried about parental outrage or practicing 'cover your ass' security where it is better to come down hard and be seeing to be doing something then risk something happening and be blamed for not acting. The life of some middle school teacher does not even begin to factor in.
Nah... I don't live in Maryland, but in my state... in my highschool, one of our teachers that was in his mid 30's started "Dating" a freshman. She broke up with him, so he started sending her letters, stalking her, finally ended up crawling in her bedroom window one night and her dad caught him. They fired him, he was charged and convicted of statutory, but then a judge forced the school to hire him back, with back pay. As far as I know he's still teaching there. Totally ostracized and they gave him a "Shop class" that no one takes, but he has a job.
So yea, it's pretty hard to get fired as a teacher.
I love reading through this... lot of people that have never been on a low carb diet, and likely have been thin their whole lives, giving everyone else advice.
Low Carb diets work. Very well, and the weight stays off, unlike low fat diets. You have more energy, are less hungry, less irritable, etc... The problem with them? Our entire food industry is completely centered on Carbohydrates. You cannot find low carb foods easily. Want a sandwitch for lunch? You can't have bread! Potatoes, the number 1 vegetable in the US, are completely out. No pasta! No Rice!
you're basically eating Steak and Fish, with vegetables, all day every day. Those things don't heat up in the microwave well.
Can we get stories about when kernel developers go to the bathroom as well?
This is hardly anything that matters or belongs on slashdot. Hans Reiser slaying his wife ... okay, sure, that meant the end of reiserfs effectively. One kernel dev serving time for a basic civil disobedience charge? Who cares? Its about as important as Bennett Hasleton rants about things he utterly fails to understand.
Yea, a war between 2 of the largest countries in Europe isn't "news that matters" at all. The imprisonment of Kernel developers for their political beliefs, nah... who cares right?
If so, and they ignored it, oh well, it's your own damn fault.
I hear this argument a lot. But the fact of the matter is, if you're neighbor is stupid enough to let their kids play with matches... yes, that's their fault, but that doesn't mean your house isn't going to burn down right along with theirs. A breach of this scale could have repercussions for the internet as a whole. I run into this attitude at work all the time... lets say we're building a website and we put a button on the screen over to the right, but if they have the window too small they can't see that button. Someone invariably says something to the effect of "Well, you'd have to be an idiot to have your window shrunk down to that size! It's their own fault for being stupid!" at which point I pipe up and say "We want stupid peoples money to don't we?"
You can't just ignore stupid people on the net. That's about 99.99% of people, and they're paying for the rest of us to actually use it properly.
My suggestion to Namecheap (and other domain registrars or hosting companies) would be to lock them all down if possible, force all users to change the passwords from e-mail or other contact method before they can login again. We don't know what they have and we don't know what their plans are. This is a gaping security hole in the internet.
Unless the users had the same password for their email account which is likely. This is the problem with the username/password system, people want single signon, but companies don't want to cooperate unless it involves giving up any shred of anonymity i.e. Facebook/Google longon.
The government confiscating all your cash in a time of financial turmoil however... that's pretty much guaranteed to happen.
If they had wanted to be truly innovative... the card would not be a Mastercard, but a Bitcoin hardware wallet,
where the user would have to program it with their Public/Private key pair, and each citizen would be given at least
three... one pair of e-cards primary/backup, and a paper document that could be used to prove ID in order to replace
documents in case the other two were lost, so they could carry the first, lockup the second someplace safe, and put the third in a safety deposit vault.
It's Africa, the later 2 likely do not exist for the majority of citizens. I went there a few years back and it changed my entire world view. The people are poorer than you could possibly imagine compared to the US. You could be literally dieing in the street and nothing could be done for you. Fall out of a tree and no-one you know is around? you're screwed. (I actually witnessed a man die in this very way) But despite that incredible poverty, everyone has a feature phone with built in calculator, messaging, calander, etc... which, unlike the US, they actually use to run their lives. They barter with cellphone minutes, transferring money via their phones. Completely homeless people rent slots in cinder block buildings to run shops off their phones selling whatever they could find to locals and tourists alike. I felt great despair and overwhelming hope for humanity all at the same time.
which leak memory like a sieve and treat memory like everything has unlimited quantities of it.
You have no idea what a memory leak is. None. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard a layman use the term correctly. A memory leak would lead to the application using a hell of a lot more memory than Firefox ever could in just a few seconds, if not immediately, and lead to the application faulting. And, for a point of fact, modern computers start with 8gig of memory, and then there's the page file/swap space. Effectively memory is unlimited, at least in comparison to the paltry 1 gig of memory Firefox is using. Firefox is a browser meant for browsing... and if that's what you're doing with it, that 1gig of memory is nothing. What background apps are using up the other 7gig? If you're running it in the background to do something, you're using the wrong application. Pandora has its own lightweight app for example.
A well designed web browser supporting ALL of the HTML, Javascript and other web standards could use a small fraction of what Firefox uses if it is written properly and in a better language like Ruby.
Example? Why aren't we all using it? Firefoxes massive advertising budget?
There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM.
Of course there is. You seem to have this idea that memory is the be all end all of resources. This was true in the 70s and 80s. Memory was $$$ then and you gave up everything to save memory. But now memory is insanely cheap... so you can use more memory if it decreases load times, lowers CPU load... or in the case of firefox, if it reduces badnwidth usage. Now-a-days bandwidth is the $$$. Many people in the world are on capped internet connections or they get charged by the gig downloaded. So Firefox has made caching its #1 priority, You are saving money on you monthly internet bill at the expense of storing that data in memory.