Your sources show that it was possible to donate to Obama anonymously, and that some people probably did so. That's not a problem, because anonymous donations can't buy influence; the problem is when someone donates tons of money and the candidate returns the favor.
The thing you mention about fraud detection sounds like a technicality that would have been decided by the bank or by a low-ranking system administrator, not by Obama himself. And you didn't provide any sources.
These days, it seems like conservatives are so desperate for dirt that they'll latch onto anything, even if it's completely artificial. Bush was corrupt, but saying "Democrats are corrupt too!" isn't a defense, isn't true, and isn't very mature.
Jesus was a reasonable person. Now he's dead, so no one can really follow him; they can only follow his teachings, which they often learn about from decidedly unreasonable people. It is better for the fanatics to follow someone who can set them straight than to pretend to follow someone who's long gone, while actually following whatever the media tells them.
I hate games that don't do this. If the computer player and I are the same species, we should have the same limitations. Why should the computer player be able to do more stuff than a human player?
Because reproducing the player's limitations is an enormous amount of work for nearly zero benefit. You can either spend months writing code to compute what the bots can see, AI to make it look around at the right times and remember where players that have ducked behind cover were and predict where players might come from, or you can just let the bot see through walls. If you want the bot to only use the buttons the player does, you then repeat that sort of problem twenty times, each with a theoretically possible solution but extremely tricky solution. Forcing the bot to use the player's interface is basically a waste of time, time which could have been spent on features that actually make the game fun.
Anyway, you can lump me in as another story similar to your friend's. I'm a computer programmer and consider myself to be in around the 95%+ percentile of techsavvyness. I can do stuff in the command line, and am not freaked out by it, but a good 75% of my attempts to follow instructions online on complex operations still falls into what I like to call the 'magical incantation' method of making things work, where you get a command that will supposedly do what you need, and you enter it in exactly like you are told to invoke the result. Along the way, you wince everytime you see an error message or warning pop up, not knowing whether or not this is the expected result or something is wrong with the incantation.
And there's your problem: you're reading developer-to-developer conversations as an end user, not understanding them, but expecting them to work for you. Information from forums is frequently outdated, misleading or just plain wrong; and the rest of your post suggests to me that you're misunderstanding a lot of it, too.
I needed to get Blackberry charging drivers installed. Found some magical incantations that were supposed to compile and install the drivers. They didn't. Couldn't figure out why.
Device drivers are a problem, yes, but nothing can really be done about it until hardware manufacturers start providing drivers like they do for Windows.
Wanted to customize the shell, the way I would customize a start menu. Found out that this involved editing config files in notepad, and if I screwed up with a typo, this could potentially be a major problem. Was told I could create some safety margin by making a mirror of the config file in my user directory and editing that. For some reason, changes to the config file in my user directory were not followed by the machine.
Customizing the shell is not at all like customizing the start menu; it's really half way into software development, and not something end users should be doing. Windows doesn't allow it at all, except with third-party software that's even more complicated to set up than what you saw on Linux. If you want to pick a different theme, you can do that with the GUI. You were following instructions meant for people who want to make their own theme.
My previous most recent attempt had involved installing Ubuntu (GG I think) on an older computer. I wanted to create a silent system, so I bought a 2GB flash drive. Ubuntu said it needed 2GB to install. It lied, it needed 2.001 GB to install, and kept dying without a good explanation of what was going on. Another few hours lost.
Yes, the installer should've told you that it didn't have enough disk space, but it also should've been obvious that what you were trying to do wouldn't work. If you have 2GB of space and need exactly 2GB to install, where are you going to save things and install new programs to? Also, what happened was probably not that Ubuntu needed more than 2GB, but that the flash drive had less than 2GB of free space on it; some space is used up in overhead, and some storage makers use a different measurement system to inflate their numbers.
Needed to install a VPN client. No support from my company, since I'm probably the only one who needs a Linux VPN client. I managed to get it working myself nonetheless, that was a moment of pride. However, it was much more unstable in its connection than the Windows clients I use on other computers. It would just randomly lose the connection, forcing me to redo work.
The problem is probably with the internet connection, not with the software.
Well the Constitution doesn't directly state you have a right to a lawyer in any case.
Yes, it does. Amendment 6: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right... to have the assistance of counsel for his defense." It couldn't be much more explicit than that.
I would rather be falsely accused of armed robbery than falsely accused of downloading music. If you commit a felony, the court will provide a lawyer if you can't afford one. Defendants against the RIAA, on the other hand, do not get court-appointed lawyers. That is the real problem. The Constitution requires that criminal defendants be provided with lawyers because otherwise, they could not defend themselves against the vastly superior resources of the government, even if innocent. That same imbalance exists when a large corporation sues an individual, but is not covered because corporations did not exist in their present form when the Constitution was written.
2 - Republicans don't go to war more then Democrats. Both parties voted to go to war. People seem to forget that polls showed that US citizens, as well as many of the world supported going into Iraq immediately after 9/11 on a false premise that Saddam had ties to 9/11. Bush pushed for diplomacy and intel. That intel concluded that Saddam had no ties to 9/11. A warmonger strikes while the iron is hot, not pushes for diplomacy for a few more years.
I can't stand to see such blatant deception moderated so highly. Bush and his cabinet pushed for war, and manipulated intelligence to make it look more desirable. No one ever suggested that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11; rather, Bush's administration manipulated evidence to falsely suggest that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He most certainly did not push for diplomacy.
3 - Clinton while in office bombed 4 different countries without pursuing diplomacy in any of those cases. He didn't ask permission, talk to the UN, consult with allies, or give warnings. He just bombed. The funny thing is that few people argued because it was over so quick, where as a land war is costly and lasts for years.
People didn't complain because he had a legitimate reason to attack in those cases. That's the difference.
As proof of concept, how long will it take Slashdot users to create an image with the md5 hash of 5ff742a58529efa02ba00ec8fa2e89bf?
Barring a major advance in cryptography theory, at least a millenium. While the MD5 hash function has been broken, in the sense that you can generate two files which collide with eachother, this only works when you generate both files; generating a file to match a particular hash is still infeasible, and if it were feasible, MD5 would be completely abandoned overnight.
The problem with daylight savings time is that it's arbitrary; astronomical noon isn't really at 12:00 noon anywhere, but if a group schedules their meetings for 9am every day year round, they want them to always be in daylight. What we should do is make the relationship between clock time and daylight explicit, by expressing times relative to sunrise: "S+1:23" would be "1 hour 23 minutes after local sunrise". Clocks would show both sunrise-time and GMT. To keep things simple, assume that the sun rises at the same time every day of a month, and at the same time everywhere in a state/time zone. That way, the same time would always mean the same thing everywhere. And rather than having one day with an extra hour and one day missing an hour every year, the last day of each month would be slightly longer or shorter, but not enough to mess up sleep schedules.
Encryption is good for protecting trade secrets, but useless for protecting social security numbers. Thieves who want to steal credit card or social security numbers can choose from tens of thousands of possible targets, at least one of which will be insecure. We need to stop pretending that social security numbers are useful as identification or authentication, because using an SSN to identify yourself requires disclosing it. We need to switch to a system of public-key cryptography, and put the blame for identity theft where it belongs: on the banks, who somehow decided that a few readily-discoverable numbers and a few easily-forged documents were all that's needed to take a loan in your name.
The problem with all the hysteria around child pornography is that it's too easy to frame someone. A little research, five minutes alone with your computer, and an anonymous phone call are all someone needs to ruin your life and reputation.
Let me be perfectly clear: Even if you're completely innocent, this is a serious threat to you. If someone decides to frame you, you won't be able to prove your innocence, and it won't matter even if you can. That's unacceptable. Yes, child porn is bad, but a society where anyone can anonymously destroy anyone else is much, much worse.
Something you have, something you know, and something you are. Security means using at least two out of the three security factors. ATM cards are supposed to be "something you know" (a PIN number) and "something you have" (a card), but unfortunately, the card's only purpose is to hold another number, so it's really "two things you know, one of which must be written in invisible ink". Until we replace all bank and credit cards with electronics that can do public-key cryptography, fraud will continue to rise.
By the way, there's no evidence that anyone from Pakistan has anything to do with this. Most likely, the information is being sent to a compromised server, to conceal the real perpetrators, who could be anywhere.
First thought was generator in the trunk, but then I realize 'Wait, I'm going a long distance, I want luggage in there!'. Second thought is to put the generator into a small trailer.
How about a generator under the hood, like, say, one of the ones that every plug-in hybrid ever sold or announced has pre-installed? Car companies aren't stupid; they wouldn't sell a car which couldn't make long trips without charging.
Hmm I spose so. Well what about swappable batteries? You could just sign up for a scheme where you swap your spent battery for ready charged batteries at a service station.
The batteries that power hybrid cars weigh hundreds of pounds, and are about as easy to remove as the transmission. You would need an expensive and specialized robot just to lift them. And not all batteries are equal; every model has a different size, shape and chemistry, and old batteries are worth (much) less than new ones. The logistics of storing and charging batteries are trivial by comparison.
The only way to justify anything is by combining facts with logic. Since you have rejected logic outright, you can't justify anything, so your philosophy simply says that no one should believe anything. You either have a simplistic and misinformed view of what logic is, or you're an advocate for stroke patients.
Nah, logic is just another tool in the arsenal of people who want to manufacture justifications for their biases. Recognizing the limitations of logic and of hard & fast philosophies is the first step to any real intellectual maturity.
If you reject logic, then your biases are all that's left. This sort of anti-intellectualism is already close to destroying the United States, so please don't spread it any further.
Video games on the market today certainly don't help with driving, but it's not hard to imagine a game that would. Suppose you had a driving simulator that was realistic, but malicious: every 10-15 minutes, it modifies the world or the behavior of the other drivers to put you in an emergency situation. Pedestrians walk in front your car, drivers cross into opposing traffic, brakes fail, and so on. Your score is how long you can survive. *That* would make people better drivers, but I've never heard of such a game on the market.
I'm getting seriously fed up of this. You are not paying even in the same ballpark of the actual cost of supplying your full connection's worth of bandwidth for an entire month.
This is a common misconception. Bandwidth is actually very, very cheap; if you use your full connection's worth of bandwidth, it costs only a tiny bit more than if you let it sit idle. In order to provide more bandwidth, you need two things: routers and fibers. Routers are cheap. In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time. On the other hand, running new fiber is expensive, because it involves digging, which is both expensive in itself and requires expensive planning (to make sure you don't damage someone else's infrastructure) and bureaucracy (for the same reason). Fortunately, when you install fiber, you can install as much as you want for little extra cost. The problem that the US cable companies are experiencing is that they need to run new fiber to a lot of places, but they would rather put it off as long as possible. But this is a strictly one-time expense; once they've run the fibers, adding more bandwidth just means buying more cheap routers.
You have completely misunderstood what the parent is talking about. Linear programming doesn't mean solving systems of linear equations, it means maximizing a target function within a system of linear constraints. There is a way to do this geometrically when there are only two variables, which you might have seen in high school, but that approach doesn't work when there are three variables or more. In that case, you would use the Simplex algorithm. It can be done by hand, but the principle is not even remotely the same, and it is certainly not taught in high school.
Lets say we have a service that costs $20 for the average person. But instead we charge $21. So if 1000 people pay 21$ instead of 20$ for a service, that subsidizes the 1% of people who uses $120 worth of service. Are you with me?
Your example reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, albeit one which is seldom explained and which the ISPs don't like to clarify. Using six times as much bandwidth does not cost the ISP six times as much money, because shared bandwidth represents only a small fraction of the cost. Routers are cheap; the big expenses are installing and maintaining the last mile (wiring to your house), advertising, and staff. Short of deliberate sabotage, there is no way you could cause your ISP $120 worth of expenses, because maxing out your connection 24/7 only costs them a few dollars more.
As unhappy as you were getting bounced around, an actual collision would've been much worse for you. Bad drivers should be punished by fining them and taking away their licenses, not by crashing into them.
Amazingly, about 1% of all spam emails actually result in a sale! So if you send out 1,000,000 emails, you can expect 10,000 sales! If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.
Who told you that, a spammer? 1% is about the percentage of spam emails that make it through filters and into someone's inbox. Given the enormous quantity and consistently low quality of spam, I'm not convinced it's producing any sales at all. You see, spammers don't have to make sales to make money; they only need to convince gullible merchants to pay them to spam. Stopping the tiny handful of people who buy from spam wouldn't achieve anything.
Making multi minute phone calls from 30k ft with 2001 phone tech and no onboard plane phones (I already know its not possible, but would love to see them try)
I haven't heard any information about the type of phones used, but satellite phones certainly would have worked fine. The Iridium satellite phone network launched in 1998 (source), so it's certainly possible that one or more of the passengers had satphones to pass around.
Slashdot Mirror
Your sources show that it was possible to donate to Obama anonymously, and that some people probably did so. That's not a problem, because anonymous donations can't buy influence; the problem is when someone donates tons of money and the candidate returns the favor.
The thing you mention about fraud detection sounds like a technicality that would have been decided by the bank or by a low-ranking system administrator, not by Obama himself. And you didn't provide any sources.
These days, it seems like conservatives are so desperate for dirt that they'll latch onto anything, even if it's completely artificial. Bush was corrupt, but saying "Democrats are corrupt too!" isn't a defense, isn't true, and isn't very mature.
Jesus was a reasonable person. Now he's dead, so no one can really follow him; they can only follow his teachings, which they often learn about from decidedly unreasonable people. It is better for the fanatics to follow someone who can set them straight than to pretend to follow someone who's long gone, while actually following whatever the media tells them.
Because reproducing the player's limitations is an enormous amount of work for nearly zero benefit. You can either spend months writing code to compute what the bots can see, AI to make it look around at the right times and remember where players that have ducked behind cover were and predict where players might come from, or you can just let the bot see through walls. If you want the bot to only use the buttons the player does, you then repeat that sort of problem twenty times, each with a theoretically possible solution but extremely tricky solution. Forcing the bot to use the player's interface is basically a waste of time, time which could have been spent on features that actually make the game fun.
Just press '.' (repeat last command) and it will indent the same range of text.
And there's your problem: you're reading developer-to-developer conversations as an end user, not understanding them, but expecting them to work for you. Information from forums is frequently outdated, misleading or just plain wrong; and the rest of your post suggests to me that you're misunderstanding a lot of it, too.
Device drivers are a problem, yes, but nothing can really be done about it until hardware manufacturers start providing drivers like they do for Windows.
Customizing the shell is not at all like customizing the start menu; it's really half way into software development, and not something end users should be doing. Windows doesn't allow it at all, except with third-party software that's even more complicated to set up than what you saw on Linux. If you want to pick a different theme, you can do that with the GUI. You were following instructions meant for people who want to make their own theme.
Yes, the installer should've told you that it didn't have enough disk space, but it also should've been obvious that what you were trying to do wouldn't work. If you have 2GB of space and need exactly 2GB to install, where are you going to save things and install new programs to? Also, what happened was probably not that Ubuntu needed more than 2GB, but that the flash drive had less than 2GB of free space on it; some space is used up in overhead, and some storage makers use a different measurement system to inflate their numbers.
The problem is probably with the internet connection, not with the software.
Yes, it does. Amendment 6: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to have the assistance of counsel for his defense." It couldn't be much more explicit than that.
I would rather be falsely accused of armed robbery than falsely accused of downloading music. If you commit a felony, the court will provide a lawyer if you can't afford one. Defendants against the RIAA, on the other hand, do not get court-appointed lawyers. That is the real problem. The Constitution requires that criminal defendants be provided with lawyers because otherwise, they could not defend themselves against the vastly superior resources of the government, even if innocent. That same imbalance exists when a large corporation sues an individual, but is not covered because corporations did not exist in their present form when the Constitution was written.
You have completely lost your grip on reality.
I can't stand to see such blatant deception moderated so highly. Bush and his cabinet pushed for war, and manipulated intelligence to make it look more desirable. No one ever suggested that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11; rather, Bush's administration manipulated evidence to falsely suggest that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He most certainly did not push for diplomacy.
People didn't complain because he had a legitimate reason to attack in those cases. That's the difference.
Barring a major advance in cryptography theory, at least a millenium. While the MD5 hash function has been broken, in the sense that you can generate two files which collide with eachother, this only works when you generate both files; generating a file to match a particular hash is still infeasible, and if it were feasible, MD5 would be completely abandoned overnight.
The problem with daylight savings time is that it's arbitrary; astronomical noon isn't really at 12:00 noon anywhere, but if a group schedules their meetings for 9am every day year round, they want them to always be in daylight. What we should do is make the relationship between clock time and daylight explicit, by expressing times relative to sunrise: "S+1:23" would be "1 hour 23 minutes after local sunrise". Clocks would show both sunrise-time and GMT. To keep things simple, assume that the sun rises at the same time every day of a month, and at the same time everywhere in a state/time zone. That way, the same time would always mean the same thing everywhere. And rather than having one day with an extra hour and one day missing an hour every year, the last day of each month would be slightly longer or shorter, but not enough to mess up sleep schedules.
Encryption is good for protecting trade secrets, but useless for protecting social security numbers. Thieves who want to steal credit card or social security numbers can choose from tens of thousands of possible targets, at least one of which will be insecure. We need to stop pretending that social security numbers are useful as identification or authentication, because using an SSN to identify yourself requires disclosing it. We need to switch to a system of public-key cryptography, and put the blame for identity theft where it belongs: on the banks, who somehow decided that a few readily-discoverable numbers and a few easily-forged documents were all that's needed to take a loan in your name.
The problem with all the hysteria around child pornography is that it's too easy to frame someone. A little research, five minutes alone with your computer, and an anonymous phone call are all someone needs to ruin your life and reputation.
Let me be perfectly clear: Even if you're completely innocent, this is a serious threat to you. If someone decides to frame you, you won't be able to prove your innocence, and it won't matter even if you can. That's unacceptable. Yes, child porn is bad, but a society where anyone can anonymously destroy anyone else is much, much worse.
Something you have, something you know, and something you are. Security means using at least two out of the three security factors. ATM cards are supposed to be "something you know" (a PIN number) and "something you have" (a card), but unfortunately, the card's only purpose is to hold another number, so it's really "two things you know, one of which must be written in invisible ink". Until we replace all bank and credit cards with electronics that can do public-key cryptography, fraud will continue to rise.
By the way, there's no evidence that anyone from Pakistan has anything to do with this. Most likely, the information is being sent to a compromised server, to conceal the real perpetrators, who could be anywhere.
How about a generator under the hood, like, say, one of the ones that every plug-in hybrid ever sold or announced has pre-installed? Car companies aren't stupid; they wouldn't sell a car which couldn't make long trips without charging.
The batteries that power hybrid cars weigh hundreds of pounds, and are about as easy to remove as the transmission. You would need an expensive and specialized robot just to lift them. And not all batteries are equal; every model has a different size, shape and chemistry, and old batteries are worth (much) less than new ones. The logistics of storing and charging batteries are trivial by comparison.
The only way to justify anything is by combining facts with logic. Since you have rejected logic outright, you can't justify anything, so your philosophy simply says that no one should believe anything. You either have a simplistic and misinformed view of what logic is, or you're an advocate for stroke patients.
If you reject logic, then your biases are all that's left. This sort of anti-intellectualism is already close to destroying the United States, so please don't spread it any further.
Video games on the market today certainly don't help with driving, but it's not hard to imagine a game that would. Suppose you had a driving simulator that was realistic, but malicious: every 10-15 minutes, it modifies the world or the behavior of the other drivers to put you in an emergency situation. Pedestrians walk in front your car, drivers cross into opposing traffic, brakes fail, and so on. Your score is how long you can survive. *That* would make people better drivers, but I've never heard of such a game on the market.
This is a common misconception. Bandwidth is actually very, very cheap; if you use your full connection's worth of bandwidth, it costs only a tiny bit more than if you let it sit idle. In order to provide more bandwidth, you need two things: routers and fibers. Routers are cheap. In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time. On the other hand, running new fiber is expensive, because it involves digging, which is both expensive in itself and requires expensive planning (to make sure you don't damage someone else's infrastructure) and bureaucracy (for the same reason). Fortunately, when you install fiber, you can install as much as you want for little extra cost. The problem that the US cable companies are experiencing is that they need to run new fiber to a lot of places, but they would rather put it off as long as possible. But this is a strictly one-time expense; once they've run the fibers, adding more bandwidth just means buying more cheap routers.
You have completely misunderstood what the parent is talking about. Linear programming doesn't mean solving systems of linear equations, it means maximizing a target function within a system of linear constraints. There is a way to do this geometrically when there are only two variables, which you might have seen in high school, but that approach doesn't work when there are three variables or more. In that case, you would use the Simplex algorithm. It can be done by hand, but the principle is not even remotely the same, and it is certainly not taught in high school.
Your example reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, albeit one which is seldom explained and which the ISPs don't like to clarify. Using six times as much bandwidth does not cost the ISP six times as much money, because shared bandwidth represents only a small fraction of the cost. Routers are cheap; the big expenses are installing and maintaining the last mile (wiring to your house), advertising, and staff. Short of deliberate sabotage, there is no way you could cause your ISP $120 worth of expenses, because maxing out your connection 24/7 only costs them a few dollars more.
As unhappy as you were getting bounced around, an actual collision would've been much worse for you. Bad drivers should be punished by fining them and taking away their licenses, not by crashing into them.
Who told you that, a spammer? 1% is about the percentage of spam emails that make it through filters and into someone's inbox. Given the enormous quantity and consistently low quality of spam, I'm not convinced it's producing any sales at all. You see, spammers don't have to make sales to make money; they only need to convince gullible merchants to pay them to spam. Stopping the tiny handful of people who buy from spam wouldn't achieve anything.
I haven't heard any information about the type of phones used, but satellite phones certainly would have worked fine. The Iridium satellite phone network launched in 1998 (source), so it's certainly possible that one or more of the passengers had satphones to pass around.