But when the dealer types the VIN into his computer and it comes up "stolen"[..]
They aren't checking the computer, they're checking the owner. If the dealer took your name instead of the VIN and checked if he had records of a car being sold to you, then calling you a thief because he does not that IS wrong.
Two things. First, RTFA. Nobody from Alienware ever called this guy a thief. He claims he is being treated like a thief, he makes claims like they think he is a thief, but there is nothing in his description where he was given anything but a rebuff for not following their rules.
Second, if the dealer is going to work on your car, he most certainly is going to enter your VIN into their computer, and it is going to be run through the corporate VIN database to look up all kinds of information. That's where vehicle recall notices are posted, service records are maintained, ownership records are maintained, and also where stolen cars are reported. If you want to avoid this kind of scrutiny, don't take a possibly stolen car to a dealership for service -- take it to a shade tree mechanic instead.
This guy failed to provide any requested evidence of any proof of purchase, and is mad because AW won't deal with him. He's making it sound like they're calling him a "thief" without evidence that they ever did so. So far, they've done nothing wrong, but it looks this guy has whipped himself up into a self-righteous froth.
Imagine if you paid cash for a car from a guy selling one in his driveway. A few months later, maybe you need a brake job, so you head to the dealer to have them do the work.
Do you expect anything except the dealer to do the brake job? Of course not. It's your car, you need brakes, so put brakes in it. But when the dealer types the VIN into his computer and it comes up "stolen", and says to you "sorry, there's going to be a delay," you might assume that he's just running a bad dealership. But that's not how the law works. If they discover you're in possession of a stolen car, they MUST notify the police, and it WILL get impounded and returned to the rightful owner. That's pretty easy to do when it's still in the dealer's garage, but not so easy if he lets the customer leave with it.
In the case of Alienware, if they sent a random customer who asked for a part a note saying "Sorry, but your PC is reported stolen, please bring it to the cops," the chances are good the customer will simply disappear, keeping the stolen goods. What are the chances he is going to voluntarily bring it to the police and say "here, have this laptop, I bought it from eBay and it turns out it was stolen. So you can just keep it, and I'll be out the thousand dollars then. Sure, I'll have a nice day."
Bottom line: how does Mr. Paget know that his laptop isn't stolen merchandise? He says got "a good deal" on it from a "hassle free seller" who shipped it promptly. If I was fencing hot PCs on eBay, you bet I'd be a hassle free, fast shipper. I'd also be gone in about a week. I'd say there's a damn good chance it IS stolen merchandise, and he's about to lose his money.
Geoffrey Chaucer (the author who wrote The Canterbury Tales) wrote what is believed to be the first surviving technical manual in English: A Treatise on the Astrolabe. It's a letter to his ten year old son Lewys that explains how to use an astrolabe, and it was written around 1391. Google for it, it's all over the internet.
If you have an astrolabe, the instructions are still valid. If not, you should get one, they're cool, and you'll know how to use it.
It's a short paper. The spelling is tough to get past, but once you figure out how to read it it's not that bad.
The "protection" you get as a customer (and I use the term "protection" in the Tony Soprano sense) is protection from the Business Software Alliance. If you are running unlicensed copies of software, and a disgruntled former employee turns you in for it, you're looking at thousands of dollars of fines.
Technically, they could levy those fines against individual home-user violators, but I've never heard of that.
The other supposed protection you might enjoy as a home user is assurance that your browser isn't some kind of Trojan-horsed copy of IEXPLORE.EXE.
But I'm mostly just coming up with cases that rationalize their use of the word protection. I certainly don't see it as a personal benefit or offering me any protection.
the point being that, as a representation of the typical computer-illiterate American, it is simply wrong.
Then you have a remarkably high estimation of your fellow man. Start doing computer support for your rabid NASCAR-watching, beer-swilling, brother-in-law's family, look at the number of people across this country that fit that description, and you start to see why it's actually a pretty good representation of the typical computer-illiterate American. They're good people, real salt-of-the-earth types, but computers are definitely beyond their ken.
I don't track my money nearly carefully enough to notice the total per month change. Yes, it "feels" like I have more money because I'm not shelling out for the parking garage and I'm filling my tank about three times a month instead of weekly, so I'm saving at least $150/month right there.
The problem with ignoring fixed or deferred costs (insurance, loan repayments, interest, repairs, depreciation, tire wear, fluid consumption, etc., is that all of those are real costs that any car owner incurs, we just don't see them in a nice lump. Justifying those costs is very much a part of owning a vehicle -- for example, if a car cost me $100/mile I wouldn't own one, but if a car cost $0.01/mile I would probably abandon it on the street in front of my office tower in the morning, allow it to be towed away, and buy a new one for the drive home.
Perhaps that's extreme, but if the transit commute were more convenient, I might be able to do away with the vehicle entirely, getting by with just a single family car. Or maybe I could get a cheaper vehicle for weekend drives (perhaps a collector car,) something that wouldn't cost as much to license or insure.
That $0.55 figure helps amortize those additional costs against each mile I drive. And as I said, if the IRS is figuring it out, I think I'm in the ballpark of my actual costs (without doing the real work of calculating the full expense,) so I'm not getting away with padding my estimate.
Average American moron, IQ 60, drinking beer, watching baseball and CNN, and believe everything his President says.
This is so simple, even a Joe Sixpack can understand.
The six-pack in question is six beer cans bound together with plastic rings. The only time Joe Sixpack refers to a muscle-bound gym rat is at the gym.
I stated no opinions of software operator's licenses or any such nonsense. (Yes, I'm opposed.) I just pointed out that it's without such regulation that we ended up exactly where we are.
One of the biggest sources of piracy Microsoft is trying to clamp down on is the local "Joe's Computer Hut"-type shop. Joe puts together motherboards and chips and sells $300 computers, including Windows. But what Joe's customers don't realize is that Joe is installing pirated copies. WGA, for all its nasty ills, is supposed to provide a way to find out if your copy of Windows is really genuine. (Of course if it's not, you're completely screwed, unless you agree to help Microsoft bust Joe for piracy.)
Actually, by "normal use of a computer" your computer can indeed cause serious damage to other computers, or to property. That's what TFA is all about.
Let's look at "normal use of a computer." And by "normal" I don't mean "geek normal", I mean "Joe Sixpack normal".
Joe Sixpack goes to Best Buy and buys a computer. He doesn't spend the $50 for the anti-virus software ($50 a year? The hell I will!) or $50 for a firewall (I already pay the cable company for this blue box just like it), and he dismisses every single warning, checking the "don't show me this again" box because he didn't understand it the first time. And then he surfs to the porn sites. So what we'd consider reckless behavior is pretty much "normal use of a computer".
There are no cops to give him a ticket for surfing on unsafe equipment, because it's not illegal. Nobody's going to protect him because he's not willing to pay extra for anti-virus. And we all know that his machine is going to be turned into a zombie within 15 minutes of connecting to the internet without a firewall.
As far as the damage goes, his zombied computer may attack and infect others. The direct costs to Joe Sixpack may include PC troubleshooting and repair, loss of data, and dealing with the theft and abuse of personal banking information. Banks are held liable to cover any fraud losses that result, and they collectively spend billions annually. And for secondary effects, we know there have been suicides due to lost money and also due to computer harassment. I don't think you can simply say that a computer can't "hurt" anybody.
( And this isn't about assigning blame. There's plenty of that: Joe Sixpack may be as irresponsible as they come, and dumber than average. The malware writers are common thieves. Some operating system vendors sell Swiss cheese. And every vendor in the process is happy to take Joe's money without regard to the consequences to him. )
If cars were as unregulated as computers, very few of us would safely return home on a daily basis.
Not to mention not having the use of my auto during lunch/after work, etc....
No thanks. Fix the model and we'll revist this one.
You might want to re-check your math on your vehicle expenses. I use the IRS business rate (the current rate is $0.55/mile), to sum up vehicle depreciation, wear-and-tear, insurance and fuel. I figure the IRS is giving away no bargains, so it's a believable estimate.
So for the past 11 months, I've been running an experiment. I've given up the drive and switched to our light rail (greener, less stressful, etc.) The previous drive was 32 miles round trip, and averaged 80 minutes per day (including the two five minute walks to and from from the parking garage to the office.) That's $17.60 in vehicle costs plus $6.13/day to park ($135/mo contract) for a total of $23.75/day.
Taking the light rail is a 12 mile round trip drive to the station, (which costs $6.60 in vehicle expense), and I park in a brand new public garage for free. The Metropass through work costs me $66/mo or $3/day (and my employer subsidizes an additional $40/mo.) So for $9.60, less than half the cost of the drive, I now spend 110 minutes per day in the commute, 70 of them on the train (it's not an express), 10 waiting on the train, and 30 minutes on the road. That's 10 extra hours per month wasted by taking the train, but a savings of $311 per month.
Could I speed that up? I could drive half the distance to a park-and-ride lot and take the express bus, but the bus schedule is hostile to my concept of time (I'm not a big clock watcher, and frequently leave work after the last bus. The train runs often enough in the evenings that I can rely on it.)
I don't know. My time is definitely worth more than $31.10/hour when my boss is signing my paycheck, but is it worth that much to me? And it's actually stressing me out more because I get home even later. I think I'm about to give up on the experiment and wait for the completion of a better public transit solution (they're working on a high-speed bus lane for my corridor.)
Wouldn't "Robots take to the stars!" make a lot more sense? I don't need a robot to run upstairs and fetch my slippers for me -- I need a robot to explore Venus, Mars, and Europa for me!
"All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there."
Oh, god, you idiots took this shit seriously. +3 Troll points for me, I guess.
As for you guys, you all get a free boarding pass for the FAIL BOAT, double-stamped with "Inability to laugh at yourself" and "Unable to recognize sarcasm." Enjoy your ride.
Sorry, I don't remember what brand converter I bought. I loaned it to my son to watch streaming videos on his TV. The quality was adequate, never great, but it's also hard to compare SDTV resolution with monitor resolution in any meaningful way. It's good enough for a TV show, but typical monitor text sizes are not readable.
I didn't know you were looking to hook up to TV sets at multiple people's houses. I thought you were just looking to fix your personal SDTV situation at home. If you really need a traveling display solution (in-home sales videos, etc.) you're probably looking at a converter that incorporates an RF modulator as the lowest common denominator (which is about as bad as you can possibly make the picture look) because many older TVs won't have composite video jacks. Plus, I would imagine lots of people refusing you access to "mess around" with their TV connections, not to mention your liability if their TV doesn't work after you've reconnected it. (Moving around 30-year-old coax or twinlead is likely to destroy the insulation and give you problems.)
That $30 price was for a PCIe card for a desktop. You'd have to google up solutions for your own laptop.
If you really need large displays to show clients, you'd probably be better off bringing your own display solution. They make some very tiny portable projectors these days (cell phone sized.) Or you could consider a laptop with a 17" display. Very heavy and fairly expensive, but comfortably viewable by three people at a table (test the side angle viewability before purchasing!)
That's right! If you want it to be "green", you have to use Organically Grown Soy so those horrible GMOs won't, uh, get on your paper and... uh... club the baby seals... umm...
Damn! Lost my place in the chapter about soy in my copy of "Liberal Rants for All Occasions." If only it wasn't printed on hemp paper, maybe we wouldn't have smoked the table of contents.
Depends on what you want and what your budget is like. The VGA-to-composite converters are kind of spendy (~$160+,) especially compared to a video card that has a composite output (~$30).
But if you're looking to improve the quality of the picture in any meaningful way, a new, off-brand 24" TV with 1920x1080p resolution, an HDMI input, and an ATSC tuner can be had for ~$280 or less at Target or Newegg. It definitely beats fooling around with old gear, especially considering adding the external ATSC tuner which is not going to improve your picture quality (reconverting to RF will suck, not to mention dealing with yet another remote.)
How about me, being a government that isn't looking favorable at the US, setting up an infected machine, monitoring the access and using it as a PR stunt should the US "invade" their computers?
Playing host to hundreds of "vigilante patriot Chinese hackers" doesn't seem to have hurt the Chinese' ability to access the net, has it?
Besides, my point was it's all about deniability. "Sorry, we're the U.S. Government. We don't know who silently fixed your DAMNED VIRUS LADEN UNPATCHED TURD OF A SERVER. Rest assured, we have our top people looking at it. Top people. But anyway, it wasn't us."
. Places like the Geek Squad are populated with people who are instructed to turn stuff over for a profit rather than solve problems, so they won't look for evidence of the battle.
I'm sorry, but that is exactly what I do with infected machines(Format/re-install). The shear number of machines I get to deal with that are infected and whatnot are just too great for me to go forensic on them and try to remove the malware, never knowing if I ever got it all.
Oh, I'm not blaming you at all for anything! Sheer economics dictate the "nuke the site from orbit" approach to virus eradication.
I'm just saying that works out to the advantage of the botnet researchers if they ever want to send a disable-the-botnet patch. People in your position are not likely to discover incidental damage caused by an anti-botnet-patch.
I wonder what type of DRM you can put on a punch card
You could print shadowed boxes that look like punched holes, that way if someone puts them on a photocopier or in a fax machine it'll look like the holes are there, but a real reader wouldn't see them.
You could put transparent tape over a few of the holes. The common cheap, at-home card readers which read cards optically to save a few bucks will not notice the transparent window. But the Big Iron IBM punch card readers that use real steel fingers to read the holes will simply ignore the taped-over holes.
Along the same vein, you could put red colored tape over the holes, and build the Genuine IBM readers with blue laser readers instead of red. They'll be transparent to the at-home punch-card copy machines that use cheap red lasers, but opaque to the blue frequencies.
Or you could punch some extra or oversized holes in some non-standard locations, like the old half-tracks on the floppy disks. Only official IBM punch machines would be able to accurately copy them.
I got it! Embed a smart chip in the corner of each JCL card, with some cryptographic verification or signature algorithm. As each punch card travels through the system, electrical contacts would verify the authenticity of the card. 4096-bit RSA on the chip ought to do the trick nicely.
How about the reverse? If you are stupid enough to be hosting a botnet node, you are likely too stupid to know when an anti-botnet attack will affect your machine, nor are you likely to be able to identify such behavior as the cause of any damage to your machine.
Nobody would ever find out. Places like the Geek Squad are populated with people who are instructed to turn stuff over for a profit rather than solve problems, so they won't look for evidence of the battle. They'll just reformat the machine and hand it back. Hackers like us on Slashdot are already probably secure against a lot of this crapware, so we'd never be "reverse-attacked."
And who's to say which piece of malware caused the damage: the original trojan, or the anti-trojan? Even if it were traced down to the anti-trojan, what evidence would you have that it was sent by the researchers, and not by some anti-botnet-vigilante group?
I bet these researchers could release an anti-trojan and get away with it completely. As long as they do it silently, the meddling kids never find out who did it.
Even better: an alliance of anti-botnet researchers! To enter, you have to swear an oath to not rat out the other guys anti-botnet software. "We tried really really hard, but we couldn't figure out who sent it, sorry." No one would ever know.
This isn't about outwitting security. That's the easy part. The real problem is if you get caught in a high security facility with a camera, it's your job and probably worse. If you add to that the fact that you were actively trying to hide it (with "automotive class trim") you might be accused of espionage.
Slashdot Mirror
But when the dealer types the VIN into his computer and it comes up "stolen"[..]
They aren't checking the computer, they're checking the owner. If the dealer took your name instead of the VIN and checked if he had records of a car being sold to you, then calling you a thief because he does not that IS wrong.
Two things. First, RTFA. Nobody from Alienware ever called this guy a thief. He claims he is being treated like a thief, he makes claims like they think he is a thief, but there is nothing in his description where he was given anything but a rebuff for not following their rules.
Second, if the dealer is going to work on your car, he most certainly is going to enter your VIN into their computer, and it is going to be run through the corporate VIN database to look up all kinds of information. That's where vehicle recall notices are posted, service records are maintained, ownership records are maintained, and also where stolen cars are reported. If you want to avoid this kind of scrutiny, don't take a possibly stolen car to a dealership for service -- take it to a shade tree mechanic instead.
This guy failed to provide any requested evidence of any proof of purchase, and is mad because AW won't deal with him. He's making it sound like they're calling him a "thief" without evidence that they ever did so. So far, they've done nothing wrong, but it looks this guy has whipped himself up into a self-righteous froth.
Imagine if you paid cash for a car from a guy selling one in his driveway. A few months later, maybe you need a brake job, so you head to the dealer to have them do the work.
Do you expect anything except the dealer to do the brake job? Of course not. It's your car, you need brakes, so put brakes in it. But when the dealer types the VIN into his computer and it comes up "stolen", and says to you "sorry, there's going to be a delay," you might assume that he's just running a bad dealership. But that's not how the law works. If they discover you're in possession of a stolen car, they MUST notify the police, and it WILL get impounded and returned to the rightful owner. That's pretty easy to do when it's still in the dealer's garage, but not so easy if he lets the customer leave with it.
In the case of Alienware, if they sent a random customer who asked for a part a note saying "Sorry, but your PC is reported stolen, please bring it to the cops," the chances are good the customer will simply disappear, keeping the stolen goods. What are the chances he is going to voluntarily bring it to the police and say "here, have this laptop, I bought it from eBay and it turns out it was stolen. So you can just keep it, and I'll be out the thousand dollars then. Sure, I'll have a nice day."
Bottom line: how does Mr. Paget know that his laptop isn't stolen merchandise? He says got "a good deal" on it from a "hassle free seller" who shipped it promptly. If I was fencing hot PCs on eBay, you bet I'd be a hassle free, fast shipper. I'd also be gone in about a week. I'd say there's a damn good chance it IS stolen merchandise, and he's about to lose his money.
Geoffrey Chaucer (the author who wrote The Canterbury Tales) wrote what is believed to be the first surviving technical manual in English: A Treatise on the Astrolabe. It's a letter to his ten year old son Lewys that explains how to use an astrolabe, and it was written around 1391. Google for it, it's all over the internet.
If you have an astrolabe, the instructions are still valid. If not, you should get one, they're cool, and you'll know how to use it.
It's a short paper. The spelling is tough to get past, but once you figure out how to read it it's not that bad.
The "protection" you get as a customer (and I use the term "protection" in the Tony Soprano sense) is protection from the Business Software Alliance. If you are running unlicensed copies of software, and a disgruntled former employee turns you in for it, you're looking at thousands of dollars of fines.
Technically, they could levy those fines against individual home-user violators, but I've never heard of that.
The other supposed protection you might enjoy as a home user is assurance that your browser isn't some kind of Trojan-horsed copy of IEXPLORE.EXE.
But I'm mostly just coming up with cases that rationalize their use of the word protection. I certainly don't see it as a personal benefit or offering me any protection.
the point being that, as a representation of the typical computer-illiterate American, it is simply wrong.
Then you have a remarkably high estimation of your fellow man. Start doing computer support for your rabid NASCAR-watching, beer-swilling, brother-in-law's family, look at the number of people across this country that fit that description, and you start to see why it's actually a pretty good representation of the typical computer-illiterate American. They're good people, real salt-of-the-earth types, but computers are definitely beyond their ken.
I don't track my money nearly carefully enough to notice the total per month change. Yes, it "feels" like I have more money because I'm not shelling out for the parking garage and I'm filling my tank about three times a month instead of weekly, so I'm saving at least $150/month right there.
The problem with ignoring fixed or deferred costs (insurance, loan repayments, interest, repairs, depreciation, tire wear, fluid consumption, etc., is that all of those are real costs that any car owner incurs, we just don't see them in a nice lump. Justifying those costs is very much a part of owning a vehicle -- for example, if a car cost me $100/mile I wouldn't own one, but if a car cost $0.01/mile I would probably abandon it on the street in front of my office tower in the morning, allow it to be towed away, and buy a new one for the drive home.
Perhaps that's extreme, but if the transit commute were more convenient, I might be able to do away with the vehicle entirely, getting by with just a single family car. Or maybe I could get a cheaper vehicle for weekend drives (perhaps a collector car,) something that wouldn't cost as much to license or insure.
That $0.55 figure helps amortize those additional costs against each mile I drive. And as I said, if the IRS is figuring it out, I think I'm in the ballpark of my actual costs (without doing the real work of calculating the full expense,) so I'm not getting away with padding my estimate.
Seriously? You don't know who Joe Sixpack is?
From the Urban Dictionary:
1. Joe Sixpack
Average American moron, IQ 60, drinking beer, watching baseball and CNN, and believe everything his President says.
This is so simple, even a Joe Sixpack can understand.
The six-pack in question is six beer cans bound together with plastic rings. The only time Joe Sixpack refers to a muscle-bound gym rat is at the gym.
I stated no opinions of software operator's licenses or any such nonsense. (Yes, I'm opposed.) I just pointed out that it's without such regulation that we ended up exactly where we are.
One of the biggest sources of piracy Microsoft is trying to clamp down on is the local "Joe's Computer Hut"-type shop. Joe puts together motherboards and chips and sells $300 computers, including Windows. But what Joe's customers don't realize is that Joe is installing pirated copies. WGA, for all its nasty ills, is supposed to provide a way to find out if your copy of Windows is really genuine. (Of course if it's not, you're completely screwed, unless you agree to help Microsoft bust Joe for piracy.)
Actually, by "normal use of a computer" your computer can indeed cause serious damage to other computers, or to property. That's what TFA is all about.
Let's look at "normal use of a computer." And by "normal" I don't mean "geek normal", I mean "Joe Sixpack normal".
Joe Sixpack goes to Best Buy and buys a computer. He doesn't spend the $50 for the anti-virus software ($50 a year? The hell I will!) or $50 for a firewall (I already pay the cable company for this blue box just like it), and he dismisses every single warning, checking the "don't show me this again" box because he didn't understand it the first time. And then he surfs to the porn sites. So what we'd consider reckless behavior is pretty much "normal use of a computer".
There are no cops to give him a ticket for surfing on unsafe equipment, because it's not illegal. Nobody's going to protect him because he's not willing to pay extra for anti-virus. And we all know that his machine is going to be turned into a zombie within 15 minutes of connecting to the internet without a firewall.
As far as the damage goes, his zombied computer may attack and infect others. The direct costs to Joe Sixpack may include PC troubleshooting and repair, loss of data, and dealing with the theft and abuse of personal banking information. Banks are held liable to cover any fraud losses that result, and they collectively spend billions annually. And for secondary effects, we know there have been suicides due to lost money and also due to computer harassment. I don't think you can simply say that a computer can't "hurt" anybody.
( And this isn't about assigning blame. There's plenty of that: Joe Sixpack may be as irresponsible as they come, and dumber than average. The malware writers are common thieves. Some operating system vendors sell Swiss cheese. And every vendor in the process is happy to take Joe's money without regard to the consequences to him. )
If cars were as unregulated as computers, very few of us would safely return home on a daily basis.
20 X 40 = 800 minutes a month to save $50?!?!?!
Not to mention not having the use of my auto during lunch/after work, etc....
No thanks. Fix the model and we'll revist this one.
You might want to re-check your math on your vehicle expenses. I use the IRS business rate (the current rate is $0.55/mile), to sum up vehicle depreciation, wear-and-tear, insurance and fuel. I figure the IRS is giving away no bargains, so it's a believable estimate.
So for the past 11 months, I've been running an experiment. I've given up the drive and switched to our light rail (greener, less stressful, etc.) The previous drive was 32 miles round trip, and averaged 80 minutes per day (including the two five minute walks to and from from the parking garage to the office.) That's $17.60 in vehicle costs plus $6.13/day to park ($135/mo contract) for a total of $23.75/day.
Taking the light rail is a 12 mile round trip drive to the station, (which costs $6.60 in vehicle expense), and I park in a brand new public garage for free. The Metropass through work costs me $66/mo or $3/day (and my employer subsidizes an additional $40/mo.) So for $9.60, less than half the cost of the drive, I now spend 110 minutes per day in the commute, 70 of them on the train (it's not an express), 10 waiting on the train, and 30 minutes on the road. That's 10 extra hours per month wasted by taking the train, but a savings of $311 per month.
Could I speed that up? I could drive half the distance to a park-and-ride lot and take the express bus, but the bus schedule is hostile to my concept of time (I'm not a big clock watcher, and frequently leave work after the last bus. The train runs often enough in the evenings that I can rely on it.)
I don't know. My time is definitely worth more than $31.10/hour when my boss is signing my paycheck, but is it worth that much to me? And it's actually stressing me out more because I get home even later. I think I'm about to give up on the experiment and wait for the completion of a better public transit solution (they're working on a high-speed bus lane for my corridor.)
Wouldn't "Robots take to the stars!" make a lot more sense? I don't need a robot to run upstairs and fetch my slippers for me -- I need a robot to explore Venus, Mars, and Europa for me!
"All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there."
Oh, god, you idiots took this shit seriously. +3 Troll points for me, I guess.
As for you guys, you all get a free boarding pass for the FAIL BOAT, double-stamped with "Inability to laugh at yourself" and "Unable to recognize sarcasm." Enjoy your ride.
Sorry, I don't remember what brand converter I bought. I loaned it to my son to watch streaming videos on his TV. The quality was adequate, never great, but it's also hard to compare SDTV resolution with monitor resolution in any meaningful way. It's good enough for a TV show, but typical monitor text sizes are not readable.
I didn't know you were looking to hook up to TV sets at multiple people's houses. I thought you were just looking to fix your personal SDTV situation at home. If you really need a traveling display solution (in-home sales videos, etc.) you're probably looking at a converter that incorporates an RF modulator as the lowest common denominator (which is about as bad as you can possibly make the picture look) because many older TVs won't have composite video jacks. Plus, I would imagine lots of people refusing you access to "mess around" with their TV connections, not to mention your liability if their TV doesn't work after you've reconnected it. (Moving around 30-year-old coax or twinlead is likely to destroy the insulation and give you problems.)
That $30 price was for a PCIe card for a desktop. You'd have to google up solutions for your own laptop.
If you really need large displays to show clients, you'd probably be better off bringing your own display solution. They make some very tiny portable projectors these days (cell phone sized.) Or you could consider a laptop with a 17" display. Very heavy and fairly expensive, but comfortably viewable by three people at a table (test the side angle viewability before purchasing!)
That's right! If you want it to be "green", you have to use Organically Grown Soy so those horrible GMOs won't, uh, get on your paper and ... uh ... club the baby seals ... umm ...
Damn! Lost my place in the chapter about soy in my copy of "Liberal Rants for All Occasions." If only it wasn't printed on hemp paper, maybe we wouldn't have smoked the table of contents.
Depends on what you want and what your budget is like. The VGA-to-composite converters are kind of spendy (~$160+,) especially compared to a video card that has a composite output (~$30).
But if you're looking to improve the quality of the picture in any meaningful way, a new, off-brand 24" TV with 1920x1080p resolution, an HDMI input, and an ATSC tuner can be had for ~$280 or less at Target or Newegg. It definitely beats fooling around with old gear, especially considering adding the external ATSC tuner which is not going to improve your picture quality (reconverting to RF will suck, not to mention dealing with yet another remote.)
That's not exactly a cult. Everyone pretty much agrees that Amanda Tapping is a hottie (or at least she was 10 years ago.)
Or did you mean some other kind of WOOSH?
Hey, good idea! A detected violation of the DRM could cause the card deck to be routed to the sorter with a random-shuffle algorithm applied.
I'm actually laughing out loud at this one! Thanks!
How about me, being a government that isn't looking favorable at the US, setting up an infected machine, monitoring the access and using it as a PR stunt should the US "invade" their computers?
Playing host to hundreds of "vigilante patriot Chinese hackers" doesn't seem to have hurt the Chinese' ability to access the net, has it?
Besides, my point was it's all about deniability. "Sorry, we're the U.S. Government. We don't know who silently fixed your DAMNED VIRUS LADEN UNPATCHED TURD OF A SERVER. Rest assured, we have our top people looking at it. Top people. But anyway, it wasn't us."
I'm sorry, but that is exactly what I do with infected machines(Format/re-install). The shear number of machines I get to deal with that are infected and whatnot are just too great for me to go forensic on them and try to remove the malware, never knowing if I ever got it all.
Oh, I'm not blaming you at all for anything! Sheer economics dictate the "nuke the site from orbit" approach to virus eradication.
I'm just saying that works out to the advantage of the botnet researchers if they ever want to send a disable-the-botnet patch. People in your position are not likely to discover incidental damage caused by an anti-botnet-patch.
I wonder what type of DRM you can put on a punch card
You could print shadowed boxes that look like punched holes, that way if someone puts them on a photocopier or in a fax machine it'll look like the holes are there, but a real reader wouldn't see them.
You could put transparent tape over a few of the holes. The common cheap, at-home card readers which read cards optically to save a few bucks will not notice the transparent window. But the Big Iron IBM punch card readers that use real steel fingers to read the holes will simply ignore the taped-over holes.
Along the same vein, you could put red colored tape over the holes, and build the Genuine IBM readers with blue laser readers instead of red. They'll be transparent to the at-home punch-card copy machines that use cheap red lasers, but opaque to the blue frequencies.
Or you could punch some extra or oversized holes in some non-standard locations, like the old half-tracks on the floppy disks. Only official IBM punch machines would be able to accurately copy them.
I got it! Embed a smart chip in the corner of each JCL card, with some cryptographic verification or signature algorithm. As each punch card travels through the system, electrical contacts would verify the authenticity of the card. 4096-bit RSA on the chip ought to do the trick nicely.
How about the reverse? If you are stupid enough to be hosting a botnet node, you are likely too stupid to know when an anti-botnet attack will affect your machine, nor are you likely to be able to identify such behavior as the cause of any damage to your machine.
Nobody would ever find out. Places like the Geek Squad are populated with people who are instructed to turn stuff over for a profit rather than solve problems, so they won't look for evidence of the battle. They'll just reformat the machine and hand it back. Hackers like us on Slashdot are already probably secure against a lot of this crapware, so we'd never be "reverse-attacked."
And who's to say which piece of malware caused the damage: the original trojan, or the anti-trojan? Even if it were traced down to the anti-trojan, what evidence would you have that it was sent by the researchers, and not by some anti-botnet-vigilante group?
I bet these researchers could release an anti-trojan and get away with it completely. As long as they do it silently, the meddling kids never find out who did it.
Even better: an alliance of anti-botnet researchers! To enter, you have to swear an oath to not rat out the other guys anti-botnet software. "We tried really really hard, but we couldn't figure out who sent it, sorry." No one would ever know.
I'm afraid of large news organizations. Where to do I turn so I can indulge in my fears?
Faux News, of course, aka the Fox Noise Channel. You'll get no better source of fear anywhere.
This isn't about outwitting security. That's the easy part. The real problem is if you get caught in a high security facility with a camera, it's your job and probably worse. If you add to that the fact that you were actively trying to hide it (with "automotive class trim") you might be accused of espionage.