Re:The black market is the answer to the success
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 1
The database part sounds an awful lot like it could be used to trace transactions - thus not making it ideal when you want to pay off illegal labour, buy a car under the table to get away from state tax, or convert those drug millions you made on the street into something mroe useful than an e-card to you (i.e. a house, gold, bearer bonds).
e-cash will never take off until people can be 100% sure they can use it in dubious (viewed more or less illegal by the state) activities - like tax evasion, black labour, illegal gambling, drugs, etc.
The $107 limit on the amount a card can hold at any given time (out of concern for someone losing their card) would probably limit its effectiveness in most of those scenarios anyway. Well the last two can be done with less than $100, but they sure as heck aren't as much fun!
Hey - I'm all for it! If I'm charged a fee for downloading music, by golly, I'm going to download music!
Once I pay $0.01 in loss 'fees' to the RIAA, I consider myself licensed to download whatever is available. If I'm prevented, they should be prepared to be sued for failure to deliver a service for which fees were imposed.
Can the judges who made these decisions be written to about this the way senators and congressmen are? If so, how about some identification of these people? Also, if this can be appealed or reversed, how is it done and who do we talk to?
Um. No. RTA. This was in the United States Supreme Court - the final point of appeal. It stops here. You might have a sliver of a hope in asking them to reconsider - but they generally laugh at such requests with impunity.
Haha, it's still early in the morning for me but I can't resist being half troll/half serious:
In Soviet Russia Santa is Blue!
My wife's grandfather is Russian, so we've gone to visit him around the holidays a few times. Their "Santa" dresses much like ours, except that all of his clothes are dark royal blue. He is called Dedushka Moroz which means "Father Christmas." However, in most areas of Russia, it is traditionally Babushka Moroz (Grandmother Christmas) who leaves the presents for the children.
I really don't think that this will be an issue...
Unless the organization qualifies as an IRS-recognized tax-exempt organization (meaning they file their taxes accordingly), they must abide by the same rules as everyone else. Further, if an otherwise exempt organization uses a professional telemarketer to solicit on their behalf, the telemarketer is still bound by the regulations as if they were working for a "for profit" entity.
Many states already have existing laws regarding lying about one's taxable status, especially when there is some level of deception involved. In my state, for instance, it is illegal to even claim to be donating/collecting proceeds for a charity unless at least 85% of the GROSS RECEIPTS (not NET), go directly to the charity.
Operations like this will be quickly shutdown because a) they are violating the FTC telemarketing law b) they are claiming to be tax-exempt when the are not (helllloooo IRS and various state consumer agancies).
This is exactly what my older brother did when he was here. In fact, he's still here because of his oak-wood desk business with deep synergy underpinnings: Pizza and beer, to your door, in 30 minutes or less, oh and they take plastic. In fact, by the numbers, even considering that they basically shut down three months out of the year, they still gross more per capita than most other chains in this end of the state.
Or then there was the other kid in his class who had a great racket going for a while - he printed up a bunch of parking tickets that looked identical to those of the university. The only difference is that the funds were to be remitted to a different address. He'd have people run around early in the morning before the real parking people went to work and cite all the illegally parked cars (primarily students in faculty lots). The real lady would come around and assume that the other lady already tagged that lot. You can imagine the rest. He got about $10,000 in his first month, oddly enough he was only expelled:)
Yep, this is like those football games between two of your rivals - you just kind of hope that the blimp falls into the stadium.
But seriously speaking, I think that the best thing 2600 can hope for is the increased publicity surrounding these issues. A case like this is a zero-sum - someone wins, someone loses. Now damn...where can I find a blimp......
My school (Miami University) has an online phonebook accessable from anywhere in the world http://www.muohio.edu/ph You can opt out of being listed completely, or you can let your information be posted (the default). Depending on where you are running the query from (ie, within Miami or outside), certain bits of information may or may not be available. I can edit my record to include my telephone number if I want it visible to the outside world. Unless I specifically include that, only people within Miami can see my school phone. The official address you keep on file is always private, and can only be viewed from within the University.
This completely ignores that we get a fair number of solicitations from outside organizations who are more than happy to inform you that your name was obtained from 'Officially Authorized University Lists', AKA: what they sold.
On the one hand, Joe Shmoe outside the school has to work to find my address and telephone number, but if you have money, hey, here's our whole database! People who officially opt-out aren't available at all in the PH (as it's called), but I know of several people who did this but still get solications by name in their dorms. *Shrug*
The biggest example of practical use of this technology seems to be sitting on a packed airplane. It seems to me that this technology may be a little too late. I seriously wonder whether or not a laptop so equipped would be permitted to be used on an airplane. Planes have had to return to an airport because a passenger noticed another one writing on a small piece of paper and giving it to the guy next to them.
If I was on a plane and the guy next to me whipped out his glasses and 'secure' laptop I'd maybe be a little alarmed. OTOH, if I walk to the loo and see that another person is doing the same thing, I'd probably point it out. Could they be looking at layouts of the plane and coordinating plans secretly? I'm fairly technical, but just imagine the 60 year old grandmother who has never flown before and is scared to death already.
In the office, you can reposition your screen. Generally if you have information so sensitive that you'd need one of these you work in a little office with a locking door. Why does everybody, including the intern, up in HR have their own closing office, while IT has 'the bullpen'? Hmm..
Consider too - I have family in various parts of Australia and they all pay for their internet access by the kilobyte. As DOS attacks occur you are literally running both the ISP and customers' bills. On this pay-per-use basis, this is kind of like walking up to my house and turning on the hose faucets and letting them run full blast. The more/longer you do it, the more you are costing me, in real dollars. No imagined "losses" here - "Well I pay $30 a month for unlimited access, and you increased my bandwidth usage for a while..."
It comes as no surprise that Australia doesn't take too kindly on massive wastings of bandwidth.
I don't know if this $/kb is standard for internet access or not, but I'm fairly certain it is at least common in some parts. My uncle has been trying to get a flat rate service plan for the past year and it just isn't offered in his area, nor is it scheduled to be.
I have always wondered if there were any examples (probably from war) of people bailing over the ocean with no/unopened parachute and surviving. Terminal velocity around sea level is like 120 mph, right? That's pretty fast, but I wonder if there's some chance of surviving an impact with water at that speed.
Given that water is an incompressible liquid and you would be hitting at such a high rate of speed, you'd be better off landing in a dirt field at the same high speed. Just think about those belly-flops; they hurt from three feet up. The second you hit, the water doesn't move. It's only after the blow has rippled out that the water moves and you begin to sink.
According to the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (http://www.worstcasescenarios.com) if you plan to jump from anything high you should be prepared to at least break your legs, and clench your buttocks as you go down so as to keep water from rushing in and um, causing severe "internal" damage. Jumping from over 50 feet is ill-advised as it will almost certainaly break something other than your legs (spine) unless you hit at exactly the right angle. At 120 MPH you may not be able to adjust yourself by the time you realize that you're going to enter at a slight angle thanks to that last second cross breeze.
Interestingly though, according to the same book you can probably survive a 50 foot fall into a dumpster of boxes with few complications.
I hear so many of you spout your ignorant bullshit about "suing them" that it's sickening. Go pay $15,000 to file a complaint. See where it gets you. Maybe after you lose $50,000 or so, you'll change your mind about your juvenile thoughs.
Slightly off topic in regards to the copyright issue at hand, but in reference to the costs of working the criminal justice system: The guy who got the pledge ruled unconstitutional spent the following: $300 in filing fees, and his time. He went up with the state lawyers (state being the government) attacking him, and he won.
Regardless of what you think of the case or its outcome, this guy spent very little in cash for a fairly high-profile case.
The trick is having the legal basis to stand on. While perhaps not very popular, the pledge case was rooted very strongly in previous court decisions (and yes, I was bored one day and read a lot of the testimony).
That all being said - I agree with Lew Payne's overall point in that it's probably not very practical to sue them. Like I said - you need the legal basis to stand on. Those BASTARDS - I put something in the public (on my treelawn) for anyone to take (my garbage) and someone comes along and says "HEY! That looks a lot like my bicycle that stolen from my mega-shop last month with a UHaul!" Then they call UHaul and report that they believe you used their vehicle (the internet connection) to steal something, and then UHaul refuses to rent to you in the future, or imposes strict conditions in your next agreement.
Before you outright flame me because "But it's not a REAL bicycle - you didn't lose any property!!" Well no, but it's already been established that it is illegal to set up a shop to mass produce copies of a book. Even if you hand them out for free to the general public (in this case at a loss to you financially). In fact, by the internet, you essentially have an "unlimited supply" of the product and the ability to make perfect copies (something photocopying doesn't yield). If wholesale piracy of imperfect copies of reading materials can be illegal, chances are unlimited piracy of perfect copies of something will be quite illegal as well.
Regardless, the whole thing is kind of a moot point once you make them available for anyone in the public to view/access. The plain-view concept. If the police cared enough, they could probably do the same thing and actually arrest you, not just have your internet shut off.
I seem to recall a few years back reading about a diesel engine (maybe from VW?) that was designed for super fuel efficiency, combined with a contineously variable transmission. The engine would shut down when stopped or coasting or decellerating and would startup again as the accelerator was pressed, presumably with minimal delay.
It seems as though the on/off problem was solved in at least this one design.
Anyone? I do distinctly remember reading this somewhere, but I can't remember who it was or whether it was actually a technology that worked. I think it was Motor Trend, perhaps two years ago. That's all I can remember. Who knows, they may have discovered that they were doing too much warranty work on the engine or something:)
If it's an efficient success, I sure hope they figure out how to build a hybrid out of it!
On a side note, is there any technical problem which has stop diesel electric hybrids in cars (they have diesel electric trains). Seems to me you would get a more fuel efficent car than a gas electric.
Perhaps it has to do with the way the gas/electric hybrids operate. The hybrids frequently kill the engine when it isn't needed. This is fine if you have a big enough electrical system to accomidate it. In fact these hybrids are super efficient in that area.
Diesels on the other hand take a bit more juice to get going, even with the new TDI technology. Perhaps this shifts the balance away in favor of having to run the engine more often, ofsetting the potential gains. From a technical standpoint, diesels are much more suited to continuous operation. One big reason emergency vehicles where persuit speed isn't critical (ambulance, fire truck etc) use diesel is that they are content to be idling at the scene for hours at a time. (This is in addition to the availability of low RPM high torque). Gas engines on the other hand, build up carbon and the plugs can get fouled up if they idle for too long. Most police departments get rid of their vehicles well before 100k miles, in part because of the loss of performance due to excessive idling. Yet, my town will keep firetrucks until the bottom rusts out 20, sometimes 30 years - then they sell the engine to the public/another department and convert the leftover body to scrap metal.
That is also your tradeoff; while diesels are well suited for extended idle situations, they aren't as well suited for frequent on/off use. Instead, this is where they get their buildup, constant temperature fluxuations in the engine block and short runtime. Think about the train (as someone else did) - they fire that sucker up in the morning and don't shut it down until they get wherever, even if they are stopped for an hour. On/off every other block is quite a different usage:) And this is the big advantage of hybrids - they start and stop the engine frequently in the course of normal operation.
3) They want to Buy you. Not win you over, not get you to trust them, straight up, here's a free copy of XP, try it out. I've seen this at the chicago CIO conference, where it was brutally succesful.
Nothing beats when they came to my college for a.Net dropoff. Total retail value of what each participant got was over $1,200 bucks. Everyone got a fully licensed version of XP Pro,.Net Pro, Office XP Pro, for starters. All the departments were given XP Server, and the school got XP Enterprise Server (or whatever the top end version is).
Sad thing is, 95% of the people went strictly for the free software. I went because I was interested in how.NET worked (I wasn't overly impressed). Everyone else was just there for the free stuff. Heck, even more than 75% of those that weren't CS majors. Even if they threw.NET out, they still made out like bandits.
I asked around some of my 'lawyerly' friends and the answer to statutes of limitations is that it depends. Some states don't allow any for civil penalty, others allow the same time period as criminal cases, others allow different periods (generally civil is longer). In some wacked situations there is a set statute of limitations, but if new evidence is introduced some time after, it can be reinstated for so many years beyond that. Seeing as I am thousands of miles from Nevada, I just don't know. The problem with civil cases is that the burden of proof shifts somewhat to the defendant. If Sprint would say "We know you just got out of jail, and we were broken into around that time, and you're the only documented person who has done that, and the break ins resemble your trademarks", depending on the judge/jury (whoever Sprint decided) it might be more up to Mitnick to prove that it wasn't him.
Bottom line though - not that he has any money to be sued for, and since noone does any jail time for civil cases, the smart thing to do would be to chalk it up as a business expense and not harass him over it. But hey, these are the same people that call my house 5 times a week and harass me, and I have no money to give either.;)
Yeah I read that but my thought was that if Sprint has long been claiming they are untouchable and someone goes on record as having broken it - They just might come looking at your door for problems they have been experiencing recently. If you've got someone who admits he knows how to break in, and you had a break in a year and a half ago that never went public, it seems obvious who you start looking into. Remember, Spring was "unaware" of these vulnerabilities. That means that probably until yesterday (and maybe even now), those doors were still open. One person has confessed to being there before.....
...is this testimony going to come back for possible charges in the future? In other words, could Sprint now decide to go after him? You really can't take the fifth once your statements have entered the public record. You can refuse to answer any further, but only in a trial in which you are accused. This is 1) Not a trial for Mitnick 2) Is not in a court of law, it is being held in the State Public Utility Commission. Consequently, all his testimony becomes public record, and he could never claim immunity or something should Sprint decide to turn around and come after him for 'losses' or the DA for criminal purposes. His only hope might be statute of limitations.
And obviously such a task (scanning bills) would have to happen right in front of you, especially in situations where there is a large line. The article focuses on hidden/unknown types of tracking where the person might have an idea they are being tracked, but surely no idea of to what extent. I 'spose for the paranoid types that do the self-checkout at the supermarket where the bill is scanned to determine the denomination, that might be possible, but why? Sure the supermarket wants my stuff, sure the cops want my stuff, but to pull something of that scale off would require massive money from somewhere. The store has almost no marketing interest in what particular currency I use (ie, $20 number 5 or $20 number 13). That'd make it hard for the cops to come say "hey it's a win-win..just install these scanners..." Not to mention the least of the problems is that you'd have to install one at every single POS in the area to even begin to come close to the level of real-time tracking discussed.
And of course - the most suspicious of all transactions are illegal anyway and surely wouldn't use a scanner. Drug Dealer to client - "Hod on, lemme scan yo $20."
Well, statistically, if you can develop a good enough test criteria, you could determine the rate with a very, very small sample. This is how some of the more reputable firms can survey 250 voting American adults and usually be within 3% of what the American public will do during the upcoming election. But hey, probability also says that he has a 1 in 100 shot of getting the number right just by guessing;)
The whole "report" was down due to excessive bandwidth (whooo hooo, Slashdot effect!), but the fact that it was posted on a free provider (Anglefire) does make me wonder. If this guy was smart enough to accurately do a study like this, you'd think he'd KNOW what happens to bandwidth when you post a story on Slashdot. Instead he keeps it on his freebee page. Was anybody able to snag a copy and post it in? Until given good evidence to the contrary, I think this study is very suspect.
What's really needed to conduct a study of this is a temporal database. Problem is, while Google may be HUGE, temporal DBs are many times larger, and not very efficient for routine searches. In essence, they store the world "as it was", "as it is", and "as it will be" and can use deduction and inference to pull out statistics exactly like this one. There are currently no commercial TDBMSs, only a few layered applications that can be placed on top of an existing DB to provide temporal-like features.
Supposedly when Tito went, he paid his expenses. They would not let someone go up at a dead loss to them. Depending on how/when they go up, the incremental cost of an additional person may just be in terms of food consumed, and fuel. IIRC, the Russians frequently send up shuttles with less than the full capacity. If the shuttle is going anyway, and there's an empty seat, actual launch costs wouldn't be that much more. As for training, basically all he got was physical conditioning and a good lecture on DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING.
Exactly. If the plate sells, there must be a demand, and the group will get money for it. If not, it'll be yanked. In my state (Ohio), if you don't sell a certain number of custom plates every year it gets yanked.
I certainaly understand that it wasn't exactly the highlight of the state's history, but hey... An earlier poster had a CNN link that said 800 of the 100,000 workers fell ill. I'm not an industry expert, but 0.8% illness/death for an industry seems pretty low. Back when this was all happening, industrial jobs were still pretty dangerous (heck some still are!), and it wasn't *that* uncommon for someone to have to quit on disability or be killed in a given year.
Wow, must be a slow news day on the ole/. But hey I'll bite anyway. I'm not surprised that members of the general public are all up in arms about it. My neighbor across the street works for NASA and he's a scientist working on the idea of nuclear propulsion in space. Their real task now is figuring out how to safely and efficiently get such an enormous reactor into space. Anyway his license plate is an MIT plate (my state has plates for almost any university that has an alumni association that can rustle up however many signatures you need) customized as "SPCNUKE" He's always getting honked at, cut off, sworn at and lectured by the obligatory mother with three kids in the grocery store parking lot. Seems everyone thinks that his project is really about one of two things. 1) How to get nuclear weapons into space. Or 2) Failing that, how to dump all our nuclear waste into outerspace.
I've asked if he's ever considered changing the plate and he said no, he kind of likes the reactions he gets from people. (Lack of attention in grade school, perhaps?)
Hey....I always knew there was something just a little bit 'odd' about those folks...
As I see it, the real problem is that when it comes to something people don't understand that sometimes has the ability to maim or kill them they don't want to take the time to learn more about it. They want it banned, damnit, banned! Out of my children's face!!!
When I see one of these plates crusing down the road I probably won't give it a second look, it's just too bad people can't see the larger issue (or more often, the lack of one) sometimes.
In my crunch for time, I forgot to add the following line to the top: "Referer and agent can both be forged by the client." The author said that he noticed that they were often coming into his site right in the middle, as if they have a list of all his pages. If you blindly type in a URL, or come from a bookmark, there will be no referer. I've seen this on my site before, you get a lot of legit people with no referer because they either have the URL written down somewhere, or they bookmarked a page. At the same time, I also get inexpliciable hits on the site that don't seem to be people because they don't follow any logical transition from subject. The problem is that requires human analysis.
Robots.txt is useful for now until the spambots are smart enough to figure out that following it will tell them how to avoid the trap. It's a neverending game of catch up.
No. The point the author made was that good bots follow the 'robots.txt' standard. A versatile program like this can differentiate. If a robot comes in and plays by the rules on robots.txt, it's welcomed. OTOH, if one comes in and just starts grabbing at everything, it will quickly find itself blocked.
I believe the exact quote in regards to why robots.txt should still be used is: "Most bad spambots don't even check the robots.txt file, so this is mainly for protection of the good bots."
Another thing I find appealing is that on a large enough system the DB could be shared amongst several servers to provide common protection for all. I've always taken a don't put an address on the page approach, but it's cool to see someone looking at how these bots operate from a technical standpoint.
Some ISPs (like mine) have policies against SPAM that stipulate that in addition to not actually spamming people, using their resources to prepare/collect addresses to SPAM is just as bad. The advantage the database gives you is that you can track the most recent offenders. A quick lookup to who owns the address, with hard evidence of one of their subscribers abusing both your system, and their policy will, if nothing else, cause the cost of spamming to rise. The reason SPAM is so popular is because it is VERY cheap to do. Once its costs approach those of 'traditional' marketing, things might get a bit more selective rather than sending my three year old '1-3 inches in 6 weeks!','Stop paying for cable', or 'Get out of debt now!' messages. Hardly directed.
(Now I don't want anyone marketing to my three year old, but I know it will happen so I'd like to at least think they would be reasonable things, perhaps a bit relevant)
Slashdot Mirror
The database part sounds an awful lot like it could be used to trace transactions - thus not making it ideal when you want to pay off illegal labour, buy a car under the table to get away from state tax, or convert those drug millions you made on the street into something mroe useful than an e-card to you (i.e. a house, gold, bearer bonds).
e-cash will never take off until people can be 100% sure they can use it in dubious (viewed more or less illegal by the state) activities - like tax evasion, black labour, illegal gambling, drugs, etc.
The $107 limit on the amount a card can hold at any given time (out of concern for someone losing their card) would probably limit its effectiveness in most of those scenarios anyway. Well the last two can be done with less than $100, but they sure as heck aren't as much fun!
Hey - I'm all for it! If I'm charged a fee for downloading music, by golly, I'm going to download music!
Once I pay $0.01 in loss 'fees' to the RIAA, I consider myself licensed to download whatever is available. If I'm prevented, they should be prepared to be sued for failure to deliver a service for which fees were imposed.
Can the judges who made these decisions be written to about this the way senators and congressmen are? If so, how about some identification of these people? Also, if this can be appealed or reversed, how is it done and who do we talk to?
Um. No. RTA. This was in the United States Supreme Court - the final point of appeal. It stops here. You might have a sliver of a hope in asking them to reconsider - but they generally laugh at such requests with impunity.
Haha, it's still early in the morning for me but I can't resist being half troll/half serious:
In Soviet Russia Santa is Blue!
My wife's grandfather is Russian, so we've gone to visit him around the holidays a few times. Their "Santa" dresses much like ours, except that all of his clothes are dark royal blue. He is called Dedushka Moroz which means "Father Christmas." However, in most areas of Russia, it is traditionally Babushka Moroz (Grandmother Christmas) who leaves the presents for the children.
I really don't think that this will be an issue...
Unless the organization qualifies as an IRS-recognized tax-exempt organization (meaning they file their taxes accordingly), they must abide by the same rules as everyone else. Further, if an otherwise exempt organization uses a professional telemarketer to solicit on their behalf, the telemarketer is still bound by the regulations as if they were working for a "for profit" entity.
Many states already have existing laws regarding lying about one's taxable status, especially when there is some level of deception involved. In my state, for instance, it is illegal to even claim to be donating/collecting proceeds for a charity unless at least 85% of the GROSS RECEIPTS (not NET), go directly to the charity.
Operations like this will be quickly shutdown because a) they are violating the FTC telemarketing law b) they are claiming to be tax-exempt when the are not (helllloooo IRS and various state consumer agancies).
This is exactly what my older brother did when he was here. In fact, he's still here because of his oak-wood desk business with deep synergy underpinnings: Pizza and beer, to your door, in 30 minutes or less, oh and they take plastic. In fact, by the numbers, even considering that they basically shut down three months out of the year, they still gross more per capita than most other chains in this end of the state.
:)
Or then there was the other kid in his class who had a great racket going for a while - he printed up a bunch of parking tickets that looked identical to those of the university. The only difference is that the funds were to be remitted to a different address. He'd have people run around early in the morning before the real parking people went to work and cite all the illegally parked cars (primarily students in faculty lots). The real lady would come around and assume that the other lady already tagged that lot. You can imagine the rest. He got about $10,000 in his first month, oddly enough he was only expelled
Yep, this is like those football games between two of your rivals - you just kind of hope that the blimp falls into the stadium.
But seriously speaking, I think that the best thing 2600 can hope for is the increased publicity surrounding these issues. A case like this is a zero-sum - someone wins, someone loses. Now damn...where can I find a blimp......
This completely ignores that we get a fair number of solicitations from outside organizations who are more than happy to inform you that your name was obtained from 'Officially Authorized University Lists', AKA: what they sold.
On the one hand, Joe Shmoe outside the school has to work to find my address and telephone number, but if you have money, hey, here's our whole database! People who officially opt-out aren't available at all in the PH (as it's called), but I know of several people who did this but still get solications by name in their dorms. *Shrug*
If I was on a plane and the guy next to me whipped out his glasses and 'secure' laptop I'd maybe be a little alarmed. OTOH, if I walk to the loo and see that another person is doing the same thing, I'd probably point it out. Could they be looking at layouts of the plane and coordinating plans secretly? I'm fairly technical, but just imagine the 60 year old grandmother who has never flown before and is scared to death already.
In the office, you can reposition your screen. Generally if you have information so sensitive that you'd need one of these you work in a little office with a locking door. Why does everybody, including the intern, up in HR have their own closing office, while IT has 'the bullpen'? Hmm..
It comes as no surprise that Australia doesn't take too kindly on massive wastings of bandwidth.
I don't know if this $/kb is standard for internet access or not, but I'm fairly certain it is at least common in some parts. My uncle has been trying to get a flat rate service plan for the past year and it just isn't offered in his area, nor is it scheduled to be.
According to the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (http://www.worstcasescenarios.com) if you plan to jump from anything high you should be prepared to at least break your legs, and clench your buttocks as you go down so as to keep water from rushing in and um, causing severe "internal" damage. Jumping from over 50 feet is ill-advised as it will almost certainaly break something other than your legs (spine) unless you hit at exactly the right angle. At 120 MPH you may not be able to adjust yourself by the time you realize that you're going to enter at a slight angle thanks to that last second cross breeze.
Interestingly though, according to the same book you can probably survive a 50 foot fall into a dumpster of boxes with few complications.
Regardless of what you think of the case or its outcome, this guy spent very little in cash for a fairly high-profile case.
The trick is having the legal basis to stand on. While perhaps not very popular, the pledge case was rooted very strongly in previous court decisions (and yes, I was bored one day and read a lot of the testimony).
That all being said - I agree with Lew Payne's overall point in that it's probably not very practical to sue them. Like I said - you need the legal basis to stand on. Those BASTARDS - I put something in the public (on my treelawn) for anyone to take (my garbage) and someone comes along and says "HEY! That looks a lot like my bicycle that stolen from my mega-shop last month with a UHaul!" Then they call UHaul and report that they believe you used their vehicle (the internet connection) to steal something, and then UHaul refuses to rent to you in the future, or imposes strict conditions in your next agreement.
Before you outright flame me because "But it's not a REAL bicycle - you didn't lose any property!!" Well no, but it's already been established that it is illegal to set up a shop to mass produce copies of a book. Even if you hand them out for free to the general public (in this case at a loss to you financially). In fact, by the internet, you essentially have an "unlimited supply" of the product and the ability to make perfect copies (something photocopying doesn't yield). If wholesale piracy of imperfect copies of reading materials can be illegal, chances are unlimited piracy of perfect copies of something will be quite illegal as well.
Regardless, the whole thing is kind of a moot point once you make them available for anyone in the public to view/access. The plain-view concept. If the police cared enough, they could probably do the same thing and actually arrest you, not just have your internet shut off.
If it's an efficient success, I sure hope they figure out how to build a hybrid out of it!
Diesels on the other hand take a bit more juice to get going, even with the new TDI technology. Perhaps this shifts the balance away in favor of having to run the engine more often, ofsetting the potential gains. From a technical standpoint, diesels are much more suited to continuous operation. One big reason emergency vehicles where persuit speed isn't critical (ambulance, fire truck etc) use diesel is that they are content to be idling at the scene for hours at a time. (This is in addition to the availability of low RPM high torque). Gas engines on the other hand, build up carbon and the plugs can get fouled up if they idle for too long. Most police departments get rid of their vehicles well before 100k miles, in part because of the loss of performance due to excessive idling. Yet, my town will keep firetrucks until the bottom rusts out 20, sometimes 30 years - then they sell the engine to the public/another department and convert the leftover body to scrap metal.
That is also your tradeoff; while diesels are well suited for extended idle situations, they aren't as well suited for frequent on/off use. Instead, this is where they get their buildup, constant temperature fluxuations in the engine block and short runtime. Think about the train (as someone else did) - they fire that sucker up in the morning and don't shut it down until they get wherever, even if they are stopped for an hour. On/off every other block is quite a different usage
Sad thing is, 95% of the people went strictly for the free software. I went because I was interested in how
MS: *Bink*
I asked around some of my 'lawyerly' friends and the answer to statutes of limitations is that it depends. Some states don't allow any for civil penalty, others allow the same time period as criminal cases, others allow different periods (generally civil is longer). In some wacked situations there is a set statute of limitations, but if new evidence is introduced some time after, it can be reinstated for so many years beyond that. Seeing as I am thousands of miles from Nevada, I just don't know. The problem with civil cases is that the burden of proof shifts somewhat to the defendant. If Sprint would say "We know you just got out of jail, and we were broken into around that time, and you're the only documented person who has done that, and the break ins resemble your trademarks", depending on the judge/jury (whoever Sprint decided) it might be more up to Mitnick to prove that it wasn't him.
;)
Bottom line though - not that he has any money to be sued for, and since noone does any jail time for civil cases, the smart thing to do would be to chalk it up as a business expense and not harass him over it. But hey, these are the same people that call my house 5 times a week and harass me, and I have no money to give either.
Yeah I read that but my thought was that if Sprint has long been claiming they are untouchable and someone goes on record as having broken it - They just might come looking at your door for problems they have been experiencing recently. If you've got someone who admits he knows how to break in, and you had a break in a year and a half ago that never went public, it seems obvious who you start looking into. Remember, Spring was "unaware" of these vulnerabilities. That means that probably until yesterday (and maybe even now), those doors were still open. One person has confessed to being there before.....
...is this testimony going to come back for possible charges in the future? In other words, could Sprint now decide to go after him? You really can't take the fifth once your statements have entered the public record. You can refuse to answer any further, but only in a trial in which you are accused. This is 1) Not a trial for Mitnick 2) Is not in a court of law, it is being held in the State Public Utility Commission. Consequently, all his testimony becomes public record, and he could never claim immunity or something should Sprint decide to turn around and come after him for 'losses' or the DA for criminal purposes. His only hope might be statute of limitations.
Any ideas?
And obviously such a task (scanning bills) would have to happen right in front of you, especially in situations where there is a large line. The article focuses on hidden/unknown types of tracking where the person might have an idea they are being tracked, but surely no idea of to what extent. I 'spose for the paranoid types that do the self-checkout at the supermarket where the bill is scanned to determine the denomination, that might be possible, but why? Sure the supermarket wants my stuff, sure the cops want my stuff, but to pull something of that scale off would require massive money from somewhere. The store has almost no marketing interest in what particular currency I use (ie, $20 number 5 or $20 number 13). That'd make it hard for the cops to come say "hey it's a win-win..just install these scanners..." Not to mention the least of the problems is that you'd have to install one at every single POS in the area to even begin to come close to the level of real-time tracking discussed.
And of course - the most suspicious of all transactions are illegal anyway and surely wouldn't use a scanner. Drug Dealer to client - "Hod on, lemme scan yo $20."
Well, statistically, if you can develop a good enough test criteria, you could determine the rate with a very, very small sample. This is how some of the more reputable firms can survey 250 voting American adults and usually be within 3% of what the American public will do during the upcoming election. But hey, probability also says that he has a 1 in 100 shot of getting the number right just by guessing ;)
The whole "report" was down due to excessive bandwidth (whooo hooo, Slashdot effect!), but the fact that it was posted on a free provider (Anglefire) does make me wonder. If this guy was smart enough to accurately do a study like this, you'd think he'd KNOW what happens to bandwidth when you post a story on Slashdot. Instead he keeps it on his freebee page. Was anybody able to snag a copy and post it in? Until given good evidence to the contrary, I think this study is very suspect.
What's really needed to conduct a study of this is a temporal database. Problem is, while Google may be HUGE, temporal DBs are many times larger, and not very efficient for routine searches. In essence, they store the world "as it was", "as it is", and "as it will be" and can use deduction and inference to pull out statistics exactly like this one. There are currently no commercial TDBMSs, only a few layered applications that can be placed on top of an existing DB to provide temporal-like features.
Supposedly when Tito went, he paid his expenses. They would not let someone go up at a dead loss to them. Depending on how/when they go up, the incremental cost of an additional person may just be in terms of food consumed, and fuel. IIRC, the Russians frequently send up shuttles with less than the full capacity. If the shuttle is going anyway, and there's an empty seat, actual launch costs wouldn't be that much more. As for training, basically all he got was physical conditioning and a good lecture on DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING.
Exactly. If the plate sells, there must be a demand, and the group will get money for it. If not, it'll be yanked. In my state (Ohio), if you don't sell a certain number of custom plates every year it gets yanked.
I certainaly understand that it wasn't exactly the highlight of the state's history, but hey... An earlier poster had a CNN link that said 800 of the 100,000 workers fell ill. I'm not an industry expert, but 0.8% illness/death for an industry seems pretty low. Back when this was all happening, industrial jobs were still pretty dangerous (heck some still are!), and it wasn't *that* uncommon for someone to have to quit on disability or be killed in a given year.
Wow, must be a slow news day on the ole /. But hey I'll bite anyway. I'm not surprised that members of the general public are all up in arms about it. My neighbor across the street works for NASA and he's a scientist working on the idea of nuclear propulsion in space. Their real task now is figuring out how to safely and efficiently get such an enormous reactor into space. Anyway his license plate is an MIT plate (my state has plates for almost any university that has an alumni association that can rustle up however many signatures you need) customized as "SPCNUKE" He's always getting honked at, cut off, sworn at and lectured by the obligatory mother with three kids in the grocery store parking lot. Seems everyone thinks that his project is really about one of two things. 1) How to get nuclear weapons into space. Or 2) Failing that, how to dump all our nuclear waste into outerspace.
I've asked if he's ever considered changing the plate and he said no, he kind of likes the reactions he gets from people. (Lack of attention in grade school, perhaps?)
Hey....I always knew there was something just a little bit 'odd' about those folks...
As I see it, the real problem is that when it comes to something people don't understand that sometimes has the ability to maim or kill them they don't want to take the time to learn more about it. They want it banned, damnit, banned! Out of my children's face!!!
When I see one of these plates crusing down the road I probably won't give it a second look, it's just too bad people can't see the larger issue (or more often, the lack of one) sometimes.
In my crunch for time, I forgot to add the following line to the top: "Referer and agent can both be forged by the client." The author said that he noticed that they were often coming into his site right in the middle, as if they have a list of all his pages. If you blindly type in a URL, or come from a bookmark, there will be no referer. I've seen this on my site before, you get a lot of legit people with no referer because they either have the URL written down somewhere, or they bookmarked a page. At the same time, I also get inexpliciable hits on the site that don't seem to be people because they don't follow any logical transition from subject. The problem is that requires human analysis.
Robots.txt is useful for now until the spambots are smart enough to figure out that following it will tell them how to avoid the trap. It's a neverending game of catch up.
No. The point the author made was that good bots follow the 'robots.txt' standard. A versatile program like this can differentiate. If a robot comes in and plays by the rules on robots.txt, it's welcomed. OTOH, if one comes in and just starts grabbing at everything, it will quickly find itself blocked.
I believe the exact quote in regards to why robots.txt should still be used is: "Most bad spambots don't even check the robots.txt file, so this is mainly for protection of the good bots."
Another thing I find appealing is that on a large enough system the DB could be shared amongst several servers to provide common protection for all. I've always taken a don't put an address on the page approach, but it's cool to see someone looking at how these bots operate from a technical standpoint.
Some ISPs (like mine) have policies against SPAM that stipulate that in addition to not actually spamming people, using their resources to prepare/collect addresses to SPAM is just as bad. The advantage the database gives you is that you can track the most recent offenders. A quick lookup to who owns the address, with hard evidence of one of their subscribers abusing both your system, and their policy will, if nothing else, cause the cost of spamming to rise. The reason SPAM is so popular is because it is VERY cheap to do. Once its costs approach those of 'traditional' marketing, things might get a bit more selective rather than sending my three year old '1-3 inches in 6 weeks!','Stop paying for cable', or 'Get out of debt now!' messages. Hardly directed.
(Now I don't want anyone marketing to my three year old, but I know it will happen so I'd like to at least think they would be reasonable things, perhaps a bit relevant)