You seem to be assuming here that the FBI actually read all that email... I see no reason to assume that they kept reading after they'd realized the error. Aside from your (understandable) mistrust of the FBI, do you have reason to think otherwise?
Not at all. I have no idea what the FBI did with the mail. I have no reason to believe they continued reading after realizing that they weren't supposed to have the mail, and I have no reason to believe that they didn't.
And it is not clear whether it was the FBI or the ISP who was at fault. Clearly someone was, and should be held responsible. Also clearly, the FBI wasn't intending to tell anyone about it until they got the FOIA request (the unnamed official said "it's common"). But we don't know whether the concealment indicates guilt, or just wanting to brush bad publicity under the carpet.
That might tip off the person whose e-mail they were reading.
So are you saying that when the case is over (they bring charges or decide there wasn't anything there), they'll notify everyone who was inadvertently snooped? That then we'll see it in the news?
Note that the intelligence official quoted in TFA says it's not a rare occurrence, "it's common".
If you think they'll do that, I've got a bridge for sale that you might be interested in buying.
The ISP screwed the pooch and sent them all email sent to that domain. The FBI noticed that they were getting way too much email, found out what had happened and corrected it.
So, the users whose mail was wrongfully given to the FBI could sue the ISP, then. Oh wait, the FBI isn't going to tell them about it. It's not going to tell anyone what the domain is, or who the ISP is, either. State secret.
I think it's your kind of arrogance that is more dangerous.
That's called "irony", son. It's one o' them literary tricks, like metaphor, where the writer doesn't actually mean what it seems like they're saying. I know, it's just plain wrong, but you know them liberal arts types. Think of it as the literary equivalent of that "there are 10 kinds of people" joke.
Of course you can't publish a Ford calendar withour Ford's consent. Anyone buynig such a thing would consider it made by Ford.
If Ford was one of the world's major calendar manufacturers, that might be true. But they're not.
You can't go out, and take photographs of your car, and then publish an ad, a billboard, a newspaper full-page spread, and a television commercial advertising your car as the best/worst.
Of course I can, so long as I am willing to waste the money and whatever I say is truthful. I occasionally see the cars of disgruntled owners with large rooftop signs proclaiming what crap they are, and how their manufacturer and dealership is evil. (You apparently reside in a different country, and perhaps you are not permitted to say truthful things that corporations might object to. In the USA one is allowed to say such things, though it may result in legal harassment.)
You can't pretend, and make people believe, that you are Ford.
No chance of that, I'm 50 years old and still haven't rusted through.
I'd bet any amount of money that a 100,000-hour bulb wouldn't be 100 times more expensive than ordinary incandescent bulbs rated for only 1,000 hours.
It needn't be any more expensive. It'll just be less efficient (give off less light for the same power consumption). Doubling the life results in about 20% less light. You can buy long-life (meaning, several thousand hour) bulbs at the hardware or dollar store right now. There's no demand for anything longer than that, outside of special applications where bulb failure is dangerous or the labor cost of replacing the bulb is high. The bulbs they use in traffic signals have longer lifetimes (and get replaced periodically even though they're not burned out yet).
What's the point in extending the life? The cost of the bulb is trivial. A 100 watt bulb rated for 1000 hr costs $0.25. @0.10/kwH, it will use $10 in energy, so the bulb cost is 2.5% of the lifetime operating cost. Now, the equation would be different for CF bulbs, which are considerably more costly, and also present disposal concerns due to the Hg in them.
most incandescent bulbs may not last as long as most CFLs, but that is almost certainly a product of planned obsolescence and not a genuine technological limitation.
You've heard of "quick, cheap, good, pick any two"? Incandescent technology is like that. "Bright, long-lasting, low-energy, pick any two." It's a pretty mature technology, after all. It's simple to make a long-lasting light bulb (and they do make and sell them). Since power is a fixed value (that's how they label incandescent bulbs, by wattage), the tradeoff is they put out less light. A 130-volt bulb will last damn near forever if you feed it 115v and don't subject it to thermal shock (leave it running, don't turn it off and on a lot) or mechanical shock (which is why they have special bulbs for locations like ceiling fans and garage door openers).
Sure there are a few Edison-era bulbs still running. I
For what that's worth. The Google paper didn't find that SMART gave much warning before failure. And a former Seagate engineer (in alt.folklore.computer) said that they had found that competitors' drives were failing to log SMART errors, to make the numbers look better. He said that he had argued that Seagate should brag about showing honest numbers, but that marketing had won the argument and now he didn't believe any manfacturer's hard drive's SMART reports.
it's possible that the cops that have killed with them were not properly educated
That may be true. And exactly what leeway do we want to give to people who kill because they are "not properly educated "? Should a cop (who is supposed to be so educated) get more leeway than any other bozo (who may not have such occupational credentials)? Or should "I was not properly educated" be a fitting defense for everyone?
Indeed. But if you set up your TV facing the picture window that faces the street (or in your shop window), so people on the sidewalk can watch it, is that theft? I would suggest that not only is it not theft for people to watch from the sidewalk, but that if there is any crime at all involved, it is "maintaining an attractive nuisance". And perhaps some sort of copyright infringement involving public performances.
Is there a Firefox plugin that randomly scrambles the data of cookies from known marketers?
No. But Firefox will let you block the cookies, or automatically erase them when you leave the program. And you can get the TrackMeNot plugin, which makes random searches on different search engines, so that when they pull your record up to see what you've been searching for, the real searches will be lost in the noise.
As a tech person, perhaps you think regular consumers should be able to partition their hard drives, but for most people computers and hi-tech gadgets are tools no matter how prevalent or even how important they are in our lives.
I got that. But isn't it important to know how your tools work, how to take care of them?
I don't necessarily expect the "regular consumer" to know how to partition a hard drive, at least without googling a bit. But I think it's reasonable to expect someone who uses computers to have a rough understanding of, say, the hierarchical file system. To know the difference between something that's on their own computer, and something that's on another computer somewhere else on the 'net. To understand in general terms how search engines work, and what their failings are. And, yes, to understand that everything they do online is being recorded by others, and going into their permanent record.
Plenty of Professional Journalists have been found fabricating stories / events just to spice up the copy to increase viewership/circulation.
The difference is, when they get caught fabricating stories, they tend to get fired and have a hard time finding another job in their field. What happens to the amateur who gets caught fabricating a story?
That's not to say that pro journalism is pure as Ivory Snow. There are plenty of pro journalists who are incompetent/sloppy/uncaring, who fail to check their facts properly, who have an axe to grind. (Probably not as prevalent as amateurs who have those failings, but still.) Even more, they are published by large corporations, and ultimately those large corporations control what gets printed, either by being able to spike stories they don't like, or by controlling hiring and firing. To my mind, this latter problem is at the core of pro journalism's problems: that it's all vetted and passed on by people who are thinking what effect a story will have on sales (not only sales of the news, but sales from other divisions of the conglomerate), what the reaction of their country club buddies will be. If they piss Washington off, will the military contracts dry up?
The CBS/GWB thing is another matter entirely. CBS got suckered. Nobody has claimed that CBS fabricated those documents themselves. They were accepted by CBS because their contents were so believable (even to the Guard secretary who would have been the one to type them, if they had been real). But, irrespective of their contents, the documents themselves were forged.
installed Ubuntu about 2 weeks ago, and somehow the installation screwed up my hard drive completely... according to this news, it was Ubuntu.
No. (I haven't read TFA because it's still slashdotted, but...) Apparently the article says it cycles the power too quickly, which leads to premature failure. Not screwing the drive up immediately, but wearing it out too soon.
If the drive screwed up immediately upon installing Ubuntu in a dual boot with a copy of Windows that had been used some already, I'd put money on it being partition problems. Ubuntu installs nicely on a clean fresh system, but if Windows is there already and the existing drive data is too odd (fragmented, swap file fragmented and/or seriously separated from the rest of the data, multiple partitions, whatever) the repartitioning may not go well. The repartitioning software (I forget what it is) is not smart enough to stop and tell you "hey, you gotta clean this drive up before I make changes" (or to deal with doing the cleanup itself).
until people figure out that you are bending the truth to promote your "message"
And how did Greenpeace "bend the truth"? Apparently (the OP does not contain a link to the original story) Greenpeace claims iPhones contain brominated compounds and PVC. As near as I can tell from the (industry) articles, neither Apple nor the industry disputes that. The defense is 1) everybody does it, 2) the compounds are approved by government agencies so they're ok, 3) there are no alternative materials, and 4) (which seems at odds with #1-3) Apple is in the process of stopping using those compounds. That these industry claims may (or may not) be true does not mean that Greenpeace's claim that the iPhone contains bromine compounds is "bending the truth".
Greenpeace has clearly picked the target that they will get the most media attention from (if they'd targeted Kyocera, who would have paid any attention?) but they didn't say everybody else (except Apple) was fine.
BTW, why are the links in the OP anonymized? I value my tinfoil hat as much as the next guy, but why in the world would even Little Dick Cheney or Mad King George care if I'm reading an article in Gizmodo? Is Gizmodo the new terrorist chic?
it's hard for some people to admit there are any advantages to being an english speaker (especially an anglo saxon one) but it just might be true on occasion.
Of course it's true, though it's not clear that word count, per se, should be the criterion... there are other ways to convey information besides having a dedicated symbol.
My point is, the same can be said for many languages. Indeed, I suspect almost no one would say that their native language is a POS and should be abolished. Not that long ago, French was the lingua franca. For the last century, English. But the British Empire has withered, and quite possibly the US has peaked. A hundred years from now, who knows, maybe Chinese. I'm sure it is a beautiful and versatile language, once you get used to it. Or maybe Samoan, if all the continental land masses become uninhabitable.
It would be quite convenient for me personally, if everyone learned English. But somehow I doubt they will find that to be an overwhelming reason.
There are people who argue that different languages carry a certain value for different fields and endeavors, but I don't buy this. English is an incredibly adaptable, flexible, evolving, absorbing language, so there should never be a lack of words to describe any concept one comes upon.
Spoken like a true monolinguist. The same could be said for many languages.
Why wouldn't it be Chinese? There are close to 3X as many native speakers of Chinese as there are of English. (There are more native Spanish speakers, too. Maybe even Hindi.) If you compare the number of people who know how to speak the language (not necessarily as their native language) Chinese still wins by 2.5:1.
I, too, speak only English. But I'm under no illusions about it being "better".
[people throwing away computers because they are infested with malware] has the flavor of a Geek-sanctioned urban legend.
I dunno. People say to me "maybe I just ought to get a new computer, this one is four years old". And the most compute-intensive thing they do is web browse.
Now, it's probably not exclusively malware. It's also buggy drivers (some of which are for hardware they don't even own any more), and layer upon layer of programs that autostart, and weatherbug (god, I hate that program) and stuff like that. But isn't that malware, too? It's just not intentional malware.
He cannot use satellite because the antenna direction from house to satellite points into side of hill.
It depends on the hill (and lot) of course, but how about atop an antenna tower. Ham radio operators sometimes have honking big towers. A quick google priced a 50' tower at around $2700 (it'll be a bit more with delivery and installation, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be assuming here that the FBI actually read all that email... I see no reason to assume that they kept reading after they'd realized the error. Aside from your (understandable) mistrust of the FBI, do you have reason to think otherwise?
Not at all. I have no idea what the FBI did with the mail. I have no reason to believe they continued reading after realizing that they weren't supposed to have the mail, and I have no reason to believe that they didn't.
And it is not clear whether it was the FBI or the ISP who was at fault. Clearly someone was, and should be held responsible. Also clearly, the FBI wasn't intending to tell anyone about it until they got the FOIA request (the unnamed official said "it's common"). But we don't know whether the concealment indicates guilt, or just wanting to brush bad publicity under the carpet.
That might tip off the person whose e-mail they were reading.
So are you saying that when the case is over (they bring charges or decide there wasn't anything there), they'll notify everyone who was inadvertently snooped? That then we'll see it in the news?
Note that the intelligence official quoted in TFA says it's not a rare occurrence, "it's common".
If you think they'll do that, I've got a bridge for sale that you might be interested in buying.
The ISP screwed the pooch and sent them all email sent to that domain. The FBI noticed that they were getting way too much email, found out what had happened and corrected it.
So, the users whose mail was wrongfully given to the FBI could sue the ISP, then. Oh wait, the FBI isn't going to tell them about it. It's not going to tell anyone what the domain is, or who the ISP is, either. State secret.
I think it's your kind of arrogance that is more dangerous.
That's called "irony", son. It's one o' them literary tricks, like metaphor, where the writer doesn't actually mean what it seems like they're saying. I know, it's just plain wrong, but you know them liberal arts types. Think of it as the literary equivalent of that "there are 10 kinds of people" joke.
Of course you can't publish a Ford calendar withour Ford's consent. Anyone buynig such a thing would consider it made by Ford.
If Ford was one of the world's major calendar manufacturers, that might be true. But they're not.
You can't go out, and take photographs of your car, and then publish an ad, a billboard, a newspaper full-page spread, and a television commercial advertising your car as the best/worst.
Of course I can, so long as I am willing to waste the money and whatever I say is truthful. I occasionally see the cars of disgruntled owners with large rooftop signs proclaiming what crap they are, and how their manufacturer and dealership is evil. (You apparently reside in a different country, and perhaps you are not permitted to say truthful things that corporations might object to. In the USA one is allowed to say such things, though it may result in legal harassment.)
You can't pretend, and make people believe, that you are Ford.
No chance of that, I'm 50 years old and still haven't rusted through.
I'd bet any amount of money that a 100,000-hour bulb wouldn't be 100 times more expensive than ordinary incandescent bulbs rated for only 1,000 hours.
It needn't be any more expensive. It'll just be less efficient (give off less light for the same power consumption). Doubling the life results in about 20% less light. You can buy long-life (meaning, several thousand hour) bulbs at the hardware or dollar store right now. There's no demand for anything longer than that, outside of special applications where bulb failure is dangerous or the labor cost of replacing the bulb is high. The bulbs they use in traffic signals have longer lifetimes (and get replaced periodically even though they're not burned out yet).
What's the point in extending the life? The cost of the bulb is trivial. A 100 watt bulb rated for 1000 hr costs $0.25. @0.10/kwH, it will use $10 in energy, so the bulb cost is 2.5% of the lifetime operating cost. Now, the equation would be different for CF bulbs, which are considerably more costly, and also present disposal concerns due to the Hg in them.
most incandescent bulbs may not last as long as most CFLs, but that is almost certainly a product of planned obsolescence and not a genuine technological limitation.
You've heard of "quick, cheap, good, pick any two"? Incandescent technology is like that. "Bright, long-lasting, low-energy, pick any two." It's a pretty mature technology, after all. It's simple to make a long-lasting light bulb (and they do make and sell them). Since power is a fixed value (that's how they label incandescent bulbs, by wattage), the tradeoff is they put out less light. A 130-volt bulb will last damn near forever if you feed it 115v and don't subject it to thermal shock (leave it running, don't turn it off and on a lot) or mechanical shock (which is why they have special bulbs for locations like ceiling fans and garage door openers).
Sure there are a few Edison-era bulbs still running. I
I've later found the issues with lack of SMART
For what that's worth. The Google paper didn't find that SMART gave much warning before failure. And a former Seagate engineer (in alt.folklore.computer) said that they had found that competitors' drives were failing to log SMART errors, to make the numbers look better. He said that he had argued that Seagate should brag about showing honest numbers, but that marketing had won the argument and now he didn't believe any manfacturer's hard drive's SMART reports.
it's possible that the cops that have killed with them were not properly educated
That may be true. And exactly what leeway do we want to give to people who kill because they are "not properly educated "? Should a cop (who is supposed to be so educated) get more leeway than any other bozo (who may not have such occupational credentials)? Or should "I was not properly educated" be a fitting defense for everyone?
Okay, so tell me what isn't a form of torture.
Any form of questioning that a Congressional committee is allowed to use when questioning an administration lackey.
Personally, I'm real interested in hearing what Alberto Gonzales has to say when they follow up with waterboarding on the "I don't remember" answers.
That requires an overt act. You specifically set up your TV so people outside can watch it.
Maybe that was just the logical place in the room to put the TV.
Setting up a WAP requires an overt act, too. You don't just wake up one morning and find that the Wireless Fairy has visited you.
If someone steals my TV set, thats theft.
Indeed. But if you set up your TV facing the picture window that faces the street (or in your shop window), so people on the sidewalk can watch it, is that theft? I would suggest that not only is it not theft for people to watch from the sidewalk, but that if there is any crime at all involved, it is "maintaining an attractive nuisance". And perhaps some sort of copyright infringement involving public performances.
Now substitute "WAP" for "TV".
What the hell does all this mean? Could someone translate in proper English for us non-native-English-speaking /.ers?
1) Aircraft carriers may change directions (getting lined up with the wind) in ways that are not predictable to the captain of a Chinese submarine.
2) It would be really bad to be hit by a carrier, they are very large.
3) But the vessels that are supposed to be guarding the carrier should have detected the "enemy" sub.
Is there a Firefox plugin that randomly scrambles the data of cookies from known marketers?
No. But Firefox will let you block the cookies, or automatically erase them when you leave the program. And you can get the TrackMeNot plugin, which makes random searches on different search engines, so that when they pull your record up to see what you've been searching for, the real searches will be lost in the noise.
As a tech person, perhaps you think regular consumers should be able to partition their hard drives, but for most people computers and hi-tech gadgets are tools no matter how prevalent or even how important they are in our lives.
I got that. But isn't it important to know how your tools work, how to take care of them?
I don't necessarily expect the "regular consumer" to know how to partition a hard drive, at least without googling a bit. But I think it's reasonable to expect someone who uses computers to have a rough understanding of, say, the hierarchical file system. To know the difference between something that's on their own computer, and something that's on another computer somewhere else on the 'net. To understand in general terms how search engines work, and what their failings are. And, yes, to understand that everything they do online is being recorded by others, and going into their permanent record.
Plenty of Professional Journalists have been found fabricating stories / events just to spice up the copy to increase viewership/circulation.
The difference is, when they get caught fabricating stories, they tend to get fired and have a hard time finding another job in their field. What happens to the amateur who gets caught fabricating a story?
That's not to say that pro journalism is pure as Ivory Snow. There are plenty of pro journalists who are incompetent/sloppy/uncaring, who fail to check their facts properly, who have an axe to grind. (Probably not as prevalent as amateurs who have those failings, but still.) Even more, they are published by large corporations, and ultimately those large corporations control what gets printed, either by being able to spike stories they don't like, or by controlling hiring and firing. To my mind, this latter problem is at the core of pro journalism's problems: that it's all vetted and passed on by people who are thinking what effect a story will have on sales (not only sales of the news, but sales from other divisions of the conglomerate), what the reaction of their country club buddies will be. If they piss Washington off, will the military contracts dry up?
The CBS/GWB thing is another matter entirely. CBS got suckered. Nobody has claimed that CBS fabricated those documents themselves. They were accepted by CBS because their contents were so believable (even to the Guard secretary who would have been the one to type them, if they had been real). But, irrespective of their contents, the documents themselves were forged.
installed Ubuntu about 2 weeks ago, and somehow the installation screwed up my hard drive completely... according to this news, it was Ubuntu.
No. (I haven't read TFA because it's still slashdotted, but...) Apparently the article says it cycles the power too quickly, which leads to premature failure. Not screwing the drive up immediately, but wearing it out too soon.
If the drive screwed up immediately upon installing Ubuntu in a dual boot with a copy of Windows that had been used some already, I'd put money on it being partition problems. Ubuntu installs nicely on a clean fresh system, but if Windows is there already and the existing drive data is too odd (fragmented, swap file fragmented and/or seriously separated from the rest of the data, multiple partitions, whatever) the repartitioning may not go well. The repartitioning software (I forget what it is) is not smart enough to stop and tell you "hey, you gotta clean this drive up before I make changes" (or to deal with doing the cleanup itself).
until people figure out that you are bending the truth to promote your "message"
And how did Greenpeace "bend the truth"? Apparently (the OP does not contain a link to the original story) Greenpeace claims iPhones contain brominated compounds and PVC. As near as I can tell from the (industry) articles, neither Apple nor the industry disputes that. The defense is 1) everybody does it, 2) the compounds are approved by government agencies so they're ok, 3) there are no alternative materials, and 4) (which seems at odds with #1-3) Apple is in the process of stopping using those compounds. That these industry claims may (or may not) be true does not mean that Greenpeace's claim that the iPhone contains bromine compounds is "bending the truth".
Greenpeace has clearly picked the target that they will get the most media attention from (if they'd targeted Kyocera, who would have paid any attention?) but they didn't say everybody else (except Apple) was fine.
BTW, why are the links in the OP anonymized? I value my tinfoil hat as much as the next guy, but why in the world would even Little Dick Cheney or Mad King George care if I'm reading an article in Gizmodo? Is Gizmodo the new terrorist chic?
it's hard for some people to admit there are any advantages to being an english speaker (especially an anglo saxon one) but it just might be true on occasion.
Of course it's true, though it's not clear that word count, per se, should be the criterion... there are other ways to convey information besides having a dedicated symbol.
My point is, the same can be said for many languages. Indeed, I suspect almost no one would say that their native language is a POS and should be abolished. Not that long ago, French was the lingua franca. For the last century, English. But the British Empire has withered, and quite possibly the US has peaked. A hundred years from now, who knows, maybe Chinese. I'm sure it is a beautiful and versatile language, once you get used to it. Or maybe Samoan, if all the continental land masses become uninhabitable.
It would be quite convenient for me personally, if everyone learned English. But somehow I doubt they will find that to be an overwhelming reason.
Also, according to most people Chinese are hard to learn.
:)
According to most people English are hard to learn, too
There are people who argue that different languages carry a certain value for different fields and endeavors, but I don't buy this. English is an incredibly adaptable, flexible, evolving, absorbing language, so there should never be a lack of words to describe any concept one comes upon.
Spoken like a true monolinguist. The same could be said for many languages.
Why wouldn't it be Chinese? There are close to 3X as many native speakers of Chinese as there are of English. (There are more native Spanish speakers, too. Maybe even Hindi.) If you compare the number of people who know how to speak the language (not necessarily as their native language) Chinese still wins by 2.5:1.
I, too, speak only English. But I'm under no illusions about it being "better".
[people throwing away computers because they are infested with malware] has the flavor of a Geek-sanctioned urban legend.
I dunno. People say to me "maybe I just ought to get a new computer, this one is four years old". And the most compute-intensive thing they do is web browse.
Now, it's probably not exclusively malware. It's also buggy drivers (some of which are for hardware they don't even own any more), and layer upon layer of programs that autostart, and weatherbug (god, I hate that program) and stuff like that. But isn't that malware, too? It's just not intentional malware.
It doesn't matter if the panels are $0.01/watt if I still need the entire neighborhood covered in them to run the coffee maker
Perhaps making heat is not the best way to use electricity? I have a gas-powered coffee maker, myself.
is there any reason I cannot post a link to a Google Map showing where he lives?
all based on public info posted in this thread
While the information would be useful, it would be far far better to leave that decision up to him.
He cannot use satellite because the antenna direction from house to satellite points into side of hill.
It depends on the hill (and lot) of course, but how about atop an antenna tower. Ham radio operators sometimes have honking big towers. A quick google priced a 50' tower at around $2700 (it'll be a bit more with delivery and installation, of course).