You step over the line when you...start selling for a profit.
If only Chuck Norris Facts didn't get there first, by selling t-shirts for obviously way over the amount it would take just to cover the cost of making them.
Ninety-four t-shirts on sale. For years. And no lawsuit against the website.
Social hacks (phishing) can be done to anyone clever enough to hold a conversation but stupid enough not to be even slightly cynical when strangers start asking certain questions. But many phishing techniques ask the hapless victim to download an attachment, or get access to the victim's computer using online foot-in-the-door tricks like eCards that are more than they appear.
What's the level of Mac penetration? 5%? 8%? Let's say it's the lowest number. Five percent of $56 billion is still $2.8 billion a year. If anyone manages to write malware that could spread in the way PC malware can multiply, especially with the average Mac user's attitude ("virus protection? Why should I save a PC user's arse when I send them Word documents? My iBook's fine..."), imagine the draw for crime syndicates. A guaranteed first shot at nearly three billion EVERY YEAR.
And yet it hasn't happened. An illegal industry that pays better than drugs, without the inherent violence on the streets, and Mac users steadfastly refuse to get fleeced.
Which means either the criminals either aren't really that hungry for this potential sector, or there's an easier way to get the money.
Just having the standard feature in a Mac that asks for your password for any new program being installed means you're put on guard. "Hey, I went to see this funny ReindeerYourself card and it's asking for my passowrd? No way..." and the keylogger software remains off your computer. It wouldn't matter if Mac penetration was 12%, 15%. If it's so much easier to hack the PC system for financial gain, it's not financially viable for anyone to write the keylogger software and then wait for enough Mac owners to be stupid enough to install the software to recopu their costs. Just let Windows users visit the page you mass-maile and enough will click the link with high speed connections. Ker-ching.
So this is finally put-up-or-shut-up for the Windows fanboyz. If the US Army puts its weight behind it, this shifts the whole landscape for writing malware. You see: before this announcement, any jihadist that wanted death to America would just do what all the other fanboys did: learn Visual Basic and send away. But now? Now they'll need to try and sneak through the Mac architecture. And unlike the Russian Mafia, cost isn't an issue. The 'enemy' will throw everything they have to bring the Army system down. Cost isn't an issue if money is not what you're after.
So if it turns out that a world full of hate-filled terrorists that care nowt for money can't hack their way in, what then for the Apple bashers?
Saturn has a ring system (probably because something smashed into an icy moon). Then we see impacts hit Jupiter. Now we're looking at a possible Mars impact.
I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but has anyone looked at a chart of the Solar System recently? We appear to be next on the list after Mars.
Wouldn't all areas in the Arctic Circle get the sun in the sky all day for months, not just in Canada? IANAPE (Planetary Expert), but I'm sure that's what the Earth's tilt means.
Ah, Slashdot. Come for the ambience, stay for the warmth. Or pitch the odd attack (unless don't want to baffle the other posters). You might get slap backs with increased frequency if your posts are too sharp... eventually, everyone finds their level as the tone of the conversations falls into a comfortable rhythm.
I was just playing safe... he played the President of the US after all. If I were to say 'screw you Mister President' in a post, I might find myself spending Christmas in Gitmo for the next xx years.
I checked out the link...they don't have anything for the 2nd Gen iPod Nano yet (and I'm not risking the 1st Gen option in case it bricks the iPod). Their instruction manual didn't mention anything about 2nd Gen Nanos at all.
Through early production of the model, it became a focus of a major scandal when it was alleged that the car's design allowed its fuel tank to be easily damaged in the event of a rear-end collision which sometimes resulted in deadly fires and explosions. Critics argued that the vehicle's lack of a true rear bumper as well as any reinforcing structure between the rear panel and the tank, meant that in certain collisions, the tank would be thrust forward into the differential, which had a number of protruding bolts that could puncture the tank. This, and the fact that the doors could potentially jam during an accident (due to poor reinforcing) made the car a potential deathtrap.
Ford was aware of this design flaw but allegedly refused to pay what was characterized as the minimal expense of a redesign. Instead, it was argued, Ford decided it would be cheaper to pay off possible lawsuits for resulting deaths. Mother Jones magazine obtained the cost-benefit analysis that it said Ford had used to compare the cost of an $11 repair against the cost of paying off potential law suits, in what became known as the Ford Pinto Memo.
This page says "the costs for fixing the Pinto was $121 million, while settling cases where injuries occur was only $50 million".
Remember the film 'Deep Impact', where the asteroid hit the Atlantic Ocean? We saw various people and locations in the States get wiped out. Then Morgan Freeman's voiceover said "blah blah, the wave hit Europe and Africa too, blah blah".
Téa Leoni gets to break the story and has a whole beach to herself with her father (what, nobody in the area got stoned enough to suicidally try and King Canute the wave back?) and two continents get a sentence...?!?!?!?!??
BearingPoint was formerly KPMG Consulting Inc., the consulting division of the huge accounting firm KPMG LLP that was brought down in the Enron/Arthur Anderson scandal of 2002. In July of 2003, BearingPoint was awarded a contract by USAID worth $79.5 million to facilitate Iraq's economic recovery with a two-year option worth a total of $240,162,688
Amoco got rid of its company name when it merged with British Petroleum, greenwashing their hands of the Amoco Cadiz oil spill.
Just for the sheer cheek of it all, the Astroturf page gives you cause to ponder at just how amoral businesses can be.
Am I the only one who thought this sentence smacked of Intelligent Design proposition?
Yes, you are.
...and yet I thought it did.
Nobody can define what 'is' merely by wishful thinking*. Whether that wishful thinking involves an idea invented on the fly, or ideas translated from Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, or Latin, into contemporary languages.
*Unless someone wishes to prove me wrong by having me drop down dead this instant.
Great. Just what the Universe needs. Two identical versions of Catherine Tate.
Here's one thing from the Wiki page that Blew. My. Mind...
A simulation may have been built for the purpose of its inhabitants, and so it may respond to their wishes if properly expressed. (This is the secular version of having one's prayers answered if delivered using the correct ritual.) If any sort of prayer or wishing is found to be effective, and is verified to be scientifically inexplicable, then it is grounds to suspect that reality is being simulated.
Wasn't there some study a few years back where prayer was shown to help aid recovery, then that was shown to be biased and statistically it turned out that more people suffered complications from the power of prayer than without it? (some searching later) Maybe not so long ago...
What if reality had a Peter Molyneux, Populous, subroutine written into it? Say: the operation of the program loses abilities and functionality (Manna) if its denizens constantly demand too much from the system without working for 'whatever they want' themselves (praying for a flood to wipe out the opposition instead of growing to the point where they do the job themselves).
With two films, there's space to fill in the creation story of Middle Earth, or maybe just concentrate on The Red Book of Westmarch (which contained Elvish stories translated by Bilbo).
I'm hoping for Christmas releases. Going to the movies at Christmas was fun for the three years of The Ring Trilogy. Especially when I realised there was no time left for Shelob in The Two Towers and I'd have to wait another year for the giant spider. Which made sense, considering how half of The Return Of The King (book) consists of a guide to pronouncing words in Elvish.
Ah, we've all been there with technology. When I got my 2nd gen. iPod nano, I thought "wow, colour screen" and now I'm thinking "hmmm, no video."
Time to meander like the old man I am: I found a 3.5" floppy at home last week where I had written on the label: 'put onto new computer, maybe 1.4GHz'. Oooh, with 256 megs of RAM and a nice big 40 Gig hard drive... I just checked eBay, there's a HP WorkStation X2000 P4 going in the US for two hundred dollars with 512MB of RAM, and still with SCSI for my old scanner.
Or I can wait twenty years and they'll have a nanobot one for free in my Corkflakes (sans SCSI).
Ah, but did he let the masses know it wasn't like a big truck, but more like a series of tubes that you get your internets on?
An internets was sent by my wife at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internets commercially.
And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
One - freedom's a nice word, but the way to truly judge freedom is action. Looking at StateOfWorldLiberty.org is a start. It takes data from the political range (I see the Cato Institute for Libertarians and the conservative Heritage Foundation, for example), and it looks like the USA...came in at number 8 on the list. Beaten by Britain with all its CCTV cameras.
Two - you give away any chance to later claim any sort of political middle ground when you start dropping phrases like "the Liberal media" into your posts. In Britain, we know it's a catchphrase used by ultra-right wing talk show hosts that advocate racism and global warming denial (Rush Limbaugh springs to mind). It's as transparent as when militant lesbians say 'heteronormal' as an insult. It's a codeword to tell us where you stand idealogically, and using 'the liberal media' paints you as being the kind of person that has cheered every wrong decision out of Washington in the last seven years or so. Seeing as, for example, Fox and NBC News have an running slanging match in the States, yet NBC is owned by one of the largest military contractors and Fox calls some of their on-air people unAmerican...well. It's a show. One you seem to take very seriously.
By heck, that Beige G3 PowerPC Mac I had a few years back was doing well for itself, then.
But that's nothing compared to what this guy did...
I took the build-your-own approach using Macromedia Flash. My target machine is a PowerMac 7200 of approximately 10 years of age, with a 12-inch, 640x480 fixed resolution monitor.
Here's the thing. The only people that have to be worried are Mac users with a dot-mac account. I have an iMac but I wouldn't dream of getting.mac account. Seeing as it costs $99.95 for a year's membership, and for that you get:
a place to share photos online (which I do for free with Photobucket)
your own personal web-space (which for personal use, Blogger does the job just fine for me)
email access anywhere, even on an iPhone (but the iPhone shows your regular ISP email anyway, which is set up the first time you plug your iPhone into your Mac thanks to the settings in the Mail program, and GMail is accessed anywhere with internet connectivity too)
remote access to your Mac (which I personally have never needed)
the ability to sync your favourite stuff to the computer you're using (my iGoogle page shows me all the stuff I usually bookmark on any computer I decide to log into Google...and after that, I have the URLs in my head or I can search for the stuff I want, or just send the URLs in an email to my GMail account, stick a star on the email and sort by stars to find it quickly)
10GB of storage online for files (XDrive gives 5GB away for free, eSnips gies 5GB away for free, my photos on Photobucket, my videos that I want people to see on YouTube...).Mac Groups (there are enough free options out there for whatever group I want to start or join...Google Groups, browsing the old Usenet newsgroups using Thunderbird, etc.)
Online backup if I don't have OS X 10.5 Leopard (or I can just buy Leopard and get all the new-fangled doohickeys too)...
What's the point? It's the equivalent of when people had CompuServe in the early-to-mid 90s. They'd pay through the nose to use a proprietary web browser and get access to groups that only other CIS users could use. It's the internet for people that don't know what's out there for nowt, a gated net community.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. Wog? You arse.
If only Chuck Norris Facts didn't get there first, by selling t-shirts for obviously way over the amount it would take just to cover the cost of making them.
Ninety-four t-shirts on sale. For years. And no lawsuit against the website.
Looks like Carlos Norris is a bit thick.
Let's put this in a language we can all understand.
Money.
According to one of these links, a press release, on Google, ID thieving alone "costs more than $56 billion, or $6383 per victim, annually". That's US, obviously.
Social hacks (phishing) can be done to anyone clever enough to hold a conversation but stupid enough not to be even slightly cynical when strangers start asking certain questions. But many phishing techniques ask the hapless victim to download an attachment, or get access to the victim's computer using online foot-in-the-door tricks like eCards that are more than they appear.
What's the level of Mac penetration? 5%? 8%? Let's say it's the lowest number. Five percent of $56 billion is still $2.8 billion a year. If anyone manages to write malware that could spread in the way PC malware can multiply, especially with the average Mac user's attitude ("virus protection? Why should I save a PC user's arse when I send them Word documents? My iBook's fine..."), imagine the draw for crime syndicates. A guaranteed first shot at nearly three billion EVERY YEAR.
And yet it hasn't happened. An illegal industry that pays better than drugs, without the inherent violence on the streets, and Mac users steadfastly refuse to get fleeced.
Which means either the criminals either aren't really that hungry for this potential sector, or there's an easier way to get the money.
Just having the standard feature in a Mac that asks for your password for any new program being installed means you're put on guard. "Hey, I went to see this funny ReindeerYourself card and it's asking for my passowrd? No way..." and the keylogger software remains off your computer. It wouldn't matter if Mac penetration was 12%, 15%. If it's so much easier to hack the PC system for financial gain, it's not financially viable for anyone to write the keylogger software and then wait for enough Mac owners to be stupid enough to install the software to recopu their costs. Just let Windows users visit the page you mass-maile and enough will click the link with high speed connections. Ker-ching.
So this is finally put-up-or-shut-up for the Windows fanboyz. If the US Army puts its weight behind it, this shifts the whole landscape for writing malware. You see: before this announcement, any jihadist that wanted death to America would just do what all the other fanboys did: learn Visual Basic and send away. But now? Now they'll need to try and sneak through the Mac architecture. And unlike the Russian Mafia, cost isn't an issue. The 'enemy' will throw everything they have to bring the Army system down. Cost isn't an issue if money is not what you're after.
So if it turns out that a world full of hate-filled terrorists that care nowt for money can't hack their way in, what then for the Apple bashers?
You insensitive clod, I wear glasses.
Saturn has a ring system (probably because something smashed into an icy moon). Then we see impacts hit Jupiter. Now we're looking at a possible Mars impact.
I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but has anyone looked at a chart of the Solar System recently? We appear to be next on the list after Mars.
Wouldn't all areas in the Arctic Circle get the sun in the sky all day for months, not just in Canada? IANAPE (Planetary Expert), but I'm sure that's what the Earth's tilt means.
...the infamous nonexistence of England's King Louis.
There. Fixed it for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_England
Or maybe I should say voilà... comme neuf pour toi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_monarchs
Ah, Slashdot. Come for the ambience, stay for the warmth. Or pitch the odd attack (unless don't want to baffle the other posters). You might get slap backs with increased frequency if your posts are too sharp... eventually, everyone finds their level as the tone of the conversations falls into a comfortable rhythm.
I think you're all my wavelength, right?
I'll get my coat.
I was just playing safe... he played the President of the US after all. If I were to say 'screw you Mister President' in a post, I might find myself spending Christmas in Gitmo for the next xx years.
Werewolves in London.
There. Fixed that plural for you.
I checked out the link ...they don't have anything for the 2nd Gen iPod Nano yet (and I'm not risking the 1st Gen option in case it bricks the iPod). Their instruction manual didn't mention anything about 2nd Gen Nanos at all.
That's exactly it. Just to give you reference: I was thinking of the Ford Pinto Memo when I thought of the word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Safety_problems
Through early production of the model, it became a focus of a major scandal when it was alleged that the car's design allowed its fuel tank to be easily damaged in the event of a rear-end collision which sometimes resulted in deadly fires and explosions. Critics argued that the vehicle's lack of a true rear bumper as well as any reinforcing structure between the rear panel and the tank, meant that in certain collisions, the tank would be thrust forward into the differential, which had a number of protruding bolts that could puncture the tank. This, and the fact that the doors could potentially jam during an accident (due to poor reinforcing) made the car a potential deathtrap.
Ford was aware of this design flaw but allegedly refused to pay what was characterized as the minimal expense of a redesign. Instead, it was argued, Ford decided it would be cheaper to pay off possible lawsuits for resulting deaths. Mother Jones magazine obtained the cost-benefit analysis that it said Ford had used to compare the cost of an $11 repair against the cost of paying off potential law suits, in what became known as the Ford Pinto Memo.
This page says "the costs for fixing the Pinto was $121 million, while settling cases where injuries occur was only $50 million".
Money came before human life.
Amoral.
Remember the film 'Deep Impact', where the asteroid hit the Atlantic Ocean? We saw various people and locations in the States get wiped out. Then Morgan Freeman's voiceover said "blah blah, the wave hit Europe and Africa too, blah blah".
Téa Leoni gets to break the story and has a whole beach to herself with her father (what, nobody in the area got stoned enough to suicidally try and King Canute the wave back?) and two continents get a sentence...?!?!?!?!??
Screw you, Morgan Freeman.
Dig around on SourceWatch. Here's what I found:
BearingPoint was formerly KPMG Consulting Inc., the consulting division of the huge accounting firm KPMG LLP that was brought down in the Enron/Arthur Anderson scandal of 2002. In July of 2003, BearingPoint was awarded a contract by USAID worth $79.5 million to facilitate Iraq's economic recovery with a two-year option worth a total of $240,162,688
Amoco got rid of its company name when it merged with British Petroleum, greenwashing their hands of the Amoco Cadiz oil spill.
Just for the sheer cheek of it all, the Astroturf page gives you cause to ponder at just how amoral businesses can be.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit-flies like a banana."
Groucho Marx.
lovers don't intentionally try to destroy their love for each other.
You've obviously never met my ex-wife.
Nobody can define what 'is' merely by wishful thinking*. Whether that wishful thinking involves an idea invented on the fly, or ideas translated from Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, or Latin, into contemporary languages.
*Unless someone wishes to prove me wrong by having me drop down dead this instant.
Nope, still breathing.
Or AM I...??? Hmmmm...
Great. Just what the Universe needs. Two identical versions of Catherine Tate.
Here's one thing from the Wiki page that Blew. My. Mind...
A simulation may have been built for the purpose of its inhabitants, and so it may respond to their wishes if properly expressed. (This is the secular version of having one's prayers answered if delivered using the correct ritual.) If any sort of prayer or wishing is found to be effective, and is verified to be scientifically inexplicable, then it is grounds to suspect that reality is being simulated.
Wasn't there some study a few years back where prayer was shown to help aid recovery, then that was shown to be biased and statistically it turned out that more people suffered complications from the power of prayer than without it? (some searching later) Maybe not so long ago...
What if reality had a Peter Molyneux, Populous, subroutine written into it? Say: the operation of the program loses abilities and functionality (Manna) if its denizens constantly demand too much from the system without working for 'whatever they want' themselves (praying for a flood to wipe out the opposition instead of growing to the point where they do the job themselves).
With two films, there's space to fill in the creation story of Middle Earth, or maybe just concentrate on The Red Book of Westmarch (which contained Elvish stories translated by Bilbo).
I'm hoping for Christmas releases. Going to the movies at Christmas was fun for the three years of The Ring Trilogy. Especially when I realised there was no time left for Shelob in The Two Towers and I'd have to wait another year for the giant spider. Which made sense, considering how half of The Return Of The King (book) consists of a guide to pronouncing words in Elvish.
Ah, we've all been there with technology. When I got my 2nd gen. iPod nano, I thought "wow, colour screen" and now I'm thinking "hmmm, no video."
Time to meander like the old man I am: I found a 3.5" floppy at home last week where I had written on the label: 'put onto new computer, maybe 1.4GHz'. Oooh, with 256 megs of RAM and a nice big 40 Gig hard drive... I just checked eBay, there's a HP WorkStation X2000 P4 going in the US for two hundred dollars with 512MB of RAM, and still with SCSI for my old scanner.
Or I can wait twenty years and they'll have a nanobot one for free in my Corkflakes (sans SCSI).
Ah, but did he let the masses know it wasn't like a big truck, but more like a series of tubes that you get your internets on?
An internets was sent by my wife at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internets commercially.
And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Two things:
...came in at number 8 on the list. Beaten by Britain with all its CCTV cameras.
...well. It's a show. One you seem to take very seriously.
One - freedom's a nice word, but the way to truly judge freedom is action. Looking at StateOfWorldLiberty.org is a start. It takes data from the political range (I see the Cato Institute for Libertarians and the conservative Heritage Foundation, for example), and it looks like the USA
Two - you give away any chance to later claim any sort of political middle ground when you start dropping phrases like "the Liberal media" into your posts. In Britain, we know it's a catchphrase used by ultra-right wing talk show hosts that advocate racism and global warming denial (Rush Limbaugh springs to mind). It's as transparent as when militant lesbians say 'heteronormal' as an insult. It's a codeword to tell us where you stand idealogically, and using 'the liberal media' paints you as being the kind of person that has cheered every wrong decision out of Washington in the last seven years or so. Seeing as, for example, Fox and NBC News have an running slanging match in the States, yet NBC is owned by one of the largest military contractors and Fox calls some of their on-air people unAmerican
But that's nothing compared to what this guy did...
Macs use computers?
.mac account. Seeing as it costs $99.95 for a year's membership, and for that you get:
...and after that, I have the URLs in my head or I can search for the stuff I want, or just send the URLs in an email to my GMail account, stick a star on the email and sort by stars to find it quickly)
.Mac Groups (there are enough free options out there for whatever group I want to start or join ...Google Groups, browsing the old Usenet newsgroups using Thunderbird, etc.)
And I thought it was over 5 percent now...
Here's the thing. The only people that have to be worried are Mac users with a dot-mac account. I have an iMac but I wouldn't dream of getting
a place to share photos online (which I do for free with Photobucket)
your own personal web-space (which for personal use, Blogger does the job just fine for me)
email access anywhere, even on an iPhone (but the iPhone shows your regular ISP email anyway, which is set up the first time you plug your iPhone into your Mac thanks to the settings in the Mail program, and GMail is accessed anywhere with internet connectivity too)
remote access to your Mac (which I personally have never needed)
the ability to sync your favourite stuff to the computer you're using (my iGoogle page shows me all the stuff I usually bookmark on any computer I decide to log into Google
10GB of storage online for files (XDrive gives 5GB away for free, eSnips gies 5GB away for free, my photos on Photobucket, my videos that I want people to see on YouTube...)
Online backup if I don't have OS X 10.5 Leopard (or I can just buy Leopard and get all the new-fangled doohickeys too)...
What's the point? It's the equivalent of when people had CompuServe in the early-to-mid 90s. They'd pay through the nose to use a proprietary web browser and get access to groups that only other CIS users could use. It's the internet for people that don't know what's out there for nowt, a gated net community.
...oops. You meant bouyancy, I was talking about using the water as the propellant.
Sorry.