I'm against this gag order, but the case about First Amendment rights seems to be weak. Under your argument, it would be fine if I posted your Social Security and credit card numbers on the internet, as long as I'm not the one stealing anything from your accounts.
Since Social Security #'s and CC #'s shouldn't mean anything in and of themselves I see no problem. It's the whole issue of these things being used in the way they are that makes them worth anything.
A SS# should be entirely useless outside the context of the SSA. I mean the damn cards say right on them that they are useless for identification purposes - but so many entities use the worthless number as an identifier and think it means something. I'll not go into the fact that they (SSA, SSN, etc.) should no longer exist anyway.
CC numbers are not so useful by themselves as they once were. You still need other information for them to be useful, particularly for fraudulent purposes. One could just come up with an otherwise valid SS or CC # easily (the formats are publicly available), but they still require other information in order for them to utilized.
In this case with the MBTA, we're talking about a government entity that is using a bad model for funding public services, here tranportation. IMO, this only reflects on a poorly managed public budget (rather typical really, many might say even inherent in government).
So what I want to know is why is the government so inefficient that it can't provide public transportation services out of the tax revenue it collects and needs to resort to collecting fares?
Just think of how much money they wouldn't be spending if they didn't resort to using some (typically ineffective) fare collection model that needs to constantly be tweaked to begin with. And so it goes with the nature of governments that try to be everything to everyone and people wonder why they can't do any one thing effectively.:shrugs:
I know a Perl guy, he's more like 300+ miles from Boston though. Not sure if he'd be interested or even a match for you (he mostly does remote contract stuff), but he may have contacts up that way he could refer.
I could put you in touch with him if you'd like.
My skillset is pretty much in the jack-of-all trades, master of none category. I've gone through so many phases of specializing in this or that (CAD, Netware Admin, security, databases, programming, desktop support, etc.) that I have no idea what I am. Part of a side effect of the industry constantly changing, being an independent sort and just having a thirst for knowledge, rather than getting really into one particular thing and not caring about anything else, I guess. Currently, I'm mostly a C developer for embedded wifi stuff, which happens to also cover quite a bit of my other skills (eg. networking, security, databases, and my rather limited php and perl knowledge).
Really this is nothing new. The only thing that makes it news is that enough people cared to catch the tampering. Will it change anything, probably not - the average American doesn't care enough about voting to begin with, much less the integrity the system. Then let's not even get onto the subject of the idiots that put Diebold machines in the States, in several cases without so much as a paper trail.
Clearly, this has long been suspected, but now Martian water's been (in the words of William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer) "touched and tasted."
What flavor is it?!?
The potential investors for my Martian Water Ice chain are really going on about this and just have to know before they will release the VC funds.
MY IP phone has a dedicated monitor that shows a christmas tree with a pretty pony under it and all the shiny blinking lights come on when people call, you insensitive clod.
Craigslist has to be about the seediest place to do business on the internet. Nothing about their service screams 'high quality,' much less 'we care.'
While this all may be true, I haven't see any other service that fills the bill of "free local classifieds" on a such a scale as CL does. And it's done without a bunch of crap (pretty ponies, flash) getting in the way, no ads to get to the...uhh ads, etc. I mean come on, it's a free Open Source classified section/advertising site, what/.er wouldn't love it?
IMHO, Ebay is moving ever closer to the "seediest place to do business on the internet" title. Maybe the "most over-commercialized and unfriendliest place to do business on the internet" title is more appropriate though for ebay, but it's certainly not without its fair share of scams, shady deals, and general seediness (eg. an item typically worth ~$200 which realistically costs ~$25 to ship - "Buy it now" for $50, but S&H is $200 is not my idea of displaying a reputable image).
CL puts in every sale listing "Avoid scams and fraud by dealing locally!" in bold red text along with some other stuff in a yellow highlighted block with a link to a page that includes, among other things, the following:
DEAL LOCALLY WITH FOLKS YOU CAN MEET IN PERSON - follow this one simple rule and you will avoid 99% of the scam attempts on craigslist.
This is good advice for anything involving private parties, whether it's CL, ebay, or bob's widget forum. FWIW, I've found and purchased a couple things via CL posts, a vehicle and a pair of wireless routers. Both local and straight deals with good people. So my opinion is that there may be a fair amount of cruft to sort through, but there are plenty of legit and honest deals there. IIRC, I've even gotten legitimate job/gig offers (none that I've taken though) due to either posting on CL or responding to one.
I've got a couple itunes for free because I got concert tickets through Ticketmaster online. But I can't even get them because I use Linux on all my machines - no client. I can boot to XP on the laptop, install the stupid software and get them, sure, but unless I can play them in Linux (certainly possible, yes) is it really worth the hassle?
More importantly, is there any music I would find worth listening to in the iTunes library?
I'd never heard of them making entire motherboards before this. I have seen a fair share of foxconn components on motherboards and maybe other electronic devices though.
I have an Acer laptop that has a buggy BIOS and certain ACPI functions are broken in Linux. From what I've seen there are a couple workarounds that have been devised, including a DSDT table hack, and last time I checked there is at least one bug report on kernel.org about the family of machines in question. I had tried a newer BIOS firmware on it but that caused even more problems in Linux and completely confused XP somehow (I'm attributing the XP issues to the BIOS upgrade but it may have been entirely coincidental) so I ended up reverting to the older version. However, Acer has long been known as a leader in the lowest price market, often with the quality to match thus fitting the saying of "you get what you pay for".
From the sounds of it this Foxconn thing is more than just your run of the mill buggy ACPI implementation which is probably more common than most people realize. Based on another post (which I can't seem to find now) it seems like what would be A Real Good Idea(TM) would be for more manufacturers to just make their BIOSes ACPI compliant period and not worry about compatibility with broken ACPI support in the OS, namely Windows. I see there being more BIOS hardware supported for coreboot happening before that though.
...I still prefer Slackware over anything else distribution-wise.
Me too.
Oh wait, I'm supposed to say something besides that.
With Slack one can still d/l and compile just a new kernel and IIRC with the installer you still get to choose whether or not to install the typical dev software all the way to picking and choosing every individual program, it hasn't changed much at all in these regards from 10+ years ago. I've done kernel updates only quite a few times on my laptop, but there's still an issue with kernel support for the buggy ACPI on it. On my primary machine I'm not so worried about keeping up with kernel upgrades as I am with it being stable and having only what is needed in the kernel. And I still install most of my software from source rather than using a package manager.
One thing that always bothered me about RedHat (along with some other distros) was how it obfuscated certain config files in attempts at making things more 'user-friendly' with their own interfaces, scripts and associated config files adding an unecessary, IMO, layer of abstraction to the standard config files. Modifying a standard file and then using the whatever-configurator utility to change some other setting often resulted in the direct change originally made being overwritten. I know this behavior can be found all over the place, not just in RedHat and not just WRT to Linux system related settings but in some cases it can be just unbelievably annoying.
My initial thought on seeing this was pretty much the same as GP's.
Sarcasm aside, it wouldn't matter if I did bother to visit the site - I have my own proxy server blocking out ads so in most cases I can't even tell if ads really are on a page. And I'm doing development work on a system that has an ad-based revenue model.
I also do embedded development, but I started using Eclipse a couple months ago to see if I liked it. However, I still use a command line make cross compile so don't really use it so much as a full IDE as I do a glorified text editor with a couple useful extras. So far, I like Eclipse much better than KDevelop which I've used for some basic stuff in the past mostly because it was already installed with KDE and I figured WTH.
I've still never gotten completely used to vi/vim even though I still often use vi because in some cases it's the only editor available on a box and I did use gvim (still do occasionally) for quite a while to do coding. Almost the same thing with emacs. I used it all the time when my primary machine was an Amiga, and have on occasion since then but I never really got into using it enough to take advantage of even half its features. For basic quick text editing I prefer to use pico. Yeah, I'm strange.
If I see my wife called I call back without a voicemail. If she said anything worth saying in the voicemail, she'll say it again without me even having to say I didn't listen to her voicemail.
Fixed that for you.
At least 99% of the time my wife will repeat anything left in a voicemail that wasn't just a "give me call when you get this, love you." message.
And "all intensive purposes" is no longer (errrrm, has never been) a phrase.
Sure it has - "This super nifty one-time only on TV (Call Now!) offer [insert product name here] is great for all intensive purposes. [insert unbelievably long list of intensive uses for product function here]"
Oh wait.. I don't think that product has been invented yet.
OK, here it is - "Chuck Norris is suitable for all intensive purposes."
You mean all the promises of huge salaries and endless opportunities just handed to you by becoming an MCP they talk about in all those training and tech school ads just aren't true?!?! OMG!
Just when I was beginning to think that maybe I really was missing out on something by not going and taking one of these courses after being in the IT field for well over a decade.
They are already working on plans to retrofit planes for widespread lime distribution. The airlines may even get into this so passengers can feel warm and fuzzy about helping the environment on their international flights.
Then of course, there's the work on evironmentally friendly rockets that can be launched to disperse lime with pinpoint accuracy to other areas.
Looks like a superpower "lime race" competition may get started with China and the US being the top players. China will likely come under scrutiny for using lead paint, mercury and other questionable materials in their rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm against this gag order, but the case about First Amendment rights seems to be weak. Under your argument, it would be fine if I posted your Social Security and credit card numbers on the internet, as long as I'm not the one stealing anything from your accounts.
Since Social Security #'s and CC #'s shouldn't mean anything in and of themselves I see no problem. It's the whole issue of these things being used in the way they are that makes them worth anything.
A SS# should be entirely useless outside the context of the SSA. I mean the damn cards say right on them that they are useless for identification purposes - but so many entities use the worthless number as an identifier and think it means something. I'll not go into the fact that they (SSA, SSN, etc.) should no longer exist anyway.
CC numbers are not so useful by themselves as they once were. You still need other information for them to be useful, particularly for fraudulent purposes. One could just come up with an otherwise valid SS or CC # easily (the formats are publicly available), but they still require other information in order for them to utilized.
In this case with the MBTA, we're talking about a government entity that is using a bad model for funding public services, here tranportation. IMO, this only reflects on a poorly managed public budget (rather typical really, many might say even inherent in government).
So what I want to know is why is the government so inefficient that it can't provide public transportation services out of the tax revenue it collects and needs to resort to collecting fares?
Just think of how much money they wouldn't be spending if they didn't resort to using some (typically ineffective) fare collection model that needs to constantly be tweaked to begin with. And so it goes with the nature of governments that try to be everything to everyone and people wonder why they can't do any one thing effectively. :shrugs:
I know a Perl guy, he's more like 300+ miles from Boston though. Not sure if he'd be interested or even a match for you (he mostly does remote contract stuff), but he may have contacts up that way he could refer.
I could put you in touch with him if you'd like.
My skillset is pretty much in the jack-of-all trades, master of none category. I've gone through so many phases of specializing in this or that (CAD, Netware Admin, security, databases, programming, desktop support, etc.) that I have no idea what I am. Part of a side effect of the industry constantly changing, being an independent sort and just having a thirst for knowledge, rather than getting really into one particular thing and not caring about anything else, I guess. Currently, I'm mostly a C developer for embedded wifi stuff, which happens to also cover quite a bit of my other skills (eg. networking, security, databases, and my rather limited php and perl knowledge).
I certainly wouldn't have bothered with the VbV crap if I didn't have to.
Just the headline was enough to make me laugh.
Really this is nothing new. The only thing that makes it news is that enough people cared to catch the tampering. Will it change anything, probably not - the average American doesn't care enough about voting to begin with, much less the integrity the system. Then let's not even get onto the subject of the idiots that put Diebold machines in the States, in several cases without so much as a paper trail.
They've tried to get people to say "cracker" instead, ignoring the very small role Nabisco plays in computer security issues.
My network is protected by a Cheese Nips box, you insensitive clod!
Clearly, this has long been suspected, but now Martian water's been (in the words of William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer) "touched and tasted."
What flavor is it?!?
The potential investors for my Martian Water Ice chain are really going on about this and just have to know before they will release the VC funds.
MY IP phone has a dedicated monitor that shows a christmas tree with a pretty pony under it and all the shiny blinking lights come on when people call, you insensitive clod.
Free oysters for all - no card needed? You're right, it would never happen.
Craigslist has to be about the seediest place to do business on the internet. Nothing about their service screams 'high quality,' much less 'we care.'
While this all may be true, I haven't see any other service that fills the bill of "free local classifieds" on a such a scale as CL does. And it's done without a bunch of crap (pretty ponies, flash) getting in the way, no ads to get to the ...uhh ads, etc. I mean come on, it's a free Open Source classified section/advertising site, what /.er wouldn't love it?
IMHO, Ebay is moving ever closer to the "seediest place to do business on the internet" title. Maybe the "most over-commercialized and unfriendliest place to do business on the internet" title is more appropriate though for ebay, but it's certainly not without its fair share of scams, shady deals, and general seediness (eg. an item typically worth ~$200 which realistically costs ~$25 to ship - "Buy it now" for $50, but S&H is $200 is not my idea of displaying a reputable image).
CL puts in every sale listing "Avoid scams and fraud by dealing locally!" in bold red text along with some other stuff in a yellow highlighted block with a link to a page that includes, among other things, the following:
DEAL LOCALLY WITH FOLKS YOU CAN MEET IN PERSON - follow this one simple rule and you will avoid 99% of the scam attempts on craigslist.
This is good advice for anything involving private parties, whether it's CL, ebay, or bob's widget forum. FWIW, I've found and purchased a couple things via CL posts, a vehicle and a pair of wireless routers. Both local and straight deals with good people. So my opinion is that there may be a fair amount of cruft to sort through, but there are plenty of legit and honest deals there. IIRC, I've even gotten legitimate job/gig offers (none that I've taken though) due to either posting on CL or responding to one.
Yahoo had an online music store? ZOMG!
I've got a couple itunes for free because I got concert tickets through Ticketmaster online. But I can't even get them because I use Linux on all my machines - no client. I can boot to XP on the laptop, install the stupid software and get them, sure, but unless I can play them in Linux (certainly possible, yes) is it really worth the hassle?
More importantly, is there any music I would find worth listening to in the iTunes library?
I'd never heard of them making entire motherboards before this. I have seen a fair share of foxconn components on motherboards and maybe other electronic devices though.
I have an Acer laptop that has a buggy BIOS and certain ACPI functions are broken in Linux. From what I've seen there are a couple workarounds that have been devised, including a DSDT table hack, and last time I checked there is at least one bug report on kernel.org about the family of machines in question. I had tried a newer BIOS firmware on it but that caused even more problems in Linux and completely confused XP somehow (I'm attributing the XP issues to the BIOS upgrade but it may have been entirely coincidental) so I ended up reverting to the older version. However, Acer has long been known as a leader in the lowest price market, often with the quality to match thus fitting the saying of "you get what you pay for".
From the sounds of it this Foxconn thing is more than just your run of the mill buggy ACPI implementation which is probably more common than most people realize. Based on another post (which I can't seem to find now) it seems like what would be A Real Good Idea(TM) would be for more manufacturers to just make their BIOSes ACPI compliant period and not worry about compatibility with broken ACPI support in the OS, namely Windows. I see there being more BIOS hardware supported for coreboot happening before that though.
Open source developers won't actually be able to profit from companies spending less by switching from proprietary software?
...I still prefer Slackware over anything else distribution-wise.
Me too.
Oh wait, I'm supposed to say something besides that.
With Slack one can still d/l and compile just a new kernel and IIRC with the installer you still get to choose whether or not to install the typical dev software all the way to picking and choosing every individual program, it hasn't changed much at all in these regards from 10+ years ago. I've done kernel updates only quite a few times on my laptop, but there's still an issue with kernel support for the buggy ACPI on it. On my primary machine I'm not so worried about keeping up with kernel upgrades as I am with it being stable and having only what is needed in the kernel. And I still install most of my software from source rather than using a package manager.
One thing that always bothered me about RedHat (along with some other distros) was how it obfuscated certain config files in attempts at making things more 'user-friendly' with their own interfaces, scripts and associated config files adding an unecessary, IMO, layer of abstraction to the standard config files. Modifying a standard file and then using the whatever-configurator utility to change some other setting often resulted in the direct change originally made being overwritten. I know this behavior can be found all over the place, not just in RedHat and not just WRT to Linux system related settings but in some cases it can be just unbelievably annoying.
My initial thought on seeing this was pretty much the same as GP's.
Sarcasm aside, it wouldn't matter if I did bother to visit the site - I have my own proxy server blocking out ads so in most cases I can't even tell if ads really are on a page. And I'm doing development work on a system that has an ad-based revenue model.
Ironic? hmmm, maybe.
I also do embedded development, but I started using Eclipse a couple months ago to see if I liked it. However, I still use a command line make cross compile so don't really use it so much as a full IDE as I do a glorified text editor with a couple useful extras. So far, I like Eclipse much better than KDevelop which I've used for some basic stuff in the past mostly because it was already installed with KDE and I figured WTH.
I've still never gotten completely used to vi/vim even though I still often use vi because in some cases it's the only editor available on a box and I did use gvim (still do occasionally) for quite a while to do coding. Almost the same thing with emacs. I used it all the time when my primary machine was an Amiga, and have on occasion since then but I never really got into using it enough to take advantage of even half its features. For basic quick text editing I prefer to use pico. Yeah, I'm strange.
Urine. It's all those beach-goers pissing in the ocean.
If I see my wife called I call back without a voicemail. If she said anything worth saying in the voicemail, she'll say it again without me even having to say I didn't listen to her voicemail.
Fixed that for you.
At least 99% of the time my wife will repeat anything left in a voicemail that wasn't just a "give me call when you get this, love you." message.
And "all intensive purposes" is no longer (errrrm, has never been) a phrase.
Sure it has - "This super nifty one-time only on TV (Call Now!) offer [insert product name here] is great for all intensive purposes. [insert unbelievably long list of intensive uses for product function here]"
Oh wait.. I don't think that product has been invented yet.
OK, here it is - "Chuck Norris is suitable for all intensive purposes."
You mean all the promises of huge salaries and endless opportunities just handed to you by becoming an MCP they talk about in all those training and tech school ads just aren't true?!?! OMG!
Just when I was beginning to think that maybe I really was missing out on something by not going and taking one of these courses after being in the IT field for well over a decade.
I think they're going for Sea# with all this talk of limes.
The parent said...
aw shit, your firefox extension filtered my post since it contained the original lame joke as well as my own.
Ooooh... duct tape to harvest stray electrons!!!
I can't believe no one has thought of this. The solution to cheap electric is in every home!
Let's see... a roll of duct tape cost $2 (or a little more for higher quality tape which could grab more electrons)....
They are already working on plans to retrofit planes for widespread lime distribution. The airlines may even get into this so passengers can feel warm and fuzzy about helping the environment on their international flights.
Then of course, there's the work on evironmentally friendly rockets that can be launched to disperse lime with pinpoint accuracy to other areas.
Looks like a superpower "lime race" competition may get started with China and the US being the top players. China will likely come under scrutiny for using lead paint, mercury and other questionable materials in their rockets.