"It follows a separate court order in April which saw popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay blocked in the UK."
PMSL! The block is about as effective as putting a cat in a wet paper bag. Why are they wasting the time of the ISPs and legal system persuing this pointless venture? Who at the BPI is actually stupid enough to think this is effective?
2 - Your idea about keeping an image for a fortnightly restore is a recipe for security holes, unless you're happy constantly repatching and upgrading everything at the same time. I prefer to keep a list of what I need to install along with any install media I need to do a clean reinstall of the essentials any time malware strikes (which is very rarely) or performance is a bit off (which is a bit more often), letting me get back to a nice clean state where I can reinstall anything else I'm using at the moment and recover my data, usually tidying it all up in the process. I also do an incremental image every couple of weeks in case of emergencies. My list currently looks like this, in order of installation:
Money not going as far as it did? Pay not stretching to the end of the month? Well why not send your Roman treasure to http://www.cashforyourgold.co.uk/ for a free valuation! Just pop all your treasure in the freepost envelope with our address written plainly on the outside so any light-fingered postman can pinch it and drop it in the bin*ahem*post box! It couldn't be simpler! Even if*ahem*when your gold arrives at our foundry, we'll only quote you 10% of it's scrap value, so don't forget to argue on the phone and we'll double it instantly! We'll still bel ripping you off, but hey, we've got a great advert with lots of exclamation marks in it!!!
Oh, we're quite sure he did it. That we know, he told us. But the charges he would be looking at in the States are up to 70 years, and we're not legally allowed to extradite anyone to a country where they may face "cruel or unusual punishment". 70 years for a minor, damage-less hack of a totally insecure system? Hmm, let me think...
Aspergers can go a very long time without diagnosis, and I don't think that this was a "diagnosis of convenience". The three doctors are all highly rated professionals and it's unlikely they'd all stake their professional reputations and risk being struck off the medical register or prosecuted for giving false evidence just for one guy, however David-vs-Goliath this case is.
However, it is quite depressing that it's become such a lynch-pin in this case when the real issue is how the hell we got into this position where our extradition treaty with America is so unbalanced, and we're so willing to send one of our own nationals to be made an example of with such awful trumped-up charges.
Only seen a single SSD fail. It was a Mini-PCIex unit in a Dell Mini 9. I suspect the actual failure may have been atypical as it seems it failed in just the right place to render the filesystem unwritable, although you could read from fairly hefty sections of it. It was immediate and irrepairable, although I suspect SSD manufacturers use better quality than that built-to-a-price (possibly counterfeit) POS.
The rationale behind splitting hard drives in a RAID between a number of manufacturers batches, even for identical drives, it to try and avoid a problem with an entire batch that's slipped past QA from taking out an entire array of drives simultaneously.
Well, if you listen to the Justice Department, it's the biggest hack of all time*, ever ever ever, cross their hearts and hope to die. I'm glad we seem to be basing this on the motive of a man, taking into account his affliction with Asperger's.
*This seems to imply that the Justice Department are denying anything bigger than this ever having happened to them. Yeah, right!
EasyTarget, plz don't feed the trolls. He's provably ignorant of the facts and background of the case and he doesn't really have any excuse for it in this day and age. Just let him rant quietly in a corner about this one
I'm not sure about the Daily Fail though, they seem to be supporting the decision. Who whudda thunk it? Oh, wait, they're waving the Jingoist Patriotism flag over this one, not the Balance of Justice flag. Shame, so close...
I think in this case it may be that the kid's body hasn't turned up yet - making cracks about dead celebs is one thing (I know some great ones about Princess Diana, Amy Winehouse and George Best) but on some level it's expected. Making a joke about an alledged murderer before the case has come to court or the body of his victim has even come to light yet? That's an extra special level of offense rarely seen these days, not to mention possibly prejudicial against the guy in the jury's mind in the upcoming trial - unlikely to count as jury tampering or perversion of justice but it certainly could be used in that manner by the defense if it gets the slightest whiff of any jury members heard/read/liked it on Facebook.
Between '93 and '98, my school had a bunch of net-booting Windows 3 machines and a couple of standalones with CD-ROM drives, all in the library. One time after school when the library was open access, I wondered in there to see if I could vulture some computer time and found one of the CD-ROM endowed machines frozen up mid-way through playing a video about monkeys. I rebooted the system, got down to some serious messing around with a new magazine cover disc I'd just got, at which point two teachers walk in. My form tutor and one of the IT supervisor people (normal teacher, no such thing as an IT teacher, he just knew how to do a reboot) walk in and straight over to this computer. My form tutor (female, head of geography) went totally mental at me for rebooting the system before anyone could tell what was wrong with it and I got banned from the library - that's right, not just the computers, the entire library! - for the rest of the year. That was in February.
What I was taught about computers in secondary school was the vasy majority of people haven't got the slighest clue how to use them and have a weird romantic view of any problem being fixable if the right person glances at the screen one time. Beyond any specific technical insight I've every gained, that's been the most valuable thing I've picked up along my career besides buying a iBook G3 8ish years ago - I'm now the star helpdesk support engineer at my company, best customer satisfaction stats for the nth month running (how long have I worked here again? that many months) and *the guy* who gets called in when people are having trouble explaining what's wrong over the phone.
She's a pretty valuable research colleague - easily distracted and a bit of prima donna, but she does provide her own lab test animals and she's immune to prosecution for ethics violations.
My Dad, a member of the London Royal Society of Chemistry, noticed this about 10 years ago. Being a very scientific family*, it caused lots of double-takes and polite WTFs around the dinner table. After a little research on the subject, turned out it's the harvesting process that's organic:
"Organic salt cannot be 'organically grown' because it is a mineral not a plant. When salt is certified organic the certification refers to the process of collection of sea salt. The saltworks must be located in a nature reserve, without risk of pollution to the water, the salt must be produced by hand, without purifying the salt or including any additives, and it must fulfil the high standards in chemical analysis." (Quoted: http://www.organicfooddirectory.com.au/organic-food/herbs-zzt-spices/organic-salt.html)
It seems that hormonal food urges may affect people to different degrees. I wonder if supressing or fulfiling is preferable? (IANA nutritionist) I heard that most omnivores have evolved a yearning for sugary and fatty foods as a biological continuance tactic - lots of energy to do other things with in a quick, easy hit - so perhaps our modern food production and distribution methods are fundamentally at odds with our natural instincts and current thinking on good health. That would make supressing those urges better for us than going with them all the time due to the damage constant indulgence would cause given the huge increase in opportunities.
This place is far removed from the stereotypical oaf-ice job - a modelling agency, photo/video production house and makeup studio rolled into one. I'd have thought keeping lunch simple would have been a nice weight off their minds.
I wouldn't say it was an Obama/Jobs/Zucker thing, it's more likely the audience that dictates the spin. Try selling this story in a positive light to Grazia, Vogue or... that other fashion one, see what kind of reaction you get there.
The amount of time some people can spend on trivial stuff like that is mindblowing people people like us. The reason we can't see the importance here is probably because we've already optimized these simple processes without even thinking about it. The weather is the most important variable factor in my clothing routine. I avoid eating the same thing two days in a row, but it follows a simple sandwich/salad + fruit/snack formula.
On the other hand, I did some field maintenance in a modelling agency (not as glamourous as you might think - an office of 15 women all with sync'd up periods, BAAAD place to be one week of the month) and it took me about as long to purchase, eat and digest my lunch as it did for a small group of these people to decide what they all wanted. It wasn't like they were trying to decide to go somewhere as a group, they all went off individually to get food from different places. I eavesdropped on their conversation while progress bars were doing their thing, they seemed to consider lunch to be some kind of personal expression that had to be absolutely perfect or face ridicule from everyone in the street for the rest of their lives. I could feel my inner feminine side trying to scream "It's just lunch! Get over it!" at them. I can't imagine what the damage to their productivity was. Maybe if they spent more time concentrating on work and less time mulling over the minutae of office life they wouldn't have had to work late every night.
We've had the Open University in the UK since 1969. One of it's more successful initiatives was putting lectures and demonstrations on TV at stupid-o'clock in the morning (only 3-4 channels back then) for it's student to videotape and watch later, with other course material being transmitted in the post. I don't know how much of an issue plagarism has been since the Internet grew in popularity, and it's perfectly possible that such distance learning has now had it's heyday.
I really hope it hasn't - at £5000/year full time, it's tuition fees are considerably lower than the £9000/yr everyone else seems to be charging for an undergraduate degree. When you take into account the student loans that everyone here takes out to pay them, lower tuition fees seem like a good way to reduce our reliance on credit.
My personal preference is fingers on 1-4 for frequently used stuff, less frequently used stuff on QWER, thumb on C and V health/mana pots. Result - 10 actions, all far easier to access than the default 1-0 bindings.
Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Bay blockade is pathetic - if the best they can do is a poor King Canute imitation, I'm really not worried.
"It follows a separate court order in April which saw popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay blocked in the UK."
PMSL! The block is about as effective as putting a cat in a wet paper bag. Why are they wasting the time of the ISPs and legal system persuing this pointless venture? Who at the BPI is actually stupid enough to think this is effective?
1 - Changing the region for the WoW install is easy, but does have the potential to be a little time/bandwidth consuming. See the blue post here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5207771231
2 - Your idea about keeping an image for a fortnightly restore is a recipe for security holes, unless you're happy constantly repatching and upgrading everything at the same time. I prefer to keep a list of what I need to install along with any install media I need to do a clean reinstall of the essentials any time malware strikes (which is very rarely) or performance is a bit off (which is a bit more often), letting me get back to a nice clean state where I can reinstall anything else I'm using at the moment and recover my data, usually tidying it all up in the process. I also do an incremental image every couple of weeks in case of emergencies. My list currently looks like this, in order of installation:
Avast Antivirus, Anti Malwarebytes, MS Updates, Firefox (plugins: adblock plus, https everywhere), Adobe (Air, Reader, Flash), CutePDF, Silverlight, VLC Player, Java, BatteryBar (if laptop), OpenOffice (or whatever)
Money not going as far as it did? Pay not stretching to the end of the month? Well why not send your Roman treasure to http://www.cashforyourgold.co.uk/ for a free valuation! Just pop all your treasure in the freepost envelope with our address written plainly on the outside so any light-fingered postman can pinch it and drop it in the bin*ahem*post box! It couldn't be simpler! Even if*ahem*when your gold arrives at our foundry, we'll only quote you 10% of it's scrap value, so don't forget to argue on the phone and we'll double it instantly! We'll still bel ripping you off, but hey, we've got a great advert with lots of exclamation marks in it!!!
Oh, we're quite sure he did it. That we know, he told us. But the charges he would be looking at in the States are up to 70 years, and we're not legally allowed to extradite anyone to a country where they may face "cruel or unusual punishment". 70 years for a minor, damage-less hack of a totally insecure system? Hmm, let me think...
Aspergers can go a very long time without diagnosis, and I don't think that this was a "diagnosis of convenience". The three doctors are all highly rated professionals and it's unlikely they'd all stake their professional reputations and risk being struck off the medical register or prosecuted for giving false evidence just for one guy, however David-vs-Goliath this case is.
However, it is quite depressing that it's become such a lynch-pin in this case when the real issue is how the hell we got into this position where our extradition treaty with America is so unbalanced, and we're so willing to send one of our own nationals to be made an example of with such awful trumped-up charges.
Only seen a single SSD fail. It was a Mini-PCIex unit in a Dell Mini 9. I suspect the actual failure may have been atypical as it seems it failed in just the right place to render the filesystem unwritable, although you could read from fairly hefty sections of it. It was immediate and irrepairable, although I suspect SSD manufacturers use better quality than that built-to-a-price (possibly counterfeit) POS.
The rationale behind splitting hard drives in a RAID between a number of manufacturers batches, even for identical drives, it to try and avoid a problem with an entire batch that's slipped past QA from taking out an entire array of drives simultaneously.
I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough....?
Hear, hear!
Oh, for a mod point right now.
Well, if you listen to the Justice Department, it's the biggest hack of all time*, ever ever ever, cross their hearts and hope to die. I'm glad we seem to be basing this on the motive of a man, taking into account his affliction with Asperger's.
*This seems to imply that the Justice Department are denying anything bigger than this ever having happened to them. Yeah, right!
EasyTarget, plz don't feed the trolls. He's provably ignorant of the facts and background of the case and he doesn't really have any excuse for it in this day and age. Just let him rant quietly in a corner about this one
I'm not sure about the Daily Fail though, they seem to be supporting the decision. Who whudda thunk it? Oh, wait, they're waving the Jingoist Patriotism flag over this one, not the Balance of Justice flag. Shame, so close...
I think in this case it may be that the kid's body hasn't turned up yet - making cracks about dead celebs is one thing (I know some great ones about Princess Diana, Amy Winehouse and George Best) but on some level it's expected. Making a joke about an alledged murderer before the case has come to court or the body of his victim has even come to light yet? That's an extra special level of offense rarely seen these days, not to mention possibly prejudicial against the guy in the jury's mind in the upcoming trial - unlikely to count as jury tampering or perversion of justice but it certainly could be used in that manner by the defense if it gets the slightest whiff of any jury members heard/read/liked it on Facebook.
Between '93 and '98, my school had a bunch of net-booting Windows 3 machines and a couple of standalones with CD-ROM drives, all in the library. One time after school when the library was open access, I wondered in there to see if I could vulture some computer time and found one of the CD-ROM endowed machines frozen up mid-way through playing a video about monkeys. I rebooted the system, got down to some serious messing around with a new magazine cover disc I'd just got, at which point two teachers walk in. My form tutor and one of the IT supervisor people (normal teacher, no such thing as an IT teacher, he just knew how to do a reboot) walk in and straight over to this computer. My form tutor (female, head of geography) went totally mental at me for rebooting the system before anyone could tell what was wrong with it and I got banned from the library - that's right, not just the computers, the entire library! - for the rest of the year. That was in February.
What I was taught about computers in secondary school was the vasy majority of people haven't got the slighest clue how to use them and have a weird romantic view of any problem being fixable if the right person glances at the screen one time. Beyond any specific technical insight I've every gained, that's been the most valuable thing I've picked up along my career besides buying a iBook G3 8ish years ago - I'm now the star helpdesk support engineer at my company, best customer satisfaction stats for the nth month running (how long have I worked here again? that many months) and *the guy* who gets called in when people are having trouble explaining what's wrong over the phone.
She's a pretty valuable research colleague - easily distracted and a bit of prima donna, but she does provide her own lab test animals and she's immune to prosecution for ethics violations.
We have a dog too. He doesn't get credit.
My Dad, a member of the London Royal Society of Chemistry, noticed this about 10 years ago. Being a very scientific family*, it caused lots of double-takes and polite WTFs around the dinner table. After a little research on the subject, turned out it's the harvesting process that's organic:
"Organic salt cannot be 'organically grown' because it is a mineral not a plant. When salt is certified organic the certification refers to the process of collection of sea salt. The saltworks must be located in a nature reserve, without risk of pollution to the water, the salt must be produced by hand, without purifying the salt or including any additives, and it must fulfil the high standards in chemical analysis." (Quoted: http://www.organicfooddirectory.com.au/organic-food/herbs-zzt-spices/organic-salt.html)
*Dad: Industrial Chemist. Mum: Chemist/Biologist/Lab Tech. Sister: Chemist/Physicist/Physiotherapist. Brother: Chemist/Computer Scientist. Me: Physicist/Computer Scientist. Cat: Psychologist/NLP Practitioner
It seems that hormonal food urges may affect people to different degrees. I wonder if supressing or fulfiling is preferable? (IANA nutritionist) I heard that most omnivores have evolved a yearning for sugary and fatty foods as a biological continuance tactic - lots of energy to do other things with in a quick, easy hit - so perhaps our modern food production and distribution methods are fundamentally at odds with our natural instincts and current thinking on good health. That would make supressing those urges better for us than going with them all the time due to the damage constant indulgence would cause given the huge increase in opportunities.
This place is far removed from the stereotypical oaf-ice job - a modelling agency, photo/video production house and makeup studio rolled into one. I'd have thought keeping lunch simple would have been a nice weight off their minds.
I wouldn't say it was an Obama/Jobs/Zucker thing, it's more likely the audience that dictates the spin. Try selling this story in a positive light to Grazia, Vogue or... that other fashion one, see what kind of reaction you get there.
The amount of time some people can spend on trivial stuff like that is mindblowing people people like us. The reason we can't see the importance here is probably because we've already optimized these simple processes without even thinking about it. The weather is the most important variable factor in my clothing routine. I avoid eating the same thing two days in a row, but it follows a simple sandwich/salad + fruit/snack formula.
On the other hand, I did some field maintenance in a modelling agency (not as glamourous as you might think - an office of 15 women all with sync'd up periods, BAAAD place to be one week of the month) and it took me about as long to purchase, eat and digest my lunch as it did for a small group of these people to decide what they all wanted. It wasn't like they were trying to decide to go somewhere as a group, they all went off individually to get food from different places. I eavesdropped on their conversation while progress bars were doing their thing, they seemed to consider lunch to be some kind of personal expression that had to be absolutely perfect or face ridicule from everyone in the street for the rest of their lives. I could feel my inner feminine side trying to scream "It's just lunch! Get over it!" at them. I can't imagine what the damage to their productivity was. Maybe if they spent more time concentrating on work and less time mulling over the minutae of office life they wouldn't have had to work late every night.
...the people who voted for those fees didn't pay them themselves...
The tyranny of the majority rears it's ugly head once again.
"I don't understand austerity"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest
In France, they call it .1% ahead of inflation.
We've had the Open University in the UK since 1969. One of it's more successful initiatives was putting lectures and demonstrations on TV at stupid-o'clock in the morning (only 3-4 channels back then) for it's student to videotape and watch later, with other course material being transmitted in the post. I don't know how much of an issue plagarism has been since the Internet grew in popularity, and it's perfectly possible that such distance learning has now had it's heyday.
I really hope it hasn't - at £5000/year full time, it's tuition fees are considerably lower than the £9000/yr everyone else seems to be charging for an undergraduate degree. When you take into account the student loans that everyone here takes out to pay them, lower tuition fees seem like a good way to reduce our reliance on credit.
Let's all argue over how to spell "shortage" - fairly sure it's not C-R-I-S-I-S.
My personal preference is fingers on 1-4 for frequently used stuff, less frequently used stuff on QWER, thumb on C and V health/mana pots. Result - 10 actions, all far easier to access than the default 1-0 bindings.