Wal-Mart has the highest revenue in the US - 469.2 billion according to the Fortune 500.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that companies only exist, and earn profit, for one year. Then they return to their ancestral home in the profit river, where they lay their nest eggs and golden parachutes for the next generation, and then die.
Alas, companies make revenue year over year... and some of the biggest frauds this country has seen have taken decades before the government acted to stop it. So "Trillions of dollars of revenue" is not an inaccurate statement. At least not if you have more brains than an anonymous coward...
"So, do you have a current backup?" -- Every tech support number you'll call, anywhere. Ever.
And yet, the single most basic thing you can do to protect your data gets overlooked by hundreds of millions of people, because it's just too burdensome to drag and drop from "My documents" to "My external drive". Viruses, malware, and crap like this would have gone the way of the dodo bird if people would just follow the most basic. advice. ever. regarding the maintenance of their computer. You wouldn't run your car out of oil after neglecting to change it for 15,000 miles, would you? So why do you do it to your computer?
And so is the $30 million figure. 0.4% * 250,000 * $300 = $300,000.
You can't expect journalists to have a grasp of basic math. Or the general public for that matter. Otherwise the headline "Company X settles 'largest lawsuit in history' at Y billion dollars" wouldn't have the impact it does after realizing Company X's revenue was Z trillion dollars. And who knows -- with the instability of bitcoin pricing, it might well be worth $30 million next week... -_-
And he'd be right to do so. Here's the thing people don't get about Snowden: He's not a revolutionary, or a hero. He's a coward. Rosa Parks didn't flee from the bus when the police came for her; She sat right there and waited. When Alabama told Martin Luther King they would arrest him if he marched, he marched anyway, and then got arrested. In fact, if you look at the history of civil rights leaders -- they all went to jail for what they believed in. They did it willingly -- they didn't run from the authorities, they stood right out in the open and said: Come and take me, but your laws are wrong, and you are wrong if you do.
Snowden stole a lot of classified materials from his employer, and then fled the country. And then he released all of it. This wasn't about "exposing" the NSA -- anyone with half a brain realizes that the very definition of a spy agency is that it spies on people. "They were spying on americans!" Yeah, ok, and? "They were spying on the germans!" Yeah, ok, and? It's their job to watch for threats both foreign and domestic. It's right there in their mission statement. Public record.
Snowden's justification for his actions fall short of what a person truly concerned about civil liberties would have done. If I'm going to denounce my government's actions, I want the police to come. I want to be arrested, charged, and put on trial. And then I want a jury of twelve Americans to look me in the eye and say "You did wrong by us." And if I'm really sure this is a matter of human rights... I'm also really sure at least one of those twelve people is going to say: "You're right. The government was wrong."
Snowden is a coward, and 3 hot meals and a cot in a concrete cell is exactly where he needs to be if he really believes what he's shovelling.
I thought PCI Compliance was supposed to take care of that per defining the standards in network security for POS (Point of Sales) systems?
It did. The article's scenario is a lie. Let me ask you how likely it is that, during the busiest day of the year for this retailer, with thousands of people jammed into long lines, in the one place where there are at least two high resolution cameras pointed at each terminal, a single person or group of persons, could plant multiple devices at multiple stores, within a short period of time, and then remove them after, without leaving any photographic or forensic evidence.
Because guys, that's the story that law enforcement, in collusion with the company, has released to the general public. So yes, this is bona fide conspiracy theory. But it's credible because 1. It only takes a small number of people to keep the secret: Target's senior management and information security, and select law enforcement offices. 2. They all have motivations for doing so -- law enforcement is doubtless aware that releasing true details of the crime would (a) expose a weakness in a Fortune 100 company that, besides processing credit card payments, also maintains personal health data at these locations (Pharmacy). The damage to the company, and indeed the country's economy, would be far in excess of the damage to individual creditors accounts. It makes sense to lie about it. And this story doesn't have to hold forever -- in a few months, when everyone has forgotten about it, the truth will emerge in a court filing when they bring the people responsible up on charges.
Now, all that said -- here's the more likely scenario, which is based on my short employment with this corporation: They hacked their wifi. Unfortunately, Target has repeatedly opted to silence, or even fire, people who object to their security policy, so I do not feel bad about making this public. Target is run by morons -- big surprise, it's a large corporation. Anyone who's worked in IT will have similar experiences -- it's hardly just Target. In this case, they allow full access to any server within their corporate network at each retail location, isolated only by primitive subnet routing to delineate what is and isn't allowed through the choke router. And that's it. Once you're logged into the network anywhere, it's a flat network topology and you can easily make contact with any other node on the network. Every store has multiple wifi routers, and while they do change the keys on an regular basis, it's not all the keys, and not on all the routers -- specifically, they use an inventory-management system within the stores (Those bulky "guns" you see the red shirts carrying) which depends on wifi.
There have been breaches to the network in the past through its wireless access points. These are not generally known to the public, but they have happened, and it has resulted in a number of security problems. Besides the customer's credit card data being stored on POS systems which are booted off DHCP to embedded windows, there's also the IP-based cameras. There are an average of 20 or so at each store, and they use an embedded webserver in each of them, which stream to a central source. The password for the approximately 42,000 devices is the same on each, and is not changed often, if ever, because the firmware lacks the ability to change the password programmically; there's no admin console. Besides the fact that many of these cameras have zoom and rotate features, and some have been known to be installed in positions where rotating the view can show the customers in the changing rooms... they're of sufficiently high quality that you can see the PINs people enter at the POS systems. The cash room, where the money is counted down at the end of every shift, is secured, but also has a camera in it. It's not hard to imagine someone with access to the cameras spying on the managers to acquire their passwords. And that's not even the creepy part: Target has installed ANPR-capable cameras i
"I read this in Popular Mechanics. In 1954. It was a slow news day, so I recycled it." Robotics has been something people have been talking about since... well, since they were first created half a century ago. This isn't news, this is olds.
Reduce funding to supplimental assistance, call them lazy, imply that obesity and poor health is a moral failing, and that prayer is an effective medical treatment.
No, this guy needs to go away because he was breaking the law - not because of how much he broke it.
No, he needs to go away because he didn't give the government it's cut of the action. That's how Wall Street can trigger a decade-long economic recession and nobody goes to jail, but one guy running a website faces infinity years in the electric chair while being anally abused by goats.
This has nothing to do with how little or much he broke the law -- it's about setting an example: Don't steal. The government hates competition.
The will of the people should prevail until you disagree, right?
You cannot expect sound judgement from a population that averages a 5th grade reading comprehension and nearly 7% believe that lizard people secretly control the government... or aren't sure. I'm all for democracy -- when the general population is educated. California is one of the most populated states in the country, and also one of the least-educated overall. The results are, well... exactly as described.
The people are morons. Why do you think the electoral college was created to begin with? Direct democracy is usually a disaster and which is precisely why it's been so rarely used by governments past and present. These initiatives were also sponsored by the same people who put a lot of money into the campaign funds of the lawmakers they allegedly were over-ruling. So no, this isn't about your ad hominid that *I* am disagreeing... it's quite plain that California is off the rails. If you want to point fingers at why, be my guest... but the majority of the rest of the country wishes it would hurry up and slide off into the ocean. We even tried giving California back to Mexico over a hundred years ago... they wouldn't take it.
Please stop. I've now cited an official government source, and a reputable international source. Both of these analysis were done by a team of economists, nuclear engineers, and accounted for as many factors as reasonably can be taken into consideration. You have cited... absolutely nothing.
According to this site the average price/kwh has been steadily increasing, doesn't look like it accounts for inflation though.
Yeah, but the OP was right: This isn't a fuel problem. In truth, it's a NIMBY problem. Nobody wants a power plant built near them, so no new plants are being built. The net result is demand is rising, but supply isn't. That's why the price is going up; It's not because the cost of the inputs have changed. It doesn't matter whether the plants are natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, or wind... if you can't build one to begin with.
If we built fast reactors, we would have enough fuel, in the form of depleted uranium sitting around idle in barrels at enrichment plants, to supply the entire planet's energy for about 1000 years.
Current reactor designs, given current geologically-proven reserves and what has already been refined and available in world markets, is about 200 years. The definition of proveable is that someone's already done it.
Fast reactors aren't economical right now. Maybe in two hundred years, assuming no new sources of uranium are discovered, we'll need to revisit it. It's economically absurd right now to suggest switching over. The 200 years estimate is based on today's technology, with today's known quantity, in today's economy. Yes, there are technologies, like fast reactors, that can re-use the spent fuel -- but until we're out of enriched uranium, there's simply no need to.
This is a question for our great great grand children to answer, not us. We should be more focused on getting off fossil fuels before our problems are less about an energy crisis than about having a habitable planet to live on. We'll have fuel for nuclear reactors for as long as the planet remains habitable. Habitability is in doubt because we're more concerned with short term gain than long-term stability. I don't want our children to have to wonder where their next meal will come from -- you can eat the trees, grass, birds, wild life, plants... but you can't eat money.
I like your post, but it propagates a myth due to severe omission. I'd like to correct it. The big problem is, you're off by a factor of 100.
False. "Uranium reserves available at up to $100 per pound of U3O8 represented approximately 23 years worth of demand, while uranium reserves at up to $50 per pound of U3O8 represented about 10 years worth of demand. Domestic U.S. uranium production, however, supplies only about 10 percent, on average, of U.S. requirements for nuclear fuel" Source. Domestic US production gives us 23 years of demand at 100% capacity. It is currently at 10% capacity. Conclusion: About 230 years.
A second estimate looking at global supply had this to say: "Thus the world's present measured resources of uranium (5.3 Mt) in the cost category around present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 80 years. This represents a higher level of assured resources than is normal for most minerals. Further exploration and higher prices will certainly, on the basis of present geological knowledge, yield further resources as present ones are used up." It goes on to state "This is in fact suggested in the IAEA-NEA figures if those covering estimates of all conventional resources (U as main product or major by-product) are considered - another 7.6 million tonnes (beyond the 5.3 Mt known economic resources), which takes us to 190 years' supply at today's rate of consumption."
200 years is an accurate assessment given available data. Your assessment is based on non-existant technology and substantial change in current industry practices. Mine is based on today's technology, and no change.
So, just to get this straight, a company who gained its position through a helluva lot of taxpayer dollars, much of it in the form of last mile access on public lands, now decides it has some ethical and moral right to block a competitor.
Actually no. They have no ethical or moral rights and never has. They are a business, not a person, and federal law be damned. What they do have, however, is a legal right, purchased through years of lobbying efforts to our legislators, who are now thoroughly corrupted -- 97% of our candidates for federal positions who won had more money than their opponent. Democracy at work.
The only reason that Google might bust them up on this is because everyone loves Google, it's new and hip, while AT&T sounds like some 60s throwback dinosaur that can safely and quietly be shoveled out the door or sacrificed on the altar of public opinion. And Google knows this!
Our proven uranium reserves would last us over 200 years at current consumption; Well beyond the life expectancy of any of our reactors. The only reason for this program was to provide a failing country with a cheap way of disposing of highly hazardous materials without losing face. It is the proverbial "turning a negative into a positive". It will have zero effect on our energy costs or programs.
It is a wonder he isn't being slapped with federal charges of extortion.
Not really. California has a long and inglorious history of trying to turn itself into its own country -- second only to Texas in it's zest for trying to co-opt, twist, and otherwise manipulate federal law. See also: "This product is known to cause cancer in the State of California." They also have the highly controversial three strikes law that results in infinite prison. As if you needed more proof California's justice system was completely off the rails than them creating laws inspired by sports games.
But, it's not a surprise the feds aren't getting involved -- they generally only become involved when the state penalty would be less than the federal penalty. In this case, it's very clearly more. The federal justice system would probably have him serving considerably less time than infinity for his crime.
As an aside, while I think what this man does was clearly anti-social and he should be punished... a prison sentence in excess of what I would get if I poured gasoline on this man and set him on fire for posting a naked picture of me on his website, I do not feel is fair. His crime was non-violent. Hate-motivated? Yes. Poor taste? Absolutely. Attempting to profit on the misery of others? Yes. But not violent. At least in my book, violence is worse than non-violence, pound for pound. And if we're going to say this guy should be punished for extortion like this, where's California when it comes to their business leaders? A lot of banks have headquarters over there...
This is incorrect for Reed-Solomon based RAID (levels 6 and higher such as RAID Z3). RAID6 can correct
... Yes, but earlier systems, which the OP was suggesting could be used for this purpose, lacks that functionality. Also, please reset your sarcasm detector, it appears to be out of alignment -- a functional detector would have pinged on "Raid 9 Million(tm)".
Any proper file system will have a large enough transaction/intent log that can be replayed to correct partial data/metadata writes due to power failure and the RAID write hole, etc.. Most file systems in use are not proper, of course, but at least a few are available.
Correct, and those that are aren't immune to human stupidity. No filesystem can save you from a guy who decides to pour beer into the storage array, or who goes to move a directory and misclicks sending it to the trash. Disaster recovery is not a simple matter of choosing the right filesystem and then patting yourself on the back. It requires careful planning and consideration... None of which the majority of the people on this thread seem to be capable of. At least you seem to have some grasp of the underlying technology.
P.S., and included separately because I didn't want to detract from the informative nature of my post;
The next time you want to slam someone for "acting like you know what you're talking about", don't respond with a bunch of links to Wikipedia. Links, I might add, that are only marginally-relevant to the topic at hand. That shit wouldn't fly in college, so why do you think it's going to hold weight in a professional environment? As well, making personal attacks on someone in such an inept fashion doesn't earn you any points in the workplace either. That only works here on the internet, and even then only when someone tells the fanboys their favorite band sucks.
There you go again. Acting like you know what you're talking about, but you don't. ZFS and BTRFS have...
Exactly dick to do with what I said. The filesystem doesn't matter. The operating system doesn't even matter.
Modern drives don't store the bits that you feed them exactly as you give them. Instead, they use CRC and error correcting codes, so they
... Which again counts for exactly dick. I'm talking about infrastructure and architecture, while you're blubbering on about the hardware.
Which, I guess, is better than getting a corrupted picture. Ideally, a RAID would be able to recreate the missing block, but I can't find any reference to a RAID doing that.
That's because you have no experience as a network administrator in a professional environment. Because then you'd know that's the very thing RAID was designed to do: Recover from hardware failure, which includes sectors becoming unreadable. You are clearly confused both which what level of abstraction is being discussed (architecture versus hardware), as well as the different types of failure modes each of these solutions presents. Bit rot is a physical process that occurs in all magnetic media, and at sufficiently small-scale, can also affect non-persistent storage such as RAM.
It surely doesn't help that modern computers have many gigabytes of memory, but almost none have ECC on that memory.
That's because ECC adds an extra layer of complexity to solve a problem that doesn't occur very often in computers, and when it does, the most severe consequence is usually that the computer crashes or behaves abnormally. For residential, and even most commercial uses, ECC memory just isn't needed. But for a select few use scenarios where data integrity is absolutely critical -- such as, say, nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, certain types of hospital equipment, or financial processing systems, the added cost is justified because they need high availability/high reliability of those systems. It's also used in certain aerospace applications because the physical mechanism that causes bitrot -- high energy radiation, increases quite a bit at higher altitudes, and in space increases several orders of magnitude -- and if you're going to put something in geostationary orbit, it then takes the full brunt of solar radiation with no mitigation. Correcting for memory problems in these situations is better done at the hardware level; hence ECC memory.
Your consumer-grade computer's memory is a piece of shit. It's made with commodity capacitors and ICs that are stamped out in bulk for super cheap. And, big surprise -- super cheap doesn't mean super reliable. But we don't need super reliability -- when our system shows obvious signs of a failing memory stick, we just drive to the store, plunk down a $20 and abscond with a new one. Problem solved.
I'm not optimistic about the long-term storage of electronic data.
That's because, as previously pointed out, your experience comes from consumer-grade hardware that you don't fully understand the design considerations made. NASA has had great success in the long-term storage of magnetic media -- in fact there was an article not long ago about how they had to reverse-engineer equipment designed during the 1960s for the Apollo program to recover data on tape reels, when they lacked the original equipment it was recorded from. They discussed how the tapes themselves had become brittle and the ferrous oxide would actually peel off in chunks while reading, much like how paint peels off a house, but they were able to recover this data anyway. The technology we have today is far more sophisticated and unlike old tape-technology doesn't require physical contact with the source media to read it. There are companies like OnTrack that specialize in data recovery from harddrives and boast a rema
I'll be the heretic here, but on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2, there is a feature called Storage Spaces. It works similar to ZFS where you toss drives into a pool, then create a volume that is either simple, mirror, or with parity, and Windows does the rest. If a volume needs more space, toss some more drives in the pool.
You have no idea what you're talking about, sir. A mirror only duplicates the data. The writes are made syncronously to both sources, the reads are interleaved between devices to improve speed. In RAID-0, if either drive fails, the array is lost. In RAID-1, mirroring, data is written to two drives at the same time, and read back in an interleaved format. Unless the device itself reports a hardware error, the cluster will continue to read data back from every device on the chain. Mirroring can introduce silent bit rot because the data is read back from only one source at a time. RAID-1 (mirroring) is meant to prevent data loss due to hardware failure. It does not prevent corruption of the filesystem or your data via bit rot, and in fact under most usage scenarios, increases it.
Without parity checking, you simply aren't addressing bit rot. Period. It could be Raid 9 Million(tm) and if all it's doing is copying the data, and not comparing it, bit rot will still proceed apace, silently eating your data. But let's say you're a good administrator that has enabled parity. Great! But there's still a problem: parity cannot restore data that has become corrupted due to bit rot -- it is a detection-only mechanism. So if you have two drives in a RAID-1 with parity configuration, as you also suggest... it will detect the file corruption, but as it cannot correct it, it will then promptly seize up and fall over dead. This is because for every N clusters written, a parity cluster is also written; This allows the array to detect if that data chunk was correctly committed; But if the data on any of the clusters within the chunk are altered later, the RAID array will only know that this chunk of data (known as a stripe in RAID), is invalid. It cannot correct it.
The only way to truly prevent bitrot is by maintaining at least three complete copies of the data, and regularly compare between them. If one of them shows an inconsistency, the other two should still remain in agreement and that data chunk is then discarded and rewritten to the inconsistent device. This is how the Space Shuttle was designed with it's landing computer -- three fully independent computers, and each with three complete sets of sensors independently connected along main buses. Because bit rot is a major problem in space due to radiation, the system is designed at every level with 3x redundancy (or more; there are 7 gyrostabilizer systems on the ISS, for example).
RAID10 and similar systems are two RAID5 systems which are independent and regularly compare data; These can detect which system is inconsistent, so you will always have at least one copy of your data in a consistent state. But if the RAID ever becomes non-operational and has to be rebuilt, there will be a period of time where only one known good copy is available -- bit rot could occur during this time, and all you could do is detect it, not repair it. This is why you want triple redundancy -- so you can remove one of the systems for maintenance and still have two remaining copies, thus maintaining the ability to detect bit rot.
Now that I've explained all the ways that you're wrong, let me say that bit rot is probably not the cause of the OPs problems. Infact, USB devices are well-known for corrupting filesystems because of spontanious disconnects, power loss events, etc., and this is simply what can be expected in a typical residential environment. Even a RAID configuration in a residential environment isn't invulnerable to the "write hole" problem -- where data is partially committed to disk, but then the array suffers a power loss event.
What's surprising is that nobody here thinks this is an inherently sexist device. Don't men suffer from overeating as well? What about a jock strap that monitors them? Eating disorders are not strictly a female problem, and technology that is unisex has, at least in my experience, fared far better in the market place. How successful has Microsoft been at developing a computer "for women"? It hasn't been. It's a terrible and stupid idea; just like designing a car "for women" has been in that industry.
Attaching the device to a bra would be alright, but integrating it into it pretty much spells its doom on the market. About the only thing that's marketed to women I buy besides clothing is deodorant... because for some very strange reason, men seem to enjoy smelling like they swam through a high school chemistry lab's discarded waste.
It was a technology whose development was dictated by a few prominent government and military officials and large organizations...
Funny how patent reform took so long because of that exact description of the individuals involved, and how copyright mutated from being a public service to a industrial weapon to be used on one's business enemies. And all in the name of innovation. And now here we stand again, wondering why America can't innovate, why China is catching up and kicking our ass in more and more areas every year, and yet the thought never occurs: Maybe we need to burn the mansions to the ground, round up and execute the lawyers, and redistribute the wealth so that America returns its promise of the American Dream to its people, now long-held in forced captivity out of fear of terrorists, foreign powers, domestic powers, and in fact every fear to be popularized has been met with the exact same response: Giving the wealthy more money.
We've dug our own graves. Either we lay down in it in dignified prose, or we throw the people who demanded we dig down those holes instead. But don't think for a second this is a problem unique to the nuclear industry.
Show me someone building an airplane. Oh sorry, you need an FAA license for that... and they're talking about even taking away our toy airplanes because they can be turned into drones. How about a rocket? Ha ha, here's a form from the BATF for your background check to own "personal explosive devices". Flying car? Forget it... you can't even build a regular car in your garage now without running afoul of regulations. The only Big Thing to come out of this country in the last forty years that Joe Average had any hope of penetrating this hopelessly dense bureaucracy was the internet... and look how quickly patent and copyright law mutated to repress any attempt at innovation there. Now we're weaving digital restrictions into the very fabric of the network, building in kill switches, and militarizing it.
You want a solution? I got one: Round up all the rich people, shove them in trains, and ship them to concentration camps, and don't let them leave until every penny has been squeezed out of them. Yeah, it's the same thing the Nazis did. Yeah, I'm going there. Because they did manage to do one thing for Germany: It got them out from under the foot of other countries who were sucking their economy dry from WWI and preventing any industrialization. And then Hitler came along and he gave Germany everything he promised: A strong economy, everyone back to work, and independence. Of course, there was a catch...
But I welcome anyone to put a serious alternative on the table for how you can combat wealth inequity on a scale not seen since the industrialization of this country, and at current rates in a few decades will have us sliding backwards into wealth inequity rates not seen since the Dark Ages. I can think of precious few examples in human history where the poor numbered so many and the rich, through peaceful means, gave up their wealth. It is, traditionally, a very bloody affair.
None of this makes a difference to honest trading except to ensure its loss making properties.
I think I see a flaw in your cunning argument: First, all trades are honest as long as it is not made under duress. And any macroeconomic teacher will tell you that in a trade both people get something they want, so the more trade you have, the better the economy is. People are operating under a wide variety of misconceptions regarding high speed trading, and only a few of the criticisms are valid. High speed trades mean that the value of a given stock or financial offering is much closer to the line where supply and demand cross. It results in less money being wasted either because the price is too high, or too low. What high speed trading does, in essence, is reduce the delta. Conceptualize a curved line, and then consider a number of equally-spaced rectangles under each approximating the volume of the curve. The more rectangles you have, the more accurate you can recreate that curve. High speed trading simply improves the delta of the supply and demand curves, so that the spread above and below the point where supply and demand cross is very small.
People get confused between high frequency trading and algorithmic trading. High frequency trading carries benefits for both buyer and seller. Algorithmic trading, on the other hand, can and has resulted in huge losses. Like most algorithms exposed to unexpected input, they behave erratically and in unanticipated ways, and once one algorithm goes off the rails, as it were, it can lead to a cascade failure where different financial agents within the system also see something that was unanticipated and then in turn fail. Because these algorithms control a lot of different financial products, these cascade failures can spread and crash entire markets, dozens of stocks, etc.
There are valid criticisms for algorithmic trading. I see none for high speed trading, however. And I do not know why people banter about about "dishonest" trading -- the trades themselves are public record, and only executed because the seller and buyer agreed on a price. There is no coercion or manipulation in the trade itself. The dishonesty in the system comes in over or under-valuation of a financial instrument, or from insider trading. This is external to the trade system itself, and comes from people using information not publicly available, or from deceptive accounting practices.
But here again, the algorithms themselves, nor the computers executing trades, are responsible, and using them is neither dishonest nor something that "only the rich" can afford to do; Sites like e-trade offer consumers a wide variety of tools which can execute high speed trades when various conditions in the market occur, such as the price rising above, or falling below, certain points, and these systems are available for use by the everyday person for reasonable fees. The dishonesty in the system is largely on the CEOs, senior management, and accountants, who collude to profit at others expense.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with the systems themselves, and I really wish people would stop spreading the idea that there's this mythical beast living in data centers in New York gobbling up poor people's money -- those live in the Penthouse, not the basement.
Or just put the receiver on the desk, and waste a bit of *their* time.
That only succeeds in informing them that your number goes to a live person, and further that said person isn't taking their calls; That's a good way to get out of the collections department and into legal. And legal will just take out a court order for the money against you ex parte in many states. You'll find your bank account zeroed and good luck fighting back then, since you won't be able to pay the court fees to file a counter-suit, or retain a lawyer.
Poor people are at a distinct disadvantage in our justice system. Whether the court action is legitimate or not, without money you can't prevail. And odds are, the money you'll spend will never be recovered.
Slashdot Mirror
Wal-Mart has the highest revenue in the US - 469.2 billion according to the Fortune 500.
Oh, and P.S., you have no clue what revenue actually means The largest company on the planet only pulls in $134.77 billion a year. Wal-mark did $469.2 in sales last year.
Wal-Mart has the highest revenue in the US - 469.2 billion according to the Fortune 500.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that companies only exist, and earn profit, for one year. Then they return to their ancestral home in the profit river, where they lay their nest eggs and golden parachutes for the next generation, and then die.
Alas, companies make revenue year over year... and some of the biggest frauds this country has seen have taken decades before the government acted to stop it. So "Trillions of dollars of revenue" is not an inaccurate statement. At least not if you have more brains than an anonymous coward...
"So, do you have a current backup?"
-- Every tech support number you'll call, anywhere. Ever.
And yet, the single most basic thing you can do to protect your data gets overlooked by hundreds of millions of people, because it's just too burdensome to drag and drop from "My documents" to "My external drive". Viruses, malware, and crap like this would have gone the way of the dodo bird if people would just follow the most basic. advice. ever. regarding the maintenance of their computer. You wouldn't run your car out of oil after neglecting to change it for 15,000 miles, would you? So why do you do it to your computer?
And so is the $30 million figure. 0.4% * 250,000 * $300 = $300,000.
You can't expect journalists to have a grasp of basic math. Or the general public for that matter. Otherwise the headline "Company X settles 'largest lawsuit in history' at Y billion dollars" wouldn't have the impact it does after realizing Company X's revenue was Z trillion dollars. And who knows -- with the instability of bitcoin pricing, it might well be worth $30 million next week... -_-
This president will give him 3 hots and a cot.
And he'd be right to do so. Here's the thing people don't get about Snowden: He's not a revolutionary, or a hero. He's a coward. Rosa Parks didn't flee from the bus when the police came for her; She sat right there and waited. When Alabama told Martin Luther King they would arrest him if he marched, he marched anyway, and then got arrested. In fact, if you look at the history of civil rights leaders -- they all went to jail for what they believed in. They did it willingly -- they didn't run from the authorities, they stood right out in the open and said: Come and take me, but your laws are wrong, and you are wrong if you do.
Snowden stole a lot of classified materials from his employer, and then fled the country. And then he released all of it. This wasn't about "exposing" the NSA -- anyone with half a brain realizes that the very definition of a spy agency is that it spies on people. "They were spying on americans!" Yeah, ok, and? "They were spying on the germans!" Yeah, ok, and? It's their job to watch for threats both foreign and domestic. It's right there in their mission statement. Public record.
Snowden's justification for his actions fall short of what a person truly concerned about civil liberties would have done. If I'm going to denounce my government's actions, I want the police to come. I want to be arrested, charged, and put on trial. And then I want a jury of twelve Americans to look me in the eye and say "You did wrong by us." And if I'm really sure this is a matter of human rights... I'm also really sure at least one of those twelve people is going to say: "You're right. The government was wrong."
Snowden is a coward, and 3 hot meals and a cot in a concrete cell is exactly where he needs to be if he really believes what he's shovelling.
I thought PCI Compliance was supposed to take care of that per defining the standards in network security for POS (Point of Sales) systems?
It did. The article's scenario is a lie. Let me ask you how likely it is that, during the busiest day of the year for this retailer, with thousands of people jammed into long lines, in the one place where there are at least two high resolution cameras pointed at each terminal, a single person or group of persons, could plant multiple devices at multiple stores, within a short period of time, and then remove them after, without leaving any photographic or forensic evidence.
Because guys, that's the story that law enforcement, in collusion with the company, has released to the general public. So yes, this is bona fide conspiracy theory. But it's credible because 1. It only takes a small number of people to keep the secret: Target's senior management and information security, and select law enforcement offices. 2. They all have motivations for doing so -- law enforcement is doubtless aware that releasing true details of the crime would (a) expose a weakness in a Fortune 100 company that, besides processing credit card payments, also maintains personal health data at these locations (Pharmacy). The damage to the company, and indeed the country's economy, would be far in excess of the damage to individual creditors accounts. It makes sense to lie about it. And this story doesn't have to hold forever -- in a few months, when everyone has forgotten about it, the truth will emerge in a court filing when they bring the people responsible up on charges.
Now, all that said -- here's the more likely scenario, which is based on my short employment with this corporation: They hacked their wifi. Unfortunately, Target has repeatedly opted to silence, or even fire, people who object to their security policy, so I do not feel bad about making this public. Target is run by morons -- big surprise, it's a large corporation. Anyone who's worked in IT will have similar experiences -- it's hardly just Target. In this case, they allow full access to any server within their corporate network at each retail location, isolated only by primitive subnet routing to delineate what is and isn't allowed through the choke router. And that's it. Once you're logged into the network anywhere, it's a flat network topology and you can easily make contact with any other node on the network. Every store has multiple wifi routers, and while they do change the keys on an regular basis, it's not all the keys, and not on all the routers -- specifically, they use an inventory-management system within the stores (Those bulky "guns" you see the red shirts carrying) which depends on wifi.
There have been breaches to the network in the past through its wireless access points. These are not generally known to the public, but they have happened, and it has resulted in a number of security problems. Besides the customer's credit card data being stored on POS systems which are booted off DHCP to embedded windows, there's also the IP-based cameras. There are an average of 20 or so at each store, and they use an embedded webserver in each of them, which stream to a central source. The password for the approximately 42,000 devices is the same on each, and is not changed often, if ever, because the firmware lacks the ability to change the password programmically; there's no admin console. Besides the fact that many of these cameras have zoom and rotate features, and some have been known to be installed in positions where rotating the view can show the customers in the changing rooms... they're of sufficiently high quality that you can see the PINs people enter at the POS systems. The cash room, where the money is counted down at the end of every shift, is secured, but also has a camera in it. It's not hard to imagine someone with access to the cameras spying on the managers to acquire their passwords. And that's not even the creepy part: Target has installed ANPR-capable cameras i
as O'Reilly's Mike Loukides puts it...
"I read this in Popular Mechanics. In 1954. It was a slow news day, so I recycled it." Robotics has been something people have been talking about since... well, since they were first created half a century ago. This isn't news, this is olds.
yeah, and those that don't get a balanced diet?
Reduce funding to supplimental assistance, call them lazy, imply that obesity and poor health is a moral failing, and that prayer is an effective medical treatment.
Duh... what are you, some kind of non-american? :/
No, this guy needs to go away because he was breaking the law - not because of how much he broke it.
No, he needs to go away because he didn't give the government it's cut of the action. That's how Wall Street can trigger a decade-long economic recession and nobody goes to jail, but one guy running a website faces infinity years in the electric chair while being anally abused by goats.
This has nothing to do with how little or much he broke the law -- it's about setting an example: Don't steal. The government hates competition.
The will of the people should prevail until you disagree, right?
You cannot expect sound judgement from a population that averages a 5th grade reading comprehension and nearly 7% believe that lizard people secretly control the government... or aren't sure. I'm all for democracy -- when the general population is educated. California is one of the most populated states in the country, and also one of the least-educated overall. The results are, well... exactly as described.
The people are morons. Why do you think the electoral college was created to begin with? Direct democracy is usually a disaster and which is precisely why it's been so rarely used by governments past and present. These initiatives were also sponsored by the same people who put a lot of money into the campaign funds of the lawmakers they allegedly were over-ruling. So no, this isn't about your ad hominid that *I* am disagreeing... it's quite plain that California is off the rails. If you want to point fingers at why, be my guest... but the majority of the rest of the country wishes it would hurry up and slide off into the ocean. We even tried giving California back to Mexico over a hundred years ago... they wouldn't take it.
Any argument that...
Please stop. I've now cited an official government source, and a reputable international source. Both of these analysis were done by a team of economists, nuclear engineers, and accounted for as many factors as reasonably can be taken into consideration. You have cited... absolutely nothing.
According to this site the average price/kwh has been steadily increasing, doesn't look like it accounts for inflation though.
Yeah, but the OP was right: This isn't a fuel problem. In truth, it's a NIMBY problem. Nobody wants a power plant built near them, so no new plants are being built. The net result is demand is rising, but supply isn't. That's why the price is going up; It's not because the cost of the inputs have changed. It doesn't matter whether the plants are natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, or wind... if you can't build one to begin with.
If we built fast reactors, we would have enough fuel, in the form of depleted uranium sitting around idle in barrels at enrichment plants, to supply the entire planet's energy for about 1000 years.
Current reactor designs, given current geologically-proven reserves and what has already been refined and available in world markets, is about 200 years. The definition of proveable is that someone's already done it.
Fast reactors aren't economical right now. Maybe in two hundred years, assuming no new sources of uranium are discovered, we'll need to revisit it. It's economically absurd right now to suggest switching over. The 200 years estimate is based on today's technology, with today's known quantity, in today's economy. Yes, there are technologies, like fast reactors, that can re-use the spent fuel -- but until we're out of enriched uranium, there's simply no need to.
This is a question for our great great grand children to answer, not us. We should be more focused on getting off fossil fuels before our problems are less about an energy crisis than about having a habitable planet to live on. We'll have fuel for nuclear reactors for as long as the planet remains habitable. Habitability is in doubt because we're more concerned with short term gain than long-term stability. I don't want our children to have to wonder where their next meal will come from -- you can eat the trees, grass, birds, wild life, plants... but you can't eat money.
I like your post, but it propagates a myth due to severe omission. I'd like to correct it. The big problem is, you're off by a factor of 100.
False. "Uranium reserves available at up to $100 per pound of U3O8 represented approximately 23 years worth of demand, while uranium reserves at up to $50 per pound of U3O8 represented about 10 years worth of demand. Domestic U.S. uranium production, however, supplies only about 10 percent, on average, of U.S. requirements for nuclear fuel"
Source. Domestic US production gives us 23 years of demand at 100% capacity. It is currently at 10% capacity. Conclusion: About 230 years.
A second estimate looking at global supply had this to say: "Thus the world's present measured resources of uranium (5.3 Mt) in the cost category around present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 80 years. This represents a higher level of assured resources than is normal for most minerals. Further exploration and higher prices will certainly, on the basis of present geological knowledge, yield further resources as present ones are used up." It goes on to state "This is in fact suggested in the IAEA-NEA figures if those covering estimates of all conventional resources (U as main product or major by-product) are considered - another 7.6 million tonnes (beyond the 5.3 Mt known economic resources), which takes us to 190 years' supply at today's rate of consumption."
200 years is an accurate assessment given available data. Your assessment is based on non-existant technology and substantial change in current industry practices. Mine is based on today's technology, and no change.
So, just to get this straight, a company who gained its position through a helluva lot of taxpayer dollars, much of it in the form of last mile access on public lands, now decides it has some ethical and moral right to block a competitor.
Actually no. They have no ethical or moral rights and never has. They are a business, not a person, and federal law be damned. What they do have, however, is a legal right, purchased through years of lobbying efforts to our legislators, who are now thoroughly corrupted -- 97% of our candidates for federal positions who won had more money than their opponent. Democracy at work.
The only reason that Google might bust them up on this is because everyone loves Google, it's new and hip, while AT&T sounds like some 60s throwback dinosaur that can safely and quietly be shoveled out the door or sacrificed on the altar of public opinion. And Google knows this!
Our proven uranium reserves would last us over 200 years at current consumption; Well beyond the life expectancy of any of our reactors. The only reason for this program was to provide a failing country with a cheap way of disposing of highly hazardous materials without losing face. It is the proverbial "turning a negative into a positive". It will have zero effect on our energy costs or programs.
It is a wonder he isn't being slapped with federal charges of extortion.
Not really. California has a long and inglorious history of trying to turn itself into its own country -- second only to Texas in it's zest for trying to co-opt, twist, and otherwise manipulate federal law. See also: "This product is known to cause cancer in the State of California." They also have the highly controversial three strikes law that results in infinite prison. As if you needed more proof California's justice system was completely off the rails than them creating laws inspired by sports games.
But, it's not a surprise the feds aren't getting involved -- they generally only become involved when the state penalty would be less than the federal penalty. In this case, it's very clearly more. The federal justice system would probably have him serving considerably less time than infinity for his crime.
As an aside, while I think what this man does was clearly anti-social and he should be punished... a prison sentence in excess of what I would get if I poured gasoline on this man and set him on fire for posting a naked picture of me on his website, I do not feel is fair. His crime was non-violent. Hate-motivated? Yes. Poor taste? Absolutely. Attempting to profit on the misery of others? Yes. But not violent. At least in my book, violence is worse than non-violence, pound for pound. And if we're going to say this guy should be punished for extortion like this, where's California when it comes to their business leaders? A lot of banks have headquarters over there...
This is incorrect for Reed-Solomon based RAID (levels 6 and higher such as RAID Z3). RAID6 can correct
... Yes, but earlier systems, which the OP was suggesting could be used for this purpose, lacks that functionality. Also, please reset your sarcasm detector, it appears to be out of alignment -- a functional detector would have pinged on "Raid 9 Million(tm)".
Any proper file system will have a large enough transaction/intent log that can be replayed to correct partial data/metadata writes due to power failure and the RAID write hole, etc.. Most file systems in use are not proper, of course, but at least a few are available.
Correct, and those that are aren't immune to human stupidity. No filesystem can save you from a guy who decides to pour beer into the storage array, or who goes to move a directory and misclicks sending it to the trash. Disaster recovery is not a simple matter of choosing the right filesystem and then patting yourself on the back. It requires careful planning and consideration... None of which the majority of the people on this thread seem to be capable of. At least you seem to have some grasp of the underlying technology.
P.S., and included separately because I didn't want to detract from the informative nature of my post;
The next time you want to slam someone for "acting like you know what you're talking about", don't respond with a bunch of links to Wikipedia. Links, I might add, that are only marginally-relevant to the topic at hand. That shit wouldn't fly in college, so why do you think it's going to hold weight in a professional environment? As well, making personal attacks on someone in such an inept fashion doesn't earn you any points in the workplace either. That only works here on the internet, and even then only when someone tells the fanboys their favorite band sucks.
There you go again. Acting like you know what you're talking about, but you don't. ZFS and BTRFS have ...
Exactly dick to do with what I said. The filesystem doesn't matter. The operating system doesn't even matter.
Modern drives don't store the bits that you feed them exactly as you give them. Instead, they use CRC and error correcting codes, so they
... Which again counts for exactly dick. I'm talking about infrastructure and architecture, while you're blubbering on about the hardware.
Which, I guess, is better than getting a corrupted picture. Ideally, a RAID would be able to recreate the missing block, but I can't find any reference to a RAID doing that.
That's because you have no experience as a network administrator in a professional environment. Because then you'd know that's the very thing RAID was designed to do: Recover from hardware failure, which includes sectors becoming unreadable. You are clearly confused both which what level of abstraction is being discussed (architecture versus hardware), as well as the different types of failure modes each of these solutions presents. Bit rot is a physical process that occurs in all magnetic media, and at sufficiently small-scale, can also affect non-persistent storage such as RAM.
It surely doesn't help that modern computers have many gigabytes of memory, but almost none have ECC on that memory.
That's because ECC adds an extra layer of complexity to solve a problem that doesn't occur very often in computers, and when it does, the most severe consequence is usually that the computer crashes or behaves abnormally. For residential, and even most commercial uses, ECC memory just isn't needed. But for a select few use scenarios where data integrity is absolutely critical -- such as, say, nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, certain types of hospital equipment, or financial processing systems, the added cost is justified because they need high availability/high reliability of those systems. It's also used in certain aerospace applications because the physical mechanism that causes bitrot -- high energy radiation, increases quite a bit at higher altitudes, and in space increases several orders of magnitude -- and if you're going to put something in geostationary orbit, it then takes the full brunt of solar radiation with no mitigation. Correcting for memory problems in these situations is better done at the hardware level; hence ECC memory.
Your consumer-grade computer's memory is a piece of shit. It's made with commodity capacitors and ICs that are stamped out in bulk for super cheap. And, big surprise -- super cheap doesn't mean super reliable. But we don't need super reliability -- when our system shows obvious signs of a failing memory stick, we just drive to the store, plunk down a $20 and abscond with a new one. Problem solved.
I'm not optimistic about the long-term storage of electronic data.
That's because, as previously pointed out, your experience comes from consumer-grade hardware that you don't fully understand the design considerations made. NASA has had great success in the long-term storage of magnetic media -- in fact there was an article not long ago about how they had to reverse-engineer equipment designed during the 1960s for the Apollo program to recover data on tape reels, when they lacked the original equipment it was recorded from. They discussed how the tapes themselves had become brittle and the ferrous oxide would actually peel off in chunks while reading, much like how paint peels off a house, but they were able to recover this data anyway. The technology we have today is far more sophisticated and unlike old tape-technology doesn't require physical contact with the source media to read it. There are companies like OnTrack that specialize in data recovery from harddrives and boast a rema
I'll be the heretic here, but on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2, there is a feature called Storage Spaces. It works similar to ZFS where you toss drives into a pool, then create a volume that is either simple, mirror, or with parity, and Windows does the rest. If a volume needs more space, toss some more drives in the pool.
You have no idea what you're talking about, sir. A mirror only duplicates the data. The writes are made syncronously to both sources, the reads are interleaved between devices to improve speed. In RAID-0, if either drive fails, the array is lost. In RAID-1, mirroring, data is written to two drives at the same time, and read back in an interleaved format. Unless the device itself reports a hardware error, the cluster will continue to read data back from every device on the chain. Mirroring can introduce silent bit rot because the data is read back from only one source at a time. RAID-1 (mirroring) is meant to prevent data loss due to hardware failure. It does not prevent corruption of the filesystem or your data via bit rot, and in fact under most usage scenarios, increases it.
Without parity checking, you simply aren't addressing bit rot. Period. It could be Raid 9 Million(tm) and if all it's doing is copying the data, and not comparing it, bit rot will still proceed apace, silently eating your data. But let's say you're a good administrator that has enabled parity. Great! But there's still a problem: parity cannot restore data that has become corrupted due to bit rot -- it is a detection-only mechanism. So if you have two drives in a RAID-1 with parity configuration, as you also suggest... it will detect the file corruption, but as it cannot correct it, it will then promptly seize up and fall over dead. This is because for every N clusters written, a parity cluster is also written; This allows the array to detect if that data chunk was correctly committed; But if the data on any of the clusters within the chunk are altered later, the RAID array will only know that this chunk of data (known as a stripe in RAID), is invalid. It cannot correct it.
The only way to truly prevent bitrot is by maintaining at least three complete copies of the data, and regularly compare between them. If one of them shows an inconsistency, the other two should still remain in agreement and that data chunk is then discarded and rewritten to the inconsistent device. This is how the Space Shuttle was designed with it's landing computer -- three fully independent computers, and each with three complete sets of sensors independently connected along main buses. Because bit rot is a major problem in space due to radiation, the system is designed at every level with 3x redundancy (or more; there are 7 gyrostabilizer systems on the ISS, for example).
RAID10 and similar systems are two RAID5 systems which are independent and regularly compare data; These can detect which system is inconsistent, so you will always have at least one copy of your data in a consistent state. But if the RAID ever becomes non-operational and has to be rebuilt, there will be a period of time where only one known good copy is available -- bit rot could occur during this time, and all you could do is detect it, not repair it. This is why you want triple redundancy -- so you can remove one of the systems for maintenance and still have two remaining copies, thus maintaining the ability to detect bit rot.
Now that I've explained all the ways that you're wrong, let me say that bit rot is probably not the cause of the OPs problems. Infact, USB devices are well-known for corrupting filesystems because of spontanious disconnects, power loss events, etc., and this is simply what can be expected in a typical residential environment. Even a RAID configuration in a residential environment isn't invulnerable to the "write hole" problem -- where data is partially committed to disk, but then the array suffers a power loss event.
This is what usually causes da
Time to reboob.
What's surprising is that nobody here thinks this is an inherently sexist device. Don't men suffer from overeating as well? What about a jock strap that monitors them? Eating disorders are not strictly a female problem, and technology that is unisex has, at least in my experience, fared far better in the market place. How successful has Microsoft been at developing a computer "for women"? It hasn't been. It's a terrible and stupid idea; just like designing a car "for women" has been in that industry.
Attaching the device to a bra would be alright, but integrating it into it pretty much spells its doom on the market. About the only thing that's marketed to women I buy besides clothing is deodorant... because for some very strange reason, men seem to enjoy smelling like they swam through a high school chemistry lab's discarded waste.
It was a technology whose development was dictated by a few prominent government and military officials and large organizations...
Funny how patent reform took so long because of that exact description of the individuals involved, and how copyright mutated from being a public service to a industrial weapon to be used on one's business enemies. And all in the name of innovation. And now here we stand again, wondering why America can't innovate, why China is catching up and kicking our ass in more and more areas every year, and yet the thought never occurs: Maybe we need to burn the mansions to the ground, round up and execute the lawyers, and redistribute the wealth so that America returns its promise of the American Dream to its people, now long-held in forced captivity out of fear of terrorists, foreign powers, domestic powers, and in fact every fear to be popularized has been met with the exact same response: Giving the wealthy more money.
We've dug our own graves. Either we lay down in it in dignified prose, or we throw the people who demanded we dig down those holes instead. But don't think for a second this is a problem unique to the nuclear industry.
Show me someone building an airplane. Oh sorry, you need an FAA license for that... and they're talking about even taking away our toy airplanes because they can be turned into drones. How about a rocket? Ha ha, here's a form from the BATF for your background check to own "personal explosive devices". Flying car? Forget it... you can't even build a regular car in your garage now without running afoul of regulations. The only Big Thing to come out of this country in the last forty years that Joe Average had any hope of penetrating this hopelessly dense bureaucracy was the internet... and look how quickly patent and copyright law mutated to repress any attempt at innovation there. Now we're weaving digital restrictions into the very fabric of the network, building in kill switches, and militarizing it.
You want a solution? I got one: Round up all the rich people, shove them in trains, and ship them to concentration camps, and don't let them leave until every penny has been squeezed out of them. Yeah, it's the same thing the Nazis did. Yeah, I'm going there. Because they did manage to do one thing for Germany: It got them out from under the foot of other countries who were sucking their economy dry from WWI and preventing any industrialization. And then Hitler came along and he gave Germany everything he promised: A strong economy, everyone back to work, and independence. Of course, there was a catch...
But I welcome anyone to put a serious alternative on the table for how you can combat wealth inequity on a scale not seen since the industrialization of this country, and at current rates in a few decades will have us sliding backwards into wealth inequity rates not seen since the Dark Ages. I can think of precious few examples in human history where the poor numbered so many and the rich, through peaceful means, gave up their wealth. It is, traditionally, a very bloody affair.
None of this makes a difference to honest trading except to ensure its loss making properties.
I think I see a flaw in your cunning argument: First, all trades are honest as long as it is not made under duress. And any macroeconomic teacher will tell you that in a trade both people get something they want, so the more trade you have, the better the economy is. People are operating under a wide variety of misconceptions regarding high speed trading, and only a few of the criticisms are valid. High speed trades mean that the value of a given stock or financial offering is much closer to the line where supply and demand cross. It results in less money being wasted either because the price is too high, or too low. What high speed trading does, in essence, is reduce the delta. Conceptualize a curved line, and then consider a number of equally-spaced rectangles under each approximating the volume of the curve. The more rectangles you have, the more accurate you can recreate that curve. High speed trading simply improves the delta of the supply and demand curves, so that the spread above and below the point where supply and demand cross is very small.
People get confused between high frequency trading and algorithmic trading. High frequency trading carries benefits for both buyer and seller. Algorithmic trading, on the other hand, can and has resulted in huge losses. Like most algorithms exposed to unexpected input, they behave erratically and in unanticipated ways, and once one algorithm goes off the rails, as it were, it can lead to a cascade failure where different financial agents within the system also see something that was unanticipated and then in turn fail. Because these algorithms control a lot of different financial products, these cascade failures can spread and crash entire markets, dozens of stocks, etc.
There are valid criticisms for algorithmic trading. I see none for high speed trading, however. And I do not know why people banter about about "dishonest" trading -- the trades themselves are public record, and only executed because the seller and buyer agreed on a price. There is no coercion or manipulation in the trade itself. The dishonesty in the system comes in over or under-valuation of a financial instrument, or from insider trading. This is external to the trade system itself, and comes from people using information not publicly available, or from deceptive accounting practices.
But here again, the algorithms themselves, nor the computers executing trades, are responsible, and using them is neither dishonest nor something that "only the rich" can afford to do; Sites like e-trade offer consumers a wide variety of tools which can execute high speed trades when various conditions in the market occur, such as the price rising above, or falling below, certain points, and these systems are available for use by the everyday person for reasonable fees. The dishonesty in the system is largely on the CEOs, senior management, and accountants, who collude to profit at others expense.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with the systems themselves, and I really wish people would stop spreading the idea that there's this mythical beast living in data centers in New York gobbling up poor people's money -- those live in the Penthouse, not the basement.
Or just put the receiver on the desk, and waste a bit of *their* time.
That only succeeds in informing them that your number goes to a live person, and further that said person isn't taking their calls; That's a good way to get out of the collections department and into legal. And legal will just take out a court order for the money against you ex parte in many states. You'll find your bank account zeroed and good luck fighting back then, since you won't be able to pay the court fees to file a counter-suit, or retain a lawyer.
Poor people are at a distinct disadvantage in our justice system. Whether the court action is legitimate or not, without money you can't prevail. And odds are, the money you'll spend will never be recovered.