No, this isn't specifically a voice over IP to IP idea (though that is the ultimate answer). How the P2P part comes in works like this. End users who have broadband or other high speed connectitivity, and a normal (POTS) phone line (and voice card to connect to it), would sign up for this "service" and run the software. When a VoIP call needs to terminate at some local exchange where such a "customer" is present and idle, the call will be made by connecting to the "termination agent" software that "customer" is running, and the call (local only) is made from that customer's phone line. That customer then gets a credit on their VoIP bill for a percentage of the cost of the call, which can be rolled over to the next month, traded online for goodies, or paid out in cash, depending on what the VoIP company can set up.
This concept, in a store and forward form, was the basis of many earlier networks from FIDO to UUCP. And with direct internet connectivity, many do this now with data calls connecting through an outbound modem. And even in the early 1970's a place I worked at was dynamically rerouting phone calls being placed to other cities via various trunk lines they had to that city (it was unused video trunks at the time) just to avoid the long distance changes (the theory was, why pay the phone company for resources that were not being used, and why not use the resources that are being paid for).
VoIP terminating in POTS is still wrong
on
SBC's VoIP End Run
·
· Score: 1
VoIP terminating in POTS is still wrong. Of course you have to do it to be able to call people who are not on VoIP. But eventually most people and businesses will have IP bandwidth sufficient to carry all their voice traffic direct. A great many have that now. Then we migrate to "voice IP to IP" and finally put an end to all the nonsense.
I remember those days. I once looked at the job postings and found 8 of them that were just what I was looking for. So I sent in my resume. Next day I got 7 calls from recruiters. I followed through and they were all referring me to the same company. It was just 1 job. Then the employer said they were not allowed to talk to me "for legal reasons because you were multiply referred and we could be on the hook for multiple fees if we hire you".
I stay away from recruiters now, unless they tell me right up front who the employer is.
I learned Visio in one afternoon. It was so easy. I was even constructing my own objects and templates by the 2nd day. OK, I cheated... I read the book. My only objection is that the original Visio company got borged.
Excuse me... but retraining is not needed. It's a facade that managers required. Well, I suppose the managers might need retraining. Smart people can pick up on just about anything. Just give them a desk, computer, net access, and the documentation (skip this part if the documentation is online), and let them at it.
As for security clearances, yes, those would be valuable for that kind of work. I've seen a number of jobs which required already having the security clearance (i.e. they would not sponsor you getting one, because it takes about 6 months, and they have work that needs to be started now that they can't give you until it comes through).
During the downturn, it was easy to fill up on people... even good people. In the DFW area, many tech companies, like those in the Telcom Corridor, were laying them off in droves, and in some cases the entire workforce all at once (a few were hanging on to their H-1B's, but many were even letting them go).
However, even during the boom, I knew good people looking for good work. The trouble is, too many employers don't really know how to find them. And it's not easy, either, but that doesn't mean they should not try.
I'd bet, since it's a law firm, that much of their "technology" is bought rather than created. During the boom, that certainly would have made the jobs less attractive. During the bust, anyone will take what they can get. But if the economy truly gets better for the working people, your brother can expect to see some turnover as people start checking out the new jobs and some jumping ship. If that comes to pass, he'll either need to keep salaries moving up (to the displeasure of the firm partners) or face having to learn how to find good smart experienced people without overlooking those who can do the job better than most experienced people without having experience in every little thing being done there. He'll need to learn to hire smart.
Of course foreign workers will be above average. They don't bring in those that are below average. For example every person I've met from India here on H-1B (about 20 or so) are all very intelligent and bright people. They know they can come here and make almost the same as we do, while living on the cheap (I know of a case of 8 H-1B's who all shared a 2 bedroom apartment... not that they were ever at home, given that their employer had them working 80 hours a week). Then when they take that money back to India, they can live like a prince for the next 10 or 20 years on it, while starting their own business there. You'd do the same if you were in their situation. So would I.
FYI, I actually dated a girl for about half a year who was here on H-1B. But she didn't plan on staying or it might have lasted even longer.
But seriously, look, there's a reason I don't mention where I work here. I don't want my behavior here to be at all attached to my company, or for my company's behavior elsewhere to be at all attached to perceptions of what I write here.
You mean like your behaviour of posting unsubstantiated claims? You should have at least posted in this thread as Anonymous Coward.
There are lots and lots of claims people are making about "my employer is hiring". In some cases there is no such hiring and in some of those they have lied even to their own people. In other cases they are just collecting resumes for the perceived coming needs (if the economy ever does get better for more than just the investor classes, this can happen). Or worse, your employer may be doing this to try to justify getting an H-1B applicant approved by saying "we have been looking but no one ever sent us a resume". Lots of the claims are being made about real jobs with unreal requirements, like having N years experience in a combination of things most people just won't have (and don't realize that most people with some variety of experience have proven they really can learn new things on the job and be a valuable asset to the company for years or decades).
I have doubts about your claim because I've seen reasons to doubt virtually every claim I've managed to see beyond just the claim. Maybe you're in the minority and your employer has a real job opening or two. But until it is shown, I have to assume the statistical probability that the claim is just more smoke.
No, it is not free to employers. Sure, at $300 a year for basic membership, it's not that much. But in an environment so highly fragmented as the job board arena (e.g. not more than 10% of candidate search even the best boards), what employer wants to sign up to a couple dozen such job boards to ensure full coverage? Of course many will succumb to the marketing blitz of some and sign up on one or two. Big corporations don't just "sign up"... they have to make partnership deals. Small businesses don't want to waste the cashflow to get full coverage.
If there truly was a job board where it is totally free on BOTH sides, with the resources to run it right (if I had the cash to start it, I definitely could, and probably would), then eventually they would come... until the big boards realize what's happening and they'd go free for a while to try to destroy it.
What would really work is for the US government to sponsor one (it would help the economy)... and... require all jobs to be listed there for at least 3 months in order to be eligible for H-1B fulfillment (and there would be tracking on just how many Americans really do apply).
Put your hyperlink where your mouth is, and point to the jobs. That can be either on your company website careers section (don't expect people to find it via google for quite a while), or the listings at your preferred online job site if you do that kind of thing. Otherwise we'll assume you're just blowing smoke like most of the corporate executives are doing.
Employers don't know how to find people. Obviously your employer did. Oh wait, you had to go hunt them down. I see. So your employer didn't want to lift a finger to fill the job. I guess they lucked out when you came along.
Seriously, some jobs are being filled. The reality is that if you take both the online jobs and the newspaper jobs and combine them, it won't represent more than about 15% of the total number of jobs. But see, this is part of the problem. Employers who refuse to properly advertise their openings really should have no right to whine about the lack of people. Sure, some people will just walk in the door. But in places like New York City, there are way too many doors to go walk in where no one is wanted, so there needs to be some means to know which doors to go in, and not waste one's time.
Maybe what employers are wanting is a place to list their job openings for free?
I read that it involves factoring products of two primes as the "hard" part the sender has to do. That wouldn't necessarily mean RSA; it could be somthing simpler.
Cracking the key involves several steps. Most are easy, but the hard one is factoring a product of two relatively large primes. Very large numbers are used when it is meant to require centuries to crack. Smaller numbers are used when it is meant to require a few seconds to crack. If the public key is available, then it's trivial to decrypt or encrypt (depending on which way they do thus... there are many ways to set this up). But to make it asymmetrical (microseconds for the receiver, seconds for the sender), you force the sender to crack the key.
I've never seen "logical thinking skills" on the "IT experience profile" sheet. But maybe that is because most corporate managers never heard of it before.
And the same problem exists the other way around. Way too many jobs are too narrow of a niche. So as a result, people are focusing on that. The problem is those narrow niche job are really crap jobs. Jobs like you want to fill sound like they are the dream career. But it's the corporate types who write a bunch of experience/training requirements, and hand that off to clueless HR people, who then send it out to recruiters, who then post (one for each recruiter that got it) that on a few job board, and the boards look flooded, and have specifications that narrow the job down to one person who isn't looking.
Some of what you want are new technologies. You find people who list those among the younger less experienced crowd. There are some jems, but you get more mud. Older more experienced (and a generalist way) don't have the experience in things like XML... and never will unless you or someone like you lets them dive in and learn. There really are people who can learn on the job. And they tend to be the older ones because the career process does filter out the non-thinkers you don't really want.
Working with all those things, and expecting experience with all those things, might be your problem. If in your interviews you find someone doesn't have any experience in FOO, then try to figure out if they have experience in learning new things on the job. Had you don that earlier on, you might have someone now who has gained all the experience they need, at your place.
Perl programmers and C programmers tend to NOT have much intersection. Just about every C programmer I know (including myself) hates Perl. Same the other way around (love Perl, hate C).
Perhaps you are also focusing too much on what you know, and failing to bring in something entirely new. Why not hire someone who knows half the stuff you know, and an equal amount of other stuff you don't know?
WTF has happened to this industry?
When I first entered the industry, a recruiter gave me a checklist of 150 different areas I might have experience in. Today, that list has grown to over 20,000 different areas (when examined with as much detail as the original... which they can't even do anymore). 5 years ago I filled out a form with 12 pages of triple column skill areas. There must have been 3 or 4 thousand items. I checked perhaps 80. The interviewer seemed unimpressed. Perhaps he's been getting college kids who check anything they've heard of.
In order to make the work asymmetrical, this is not an ordinary encyrpt/decrypt. The sender is not given the key and must crack it and that involves at one point in the process factoring a product of two primes. Primes as large as used in RSA encryption are very very hard to crack and would take years or even centuries. In order to make it viable on a smaller scale, smaller numbers are chosen instead of the big ones in RSA. And the sender has to crack it instead of using a public key. That's where factoring comes in. The point is, there is a boundary below which factoring becomes O(1) because it can be looked up instead of actually factored. A 20 bit product is way too small for this to be effective the way described because it is too easy to factor by doing a lookup. To make it work, you have to get into the range where it would require a terabyte or more of table to lookup to make it ineffective to create and use such a table. By then you have a number which takes too long to factor (many seconds to many minutes).
Even easier than that. At 20 bit values, we're not talking very many different numbers here. These can be pre-calculated in a few hours, packaged on CDROMs, and sold to other spammers. Yet another way to make money on the net.
However, verifying a stamp requires just one SHA-1 computation. For use in e-mail, a 20-bit value is currently the
recommended price: Senders need to perform about a million trials to find a valid stamp, which takes less than a second
on the most recent CPUs and compiled applications. And it still takes only a few seconds on relatively old machines.
Fur sail 2 u nou: 5 mil-leeun facter numberz
Yuz cun b-u-l-k f4ster wit dis CD uv all-ready calcoolated leest uf numbors. Fer onlee $99.95, u getz ohver fiv milyun numz ant wee tos in freeee a miliun fresh A-O-L addys. Vizut us @ hotprimefactors.biz to ordur.
I've had only horrible experience with register.com. After they completely screwed up the 5th domain I registered with them, and took over a month to get it to work, and then screwed up their web site with buggy programming, I decided to transfer all my domains away. As expected, that took over a month, too. Just about everyone there was clueless, including whoever managed their own DNS servers for their own domain as I found errors in that, too. So from now on, I always recommend to all my friend, partners, and clients, to never use register.com, ever.
A good scientific experiement will have to study all factors and consider all variables. And there are many variables. Out test wasn't scientific at all; it was done more for a laugh. That and to see just how far it might go. We were in the store for nearly an hour. I wanted to see if they'd even throw him out at one point (the plan was we'd both be looking at stuff in about the same way). They didn't throw him out, though.
His ratty old clothes were more like work clothes, not what a vagrant would were. I was wearing a clean white shirt and black slacks like might be seen in a corporate office, though minus the tie (as if I had taken it off on my way back from work... though in real life I don't wear such stuff). The idea was to make it believable, and not give a clue that it was a setup.
A friend of mine and I tried a trick in a store many years ago. It may even have been a Best Buy store (I don't recall). Anyway, between us, we grabbed a bunch of our cash to the tune of about $3000 and went to the store. My friend, who is black (I'm not), put on some ratty old clothes, and carried all the cash. We went into the store separate, and never conversed. I got approached several times to be assisted, and talked about buying some big stuff. But I followed not too far from my friend, who approached the same products I did, but no sales people ever approached him. One did watch him at times. We both picked up an item we really wanted, and went to checkout about the same time. He went first so I'd be in line to watch. He bought a printer cable and pack of blank floppies and the total rang up around $45. He pulled out the whole wad of $3000, with the hundreds on the outside, and proceeded to pay with a $100 bill. The checkout clerk's jaw dropped. But she did try to sell him some more stuff, like gift cards. I bet she thought he was a drug dealer or something (he was an associate professor of chemistry, so I suppose he could make drugs if he needed them). When I made my purchase, I dug through my pockets for tiny bits of change to barely make the price. She didn't try to sell me anything else. The whole thing was more a racial bigotry test, but there certainly could be some perceived economic effects, too.
Well, I doubt two different browsers would have fabricated exactly the same server response. The server sent that data. Maybe it wasn't overloaded anymore when you tried it. Or maybe it detects Linux somehow (e.g. I don't have any buggy Windows ports being emulated here to make it look like I'm running Windows).
This brings up a complaint I've got with your signature:
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try. -- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822.3.
Dr. Spock was a baby doctor. Mr. Spock was a character in the Startrek series and movies. But Yoda spoke those words in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back".
Maybe if you applied the principles of properly designing it from the start, instead of choosing the option of continually hacking at your signature, it wouldn't be so buggy by the time it hits Slashdot. Or I guess one hand wasn't aware of what the other hand was doing.
Trouble is, way too many business, large and small, are run by people who are effectively just such dummies when it comes to technical things like internet protocols and who developed them.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this isn't specifically a voice over IP to IP idea (though that is the ultimate answer). How the P2P part comes in works like this. End users who have broadband or other high speed connectitivity, and a normal (POTS) phone line (and voice card to connect to it), would sign up for this "service" and run the software. When a VoIP call needs to terminate at some local exchange where such a "customer" is present and idle, the call will be made by connecting to the "termination agent" software that "customer" is running, and the call (local only) is made from that customer's phone line. That customer then gets a credit on their VoIP bill for a percentage of the cost of the call, which can be rolled over to the next month, traded online for goodies, or paid out in cash, depending on what the VoIP company can set up.
This concept, in a store and forward form, was the basis of many earlier networks from FIDO to UUCP. And with direct internet connectivity, many do this now with data calls connecting through an outbound modem. And even in the early 1970's a place I worked at was dynamically rerouting phone calls being placed to other cities via various trunk lines they had to that city (it was unused video trunks at the time) just to avoid the long distance changes (the theory was, why pay the phone company for resources that were not being used, and why not use the resources that are being paid for).
VoIP terminating in POTS is still wrong. Of course you have to do it to be able to call people who are not on VoIP. But eventually most people and businesses will have IP bandwidth sufficient to carry all their voice traffic direct. A great many have that now. Then we migrate to "voice IP to IP" and finally put an end to all the nonsense.
... until the spammers and telemarketers team up.
I remember those days. I once looked at the job postings and found 8 of them that were just what I was looking for. So I sent in my resume. Next day I got 7 calls from recruiters. I followed through and they were all referring me to the same company. It was just 1 job. Then the employer said they were not allowed to talk to me "for legal reasons because you were multiply referred and we could be on the hook for multiple fees if we hire you".
I stay away from recruiters now, unless they tell me right up front who the employer is.
I learned Visio in one afternoon. It was so easy. I was even constructing my own objects and templates by the 2nd day. OK, I cheated ... I read the book. My only objection is that the original Visio company got borged.
Excuse me ... but retraining is not needed. It's a facade that managers required. Well, I suppose the managers might need retraining. Smart people can pick up on just about anything. Just give them a desk, computer, net access, and the documentation (skip this part if the documentation is online), and let them at it.
As for security clearances, yes, those would be valuable for that kind of work. I've seen a number of jobs which required already having the security clearance (i.e. they would not sponsor you getting one, because it takes about 6 months, and they have work that needs to be started now that they can't give you until it comes through).
During the downturn, it was easy to fill up on people ... even good people. In the DFW area, many tech companies, like those in the Telcom Corridor, were laying them off in droves, and in some cases the entire workforce all at once (a few were hanging on to their H-1B's, but many were even letting them go).
However, even during the boom, I knew good people looking for good work. The trouble is, too many employers don't really know how to find them. And it's not easy, either, but that doesn't mean they should not try.
I'd bet, since it's a law firm, that much of their "technology" is bought rather than created. During the boom, that certainly would have made the jobs less attractive. During the bust, anyone will take what they can get. But if the economy truly gets better for the working people, your brother can expect to see some turnover as people start checking out the new jobs and some jumping ship. If that comes to pass, he'll either need to keep salaries moving up (to the displeasure of the firm partners) or face having to learn how to find good smart experienced people without overlooking those who can do the job better than most experienced people without having experience in every little thing being done there. He'll need to learn to hire smart.
Of course foreign workers will be above average. They don't bring in those that are below average. For example every person I've met from India here on H-1B (about 20 or so) are all very intelligent and bright people. They know they can come here and make almost the same as we do, while living on the cheap (I know of a case of 8 H-1B's who all shared a 2 bedroom apartment ... not that they were ever at home, given that their employer had them working 80 hours a week). Then when they take that money back to India, they can live like a prince for the next 10 or 20 years on it, while starting their own business there. You'd do the same if you were in their situation. So would I.
FYI, I actually dated a girl for about half a year who was here on H-1B. But she didn't plan on staying or it might have lasted even longer.
You mean like your behaviour of posting unsubstantiated claims? You should have at least posted in this thread as Anonymous Coward.
There are lots and lots of claims people are making about "my employer is hiring". In some cases there is no such hiring and in some of those they have lied even to their own people. In other cases they are just collecting resumes for the perceived coming needs (if the economy ever does get better for more than just the investor classes, this can happen). Or worse, your employer may be doing this to try to justify getting an H-1B applicant approved by saying "we have been looking but no one ever sent us a resume". Lots of the claims are being made about real jobs with unreal requirements, like having N years experience in a combination of things most people just won't have (and don't realize that most people with some variety of experience have proven they really can learn new things on the job and be a valuable asset to the company for years or decades).
I have doubts about your claim because I've seen reasons to doubt virtually every claim I've managed to see beyond just the claim. Maybe you're in the minority and your employer has a real job opening or two. But until it is shown, I have to assume the statistical probability that the claim is just more smoke.
No, it is not free to employers. Sure, at $300 a year for basic membership, it's not that much. But in an environment so highly fragmented as the job board arena (e.g. not more than 10% of candidate search even the best boards), what employer wants to sign up to a couple dozen such job boards to ensure full coverage? Of course many will succumb to the marketing blitz of some and sign up on one or two. Big corporations don't just "sign up" ... they have to make partnership deals. Small businesses don't want to waste the cashflow to get full coverage.
If there truly was a job board where it is totally free on BOTH sides, with the resources to run it right (if I had the cash to start it, I definitely could, and probably would), then eventually they would come ... until the big boards realize what's happening and they'd go free for a while to try to destroy it.
What would really work is for the US government to sponsor one (it would help the economy) ... and ... require all jobs to be listed there for at least 3 months in order to be eligible for H-1B fulfillment (and there would be tracking on just how many Americans really do apply).
Put your hyperlink where your mouth is, and point to the jobs. That can be either on your company website careers section (don't expect people to find it via google for quite a while), or the listings at your preferred online job site if you do that kind of thing. Otherwise we'll assume you're just blowing smoke like most of the corporate executives are doing.
Employers don't know how to find people. Obviously your employer did. Oh wait, you had to go hunt them down. I see. So your employer didn't want to lift a finger to fill the job. I guess they lucked out when you came along.
Seriously, some jobs are being filled. The reality is that if you take both the online jobs and the newspaper jobs and combine them, it won't represent more than about 15% of the total number of jobs. But see, this is part of the problem. Employers who refuse to properly advertise their openings really should have no right to whine about the lack of people. Sure, some people will just walk in the door. But in places like New York City, there are way too many doors to go walk in where no one is wanted, so there needs to be some means to know which doors to go in, and not waste one's time.
Maybe what employers are wanting is a place to list their job openings for free?
I read that it involves factoring products of two primes as the "hard" part the sender has to do. That wouldn't necessarily mean RSA; it could be somthing simpler.
Cracking the key involves several steps. Most are easy, but the hard one is factoring a product of two relatively large primes. Very large numbers are used when it is meant to require centuries to crack. Smaller numbers are used when it is meant to require a few seconds to crack. If the public key is available, then it's trivial to decrypt or encrypt (depending on which way they do thus ... there are many ways to set this up). But to make it asymmetrical (microseconds for the receiver, seconds for the sender), you force the sender to crack the key.
I've never seen "logical thinking skills" on the "IT experience profile" sheet. But maybe that is because most corporate managers never heard of it before.
And the same problem exists the other way around. Way too many jobs are too narrow of a niche. So as a result, people are focusing on that. The problem is those narrow niche job are really crap jobs. Jobs like you want to fill sound like they are the dream career. But it's the corporate types who write a bunch of experience/training requirements, and hand that off to clueless HR people, who then send it out to recruiters, who then post (one for each recruiter that got it) that on a few job board, and the boards look flooded, and have specifications that narrow the job down to one person who isn't looking.
Some of what you want are new technologies. You find people who list those among the younger less experienced crowd. There are some jems, but you get more mud. Older more experienced (and a generalist way) don't have the experience in things like XML ... and never will unless you or someone like you lets them dive in and learn. There really are people who can learn on the job. And they tend to be the older ones because the career process does filter out the non-thinkers you don't really want.
Working with all those things, and expecting experience with all those things, might be your problem. If in your interviews you find someone doesn't have any experience in FOO, then try to figure out if they have experience in learning new things on the job. Had you don that earlier on, you might have someone now who has gained all the experience they need, at your place.
Perl programmers and C programmers tend to NOT have much intersection. Just about every C programmer I know (including myself) hates Perl. Same the other way around (love Perl, hate C).
Perhaps you are also focusing too much on what you know, and failing to bring in something entirely new. Why not hire someone who knows half the stuff you know, and an equal amount of other stuff you don't know?
When I first entered the industry, a recruiter gave me a checklist of 150 different areas I might have experience in. Today, that list has grown to over 20,000 different areas (when examined with as much detail as the original ... which they can't even do anymore). 5 years ago I filled out a form with 12 pages of triple column skill areas. There must have been 3 or 4 thousand items. I checked perhaps 80. The interviewer seemed unimpressed. Perhaps he's been getting college kids who check anything they've heard of.
In order to make the work asymmetrical, this is not an ordinary encyrpt/decrypt. The sender is not given the key and must crack it and that involves at one point in the process factoring a product of two primes. Primes as large as used in RSA encryption are very very hard to crack and would take years or even centuries. In order to make it viable on a smaller scale, smaller numbers are chosen instead of the big ones in RSA. And the sender has to crack it instead of using a public key. That's where factoring comes in. The point is, there is a boundary below which factoring becomes O(1) because it can be looked up instead of actually factored. A 20 bit product is way too small for this to be effective the way described because it is too easy to factor by doing a lookup. To make it work, you have to get into the range where it would require a terabyte or more of table to lookup to make it ineffective to create and use such a table. By then you have a number which takes too long to factor (many seconds to many minutes).
I've been trying to sell my "pluseebo pills" that have been scientifically tested for use in curing just about everything.
Even easier than that. At 20 bit values, we're not talking very many different numbers here. These can be pre-calculated in a few hours, packaged on CDROMs, and sold to other spammers. Yet another way to make money on the net.
It's easily solved. Just buy the CD of pre-calculated prime factors from the spammers.
Fur sail 2 u nou: 5 mil-leeun facter numberz
Yuz cun b-u-l-k f4ster wit dis CD uv all-ready calcoolated leest uf numbors. Fer onlee $99.95, u getz ohver fiv milyun numz ant wee tos in freeee a miliun fresh A-O-L addys. Vizut us @ hotprimefactors.biz to ordur.
I've had only horrible experience with register.com. After they completely screwed up the 5th domain I registered with them, and took over a month to get it to work, and then screwed up their web site with buggy programming, I decided to transfer all my domains away. As expected, that took over a month, too. Just about everyone there was clueless, including whoever managed their own DNS servers for their own domain as I found errors in that, too. So from now on, I always recommend to all my friend, partners, and clients, to never use register.com, ever.
A good scientific experiement will have to study all factors and consider all variables. And there are many variables. Out test wasn't scientific at all; it was done more for a laugh. That and to see just how far it might go. We were in the store for nearly an hour. I wanted to see if they'd even throw him out at one point (the plan was we'd both be looking at stuff in about the same way). They didn't throw him out, though.
His ratty old clothes were more like work clothes, not what a vagrant would were. I was wearing a clean white shirt and black slacks like might be seen in a corporate office, though minus the tie (as if I had taken it off on my way back from work ... though in real life I don't wear such stuff). The idea was to make it believable, and not give a clue that it was a setup.
Next time: big full length leather trench coats.
A friend of mine and I tried a trick in a store many years ago. It may even have been a Best Buy store (I don't recall). Anyway, between us, we grabbed a bunch of our cash to the tune of about $3000 and went to the store. My friend, who is black (I'm not), put on some ratty old clothes, and carried all the cash. We went into the store separate, and never conversed. I got approached several times to be assisted, and talked about buying some big stuff. But I followed not too far from my friend, who approached the same products I did, but no sales people ever approached him. One did watch him at times. We both picked up an item we really wanted, and went to checkout about the same time. He went first so I'd be in line to watch. He bought a printer cable and pack of blank floppies and the total rang up around $45. He pulled out the whole wad of $3000, with the hundreds on the outside, and proceeded to pay with a $100 bill. The checkout clerk's jaw dropped. But she did try to sell him some more stuff, like gift cards. I bet she thought he was a drug dealer or something (he was an associate professor of chemistry, so I suppose he could make drugs if he needed them). When I made my purchase, I dug through my pockets for tiny bits of change to barely make the price. She didn't try to sell me anything else. The whole thing was more a racial bigotry test, but there certainly could be some perceived economic effects, too.
Well, I doubt two different browsers would have fabricated exactly the same server response. The server sent that data. Maybe it wasn't overloaded anymore when you tried it. Or maybe it detects Linux somehow (e.g. I don't have any buggy Windows ports being emulated here to make it look like I'm running Windows).
This brings up a complaint I've got with your signature:
Dr. Spock was a baby doctor. Mr. Spock was a character in the Startrek series and movies. But Yoda spoke those words in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back".
Maybe if you applied the principles of properly designing it from the start, instead of choosing the option of continually hacking at your signature, it wouldn't be so buggy by the time it hits Slashdot. Or I guess one hand wasn't aware of what the other hand was doing.
Trouble is, way too many business, large and small, are run by people who are effectively just such dummies when it comes to technical things like internet protocols and who developed them.