Sure they could be brute-forced. A few of them, I realised I had no hope of getting them so I wrote some QuickBasic code to brute-force them.
The chess-derived ones in 7G and 11H annoyed me though. The authors clearly hadn't put any real thought in - they'd just run out of ideas and pilfered a book of "classic puzzles".
Bullshit. If you can prove the camera is calibrated wrong, go for it. If not, you're talking urban legends.
You certainly can dispute a camera ticket if you want. Your speeding fine will (or should) say where you were speeding, so you can look back and work it out. Speed cameras aren't on the junctions themselves, so getting T-boned in a camera zone is most unlikely. Plus in the UK at least, cameras need to take two photos of you speeding (at fixed intervals to prove how fast you were going), so if you want to dispute it then you can get the photos and use them to show the state of the road and positions of other road users at the time.
Of course, usually it *is* almost impossible to dispute a cam ticket, because nearly always you've been caught red-handed and there's nothing you can do about it.
You mean the police are actually doing something about it when you break the law?!?! Hell, that shouldn't be allowed! We should all be free to break the law whenever we want, right?
I think you'll find there was a person doing the "meep meeps"...:-)
Grab.
Is /. a helpline for incompetent businesses...?
on
Becoming a CLEC?
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Excuse me, you're running a professional business here? If you seriously claim to be an ISP and don't have the resources (or resourcefulness) to find out about this, you don't deserve to be in business. I could understand this from some hobbyist/amateur, but not from a company making money off it.
And WFT is this doing on Ask Slashdot anyway?! Oh yeah, same as the last bunch of pointless questions on Ask Slashdot. I really wish Taco knew where he got these editors from, so he could put them back there and stop them fouling up the site with crap.
If this guy is playing an hour or so in the evening and his SO still complains, then I agree, she's getting too uptight. There's no reason a couple have to have identical interests - it's healthier if you do treat each other as individuals rather than trying to be a pair of Borgs.;-) (In my case, I'm a coder by vocation so I do that at work and home, plus electronics. My wife's into musicals and drama. We intersect on music, hiking and gardening.:-)
But if he's playing 4 hours every evening, so he gets back from work and plugs in, things ain't right. Having a SO means that they *are* "significant". If they're less significant than gaming, then game and ditch the inSO, but he can't expect her to just put up with it. Not unless she's using him for income and getting her emotional needs met by some other guy, anyway.
Come off it - the BBC has *never* known what to do with Dr. Who! "Hey, we've got this ultra-successful, iconic TV programme, so let's axe it while it's having a real come-back. And while we're at it, let's wipe all the recordings of old programmes as well. Releasing old episodes on video/DVD? Nah, don't want to do that..."
That's the blessing and curse of the BBC. As an organisation with external funding unconnected to its viewing figures, it can produce objective reporting, challenging programmes, and serious documentaries with quality rather than immediate payback. OTOH, it doesn't have to give a damn about its audience, so there could be mass marches outside their offices for a show to come back or be made available on video/DVD, and they wouldn't give a damn (Dr. Who being the prime example).
As for stuff from the 50s, very little of it exists. Like the Dr. Who episodes, most of them have been erased so that the tapes can be reused. Ironically, most recordings from before about 1970 that have survived have only done so bcos BBC employees have stolen them.
My pet peeve about the BBC is that whilst you can listen to radio shows again via the Internet, you can only do so streaming - you can't download the whole show and listen to it. This screws over anyone on 56K (which currently is most of the UK), bcos it becomes unuseable when you have 1-minute gaps between 10-second chunks of music!
Except it doesn't, and Scaled Composites and the rest are out to prove that. Cheap access to orbit equals cheap access to putting things in orbit, equals cheap way of getting bits up there for bigger missions.
One of the original intentions of having an orbiting space station (way back when) was to serve as a staging post for missions to Mars and other planets, including providing the facilities to assemble craft to get there (because such craft would be too big to get out of the Earth's gravity well with current rockets, so it's easier to ship them up in bits). Shame that all went tits-up with the ISS, but then the ISS turned into a political goal in itself, rather than a way of getting space exploration further, mainly due to NASA's usual massive budget overruns.
Commercial companies are actually the only people likely to achieve anything in space, if you think about it. NASA are so wasteful that even the US gov can't provide enough funding for them to do meaningful work. NASA *could* do anything they wanted, given their funding, but they just don't seem to have the mentality of using money wisely and keeping their engineers under control. It either needs a total rethink of NASA's management, or it needs NASA to be disbanded and the money used to "outsource" to commercial companies who *do* have a history of meeting cost targets and deadlines.
Hell, I'd work on it if I knew how to program and had a Domino's in my area.
I wouldn't. Domino's are probably the foulest pizzas in existence, made so by a tomato sauce that appears to have been produced by feeding the tomatos to some poor creature and then forcing it to vomit them back up.
You may have guessed that I don't like Domino's pizzas...;-)
Besides which, even if you don't object for reasons of taste, you're better to support smaller businesses. Go to your local pizza place instead, instead of a chain, for the same reason you don't go to Starbucks unless there's no choice.
The only data I have that could be useful to someone else are the files for my open-source projects. And those are on SourceForge, which for me is a combined release mechanism and off-site backup service. If I croak, someone else can take the projects over if they want. If no-one wants them, the data wasn't that important anyway so no big deal.
I've got a billygoat you can have, Mr. Troll...;-)
a) UK TV channels *do* pay for US shows, cash on the nail.
b) $7 trillion that would never have been needed if a bunch of right-wing fanatics hadn't been running the US for 40 years. Mutually-assured destruction requires "mutual" up-arming, and the US always liked going one better on that score. (And oh boy, are the good times rolling again in this presidency!)
c) Sorry, but the UK repaid every last cent from WW2. And the US got a great deal with technology transfer, since the Brits taught the US a whole lot about computers, radar, aircraft design, sub tracking, etc. Oh, and about believing British intelligence reports, after a few unfortunate incidents like Pearl Harbour...
Correctly rated as "troll". But to enlighten you...
One mobo is not a big problem. But the zillions of circuit boards thrown away every year, when they're all taken together, *are* a problem. It's the same as smokeless zones - one campfire is not a problem, but an entire city with coal fires screws up the air.
You don't plan eating your mobo, but wherever they're shipped to (usually China) for "recycling", this shit dissolves out of the piles of boards and seeps into the water supplies. So people over there are *literally* eating and drinking the metals out of your mobo. Life expectancy in those areas is pretty damn short, due to poisoning from lead, cadmium, arsenic and other nasties.
Grab.
Re:Following distance? We don't need no stinking f
on
Intelligent Road Studs
·
· Score: 1
It's the regional differences that I was talking about. With all that stacked against me, and I was still driving safer than most of the rest of the traffic who (theoretically) knew the score...;-)
Grab.
Re:Following distance? We don't need no stinking f
on
Intelligent Road Studs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually we're *owned* by Ford, so we're (relatively) free to hold opinions...:-)
Everyone at Ford knows the Taurus was a dog - it's not news. The more interesting question (which they're still trying to answer) is how they managed to get the Focus handling so wrong on the US model, when they got it so right on the European version.
On the plus side, check out the Hybrid Escape when it comes out. It's not like earth-shattering performance (hell, it's an SUV, what do you expect?;-) but it's a pretty sharp bit of kit. Electric motors give a really good boost at low revs - no waiting for torque converters to spin up or stuff like that. Generally it's pretty nice to drive. And (finally!) electric power assist steering, which is the Right Way To Do It.
Grab.
Re:Following distance? We don't need no stinking f
on
Intelligent Road Studs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Our company works for Ford. First trip to Detroit, having never driven on the right before, I rode with an American colleague to see what to expect. First ten minutes were a real white-knuckle job, but I hate back-seat drivers myself so I didn't want to say anything. Eventually I had to say tactfully, "People seem to drive an awful lot closer to each other over here." Reply was something like, "Oh yeah, we don't much bother with stopping distance over here. You get used to it."
And eventually I did get used to it. There were so many factors against me on that first trip: never driven on the right before; never driven an automatic before; in a strange car (Taurus) which apparently has no suspension, triggers its ABS at the slightest provocation, feels about 20 feet wide and accelerates like a slug (in spite of its V6 engine); on roads where the freeways are so badly potholed that even the worst, smallest country road in Britain is in better condition; don't know how US traffic systems work; don't know my way around town; and in a town which apparently thinks putting a signpost right on the exit to say "hey, you missed your turn, sucker" is a good method of traffic signing. It was a real thrill ride.
And IN SPITE of all that, at my very worst, with everything conspiring against me, my driving was no worse than what I saw every day from regular Detroit citizens!:-)
Actually he is *explicitly* blaming the tool. "I don't think Linux should be used for killing." Can't get clearer than that.
Jeffrey Dahmer used regular kitchen knives to cut up his victims. You didn't see kitchen knife manufacturers saying "This is terrible, we mustn't produce any more knives otherwise this could happen again." Sure, there's a connection that Jeffrey Dahmer couldn't have cut up his victims without a knife, but then he would have found some other way. Similarly here, if the Pentagon wasn't using Linux then they'd be using Windows. This would not have changed the thousands of deaths of Iraqis and the hundreds of deaths of servicemen, which is a factor that can only be laid on the shoulders of George Bush and his friends.
He's not even consistent - his idea of the best use of DoD funds was GPS, and he says "In the first Gulf War, even the Iraqis used American GPS to guide their missiles. Talk about your equal-opportunity technologies." So it's *good* news that the DoD funded a project which enemy forces used to kill Americans?! GPS was certainly a good use of money, but that's bcos it's benefitted millions of people around the world. But if GPS is a technology that's been used to kill ppl, he should be taking the same line as with Linux, if he's to be consistent in his arguments.
And if he can't manage a consistent moral argument, it's a damn good job he's no longer running the LUG. I for sure wouldn't trust someone to run things for my benefit if they've displayed what's either a double-standard or simply an inability to think logically.
As far as the Pentagon abiding by the GPL, well that depends on whether the Pentagon release their modified code to the world, which, let's be honest, is unlikely to happen. It's only a GPL violation if someone takes your code, modifies it and then distributes it as their own work. If someone takes your code, modifies it and then uses it internally within their organisation, that is specifically allowed by the GPL.
And as far as "realising the connection between technology and how it affects the world", man, we're talking the opinions of some self-important teenager here. This is so crass, I hardly know where to start.
SourceSafe. Don't go there. Just don't. I've yet to find one good thing about SourceSafe - even the interface (the much-touted MS advantage over free software) isn't noticeably better than WinCVS.
I never really got on with WinCVS - I thought as a user interface it left a lot to be desired. TortoiseCVS has some problems, but it's easier to use on a day-to-day basis. In general, Tortoise's integration into Windows Explorer is really neat. I'm planning on trying Subversion at some point, but for the moment I don't see any point in messing with a working system. Maybe if I was starting over then I'd use Subversion - CVS has its, erm, "peculiarities", shall we say, so Subversion is probably a better choice for a new project.
Incidentally, CVS doesn't need some fancy server in the back-end - TortoiseCVS and WinCVS are quite happy running off an archive based on your local hard drive, or on an archive based on a network drive. It doesn't need some server process running to manage it all.
His lawyer is apparently whining "we'll have to appeal this very, very harsh sentence". Harsh?! 18 month sentence (and let's be honest, that only really amounts to 12 months inside) for killing someone?! Shit, the kid should be thanking his lucky stars *I* wasn't handing down that sentence...
Hitting someone when you're doing 157km/h in a built-up area is not an accident - it's like standing on a crowded subway, pulling out a pistol, closing your eyes and pulling the trigger. Maybe you won't hit anyone, but that's only by luck. That speed on the freeway, fair enough if you can handle it. But in a built-up area, no way.
By all means, sniff the passwords. But then put them in a document and circulate it to your department supervisors. Make sure the document says *exactly* what you did (every step of the process). It would be good if every step was within the IT policy you subscribed to (then they can't lynch you for that), although as a whistle-blower this may not be necessary. And NEVER use those passwords, otherwise you could be done for hacking into someone else's account.
Don't even think about asking for money - as someone else said, this makes you look like a blackmailer. Initially you have to act simply as someone bringing in information. What they choose to do with the info is their decision - most likely someone in the IT department *does* have the skills to fix the problem, it's just that they got some incompetent trainee to do it instead. If it turns out that the IT department need your skills then you can negotiate a contract or you can do it for free, but NEVER state that to start with.
Give out ONLY hard-copies - that way a Word document can't accidentally get put on the web or something dumb like that. This limits circulation - it's more effort to photocopy/scan than to forward an email, so there's less chance of the passwords going where they shouldn't.
Finally, make sure a hard-copy goes to the school paper, with instructions to hold onto it for 2 weeks (or some arbitrary length of time), and have a good talk with the people running the paper before you tell the school authorities. Make sure when you raise the issue with the school authorities that you tell them you've given the info to the school paper, and tell them the time limit. That way, they know they need to fix things within 2 weeks before things go public. It also covers your ass by ensuring they can't lynch you as a scapegoat, bcos the paper will crucify them.
Basically, examine every step you take and see how it could be used against you. Getting a couple of your friends to check through what you're doing would also be useful (and having a friend watching at crucial stages like sniffing the passwords gives you the extra backup of a witness).
Slashdot Mirror
Sure they could be brute-forced. A few of them, I realised I had no hope of getting them so I wrote some QuickBasic code to brute-force them.
The chess-derived ones in 7G and 11H annoyed me though. The authors clearly hadn't put any real thought in - they'd just run out of ideas and pilfered a book of "classic puzzles".
Grab.
Bullshit. If you can prove the camera is calibrated wrong, go for it. If not, you're talking urban legends.
You certainly can dispute a camera ticket if you want. Your speeding fine will (or should) say where you were speeding, so you can look back and work it out. Speed cameras aren't on the junctions themselves, so getting T-boned in a camera zone is most unlikely. Plus in the UK at least, cameras need to take two photos of you speeding (at fixed intervals to prove how fast you were going), so if you want to dispute it then you can get the photos and use them to show the state of the road and positions of other road users at the time.
Of course, usually it *is* almost impossible to dispute a cam ticket, because nearly always you've been caught red-handed and there's nothing you can do about it.
Grab.
You mean the police are actually doing something about it when you break the law?!?! Hell, that shouldn't be allowed! We should all be free to break the law whenever we want, right?
Grab.
I think you'll find there was a person doing the "meep meeps"... :-)
Grab.
Excuse me, you're running a professional business here? If you seriously claim to be an ISP and don't have the resources (or resourcefulness) to find out about this, you don't deserve to be in business. I could understand this from some hobbyist/amateur, but not from a company making money off it.
And WFT is this doing on Ask Slashdot anyway?! Oh yeah, same as the last bunch of pointless questions on Ask Slashdot. I really wish Taco knew where he got these editors from, so he could put them back there and stop them fouling up the site with crap.
Grab.
Got milk?
Gratuitous Sluggy Freelance reference
Grab.
There's this "for the most part" bit, though...
;-) (In my case, I'm a coder by vocation so I do that at work and home, plus electronics. My wife's into musicals and drama. We intersect on music, hiking and gardening. :-)
If this guy is playing an hour or so in the evening and his SO still complains, then I agree, she's getting too uptight. There's no reason a couple have to have identical interests - it's healthier if you do treat each other as individuals rather than trying to be a pair of Borgs.
But if he's playing 4 hours every evening, so he gets back from work and plugs in, things ain't right. Having a SO means that they *are* "significant". If they're less significant than gaming, then game and ditch the inSO, but he can't expect her to just put up with it. Not unless she's using him for income and getting her emotional needs met by some other guy, anyway.
Grab.
Excellent! I thought there must be a way to do it, but I couldn't find it for the life of me. Cheers!
Grab.
Top tip - read every license, and pick the one that matches what you want. Stating the bleeding obvious, but if you need to ask...
Grab.
Come off it - the BBC has *never* known what to do with Dr. Who! "Hey, we've got this ultra-successful, iconic TV programme, so let's axe it while it's having a real come-back. And while we're at it, let's wipe all the recordings of old programmes as well. Releasing old episodes on video/DVD? Nah, don't want to do that..."
That's the blessing and curse of the BBC. As an organisation with external funding unconnected to its viewing figures, it can produce objective reporting, challenging programmes, and serious documentaries with quality rather than immediate payback. OTOH, it doesn't have to give a damn about its audience, so there could be mass marches outside their offices for a show to come back or be made available on video/DVD, and they wouldn't give a damn (Dr. Who being the prime example).
As for stuff from the 50s, very little of it exists. Like the Dr. Who episodes, most of them have been erased so that the tapes can be reused. Ironically, most recordings from before about 1970 that have survived have only done so bcos BBC employees have stolen them.
My pet peeve about the BBC is that whilst you can listen to radio shows again via the Internet, you can only do so streaming - you can't download the whole show and listen to it. This screws over anyone on 56K (which currently is most of the UK), bcos it becomes unuseable when you have 1-minute gaps between 10-second chunks of music!
Grab.
Except it doesn't, and Scaled Composites and the rest are out to prove that. Cheap access to orbit equals cheap access to putting things in orbit, equals cheap way of getting bits up there for bigger missions.
One of the original intentions of having an orbiting space station (way back when) was to serve as a staging post for missions to Mars and other planets, including providing the facilities to assemble craft to get there (because such craft would be too big to get out of the Earth's gravity well with current rockets, so it's easier to ship them up in bits). Shame that all went tits-up with the ISS, but then the ISS turned into a political goal in itself, rather than a way of getting space exploration further, mainly due to NASA's usual massive budget overruns.
Commercial companies are actually the only people likely to achieve anything in space, if you think about it. NASA are so wasteful that even the US gov can't provide enough funding for them to do meaningful work. NASA *could* do anything they wanted, given their funding, but they just don't seem to have the mentality of using money wisely and keeping their engineers under control. It either needs a total rethink of NASA's management, or it needs NASA to be disbanded and the money used to "outsource" to commercial companies who *do* have a history of meeting cost targets and deadlines.
Grab.
Hell, I'd work on it if I knew how to program and had a Domino's in my area.
;-)
I wouldn't. Domino's are probably the foulest pizzas in existence, made so by a tomato sauce that appears to have been produced by feeding the tomatos to some poor creature and then forcing it to vomit them back up.
You may have guessed that I don't like Domino's pizzas...
Besides which, even if you don't object for reasons of taste, you're better to support smaller businesses. Go to your local pizza place instead, instead of a chain, for the same reason you don't go to Starbucks unless there's no choice.
Grab.
The only data I have that could be useful to someone else are the files for my open-source projects. And those are on SourceForge, which for me is a combined release mechanism and off-site backup service. If I croak, someone else can take the projects over if they want. If no-one wants them, the data wasn't that important anyway so no big deal.
Grab.
And me with no mod points! +1 for smart reference, +1 for details from reference, +1 for funny, and +1 just for quality... :-)
Grab.
I've got a billygoat you can have, Mr. Troll... ;-)
a) UK TV channels *do* pay for US shows, cash on the nail.
b) $7 trillion that would never have been needed if a bunch of right-wing fanatics hadn't been running the US for 40 years. Mutually-assured destruction requires "mutual" up-arming, and the US always liked going one better on that score. (And oh boy, are the good times rolling again in this presidency!)
c) Sorry, but the UK repaid every last cent from WW2. And the US got a great deal with technology transfer, since the Brits taught the US a whole lot about computers, radar, aircraft design, sub tracking, etc. Oh, and about believing British intelligence reports, after a few unfortunate incidents like Pearl Harbour...
Grab.
Manual typewriters have an utterly different feel from a computer keyboard.
Grab.
Correctly rated as "troll". But to enlighten you...
One mobo is not a big problem. But the zillions of circuit boards thrown away every year, when they're all taken together, *are* a problem. It's the same as smokeless zones - one campfire is not a problem, but an entire city with coal fires screws up the air.
You don't plan eating your mobo, but wherever they're shipped to (usually China) for "recycling", this shit dissolves out of the piles of boards and seeps into the water supplies. So people over there are *literally* eating and drinking the metals out of your mobo. Life expectancy in those areas is pretty damn short, due to poisoning from lead, cadmium, arsenic and other nasties.
Grab.
It's the regional differences that I was talking about. With all that stacked against me, and I was still driving safer than most of the rest of the traffic who (theoretically) knew the score... ;-)
Grab.
Actually we're *owned* by Ford, so we're (relatively) free to hold opinions... :-)
;-) but it's a pretty sharp bit of kit. Electric motors give a really good boost at low revs - no waiting for torque converters to spin up or stuff like that. Generally it's pretty nice to drive. And (finally!) electric power assist steering, which is the Right Way To Do It.
Everyone at Ford knows the Taurus was a dog - it's not news. The more interesting question (which they're still trying to answer) is how they managed to get the Focus handling so wrong on the US model, when they got it so right on the European version.
On the plus side, check out the Hybrid Escape when it comes out. It's not like earth-shattering performance (hell, it's an SUV, what do you expect?
Grab.
Our company works for Ford. First trip to Detroit, having never driven on the right before, I rode with an American colleague to see what to expect. First ten minutes were a real white-knuckle job, but I hate back-seat drivers myself so I didn't want to say anything. Eventually I had to say tactfully, "People seem to drive an awful lot closer to each other over here." Reply was something like, "Oh yeah, we don't much bother with stopping distance over here. You get used to it."
:-)
And eventually I did get used to it. There were so many factors against me on that first trip: never driven on the right before; never driven an automatic before; in a strange car (Taurus) which apparently has no suspension, triggers its ABS at the slightest provocation, feels about 20 feet wide and accelerates like a slug (in spite of its V6 engine); on roads where the freeways are so badly potholed that even the worst, smallest country road in Britain is in better condition; don't know how US traffic systems work; don't know my way around town; and in a town which apparently thinks putting a signpost right on the exit to say "hey, you missed your turn, sucker" is a good method of traffic signing. It was a real thrill ride.
And IN SPITE of all that, at my very worst, with everything conspiring against me, my driving was no worse than what I saw every day from regular Detroit citizens!
Grab.
Actually he is *explicitly* blaming the tool. "I don't think Linux should be used for killing." Can't get clearer than that.
Jeffrey Dahmer used regular kitchen knives to cut up his victims. You didn't see kitchen knife manufacturers saying "This is terrible, we mustn't produce any more knives otherwise this could happen again." Sure, there's a connection that Jeffrey Dahmer couldn't have cut up his victims without a knife, but then he would have found some other way. Similarly here, if the Pentagon wasn't using Linux then they'd be using Windows. This would not have changed the thousands of deaths of Iraqis and the hundreds of deaths of servicemen, which is a factor that can only be laid on the shoulders of George Bush and his friends.
He's not even consistent - his idea of the best use of DoD funds was GPS, and he says "In the first Gulf War, even the Iraqis used American GPS to guide their missiles. Talk about your equal-opportunity technologies." So it's *good* news that the DoD funded a project which enemy forces used to kill Americans?! GPS was certainly a good use of money, but that's bcos it's benefitted millions of people around the world. But if GPS is a technology that's been used to kill ppl, he should be taking the same line as with Linux, if he's to be consistent in his arguments.
And if he can't manage a consistent moral argument, it's a damn good job he's no longer running the LUG. I for sure wouldn't trust someone to run things for my benefit if they've displayed what's either a double-standard or simply an inability to think logically.
As far as the Pentagon abiding by the GPL, well that depends on whether the Pentagon release their modified code to the world, which, let's be honest, is unlikely to happen. It's only a GPL violation if someone takes your code, modifies it and then distributes it as their own work. If someone takes your code, modifies it and then uses it internally within their organisation, that is specifically allowed by the GPL.
And as far as "realising the connection between technology and how it affects the world", man, we're talking the opinions of some self-important teenager here. This is so crass, I hardly know where to start.
Grab.
SourceSafe. Don't go there. Just don't. I've yet to find one good thing about SourceSafe - even the interface (the much-touted MS advantage over free software) isn't noticeably better than WinCVS.
Grab.
I never really got on with WinCVS - I thought as a user interface it left a lot to be desired. TortoiseCVS has some problems, but it's easier to use on a day-to-day basis. In general, Tortoise's integration into Windows Explorer is really neat. I'm planning on trying Subversion at some point, but for the moment I don't see any point in messing with a working system. Maybe if I was starting over then I'd use Subversion - CVS has its, erm, "peculiarities", shall we say, so Subversion is probably a better choice for a new project.
Incidentally, CVS doesn't need some fancy server in the back-end - TortoiseCVS and WinCVS are quite happy running off an archive based on your local hard drive, or on an archive based on a network drive. It doesn't need some server process running to manage it all.
Grab.
Dead right, man.
His lawyer is apparently whining "we'll have to appeal this very, very harsh sentence". Harsh?! 18 month sentence (and let's be honest, that only really amounts to 12 months inside) for killing someone?! Shit, the kid should be thanking his lucky stars *I* wasn't handing down that sentence...
Hitting someone when you're doing 157km/h in a built-up area is not an accident - it's like standing on a crowded subway, pulling out a pistol, closing your eyes and pulling the trigger. Maybe you won't hit anyone, but that's only by luck. That speed on the freeway, fair enough if you can handle it. But in a built-up area, no way.
Grab.
Dead right.
By all means, sniff the passwords. But then put them in a document and circulate it to your department supervisors. Make sure the document says *exactly* what you did (every step of the process). It would be good if every step was within the IT policy you subscribed to (then they can't lynch you for that), although as a whistle-blower this may not be necessary. And NEVER use those passwords, otherwise you could be done for hacking into someone else's account.
Don't even think about asking for money - as someone else said, this makes you look like a blackmailer. Initially you have to act simply as someone bringing in information. What they choose to do with the info is their decision - most likely someone in the IT department *does* have the skills to fix the problem, it's just that they got some incompetent trainee to do it instead. If it turns out that the IT department need your skills then you can negotiate a contract or you can do it for free, but NEVER state that to start with.
Give out ONLY hard-copies - that way a Word document can't accidentally get put on the web or something dumb like that. This limits circulation - it's more effort to photocopy/scan than to forward an email, so there's less chance of the passwords going where they shouldn't.
Finally, make sure a hard-copy goes to the school paper, with instructions to hold onto it for 2 weeks (or some arbitrary length of time), and have a good talk with the people running the paper before you tell the school authorities. Make sure when you raise the issue with the school authorities that you tell them you've given the info to the school paper, and tell them the time limit. That way, they know they need to fix things within 2 weeks before things go public. It also covers your ass by ensuring they can't lynch you as a scapegoat, bcos the paper will crucify them.
Basically, examine every step you take and see how it could be used against you. Getting a couple of your friends to check through what you're doing would also be useful (and having a friend watching at crucial stages like sniffing the passwords gives you the extra backup of a witness).
Grab.